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This means that Georgia and Florida might be #1 and #2.  If that happens, I promise we’ll put out a commemorative webcomic… thesis be damned.
UPDATE: Erm, due to unexpected losses by both Georgia and Florida, it appears we will be able to keep our theses on schedule.

“It’s the most heart-warming phone ad of the year!”  I’m not sure that heart-warming is the best fit for NFL Live.  I think that the average American man likes his humor a bit more robust and, umm, funny.

UPDATE: We’re in the second quarter now and the ad has played three five times.

SECOND UPDATE: The ad ended up playing nine times, by my count.

Agent Orange, our mutated alligator, has already provided a set of Stuff Mammals Like. Now, he offers this insight into Stuff Gators Like.

1. Steve Irwin. Anyone that hunts crocodiles is a friend of gatorkind. And he survived a wrestling match with Albert the Florida Gator, which proves that he is highly esteemed by the Gator Gods.
2. The Gator Gods. These benevolent divine beings are the source of gator virtues, foremost among them friendliness, charity and bloodlust. The Gator Gods frequently bestow great blessings upon their chosen ones the gators, like the unfairly gifted Tim Tebow.  (See also Janikowski’s Curse of the Gator). In exchange for these blessings, the Gator Gods jealously demand worship (the Gator Chomp) and tribute (FSU blood).
3. Sweet, sweet victory. The first gator to use the phrase “rebuilding season” will be summarily sacrificed to appease the Gator Gods. They are not without compassion, but the total exclusion of the Gators from March Madness was merely the latest sign that the Gator Gods. Are. Angry. We fail to slake their thirst for blood at our own peril.

In theory, the Office of Special Investigations employs all of the US government’s supernatural employees. Several examples suggest otherwise. In WWII, Sgt. Audie Murphy found 80 Nazis and took them as prisoners of war – alone. Several DEA agents can smell narcotics through layers of clothing and, in one case, a Mr. Potato Head toy. And everyone knows about the Navy SEALS, whose “Hell Week” is the single best argument that only mammals can be ninjas.

However, in only does one agency– the US Secret Service– does the presence of undeniably unnatural agents shape agency procedures and contingency plans, particularly regarding the Football, the laptop with the President’s nuclear launch codes. SS regulations require that the agent protecting the Football must flee if the President is attacked. Furthermore, statutes require that the Football always be within 30 seconds of the President.

One wonders what’s the point of fleeing if the agent plans to stay within 30 seconds of the President. He would presumably be within 30 seconds of the attackers, right?

That’s where RB (pronounced Arby) comes in. We haven’t bothered measuring what his land-speed is. What we know is that’s he fast. Really fast. In a test-run, he went from the Oval Office to Arlington, VA in approximately three seconds. (He blames most of that on closed doors). The Secret Service and relevant Air Force bodies have constructed safehouses within 30 seconds of the White House. Although they had not anticipated building such sites in Colorado or Montana, no one is disappointed.

The problem is that RB only works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. For the other half of the workweek, QB (cuby) controls the Football. He’s a Ph. D in particle physics and he looks more like one of the guys that designed the Football than one of the agents that guards it. However, he does have the ability to teleport… However, his teleportation has a roughly five percent chance of destroying everything within a hundred miles of his “landing zone.” Accordingly, contingency sites have been constructed in American Samoa…

–Captain Carnage

Not surprisingly, mammals usually drink beer when watching football.  If I had to root for a team like the Golden Gophers, I’d also want to drink myself into a stupor.

–Agent Orange, Superhero Nation’s resident mutated alligator (and football afficionado)

The Game: Awesome. Ridiculous. This will likely be the highest-watched Superbowl thus far.

The Show: I was elated to see that it was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but it confuses and enrages me that “Won’t Back Down” and “Free-Falling” made the cut and “Last Dance with Mary Jane” did not (because it’s possibly narcotic?). After around five seconds of Free-Falling, I was ready for Tom Brady and the (New York) Heartbreakers.

The Ads: From bad to worse. I enjoyed a spot that featured salamanders dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, but in an objective sense I realize that the ad is only funny to people that think that dancing salamanders are funny.

Best Use of Copyrighted Character: Terminators doing battle with the NFL robot guys to showcase the unbelievably bad Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Worst Use of Copyrighted Character: Hard to say, but probably the Coke (Pepsi?) commercial that used Stewie from Family Guy.

