Wednesday, July 9, 2008

More Verne Lundquist for everyone

Sports Business Journal is an excellent publication, but to me it buries the lead in this story about potential BCS negotiations this fall. It says the SEC has apparently rejected Fox's efforts to get the league's games and will stay with CBS and ESPN. Fox was the most likely candidate to partner on an SEC TV network. I think that means you can also conclude the SEC will not create their own channel, with CBS College Sports instead doing lots more SEC programming than they already have.

It's fall, so it's time for former UF defensive coordinator John Thompson to take another job. He's going to be defensive coordinator with Bill Curry at Georgia State. When Zook hired Thompson in 2002, it was considered an excellent move. He was gone after one year for the East Carolina head job and has been in as pronounced a downward spiral careerwise as anyone I have ever seen since then. The combination of him and Bill Curry will have every AD in America looking to schedule Georgia State today.

It finally dawned on Rich Rodriguez that "I don't wanna" is not an acceptable reason for refusing to pay a 4 million dollar buyout in a contract you signed. He's going to cough up the cash. Rodriguez should have done it before his lawyer compared his buyout clause to slavery and his agent was exposed as a former 900 number gambling picks line guy. The damage from this episode will stick for quite a while.

Nice work by the Boston Globe unearthing FBI files on a variety of deceased sport figures. The real headline grabber is that some nutcase racist not only sent Bobby Knight a death threat to Red Auerbach but apparently thought he'd help their plot by inviting Auerbach to Indiana so they could kill him. Hard to believe there are people who are this demented, but we know they're out there.

Not sure what's odder about the news that Rick Moranis refuses to take part in the Ghostbusters video game coming out this year: the fact Moranis has apparently retired without telling anyone or the fact someone thinks a Ghostbusters video game is a possible hot seller in 2008. Give Moranis credit, though, because if I broke the ten million income mark I wouldn't be doing anything just for the money ever again either.

No comments: