If you head over to IE’s front page, you’ll see that Pennsylvania linebacker David Posluszny has committed to the Irish. Huge get!
David is the younger brother of Penn State linebacker Paul Posluszny.
David is also an enormously important recruit to the Irish. We here at HLS are thrilled to welcome him to the ND family!
I’m still ticked at ESPN. I don’t care if The Big Lead sues ESPN for ruining their business. I think the government has a legitimate case against ESPN for partaking in anti-competitive practices. But what do I know? I got a C in Business Law.
The Roundup:
You probably know that we read The Big Lead a fair amount. It’s like Deadspin with actual connections to the sports journalism world and minus the hypocrisy.
What you might not know is that if you click the link above, it might not work right now. That’s because The Big Lead, a blog and a person’s business (he runs ads on the blog), was willfully destroyed by ESPN today.
Colin Cowherd, an ESPN radio host, blew up The Big Lead this morning. Intentionally. As good a transcript as we can make typing as we listen follows:
“You and I are straining the system, that what I heard…We occasionally, once a week…we’ll mention a website, our listeners will flee to it, and we’ll shut it down. We feel bad about this, we don’t mean to do it. It usually forces that young guy or young gal to buy more bandwidth and can be expensive. I don’t know that…but wouldn’t it be great if every day we gave out a new, young website and blew it up? If I told my audience every day–just one that’s annoying–and we could give it to them, and our audience would blow it up?
I want everyone to go to it as fast as you possibly can. When I say go, go….it’s three words. THE BIG LEAD dot com. THE. BIG. LEAD. DOT. COM. Go now.”
If you think about it, this is sort of like Pizza Hut going around the country and burning down various mom and pop pizza shops. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. I’m also pretty sure The Big Lead should hire some feisty lawyers.
According to this article, Urban Meyer is down right proud of his “student athletes.” (Thanks, novascotiairish of NDN)
“Someone laid a piece of paper on my desk telling how our basketball team has a 100 percent graduation rate and our football team has an 80 percent graduation rate, number one out of 56 bowl teams. Did you guys know that? I think that’s kind of important information in today’s day in age.”
Wow. 80% is quite impressive. Only problem is, there are more than 56 bowl teams. It’s simple math, really. Just multiply the number of bowl games by the number of teams required to play in each bowl game.
I wonder which bowl teams might have been left out of their comparison pool to derive that #1 ranking.
Eddie Robinson, former head coach of Football at Grambling, has passed away. Eddie coached football nearly as long as the modern game has existed. He also decided not to recruit 2 of the best players on my high school team after meeting them (despite FSU, SC, and Georgia offering them both), which means he was probably a man of excellent judgment and character.
Robinson owns career records that no amount of virgin sacrifices could help Joe Paterno break.
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Robinson was brought in to speak to ND players in 1999. So at least Bob Davie got that right.
So you know things are bad when little Toledo is outed to be the bad guy. I mean, we used to be able to depend on schools like Miami, USC and St. Mary’s to provide us with scandal. But was that enough? NO! Toledo saw Pete Carrol’s shady recruiting practices, Miami’s ability to somehow conceal high-power assault weapons on the field, and they thought: Hey, that looks like fun! We’ll give it a shot.
So the players took bribes in the form of cash, cars and groceries. Wait, groceries? Why the hell would you take groceries? Paper towels, lettuce, cereal? What the…
Can’t you just take cash and then BUY groceries? Or something more fun or destructive, like booze or drugs? I digress…
They then worked together to recruit other players in football and basketball, and I think I heard gymnastics and waterpolo, with the goal of altering outcomes. All of this at the behest of an equally shady bookie/bettor/shady dude named Gary.
Gary?
Gary.
Gary Coleman?
Nope. Just Gary.
Now, if you’re going to mastermind something like this, and try to profit from it, you need a better name than that. How about ScarFace? Or Jimmy the Rat? Anything is better than Gary. Gary is the smelliest town in the country, in the armpit of Indiana. It is NOT a shady dude using college kids for profit. (and with that we’ve managed to fit two of the lamest cities in the country in a single post, woo hoo!)
What’s the point? There is none. It was just a random story involving a small school with virtually nothing else going on and a dude named Gary. How could we not write about it?
Here’s more at ESPN if you’re interested, but I don’t think reporting can get any more solid than the above: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=2823507
Well, the NCAA Mens Baskeball Tournament wrapped up last night with all the excitement of a 6th grade class doing a close narrative study of Kontiki. Florida won. And by extension, “Jordan Fromholt” (Clearly a reference to some arcane art-house movie) won the Her Loyal Sons’ Bracketitis Challenge. Congratulations, Jordan. We’d get you one of these to commemorate the event, but we don’t have the budget and we’re a little peeved that you picked Florida to win it all. That’s sort of like picking Satan in, well, anything.
“Look at me! I’m a mediocre basketball player!”
With the NFL Draft quickly approaching, and the NCAA College Basketball Tournament Bracket Games for People Who Don’t Guess Good
mercifully ending, we thought it would be a good idea to pass the time with a little tournament. At first we were planning on the obvious: something involving Jello wrestling, Red Bull (do the kids still drink this stuff like it was Kool Aid?), a baby seal or two, and midgets. But it’s hard to come up with the appropriate quantities of Jello without it going all melty, so that’s out. On to Plan B: The Draft Buster Bracket.
How it works: You, the reader(s?), nominate NFL players who were A) highly touted, B) highly drafted, C) highly signing bonus-ed, and D) complete and total NFL failures down in our handy, dandy comments section. Then we, the staff of HLS, using our benevolently omnipresent powers of knowing stuff, will arrange said nominees into brackets. Then, each day we’ll have a battle to the death between the contestants in the brackets until, hopefully by draft day, we’ve crowned the biggest NFL Draft Bust in history (until, of course, that kid from LSU gets picked by the Raiders). Fun!
So get started nominating and what not. Go ahead. The comments section wont bite! Also, if you have ideas for names of the bracket “divisions,” feel free to pass them along.