For purposes of this resolution consume is defined broadly. I’m not buying a car, a taco, a beer or insurance from the advertisers. I’d ask anyone who’s disgusted with the current state of college football in America to join me. Take a stand for one month to express your outrage over college football’s refusal to consider the wishes of their fans and institute a playoff.

We’re approaching 2009 and the dawn of yet another season of BCS controversy. The state of Texas is contemplating becoming a Republic again, there are four games no one gives two shits about and ESPN has ponied up $495 million for the rights to air the BCS games from 2011-2014. Next year your team could be the one getting screwed. About this time of year everyone complains about the BCS but no one ever comes up with a solution that actually makes sense to end the BCS. That's because most solutions involve not watching the games, not buying the tickets, or relying on college football presidents and the companies that make money off the BCS to come to their senses. Plainly, for true college football fans, none of these are viable options. So we all end up pissed with nothing to show for it. At least until now.

I've spent an awful lot of time thinking of ways that actual fans (who aren't billionaires) can have an impact on bringing about a playoff. And this is my idea—boycott the BCS advertisers.

After New Year’s you’ll have seven days to gear up for the BCS Championship Game between Oklahoma and Florida on January 8. There will be five BCS games in all and thanks to the continued allegiance of college football fans, all five of these games will garner high ratings. Last year’s Ohio State-LSU game brought in 23.1 million viewers. This year’s game will bring in even more viewers. And these numbers are one of the reasons why ESPN was willing to pay $495 million to steal away the broadcast rights from Fox.

Posting viewership like this enabled Fox to sell almost all of the advertising spots for their games before the match-up was even announced. How much did those spots sell for in 2008? Try a reported $500,000 for the non-title games and up to $950,000 for the title game spots. So there’s huge advertising money out there to support these games. Why? Because even if fans don’t particularly like the way college football selects their national champion, they’re still going to tune in to watch the games. Particularly men ages 18-49 who are the most difficult to reach for advertisers. Bingo, a flawed system still brings in a lucrative payoff.

That’s why calls for fan boycotts of the game have been so ineffective in the past. No matter how convoluted, communistic, or unfair the college football finale is, no fan will give up the chance to watch this game. College football fan outrage doesn’t trump college football fandom. Fair enough. I hate the BCS but you can bet I’m going to be sitting down and watching these games. So asking fans to boycott the games themselves either by not traveling to them or not watching them on television is a losing proposition.

But, here’s the deal, if we’ve learned anything in the modern media landscape it’s that advertising determines whether or not programming continues. If a program isn’t doing well enough in the ratings it gets pulled, because advertisers want to reach viewers. This is pretty basic stuff. Clearly ratings aren’t going to be an issue for BCS games. Millions are going to watch no matter who plays. But advertisers also want their products to be well-received. They don’t want to antagonize consumers by helping to promote causes, ideas, or beliefs that their consumers find offensive. Keep in mind it wasn’t a threatened boycott of listening to Don Imus’s radio show that was an issue after his controversial comments, it was one advertiser after another publicly announcing that they didn’t want to continue to be associated with his program and were consequently pulling their advertising dollars. Bang, Imus crumbled and his radio show (and its television simulcast) came to an end. At least for a while. You can agree or disagree with the decision to pull his show, but what you can’t dispute is that it was pressure from consumers against advertisers that brought about the show’s demise. And it was the public indignation regarding Imus's advertisers that got me really thinking, college football fans could do the same thing to BCS advertisers.

Only there are tens of millions more people who watch college football than ever listened to Don Imus on the radio. Plus, these tens of millions of BCS haters spend billions and billions of dollars on the products advertised during BCS games. Even a small minority of consumers choosing to switch away from their usual product selections for a month will be felt by these companies.

That’s why I’m encouraging fans not to support all the advertisers who buy commercial spots for the BCS games. But even that’s not enough. Instead support their competitors, the companies who weren’t willing to help prop up an illegitimate way to crown a college football champion. After all, in today's age most products are fairly fungible. Not only will you be taking from the pockets of the BCS advertisers, but you'll be enriching their competitors. Eventually those companies are going to notice.

Who are these advertisers? Well, we don’t know them all yet. That’s because Fox and ABC don’t release the names of their advertisers prior to the games. Not even when you call the companies and ask nicely. The individual companies can announce, however, and that's especially the case when they buy naming rights sponsorships for bowl games. Here are four big targets.

