We are now inside of 100 days until the joyous return of college football.

{pause for celebratory gunfire}

But 100 days, as anyone who's ever served time in Tijuana for jaywalking can tell you, can pass very, very slowly. Ergo we must still find ways to amuse ourselves. You know, besides sneaking into the Alabama film room and replacing Nick Saban's oatmeal creme pies with mescaline-laced Twinkies. Hey, Steve Jobs said that Microsoft might have done a lot of cool stuff if only Bill Gates had dropped acid. So we figured it was our duty in the name of football science. But since they've now hired more security guards in Tuscaloosa, we present Free Form Friday. It's not just any weekend open comment thread. It's our weekend open comment thread. Maestro, cue the theme music for the basketball staffing news which sent waves of giddiness through the Dawg Sports staff room . . .

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Sure, times are tough. The days are long, the nights are longer, and there's no college football to be found during either. But it could be worse. You could be interim commissioner of the Big East. Which is kind of like being the proprietor of a halfway house, except that Chris Petersen isn't likely to leave behind any good drugs when he rejoins college football society.

In the absence of college football we'll have to find something else to do with our time. Of course we could work, or volunteer in our communities. Or we could discuss the topics found below the fold in Free Form Friday, your weekend open comment thread of dubious organization, entirely unfettered by considerations of "theme" and "message."

Maestro, if you please:

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Free Form Friday is committed to educating the youth of the Peach State, and will do so for less than some other virtual university administrators. The crew at Roll Bama Roll, for example, would almost certainly insist on an 8 foot tall bronze statue of themselves after the first big move up in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. So please, write to the Board of Regents. Drop our collective names in the hat. And know that our first move will be to install a course on the geometry of Herschel Walker's greatest runs as an elective in the math department. Because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but when you have both the speed and mass of a Kentucky Derby winning racehorse, all paths are the path of least resistance.

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Oh sure, we could talk about the NFL Draft or barbecue or whatever the hell else you rapscallions come up with, but I think we all know what the 800 pound gorilla of the day is. I could spill 2000 words on the screen about college football playoff proposals the way Jon Gruden spills corny truisms about NFL Draft prospects, but I'll try not to. Let's talk about this thing in a a rational, concise manner after the jump shall we?

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Maestro, cue the periodic reminder that if you missed the opportunity to see R.E.M. live, whether in 1985, 1995, or 2005, you missed out on something special indeed. Not to be a geezer about this, but Peter Buck laughs his FAO at LMFAO:

On to the show. . .

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College football's offseason. The final frontier. These are the musings of Free Form Friday. It's mission: to boldly make light of a situation that, when you get right down to it, isn't really very funny at all. [Theremin solo!!!!].

But because tragedy is when I cut my finger and comedy is when you fall through a sewer grate and die, we'll kill some time until the start of football season by examining the pigskin scandal du jour: Bobby Petrino reprising the Kelly McGillis motorcycle ride scene from Top Gun with disastrous results. Enjoy.

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Welcome to Free Form Friday, where we gather to discuss college football, barbecue, the oxford comma, the storming of the Bastille, the Sound and the Fury, and who knows what else while we wait for the return of actual, by God college football, praised be its name. Below the fold you'll find the topics for the days discussion (at least until the comments take us in another direction, which, sure as you're sitting there getting no work done on a Friday afternoon, they will) and the theme music, which this week is not for the sensitive or especially virtuous. You've been warned.

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In a world where the University of Georgia football team will not take the field for five and a half months in live action, the basketball team is still licking its wounds while the Mercer Bears are still alive in post-season play, and you're stuck at work on a gorgeous spring afternoon, one man stands alone against the boredom. He is . . .Kyle King. But he's already hit his 35,000 word quota for the week*. So you're stuck with MaconDawg, who has put together a blog post about nothing and everything all at the same time. He calls it Free Form Friday. The Birmingham Bammer Tribune calls it "ROOOLLLL TAAAHHHHDDDD!!! FUNERAL!!! YUR DAWG DIED!!!!!" The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Dawg Sports has now gone 6 years without winning a Nobel Prize, Pulitzer, Peabody, or Grammy, and asks how much longer Bulldog fans will be willing to put up with such mediocrity. You'll pay for the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge.

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