Monday Morning Tail Slap: Cash Rules Everything Around MyFavoriteCollegeFootballTeam (the gratitude continues...)
Some Oregon State Bye Week Musings from America's Playground
Happy Monday Morning Tail Slap, Cream Subscribers! I want to take a moment here at the top to thank all of you who have subscribed to Cream: a college football Substack so far. Every single time I get the email notification of a new subscriber it brings a lot of joy with it. I know there are a million other things each of you could be doing with your time and I also know your email inbox real estate is a special space. Please know I do not take my place in that space for granted. Thank you.
The last several notifications have informed me the people subscribing to Cream are coming from a lot of different places. Some of you have known me for nearly my entire life and are well versed with all of the versions of my bullshit. I want to offer you all my continued thanks for your continued tolerance of said bullshit. Some of you are friends I know, but haven’t spoken to in years. It’s a privilege to get to reconnect with you this way and please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if there’s anything I can do to return the favor. If there are any projects, pursuits, or anything else that I can support in any way, I’m more than happy to do so for all of you (even you, Will). However, the most special of all the Substack notifications are for those of you who I’ve never met before. I don’t know how you found this weird little corner of the internet, but I’m so happy you’re here.
To say that this has blown up would be a bit of a reach (it has absolutely not ‘blown up’), but there are more people here than I thought there would be, especially this soon. With that in mind, here’s a quick reminder of what this silly little publication is and what inspired me to put it together.
‘Cream,’ stands for Cash Rules Everything Around MyFavoriteCollegeFootballTeam. It’s an unmistakable nod to the eternal genius of the Wu-Tang Clan and an honest assessment of the current college football universe, most notably to this writer, the universe that the college football team representing my alma mater currently finds itself in, the Oregon State Beavers.
Cream is meant to be a celebration of the still beautiful soul of college football, and an attack on the soulless bastards who are getting rich off of trying to kill it. Despite the sincere hatred in my heart towards the people who are actively trying to erase something I love, this is still a love forward publication. And despite all that’s going on there is still much more love than hatred in my heart as I write this week’s Monday Morning Tail Slap.
I need to offer my apologies for another belated posting. I’ll be putting the finishing touches on today’s Tail Slap on my flight back to Minneapolis from Las Vegas where we just spent the weekend celebrating my dear friend and beloved Belligerent Beavs co-host Benjamin Lawrence Sebastian Wehage. If you’re a listener of our show then you know him as Benny, aka Benny with the Good Coif, aka a zillion other silly nicknames. The final and hardest working third of the Belligerent Beavs podcast, JP Bertram, of course joined us in Vegas and despite our best efforts to record a new episode from the famous Flamingo, somehow, we got distracted (instead, we’ll be recording after Benny and JP’s Niners inevitably kick the crap out of my Vikings on Monday Night Football).
It was an incredibly weekend in Vegas and one that included seeing Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, and De La Soul in concert at the MGM Grand. I have yet to get a chance to speak with any of the nine members of the Wu in person, but I’ve been told they are incredibly flattered by the name of this Substack. The weekend worked out perfectly as Benny and I especially are diehard fans of Wu-Tang, but also because this stop on the New York State of Mind Tour fell on Oregon State football’s bye week. A clear sign from the cosmos this bachelor party was simply meant to be.
Just because Oregon State didn’t take to the gridiron in Week Eight, doesn’t mean there aren’t still plenty of talking points related to the team from the Paris of the Pacific Northwest. Here are a few of them:
Bye Week Beavs Keep Climbing
Despite remaining idle, the Beavs moved up to No. 11 in this week’s AP Poll and No. 12 in the Coaches Poll. Both marks are the highest Oregon State has been ranked since 2012. It also marks the first time in program history that OSU has opened a season with nine consecutive weeks ranked in both polls.
Oregon State is making program history while boardroom suits who have never played football are trying to erase their program.
I’ve seen some chatter in social media and in the broader college football space that suggests Oregon State and Washington State are “getting annoying.” If anyone brings this up to you then please gently remind them of the one sentence paragraph above. If you are one of the people who happens to think this, I’ll say it for you one more time:
Oregon State is making program history while boardroom suits who have never played football are trying to erase their program.