1. FedEx- For the month of January don’t even consider FedEx as your delivery service of choice. As both the named sponsor for the BCS Title Game and the Orange Bowl, it's hard to find a company that is more supportive of college football's communistic If you already have an account with FedEx consider switching next January to a company that doesn’t support the BCS as much as they do. Basically any competitor.
2. Tostitos- I eat Tostitos all the time while I'm watching college football. But, they’re dead to me for the month of January. And, fortunately for me, there are a billion other companies that make chips and aren't screwing up a playoff.
3. Citi- Isn't the sponsor of the Rose Bowl almost bankrupt anyway? In fact, is this sponsorship, shudder, being paid for by taxpayer dollars via the bailout?
4. AllState- Go to one of the other insurance companies if you're looking for insurance. Trust me, the companies aren't much different anyway.

This is just a start but it's the four most egregious advertisers helping to keep an illegitimate system afloat. Join me in taking the ultimate capitalistic stand against a totalitarian system, spend your money on their competitors who don't foist an unfair and illegitimate national champion upon us. And join the facebook petition in the process.

(Note: I originally wrote this as a ClayNation column for CBS. It was set to run on December 31, 2007 and then, the day it was set to go up, I received word that the editors at CBS decided this boycott idea might anger their own advertisers and so they wouldn't publish it. I respected their position but it made me realize just how much in bed with the BCS every major media company truly was. Nothing changes with college football because the power structure doesn't want anything to change. That's only going to get worse. Unless fans like you and me actually take control of the process.)

(Double Note: This will be my final post for Deadspin. At least for the foreseeable future. Don't worry, A.J. has assured me that when On Rocky Top hits stores this summer you'll all get a tasty excerpt featuring the largest amount of dick jokes per capita in the entire book. After I finish the book I'm honestly not sure exactly what I'm going to do. At least the economy is awesome. You can always find me at claytravis.net . Viva la BCS revolucion, Cle.)

Future bets are out for college football. Updated ones at least. For odds to win the national championship and over/under on wins for the season. Now that we’re about six weeks from kickoff some of these propositions start to get pretty interesting.

Thanks to the NCAA threatening to geld any media outlet that actually mentions gambling and college sports in the same sentence, none of this stuff ever gets talked about. Where’s the money going as we get close to season kickoff on August 28? Not surprisingly, Southern Cal is a big favorite to win the National Championship at 3-1. Followed by the usual suspects of Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia and Ohio State. But who is sneaking into the picture after the proverbial big boys? Missouri at 10-1.

Georgia sliding in at 8-1 is a horrible bet. They aren’t that much better, if at all, than several teams on their schedule and they have a quarterback in Mathew Stafford who still prefers to pick dandelions on the sideline. So waste your money on the Dawgs if you must.

Seven other things that jump out at me based on these odds:

1. West Virginia even under their new coach that no one has ever heard of, Bill Stewart, is still at 15-1. Which seems surprising given a trip out to Colorado and a game at home against Auburn. That's a horrible bet.
2. Virginia Tech is lurking there at 22-1. Just tantalizing enough that if you put your money on them, you’ll start getting optimistic come mid-October before the inevitable Frank Beamer-led tanking. But what special teams! Also, and this is somehow perfect, Virginia Tech’s official site already color coordinates what games you’re to wear white, maroon, and orange. Because when you think Virginia Tech Hokie fans, you think fashion-obsessed.
3. Not particularly surprising but the dismissal of quarterback Ryan Perrilloux from LSU’s team has dropped them from 15-1 contenders to 25-1. At least for Perrilloux’s sake they’re going to be selling sweet tea vodka in Alabama soon. That will end well.
4. Clemson (at 20-1) and Wisconsin (at 30-1) are two teams that are lurking outside the national attention and seem like decent plays. Taking them in reverse order, look at Wisconsin’s schedule. They play at Michigan, which is probably their toughest road game, but get Ohio State, Penn State, and Illinois at home. If Wisconsin can manage to beat Ohio State, odds are they win the Big Ten and could still have a decent chance to play for the national championship even with one other loss on their schedule. At 30-1 that looks pretty good to me. Then, Clemson at 20-1. The Tigers open with a neutral game in Atlanta against Alabama (which they’ll be favored to win) and then play four home games in a row that they’ll be prohibitive favorites in. So a very decent chance they start off 5-0. Now I know that Tommy Bowden has started seasons great before tanking in the past, but you’re telling me that Clemson’s three toughest road games are at BC, at Florida State, and at Virginia? That's ridiculous. None of those three teams are very good. So Clemson at 20-1 looks pretty good. They’ll probably be favored in every regular season game. Unlike, Wisconsin you have to worry about them tripping up in the conference title game, but, still, Clemson’s a good bet.
5. 17 teams are left outside the field. Who’s included in the field that could win the national championship? Not a single team. Seriously, that’s a weak field.
6. Notre Dame clocks in at 100-1. This means they’ll be #12 in the media poll to begin the season.
7. If there are any actual UNLV fans, leaving the odds of their winning the national championship is just rubbing it in. At the very bottom, 1,000-1. And the cum shot on UNLV football fandom, college football behemoth Nevada is only at 400-1.

