Welcome to week 12 or 11 of the Pembroke Mafia Football League. This week’s PMFL is dedicated to the notion there is intelligent life amongst UGA fans, you just need a rocketship and space boots to track it down, grab it with some of those reach extenders and stick it in a plastic sack.

Yep. When grown bearded women who are presumably taxpayers and pillars of society shave their heads, paint them red and then throw on shoulder pads just to spend weeks barking like grumpy golden retrievers hollering “Hunker down yewww hairy dawwwwgs!”, well, something’s amiss.

Granted, the tide is high for Georgia right now in a lot of ways, not just football. You can’t turn around without somebody in the governor’s office named Brian Kemp saying “hard working Georgians,” and if we’re not careful we’re all going to wind up having to work building battery powered subcompacts while we hunker our hairy selves down.

But will Georgia win a second straight national title? Probably, and I’ll tell you why.

They cheat. Gleefully so. In fact, they always have bent the rules up in Athens. So if you can run with or throw a football, you can take graduate level classes in Indoor Nap Taking, or Imagining Ways to Make Mundane Tasks Sound Important.

For example, writing this column, while clearly brain surgery, is also so easy anybody with a typewriter and elbows can do it. It would be called Introduction to Outdoor Brainiac Surgery 220 (it’s a sophomore class, filled to the willies with sophomoric attempts at humor), in that the plan is to find somebody with a typewriter and elbows and get them to do the heavy lifting brain surgery for you while you collect a consulting fee or run for Congress and claim to have made $97 billion all by yourself.

It works if you have a diploma, or at least a certificate. I knew a Georgia fan who didn’t graduate high school, but did graduate from DUI school after he ran a golf cart into his own pickup while he was driving both (seriously) at the same time, and danged if he didn’t frame that thing and hang it on his wall. I couldn’t make up stuff that good if I tried. Go Dawgs.

As for UGA, well, good old Dick Shakespeare put it best.

“I was not angry since I came to France Until this instant. Take a trumpet, herald; Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill: If they will fight with us, bid them come down, Or void the field; they do offend our sight: If they’ll do neither, we will come to them, And make them skirr away, as swift as stones Enforced from the old Assyrian slings: Besides, we’ll cut the throats of those we have, And not a man of them that we shall take Shall taste our mercy. Go and tell them so.”

Look out Kentucky. The Bulldogs are coming. 

This week’s standings, courtesy the illustrious B.J.

Clark: 1. Ted O’Neil, 34 2. Tie: Rev. Lawrence Butler, Mike Butler, 36 3. Carter Infinger, 38 4. Tie: Dr. Gene Wallace, Freddy Howell, 40 5. Ben Taylor, 41 6. Tie: Dawnne Greene, Noah Covington, 43 7. Tie: B.J. Clark, Mike Brown, Jeff Whitten, 46 8. Alex Floyd, 47. This week’s games: SMU vs. Tulane: Everybody takes Tulane, even the people who didn’t. Actually, I don’t know who took what.

Illinois vs. Michigan: I was in Wally-World the other day and everybody sounded like they came from Chicago: “Ya know whaaat! Cubs eat booger flavored cereal!”

Yikes. Syracuse vs. Wake Forest: The non-Yankee team will prevail. We hope.

Wisconsin vs. Nebraska: Who let this game get on the schedule? Is this in Fargo?

Oklahoma State vs. Oklahoma: Oklahoma is one of those states where everybody has a mullet or a skullet, including the head coach. Sooners lose later.

Colorado State vs. Air Force: Go Falcons.

Utah vs. Oregon: Both teams have excellent quarterbacks. I once interviewed Bo Nix’s grandfather, Conrad. He was coaching Northside Warner Robins at the time, and they’d just unloaded on Bradwell Institute something like 400-2 in the first round of the state playoffs. Nix was a very nice fellow, kind of reminded me of Bear Bryant.

Marshall at Georgia Southern: The Iggles have deploded. Or reploded, or unploded, or something. It’s those silly blue pants. Anyhow, much as most of us hereabouts hate the Herd, we got to pull for them for Mike’s sake.

Southern Cal vs. UCLA: No, I didn’t write it down the way BJ had it, which was USC vs. UCLA. Hate to bust anybody’s bubble, but USC stands for University of South Carolina. The rest are pale imitators, or as Cicero put it, “Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”

Dum Spero Spiro. Succombo deorsum pilosus canus. Yep.