Labor Day weekend is always a good time. Cookouts, football, baseball, e coli bacteria, shirtless neighbors, and enough sports on TV to make you literally fill your lap with drool just thinking about it.

We’re not even halfway through this weekend and I already have to vent.

First off, on Thursday night my alma mater, the Harvard of the Midwest, Nothern Illinois University was the author of the biggest upset of the very young (six days old) college football season. Thanks to the miracle of TiVo, I got to witness a game that I otherwise would have missed. Fourteenth ranked Maryland traveled to DeKalb to take on the Mighty Fighting Huskies and a few things happened.

– Somebody in the Maryland Athletic Department lost his job when they realized he scheduled a game AT Northern Illinois. You just don’t do that. Big time programs don’t travel to DeKalb. But Iowa State will find that out in a few weeks.

– Dave Kaplan and Tom Waddle did the announcing and Waddle is very good. Kaplan is hideously, horrendously, and loudly terrible. He makes Chip Caray sound like Lindsey Nelson.

– Lionel Hickenbottom continues to have the coolest name in college football.

– PJ Fleck caught 12 passes and did a pretty mean Tom Waddle impersonation.

– The Huskies defense laid out a few Terps.

– Steve Azar showed why he and that weirdo from Iowa are the two best kickers in the country. Azar should hit the frat parties at NIU this year telling the hot chicks, “You might as well sleep with me, because I’m auditioning potential wives and I’m going to have a 10-year NFL career.”

– Joe Novak, the NIU coach, and one of the nicest guys around got the biggest win in the history of the 108 year old school. His president, John Peters, formerly worked at Tennessee and Nebraska and told Joe he’d never been at a school with a bad football team and he wasn’t going to start now. Joe’s safe.

For a while.

I didn’t go to that many Huskies games when I was there, mainly because they started too early and I was pretty hung over, and also because Notre Dame was always on TV and Lou Holtz was the coach. Hey, I had my priorities. But the few games I did go to, we were famous for two things. On Homecoming, win or lose we tore down both sets of goal posts and paraded them across campus to the lagoon and then we took them for a swim. Good times. Every Monday after Homecoming there’d be an article in the student newspaper, The Northern Star, with somebody in the athletic department bitching about how much new goalposts cost. Our other tradition was throwing marshmallows at each other in the student center. Marshmallows got banned my senior year when a) people started putting pennies in them so they would travel farther and b) we knocked a cheerleader off the top of a pyramid with a well placed marshmallow. Hey, sack it up. You’re the one dumb enough to want to be a cheerleader.

Alas, both of those things were missing on Thursday. But one slight improvement was seen. The team on the field was pretty damn good.

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The Cubs starting pitchers did everything you could ask them to do in St. Louis and yet, the toxic bullpen pissed away two games. Regardless, the Cubs woke up this morning only a half game out of first place.

But…Shawn Estes took the mound for a game against Milwaukee and the loss was guaranteed. How can you even trot that piece of crap out to the mound every five days? Can’t we sue them for this? Chip and Steve were busy making excuses for him, but all you need to know about Estes and his career are these two things. He’s got good enough stuff to be a good Major League pitcher, but he’s a wuss. He has no stones. He wants out of the game the minute he’s in it. The bonus is that the fans agree with him.

The boos came early and often for Shawn. They actually started before the game. He did nothing to quiet them. I’m going to type up his unconditional release papers and fax them to the clubhouse, hopefully he’ll sign them.

While the Cubs are hell bent to ruin my day, they’re not alone today. This is where the “An insult to my genius” headline comes from. Let’s run them down.

– In the Nebraska-Oklahoma State game not only is Bob Griese stuttering and stammering, he referred to former OSU running back Thurman Thomas as Thurman Munson. The only way he could have made it up would have been to have ad libbed, “Wait, I got my ‘guys killed in plane crashes confused’ I was thinking of the white guy who played quarterback with Tommie Frazier.” That would have been a sweet reference.

– The “greatest fans” in college football booed their team about 28 minutes into the season. Ask Frank Solich how “great” they are.

– In the Yankees-Red Sox game on Fox, Dick Stockton and his thinning-brillo pad hairdo filled in for Joe Buck. Dick was completely lost. It was hilarious. My favorite moment, in the Sox eighth inning Stockton credited Kevin Millar with scoring three times. First when he said he’d scored Millar was on second base. Then, Millar scored and Dick got it right. Then, Jason Varitek scored a little later and Dick said he was Kevin Millar.

– The first live college football game of the season I watched had Bob Davie grinning back at me from across the TV. This reminded me of a rant I went on Wednesday night when I was talking to a friend about Patriots’ wide reciever David Givens. It went something like this. “If there’s a football hell, Bob Davie will go there when he dies because of what he did to David Givens. He took a guy who will have a 10-year NFL career as a wide receiver and wasted him for four years. Givens was the best pure wide receiver the Irish have had since Tim Brown and Davie moved him from wideout to halfback to flanker and even when he did play him he didn’t throw it to him. I hope Davie spends the afterlife trying to roll a 400 pound boulder up a hill that has Givens’ career Notre Dame stats chiseled on it.”

– Chip and Steve keep going on and on about how Scott Podsednik of the Brewers should win the rookie of the year award. Here’s the thing. Scott Podsednik is not good. He’s a slap hitter and overrated defender. He has no power. He plays on the worst team in the National League. His stats are hardly any better than the guy he replaced in center for the Brewers…Alex Sanchez. Alex Sanchez is everything that’s wrong with baseball. If Scott Podsednik wins the rookie of the year award, even Jerome Walton will sit at home and laugh. Besides, how embarassing would it be if the writers gave Podsednik the award over Brandon Webb and Dontrelle Willis and Dave Krynzel took the centerfield job from Podsednik in spring training next year? Once again, Chip and Steve need to be quiet.

– Chip wanted to know why Shawn Estes had had such good luck up to this point against the Brewers. He was 2-0 going into today against them this year with a 1.35 ERA. Why didn’t Steve reply with, “Because the Brewers suck, Chip.”?

– Wisconsin played at West Virginia and the Mountaineer fans disappointed me by not throwing microwaved parrots onto the field. If you remember why that joke is funny, I will remind you that at the time, my joke was, “Barry Alvarez’s son has been arrested for cooking a parrot by putting in a microwave until it exploded. Everybody knows you have to punch holes in a live parrot with a fork before you microwave it.”

– Chris Fowler went off against the University of Washington and the NCAA for Rick Neuheisel losing his job for betting in an NCAA basketball tournament pool. The reason Neuheisel got fired is because he has a hsitory of lying to his bosses and the NCAA about EVERYTHING. He’s been investigated by the NCAA five times in the last six years for one thing or another. He deserved to get what he got. His ass fired.

– Estes fell for a little league play when with a runner at third he threw to first base on what he thought was going to be a pickoff, only to have the great, brilliant, rookie of the year Scott Podsednik steal home.

– Dusty denied Cubs fans their Constitutional right to boo Shawn Estes in the bottom of the second when he pinch hit for him in a 6-1 game. Were I Dusty, Estes would have batted so the fans could boo him and then he’d have gone out to start the third. Only, before he threw a pitch, I’d go to the mound and force him to take his jersey off and give it to me so the world would know I just ended his Cubs career.

Anyway, the Cubs are down 9-2 in the fifth, and I’ve still got hours of sports to watch on TV. It’s the best and worst of times.