College Football Odds to Win National Championship [Vegas Insider]

The most frequent email from ClayNation column readers since I said I was leaving CBS has been whether or not All That and a Bag of Mail will continue alongside the beaver pelt trader of the week. Fear not, we’re rolling. Every Friday we’ll do our best, like Matt Jones, to bring the goods.

For our inaugural beaver pelt trader of the week here at deadspin, we’re going straight to the commenters. Specifically to the earl of weaver who wrote on my first post: “Vlade Divac called. He wants his head back.” I have no idea who you are but because of you I’ve been Vlade in emails that my friends have sent to me all week. Well played, sir, well played, indeed.

Now on to an abbreviated first mailbag. It’s several less emails than normal because I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing here. Sizing pictures, making sure links work? Prior to this email was about the extent of my technological expertise. For the first three days I felt like I was sandbagging on the Mississippi levees. Just when I’d get things figured out something new would erupt. Anyway, things should be rolling now. On to All That and a Bag of Mail.

Multiple people emailed and asked:
“Why the apostrophe, C’lay?”

Honestly, at first it was a mistake. I posted in response to Big Daddy Drew calling me a fag (even when everyone already knows he’s a double fag) and my name came up as Clay Travis. Which I thought made it look like I was somebody’s dad. So I went back to my log-in page and tried to change my posting name to C’lay. Only it changed everything else too. After that the Deadspin flood had already arrived and I didn’t take the time to fix it.

My affinity for unnecessary apostrophes in names made me kind of enjoy the look. Then somebody posted that putting an apostrophe in your name was racist. Which was so absurd I loved it. Is the question mark sexist? The semi-colon ageist? Anyway, with reader nominations we established the ClayNation Apostrophe Rankings (CAR). Right now here is the top 5.

1 .S'Quindalyn
2. Al'Lonzo Coleman
3. Tayl'r Hollis
4. Da'Veed Dildy
5. K’lee Arredondo

For a week at least I knew how it felt to have an apostrophe. And I loved it. Keep the new nominations coming. (For the record, two of these are white women.) Because the apostrophe knows no color and has no politics other than unconditional love.

Dan writes:

“Do with this what you will."

So the South Carolina Tourism board chose to advertise, “South Carolina is so gay,” overseas to attract gay tourists and the people of South Carolina had a problem with this? Shocking. I’m sure that printed out versions of these signs won’t make any appearance whatsoever during the upcoming football season. My prediction: at least one visiting fan gets sliced to death with the shards of an oyster shell. Or quarterback Stephen Garcia goes Ulysses on them with one of his swords.

Johnny writes:

“I'm curious (not bi-curious, just regular curious) to know if you are planning on busting out your ‘SEC Rules, Pac-10 Drools’ banner for the UCLA game? Are you afraid it might jinx your Vols? If so, you could loan it to our flat-chested Georgia friends when they play Arizona State.”

If by “flat-chested Georgia friends” you mean the girls with the biggest tits in North America, then I wink and nod at your knowing sarcasm. I’ll be in LA for the game but unless my publisher wants to buy another banner I’m keeping quiet. Although, if I were an Arizona State fan and I wanted to go double agent as a way to get my team fired up? The banner sounds like a pretty good plan. Personally, I’d go with, “Hey Dawgs, Herschel is dog-fucking your wife right now. Enjoy Tempe.”