Best Use of Athlete: American Idol’s use of Ben Rothlisberger.

Second Best Use of Athlete: Chad Johnson in “Moment of Truth”.

Our resident mutated alligator, Agent Orange, offers this look into the brutally competitive world of reptology.

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I came across this ESPN commercial featuring a brawl between Steve Irwin and a certain Florida football mascot. It’s reasonably hilarious. Unsurprisingly, Albert the Florida Gator puts the screws to him in ~5 seconds.

Speaking of AFG, he has his own Myspace page.  Incidentally, Albert and his long-time mistress Alberta can be hired out for private events. Understandably, AFG doesn’t come cheap. Even his gesture gets its own Wikipedia page. Hell. Alberta costs $250 an hour. Speaking of the Gator Chomp, see also The Curse of the Gator Chomp, inflicted on players that mock the Gator Gods at their own peril. Sebastian “Worst First Round Draft Pick” Janikowski has never been the same.

Speaking of Gator Haters, we have this amusingly depraved comparison of Gator pep rallies to Nazi events.

Remember, it’s not a real party unless there are muzzles and reptiles in t-shirts.

For 24 glorious hours following the end of the Super Bowl, Superhero Nation’s going crazy with either a NY Giants or NE Patriots-themed header. You may remember the custom header I prepared in the off-hand chance that the 1-12 Dolphins beat the 13-0 Patriots. (It, uhh, didn’t happen).

Click to see the part that got cut off on the right.

Mercifully, I did a better picture of Brady this time around.

With all due respect to literate alligators, shouldn’t Florida print signs that say ATTENTION, HUMANS?

Agent Orange has a picture of his own, but I think that it doesn’t really need a caption.

I notice that he skipped over the game against Michigan this year, but I’m from Notre Dame and can’t really say anything about who had a lackluster post-season showing.

 A Time article had the following correction. 

An article on Thursday about John McCain’s relationship with his children misstated, in some editions, the site of a graduation ceremony for Mr. McCain’s son Jimmy, which was attended by several siblings. Jimmy McCain graduated from Marine boot camp; there is no Marine Academy.

“There is no Marine Academy.” Yeah, Time. Any college football fan could tell you Marines play for the Naval Academy, one of an elite group of nine teams that beat Notre Dame this year.

I’ll chalk this up to a crucial misalignment of football fans, rather than a “I-hope-someone-at-Time-knows-military-stuff.”

And, just in case anyone at Time’s Human Resources Department is reading (wink wink), I know the difference between Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada and a Hawaiian death-threat.

No one on the Superhero Nation editorial board is pleased with the way football has gone this year.

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Mike: You’re positive you’re not an alien?

Catastrophe: Do aliens frequently speak fluent English?

Mike: Decryption programs applied to radio transmissions can do surprising things.

Catastrophe: I was checking football club rankings when you found me. Unless aliens are frequently interested in football…

Mike: You’d be surprised. You follow football?

Catastrophe: Sometimes. There aren’t any good teams around here.

Mike: Name three.

Catastrophe: Good teams? Arsenal, Man U and Newcastle.

Mike: Please. If you ever need to make up sports teams in the future, I recommend going with animal names, not randomly selected adjectives and nouns. “New castle?” “Man you?” That doesn’t even make sense!

Catastrophe: …

Catastrophe: You don’t get out much, do you?

This is the final part of a four part series. You can see part 1 here.

Having trounced Pittsburgh, the New England Patriots appear to have a clear road to a perfect 16-0 season.  But they won’t go 16-0 because the Miami Dolphins are going to beat them and go 1-15.  I will further predict that their win against the Patriots will be their only win this season. 

The Notre Dame-Navy game was painful but exciting.  Navy won by 2 in triple overtime, snapping a losing streak that dates back to 1963.

Three key plays:

1. Notre Dame’s offense fumbled, resulting in a Navy defensive TD.
2. ND is down seven and there are six minutes left in the fourth quarter. It’s third-and-28.  Quarterback Sharpley sneaks up for fourteen yards.  On fourth-and-14, Sharpley is hit as he’s throwing the ball.  Notre Dame catches the ball, anyway, for a first down.  Notre Dame goes on to tie the game on the drive.
3. Notre Dame is 25-30 yards away from the endzone.  It’s fourth-and-eight.  There are 45 seconds left in the game and the score is tied.  Notre Dame goes for… a first down!?!  At the time, this play seemed absolutely inexplicable to me. We end up missing the first down.  Admittedly, we probably would have missed a 40-yard field goal, too.  But a successful FG would almost certainly have won the game.  A first down would not guarantee a score– you’d still have to make a FG or TD.

