Rolando McClain did his best Ben Roethlisberger impression yesterday, laying down his new motocycle and sliding underneath a moving SUV. Thankfully he's unhurt save a few minor scratches:

I guess the Strip isn't the only thing we have to be concerned with anymore.

VHT wide receiver commit Destin Hood might not be headed our way after all:

According to the article, he's listed as a Top 100 prospect, which means big money if he's taken, so it's hard to blame the kid.

Not a very inspiring lot this week, so that means it's time for the weirdest music video evah:

Y'all know how to play, so get to it.

1. The Flying Burrito Brothers - Cody Cody
2. Miles Davis - Flamenco Sketches
3. Two Dollar Pistols - Where Was Love (When You Needed Me)
4. Creedence Clearwater Revival - It's Just a Thought
5. Joy Divison - Twenty Four Hours
6. Hank Williams, Jr. - This Ain't Dallas
7. Lucero - Nights Like These
8. Mandy Barnett - The Whispering Wind (Blows on By)
9. Bruce Springsteen - Across the Border
10. Jimmy Eat World - The World You Love

Until we fully figure out everything on the new platform, I'm going to have to give you a YouTube instead of a streaming song for my Random 10 contribution this week. For those of you out there that are Tom Waits fans, he announced his summer tour this week and he'll be stopping in Birmingham and Mobile! View his press conference below. This is the greatest presser in the history of pressers!

virtu \vuhr-TOO; vir-\, noun:
1. love of or taste for fine objects of art.
2. Productions of art (especially fine antiques).
3. Artistic quality.

Mark Schlabach's profile of Mike Leach revealed a man who's interests aren't limited to pirates, as we all know and love him for, but also replica virtu.

Hey Roll 'Bama Roll,

Today is the big day. We've switched your community over to the new SB Nation sports blog platform. My name is Trei, and I'm here to help you get adjusted to the new home we've built for you. If you have questions or trouble with the new system, post a comment in this thread and myself or one of the team (lovitt, sixfoot6 or odacrem) will try to point you in the right direction.

Before we begin, I want to let you know we still consider this a beta platform, so don't be surprised if you find a few bugs or if everything isn't exactly right yet. We hope you'll take the time to report any problems you encounter at bugreport@sbnation.com. We'll be continuing to make changes and improving things.

Please take a few minutes to read about what's new below. But if you just can't wait to jump in, here are some quick things to check out:

1. Sign up for your SB Nation network account and claim your old blog accounts
2. Once you're logged in, press your  Z  key in any thread with new comments
3. Explore your dashboard and setup your profile
4. Read the guide to the new FanPost editor
5. Install the FanShot bookmarklet and post videos to Roll 'Bama Roll from YouTube or images from Flickr
6. Click the "Rec" button on posts and comments to help other people find the good stuff.
7. Customize display options on your Edit Settings page

What Has Changed

SB Nation Network Accounts - the Big Change

Readers across all of our blogs told us they wanted one account to use on every SB Nation blog. To make this work, we're requiring that everyone create a new SB Nation network account. In most cases you should be able to keep your old username, but a few of you may have to choose something new, since every other community in SB Nation will be going through this same transition. We tried to be as fair as possible in deciding who gets to keep which name, using a formula that takes into account length of membership and frequency of activity.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate on all of our blogs, but we don't want to encourage everyone to start visiting rival team blogs and initiating flame wars. To maintain friendly communities we ask that you explicitly join each blog in order to participate. It's a two-click process, but it does means accepting each blog's community guidelines. Just as you join each blog individually, you can be banned on each blog individually.

You can claim old accounts from multiple SB Nation blogs, and your new username will be retroactively attached to all your old comments and diaries. So now you'll be able to access all your writings from your single profile page... like magic.

To get started, click here to claim your old blog accounts and create a new SB Nation network account.

FanPosts (the Section Formerly Known as Diaries)

We changed their name. Why? Because we took this major upgrade as an opportunity to leave behind some vocabulary that never made much sense for a sports blog. SB Nation is the network of, by and for fans, and these are the blog posts we make. So we call them FanPosts. When you're at a bar telling someone to check out your online sports opinions, you don't have to suggest they read your diary.

FanPosts are displayed differently on the homepage - we include your avatar to give more credit for the time you spend writing great posts. The new post editor has a WYSIWYG view that provides easy formatting. It also auto-saves drafts so you don't have to worry about losing your work when you compose a post within the web browser. And you can now associate teams, players and games with your posts: these tools promote your FanPosts on our new team, player and game pages - across the entire network.

The new system does not work like the old diary editor. For example, in HTML mode the new editor doesn't auto-create a new paragraph from two line breaks. But it does offer a whole array of new features. Look for the blinking help button on the right side of the FanPost editor for quick tips, and take a look at our full guide to writing FanPosts on the new platform.

IMPORTANT - if you write your posts in Microsoft Word or some other off-line editor, you will get the most reliable behavior if you cut & paste your post into the HTML view of the FanPost editor. And if you do that, remember to wrap <p></p> tags around each paragraph so your text doesn't run together.

Visual Redesign

This one is probably the most obvious change of all. Like other major websites working to improve readability for their audience, we've adopted a fixed-width layout optimized for the 1024 x 768 resolution used by the majority of Roll 'Bama Roll and SB Nation network users. Use the switcher below the user menu if you prefer the wider layout designed for 1280 monitors. We've introduced a top navigation bar with quick links into old and new sections of the site. We also polished a few edges, made some things larger, others smaller and moved a few boxes here and there. More changes and adjustments to come.

Search

We've completely replaced the old search engine with a new one. We're excited to make it easier to find old posts and comments, but we've only taken our first pass on the tools we're offering. We're focused on making search even better than what you had before, so please know that we're aware search is missing key features and we're working on it.

