Starting Five

1. The Man Who Fell To Earth… Austrian sky diver Felix Baumgartner, 43, detonates the entire concept of “Lazy Sunday” by leaping from a capsule, buoyed by a balloon, some 24 miles above the earth. A few facts:

Altitude at time of jump: 128,100 feet (24.26 miles)

Top Speed: 833.9 mph, or Mach 1.24 (faster than speed of sound)

Time of Descent: Roughly 9 minutes

Height of Helium Balloon: 55 stories

Time of free fall: 4 minutes, 20 seconds

Landing Site: Roswell, N.M.

Numbe of Viewers on YouTube: 7,000,000

Altitude at which he opened parachute: 5,000 feet

Coincidences: The leap was originally scheduled for last Tuesday, but by attempting the stunt on Sunday Baumgartner and his team found a wonderful, albeit unintentional, way to celebrate the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager first breaking the sound barrier, a.k.a. Mach 1, in a jet. Also,  the stunt took place 50 days after the death of Neil Armstrong, who had the most famous quote about a leap in history.

2. The Team Who Fell to Earth… One day earlier and only 175 miles east of Roswell, college football’s highest-risk undefeated team hit terra firma with a thud in Lubbock, Texas. West Virginia, which entered its game at unranked Texas Tech ranked No. 5, fell behind 42-7 before eventually succumbing 49-14 (and that wasn’t even the worst beating a Big 12 team suffered in Texas). As someone — we forget; rail at us later — noted on Twitter, the Mountaineers allowed 1,080 yards in their last two games while No. 1 Alabama has allowed 1,087 through its first six.

3. Pinstripe horror as Derek Jeter breaks his ankle, an ankle he had been favoring for most of the previous month, going to his left for a grounder. The Captain’s season is over, and if Robinson Cano cannot break out of an 0-for-26 slump, so is his team’s. It doesn’t get any easier for the Yankees, in an 0-2 hole to Detroit, as they face Justin Verlander tomorrow night. Perhaps only Kate Upton can save them.

4. Packers regain form as Aaron Rodgers throws six touchdown passes and knocks the Houston Texas from among the ranks of the undefeated, which is meaningless in the NFL, anyway.

5. Our friend –and loyal MH supporter — Matthew Zemek only gave the game a “C-plus” on cfn.scout.com, but we happen to think Notre Dame 20, Stanford 13, with an epic goal-line stand staged in a driving rain (on real grass!) was a classic. Did Stepfan Taylor score? There are excellent arguments on either side of the debate.

Reserves

No comedic riff captured the zeitgeist of the 21st century better than Louis C.K.’s excellent, and insightful, “Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy“. This weekend Saturday Night Live did its own riff  (video at bottom; Fred Arnisen in classic form) on this piece using recent complaints about the iPhone 5 as its stepping stone.

Quotable: “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS”

                                 –Ohio State backup quarterback Cardale Jones on Twitter. Jones was suspended for the tweet and WORSE, his Twitter account was deleted. Although, let’s face it, his is a legitimate question.

The top ten teams in the FBS in terms of Turnover Margin are a combined 56-4. Turnovers are not accidents of nature.

Late August: Notre Dame irrelevant, AP poll relevant. Mid-October: Notre Dame relevant, AP poll irrelevant.

The irreplaceable Stephen Colbert, as himself, on “Meet the Press.”

Our official Felix Baumgartner Great Leap Playlist (although it may take more than nine minutes to listen to):

Up, Up and Away… The Fifth Dimension

Top of the World… The Carpenters

Jump… Van Halen

Free Fallin’ (but of course)…. Tom Petty

We are a nation too infatuated with statistics when it comes to sports. Especially when it comes to validating choices for MVP or Heisman. Yes, Geno Smith of West Virginia has thrown 25 TD passes versus zero interceptions, and that is incredible, and yet if he were wearing the uniform of the team that beat his on Saturday (by five touchdowns) all you’d hear is “system quarterback.”

If we were naming Heisman candidates purely by who have been the most captivating, and exemplary, players so far this season, Geno would certainly make our list, but so would these players (in no particular order):

Johnny Manziel, QB, Texas A&M (“Johnny Football” just fits)

Kain Colter, QB, Northwestern

Manti Te’o, LB, Notre Dame

Ace Sanders, PR/DB, South Carolina

Collin Klein, QB, Kansas State

Blake Bell, Not-So-Secret Weapon, Oklahoma

Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports on the morgue that is the new Yankee Stadium. It’s a terrific read. I wish JP would’ve emphasized the moat that separates the big spenders who sit between first and third base on the lowest level and the rest of the fans. As a New Yorker who watches a plethora of games on TV (and has never attended a game at the new stadium in person, as much out of principle as due to finances), it is a blight on the franchise to see so many empty seats behind home plate each game.

The old Yankee Stadium was the House that Ruth Built. The new one is the McMansion that Avarice Built (with taxpayer money). Constructed at the height of the Wall Street bubble, the stadium was erected as a monument to all the fiscal wizards and other wealthy types in the tri-state area who could either afford $1,200 seats on their own or write them off on the company’s expenses. But then the market crashed and suddenlty the Yankees couldn’t sell all those tickets (and a similar thing happened with Arthur Ashe Stadium, which will never be as dramatic a place to watch a tennis match as Louis Armstrong Stadium, and every last member of the USTA knows it).

We sort of like that Fearless Felix Baumgartner was cruising toward earth unencumbered by anything other than a space suit while the space shuttle Endeavor was basically starring in its own episode of “The Californians.” (“Ehhhh, what are YOU doing here?”)

Speaking of “The Californians”, look who made a cameo appearnce at the end ot its latest installment.

We already have a playoff (open your eyes):

No. 1 Alabama: Still at No. 12 Mississippi State, at No. 6 LSU (all rankings BCS, since they’re all that matter)

No. 2 Florida: No. 7 South Carolina, No. 11 Georgia, at No. 14 Florida State

No. 3 Oregon: at No. 10 USC, No. 20 Stanford, at No. 8 Oregon State (and look out for the unranked Sun Devils on Thursday night in Tempe)

No. 4 Kansas State: at No. 13 West Virginia, No. 17 Texas Tech, at No. 23 TCU, No. 25 Texas

No. 5 Notre Dame: at No. 9 Oklahoma, at No. 10 USC

Anniversaries: 24th anniversary of Kirk Gibson’s home run and Catholics 31, Convicts 30 (another epic South Bend game in which the visiting team had a legitimate beef about a rushing play near the goal line); 46th anniversary of the birth of the funniest man I know from Notre Dame, Mike Smoron (a 2:35 marathoner and an attorney, too), and two days past a monumental birthday for my sister, Lorraine.