Air Israel, please clear the runway!

I'm glad Nimrod Tishman has been cleared to see action for Florida this season. Billy Donovan clearly doesn't expect him to come in and have a giant impact, but at least it gives them a viable option to keep from wearing Erving Walker out before the Gators even get to conference play. Tishman's going to be a source of great curiosity for some people. In Birmingham last week, at least two different Jewish focused publications tried to get Billy Donovan to discuss him (which he said he'd been advised not do given his status still being unresolved).

Andre Agassi's admission in his new book that he used crystal meth back in 1997 has people as stirred up as anything from the tennis world short of Anna Kournikova finally posing for Playboy would. The part I found interesting was how he got away with it after testing positive - he claimed he drank a soda spiked with the stuff by his assistant (who he had since fired). The ATP let him skate, which is absurd. I'm surprised Agassi would admit this - by all accounts he seems to be doing well financially so it's not like he's desperate for the book to sell. He's also got a foundation doing great work in Las Vegas and was a tremendous positive for his sport in his final years as a competitor after being everything that was wrong with it earlier in his career. I suppose he should be commended for his honesty here, but I hope it doesn't overshadow all the good things he's done since that time in his life.

SI.com's Don Banks has spotted a major problem brewing for college football in the next couple of months. There are two factors most people expect to drive an unprecedented number of top underclassmen into this draft:

1. a possible NFL labor stoppage in the 2011 season which would deprive guys who don't go this year of all or part of their rookie year's salaries

2. the Sam Bradford/Jermaine Gresham effect - better go pro or you'll get hurt and lose millions the way they may have

Knowing that more players than usual will be eyeing the draft, it would appear more important than usual for them to get reliable evaluations of where they stand. Thanks to a dispute over the coaches tapes, which XOS Technologies now control and want 20-30 million for when they used to be free, they aren't going to get them. XOS is the same outlet behind the SEC Digital Network that was trying to say TV stations could no longer use video they shot more than 72 hours after the game earlier this season. Remember, this is an "amateur" sport and it would be horribly wrong to give the kids any money. So what if XOS's greed now results in some of those same kids making bad decisions and wrecking their shot at a pro career because they couldn't get an honest assessment of where they stood - if you want to make an omelet you have to break some eggs, right?

Myron Rolle is studying at Oxford this year while also preparing for a potential NFL future. The former FSU safety didn't really do his alma mater any favor with his comments in this New York Times Q and A about their recent poor history of developing talent for the pros...

"Darnell Dockett, Laveranues Coles, Javon Walker, Anquan Boldin, Chris Hope were good in college, but when they got to the pros they blew up. I think it has a little bit to do with the scheme that’s played. I know for me, particularly, I don’t think that my abilities were used in blitzing and in pass downs. I was 6-foot-2 and 215 pounds and could run a little bit, I would like to have blitzed. My assignment on the field didn’t call for that. I also didn’t cover tight ends that much. I was covering slot receivers. It’s about your abilities and how they’re used."

Who knows whether FSU's coaching staff will be in Tallahassee next year or not? Should the current assistants stick around, they can count on having to defend themselves from those comments when they hit the recruiting trail in January.

Anyone else creeped out by Directv using Chris Farley's "fat guy in a little coat" scene from Tommy Boy in their new ad? It's one thing to have Sigourney Weaver doing a different version of a scene from Aliens - she made a concious choice to be in the commercial. Directv's decision to have David Spade basically mocking his dead friend as a way to make me want to buy their programming puzzles me. As for Spade, he's still got a TV series, does standup in Vegas and gets some film roles - he should be doing alright. How could he need money badly enough to think this was a good idea?