Welcome to Fraud City

Lotta frauds this week, fellers…lot, of, frauds.

There seem to be three distinct fraud camps from last week’s slate of college football action, the teams that were well established in the polls taking a nosedive, teams in the bottom part of the rankings getting hosed and then, from the cradle of fraud, YOUR Big XII North.

But I REALLY don’t want to talk about the Big XII North…so we won’t.  And they’re not mayors anyways, more like land barons or dukes or some shit like that, so why even bother?  Lets get right to the meat.

Michigan, is usually included just as a humorous side displaying some good ol’ fashioned hatred from a rival, but this week is a serious inclusion.  Now, being as objective as I can about Michigan, I fully understand that they are, scratch that, were making some solid strides with a young team, and frankly, beginning to scare the shit out of me.  Unfortunately, along that course, they ran into some issues, most notably, with Indiana and Michigan State before running into Big Ten behemoths Iowa and Penn State.  Losing a close one to Iowa and getting waxed by PSU is nothing to be ashamed of, but getting straight up FUCKED by Illinois?  Yea…

But, still, this is a rebuilding team with an incredibly young and thin roster.  This is a work in progress…but still, ILLINOIS?!?!?!  ZOOK!??!!?  You have GOT to have more pride than that.  Oh, and handling yourself without a fucking iota of class?  We’ll get to that in about an hour.

Even then, they’re not mayors and I don’t really like beating up Michigan if it involves praising the Zookster.  So lets move on…

Iowa bravely took on Indiana, was down entering the fourth quarter, then just rolled from there.  Do we excuse Ricky Stanzi’s FIVE INT’s?  No.  Do we excuse the fact that Iowa is simply a collection of cards arranged in a particular manner to stand up in what is commonly referred to as a “house?”  Nope.

Basically, what I’m getting at is that Iowa is a huge fraud of epic proportions with their lone bright spot being a win over an un-gelled Penn State team.  They still have a shot at the Big Ten crown, but lets be honest, they’re going to get rolled by Ohio State. Why?  Because Iowa is simply not that good.  On either side of the ball.

Of your lower ranked teams that lost…West Virginia, Mississippi and South Carolina all lost, but they’re not qualified to be mayors of Fraud City due to their statue of limitations being up from their previous terms in office.

What to do with USC however?  Interesting.

For a team ranked in the top 5 with a string of Pac-10 dominance to get so beat up in humiliating fashion NOT to be the mayors this week is rather impressive, but when you look back on it, the manner in which they lost wasn’t entirely surprising.  Unless you were stuck back in Week 2, USC has proven that they’re a shell of their dominant selves, vascillating between awful performances on offense and defense.

USC’s defense, once it’s bedrock, was absolutely depantsed by the quick tempo, wide splits’d Oregon offense that just gashed their way into the endzone time after time after time after time.  While I’d love to sit here and take shots at Matt Barkley, Pete Carroll and the rest of the USC team that is just so SMUG, I can’t.  Oregon is a fantastic team with one of the best offenses in the country and were playing at home in one of the loudest environments in college football.  USC’s defense has been getting hosed the past two weeks and Oregon’s offense has been clicking in their post-Boise malaise, so really, was this THAT out of the blue?

Now you never expect USC to get blown the fuck out, hell, this is the first time they’ve lost by more than 10 since 2001 (!!!), but still…ugly.  And the only things saving them this week were the fact that, ON PAPER, this loss made a whole fuckton of sense and the fact that a new candidate, one with years of experience in the Fraud field, entered the race.

Virginia Tech, oddly ignored during their first two losses thanks to a) Alabama being all sorts of awesome and the loss not that turrible and b) Ohio State losing in MUCH more horrible fashion in the same week, are this week’s mayors of Fraud City.

How do you prove that you’re truly among the nation’s powerhouse programs?  By losing to an inferior opponent, killing your conference hopes, killing your BCS hopes, erasing the memories of a blowout over a previously ranked top-10 team earlier in the year and basically rewriting the story you’ve written for the past decade updated for 2009.

That’s how bad VT’s loss to UNC was.

Considering that pretty much their entire season had been boiled down to “win out” status ALREADY, losing to a maddeningly inconsistent UNC team AT HOME while wearing uniforms THAT ugly, then yea, you’re pretty much as fraudulent as it gets.  VT is a cute little program that consistently churns out NFL-caliber DB’s, but for the sake of national integrity, lets please just ignore the fuck out of them, ok?

So lets have a hand for this week’s mayors of Fraud City…YOUR Vagina Tech Hokies.