A few days old, but saw it new today …

Here we have Mike Leach, lover of pirates, giver of amazing dating advice, laying it on thick after Texas Tech’s loss this weekend:

Yeah, you hear that linebacking corps? I’M SICK OF YOUR FAT LITTLE GIRLFRIENDS TELLING YOU HOW AWESOME YOU ARE. ALSO, TELL THEM TO STOP STEALING MY MUFFINS.

Making this story more awesome? Mark Mangino — yes, this Mark Mangino — backed up Leach a bit, saying:

I don’t want to get into all of that. There’s pretty girls everywhere. Tech’s got their share, and KU has their share. We’re partial. We think KU has the best. I think you can have fun with it. That’s what Mike’s trying to do. He’s trying to have fun with it.

Yes, I agree: it’s always about fun with Leach. He’s fun for the whole family!

So, I tried to get all serious on Kirk Ferentz’s lack of Twitter/Internet knowledge Monday, but whatever: it’s oftentimes a generational thing, and some people are stubborn like that. If Ferentz doesn’t want anything to with the Internet, it’s at his own peril.

Ferentz, it seems, is not alone in his lack of knowledge. Joe Paterno had an amusing quote at Big Ten Media Day, calling Twitter “Tweedle-doo, Tweedle-dee.” But, he’s old. Really old. It’s hard to mock anything the man does. Respect your elders, and all.

So in a contest I decided to make up right now, and that I’m only judging from things I’ve gleamed from Spencer Hall and Pat Forde, I am giving the winning-college-coach-quote-of-the-last-week-or-so award to Texas Tech’s Mike Leach. Why?

Because he’s never sent an e-mail in his entire life.

Hey, at least he wasn’t giving out dating advice.

Quarterback controversies emerge within almost every organization that doesn’t possess a clear-cut starter. That’s no surprise. But the Cleveland Browns and Washington Redskins signed some undrafted free agents today that will create a little more controversy than what is just on the depth chart.

For instance, the Browns signed former Texas Tech standout Graham Harrell — no big deal, right? Harrell was a baller in Mike Leach’s system, put up huge numbers, but no one thought he would end up being an NFL starter (although I fail to see why the Panthers didn’t at least grab him late in the draft).

But here’s the tricky part to this signing: on Saturday night, Leach flew off the handle in a rant pointedly directed at Browns head coach Eric Mangini, because Leach believed that the ManGenius purposely sabotaged TT alum Michael Crabtree’s draft stock. Two days later, Mangini is inking Leach’s boy Harrell to a deal, despite the fact that he already has Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn on his roster.

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Has there been any other more infectious jingle in the commercial landscape the last couple years than Subway’s “$5 footlong” song? I dare you to name one. It’s quite good. And when you hear the deal, you go: “Yeah, that’s actually not so bad — five bucks for a footlong. I should go get one of those.”

And Subway as a whole has really permeated the sports crowd with advertising quite well. Jared is still rocking out after all these years, and it has a host of athletes endorsing its product. For some reason, Jay Glazer is now doing commercials for them, too.

But here’s the thing about Subway: No matter how much I see it on my TV screen during games, its sandwich is inferior to Potbelly’s and Jimmy John’s in every way. Subway’s bread is weak, bro. It’s toppings seem like they’ve been hanging out for weeks in their containers. But hey, you can toast your sandwich there!

Jimmy John’s has much better selection on its 17-sandwich (plus the gargantuan, which is awesomely gaudy) menu. There’s variety there, and the toppings and meat it has blows Subway away in quality.

Potbelly’s is higher quality across the board as well, and when you add in the soups and chili and shakes it offers, Subway becomes the Apple IIE to Potbelly’s MacBook Air.

And now that I’ve spent this entire post talking about chain sandwich restaurants, time for the sports hook: Michael Crabtree has signed on to endorse Subway, even before he’s signed on with an NFL team.

Rumor has it Crabtree will use the money to get his grandma’s house back.

The final score of last night’s game: Texas Tech 167, East Central 115. That’s a combined 282 points. Not completely unheard of in the NBA, but keep in mind that college ball is played within 40 minutes and a 35-second shot clock. Without even considering free-throw shots, the teams attempted a total of 207 shots from the field, which breaks down to an average of a shot every eleven seconds.

Seriously, what sort of strategies were these teams employing last night? I didn’t watch the game live, so I can only guess that they used the approach conceived by every six-year-old who plays a basketball video game and refuses to press the “pass” button except when inbounding the ball. Just pass to whoever is open and mash the “shoot” button like mad. Is the player even past halfcourt? No? Tough nuts, junior, it’s showtime.

It took a game like this to lead me to realize basketball’s magnificent difference from other sports. If two people play a baseball video game and swing at every pitch, it will probably end a scoreless tie. If they play a football game and call a Hail Mary every play, they’ll never score unless the game of choice is NFL Sports Talk Football. But basketball, apparently, can be as highbrow or lowbrow as you want it to be. You can engage beautiful, elaborate offensive schemes, or you can just frenetically hurl the ball from wherever you want. I think we all knew that kid growing up — the kid who would do nothing but jam the square button on his Playstation controller for a game before throwing it down, declaring that “this game is boring,” and yell at his mother to bring him some Pop-Tarts. If last night’s game was any indication, that kid grew up to coach Division-1 NCAA ball. Who knew?

Also see: The Sporting Blog

I was sitting at a bar — this is how all my stories start, really — on a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the college football season, and there were a disproportionate amount of Texas Tech fans hooting and hollering during a Red Raiders game.

These were the first Texas Tech fans I’ve ever seen in Chicago. And they’d all congregated at this bar. I’ve come to find, as Texas Tech’s offense has completely worked the competition this season, that these people had plenty of reasons to cheer that day.

But it was famed writer Michael Lewis who profiled Mike Leach and the program three years ago and saw this coming to an extent. (Though, Leach always had the offensive prowess. He just hadn’t worked it to great success at Tech yet.) An excerpt from a follow-up interview on that piece via the New York Times‘ Play Magazine (via Shanoff):

Could Leach take this system to another big-time football factory and make it work?

If he was at big-time factory and they let him do what he does, and not get in the way, it would be unfair. I mean, is it moral to score 100 points every game? Of course, people will catch up. They already are catching up. But if he had gone to say, U.S.C., 10 years ago and installed his system there, it would be comical. He would score every time - and he would have a defense by default because he would get great athletes.

That’s some praise there, eh? I don’t know though. Every time I think of Mike Leach I think of this video and his dating advice and then I just start to laugh. But, dude can coach too.

College football is not exactly my bread and butter — bread and butter is my bread and butter, actually; since when are you too good for bread and butter? It’s delicious — but I know when I’ve seen some crazy ish. Such is the case with the above video.

That’s Texas Tech receiver Michael Crabtree helping the Red Raiders beat Texas in stunning fashion Saturday night, something Ryan and I learned about via text message. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. We had no access to TV. And trying to understand the game situation from sporadic text messages was nearly impossible.

Turns out, what happened is this: In one pass, Texas Tech went from gimmicky joke to legitimate contender; Mike Leach went from quirky clown to legitimate genius; and the 2008 Red Raiders put themselves in prime position for National Championship contention. All in a night’s work.

For what it’s worth, Bob Knight grumpily called this. And Lee Corso? That man should never, ever be allowed to touch a gun: