Actually, I’m Jewish.

It’s a phrase I’m used to saying, for one reason or another.  What are you doing for Christmas?  Actually, I’m Jewish.  (Subtext: going to a Chinese restaurant.)  Why are you dressed in a suit and walking away from class on the first day of the quarter?  Actually, I’m Jewish.  (Subtext: going to shul for Rosh Hashanah, and then probably to a Chinese restaurant.)  How come you didn’t play Little League?  Actually, I’m Jewish.  (Subtext: and Koufax I ain’t.)

I’ve been saying it for as long as I can remember, since my second grade class wrote letters to Santa—and I wrote one to Harry the Hanukkah Elf.  I’ve got the tone down, too, inflected enough to not offend whoever makes me say it, but casual enough to not sound offended.  Done right, it’s downright diplomatic.  Actually, I’m Jewish.  (Subtext: but thanks for asking anyway, I mean it, really, and don’t feel bad about it, there’s really no way to tell—not like we have horns or something—and if you’d like to know anything about my culture I’m probably a mediocre ambassador but I’d be glad to do my best to use my bar mitzvah, my Hebrew school, my bits of Yiddish, my ability to tolerate gefilte fish, to use anything, really, to help explain whatever may be on your mind.)

I’ve been saying it for so long, in fact, that I’m completely taken aback when, in the back seat of a luxury sedan in the middle of Berlin, the ethnically Persian, culturally German girl beside me—who’s a bit of a world traveler and has carried on conversations with two people in this car and one on a cell phone in four different languages—turns abruptly in her seat and asks me, without warning, “Are you Jewish?”

“Actually, uh, yeah, I am,” I stammer.

* * *

If you’re expecting me now to say that being Jewish during the quarter I spent studying abroad in Berlin was weird or isolating or deeply significant or anything like that, well, sorry to disappoint.  Most of the time I didn’t even think about it.  I really didn’t even think about it when I applied to the program—Berlin was just another European city, a name like Paris or London or Venice.  Unlike Paris, London, or Venice, though, Berlin was faceless.  I could picture those other three, could picture Moscow or Madrid or Dublin, without having been to any of them.

But Berlin was blank.  It had no Eiffel Tower, no watery canals, and for whatever reason the sights and monuments I would fall in love—or at least wanderlust—with had never entered my sphere of, ummm, “world travel awareness.”  (There’s a German word that captures exactly what I’m trying to say here, I’m sure, but hell if I know what the word is.)  I associated Berlin synecdochically with Germany, and Germany with, well, Bavaria.  Munich beer halls, dirndls, fantastic accents.  Hans Gruber.  The Sound of Music—which, I know, takes place in Austria, but the two countries were pretty thoroughly amalgamated in my mind before I visited both of them.

Of course, there were also the wars.  World War I’s all spiked helmets and U-boats to me, maybe because I’m hard-pressed to imagine a Princeton professor leading my country to war, or maybe because it’s largely eclipsed in media and high school history by its successor.  World War II is the spoiled child of military history, getting all the attention with its whole war-on-fascism and final-battle-between-good-and-evil deal.

So I guess Berlin wasn’t really completely blank.  Stretched over the empty canvas of that city like a dirty film were images of wide streets lined in stark red and black iconography, iron crosses and swastikas, Nazi rallies and narrow little mustaches.  But, I told myself, I was young enough and progressive enough and forgiving enough to look beyond that, to let Berlin dump its demons into the abyss of the past and travel there with a clean slate that I was ready to fill with beer and pretzels.

My family had other ideas.  My parents seemed fine with it—if perhaps a little unsure why, exactly, I was choosing to go to Berlin out of the ten or so other study abroad programs easily accessible to me—but my dad made a point of telling me what his dad would have said if Papa Winger hadn’t snuck so many Denny’s cheeseburgers into his doctor-prescribed, heart-healthy diet.  My grandfather, born in the roaring twenties in New York and second youngest of twelve, left Winger Bros. Meat Company to join the US army as a cook, ended up on a command plane in the 82^nd Airborne division (the how of this story is a little unclear to me), and one cloudy June morning in 1944 landed behind enemy lines on a beach in the north of France.  His eyesight, like mine, was abysmal, but instead of discharging him the army had taken his rifle, given him a gold bar on his uniform and a Thompson submachine gun, and told him to squint and kill some Krauts.

