Saturday, May 17, 2008

college athletics

USN Current Issue

The NCAA Hands Out Sanctions

The NCAA penalized teams in part on the academic eligibility and graduation rates of student-athletes. more >>

Kansas Fans (Mostly) Keep It Together After Big Win

School cancels classes to celebrate men's basketball championship. more >>

Rally Addresses Basketball and Budget Cuts

At California State-Fullerton, a celebration of the team's short but admirable run in the NCAA tournament (its first in 30 years) ended in a spasm of indignation over the budget cuts. more >>

Michigan Under Fire Over Athletes' Academic Integrity

The University of Michigan has come under the harsh glare of its local paper, the Ann Arbor News. more >>

School Bands, 'You Suck,' and Differing Levels of Propriety

The American University athletic department has asked the school's pep band to stop playing the "Hey" song. more >>

Stanford Celebrates USC Upset, but Team Is Still Not Above .500

A heroes' welcome greeted Stanford football players in Palo Alto as they returned from their upset victory over No. 1-ranked USC. more >>

Free Shoes University Keeps NCAA Officials Busy

Florida State University's athletes are in trouble for misconduct again. more >>

Timber! Down Goes Duke’s Losing Streak, Goal Posts, Student

After Duke's football team snapped a 22-game losing streak (the longest in the country) with a 20-14 win over Northwestern, hundreds of fans stormed Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham, tearing down the goal posts in "a visceral reaction to a moment of pure fanatic jubilation. more >>

Secondhand Ticket for a Second-Tier Football Game = $1,100

You can buy a lot with $1,100: at least 4,400 packages of Ramen noodles, one semester or so of textbooks, even a small portion of your tuition. You can also buy a ticket to the greatest rivalry in college football: Penn State vs. Notre Dame? more >>

Give Me a L-O-O-P-H-O-L-E?

A recent decision by the University of Oregon athletic department to invest a pretty penny in a competitive women's cheerleading squad has twisted the spankies of parts of the college sports community, resulting in a war of words via the Oregon Daily Emerald. more >>

'We Swear. He's Not a Chaplain'

In the newest chapter of Iowa State's "Chaplain? Or not a chaplain?" saga, not much progress seems to have been made. While the athletic department had earlier conceded and appointed a "life skills assistant" instead of a "chaplain" for the football team after 130 professors threw a massive hissy fit, the Iowa State Daily reports the same person who would have been named the team's religious counselor now fills the PC-ified position. more >>

You'd Want to Pray Too If You Went 4-8 Last Season

In response to faculty discontent over a football team chaplain at Iowa State University, the school's athletics council approved a "volunteer life skills assistant" position instead, the Iowa State Daily reports. Critics say that the guidelines would offer a bogus "one size fits all" religious counseling experience and that "life skills volunteer" is really just a superfluously syllabic way of saying "chaplain. more >>

Cal Tech Basketball Wins For First Time in 11 Years, Finally Gets Attention

After "a mathematically improbable run of 207 consecutive losses," the Beavers broke their streak this weekend, the AP reports. More newsworthy, perhaps, for the Cal Tech athletic program, is that the AP paid attention at all. more >>

Trail Mix

Two college presidents support the idea of a college football playoff, Bloomberg reports. A Christian college in Pittsburgh has filed a lawsuit demanding the right to use religion as a criterion for hiring faculty and staff, the Beaver County Times reports. more >>

Oregon's New Mascot: Its Football Players

When University of Oregon football players go to Las Vegas this week, they could be wearing new lime green helmets with silver flames. New uniforms are expected to match. more >>

Brockport Says Its Football Squad Was Fielding a Dropout

SUNY-Brockport's football record has dropped from 4-6 to 1-9 after the team discovered that one of its players was not actually a SUNY-Brockport student, a local news station reports. The school's athletic director said a computer failure caused the oversight. more >>

After Talk, Florida President, Provost Decide Not to Cancel Class for Ohio State Game

Students who skip class to watch their football team take on Ohio State on January 8 will not get excused absences, the president and provost of the University of Florida decided Tuesday in a meeting. The national championship game in Glendale, Ariz. more >>

From Austria to Jacksonville, Via a Message Board

When Wake Forest made the ACC Championship football game this year, Rick DeMaio, a student fan studying abroad in Vienna, started a thread on a message board for Wake fans titled "Anyone got $800 lying around, or a private jet to take me from Austria to Jacksonville?" In less than one and a half days, patrons of the site had taken his joke seriously enough to raise about $1,000, which will bring DeMaio to Jacksonville, Fla., tomorrow—via Slovakia, Germany, and Charlotte, N. more >>

Discrimination Complaints Target Lehigh Athletic Department

One cross-country runner says his coach treated him differently because of his sexual orientation, telling him recruits would not feel comfortable staying in his dorm room because he is gay, according to the Brown and White paper at Lehigh University. The coach tells the paper she has apologized to the student. more >>

Editorial: Student Athletes are "Ineducable"

"The process of attempting to educate the ineducable or those who don't want to be educated is at best futile and at worst silly," the University of Oklahoma Daily declared in an unsigned staff editorial last week. They got some heat for the story--but, in at least one case, seem to have relieved some bottled tension, too. more >>

Mississippi Couple Travels to Cambridge, Mass.--for Football

Who wasn't watching Saturday's Ohio State-versus-Michigan game this weekend? While 21.8 million viewers tuned in, one Mississippi couple packed their bags and drove up to Cambridge, Mass. more >>

Trail Mix

Lebanon Valley College's football team had a winning record for the first time in 14 years this year-and, following a traditional student march on the college president's lawn, they'll get an extra day off to celebrate . After three years, Arizona State's rodeo team is doing well, the ASU Herald reports. more >>

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