Tuesday Skull Session

The only way to grill a hot dog

Happy Tuesday everyone, and welcome to your morning Skull Session. To paraphrase the Simpsons, I hope you all had a good time celebrating the birth of America by blowing up a small part of it. But sadly, playtime is over. The fireworks have exploded, the processed meats have been consumed, and the overweight, balding men have extinguished their cigars and put their shirts back on.

Back to the grind we go, gritting our teeth as we put on our Resigned To Our Fate big boy pants and gear up for what should be an interesting conclusion to the Summer of George (Dohrmann). Just hang in there, though. Fall camp will be upon us faster than James Louis pouncing on a bucket of wings at 3 am, and football, honest to God football, will start to take center stage again. I really believe that this upcoming season should be a lot of fun and incredibly cathartic in a number of ways, and I can't wait for it to start.

...Is what I will probably write again in like four weeks. Seriously, I need to watch a college athlete throw a football at something or someone relatively soon or I am going to go insane.

Just Kidding! This Works Fine, Too If you think about it, the hot dog is really the food version of a football. They are both brownish, have their origins in the pork world, and the greatest athletes in the world use them to showcase their incredible skills. Of course I am referring to Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, which was won for the fifth year in a row by GOD FEARING AMERICAN Joey Chestnut, who consumed 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes to claim the mustard belt, ten thousand dollars, and the undying love and affection of Mrs. Paula Deen.

Or did he? In an undisclosed location (probably some kind of bunker beneath the Pentagon), former champion Takeru Kobayashi ate what would have been a world record 69 hot dogs in a simulcast webshow that aired along with the official contest. Kobayashi has been in some kind of dispute with the official governing body of competitive eating, which is one of the more ridiculous beginnings to a sentence I've ever written. His record is not official and will not be counted, which is very dumb because it's literally a question of him eating a bunch of hot dogs and not inventing cold fusion or something.

Elsewhere...

"If the hot dogs had been made out of horse meat, I bet Johnny could get down 75," typed Denny into his Packard Bell Legend 406CD, grinning inwardly to himself before clicking "save."

In Fake Football News The Associated Press has an update on the poisoned trees in Toomer's Corner at Auburn and brace yourselves... they might die, they might not. Stupefying news to be sure, but I feel that OSU fans have something of a kinship with these trees now. Seriously, hear me out:

The trees are going through cycles of sprouting and shedding leaves because of the poison, Keever said.

"After the yellowing, browning and dropping off, the buds break out again and new, immature leaves will form," he said. "It's good that they still have the stored food reserves to do this."

You see, OSU fans are very much like those trees. Even as scandal and poison threatens their way of life, causing the leaves of happiness to wither and die, new and immature leaves of hope and optimism continuously spring anew, laughing in the face of possible doom. Also I guess you could make a fat joke. But the point I'm trying to make here is, I hope that both the optimism of OSU fans and the trees at Toomer's Corner last for a long, long time.

In Real Football News My sister's alma mater might actually have something to be proud of in football besides Jay Cutler(?) in the coming years. As Andy Staples lays out in his typical hyperbolic fashion, Vanderbilt is seemingly poised to have a great recruiting class after signing one of the top prospects in the state of Tennessee. A lot of this article is fluff, but one thing that I think Staples gets dead on is this:

"Is it too hard? That's what people use against us," [Vanderbilt coach] Franklin said. "Don't go to Vanderbilt. It's too hard academically. Well, what are they telling you? What are they saying to you when they say don't go to Vanderbilt because it's too hard academically?" The answer is obvious; in not so many words, Franklin has just convinced a recruit that a competing coach thinks the player is too stupid to succeed at Vandy.

Negative recruiting is nothing new, but it definitely makes me wonder how many coaches have lost players by attempting to appeal to their academic laziness. My grades in high school were anything but great, but had a recruiter said something like that to me I probably would've had exactly the reaction Franklin is hoping other kids will have.

In Parade News During Columbus' 4th of July parades there apparently were a couple of Jim Tressel themed floats, which were both hilarious and kind of sad, meaning that "sadlarious" is now a new word in my lexicon, joining badong and incredibad. On the other hand, who said nothing good ever came from the incredibly obnoxiously named Doo Dah parade?

And Finally... In serious, actual news, Sean Matti, a running back at Purdue, went missing during the weekend at a lake in Indiana. Please send your best wishes and prayers to the Purdue football family at this time, as we hope for the best in this very unfortunate story.