Bottom 10: Things go south for Clemson and its South Carolina mates
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Inspirational thought of the week:
I can’t see the future but I know it’s coming fast
It’s not that hard to wind up knee deep in the past
It’s come a lot of Mondays
Since the phone booth that first night
Through years and miles and tears and smiles
I want to get it right
From the bottom of my heart
Off the coast of Carolina
After one or two false starts
I believe we found our stride
— “The Coast of Carolina,” Jimmy Buffett
Here at Bottom 10 Headquarters, located at the base of the garbage chute where Pat McAfee throws away all of the sleeves that he cuts off his shirts, we entered Week 1 with our eyes focused on the horizon ahead and our hands firmly wrapped around the ship’s wheel as the wind of actual football filled our sails and pushed into the season. With fins to the left, fins to the right, because yes, it’s been quite a summer with rent-a-cars and westbound trains, and … OK, full disclosure, we don’t listen to a lot of Jimmy Buffett in our HQ. We’re more of a hopeful marching band and drumline descending into a sad country breakup song kind of office.
But Saturday morning, as I took the stage to co-host “Marty & McGee” from Nashville, Tennessee, built squarely in the center of Lower Broadway, a man in a parrot-covered shirt was asleep on the sidewalk outside Buffett’s Margaritaville. He suddenly jumped up, ran over to the railing and said, “McGee, Jimmy is dead, and I don’t feel so good myself. The last time I saw him was here in Nashville, and that same weekend, I watched Vanderbilt lose by a hundred points to South Carolina. Jimmy loved South Carolina. Not the team. The state. It’s sad.” And he went back to sleep.
At the time, I laughed it off. Then, as I thought about it more, I was sad too. Jimmy Buffett was indeed gone. And he did indeed love South Carolina. He wrote songs about South Carolina. He sailed off the coast of South Carolina. He had played so many sellouts all over South Carolina. Later that night, in Charlotte, North Carolina, I watched South Carolina quarterback Spencer Rattler spend the evening running for his life as the Gamecocks lost to UNC 31-17. During a second-half timeout, the PA system started blasting “Margaritaville” as the packed stadium sang along.
Another man in a beachy button-down shirt, much more sober than the first — at least at that point in the evening — tapped his baseball cap with a Gamecocks logo and said, “They’re playing the wrong song.” He pointed to Rattler, on the bench as his beleaguered O-line awkwardly sat next to him, silent and embarrassed. “They should be playing, ‘Nobody Speaks to the Captain No More.'”
With apologies to the Oldest Surfer on the Beach, the Son of a Son of a Sailor and Steve Harvey, here’s the 2023 Week 1 Bottom 10.
1. Arkansaw State Fightin’ Butches (0-1)
After allowing Oklahoma to squeak by 73-0, Red Wolves coach Butch Jones said, “I thought they out-athleted us.” He’s not wrong. His team also was outscored, outrushed, outpassed and out-ed as the runaway early favorite to take home the Bottom 10 title.
2. #Kentergy (0-1)
The Golden Flashes opened their season by going down to UCF. Like, literally. They lost 56-6 and had the 35-point spread covered faster than my brother-in-law slathering Country Crock and strawberry jelly on a homemade biscuit. Now they go to Arkansaw Not Arkansaw State, where they are a 38-point underdog and where head hog Sam Pittman (a longtime friend of the Bottom 10, so he knows I say this in jest) probably just ate one of those same biscuits. Or six.
3. North by Northworstern (0-1)
You know when Northwestern put this 2023 schedule together, they thought, “Are you kidding? We get In-A-Rut-gers Week 1 and then Dook Week 3?” Well, they just got Sonny-at-the-toll-booth’ed in New Jersey, 24-7, while Duke did the same to Clemson, 28-7.
4. No-Braska (0-1)
Those same conversations were likely happening in Lincoln, where the Cornhuskers saw season-opening trips to Minnesota and Colorado and thought, “Hey, this isn’t bad. We nearly beat the Gophers last year, and the Buffaloes are the defending Bottom 10 champions!” Then the Cornhuskers blew a second-half lead and lost to Minnesota, just like last year, and the Buffs are led by Deion Sanders, who spent Week 1 being anointed as the greatest coach in the history of football.