The point being I can understand, at least superficially, why my grandfather never so much as looked at a Volkswagen for the rest of his life.

My other grandfather had also been drafted into the army during World War II, but hadn’t fought in Europe.  He had the same bemused questions as my parents about why Berlin, but went one step further.  “What do you think it’s like to be a Jew there?” he asked.  I didn’t know.

* * *

The quick answer is that being a Jew in Berlin in 2010 turns out to be a lot like being a Jew anywhere else.

* * *

I found out a year after that conversation with my grandfather that, Jewish or not, going to Berlin was probably more of a homecoming than I ever thought.  I always assumed “Winger” was an Ellis Island name, assigned by lottery to replace some Polish construct held up by an arch of consonants pushing on the weary keystone of an O.  But one of my dad’s cousins did some digging into the family’s past, unearthing the earliest recorded Winger sometime in the eighteenth century in eastern Europe—a long time before any huddled masses yearned to breath free, before any of my relatives, tempest-tost by Teutonic turmoil, washed up on the shores of America.

This cousin’s guess about the origin of our name?  It evolved from the German word for our ancestor’s profession.  Some Winger progenitor followed the German vineyards that were exported to Poland in the middle of the last millennium.  We’re winemakers.  Winger.  Weinmacher.  Pass the Manischewitz.

* * *

But back to that luxury car idling in Alexanderplatz traffic, and the question from the high-class German-Persian girl next to me, mercifully in English, but otherwise out of nowhere:  “Are you Jewish?”

Actually, no, I could have said.  I’m German.  More German than you, even.  Or I could have told her I was Swedish, since my ancestors lived in what was technically the Swedish Empire, which swelled into eastern Europe in the 15 and 1600s.  Or Polish, or Hungarian, or Czech, or Ukrainian, Silesian, Russian, Lithuanian—borders that swam around the Winger clan so often that different generations were often wildly different nationalities.

But that’s just it—the borders changed so much, and so long ago, that I have no connection to any of those countries.  When I think family history, I don’t think of German wineries or Hungarian dairy farms.  I think bar mitzvah.

So I say what is the obvious answer, even if I am caught a little off guard.  “Actually, uh, yeah, I am.”

The girl leans back in her seat, looking pleased with herself.  “I thought so,” she says, and makes some vague hand gesture that could be referring to a nose, some hair, maybe even a circumcision.  It’s hard to tell.

* * *

It’s not hard to tell, apparently, that I’m new to Berlin, despite my efforts to blend in.  I bought a trendy European jacket and by sheer luck already owned the same pair of Adidas that dots the aisles of every U-Bahn train like a conspiracy of leather ravens, bobbing their heads rhythmically with the sway of the train car as German commuters tap their feet, shift their weight, huddle by the exits.  Within a week of getting to the city I made a point of not carrying the subway map with me on my commute to class.  But I reek of America.  It’s in the way I walk, the way I quickly look away when my people-watching is discovered.  It’s in my plaid shorts and my cheap pay-as-you-go phone, and hopelessly ingrained into the English copy of Lolita I’ve been reading on the train.

I expected all of that.  I’m a Californian and proud of it, and trying to blend in came from a desire to distance myself from tourists, not from my country.  But I didn’t expect to find out that it’s also apparently not too hard to tell that I’m Jewish.

Less than a week after I was called out in the car in Alexanderplatz, I’m having dinner with my host mother in her apartment.  She’s middle-aged, single, and—I’m extrapolating—probably lonely in her tiny two-bedroom flat, with only a stream of one-quarter students keeping her company.  Ten weeks and they’re gone, absconding in the early morning to catch a flight back to their homes, their loved ones, their families, just like I’m planning to do in a month and a half.

My host mother isn’t German.  She’s a Bosnian immigrant, speaks German as a second language and English as a third.  Between my rudimentary German and her passable English, we manage to communicate in hybridized, halting Deunglish, thought I can’t help but feel something’s always being lost in translation.  Perhaps by necessity, our conversations are usually curt and simple.  I can’t do anything more in German.  But tonight, over steamed spargel and boiled potatoes, she breeches new ground.

