Come Fill Your Glasses Up, To Williams! To Williams! To Williams!

The latest issue of Sports Illustrated has a fine article on Mike Reilly, a Williams football star from the early 1960s who tragically succumbed to Hodgkins disease just weeks after he graduated in 1964. Thus during the Homecoming game against Amherst Williams will honor Reilly, whose #50, while never officially retired, has never been worn since. (Williams has never retired a player's number.)

I'll be at Homecoming this weekend, so if you'll be there let me know, and we'll check out the new Purple Pub.

Bobcat v. Buckeye

Rufus Bobcat, the mascot of one of my alma maters, started a fight with Brutus Buckeye before the Ohio-Ohio State clash in Columbus on Saturday. I'm so proud.

UPDATE: Dude's not even an OU student.

OU and the Fulmer Cup

Ohio University's football team is climbing up Every Day Should Be Saturday's Fulmer Cup Rankings. Such pride beats in the breasts of all Bobcats.

Commemorating Black History

Scottsboro, Alabama has opened a museum to document the case that made the town infamous. In the words of Garry Morgan, a white man who helped establish The Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center, "We want to end the negative stereotype of Scottsboro, to let the world know we've moved into the 21st century."

Meanwhile today in Louisiana the Eddie G. Robinson Museum will open, honoring not only the legendary Grambling football coach, but also taking an honest look at segregation.

One Last Cheer for the Huskies

Noertheastern University is cutting its football program and it is doing so because of money (or the lack thereof). I always hate seeing any college sports cut, because I do see sports as bringing a lot more to the table than they take from it. At the same time, in the ranking of priorities at most colleges and universities we need a little perspective. Football is important. It is not essential. And in the case of the Northeastern program it appears that "high costs, lack of fan interest, and inadequate facilities doomed the program" and that the loss of the program will be a gain for Northeastern's student body.

Gameday!!!

The ESPN Gameday crew will be in Austin tomorrow for the Texas-Texas Tech game. It's not going to be as thrilling as last year's game, as Tech is nowhere near as strong and the Longhorns might be better than they were in 2008, but it will still tax the scoreboard operator. My guess? Texas 54 Texas Tech 35.

The best part? I'm gonna be there.

Anthropologizing Ohio State

Orson of EDSBS goes all anthropologist on us on a Saturday gameday in Columbus. He nails the Ohio State fan quite well.

Mind the Raining Blood and Locusts

Here is a sure sign of the apocalypse, bringing together two of my least favorite entities on the planet.

"B" is for "Better"

Due to economic circumstances my MA alum UNC-Charlotte (which, for branding purposes tries to go simply by "Charlotte")is scaling back its plans for its new football program. And while this will seem like rationalization, making virute of necessity, I think the new Plan B is better and saner than the original Plan A.

(Hat tip to this guy. The Yankees suck.)

The Coach Jag Firing

I'm still in Washington DC with the issue of genocide occupying my days, but I wanted to comment very quickly on the bizarre Jeff Jagodzinsky firing at Boston College. Apparently a huge part of the issue comes down to BC Athletic Director Gene DiFilippo's sense of betrayal. In many ways this reminds me of the sense of betrayal that pervaded the dissoution of Bill Belichick and Eric Mangini's relationship when Mangini took the Jets coaching job. But isn't there some irony attached to Boston College reacting to Coach Jag's potential breach of contract by breaking their contract with him by firing him?

Ranking the College Bowl Games

Because even the most insane among us cannot watch them all, Stewart Mandel ranks the college bowl games from the best (Oklahoma-Florida) to the worst (the December 28 Independence Bowl, featuring 7-5 Louisiana tech versus 6-6 Northern Illinois).

Utah v. Boise State

Awesome! Now that the DI college football season is done, and given that one of the justifications for not having an actual national championship tournament is that the regular season is in effect a playoff, I am thrilled that we will have a legitimate national champion decided between the only two undefeated teams: Utah and Boise State!

That should be a great game. And by going undefeated, you've earned your opportunity!

The BCS Mess

Courtesy of this guy comes the heads up about a blistering Jason Whitlock column in which the Big sexy takes square aim at ESPN and fires repeatedly. Now Whitlock has more than his share of sour grapes about ESPN, and his hook into the column, the (he believes overlooked and dismissed) success of Ball State's football team comes with the caveat that Whitlock not only is an alum of Ball State, he played football for them. That said, many of his criticisms hold true.

Whitlock's column once again reminds us of the problematic nature of how the NCAA decides its postseason in college football. In every other sport, indeed in every other division of college football, championships are decided by players on the floor, field, track, pool, court, pitch, or what have you. But not big time college football, where these things are decided (the passive voice is intentional) by an unwieldy agglomeration of polls of journalists and coaches and a secretive computer program. And yet every week during the season the pollsters get it wrong, then blithely go back on tv or in their columns and explain why this time they have it right and how dare you question their judgment. the computers don't have a much better success rate.

And as we've seen this year, with three undefeated teams from non-BCS conferences, two of which are almost certain to be shut out of the BCS bowls, even an 8-team playoff would not do the trick. I still advocate, as I have in the past, a 16 team playoff whereby every conference winner gets a bid to the tournament, with remaining spots chosen at-large by a committee very much like the one that chooses the Big Dance for college basketball. One of the main arguments in favor of the current system is that every week there is a de facto playoff, and the regular season means so much. Which is hogwash. Otherwise the three undefeated teams from non-BCS schools would populate those top four spots with Alabama, Texas would rank ahead of Oklahoma, having beaten the Sooners when the two teams played on a neutral field, and USC and Penn State would have every opportunity to compete for the national championship with their one-loss teams, rather than almost certainly be relegated to also-ran status because people have decided that a one-loss team from the SEC or Big Twelve is better than other one-loss teams.

