Hitting a High Note With This Band Camp

It’s college football Saturday again and Steven Wells of the Guardian in England can hardly wait -- not for the games but for the music.

“Where America has the rest of the world ball-gagged, hog-tied and dressed in bright orange overalls is with its football marching bands,” Wells wrote. “These have to be seen to be believed. They are outrageously camp and ludicrously Ruritarian examples of American cultural gigantism at its most wonderfully vulgar.

“Dressed in Little Richard-esque uniforms -- the sort of thing Liberace might have insisted upon, had he ever commanded a 19th century British cavalry regiment -- these amazingly talented kids (way, way more talented than the dumb psychos in the football uniforms) perform incredible acts of coordination while hammering out note-perfect brass-n-drum versions of irresistibly ultra-dumb rock-n-roll classics.”

Sousa would have been so, so proud.

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Trivia time: Boris Becker, Steffi Graf, Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Mueller were not voted Germany’s top athlete of the 20th century. Who was?

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Out of tune: College bands are one thing, the Ying Yang Twins are quite another.

One day after announcing that the rap group would perform at Pro Player Stadium at the Florida Atlantic University-Florida International football game on Dec. 4, FAU canceled the contract.

The Florida Sun-Sentinel said the decision was made by Athletic Director Craig Angelos after university officials had reviewed “the group’s explicit and obscenity-laden lyrics that focus on sex, drugs, drinking and partying.”

Why would FAU even consider such an act? Simple.

“FAU is desperate to get fans to its games in order to meet an NCAA-mandated average of 15,000 per game,” the Sun-Sentinel said.

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Give him a D: “It’s tempting, briefly, to pick mercurial Notre Dame for a monster upset of No. 1 Southern California, which beat Notre Dame by 44-13 in 2002 and 45-14 in 2003,” wrote Chuck Culpepper of Newsday.

“It’s also tempting to make it 46-15 just for arithmetical progression. But let’s land in between, at 34-9, owing to something nobody discusses much: USC’s marvelous defense.”

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Gulping water: There’s bad news for freestyle swimmers hoping to win a medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Aaron Peirsol, winner of three gold medals in Athens and the world-record holder in the 100- and 200-meter backstroke, is coming after them.

“I love freestyle,” Peirsol told the Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia. “I think it’s something I definitely would love trying to do at the international level because I feel I’ve done something in backstroke ... so why not try to spread out and have some fun with it.”

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Trivia answer: Seven-time Formula One champion Michael Schumacher.

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And finally: From Aussie golfer Kurt Barnes, who shot a 65 to lead the Australian Open by two shots Thursday and then shot a 73 on Friday to fall four off the pace: “You can’t treat this game too serious, otherwise you go insane.”