“So.  You,” she says, out of nowhere.  “Are you, ah, Juden?”

I’m caught off guard again, but this time I manage a smile and take a bite of asparagus.  “Ja.”

“Ah,” she says, leaning back in her chair.  “I had thought so.”

Again with the certainty.

* * *

The long answer to my grandfather’s question—what’s it like to be a Jew in Berlin—seems to be this:

Being a Jew in Berlin in 2010 turns out to be a lot like being a Jew anywhere else, except that you’re thinking, all the time, about that question your grandfather asked you and wondering if maybe things are different but you’re just not noticing them, wondering if the fact that acquaintances come right out and ask about your religious identity in a way that’s almost unheard of in America is indicative of a cultural difference, a shamelessness akin to nudity at a public beach, or if it portends some lingering Semitic sensitivities—not necessarily anti-Semitism, mind you, but maybe just some sense that German history was different for these Jews, diese Juden, these once-yellow-starred and starving people, and that this is something to be aware of, something to note, to observe.

Then again, neither of the people who asked me straight out about my Judaism were truly German.  They were, undoubtedly, Berliners—but Berlin is a city of immigrants and emigrants.  The street signs just happen to have umlauts.

* * *

There’s a long history of Jews, those eternal immigrants and emigrants, in Berlin—lives lived well before the Holocaust, which in both my secular and religious education was the only facet of German Jewish history ever discussed.  The city’s grown around them, but the sights are still there.  Majestic synagogues, ancient Jewish day schools.

Berlin is a new city, shining metal skyscrapers erected out of bombed-out rubble, jockeying for skyline space with the few crenelated nineteenth-century low-rises that survived the Allied assault and the dull gray soviet housing projects that dominate the east.  The new construction didn’t leave the Jews behind—their ghosts are etched in the jagged lines of the Liebeskind Museum, in the ivied statues of the Rosenstraße memorial, in the endless field of concrete blocks dedicated to die ermordeten Juden Europas.

I’d be lying if I said the thought of experiencing the more infamous side of German Jewish history didn’t enter my mind when applying to study in Berlin.  But I didn’t know these memorials existed, that architects and sculptors had attempted to recreate in concrete and granite the terror and inhumanity of the Holocaust.  What I did know about, what I was prepared—what I hoped, even—to see, was a concentration camp.

* * *

I had my chance one week before people started confronting me about my heritage in cars.  A group of students was taking the train to a camp, led by a German history professor.  I went along.

We didn’t go to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or Dachau, though, not to any of the names that had been painted in blood and tears and human ash on the inside of my skull by history teachers, Sunday school rabbis, Spielberg movies.  We went to a little town north of Berlin called Oranienburg, and visited the monster slumbering in its belly: a camp named Sachsenhausen.

There are a lot of reasons you’ve probably never heard of Sachsenhausen.  I had certainly never heard of Sachsenhausen.  It wasn’t a death camp, first of all, which would be a distinction worth something if 100,000 people hadn’t died there.  And though it was a concentration camp, it was largely used for communists and political dissidents.  (Somehow in the wash of history people always seem to forget that Nazis murdered not just one multitude, but many.)  The camp now centers around an enormous memorial the Soviets erected after liberating it, a giant obelisk depicting brave communist comrades who stood up to their Nazi jailers.  Unlike other camps, Sachsenhausen is more Soviet museum than mausoleum.

I only thought about all of this hours after I left the camp.  The entire time I was there, I could only think about how goddamn beautiful it was.  The sky wasn’t dull gray like I imagined it was at all these camps.  It wasn’t cloudy or brooding or menacing.

It was blue.  Fucking blue.

And it was big and beautiful and stretched on forever to the horizon, forever up to the heavens, forever back in time, oblivious to everything that happened underneath it.  At the time I thought it had no right to be so be beautiful.

I realize now that I had no right to tell it not to be.

I came to Berlin partly to be a part of history—the history of the twentieth century European Jew, a history of my own aunts and uncles and cousins whose names I don’t know, my history.  The skeletons of crematoria are still standing in Sachsenhausen, charnel houses to hold sepulchral the shadows of burning human flesh and the echoes of desperate screams.  There are also gravestones.  Large stone blocks placed evenly around the footpaths, granite slabs with memories interred.

