The main topic on my Columbia radio show yesterday was Tennessee signing Daniel Hood to a football scholarship. The young man has a 3.8 high school GPA and a 28 on his ACT. He also was found delinquent as a 13 year old “on the basis that he had committed the adult offenses of kidnapping and aggravated rape”. The 17 year old he aided in the rape of his 14 year old cousin was tried as an adult and received ten years in jail. The full details of the incident in question are online and they're sickening. Yet by all accounts Hood paid the debt society required of him in juvenile facilities over roughly a three year period and then was exemplary in his high school behavior. If our justice system is supposed to rehabilitate people who make mistakes so they can return to society, how would it be fair to refuse Hood the chance to go to college due to a horrible choice he made six years ago? Having said that, I disagree with Tennesee treating him just like any other recruit they signed this year. I think a mandatory redshirt would be appropriate to see how Hood adapts to campus life. Not rewarding him with a scholarship for the first year also would have been a good decision - if he shows he can live up to his responsibilities then he gets that honor. Maybe Hood really has turned his life around. I hope for him that's the case, but this was too egregious an issue not to require some proof he can handle the freedom college offers.
The APR numbers came out yesterday, and for the first time an SEC football program took a hit. Ole Miss loses three scholarships over the next two seasons, which isn't devastating but does reduce their margin for error in recruiting. Here's the full list of programs in trouble. Seems like Auburn might want to reexamine some things in their academic advisement setup for athletes, considering four of their programs face some level of penalty. Your two worst offenders apparently are Centenary basketball and Tennessee-Chattanooga football, neither of which will be eligible for postseason play. Good to know the NCAA's holding the big boys accountable.
Two months ago I noted the governor of Delaware was proposing that his state should offer a form of legal sports betting. Yesterday despite having a 23-15 majority vote yes, the bill failed in the state House. Apparently a three fifths majority was required. Eventually someone besides Nevada is going to have legal sports betting, and as far as I'm concerned every state should. There is no difference between the morality of betting on horses and betting on the NBA. Allowing sports betting on non-parimutuel events to remain illegal helps organized crime and makes gambling profits easy to hide from the IRS. Anyone who want to bet can still do so with a bookie or on the internet pretty easily, so who is this prohibition helping?
With great fanfare yesterday, UF announced that Urban Meyer has joined Twitter. Call me a cynic, but I suspect someone other than Meyer is writing the posts for the account. Very dry "just the facts" twitter postings from coaches almost always fall into that category. The other reason I'm skeptical of Meyer's twitter participation? He's following 20 feeds, one of which is from Fifty Cent. For some reason that doesn't seem like Urban Meyer music to me. At least Meyer has avoided making the mistakes of West Virginia's Bill Stewart. On his twitter feed yesterday, Stewart said...
I will be on ESPN Radio Tampa, Fla., today at 3:10 pm ET. I will be talking WVU Football so all Mountaineer fans in South FL need to tune in.
Yes, all the Mountaineer fans in south Florida probably heard the Tampa ESPN affiliate, AM 1040, really well from 200 plus miles away. Hopefully Stewart knows football better than he does geography.
Joel McHale does a fantastic job of skewering TV programming on E's program The Soup. He's really funny in guest appearances on other programs as well. Chevy Chase was one of the funniest people in movies until roughly the start of the Clinton administration, at which point he apparently was replaced by his evil twin Yugo Chase and his career became painful to watch. It's been announced that the two of them will star in a new show for NBC called Community. I haven't watched a TV comedy with any regularity for at least twenty years, but I'm going to give this one a shot. It almost feels like McHale is Luke Skywalker trying to bring Darth Vader back to the good side of the force. The funny is still within you somewhere, Chevy!
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