The stripper story surrounding Rick Pitino, Louisville, and college basketball does not seem like it is going away. Hopefully, since the topic is more complicated than immoral-narratives, some nuance is used before the world declares some sort of ban on all things recruiting trips. Link dump.
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College Football
Andy Schwarz has an absolutely terrific column discussing the exploitation of college football players over at Vice Sports. It is rather unfortunate, though, that writers have to continue to pump out these type of articles, as it seems obvious that something needs to be fixed. Yet here we are, writing these columns year after year… after year.
Urban Meyer has the luxury of deciding between two quarterbacks that most every other program in the country would kill a walrus for. Bart Doan talks about Meyer doing an excellent job handling the situation.
Mount Union is going for its 100th straight win. That is a lot of college football games. I don’t care about the level of competition. I can’t walk 100 steps without stumbling, and one football program is about to win 100 competitions in a row. My goodness.
Spencer Hall leaves a note for Michigan’s punter. He also has a post about Steve Spurrier. Both, obviously, are well worth your time.
CBS has its midseason superlatives article out. According to the title of the post, the Ohio State Buckeyes are not going to repeat. It is a good and somewhat light read.
Only the New York Post can turn the Michigan punter story into something different. By different, I totally mean the Post went the route of discussing Blake O’Neil’s history as a model. I like it… if only because it isn’t talking about O’Neil as though he is at fault for kids dropping out of college.
Extra Point
Today is the day that Marty McFly came “Back to the Future” and stuff. I hate to burst everyone’s bubbles, especially blog twitter (which is surprisingly made up of a ton of Cubs fans), but Chicago doesn’t seem like it is going to win the World Series. Anyway, Biff was always way cooler than given credit for. On a personal note, the actor who played Biff also played Maniac in the Wing Commander video game series, which is a personal favorite of mine.
College Basketball
Reid Forgrave says that the Big 12 might end up being the best conference in all of shooty hoops. It seems weird for anyone to say that, but he is probably not wrong. Since the old Big East went the route of becoming a newer, different Big East, while the other conferences are still in a transitional phase marked by the process of getting used to being much larger, the Big 12 continues to be more than steady.
I no longer care what college coaches think. I simply don’t. Scott Drew wants to move the start date to the season a month back? Tremendous! Seriously. What a guy. There aren’t enough sarcastic adjectives around for me to describe how much I hate the use of coaches’ opinions as a way to push our agendas. They are just dudes who are mostly oblivious to the logistics of the world and only know about coaching and recruiting — I do NOT care if they think [insert topic] is swell or not.
Rob Dauster has an ACC preview over at CBT. As per the rules of our shooty hoops lord, it is well done and provides some insights into the league which casual fans might want to take a peek at.
Oh, about the Louisville story: Here is some more news that came out about it yesterday. By now I am sure you have heard about it, but felt it important to at least post to one story about it. It is kind of a big deal.
Sports Illustrated takes a bit of a different approach to its conference previews than CBT, but the work is still worth your time as well. Here is SI’s Big Ten preview.
And One
What? You know nothing about the Wing Commander video game franchise? I am not talking about the forgettable movie. I am talking about the games! Go read about it, then go buy every single last game in the entire franchise. Below is a YouTube video of Wing Commander 4… you know, to help you get pumped.
