The_Admiral

Basketball isn't COMPLETELY irrelevant... and neither is Academics to a couple of the conferences. But they are about as close to completely irrelevant as something could possibly be.

Not true on either point in certain cases. While football controls the discussion in college athletics, men's basketball and academics both are a decent part of it for certain conferences (ACC for both, Big Ten for academics only, etc).

Academics, pfft. You know, as much crap as SEC fans rightfully get for that S-E-C-S-E-C "I hope our rivals win because somehow it makes us better" chanting, the Big Ten is the most masturbatory conference in college sports. At least all that South-will-rise-again stuff terminates at the end of football season; Big Ten circle-jerking permeates every aspect of everything.

Bet this is about Reinsdorf getting the strip mall for free or dirt-cheap. I'm surprised these two parties are even negotiating, because that Camelback Ranch development that was supposed to change the way we thought about spring training baseball villages has been a total money pit and hasn't come close to delivering the growth it promised. Jobing.com Field.

Pretty silly to act like academics matter when this is only about football. I mean, it's not even about basketball, and basketball makes like a billion dollars a year in rights fees!

Missouri is NOT Southern.

Depends where you are in the state. You get west of Eureka and you can practically hear the banjo music wafting into your car.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! You can make the best of it and pretend that John Law's comin' for ya. Game over, man, game over.

The Untouchables and Ordinary People have to be up there, the former being about one of the city's most famous personages and the latter so deftly capturing the distinct repression and insularity of the North Shore that it's practically a fourth principal character. Also, show me where Rookie of the Year won Best Picture.

I don't know what an enormous lifestyle strip mall costs in the rest of the country, but I'd have to imagine it would go for more than $40 million. If "the real estate bubble" were a Pictionary clue, all you'd have to draw is the state of Arizona. You guys are all even more dicked than the rest of us.

http://www.azcentral...epossessed.html

Westgate City Center, the Glendale entertainment complex that serves as a pre-game party destination, is now partially lender-owned after a foreclosure auction Monday.The lender iStar Financial took back the property from the developer, the Ellman Cos., after setting a minimum bid of $40 million and receiving no offers.

I will think less of Stanford as an academic institution if they play football games against Boise State University on a semi-regular basis. This is big.

Why don't they just admit them as an athletic member and not an academic member, then? This is not, nor was it ever, about academics. It's about grey-market pro football.

For the most part, I feel that that's really stupid, but then I look at the roster of the Montreal Canadiens and I see names like Spacek, Plakanec, Markov, Kostitsyn, and something doesn't feel right.

If the Treasure Valley can grow some more, and BSU can remain a great team, then maybe the end of this decade is when they jump to a power conference.

THE SCHOOL IS A GLORIFIED COMMUNITY COLLEGE.

That's the problem, and no amount of population growth or football skill can correct that.

"You don't have enough graduate programs to play grey-market-pro sports against us"

Have you not been paying attention to college football lately?

Not really. Uh oh.

I also hate white football helmets, for the most part. There are some rare exceptions where white helmets do look fine (Texas Longhorns, for example). But helmets should display a team's color, other than white. I mean, imagine if baseball helmets were white.

Imagine if football uniforms had grey shirts and grey pants. Every sport has its own conventions.

Yet it seems to get worse every time...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy0UBpagsu8

Let me see if I can guess how this goes.

1) "We believe this team is a highly undervalued asset that we have the means to turn around overnight."

2) "We really believe in this team and can't wait to start taking a closer look at the business side of things."

3) "We're really excited about the imminent purchase of the Coyotes as soon as we forge a meaningful public-private partnership for the community."

4) "Y U NO GIVE FREE MONEY?!?"

5) There are no (anglophone) bidders at this time.

I don't mind the solid red socks. I suppose they might as well be, right?

How can you say the Islanders deserve no respect but the Rangers do? "mommy, mommy, look, I can be a New York sports team that spends lots of money on big free agents too!"

This is a perfectly acceptable color scheme. You're freaking out as it if it's highlighter yellow and pea green.

double post

New York sports teams should look like sports teams, not clownshoes technicolor fever dreams. There's a place for those sorts of uniforms; that place is Salt Lake City or Jacksonville or Phoenix or whatever. The old/new Isles sweaters had New York's colors and a no-nonsense striping pattern. They won four Cups in a row with these. They play in the suburbs of the biggest city in the country. Why shouldn't they look like professionals?

The glorious Pac-# and its Lofty Academic Standards™ will never be sullied by the likes of Boise State and Kansas State blargh yargh blorgh

Well, yeah, it is. Why is that bad? Those are truer to how the Red Sox should look than the all-midnight blue look, even if they were on pullovers. I never understood the fascination with sucking the soul out of road uniforms by using drab blue so much. Why shouldn't the Red Sox on the road look like the Red Sox at home but for a grey base rather than white?

Also strange about that redesign is that it runs counter to the Henry regime's obsession with making red the team's primary color rather than the navy/red mix it had been before. Red pullovers, red BPs, red undershirts, red this, red that, because after all they are the Red Sox. So with that whole push, why introduce a road jersey that uses no red at all?

For the record, the best balance of navy and red for the Red Sox would be to have navy undershirts along with the traditional red lettering/numbers on the jerseys, as modeled by this jerkass:

Really lets the red stand out. Red doesn't look right as a base color for them.

All I can say is if Mizzou goes to the SEC, southwest Missouri is going to erupt in college sports chaos.

Oh, dear!

Mizzou historically may be one of the few programs that does a better job of squandering the advantages given to them by geography and circumstance than Illinois

To write out what I know about college sports could barely fill a postage stamp, but all I know Mizzou as is a team that is often involved in the wrong side of notable games. (The pro wrestling slang for this is "jobber to the stars.") I don't know that they squander what they have, though. Seems like they have a strong statewide fanbase to me.

If the squandering you refer to with Illinois is their failure to wholly capture Chicago, that's going to happen when you have a large population that goes every which way for school and lends its primary allegiances to professional football and basketball. I'd say they do well enough with a big downstate fanbase and a decent alumni foothold in Chicagoland. For that matter, Northwestern does about as well as they should for a school that doesn't emphasize athletics.

Yeah, there's obviously some kind of deep discount or something going on. Also consider that they can lead the league in new STHs when others can't because the good teams all maxed out their season tickets while the Coyotes have (virtually) nowhere to go but up. It's also entirely possible that they're lying.

No, they like to write inscrutable blog posts with titles like "why LeBron James is like Eric B. and Rakim"