COASTAL DIVISION

The ACC Coastal Division is the most arrogant collection of snobs west of Paris. The Ivy League would like to be this snobby, but with schools rivaling Ivy Leaguers in academics, and with teams who actually play real football and basketball teams instead of weenies who can’t figure out why they need a cup to protect two lentils and a bean sprout, the ACC Coastal rules Snob City USA.

Duke – The University of New England at Durham invented a whole new level of snobbery.  The entrance requirements at Duke are so high, NASA has to roll the Saturn V back out of mothballs to send something to the door. Parents all over the region hope their child will be smart enough to get into Duke, then when they see the price tag, they buy their kids skateboards, trampolines and ATV’s and send them out without helmets to lower their IQ’s enough that there is no chance of it. One semester at Duke costs more than both a Bachelors and Masters degree at NC State. 

You can tell a Duke grad or student from others in the Carolinas. They’re the ones who hold their heads so far back that you can count their boogers when they talk to you. And their boogers are better than yours. They’re Duke Boogers! For all this, the most famous Duke graduates are Tricky Dick Nixon and Sean McManus (President of that other forum where you see b s.) Boy, they got a lot for their money!

I am not a crook. And I have Duke boogers!

But if you thought the snobbery ended at academics, you must be a virgin. Duke is why they invented basketball. America was wandering in a sports desert until the man who poured his name out of a can of alphabet soup descended from mountain peaks of Poland to bring greatness and basketball to the undeserving masses. Duke sports is basketball, and Duke basketball is Mike Krzyzewski - pronounced sha sha sha, sha sha sha, sha sha sha sha sha sha sha Sha-shevski. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjsh2j7W6Bo

When it comes to football, Duke sports is basketball. Hard as they hardly try, Duke is the eternal skinny nerd kid with the funny clothes no one sits beside at lunch and who constantly gets bumped to the back of the line. Despite actually winning four games in 2009 – an occurrence as rare as watching Haley’s Comet with the Loch Ness Monster during a lunar eclipse, David Cutcliffe lost his talented quarterback Thaddeus Lewis. But Cutcliffe turned down the job at Tennessee to stay at Duke. Read that again. Cutcliffe is at Duke coaching football. Duke football. He turned down one of the SEC’s historically most prized jobs at Tennessee. To stay with Duke football. And Duke football doesn’t have Duke boogers. They usually get the snot knocked out of them before it can dry and set.

Either he really has something going at Duke, he is really clueless, or Tennessee is poised to replace Duke as the Duke of football.  I’m picking program improvement as the motive. Duke will struggle, but look for 5 or 6 wins out of them this season and some seriously hurt feelings in the ACC. 

Georgia Tech – There are snobs, and there are engineer snobs. Engineers snobs are the most obnoxious snobs in the world. They not only really are smarter than you and prove they are smarter than you, they say it in a way that you have no hope of even understanding, much less responding to! Engineers are hooked on amorphous and crystal math. And the Georgia Institute of Technology is so snobbish, it doesn’t WANT to be a university. That is beneath it.

There is no way to describe this place to outsiders. It is hard, harsh, was once one of the ugliest campuses in the US, is situated in the middle of a crime-infested city where wild predators rob, rape and kill regularly. When you go outside to get fresh air – you lazy, unfit scum who isn’t working solutions of non-linear indefinite integrals in a dark, dank room! – you don’t get fresh air. You get hot smog or soggy smog. My strongest memories of the place include a dorm room at the closest point of the campus to I-75/85 South, before we had air-conditioning, where opening the window meant getting car and truck exhaust fumes to breathe and closing the window meant your room stayed at about 95º all the time, and you woke up to the sound of trucks rolling toward your room at night. No wonder the alumni love this place so much!

(Note to non-engineers – NEVER do kinky sex with an engineer. Their pain levels would make an Al Qaeda terrorist cry and volunteer for a belt bomb mission.) 

Engineers have a perverse sense of normal. Their idea of beauty evolved from World of Warcraft trolls, and they think it’s normal to dress like a Star Trek character for everyday life.

Oh, Keppler! You can put your expanded substitution in my solution void anytime!

Unfortunately, this perverse and reverse view of the world extended to sports for a very long time. Now Georgia Tech has suddenly realized it used to be a national football power. There used to be days of national championships and coaches with legendary names and records. This was Bobby Dodd’s and John Heisman’s home.

Tech has had a thing for coaches with bone offenses that is still there. Pepper Rodgers gave them the wishbone, but wishing and boning aren’t the same thing. Now, suddenly, there is a new face on the flats. And he has brought a flexbone with him. Any girl will tell you a flexing bone is a lot better than a regular bone – and this guy is so good they even named him…Johnson!!!

Paul Johnson brought something to Atlanta last year that they haven’t seen in a long time. He gave them a top ten standing through most of the season, took them to a major BCS bowl, and won the ACC championship.

