Link City: Fake Girlfriend City

Was going to + rep but then saw the annoying Pitbull .gif...

Someone try to name something in the history of the world that's funnier than the Te'o situation.

This is going to go down as the biggest lulz EVER. Proud to be around to see it.

That Pitbull gif has me LOL'ing.

Good read.

How long as Pitbull fan Dan been holding on to that gif?

Thread Killa said:

Good read.

How long as Pitbull fan Dan been holding on to that gif?

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A couple of weeks. I was hoping something great would happen so I could unveil it, thinking I'd have to wait until signing day. Thank you Deadspin.

The manti teo thread is the GOAT thread. Must read.

Dan E. Dangerously said:

Thread Killa said:

Good read.

How long as Pitbull fan Dan been holding on to that gif?

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A couple of weeks. I was hoping something great would happen so I could unveil it, thinking I'd have to wait until signing day. Thank you Deadspin.

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That one is up there with the best dancing/celebration gifs.

Some people would disagree with you calling Schnelly the "Godfather" of UM football. I've talked to some oldtimers, people who followed things very closely at the time, who said the real founding father was Saban. Lou, that is.

I remember a conversation many years ago with the wife of an old-time player (he played in the '50's) and she said Saban was the guy. She said that we would have won a NC even sooner had he stayed, and that he was non-pareil as a recruiter. He could get any player he wanted. Remember the '79 team, the nucleus of our re-emergence, was largely recruited by Saban. That included Jim Kelly and a bunch of others. I don't remember who else was on that team, but it might have included Lester Williams (a huge recruit at the time), Mark Rush, Rocky Belk, Mark Cooper, Tony Chickillo, a bunch of others. I can't remember them all. Please let me know if I'm wrong about who recruited the guys I' mentioned.

Not to take anything away from Howard--I loved the guy, and was heartbroken when he left--but it shows the program is bigger than one guy. As Howard said after Jimmy won his NC in the '88 OB, "maybe I recruited a lot of the players, but somebody had to coach them." Gave a lot of credit to Jimmy. Saban left Howard with a nucleus that gave us perhaps the best team in the country in '81. We lost two close games that year, and arguably, we were the best team. Nobody knew it, though.

We need to get back on that perpetual motion machine where we just plug in new players and coaches when the old ones leave, and we keep winning. Somehow, we've fallen off.

Great points about Saban, who is often overlooked when discussing coaches who made UM a national power.
That 1978 frosh class was huge.
Acquiring what would today be known as 5-star recruits from Florida like Lester Williams, David Jefferson, Fred Marion, Tony Chickillo,
Mark Rush, Chris Duffy, Frank Frazier (Tampa), Mark Richt, Mike Rodrique, Mark Cooper,etc.....Those guys were recruited by everyone,
and those were the type of local players that in those days avoided UM for the likes of Oklahoma, Ohio STate, Alabama, and so on.
Sprinkle in highly-regarded from outside of Florida like Tim Flanagan (VA), Rocky Belk (VA), Bob Nelson (MD), John Canei (WV), Clem Barabarino (PA)
and, of course, Jim Kelly, and that was a monster-class.
Saban showed that UM did not have to take a backseat to anyone with regards to recruiting.
He changed the landscape in UM's favor.

TheMatador said:

Some people would disagree with you calling Schnelly the "Godfather" of UM football. I've talked to some oldtimers, people who followed things very closely at the time, who said the real founding father was Saban. Lou, that is.

I remember a conversation many years ago with the wife of an old-time player (he played in the '50's) and she said Saban was the guy. She said that we would have won a NC even sooner had he stayed, and that he was non-pareil as a recruiter. He could get any player he wanted. Remember the '79 team, the nucleus of our re-emergence, was largely recruited by Saban. That included Jim Kelly and a bunch of others. I don't remember who else was on that team, but it might have included Lester Williams (a huge recruit at the time), Mark Rush, Rocky Belk, Mark Cooper, Tony Chickillo, a bunch of others. I can't remember them all. Please let me know if I'm wrong about who recruited the guys I' mentioned.

Not to take anything away from Howard--I loved the guy, and was heartbroken when he left--but it shows the program is bigger than one guy. As Howard said after Jimmy won his NC in the '88 OB, "maybe I recruited a lot of the players, but somebody had to coach them." Gave a lot of credit to Jimmy. Saban left Howard with a nucleus that gave us perhaps the best team in the country in '81. We lost two close games that year, and arguably, we were the best team. Nobody knew it, though.

We need to get back on that perpetual motion machine where we just plug in new players and coaches when the old ones leave, and we keep winning. Somehow, we've fallen off.

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His short tenure is why I've always overlooked him. I certainly remember reading about him in Cane Mutiny, and Feldman brings up the points both of you made. Didn't Saban leave because of a family medical problem? I want to say it was his wife.

Dan E. Dangerously said:

His short tenure is why I've always overlooked him. I certainly remember reading about him in Cane Mutiny, and Feldman brings up the points both of you made. Didn't Saban leave because of a family medical problem? I want to say it was his wife.

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Saban's departure had more to do with the comments he made after a runin between some football players and a ****** student at UM.

Within a few years of leaving Um, his wife committed suicide.

