The long, hard summer is over. Boise State returns to practice today on the first day of Fall Camp.
I know how I spent the past several months of no football - stumbling around in a daze, listening to Dashboard Confessional, going all John Nash in Beautiful Mind with my Phil Steele magazine. But what about the players? How did they spend their summer vacation? Let's find out.
"Wow. Let's see. Where to begin?
"Well, ever since the Poinsettia Bowl, my anger has been heating the Large Hadron Collider. I'm still pretty upset about losing, but if my rage can be funneled into particle physics research, then I'm all for it.
"When I'm not making scientific discoveries with my emotions, I'm in the film room, studying game tape of Oregon, breaking down the Zappruder film, and analyzing Brad Pitt's performance in Benjamin Button so that he can be a better actor. I don't know how many times I have to tell him, 'It's in the eyes, Brad. The eyes!'
"The film room keeps me busy, but I still find time for the occasional extracurricular activity. I've swam with the dolphins and decoded their language into a literate version of the Roman alphabet. I taught Tim Tebow how to throw a post-corner. David Augusto invited himself over for a sleepover. I put out that fire in Eagle. Everything I touch turns to gold. I converted a Honda Accord into a BatPod.
"But my favorite part of summer has probably been hanging out with my little brother Kirby. We enjoy fighting crime at night together."
"I spent my summer vacation studying the chase sequence from the movie Mitchell."
"Coach Pete locked me in a castle - kind of like Rapunzel, except there was an XBox."
"One day I was sitting on a hill by the Boise River, combing my beard with a large pine tree, when without warning the river reared up and spat four hundred and nineteen gallons of muddy water onto my beard. This startled me somewhat, but I figured if I ignored the river, it would go away and leave me alone. But that ornery river jest reared up again and spat five thousand and nineteen gallons of muddy water onto my beard, adding a batch of mud turtles, several large fish and a muskrat into the mix. I was so mad I jumped up and let out a yell that caused a landslide all the way out in Pike's Peak.
"'By jingo, I am gonna tame that river or bust a gut trying!' I cried.
"So I sat for four days eating popcorn and trying to figure out how to tame that river. I ate so much popcorn that the air was soon filled with white bits and the ground for three miles around was covered with eighteen inches of popcorn scraps. This caused several hundred small animals and a few dozen birds to conclude that they were in a blizzard and so they froze to death. This furnished the loggers nearby with pot pies for several days.
"Just as I ran out of popcorn, I decided that the way to tame the river was to pull out the kinks. I would hitch the river to Babe the Blue Ox and let him yank it straight. Of course, I knew that an ordinary log chain and the skid hook wouldn't work with water. So Babe and I took a short walk up to the North Pole. There, I caught six young blizzards and an old nor'wester. I put two of the young blizzards in my sack and released the rest. Then Babe and I went back to our camp.
"As I walked into camp, I yelled to Ole, the Big Swede to build me the largest log chain that's ever been built. Then I staked out the two blizzards, one on each side of the river. Right away, the river began to freeze. By morning, the river had a tough time rearing up to whistle because it was frozen solid for more than seventeen miles. When I finished my breakfast, I harnessed Babe and wrapped the chain seventy-two times around the foot of the frozen Boise River. Yelling to the men to stand clear, I shouted at Babe to pull. Babe pulled that chain into a solid bar and sank knee deep into solid rock, but that ornery river refused to budge. So I grabbed the chain, and Babe and I gave such a yank that the river jerked loose from its banks and we dragged it across the prairie so fast it smoked.
"After a while, I looked back and saw the river was as straight as a gun barrel. But the river was much shorter with the kinks out, and all the extra lengths that used to be in the kinks were running wild out on the prairie. So I got my big cross-cut saw and a lot of baling wire and sawed the extra lengths of river into nine-mile pieces, rolled them up and tied them off with the baling wire. I later used them to float my logs when I logged out the desert.
"Also, I moonlighted as an African-American."
Kyle Wilson
"I spent my summer becoming the most highly regarded pro prospect in all of the non-BCS. And I went to Wahooz Fun Zone once."