If you can’t be sympathetic to the hurt and the angst that fact is causing, then not only are you letting down a great institution, but you’re also letting down me, and worst of all letting down Wu-Tang. Please listen to ‘Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers’ from start to finish at your earliest convenience, look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are indeed the human being you profess yourself to be.
Oregon State’s home wins against Utah and UCLA earned a nice boost in the reputation department this weekend. Utah clawed their way to stunning come-from-behind victory at USC behind some superb play from walk-on/third-string/pig farmer/quarterback Bryson Barnes, effectively ending the Trojan’s college football hopes and any chances of Caleb Williams becoming the first back-to-back Heisman Winner since Archie Griffin in 1974-75.
I may be the resident worrywort on Belligerent Beavs (it’s a difficult job, but someone has to do it), but I’m having a hard time not letting my imagination start to run away with me on how special this season could yet become. More thoughts on that thought:
Oregon State Controls its Destiny
Mark my words, the Arizona Wildcats are better than anyone outside of Tucson thinks they are. Jedd Fisch has done an incredible job rebuilding the Wildcats and has probably done a better overall coaching job over the last three seasons than anyone in the country not named Jonathan Smith (it’s a Substack with an Oregon State lens, remember).
Next week’s game against Arizona terrifies me. The Wildcats are not only well-coached, but there is legitimate NFL talent at the receiver position, and they’ll be playing at home. Weird things happen in the desert, y’all.
Prior to last week’s 44-6 drubbing of the Cougs in Pullma, Arizona played well in close losses to Washington and to USC. Make no mistake, they’ve had this game agains’t highly ranked Oregon State circled for awhile, and they also had a bye week to prepare for it too. This game is one of the toughest, and most crucial tests for Jonathan Smith as OSU’s head coach.
And yet, I cannot stop dreaming, y’all! At 6-1 and No. 11 in the AP Poll, Oregon State is in total control of its destiny. If the Beavers want to book a trip to the Pac 12 Championship in Las Vegas in six weeks (who knows if the Bebes will be recovered by then, but we’ll move mountains to be there in person) then all they need to do is take care of business. OSU should be a clear favorite in each of their next three games at Arizona, at Colorado, and against Stanford in Corvallis, before they close with the two-legged gauntlet of Washington and Oregon.
Washington will likely be favored in that one, but they have to come to Corvallis where no team other than USC has tasted victory in two years. The Huskies also just looked super vulnerable against Arizona State at home this week.
Beating the Ducks at Autzen for the first time since 2007 won’t be a walk in the park, either, but it would be great poetry and great theater for Oregon State to go into Autzen Stadium, potentially for the last time on an annual basis, with a Pac 12 Championship berth on the line.
Having these types of stress dreams is what we regular dreamed about back in August, Beaver Nation. Now that it’s here, don’t hesitate to embrace it.
The 12-Team College Football Playoff
While the 12-Team College Football Playoff is still a year away, it’s hard for any college football fan not to look at how the field is shaping up this year and imagining what the 12-team field could look like.
Bud Elliot of 247 Sports and the Cover 3 Podcast shared what a College Football Bracket might look like if the 12-team field were to be applied to this season. It held a number of interesting hypothetical matchups including a 10-seed Oregon State playing against 7-seed Alabama. Whether or not Oregon State could win or lose such a matchup is not the point.
The point is Oregon State finished No. 14 in last season’s final CFP Rankings, and are now hypothetical but believable opponents against Alabama. Do you remember early in the 2021 season against Washington at home when a Beavs fan at Reser held up a ‘We Want Bama’ sign in the student section?
This time two years ago it was hard not to meet that sign with a laugh. Today, while still being a hypothetical, would be a very interesting matchup against two very good teams, both with designs of winning it all. We could talk every day about the job Jonathan Smith has done since taking over a team at the bottom of the Power 5 barrel in November of 2017 and it still wouldn’t be enough.