This will not be the same kind of year as 2009, but with an offense that is constantly being honed to adjust to new opponents and a new focus on defense that was lacking earlier, the Jackets will see more wins again this season than Chan Gailey could count to.  And new quarterback personnel will begin to see more playing time to prepare for the post-Nesbitt era. 

Miami – Have you ever been to a nice, church social where everybody had to wear their Sunday clothes best and could only say “My goodness!” when something bad happened?

Well that was the Coastal Division. The Duke, Carolina, UVA, Georgia Tech crowd, all gathered together, mish-moshing and gnoshing and sipping their lime sherbet punch while they tell their obscure and oh-so-sociably acceptable insults.

I do declare, you handsome men are just makin’ me all swoonie feelin’.

Then these guys show up…

Yo, muthafuckahs! Where be da ho’s an’ da drugs?

This is how the Coastal ACC looks at Miami. They have that great football winning tradition. They have the South Florida presence. They have a program that is building back toward what they want in football. But the Coastal snobs still just feel like they are going to the slums when they are around them. This is a football program at a school, and the ACC snobs want a school where there’s a football program. They call themselves the U, which delights the snobs, who construe that U must imbue that it’s true, what they knew, “we want through and through to be just like you.”

Miami had flashes of brilliance in the 2009 season that were inspiring and frustrating to their fans, and hair-raising and amazing to their opponents. Jacory Harris returns with a better offensive line, trial by fire behind him, and a defense to hold down the opponents’ scores to manageable levels. This is a Miami team poised to make a big statement this year, and it will take a lot of effort to put them into the loss column.

North Carolina  - Ask any North Carolina grad what makes their school special, and they will tell you it’s the oldest state university in America. Georgia Dawgs will rise to the occasion and point out that theirs is the oldest chartered state university, but the Heels will counter with, “You only had a piece of paper. We built the buildings first.” And that’s what it’s like arguing with these guys. To be so smart, they hit you with a ton of bricks.

There are a number of very successful graduates from UNC, but none more well known than the Taylor triplets.

Andy                  James                      And Lawrence

So how do the UNC guys identify themselves, anyway? They are the state-supported flagship of the university system of North Carolina, they compete for liberal arts excellence with Duke and UVA in the snob division, and they proudly call themselves “Tar Heels.” Dudes, how do you expect to be a real snob if you walk around barefoot in sticky tar? What the hell do you do for a living, look for BP style oil spills and stomp on tar balls all day? Gross!!

What I did with my degree from UNC.

As if that isn’t enough, the Tar Heels use a ram to represent them. A male sheep. That’s what they rally around. In sticky feet.  No one has a clue why they chose this. Bighorn sheep don’t live in the Carolinas, and the only connection anyone can come up with about sheep and North Carolina is….never mind.

Back in the early 80’s, they used the ram in a bumper sticker campaign. It was a picture of the UNC sheep butting something with the slogan “Ram it.”  Numerous UNC grads were treated for whiplash before the campaign was halted.

So, these guys think they are as high class and academically elite as Duke, Wake Forest and UVA, but if you talk to them, it takes about 3.14 seconds to find out you are discussing basketball and the glory days of Dean Smith and the horrible Dookies (I wonder if they stepped in that too?)  They really don’t talk about football, but then again, when was the last time North Carolina made a serious run at a national title or even rode high in the top ten? During their 121 year history of football at UNC, they have had 29 coaches, and the best record of any of them in post World War II history is Dick Crum’s at 72-41-3 (.634).  The overall bowl record of the Tar Heels is 12-15. And that’s why people are saying this is the year. (??)

This is the year UNC will show why you play on both sides of the ball. Great defenses are wonderful. Offenses that don’t score are un-wonderful. I don’t know what will be more boring this season: watching UNC and LSU not score on each other or watching the political ads between plays. Carolina will have another winning season this year, but they will not be the world beaters people think.  But maybe a .600 win percentage is not bad if you have sticky feet and cheer for sheep.

Virginia – Snob, thy name is Wahoo! If UNC lays claim to being more first than Georgia, UVA simply claims that they are more first and important because their founder is “Mr. Jefferson.” Yes, the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution set up the University of Virginia, was the architect for it, and established it to be a place for free thinkers. He also put it in a place where he could sit at Monticello with a telescope and play peek a boo on the students down in Charlottesville. It must have been unnerving going to school there. Thomas Jefferson watching you with his Italian refractor fully zoomed out while Edgar Allan Poe sulked around you babbling about ravens and razor sharp pendulums. What a cheerful place!

Welcome to UVA. I will be your new roommate.

There is no campus at the University of Virginia. You will be harshly told they are “the grounds”. Dudes! A university has a campus. Coffee has grounds!