5. The Palm(in the face)etto State
There are three FBS schools in the state of South Carolina — Coastal Carolina, South Carolina and Clemson — and they all lost over the weekend. There are six FCS schools in the state of South Carolina. They went 2-4, but one of those wins was by Charleston Southern over North Greenville, one of the Palmetto State’s seven Division II schools — which went 3-4 over the weekend, including in a head-to-head matchup. So your final record for the Sandlapper schools was 5-11, with two of those wins coming head-to-head, capped by Clemson’s orange crush of a loss at Duke. I immediately texted my best friend from high school, now a highly decorated high school history teacher in Lexington, South Carolina, to make sure the following tweet (or X or whatever we’re calling it) was OK. He hung up on me. He’s a South Carolina alum. #toosoon
Clemson L
SC L
N Greenville L
Wofford L
The Citadel L
Coastal Carolina L
SC State Lx2
Presbyterian L
Erskine L
The last time the state of South Carolina had a weekend this bad was because of Sherman.— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) September 5, 2023
6. San No-sé State (0-2)
Much is being made of the fact that the ragtag fugitive fleet known as the Pac-12, soon to be the 2Pac, has yet to lose a game. It hasn’t hurt that two of the league’s best teams have played San José State, with USC and Caleb Williams winning the Trojan-Spartan War 56-28 and Oregon State rolling 42-17. The magically and creepily accurate FPI tells us the Spartans should be 1-4 entering mid-October when they visit …
7. Whew Mexico (0-1)
The No-Bos opened the season with a brutal yet financially worthwhile trip to College Station, Texas, where they surrendered so many points and yards that they asked new A&M offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino if they could borrow his neck brace for their trip back to Albuquerque. After hosting Tennessee Tech in Week 2, the No-Bos remain at University Stadium to welcome in …
8. Whew Mexico State (1-1)
The Other Aggies shocked the Week 0 world when they were run over by the preseason top/bottom-ranked UMess Minutemen like they were the Redcoats retreating on the road back to Boston. Sure, the Other Aggies rebounded with a 58-21 win over the FCS Western Illinois Leathernecks. But now they make a pilgrimage to Jamey Chadwell’s Liberty before heading up Interstate 25 to visit the No-Bos — one week before traveling to current 0-2 Huh-Why-Yuh.
9. My Hammy of Ohio (0-1)
Despite losing 38-3 to the Hurricanes in the Battle of My-Hammys, the RedHawks are a touchdown favorite this weekend as — speaking of UMass — they make the trip east to face …
10. UMess (1-1)
Yes, our old friends from the Revolutionary War reenactment camp started the year 1-0, but they followed their triumph on Lexington Green with a Bunker Hill-like effort on The Plains, blindsided 59-14 by Hugh Freeze and Auburn. After a pair of #MACtion dates with My Hammy of Ohio and Eastern not Western Michigan, UMass closes out September with visits from Whew Mexico and … yes … wait for it … this is awesome … full circle moment … Arkansaw State! Week 0 glory be damned; all Bottom 10 roads still run through Massachusetts. And like a salt and brine mix on the Mass Turnpike, it’s going to rust out the undercarriage of the 2023 college football season.
Waiting List: Huh-Why-Yuh, LS-Who, Flori-duh, No-vada, Central Not Western or Eastern Michigan, Muddled Tennessee State, TC-Who Just Played For The Natty And Then Lost To The Bottom 10 Champs?
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Paula Lavigne
Florida prosecutors confirmed in a hearing Friday that their key witness in the murder case of a former University of Miami football player is alive and was contacted Thursday by officers where he lives in Kentucky.
ESPN reported Thursday that, despite prosecutors stating July 17 that they tried every effort to locate 81-year-old Paul Conner and had a report from a commercial database he was dead, journalists found Conner alive at his apartment in Louisville.
Conner is the only eyewitness in the case against former Miami football player Rashaun Jones, who is facing second-degree murder charges in the 2006 shooting of teammate Bryan Pata. Jones, who was arrested in 2021, has pleaded not guilty.
Miami assistant state attorney Cristina Diamond told Florida 11th Circuit Court Judge Cristina Miranda that, after the ESPN story was published, her lead detective reached out to police in Louisville and asked them to go to Conner’s last-known address — where ESPN reporters had found him.