The thirty or so people I was with walked past the first grave marker, but I hesitated.  I kicked the dirt around at my feet until I found what I was looking for: a rock, irregular, small, and a little dirty.  I picked up the rock and rolled it in my palm twice, then placed it slowly on the granite block.  Everything looked for a second like the rolling green hills from my childhood, like Eden Mortuary in Los Angeles, the bronze plaque of my grandmother’s plot, the embossed words, Ruth Felder, beloved wife and mother and grandmother, the little rocks to lay by her name that my brother and I would run around collecting—frolicking in the cemetery—and then it was gone.  A pebble on a slab of gray.  The blank slate of countless futures, the single point of the present, the weight of the past.

When we left Sachsenhausen, one of my classmates asked me why I had stopped to put the rock on the gravestone.

“Well,” I said and paused, trying to find the words to sum up a long funereal tradition, wondering how much detail to delve into, if other customs—rending clothes, covering mirrors—should be brought up.  How do you talk about one part of tradition without giving the whole story?

“Well,” I said, as I realized all that needed to be said.  “Actually, I’m Jewish.”

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

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

- Woody Allen

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

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

In the beginning man created the game and the sport.
And the sport was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the spirit of man moved upon the face of the football field.
And man said, LET, and there was a postseason.
And man saw the postseason, that it was good: and man divided the victorious from the defeated.
And man called the victorious Champions, and the defeated he called The Also-Playeds.  And the East against the West was the first bowl game. 

That first game showcased man’s proudest creations: the University of Michigan as Adam, made in man’s image as the archetypal eastern football team, versus our own Stanford University as Eve, cast from the rib of eastern football but startlingly unique and beautiful in its own western right.  The date was January 1, 1902, and the game was an exhibition game in Pasadena following the annual Tournament of Roses.

And Stanford lost 49-0, forfeiting in the third quarter.

But the beautiful concept of the bowl game was born!  Yet in those dark and medieval days, it wasn’t always easy to figure out which teams should play each other.  And so, in 1998, a great flood washed over the landscape of college football—and when Roy Kramer released a dove from the summit of Mount Ararat, it returned with the bylaws of the Bowl Championship Series, which have governed the postseason of college football to this day.

Thus the game and the sport were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day man ended his work which he had made and said screw it I’m watching the NFL.

BCS rankings have been used since 1998 to determine which two teams play in the National Championship game, and also somehow vaguely influence the four other so-called BCS bowls: Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange.  There is a (ahem) byzantine and confusing selection process behind this that I really don’t think I could fully decipher or explain, so I’ll just say that the Wikipedia summary takes no less than ten bullet points to fully delineate all possible selection criteria and the breakdown of each week’s rankings involves a lot of numbers:

BEHOLD THE MIGHTY AND UNQUESTIONABLE POWER OF MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION!

In an effort to stave off the eventual triumph of our future robot overlords, the current BCS system weights two human polls with a single composite computer average, ensuring the human voters still have a large say in the final rankings.  Each computer has its own unique algorithm that’s secret and proprietary and may range from sophisticated statistical techniques to monkeys throwing feces at a map of FBS teams.  No one’s really sure.

Surprisingly not how this column is (usually) written.

Like the total lack of a system before it, the BCS has some… quirks.  It seems to hate the Pac-12, for example, though given the number of completely fubar win-loss triangles in our conference this year, that may turn out to be justified (USC beats Oregon but loses to Stanford and is crushed by Arizona State?).  And then there’s the whole unbeaten-doesn’t-mean-you’re-the-best issue.  Ask Boise State or TCU about that one.

But weirdest, in my mind, is the Notre Dame clause.  Our opponent this week is an independent team, with enough of a devoted (read: rabid) fan base to succeed while not belonging to a conference like the rest of us.  But there is a specific line in the BCS rules that says Notre Dame must go to a BCS bowl game if it’s ranked in the top eight teams—which, admittedly, would probably happen anyway because no bowl in its right mind is going to turn down the hordes of Notre Dame fans coming to watch the Fighting Irish Irenicons play some football, but the fact that it’s actually codified still reeks of privileged 1%-ishness.

Notre Dame’s Irish Guard, on the other hand, just reeks of plaid—like if a hipster’s attempt at irony threw up on a Buckingham palace guard.

