Apologies for the late post. Steak waits for no one.

Starting Five

1. Manti Te’o will do his Armstronging with Katie Couric, thank you very much. Couric has a hard news background (“Manti, what newspapers do you read?”), but chalk this up as another stop on the Bad Advice Tour. Couric and Te’o share a spokesperson, and certainly there is a conflict of interest no matter how much Katie doth protest. Jeremy Schaap was the proper move and if anything Manti should take a second dose of JS, this time on camera.  Just the fact that he’s speaking with a female whose current show is more suited to the Lifetime crowd (“Mother, May I Not Sleep With, But At Least Conduct an Online Romance With, Danger?”) will only result in the masses linking his and Lance’s stories together more. Or did you not see Saturday Night Live‘s cold open?

2. Moving onto other Domer Heisman Trophy finalists/winners in the news, Tim Brown suggests that his Oakland Raider coach, Bill Callahan, sabotaged the Silver & Black’s last Super Bowl appearance by changing the offensive game plan three days before meeting the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. What’s next? Did Callahan buy Barret Robbins his first round of beers on the eve of the game, too? What’s even stranger is that Jerry Rice, Brown’s teammate on that Raider squad in 2002, is backing Brown. This is the greatest wideout of all time and another who is a probable future Hall of Famer with more than 1,000 career receptions. Still, why would a coach lead a team all the way to the most important game on Earth outside of the World Cup final (you heard me!) and then not care who won? Right about now Notre Dame –which is losing its sports information director, Brian Hardin, at month’s end — could use another of its Heisman brethren, Paul Hornung, to drop trou in public or be caught with a Playboy centerfold (perhaps the one Ditka had a crush on?!?). Anything to take the heat off.

3. So that’s Eddie Money (given name: Eddie Mahoney) in those “Two Tickets to Paradise” ads for GEICO. When you get into your forties (arthritic hand raised), you forget that everyone does not have your frame of reference pop-culturally. Eddie, 63, who now resembles an ugly old woman from Hempstead, was once quite the rocker. Our favorite tune of his came out in the mid-Eighties and was MTV gold. Just as this ad is a call-back to an era of a quarter-century ago, that tune is, too. Ronnie Spector’s part is culled from her famous early Sixties classic tune, “Be My Baby.” We give Ronnie indignant props (like mad props, only more intense) because it takes one helluva woman to be married to Phil Spector and survive.

Are those those two tickets to paradise by the dashboard light? (Shut up, Meatloaf!)

4. So, yeah, Obama’s inaugural address. Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.

5. Great Britains’ Prince Harry (third in line to the throne) says that he has killed Taliban members and credits his fondness for video games and X-Box with making him such a deadly shot from the cockpit of a helicopter. Somewhere that LaPierre dude from the NRA is pointing toward England and saying, “See? See?”

Reserves 

We remember Colin Kaepernick when he played at Nevada. Superb athlete but never close to being THIS jacked. It’s funny how whatever football teams Jim Harbaugh coaches, his players go from soft (do you remember 2006 Stanford?) to JACKED!

We don’t care much for tats, but those are some badass tats.