“They were able to make contact with Paul Conner. So at this time, what I can tell the court is that Paul Conner is alive,” Diamond said, adding that she had reviewed the officer’s body camera footage. “I think the state needs to do a little bit of further investigation. It appears that he was very confused and is not certain what the case is about.”
When ESPN reporters interviewed Conner on Aug. 25, he said he did not remember details about the case. Miranda had ruled in July that, assuming Conner was dead, the state could present jurors a videotape of prior testimony he gave in 2022 in a bond hearing in the case in lieu of having him testify in person.
If a determination is made that Conner is not competent to testify, she said, “we may still be in the same situation.”
Conner first spoke to police shortly after the Nov. 7, 2006, shooting, and he picked Jones out of a police lineup. Police reinterviewed him in 2020. Conner also recounted what he saw at the 2022 bond hearing and in a 2023 deposition with attorneys.
At the time of the shooting, Conner lived in the same apartment complex as Pata. He said during his 2022 testimony that he heard a “pop” and saw someone “jogging” away from the parking lot entrance near where Pata, a likely high pick in the 2007 NFL draft, was shot once in the head.
How the confirmation of Conner’s status affects the case, which is scheduled for trial Oct. 6, is to be determined after attorneys argued in court Friday about what steps to take next regarding questioning Conner and going over the evidence of the state’s prior efforts to find him.
Jones’ attorney Sara Alvarez told Miranda that she wanted to request a hearing to determine if prosecutors violated the rules of evidence, saying she thought the false conclusion of Conner’s death “may have been intentional.”
Diamond rebutted that accusation, saying Miami-Dade officers made multiple attempts to reach Conner.
“This is our key witness in the case. This is somebody we want,” Diamond told the judge. “The defense is accusing me of making misrepresentations to the court. Every representation made to the court was based upon a conversation with an officer who I was prepared to have testify.”
Diamond was referring to officers from the Louisville Police Department who she said went to Conner’s address over the summer and “spoke to someone but believed it was not the witness.” She said she had a copy of the body camera footage as well. She said those officers told her they also spoke to someone with the apartment’s leasing office who did not find Conner in their records.
She said they did not locate a death certificate in Kentucky but relied on the third-party commercial database that stated Conner was deceased. Jones’ counsel asked for a copy of that report along with other records that would verify the state’s efforts.
The Louisville officers did not testify Friday, as the judge decided to give the attorneys some time to correspond with each other and decide how they wanted to proceed.
ESPN had asked for records or information from the Louisville Police Department regarding efforts to locate Conner, and a department spokesman said there were no records of any officer going to Conner’s address this summer prior to a July 22 request from a former colleague who had called for a welfare check on Conner after being contacted by ESPN reporters.
ESPN made multiple requests to police and the Miami-Dade State Attorney for records of their efforts to find Conner. After initially saying they had no documents, they eventually provided an email exchange in which lead detective Juan Segovia wrote that he left 15 voicemail messages with Conner since May. Segovia added that he also sent emails to an address that officers had used with him previously. They also provided a copy of a June 6 letter addressed to Conner at his Louisville address that asked him to contact their office.
They provided an email exchange with a Louisville police officer, but it had no information about Conner or efforts to find him, and they provided a copy of a subpoena for the officer to testify. ESPN reached back out to Louisville police with the name of the officer and a request for further information and is waiting on a response.
Michigan State wide receiver Nick Marsh and leading rusher Makhi Frazier are expected to play at USC on Saturday night, sources told ESPN’s Pete Thamel on Friday.
Marsh had a leg injury in last week’s win against Youngstown State, and Frazier suffered a lower-body injury. Both are cleared and in line to play in the Spartans’ Big Ten opener, sources said.
Through three games, Marsh has caught 16 passes for 194 yards and three touchdowns, which is tied for second among Big Ten wide receivers.
Frazier began his sophomore season by rushing for 103 yards and a touchdown on 14 carries in Michigan State’s win over Western Michigan. Through three games, he has totaled 206 rushing yards and two touchdowns.
Both Frazier and Marsh will face off against a USC team that is also 3-0 and boasts a defense that has forced seven turnovers this season.
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