So: is the BCS broken?  Well, probably not.  With only twelve games per season, it does a pretty decent job of making a ranking system that makes at least a bit of sense.  But there’s perennially talk of switching to a playoff system between the top eight teams—a December Delirium to match NCAA basketball’s March Madness.  In fact, one of the biggest supporters of a playoff system is President Barack Obama.

Valid way to win votes in Texas and Idaho?  I’d say so.

Goddammit man, I voted for CHANGE, not an LSU-Alabama rematch.

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

• David Shaw: BCS system ‘flawed’—I wrote the body of my column about six hours before this article came online, so that makes it the epitome of the ancient Greek concept of kairos
• Cardinal will sport whole new look against Notre Dame—yeah, you didn’t forget about that, did you?
• Brian Kelly has Notre Dame heading in the right direction despite serious distractions—two of which, in my mind, are that 1) this article’s mediocre use of the phrase “the luck of the Irish” was the best I could find in a week when the Fighting Irish play Andrew Luck, and 2) Brian Kelly looks like someone pissed in his Lucky Charms
• And I’d just like to point out that of the 120 FBS teams, two have their own dedicated ESPN blog—an important part of rhetoric, after all, is knowing that you have an audience

This is a story about losers.

It is a story about me, primarily, but I—for a change—am not the loser.  It is a story about me, and Stanford, and primarily it is about a football team with an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

This is a story about 2007.  (Or did you have something else in mind?)

To me, 2007 was the start of something beautiful on the Farm.  It happens to coincide with the first year I found myself on Stanford’s campus, but we’ll chalk that up to correlation rather than causation.  You see, 2007 was also the year the Venerable James  Harbaugh came to campus—and the year that Stanford football began its rebound.

It was slow.  And painful.  And definitely didn’t happen in 2007.  But that was the start, the genesis, the inception of greatness.

…and the fourteenth level of the movie is a complex football metaphor.

In the first eleven games of the season, Stanford football won one home game.  Against San Jose State.  I was there for those games—and they were painful.  Stadium-meals-are-the-best-part-of-this-experience painful.

There were glimpses of greatness, though.  The biggest upset in college football history comes to mind, a stubborn refusal from the Venerable James Harbaugh to bow to any accepted powerhouse.  But ultimately, that week after Thanksgiving, Stanford was looking at a 3-8 season.

It was disappointing.  It was disheartening.  It was disempowering.  And then, the California Golden Bears came to Stanford Stadium.

Big Game, if nothing else, did wonders for morale.

Inexplicably heartwarming.

There’s something magical about a rivalry game that can make you forget the rest of the season, forget any losses or injuries or blown calls or missed tackles or some short guy with a CamelCase name running train all over your backfield.  And that was true in 2007—all of a sudden, 3-8 Stanford was 4-8 Stanford with a Big Game victory, and the season didn’t seem so bad anymore.  Sure, there was no bowl game.  But we had crushed USC’s dreams and beaten Oski to a pulp—what more could you ask for in a season?

“Beaten to a pulp” may be a mean-spirited thing to say when to begin with Oski looks more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame than the mascot of California.

Rivalry games are definitely the best part of the season.  And the best part of rivalry games?  Well, their names—and spoils of war associated with them.

• Duel in the Desert: Arizona v. Arizona State
• Prize: The Territorial Cup
• First game: 1899
• Why you should watch it: Arizona’s season is irrecoverable.  Arizona State’s is spiraling down in flames.  So lately?  I dunno, just to see if Vontaze Burfict kills a guy.

The Territorial Cup is notable for being the only trophy that can hold all of the liquid in the state of the colleges that play for it.

• Civil War: Oregon v. Oregon State
• Prize: The Platypus Trophy
• First game: 1894
• Why you should watch it: Upset?

It’s a duck stuffed in a beaver stuffed in a turkey!

• Apple Cup: Washington v. Washington State
• Prize: The Apple Cup
• First game: 1900
• Why you should watch it: Opportunity to make cougar jokes.

Wait, the cup is actually a trophy?

• Holy War: Utah v. BYU
• Prize: The Beehive Boot (sort of)
• First game: 1896
• Why you should watch it: Only rivalry game whose history involves a cheerleader fight.

