We Are Hot Chicks: Tailgate Candy

With college football kicking off in earnest last week, and the NFL getting underway tomorrow, it's time to thrust together two of the HoG's deepest loves: tailgating and Hot Chicks.

There's a new blog that's been blowing up a bit of late, getting mentions on the Deadspins and W/Leathers of the world. It has possibly the greatest name ever: SEC Poon. Its premise is extremely complicated and vague, in that it shows photographs of tasty college girls on their way to football games. Crazy, those Southerners.


Now on my voyages to this web site, I had an unmistakable feeling of deja poon. I knew many of these girls. Not "knew" like I'd met them, but "knew" like I'd ogled these same pics at some point in the past, on these same YourStubs. Many of the images on SEC Poon are gleaned from a site called Southern Fried Football, which is maintained by some dude named Packman. And I'm sure that Packman is ecstatic that his nickname has been co-opted by one Adam Jones.

Anyway, Packman has this gig wherein he travels to the gridiron cathedrals of the American South and hangs out in parking lots. There he tempts saucy coeds to pose on his golf cart by giving them stickers or something. He has corporate sponsorship for this endeavor. In a way he's much like the mysterious Brooks we visited a few weeks back. Packman, keep up the good work.

If you dig on some college football (standard HoG disclaimer: The BCS is bad and Notre Dame is awesome!) then no doubt you've heard that no brand of the sport can hold a candle to the Southeast Conference. You've no doubt heard this from some toothless inbred coon-ass who can't spell "candle," but that's neither here nor there.

While my SEC experience consists of a trip to Death Valley (the Baton Rouge edition, sorry Clemson) and one to Arkansas (which doesn't really count), I have attended numerous games in the great state of Texas (much of my family went to A&M). And I can say with authority that one huge thing Southern football has over the Midwestern, West Coast and yes, even the Rocky Mountain flavors is this:

The girls.

There are women at every football game, but Southern girls take it to a different level. For one, they like the game and they don't have any ridiculous feminist hangups about it. They dig the traditions and the outdated corniness of stadium rituals. Furthermore, they get their shit together for a game. None of this no-makeup-and-pajamas crap you'll see up North, no sir. These ladies take their tailgate attire serious.

And so, without any further bullshit, here are a bunch of photos of chicks going to football games. Much of it is honest-to-goodness SEC poon all right, but there's some ACC poon as well (sorry about the Jenn Sterger). And here's a little shout-out to tiny Appalachian State, who not only knocked off Michigan but has some fine poon at their school as well.



















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The HoG's Semi-Informed College Football Preview

Tonight the collegiate gridiron season kicks off, as Louisiana State University visits the hostile environs of Starkville, Mississippi to battle the MSU Bulldogs. I'm glad to have the games back, and I'm ready to watch and gamble my little heart out. I can't quite shake the feeling, though, that the sport of college football really stinks right now, and it may get a lot worse before it gets better.

Don't get me wrong, the games themselves are great. There is absolutely nothing better than a close, well-played college football game. Due to the fact that there is no preseason and no playoff system, each contest is incredibly important to everyone: the players, the coaches, the students, the alumni, the media wags, and dopes like me sitting at home on the couch.

I mean, I hate Notre Dame, but for some reason the Irish have played an incredible number of fabulously entertaining games since Charlie Weis got to South Bend. Be it against USC, who's always better, or Michigan State, who's always worse, Notre Dame has played in at least half of the truly great games that I've seen in the past two years.

But Notre Dame is indicative of everything that's wrong with this sport. They set their own rules and have a preposterously easy path paved straight to the BCS. The deck is clearly stacked in their favor, and they make no apologies for this fact.

Take Major League Baseball, which most would argue is the least equitable of the major professional team sports (plus hockey). The main argument that casual fans have against MLB being a truly great game is that the New York Yankees can spend way more money than the Minnesota Twins. This is very true. But the Yankees still have to play a balanced schedule set by a governing body, and that schedule contains an equal number of home and road games. They have to earn a spot in the playoffs or the World Series by wining more games than their opponents, not because they have more fans or history and tradition on their side.

Now I'm not arguing for some giant sports welfare program to come in and make everything "fair" and "right." I'm a capitalist, a proud one, and I've never had any problem with smart people making good business decisions and succeeding because of them. If the University of Florida has a bigger football fan base and places more emphasis on football on an institutional level than does Vanderbilt, than they should kick Vandy's ass in football. You can't legislate Vanderbilt into being good at football if they don't want to be.

Vanderbilt doesn't have to play in the SEC or even Division I, just like Minneapolis doesn't have to have a Major League Baseball team. It's a choice. If Vanderbilt wants to kick ass, they can either invest the resources it takes to play big-time football or it can drop down to D-II.

But this is all getting very political and abstract, and it doesn't get to the reasons I don't care as much about college football. Everyone knows how fucked up the polls are, and how difficult it is for a truly underrated or underappreciated team to make any kind of meaningful advancement in one season. If you're not in, say, the top 12 to start the season you have no shot at winning it all. How many champs in other sports have defied preseason expectations to come together and make a run? Try most, lately. In the BCS the Cardinals, White Sox, Marlins and Angels would have never won rings, because the pundits never would have put them in the title round.

To me the most ridiculous aspect of the polls, specifically the preseason ones, is the impact of the perceived strength of schedule. A team like Rutgers or Boise or Louisville is downgraded because they don't play a tough enough schedule, and yet USC is No. 1 in part because their schedule isn't as hard as LSU's (or Texas' or Michigan's...or West Fuckin Virginia's). The Trojans are the most likely elite team to go undefeated, so they're tops. The voters allegedly love ballsy scheduling decisions like Texas and Ohio State playing early games the last few years, but the incentive of scheduling such risky matchups is far outweighed by the benefit of lining up tomato cans.

So we the fans get screwed, in dozens of different ways. We don't get true champions. We don't get good early games (I'm supposed to be excited about Tennessee and Cal this weekend). What we get is an endless series of bullshit political debates, about the relative merit of an SEC loss versus a Big East win and blah blah blah. I watch sports to escape the shenanigans going on in D.C., yet it seems as though modern-day fandom is all about salary structure, court documents and lobbying by Oklahoma State patrons.

So that's that. I know, Earth-shaking revelations--college football has some issues. If you tuned in seeking an honest-to-goodness PREVIEW, go somewhere else--I hear ESPN, EDSBS and Scooter McDougle have good ones. The team I feel is going all the way? That's easy. West Fuckin Virgina.


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