Gridiron Rhetoric: Fiesta Bowl Edition

[Cross blogged for Leland Quarterly]

Amid all the talk of sportsmanship and integrity and athletic ability and scholarship, it’s sometimes easy to forget that at its heart, college football stands for one thing: spectacle.  Luckily, we have Bowl Season (sponsored by the Sizzler) to remind us.  We’ve already seen an Alamo Bowl (sponsored by the Texas Historical Society) to remember, witnessed the Air Force come under Rocket fire in the Military Bowl (sponsored by Cyberdyne Systems), and watched Cal go on vacation during the Holiday Bowl (sponsored by Cheese Board Pizza).  So what can the Fiesta Bowl (sponsored by T. Boone Pickens and John Arrillaga) possibly hold?

In a word?  Spectacle.  (Sponsored by Andrew Luck and Brandon Wheeden.)

I’d like to think that over the last fifteen weeks, I’ve touched on a lot of the traditions and topics that make college football such a unique experience.  And this week, during the biggest desert party of the year, they’re all on display.

Okay, second biggest desert party.

Ridiculous press build up?  Yeah, the game between Stanford and Oklahoma State is being billed as the offensive half of the national championship, with the LSU-Alabama rematch being left to the defense.  Oh, and headline puns abound, of course.

Mascot match up?  The Stanford Not-So-Much-the-Indians-Anymore versus the Oklahoma State Cowboys.  Poetic western backdrop for shootout metaphors is a go.

Between “Pistol Pete” and a horse named “Bullet,” it’s a wonder no one’s died at an OSU game.

Over-the-top fight songs?  OSU’s is “Ride ’Em Cowboys.”  It really doesn’t get much more over-the-top than that.  (Oh wait.)

And as for a venue, we have the University of Phoenix Stadium, home of the Arizona Cardinals and host to Super Bowl XLII, last year’s BCS Championship game, and Wrestlemania XXVI.  The stadium, located in the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area, is the home field for the University of Phoenix, thirty-time national champions in seventeen different Division I sports.^{[citation needed]}

The stage is, in every conceivable way, set.  It’s time for the Cardinal and the Cowboys to do what they’ve done best all season: play some damn good football.

Thanks for a great season, Stanford—and thank you for reading.  I’ll see you in Phoenix.

Finally finally, a look at some rhetoric from around the internet:

• At very least, Andrew Luck is big schmoe on campus—we know he’s humble, but this borders on meiosis
• Stanford running back Stepfan Taylor delivers rap on, off the field—gaining yards with rhythmic meter
• Stanford football instills importance of education to its players—a regular Institutio Oratoria
• Get Him to the Game—phronesis from Coby Fleener

Terminal Eternal

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.

- Woody Allen

I am going to live forever.

I am also, of course, kidding.  (OR AM I?)  But some part of me is, undoubtedly, going to live forever.  The only hiccup with this is that I’ll be in no way associated with it.

There are two intertwining threads that lead to my inevitable immortality: 1) the amount of information and personality I’ve poured into the cloud via this blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., etc., and 2) rapidly accelerating progress in language processing and artificial intelligence.  Even just a simple Markov text generator (thanks, CS106B!) can generate passable, if not convincing, text in the voice of a sample author.  Now, extrapolate this is two dimensions: I’ll only continue to add information about myself in the form of writing to the web, and programmers—and thus algorithms—will only continue to be better and better than my simple class project.

The result?  Predicted in William Gibson’s Neuromancer: by the time I’ve died, I’ll have essentially uploaded myself to the cloud.  Insert your heaven metaphors here.

And not just me—anyone born in the last half century who has a non-negligible presence on the internet could be resurrected.  The only St. Peter and the Pearly Gates of this afterlife (there, a metaphor) are a friend, relative, or private investigator who feels like having a bit of a posthumous chat with the ghost you left in the machine.