Not really sure why this is sought after.

• Crosstown Showdown: UCLA v. USC
• Prize: The Victory Bell
• First game: 1929
• Why you should watch it: Vain hope that UCLA beats USC.

Note: bell has not been this color for some time.

• Notre Dame – USC rivalry: Uhhh… Oregon State v. Colorado?
• Prize: The Jeweled Shillelagh
• First game: 1926
• Why you should watch it: Learn what the hell a jeweled shillelagh is.

Pronounced shuh-LAY-lee, obviously. Turns out a shillelagh is some sort of ancient Irish war club, which makes a jeweled shillelagh about as useful as a bedazzled assault rifle.

• Big Game: Stanford v. California
• Prize: The Stanford Axe
• First game: 1892
• Why you should watch it: Assert your Stanford superiority in athletics, academics, and attractiveness.  Watch Kal weenies cry.  Channel your inner lumberjack.

Always reads 20-19 in 1982.

The moral of the story is this:  No matter how good or how bad the season, no matter how disappointing or exhilarating the games have been, there are always more games, future years, new horizons—and so a team is never a loser.

Until it loses its rivalry game.

Finally a look at some rhetoric from around the internet (and a last, resounding, BEAT CAL):

• The Play—antonomasia has never been so controversial
• Walk-on Whalen doing a whale of a job for Stanford—FINALLY A PUN ABOUT WHALEN YES YES YES
• AXE REGAINED!—ecphonesis announces this clip from the Daily, 1930, about the Immortal 21
• Out in full force—Tree Corso may have made the wrong prediction, but it was worth getting up at 4AM just to watch him dance in a tree hat

When I was looking for the metaphor to describe this week’s game, I went through a lot of options.  Stanford’s prowess in logical reason and philosophical debate definitely lent itself towards the idea of duck season.  The pomp rapidly expanding around the game reminded me of Duck Soup.  Hell, I even thought the idea of two top-ten teams warranted a Clash of the Titans reference (Andrew Luck would be, of course, the Kraken).

Yet they all lacked that certain something that defined the match up this weekend, mighty Oregon versus fearsome Stanford.  And then something wonderful happened: Joe Frazier passed away.

This is, objectively and obviously, a terrible thing.  Smokin’ Joe was a phenomenal boxer and athlete, graced with the coveted undisputed-heavyweight-champion-of-the-world title for several years until he lost it in a terrific battle with a man named after a fat-draining hamburger grill.  But the death of this icon reminded me of his most iconic fight: the Fight of the Century between Frazier and another boxer named Muhammad Ali (maybe you’ve heard of him).

There, at last, was the metaphor.  Frazier walked into that fight with a record of 26 wins (23 by knock out) to 0 losses; Ali had 31 wins (25 KOs) and 0 losses.  Stanford walks into our fight on Saturday with 17 straight wins (3 shutouts) and 0 losses in a over a year; Oregon has 18 straight conference wins (2 shutouts) and 0 conference losses in two years.

Buckle your seatbelts.  We’re in for the Pac-12 Game of the Century.

Our mouth guards are better, though.

The Fight of the Century lived up to its hype.  When the dust (and blood and sweat and spit and whatever else gets sprayed into the ring) settled after fifteen grueling rounds, Muhammad Ali had lost for the first time in his professional career.  The Greatest was now second best.  And suddenly, Frazier was king of the world.

If Stanford finds itself standing over Oregon at the end of the bout, we’re suddenly king of the world.  The trick, however, is to make it all fifteen rounds.  That’s what makes a good fight into a great fight—and what makes a Stanford-Oregon football game into the Stanford-Oregon football game.

Such a historic game mandates historic Stanford football fervor.  Luckily, most of this fight’s promoting has already been done for us.  For the first time in Stanford’s history, ESPN’s preeminent college football program, College Gameday, is coming to campus.  The nation is watching.  There are Pac-12 championship and—dare I say—national title implications.

PARTY WITH LELAND CORSO

So we don’t really need a promoter, but what would any boxing match be without one?  Allow me to put on my Don King hat/wig for a minute.

It’s pretty similar to my crazy homeless person hat/wig.

Ahem.

