GBH WATCHLIST Week 2: Leftover Football

Greetings from the aftermath of the opening feast. We gorged on fatty classics last week, now we’re picking over a few bones with string and sinew left on them in an attempt to make a palatable stew. Try not to consume any untoward bacterium.

Chuck

CINCINNATI @ PURDUE

11 AM - BTN

Have you ever been to a downtown Vegas casino in the wee hours of the morning? Not that glitzy, bachelorette party, Bellagio, "I'm here to have fun" kinda thing. I mean the nicotine-stained, post-Sinatra, "I need that money to buy baby formula" kind of place.

Well Cincinnati is the guy you see outside of Fitzgerald's at 4 AM, ghost white and drenched in sweat, mentally psyching himself up to call his wife and ask her to wire him bus fare home because it happened again and I know honey but there was a soft line on the Dodgers and it's a no-brainer that they would cover how was I supposed to know Puig was out with a shoulder injury? The Bearcats were once the toast of the Big East, grown accustomed to 10 win seasons and conference championships under Brian Kelly and Butch Jones. Now they are staring down the barrel of season four of the Tubberville era, and they followed up last season's Hawaii Bowl pantsing by giving up 323 yards and 37:06 of possession to Tennessee-Martin last week. And they just keep staring at that losing sportsbook ticket, wondering where it all went wrong.

Purdue is the chain-smoking old man playing penny slots in a leisure suit jacket, shorts, and white tennis shoes. He's been losing for so long he actually has forgotten that it is a bad thing and thinks that the sound of the pennies clinking their way into the machine sounds like jingle bells if you listen hard enough. the only joy he felt all week was laughing at Cincinnati as security escorted him off the premises. Welcome to purgatory, buddy.

Shooter

South Carolina at Mississippi State

6:00 pm CST

ESPN2

Remember the movie from the 80's "Spies Like Us"? It featured Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd in their comedy prime. One of the often overlooked, under-rated comedies of the 1980's. And Vanessa Angel walking around in her undies as a Russian officer may have helped jump start puberty for me in 1985. But I digress. They play the part of two bumbling CIA agents promoted way over their heads. Their primary purpose is to be used as decoys while their former bosses, maneuver to gain supremacy of the nuclear cold war. We're just watching a remake of this movie, but it's "Coaches Like Us" and Mullen and Muschamp are absolutely killing it as the two buffoons put in charge. I just hope ESPN can catch the two of them talking on the field before the game during warm-ups...

Mullen: "Hey Will, what was that trick play you guys used last week at Vanderbilt."

Muschamp: "It's a dikfer."

Mullen: "What's a dikfer?"

Muschamp: "To pee with."

Listen if you want to see some comedy gold, tune in to watch these two befuddled SEC teams trip, fall down, fart, fumble, and slapstick their way through an entire 60 minutes of college football on Saturday night.

Rush

Texas Tech at Arizona State

Saturday, 9:00 p.m. | FS1

The premiere Spring Break programs in the country are bringing the party to the parking lots. Thousands will hook up. Tans and bicep tats will be compared, metric tons of Coors Light will be shotgunned and head-crushed, and dozens of bro-brawls will ensue in the arid desert afternoon leading up to kickoff. This has the potential to be an interesting football game as well. Tech QB Patrick Mahomes will be a huge test for a struggling ASU defense, but Sun Devil Stadium at night is possibly even weirder than Lubbock after dark. Even if you watch this game stone sober, you'll likely find yourself questioning the very fabric of the universe in the early hours of Sunday morning. This is late-night PAC-12 action with a healthy dose of Tech pandemonium thrown in. O/U on TMZ paparazzi at Kliff's hotel hot tub party: 7.5. Let's get weird.