If you are lucky, you can room in one of the original student quarters where there is no electricity and the only heat in winter is from a tiny fireplace opposite the door. My, that sounds like fun! Virginia has a climate very much like Pennsylvania. Would you pay a buttload of money to have a room in Pennsylvania with no heat??!!

When you are in the home of the University of Virginia, you quickly learn that this place has an identity crisis.  It is also The University (which must be terribly confusing when they play the U) and Mr. Jefferson’s University. They are the Cavaliers, Cavs, Wahoos, and Hoos. They live in Charlottesville, C’ville, or Hooville. And you have to visit Vinegar Hill, but not so much Pantops, although Barracks Road is great and lots of stuff is on Rio Road, which is prounounced RYoh, although it got its name because it was Route 10, or R10 road. UVA students put decals on their cars declaring it the Unigenia of Virgicity and the women’s teams are sometimes known as the Cavalier Vaginas. What else would you expect of a place known for liberals but less than liberal amounts of football victories? Woodrow Wilson, Bobby and Ted Kennedy and Katie Couric all went to UVA, and not a one of them played football there!

Virginia refers to its rivalry with UNC as the South’s oldest rivalry, thus picking on Georgia again, but dragging Auburn into it this time.  They really don’t want to do that. It has been twenty years since Virginia sniffed a national title, and this year they are very, very far from another one. In an amazing application of green decision making, UVA only traveled 75 miles east to Richmond to hire their new coach, Mike London, from the University of Richmond. Rumors that they used a Prius to bring him back have not been confirmed. London comes to UVA with an overall record of 24-5 and an FCS championship. He may have less to work with at Virginia than he had at Richmond, though. Look for the Cavs to struggle in this first season for London, but his recruiting and expertise at coaching will soon bear fruit here, and UVA should return to a place outside the cellar by next year.

Virginia Tech – What a bunch of turkeys! Who else in the whole US would want to name their team for Thanksgiving dinner? These guys went from the innocuous Virginia Polytechnic Institute Gobblers to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Hokies. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I say something is hokie, I don’t mean it in a nice way. In fact, when you look up the definition of the word, you get “corny and contrived, fake and melodramatic, insincerely emotional.”  That’s just what I want my team to be called. Don’t you?

Virginia Tech still uses a turkey as their mascot, yet they have faced every opponent unafraid and given them a hard battle most of the time, win or lose. Thankfully, no one has scheduled them to play Sarah Palin yet.

Golly, gosh, Jesus just wants me to eat this turkey before it votes for a Democrat!

But they seem to like being Hokie and somehow still win in spite of it. That may have had something to do with Frank Beamer’s attitude to push them to win. That and the fact that he was named for an automobile.

Ah, jeez, did you have to name me for a post-menopausal woman’s car?

VPISU, or VippySue for short, is located in Blacksburg, Virginia in the New River Valley. The New River is an old river. Even though it’s New it has been around perhaps since the time of the first gators and crocodiles. No one has yet started a hunt for protoOBG or Protebow at its source, but this connection may explain Virginia Tech’s current football prominence in the ACC.

Virginia Tech is a newcomer to the ACC, but their claim to snobbery is pure football power. Like an SEC team planted in the Mid-Atlantic, they dominate the football landscape of the ACC and strike fear into the hearts of Big East regional opponents as well.  Since entering the ACC, the natural rivalry with UVA has been very lopsided, with the Cavaliers sporting the lopped side.

Other rivalries that remained intact include Miami, a fellow Big East convert, Florida State, who discovered that they eventually had to Bow down to the Beamer, Clemson, who also use orange as a color, but who have much better color matching skills in combining purple rather than red with the uniforms, and Georgia Tech, who are still so pissed that VPI calls itself Tech that they wind up wearing their gold pants in every game with them, whether they put them on to begin with or not.

This season is the year of the Hokie. This Hokie isn’t the hokie Hokie, but the kind that will be showing the bird to every team they play. Of all the teams in the ACC, this one can go undefeated. It is by no means certain, but they have the strongest claim to returning the team, the coach and the experience to do it. So, Virginia Tech is well placed in the snobbiest division of the snobbiest conference in college football.  And the heartfelt congratulations of their fellow Coastal members will pour in at season’s end:

“You aren’t as pretty as me, and Thomas Jefferson liked me better and I’ll be on Katie Couric tomorrow!”

“I only lost because I had sticky feet”

“We only miscalculated the trajectory of that play because of magnetic interference from Lou Holz’s spit dripping into the electrical system”

“Yo, fuckah, you be goan pay nex time. You un’stan’ what I’m sayin’?”

“You knocked out my Duke boogers!”

ACC Coastal Prediction

1-     Virginia Tech

2-     Miami

3-     Georgia Tech

4-     UNC

5-     Duke

6-     Virginia