I’d like to say this post wasn’t inspired by Facebook’s recent Timeline update, but—alas—something about seeing my entire digital history vivisected and displayed got me thinking about what it might look like in ten, twenty, thirty years.  (And if I’d ever be able to run for public office, but frankly in thirty years I don’t think I want to vote for anyone who doesn’t have some digital dirt on them.)  There’s a record of my soul, if you want to call it that, online—the places I go, people I talk to, things I say.  My wit, my inanity, my charm, my tiredness, my good side, my bad side are all there.  In fifty years, it’ll just take a little clever stringing together of those lumps of clay to make a convincing Seth-golem, something that talks like me, something that acts like me, something that is deterministically programmed to emulate the free will and spontaneity of me.

Someone told me once that his idea of the afterlife—heaven, hell, or purgatory, depending—was to put everyone you’ve ever met into a theater and show the movie of your life, in real time, from birth to final breath.  I propose a new afterlife, and with it a new metric for a life well lived:

When your avatar is raised by some computer necromancer in a séance of modem noises and flickering blue screens, what would it say?

Gridiron Rhetoric: The Histrionic Historiographer on Andrew Luck

[Cross blogged for Leland Quarterly]

In the course of human history, there are individuals who, from time to time, rise above the dirt and grime of ordinary humanity and transcend our mortal lives, become immortalized as shining paragons of all that is commendable about our species.  These are the titans of their age, giants nonpareil whose names are writ in the tome of history indelibly.

As the Histrionic Historiographer, I have been silent for many weeks.  But that is because I have been waiting.  Watching.  Observing.  And now, the time for apotheosis has come.

This quarter has given us one of these aforementioned titans, one of these names that will haunt the halls of Stanford University forever, enshrined with the likes of Jordan, Branner, Elway, Tresidder, Plunkett, Hoover, even young Leland Jr. himself.  This quarter, we have seen greatness.  This quarter, we have seen Luck.

Maybe you've heard of him.

Luck was born in 1989 to Kathy and Oliver Luck, the latter a former NFL quarterback for the Houston Oilers.  The young Luck spent much of his childhood in England and Germany playing football (that sport with the black-and-white ball and the ridiculous haircuts) before returning to Texas, where he—you know what, I’m tired of dancing around it.  Let’s cut to the point:

Andrew Luck is the best fucking architect ever.

It’s not even a competition.  I mean, there have been some great architects, don’t get me wrong.  When you look at the forward motion that Frank Gehry can create or the changes that Walter Gropius brought to the game, well, those are phenomenal advances that revolutionized the industry.  But no one—no one—architects like Andrew Luck.

Luck is the full package.  He can draft, he can model, he can analyze.  He has an extensive knowledge of complex building codes and is adept at reading local planning and zoning laws to ensure he constructs the best possible building for that specific location.  And the man can build like no one I’ve ever seen.  Houses, office buildings, stadiums, dams, Russian palaces, pyramids, synagogues—you name it, Andrew Luck knows how to design, orchestrate, and execute it in the field.

Just by numbers alone, Luck stands out.  He’s designed over eighty different buildings during his time at Stanford, and built models of another seven.  This is especially remarkable when you consider that Luck’s only been an architecture major for three years—he spent his freshman year on the Farm undeclared.  In just three years, Luck has managed to break almost every architecture record the department keeps, and consistently turns in quality buildings when the pressure and odds seem insurmountable.

But it’s more than numbers.  Luck is the only architect to ever master both Trojan and Irish architectural styles—in fact, on a recent class trip to Los Angeles, Luck was able to revitalize the aging Memorial Coliseum, replacing it with a wide open thoroughfare from end to end, a radical redesign that was greeted with huge industry fanfare.  Luck not only does the final design work on each of his buildings, but is involved with the planning from the beginning, often deviating from professors’ prompts if he sees a better way to build.