A (minimum) 16-team playoff is the only plausible and legitimate solution. Too bad we are years away from sanity prevailing.

Harvard Beats Yale

On the eve of the 125th installment of "The Game," the annual football rivalry between Harvard and Yale, The New York Times reviews what Manohla Dargis calls a "preposterously entertaining documentary" of the most famous of all Games, the 1968 29-29 tie.

49er Football

If you walk into the office of UTPB's president one of the first things you will see is a UTPB football helmet and a toy bubblegum machine with a sign affixed to it reading "UTPB Football Fund." At our university bookstore you can find those t-shirts that seemingly every university has when they don't have a football team: "UTPB Football: Still Undefeated!" Of course UTPB does not have a football team, and while there are many who wish deeply that we did -- this is West Texas after all, and I'm convinced that some in the community honestly believe that absent a football team we are not even a real university -- without the generosity of a long-term benefactor, I have a hard time seeing such a dream come to pass. And maybe it shouldn't. Few love sports as much as I do, and yet I am not convinced that at this time in our development we need to be pursuing football, however much fun it might be to go to games on saturdays (and inevitably get crushed for several years).

These thoughts come to mind because one of my alma maters, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, appears to be on the verge of developing a football program. UNCC (or simply "Charlotte" as it prefers to be known for athletic branding purposes) is in a much different place than is UTPB. For years it was one of the fastest growing campuses in the country, it has a legitimate Division I athletic program, it is located in a city that would likely be able to support the program, and the university could likely successfully weather the added cost and other growing pains. And now I'll have a legitimate interest in who wins the DI-AA title every year. Go 49ers!

Hip to Be Square Watch (Alumni Edition)

What, is Stuart Scott coming up with Homecoming ideas for Ohio University? Get Your Green On seems like the sort of three-years-out-of-date, quasi-urban-hip reference that Scott would toss out. The reference is a double entendre intended to promote both the school's colors and aa deep and abiding (read: recent) commitment to the environment.

Oh well. Go Bobcats! Beat VMI! And enjoy the attention you'll get when you travel up to Columbus to take on Ohio State at the Horseshoe on September 6. I'll be hoping for the best for you.

Resolving the Mess of the BCS

At the online newsletter of The New York Times' sports magazine Play Dan Shanoff proposes a pretty brilliant solution to the intransigence of those conferences that refuse to establish a playoff system for college football's highest level:

Personally, I would like to see [SEC Commissioner Mike] Slive take his ball and go home: "SEC-ede" from the B.C.S. and create his own playoff; as the nation's strongest conference (by far -- it boasts the past two national champs), he has the juice to do it.

Invite more playoff-friendly conferences, even individual teams, into the mix (and don't be afraid to go it alone). Create room for the non-B.C.S. schools to participate. Generate billions in revenue from TV networks and advertisers. And isolate the Big Ten and Pac-10, daring them to try to proclaim one of their member schools -- even an undefeated one -- as "national champ" while the rest of the country has turned its attention to a thrilling 8- or 16-team playoff. Any school that doesn't want to participate doesn't have to; I imagine that resistance will be short-lived.

Incremental measures won't work. Obstructionist colleagues need to be marginalized.

To save the B.C.S., they need to destroy it.

The idea that the BCS is worth saving, that a playoff system is somehow going to violate the academic integrity of college football, or anything else is patently absurd. The BCS is irredeemable and always has been. The fact that every other division of college football has a championship tournament and that every other NCAA sport has either a tournament or a meet to establish a champion on the field, court, pools, track, field, or ice should be enough to reveal the BCS for what it is: A naked grab for cash from a cabal of self-interested parties.

The BCS, BC and VTech

Soon enough I'll have my annual rants about the Bowl Championship Series and the patent fraud that is the end of the major college football season. But let me give you a little preview:

Can someone please explain to me how Virginia Tech is ranked ahead of Boston College? The two teams play in the same conference. They have the same record, as both teams are 10-2. And they played once this year. Boston College won. And so what we have here is a case in which the voters (I realize there is the computer component to consider as well) have decided, despite what has happened on the field when the two teams played, that Virginia Tech is better than Boston College despite the fact that all things are equal and Boston College won when they met on the field. The experts have chosen to place themselves above the action on the field. And yet at the end of year we are supposed to believe that things have worked out because the very people who have a say in the system tell us that they have finally gotten it right.

I realize that neither Boston College nor Virginia Tech is going to be in the national championship picture. And I realize that BC and Virginia tech will meet again tomorrow in the ACC championship game. But if the supposed experts can allow this pretty clearly unjustifiable glitch in the system to happen largely because of their own belief that their opinions matter more than what has happened on the field, how can we take them seriously as the final arbiters of a system that everyone else knows is flawed?

Soon enough I'll be making my case for Hawaii's deserved place in the BCS Championship game (if they hold up their end of the bargain in the last game of the regular season at home against Washington tomorrow night).

In the Valley of the Sun

We spent the day driving from Odessa to the greater Phoenix area in order to spend the week with this guy and his family. It took about ten hours driving across desert terrain that took us through El Paso, Las Cruces, Tucson, and into the epicenter of the Valley of the Sun. Thanksgiving Day activities will involve your faithful scribe participating in a fun run with Jaime's son while his parents run the real race, an enormous amount of food, and then tailgating before that night's Arizona State-USC game, for which we have tickets. Otherwise the week will consist of world class caliber hanging out, overeating, and buying ASU stuff. I'll post as I can, but in any case, have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Gameday at Williams

Donnie Baseball asked for it, and I responded. Here is an expanded version of my views on ESPN's Gameday spending their Saturday in Williamstown for the Williams-Amherst game (which Williams won 20-0).