Joshua Smith writes:

“I'd like to be BGID again, but father time has caught up with me very early and I'm now BGID in another way...bald. My brother claims that having a beard with the razor shaven head is even more GID. I am skeptical. I can't decide if this is silly or truly GID.”

I’m coming around on the shaven head with beard look based on several emails but I’m still a bit skeptical. On the positive side you look like such a bad ass that there is no way anyone ever chooses to fight you. On the negative side, you might end up in a fight with a guy with a shaven head and no beard because he’s going to inevitably be at the bar with the chick wearing a blue jean jacket and combat boots in the summer and you’ll cut that chick at the bar when you’re trying to get a beer because she'll had bad vision on account of her hoodie. I guess what I’m saying is dudes with bald heads and beards roll with lesbians. Nothing wrong with that but be forewarned.

Entering the camp, McGrady was a 17-year-old mystery from central Florida, unmentioned on most top-500 recruiting lists. So everyone in the gym took notice as he slowed at the top of the key to wait for the much-hyped Felton. When the big man caught up, McGrady stared him down, then took off a couple of strides inside the free throw line. Felton jumped too, but just as his fingers grazed the ball palmed in his opponent's right hand, McGrady whipped it down to his waist. In the next instant, he grabbed it with his left and windmilled it through the hoop so fiercely that it should have dented the floor. By the time the unheralded prep landed, he was the next big thing. Dozens of fans and players tumbled onto the court, yelling and high-fiving, temporarily halting the game. All Felton could do was shake his head, scratch his cheek and try not to look the victim. But the damage was done. The country's most-sought-after big had been owned. "It was one of the best basketball moments of my life," recalls Odom. "An I'm-ready-to-get-drafted type of move. I'd never seen anyone do something like that, not even in the NBA."

Feldman’s story ends sadly. McGrady goes on to be a multi-millionaire All-Star while James Felton’s life falls apart. Feldman traces their career arcs from this moment and while the construct might be artificial, the central concept, that some dunks are big enough to change the way we think, is not.

In much less maudlin terms the story left me thinking about the dunks I remember most from my life as a sports fan. We all have these moments stored away in our minds but we remember lots of them from television viewings. Which, to be honest, is not the way a dunk was truly meant to be experienced. With a catchphrase or an attempted witty quip from a desk-bound anchor. It strips away the primordial fury of the dunk. The soaring through the air, the unexpectedness of it, the sheer power. When you’re watching highlights on television you’re expecting to see the otherworldly. Watching a game in person when something spectacular happens, that’s when the true impact of the dunk is felt. So here are the three dunks I remember most.

The first wasn’t during a game or any particular athletic event. We’d just come back from summer break and were freshmen in high school. My best friend, Ian, had spent the summer refining his dunk attempts but none of us had seen him be successful so far. Then, during lunch break, he took a basketball and dunked. Having a friend your same age who could dunk suddenly makes you realize that you’re getting older. An actual friend who could dunk? Wow. Sex was sure to come soon. Even if, you know, it wasn't. I know the first guy able to grow a mustache gets a lot of pre-adolescent tail, but the first guy who could dunk in your high school? All of a sudden the sky was the limit for Ian. Chicks dig big verticals.

The second also happened in high school. My school, Martin Luther King, was playing Shawn Marion’s team from just up the road in Clarksville. During warm-ups Marion’s head almost touch the rim on the lay-up line. He was very thin and gangly and his arms and legs seemed a bit disjointed from the rest of his body. Even now when you watch Marion play on television there’s something a bit awkward about the way his body moves. So imagine this same movement during his junior year. It was a summer league game and a guy on the team, Jamie, was supposed to have the back side of the rim covered. Then, out of nowhere, it happened so quickly I could barely tell what was happening, a lob was in the air and Marion came soaring from what seemed like the roof of the gym. It was unbelievable. The most explosive athletic move I’d ever witnessed up to that point. Jamie never saw it coming. Which was probably fortunate because at least this way he only ended up with Marions nuts on the back of his head instead of his face. Marion hung on the rim and straddled him for a moment before coming back to earth. Every player on both teams just stopped playing. Except for Jamie who was trying to run back up to the court.

