Tuberville has his coordinators backs - with a knife in them

There had been rumors things were not going well on the Auburn coaching staff, but it was still a stunner when Tommy Tuberville fired Tony Franklin as offensive coordinator Wednesday afternoon. He was halfway through his first year trying to install a spread offense with personnel not ideally suited to run it. Auburn's production on that side of the ball has been putrid, but if you're Tuberville why do you make this move in the middle of a game week when you spent the last two days saying you were committed to the spread? This isn't quite as bizarre as Terry Bowden (choose one: bailing out on/being fired by) Auburn Friday before a game ten years ago, but it's right up there. Remember this: Franklin wrote a tell all book about Kentucky's cheating during the Hal Mumme years when he left that staff under bad terms. Tuberville better have made sure no shenanigans went on while Franklin was around or he could reap some serious longterm trouble from this.

Speaking of Kentucky corruption, exactly how is it the Wildcats are having Midnight Madness for basketball this weekend when practice is still a week away? Jeff Goodman of Fox Sports explains here, but this fits a pattern. UK coach Billy Gillispie seems to take a perverse pride in being tricky. Get too cute with ways to get around recruiting restrictions and it can backfire on you in a big way. If I was a UK fan this guy would be making me extremely nervous.

Plenty of people have made a bad decision or twenty when they've been drinking. Some wind up with devices on their cars which won't allow them to start without the driver passing a breathalyzer. I've received a few drunk dialing phone calls over the years, but never thought of it as some sort of crisis. Apparently, I was wrong. Despite a computer being more challenging to operate than a phone, drunk emailing has become a problem too. Fret no more about your possible poor choice in hitting that send button, though, as Gmail will now offer you the option of setting up "Mail Goggles" to prevent such episodes from happening. If you're getting hammered often enough that you feel you need this service, please seek counseling.

There haven't been many comic strips in my lifetime worth reading, but Bloom County was one of them. Berkeley Breathed stopped drawing that when I was a junior in high school, but has kept it around in bits and pieces with Sunday only strips in the nineteen years since. November 2, that all changes. Opus, which has been around since 2003, will publish its final strip and Breathed says that's it. Blondie and Hagar the Horrible will live forever, but I can't get Opus or Calvin and Hobbes once a week? It's just one more reason newspapers in dead tree form are going away sooner rather than later.