So, first things first, congratulations to Whitney Mercilus for taking home one of the lowest-vote totals in Name of the Week history, beating Wisdom Onyebule 13-12. It's mainly cuz I posted it on thursday, but, still. Wisdom made good on his name of the week naming, and turned in a sack, proving to me that his name is, in fact, pronounced "merciless." Which is awesome. Either way, it was a bad week in the name world for fans of wisdom, and an even worse one for fans of mercy. (Hopefully, not to many of y'all are big mercy fans anyway. In fact, the only time I am ever pro-mercy, generally, is when discussing the second single from Marvin Gaye's album What's Goin On, which is, what, top-10, top-20 albums all time, hands-down? Anybody gonna disagree with me? Good. Moving on.)
I'm sorry to say it, but Wisconsin is painfully devoid of interesting names. I could make a list of the five most interesting names (candidates include O'Brien Schofield, Elijah Theus, Coddye Ring-Noonan, and Jaevery McFadden.) But this would be doing a disservice to both them and you, the readers.
Therefore, it is my solemn and painful duty to tell you that there will be no name of the week poll. I'm preemptively awarding the regular season's final title to the owner of the far and away best name on the team, Prince Moody.
Surely, there will be some disappointment - especially from the Prince himself, knowing how moody that poor chap is - but I hope we can all agree it's the right thing to do. I hope you respect Prince with the same veneration deserved of all name of the week winners.
Prince is a senior defensive back, but essentially only plays on special teams. He's a history major, and is academic all-Big Ten, so, dayum, Also, his cousin is Natrone Means. I hope you enjoy that information.
So here's how this is going to work: I've updated the name plaque, and next week, we'll do a 12-man name of the year run-off to decide the top four names of the year out of the teams NU has played, and those top four will advance to play whoever has the name of the week on the team we play in a bowl. Then we will decide the Name of the Year, and then I'll find a way of getting the plaque to the award-winner. So people, get ready.