Before last season, Desmond Howard predicted that Baylor, Texas A&M, and Pittsburgh would join Michigan in the College Football Playoff. The Aggies and Bears finished with losing records and the Panthers went 9-4, but hey, the Wolverines made it!
I swear I’m not making this up. It’s worth documenting and remembering.
Bottom line/point being, once I saw that, all bets were off as far as anything Howard would say or do going forward as an analyst for ESPN’s College GameDay.
Those sorts of postseason projections should be grounds for being fired on the spot, but hey. Good on you, Des. Leveraging the goodwill from your 1991 Heisman Trophy into a virtual lifetime contract in a dream media job? That’s a level of finesse few of us will ever comprehend, much less come close to executing.
Part of me just kind of tunes out almost anything Howard pontificates about. HOWEVER, it’s times like these when we’re all so lucky to have Desmond Howard in our lives. He’s bound to do something absolutely absurd. It’s physics. It’s inevitable. And damn, on Saturday morning did he ever deliver.
Forget coffee, this will wake you RIGHT UP and keep you lit prior to the highly anticipated 3:30 p.m. ET kickoff between Oregon and Washington.
Taking after Robert Griffin III’s delightful pioneering of the “Big Penix Energy” moniker of sorts for Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr., Des was HYPED to evolve that phrase into a rallying cry for the Huskies faithful in Seattle.
Now let me see if I can typographically articulate how “Penix” is meant to be pronounced. Think Penn State when you go for the first syllable. “PENN-icks.” That’s how it’s done. Penn-icks.
What we got from Howard instead was, “PEE-nicks.” The hard consonants at the end of that surname are pretty much lost when your eardrums are shook from the hard “PEE.” Then you factor in the live mic picking up all the crowd noise, and when you blast that sharp vowel through your upper facial resonators, “PEE-nicks” sure sounds like something else.
Look what you’ve created, RGIII!!