LADIES AND GENTLEFOLK:

WELCOME TO THE GAME OF THE CENTURY.  PLEASE DIRECT YOUR ATTENTION TO THE RING, WHERE I PRESENT TO YOU TODAY’S FIGHTERS, THOSE COLOSSAL COLLEGIATE COMBATANTS, THE PUGNACIOUS POLYTECHNIC PUGILISTS, OUR STUDLY STUDYING SCRAPPERS!

LADIES AND GENTLEPEOPLE, I PRESENT TO YOU THIS NIGHT THE CHALLENGER.  IN THE GREEN CORNER, WEIGHING IN AT FOUR-HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-EIGHT DIFFERENT UNIFORM COMBINATIONS AND LED BY THAT MOST LAMBENT LAMMERGEIER, LAMICHAEL, WE HAVE THE JOSEPHS OF THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOATS, THE KEEN KEYSTONES OF KELLY, THE EUPHONIOUS EUPHORIANTS OF EUGENE—THE OREGON.  MIGHTY.  DUUUUUUCCCKKKKKSSSS!

AND LADIES AND GENTLECITIZENRY, I PRESENT TO YOU THEIR OPPONENTS, THE CURRENTLY UNDISPUTED CHAMPIONS OF THE PACIFIC TWELVE.  IN THE RED CORNER, WEIGHING IN AT SIXTEEN CURRENT NOBEL LAUREATES, ONE-HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, AND NO LESS THAN SEVEN DIFFERENT COUPA CAFÉS OR COUPA CAFÉ BRANDED VENDING MACHINES, WE HAVE THE VALIANT VALEDICTORIANS OF THE VALLEY, THE SIGIL OF SILICON SIMCHAS, THE CACHINNATING CAVALIERS OF CALIFORNIA—LED BY THE PROBABLE LAUDABLE AUDIBLE, THAT ACCRETION OF PASS COMPLETION, THE BARONET OF DUAL-THREAT, MR. ANDREW “I DON’T NEED” LUCK HIMSELF—I GIVE YOU YOUR INDESTRUCTABLE, INDEFATIGABLE, INDOMITABLE.  STANFORD.  CAAAAARRRDDDDINAAAAAAALLLLL!

In short?  Get excited.

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

• Oregon not awed by Andrew Luck—and Kelly tries to use aporia
• Stanford QB Andrew Luck’s biggest game—hyperbole no longer
• Week 11’s college football schedule filled with vital games—Stanford and Oregon as each other’s antithesis
• Catching up with the tight end trio—get it? “Catching”?

There’s clearly a lot to be said after a game like last week’s, and all of it is worthy of heroic hexameter.  I could talk about Luck’s determination (which we’ve seen against USC before), or about how we scored more points against USC than anyone else has ever (breaking our own 2009 record)—but I want to talk about what wasn’t on the field.

Namely: Shayne Skov, Delano Howell, Jordan Williamson, and Zach Ertz.

It was, to say the least, a bad day for Stanford’s injured list.  Skov’s been out, mohawk and all, since Arizona; Howell’s presence in the backfield was sorely missed; Williamson poetically gave up the kicking game to the younger brother of the hero of last year’s game; and Ertz—oh Ertz—is one of our three dominant tight ends, our Tree Amigos, our Tree’s Company, our Tree Musketeers, our Tree Wishes, our Holy Treenity…

Pictured: our new Nike Pro Combat uniforms

Yes, fate is a cruel and unjust mistress, and the injured list can make or break a season.  But this is Stanford, after all.  We have something those other Pac-12 schools don’t have.  I’m not talking about a potential number-one-draft-pick quarterback, though we have that.  And I’m not talking about a dominant offensive line, though we have that.  I’m not even talking about the highest graduation rate of any Pac-12 football program, though we sure as hell have that.

No, I’m talking about something even more special.  You see, Stanford has a $12.6 billion endowment.  That’s more than every other Pac-12 school put together.  And we spend it on the most dangerous thing imaginable:

Science.

Let’s go back for a minute to 2005.  George W. Bush is being inaugurated for his second term.  Saddam Hussein is put on trial.  Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is taking theaters by storm.  And into this brave new world, Stanford researchers introduce the cold glove, a device that enables athletes to cool down rapidly after workouts, massively reducing muscle fatigue.