There were a few positive points.

• Notre Dame’s running game had been absolutely abysmal… possibly the worst in the country, averaging 34 yards a game.  Eldridge alone ran for 120 yards this game.  Although much of the improvement can be contributed to a soft Navy defense, it does appear that ND’s offense is improving on many fronts.
• Our punt return unit improved considerably.
• The defense was not particularly productive but didn’t give up many enormous plays.
• The offense is playing somewhat more carefully.  It still gave up a fumbled touchdown, but that’s a lot cleaner than some of our previous outings.  We also protected Sharpley fairly well, although Navy has never been sack-heavy.

In other Notre Dame news, Notre Dame alum Ryan Shay died during the New York City marathon today.  But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that athletes are more important… Bill Anderson, the father of several ND alumni and a Scoutmaster, passed away a month ago today.

…if Notre Dame defeats #11 ranked USC.  In fact, the win would affect my mental state so greatly that it might affect my website.  Suffice it to say that the website redesign would be GLORIOUS.

Another team very close to my heart has pulled off an upset, though one that was probably a bit more unexpected than Notre Dame thwomping UCLA. Stanford upset #2-ranked USC at its LA Coliseum, ending a 35 game USC home win-streak.

The game roughly paralleled the ND victory. The Trojans put up 459 yards to just 235 for Stanford.

Like UCLA, Stanford wasn’t playing with its starting QB (because of a seizure).

The game came down to an early extra-point attempt by USC’s Buehler being coldly denied by Pannel Egboh.

USC was only up 9-0 at halftime and was booed off the field.

USC led 16-7 going into the 4th.

The Trojans had 459 yards of total offense, compared to 235 for Stanford. That was pretty similar to UCLA vs. Notre Dame, but again turnovers proved critical.

Details of how Stanford got up 24-23 are scarce, but you can see this Youtube video showing the last sixty seconds with some mildly annoying commentary by a drunken Stanford fan.

Early on, ND forced the UCLA starting quarterback out of the game with a knee injury.

Brandon Walker just tied the game 6-6 with a field-goal that hit the goalpost and went through.

By the way, the oddsmakers had us losing this game by 22.5 points. I had projected a somewhat smaller loss, somewhere between 10 and 14, based mostly on a much better performance against Purdue than anywhere else.

Our special teams are foaming-at-the-mouth rabid this game. A punt put the ball on the ten yard line and special teams kept UCLA from moving the ball very much. NEXT play. UCLA moves the ball 3 yards and then, maybe fumbles the ball. They’re challenging the play now. My impression is that it’s a ND ball. Not that I’m biased or anything. :)

YES! ND has it. 31 yards to go.

Aww. Too bad. ND ended up punting, but it’s on their 2 yard line.

GOAL! Another interception. We are real close. Again!

TOUCHDOWN BABY! Clausen goes for the goal! 13-6 after the extra point.

GOAL GOAL GOAL! Another fumble for them, we turn it into another touchdown. 20-6 after the point.

Aww. They just scored a touchdown on a monster pass play. Wait, no. Flag called at the 45, on the offense. :)

End score: 20-6. They ended up doubling our offensive output (300 total yards to 150) but gave up something outlandish like 6 turnovers.

Claussen had a really slow game, 17 of 27 passes for 84 yards, with no aerial touchdowns and no interceptions.

At around 10 pm, I did a Google search for ‘UCLA Notre Dame.’ Look at the one starting No. 10. Suffice it to say that for a few moments I thought we had won.

UPDATE: We did!  Score. 

Yeah, screw you, Google.

It’s almost halftime and the score is 17-14, MSU. Notre Dame is performing much better on both sides of the ball. We’re currently at a third-and-17, not exactly promising, but the situation is much rarer today than in our past outings.  Our two offensive touchdowns are the first for us this season.

UPDATE: MSU just made two monster third down conversions, including a third-and-17. That drive ended in an MSU touchdown. 24-14 MSU.

4th and 1, Notre Dame goes for it but the runner is quickly tripled for a loss of yards.   Darn.  I would have gone for it, too.