My uncle played for for UM pre Saban and would always tell us stories bout the players and coaches back then



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Psf-rxZmoY

GhostofVenice01 said:

My uncle played for for UM pre Saban and would always tell us stories bout the players and coaches back then



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Psf-rxZmoY

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So then Bobby Hurley says to me "Coach, I have diarrhea"

GhostofVenice01 said:

My uncle played for for UM pre Saban and would always tell us stories bout the players and coaches back then



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Psf-rxZmoY

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Was your uncle Tony Cristiani? I remember him well. I went to FSU for a while back in the early '70's, and I recall sitting in the student union up there watching UM play the Noles. Of course, I was for the Canes. Tony used to drive the Noles fans bat**** every time he made a sack or tackle for loss, since here was this little guy with an Adonis physique who would raise his arms upward in exuberance right after making the big play. He was a **** of a middle guard, he kind of shared All American honors at that position with Rich Glover of Nebraska. Of course, Tony was too small to play in the NFL. I was hoping he might be able to play LB, but I guess not.

I recall that he was from the circus family. I have a recollection that there was a Cristiani girl who posed in Playboy sometime in the '70's. I assumed it was a relative.

Chuck Foreman was from up around here, where I live now in Maryland. He was from Frederick. He was like second or third black player in the program. I recall watching him go crazy on the Ga Tech freshmen in Vero Beach when UM freshmen played Ga Tech freshmen. That would have been '69. Freshmen had separate teams back then, they weren't eligible for varsity. I don't remember if Burgess Owens was on that team, too. I think the late Tom "Silky" Sullivan came a year before, and he might have been the second black after Bellamy. Sullivan died some years ago in North Carolina, I think. Had a decent career for the Eagles. Left two wives fighting over his NFL pension. He wouldn't bother to get divorced before moving onto the next wife.

I lost track of my beloved Canes in the mid-70's, because I lived on the west coast or up north, and there was rarely a national TV broadcast featuring the Canes during that era. In fact, the print media rarely printed a game story. It was tough. I don't remember the '78 recruiting class during the time, since information was so hard to find. I do know that Bill Trout was recruiting kids up in the Washington DC area around the late '70's. I think I read a story about Kevin Flanagan who was from the Woodbridge, VA area. Rocky Belk was from Alexandria, and coached in D.C. for years. He died a few years back. One of the fastest kids in the history of the program, I think. Just didn't have a long NFL career. I guess he was not that polished as a receiver. I think he had to play behind the average white boys, Brodsky and Rodrigue. There were so many great kids who came in that '78 class. There was a myth about how Kelly turned down PSU because they wanted to make him a LB. The story I heard, years later, from another person from East Brady, PA was that he didn't have the SAT score. (I also heard that there was some "assistance" that took care of that at some point. Don't know if it was true).

I think that WR coach was the first Larry Wilson, the one who played the opposite end from All American Bill "Brownie" Miller. He was pretty decent himself, and was one of George Mira's targets during the Matador's sophomore year. The two graduated, and then it became guys like Nick Spinelli, Jack Bahen, Hoyt Sparks, Bill Spears, and some others. That was early '60's.

The player whose wife told me the story about Saban was Gary Greaves. She used to work at a bank in Coral Gables. I spoke to her in the mid-80's. Gary played in the late '50's I believe.

Something I've mentioned on other websites, from time to time. So much of our recruting before the '70's and '80's was done in northwest Maryland, western Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, over through Indiana and Ohio. We'd get the kids from working class towns all over the place. Always white kids back then, I remember the first black kid, Ray Bellamy from Palmetto, FL. Wrecked his leg in a car accident after his sophomore year. Terrible shame. He was like a black Ron Sellers, and Sellers was perhaps the top WR in college football in '68.

Lou Saban, incidentally, was apparently related to Nick, but I'm not sure how. Not closely related. I recall the incident involving about three players throwing an Orthodox ****** kid into the lake. One, I think, was Joe Wysock. (Sorry if I'm wrong about him.) I don't remember the other players. I know Lex Lugar (Larry Pfohl) was around at that time, though I don't think he was involved. He trashed a hotel room during a game trip and was canned by Saban, I think.

I think that kind of thing was par for the course for a lot of players over the years. I spoke to somebody years ago whose uncle or somebody was a maintenance man at the U. The uncle told him how successive generations of players would trash and destroy the dorms. I guess they had a lot of steam to let off. Apparently the destruction would be pretty significant.

I did miss most of the '70's because I lived so far away and there was no coverage. Thank goodness. I might not have survived it. People complained about "Corch" Shannon and Coker. People don't know how much worse it was 30 years before. We had some great players, but lousy teams. Guys like Don Smith, Don Latimer, Ruben Carter, Eddie Edwards, O.J. Anderson. How could we have been so bad? I think we didn't have a big enough budget, not enough scholarships, maybe. Now, everybody's on an even playing field. Back then, the richer state schools had so many more players.

Of course, we had some unusual coaches, guys who maybe had no business being there. Still, FSU had it even worse, with Dr. Darrell Mudra, who coached from the press box.

By the way, I don't know what Hal Allen died from. When I met him at Hecht some years ago, he was a chain smoker. He was smoking in the video A very good player for us in about 1950 or so. From Key West. Probably played with the first Chickillo, maybe Al Carapella, Frank McDonald and Jim Dooley. Those were some of our first All Americans. Don James, later the longtime head coach at Washington (won the NC we shared with Washington) was a QB around that time.

Frank Smith was our great RB in the early '50's, brother of Russ Smith who was a very good RB for us in the mid-60's.

Well, that's enough. I could go on forever talking about UM football hstory. It did not start yesterday, or in 2001, or 1983, believe it or not. We had some good teams and some studs over the years.