THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR BUT IT KIND OF IS

The Tennessee-Florida game is this week. No one wants to talk about it and that’s fine. One program is managed by a dull Battletoad whose idea of a rallying cry is a garbage can. The other spent most of his offseason taking offense at the implication that he looked like a man who posed nude on a shark. Neither is living up to expectations at places that desperately want a likable winner, and neither is happy.

This game will be like watching two pigeons fight over a half-eaten chicken wing. No one respects the pigeons to begin with, because they are pigeons. Both are poorly armed and equipped for the fight, because again: are pigeons. As an SEC East rivalry, the entire exercise is an exercise in cannibalism. As a fight over position in the blighted SEC East, it is a futile fight with very little meat on the bone to be won.

Bystanders will be mildly horrified, only mildly, because this game doesn’t have the gravity to merit full horror.

What it will have: The head coach of one team hawking Barbecue Sauce in the stadium’s concession stands. Jim McElwain’s recipe can now be yours in the form of Mombo3 barbecue sauce, named for McElwain’s mom, and for the number of children the McElwain family have, and definitely not for field goals. Nope. Definitely not a 3 for endless field goals to end offensive drives.

Reading over it, it sounds like this is a production of McElwain’s wife Karen and Marty Hurwitz, who is some dude who used to Manage Raquel Welch, but who now lives in Sarasota. (We would put money on there being at least five dudes in Sarasota who say they used to manage Raquel Welch.)

When asked to describe the sauce, Hurwitz, who did not think of the football implications of this at all, gave the Gainesville Sun this:

He describes it as “perfume for the mouth. Sweet at first, then tangy and finally a kick at the end.”

That is correct. The Gators’ barbecue sauce starts sweet, but then turns bitter and ends with a kick. No, this is perfect. The branding is perfect, don’t change a damn thing, not at all. Tennessee at Florida will be broadcast at 3:30 p.m. ET on CBS, and Jim McElwain definitely did not pose nude atop a shark this offseason. He says it wasn’t him, and that offends him and his family when you say it.