Move on to 2010.  Wikileaks releases tens of thousands of classified documents to the mercy of the internet.  North Korea fires artillery shells at a South Korean island.  The second half of Glee’s breakthrough first season airs on Fox.  And the San Francisco 49ers are outfitted with complex networks of force and pressure sensors by Stanford researchers, allowing Stanford unprecedented access to a professional football team.

Fast forward to the present.  Stanford researchers start using force-sensitive mouthpieces to collect in situ data of football collisions.

The red LED light means it’s from the future.

What is the point of this, you might ask?  Well, besides continuing to push the boundaries of sports and orthopedic medicine to new frontiers, pursuing cutting-edge science that may change the way sports equipment is designed, and creating the potential to vastly reduce the damage caused by sports injuries, Stanford is clearly focused on one thing: getting Skov, Howell, Williamson, and Ertz back on the field.

That’s right.  We can rebuild them.  We have the technology.

Better.  Stronger.  Faster.  Harder, well, that one was Daft Punk’s idea.

Because really, what’s a six million dollar man to a university with a twelve and a half billion dollar endowment?  0.048%, that’s what.  Start warming up the operating table, boys.  It’s time to build us a football team.

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

• Riley remembers watching a great Stanford quarterback take apart the Beavers in 1969—dripping in arete and reverence for both Plunkett and Luck
• Shaw explains the Wildcat call—an appeal to logic and levelheadedness by Stanford
• USC Coach Lane Kiffin is fined; safety T.J. McDonald is suspended—Kiffin as an emotional eristic
• Zach Ertz’s absence changes the plan—and I’m telling you, the new plan is cyborgs

Sing, goddess, sing of the son of the Oiler, of Andrew and football—
Tell us a tale of a battle, of war on the gridiron foul fought.
Heroes of valor, intrepid in red, that most vibrant of color,
Card’nal crusaders who rampaged and pillaged, with ruin and wreckage
Left in their wake.  In the rubble of Troy we did dance ’til the morning.

Two thousand seven the year was, remember, when downtrodden Stanford
Toppled the powers that be; in their home Coliseum, our vict’ry.
Huge was the wrath of the Trojans, those Demons, who storm’d our own homestay—

Two thousand eight was a sad one, remember, when vanquishing Stanford
Tasted a bitter and loathsome defeat at the hands of the white, gold,
Card’nal imposters, the Armies of Troy, in our home brought us downfall.

Two thousand nine was a great one, remember, resurgent as Stanford
March’d into Troy, and then took what it wanted, a fifty-and-five coup.
Harbaugh to Carroll, a jest and a joke: what’s this deal of your owning?

Two thousand ten was a close one, remember, when prospering Stanford
Placed all its hopes on the foot of one kicker, and truly the ball flew,
Wings like wise Hermes was shepherding; I shall not want for a vict’ry.

What is the reason for such a long epic, a story engrossing?
Sanchez as Paris, he stole from us Helen, the Pride of Pacific;
Harbaugh avenger, the king Menelaus, built armies to cross swords;
Carroll as Priam, the elderly monarch with wisdom and savvy;
Shaw then is King Agamemnon, commander and leader of Stanford;
Barkley as Hector, the pride of his father, a soldier of old Troy;
Leaving us Andrew, our Luck as Achilles, the mightiest hero,
One whose adroitness is legend, whose talent is awesome, with warlike
Myrmidons Cardinal ready, besiegers with sights set on Troy’s walls.

Two-O-eleven, a great one, remember, when dominant Stanford
Travels to Troy with a visage resplendent, to show once again that
Card’nal and white will best card’nal and gold, and no horse and no fight song
Have any hope that the outcome be changed, for my Cardinal FIGHT ON.

TROY, based on Homer’s THE ILIAD, starring ANDREW LUCK as ACHILLES

Finally, a look at some non-dactylic-hexameter rhetoric from around the internet:

• Stanford Questions worth asking—I do like rhetorical questions (they have “rhetoric” right in ’em!)
• For USC’s Matt Barkley, one more year could be magical—Plaschke opens with epistophe
• Linebacker Chase Thomas making life tough on opponents—with a classic Harbaugh anecdote
• Now Stanford is ruler, USC is rebel—a more prosaic retelling of the saga, albeit with titular asyndeton