Well, abortion there’s some kind of exhibition game going on tomorrow against Indiana State, ed but we all know that can’t be a real game that counts, salve right? Because it wouldn’t be fair; wouldn’t be “success with honor” to beat up on a team from a conference whose stadiums average around 16,000 seats and from a league which offer substantially lower athletic scholarships than our league does…

Division I FCS schools are currently restricted to giving financial assistance amounting to 63 full scholarships. Unlike Bowl Subdivision schools, Championship Subdivision schools may divide their allotment into partial scholarships, but Championship Subdivision schools are limited to 85 players receiving any sort of athletic financial aid for football. Because of competitive forces, however, a substantial number of players in Championship Subdivision programs are on full scholarships.

According to the fine folks at BSD, there’s nothing wrong with doing the football equivalent of having the Texas Rangers not only play a game against the Round Rock Express but have it count in the standings for both teams. After all, both teams play the same game by the same rules, right? Balls and strikes and whatnot?

Huh. Doesn’t seem right to me. But I’m assured by the homers at BSD that it still doesn’t matter because everybody does. So I’m sure that if I look at the top-flight programs in the BCS conferences, I won’t find anybody who didn’t schedule a 1-AA team. Let’s start!

Team	1-AA games
Ohio State	None
Michigan	None
Nebraska	Chatanooga
Florida State	Charleston Southern
Miami	Bethune-Cookman
Virginia Tech	Appalachian State
Pitt	Maine
Oklahoma	None
Texas	None
Texas A&M	None
Noter Dame	None
Oregon	Missouri State
UCLA	None
USC	None
Alabama	Georgia Southern
Auburn	Samford
Florida	Furman
Georgia	Coastal Carolina
LSU	Northwestern State

It goes on like that. Point is that the biggest SEC teams and ACC teams seem to schedule a 1-AA team every single season; and most top-flight programs from other conferences did not. (Of course they schedule one once in a while – Hi Michigan!; but not every single season like Penn State has done lately). An interesting aside: Most of the teams on that list with 9-game conference schedules actually didn’t schedule a 1-AA game.

So, homers, I breathlessly await your apology. Everybody doesn’t do it. And after that, I guess you need to decide who you want to be more like: Michigan, Notre Dame, USC, UCLA; or Florida, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, Pitt? Just let me know, K?

Dear sports “communities”: I really don’t have time for this. Really. But you’ve ground my gears so much I have to take three seconds away from curing cancer at my real jorb to do this for the sake of the entire internet.

Trolling means something.

It does not mean “an argument I don’t like”. It does not mean “an argument I think is stupid”. It does not even mean “an argument that really makes me mad because they keep making it at me”. Which is how some people are using it these days.

It means “somebody is yanking your chain on purpose, and, and this is the most important part: usually doesn’t even believe what they are saying“. The easiest way to tell if it’s a troll is if they are saying something they know is not actually true. Not a matter of opinion; not “I disagree”; but counting two things and coming up with three. Or insisting that the moon landing happened in 1968. It has a long and storied history, originally on USENET, when we called it “fishing”. How do I know this? BECAUSE I DID IT A LOT, JACKWAGONS.

Here’s a really good example (found it in like 3 seconds). I had a Michigan fan going in circles calling me stupid for not being able to count, and mispelling the name of Albert Einstien, while everybody who knew what was going on was giggling behind their own computers in their mom’s basement. (No, YOUR mom’s basement!). In threads like these, I would say “anybody can fake a web page” when refuted with something they dragged up, make my own fake web page, post it in response, and then answer “it’s impossible to fake web pages” when they’d call foul, and they’d never realize they had a hook in their mouth. Or say I had 3 reasons they were wrong, post two (numbered 1 and 2, or even better, 1 and B), then when they called me stupid for not counting correctly, I’d insist I had no idea what they were talking about, and edit the quoted material accordingly. Then, when accused of changing the post, I’d tell them they were clearly idots – because you can’t change something that’s already been posted for these 3 reasons: 1, B. Lather, rinse, repeat, catch, release.

Another good example (difficult to find proto-thread in google groups given that searches prior to 2000 appear to be only intermittently working anymore) is when I made some Nebraska fans furious by insisting that they tied Kansas that one year (1994) when they actually lost to them. I also at a slightly later point had them convinced I was a Nebraska fan by the clever fiction of signing my posts “Husker M1EK” while changing absolutely nothing else.

So that’s fishing, or trolling as you n00bs like to call it now.

Again: things that are NOT trolling: “Somebody said something that I don’t like!”, or “Somebody keeps pissing me off”, or even “Somebody keeps pissing everyone off”. If they believe what they’re saying, it’s not trolling, not really.