Whatever firm acquires Luck next year is in for a marquee architect, one who has the potential to make a huge impact from his very first day through the door.  Luck’s talents are unique, his intelligence unrivaled, and his ability to integrate sustainable design practices while creating a building that is not only functional but also aesthetically appealing is simply incredible.  Someone should give him a trophy.

It’s really too bad he’s just not very good at this sports thing.

Finally, a look at some rhetoric from around the internet:

• Heisman or not, Luck’s legacy at Stanford sealed among school’s greatest athletes, ambassadors—yet has never once sunk to bomphiologia
• Fiesta Bowl has makings of a classic—all these rhetorical terms come from the classics, after all
• Andrew Luck wins Johnny Unitas award—for the best quarterback in the nation, just like Toby Gerhart won the Doak Walker award for best running back in the nation in 2009
• Stanford QB Luck: I’m ‘absolutely’ prepared to try the NFL—well, damn
• Salon’s Sexiest Men of 2011—number 12 is number 13

Gridiron Rhetoric: Week 14

[Cross-blogged for Leland Quarterly]

The end of the season means one thing: it’s time to bust out the superlatives. Superlatives are tossed around a lot in football—sometimes tossed around more than the football itself—and so it’s easy to forget that only one quarterback, one linebacker, one coach is the absolute, unquestionable, indisputable best.

And this year, two of those three belong to Stanford.

Andrew Luck, in a wildly unpredictable turn of events, has been named the Pac-12 player of the year, and our coach David Shaw (not that David Shaw) is the Pac-12 coach of the year. Add an 11-1 season, a likely shot at another BCS bowl title, and wins over Cal, USC, and Notre Dame, and it’s easy to see why the superlatives start flying.

But it’s been a rough year for some other Pac-12 schools. Stanford, on the other hand, found that it’s pretty easy to win when you have the best coach in the game. And when your quarterback also happens to be the best coach in the game, well, what do you expect to happen?

Answer: transcendence.

But: We should take a moment to pause at this, the end of our season, before we’re tossed into the chaos of college football’s bowl games, and reflect on how grateful David Shaw must have felt this Thanksgiving to still have his job, when elsewhere in the Pac-12 it was coaches (and not just turkey) on the chopping block.  The expectations for Shaw were astronomical. The stakes were colossal. And the results were monumental.

Other coaches were not so lucky. Rick Neuheisel helped his Bruins accidentally become Pac-12 South champions, despite their best effort not to do so. Arizona State’s Dennis Erickson watched his team implode slowly over the course of the last six weeks of the season. After a strong start, Washington State collapsed into its (as of recently) usual place as football doormat, and Paul Wulff got shown the door. And Arizona didn’t even wait until the end of the season to give Mike Stoops the boot.

Yes, it’s a hard job, being a NCAA football coach. And one that sometimes seems frustratingly based on how much luck (Luck?) you have on the field—or how well your predecessors managed to recruit people like Luck. But don’t feel bad for Neuheisel or Erickson or Wulff or Stoops—they have hefty severance packages and they’ll turn up again somewhere, either assistant coaching in the NFL or commentating or just realizing that making between $600,000 (Stoops) and $1,500,000 (Erickson) per year was a pretty nice gig while they had it.

The highest paid coach at a public Pac-12 school? Take a guess.

College football players may not be paid, but college football coaching is not exactly an altruistic endeavor. And like in any job that’s highly competitive and rewards talent, if you don’t perform to expectations, well, say goodbye to that bathroom.

Finally, a look at some rhetoric from around the internet:

• Pac-12 coach firings don’t surprise Stanford’s Shaw—listen to Shaw wax elegiac
• A suitably awful end to an awkward Pac-12 Season—an alliterative introduction to the inaugural Pac-12 championship game: Oregon vs. sure, UCLA, why not?
• Stanford tight end ‘one of a kind’—which is, I believe, the most ironic of all idioms
• Andrew Luck, the student, not part of Stanford’s Heisman push—which is really too bad