What's New

Schedule, Scores, Stats and Roster

Roll 'Bama Roll now has all the basic information about the Alabama Crimson Tide and hundreds of other teams. During games you'll see a regularly updated line score, and as the season progresses we'll track team stat totals and leaders. This is just our first step, so look for us to publish more detailed and archival stats in the future. The best part about all this sports data is that we've integrated it directly into the blog so. We now have special pages that aggregate all blog posts written about games, players and teams.

Recommending FanPosts

Some writing deserves more attention and more conversation. If you want to bump a FanPost up to the top and keep it there for awhile, just click the 'Rec' link under the body of the post. When a FanPost receives enough recommendations it will make the recommended list.

Auto-refreshing Comments

You no longer need to refresh the page to see new comments. If you're logged in, new comments will automatically appear on the page every few seconds. When you post a comment, the page will not refresh either. If you want to quickly cycle through all the new comments, you can press the C key on your keyboard. Unmark a new comment after you've read it with the X key. And use the Z key if you want to umark comments as you're cycling through them.

As you use these shortcuts to cycle through comments, press the R key to reply to the current comment. All these helpful keyboard shortcuts are listed at the top of each comments section for reference.

Recommending Comments

Now you can reward those folks who take the time to look up stats and make smart arguments in the comments. Next to each comment there is an 'actions' link that you can click to find the recommend and flag options.

Flagging Comments

To help the moderators on a site, we've built-in tools that let you flag comments that are spam, trolling or just plain inappropriate. Only moderators can see those flags.

FanShots

Many members of the community just want to post that one link, video, photo or quote, but don't need a full FanPost. We've got you covered: FanShots let you share YouTube videos, Flickr or PhotoBucket photos, quotes from articles, portions of chat transcripts, top 5 lists and simple links. If it's a video or image we'll put a thumbnail on the homepage when you post it.

For those of you who are experienced internet hunter-gatherers of Alabama Crimson Tide material, install the bookmarklet onto the links bar of your browser and share FanShots with the community from wherever on the web you find that killer quote or photo.

Archives

It's much easier to find that post about a certain deadline trade or prospect retro feature. You can browse by year and month.

Avatars

Upload an image so folks can see your custom avatar on your profile, your FanPosts, and all your comments.

Network Profiles

Now that we have unified SB Nation network accounts, your profile will be your central hub for all of your activity on any blogs where you are a member.

Network bar

The top bar stays with you on all SB Nation blogs. It's a quick way to login and logout. When you're logged in, you'll see your avatar and screen name which links to your profile. The icon to the right leads to your Dashboard area where you can edit your settings, profile, account details and any FanPosts or FanShots you've published. As we add more blogs to the new SB Nation network, the My Blogs menu will be a handy way to navigate between the blogs you've joined.

-------

There are plenty more small changes and additions we've made, so please take a careful look around and explore this new system. We appreciate your patience and hope you'll help us improve the new platform for this and all the other SB Nation blogs.

And in case you missed it, you'll want to start by claiming your old blog accounts and creating a new SB Nation network account.

Just a reminder, we'll be switching over to the new platform sometime this evening. The blog will likely be down for a fairly extended amount of time sometime tonight, but don't worry, it's supposed to be. See y'all tomorrow.

riparian \rih-PAIR-ee-uhn; ry-PAIR-ee-uhn\, adjective:
Of or pertaining to the bank of a river or stream.

We might detest the football team that calls it home, but the riparian location of Neyland Stadium does make for one of the coolest traditions in all of college football.

small beer \small beer\, noun:
1. Weak beer.
2. Insignificant matters; something of little importance.

adjective:
1. Unimportant; trivial.

After Dubose's unfortunate misunderstanding of what a head coach's job actually entails, it's nice to have a coach that considers playing golf and hobknobbing with the boosters small beer annoyances to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

...Spinal Tap in Lego form.

fustian \FUHS-chuhn\, noun:
1. A kind of coarse twilled cotton or cotton and linen stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc.
2. An inflated style of writing or speech; pompous or pretentious language.

adjective:
1. Made of fustian.
2. Pompous; ridiculously inflated; bombastic.

Jimmy Clausen's fustian announcement that he would play for Notre Dame didn't result in an equally impressive display on the field.

The whole Sports Blog Nation group is getting an upgrade to a new blogging platform and we're up this week. What does that mean? Well, come Thursday night the site will be down for a little while, so don't panic. It just means that things are going to be a little different around here Friday morning. Not crazy different, of course, but there will be quite a few new features that we're all going to have to learn and get used to but that will really make this blog a lot more fun for the authors and readers. Go check out Burnt Ornage Nation for a preview of how things are going to look, and while you are there do one thing; claim your account! The account you use to log in here at RBR or at any other SBN blogs will need to be reclaimed, but the good news is you'll only have to do it once since the accounts are now network wide. That means you can now go and comment away at any other SBN blog without having to sign up for individual accounts on each, but that doesn't mean you can go around being a jerk on rival blogs and start up a flame war or anything because you can be banned on individual blogs just like always. To claim your old account, just go over to BON and "sign up" with the username and password you use here. It's just that easy.

[editor's note, by Nico]

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but there are many great "behind the scenes" things happening here at RBR. This upgrade is one of them and we'll also have another exciting announcement for you all very soon. Seriously, y'all are going to freak when we announce this other thing. I mean, FREAK OUT (in a good way of course.) We'll probably make that announcement in a week, so hold onto your hats. I promise it'll be worth the wait and that you'll understand why production has been so slow around here lately (in addition to finals and work.) I can't believe we've kept this under wraps actually, but we want it to be a big surprise. I just couldn't wait any longer and had to at least tell you all that something really awesome is coming.