During the next timeout he said to my friend D.J., “How come you didn’t yell backdoor?”
And D.J., whose mouth was still agape, said, “Because I wanted to see what happened.”

From that day forward everyone knew that there were good athletes and there were great athletes and there was a tremendous line between the two.

Finally, during my sophomore year at George Washington University, GW and Xavier were locked in a very tight game that would decide the outcome of the A-10 West. There was a breakaway and then-sophomore James Posey of Xavier got the ball. Only GW’s 6’7 brute Spaniard, Antxon Iturbe, stood in the way. Iturbe had a vertical leap of about 24 inches on a good day so he had no hope to challenge Posey at the rim. Instead of fouling him as hard as he could, Iturbe decided to set up in the middle of the lane and take a charge. Only Posey never slowed down. Instead Posey took flight just inside the free throw line, cocked the ball behind his head, slammed into Iturbe and never stopped going. It appeared he might float all the way into the white retaining wall behind the basket. Instead he reached the rim and slammed the ball with such force that a raucous Smith Center crowd went completely silent. You could hear a pin drop all of a sudden. Even the white kids from parochial high schools who had been taught to take charges their entire lives didn’t speak. There was no foul called because I think the referee was too shocked to call the charge. But I’ll never forget that moment of complete silence that followed the dunk. I’d never before, and never have heard again, a home arena go so silent in an instant, all in awe over the awesome power of a dunk. To this day, every dunk I’ve ever seen is compared to that one single dunk that doesn't even exist in cyberspace anymore. And all have been found lacking.

The Wrong Side of Great [ESPN]

Professional sports locker rooms are one of the last bastions for gay humor. That’s because there’s never been any gay athletes. So, you see, the very idea of anyone being gay is always funny. Which brings me to the first big scoop of my illustrious Deadspin career: The phrase “No Homo” has taken over NFL locker rooms.

It’s everywhere, on every single team, the NFL equivalent of the late 90's Macarena dance. No Homo owes its popularity to the remarkably varied and infinitely complicated nature of its use. Or the opposite. One or the other. It’s applied thusly:

LenDale White says to Vince Young: “Vince, you’ve got great nips. No homo.”

Did you catch the subtle twist there? LenDale has said something that on any other day might be considered gay, but, and this is key, he’s inoculated his heterosexuality by appending, no homo at the end. No homo also works at the front of the phrase but then it’s much less enjoyable because the other party has been keyed into the homosexuality of the statement that’s to follow. Hence, “No homo. Vince you’ve got great nips.” No dice there.

Like many great evolutions of the English language, this tidy little appellation can be traced to none other than rapper Juelz Santana. (Not surprisingly there’s an apostrophized genius behind the curtain, Juelz was rapping alongside Cam’Ron).

Right now, you’re shaking your head, giddy with chill bumps, thinking to yourself, this can’t possibly be true. The entire NFL can’t be swept up in a tide of no homo humor. You, my friend, are wrong. Chances are while you’re pretending to work at your desk your favorite NFL player is bringing down the locker room house with a well-placed no homo joke. “Pass me the nuts, Hines. No homo.” It’s locker room work like this that makes Big Ben such a great team leader.

You’re probably lame and white, like me. Which means that most of your friends have never used this phrase or heard it used before. Well, welcome to the future my apple-hineyed friends. No homo. If, perchance, you happen to be so hip that you’ve been breaking cats down no homo style for the past year then consider yourself enlightened and awesome. Like Kordell Stewart.

Otherwise, get studied up on No Homo.

Because if your life is anything like mine, pretty soon all your emails for the next week are going to feature this tidy phrase. It’s probably going to sweep through your profession. Accountants, doctors, Odysseus, engineers, all fall victim to the Siren-like call of no homo. Don’t believe me? Since receiving the no homo tip from several NFL players (no homo?), the Nashville legal community has become fertile ground for no homo talk. Even in the pleadings. "Comes the plaintiff (no homo)." It’s spread faster in the legal community than imaginary billable hours. Clients are even following suit. Pretty soon, no homo is going to be the new making it rain. And once again we’ll all have NFL players to thank for broadening our national jargon. As we begin our 233rd year as a nation, thank god for that. God bless you Roger Goodell’s collection of saints, god bless you every sngle one.