I Tivo'd the debate and watched the rest of the Fulmer v. Spurrier game, in which UT rallied late for a convincing win after a few misfires and mental mistakes. The ESPN announcers seemed quite disappointed.

Harold Ford Jr. had no mental mistakes or misfires. He was hitting on all cylinders as usual. In contrast, his opponent talked a lot of gibberish that didn't make any sense. For a minute there I thought maybe he hadn't shown up and they had gone out on the street and found some homeless guy, dressed him up and powdered his nose, and pushed him out on the stage to babble incoherently. ("We need to invest in research and enzymes!")

Whoever that guy was, he had no depth whatsoever on national issues. The audience laughed out loud when he talked about the clean campaign he'd run. And somebody ought to count how many times he said "make sure."

The Ford Report has a full blow-by-blow factchecking [1].

UPDATE: Sean Braisted live blogged it [2]. And while you're over there, what the hell is this [3]?