I thought Florida had weird weather

Day two here in Omaha went quite a bit smoother than Sunday. Despite stormy conditions in the morning, all three of the games were played to get the College World Series back on schedule for now. Florida was the first team eliminated - here's the piece I wrote about that for fightingators.com - and South Carolina would be the next to go should they lose to Arizona State today. If that happens, I'll likely be home Thursday. Otherwise I'm probably here for the rest of the week. Today's weather looks rather bleak, although the current forecast has it magically clearing up around 4 PM. Meanwhile the Weather Channel just projected a 50 percent chance of a tornado in eastern Nebraska. At this point I'd be about as likely to believe a woman reading dead rabbit entrails to tell the Omaha weather as I would meteorologists, so who knows?

Stu Sternberg finally went public yesterday with what has been obvious since Tampa and St. Petersburg first competed for a team back in the 80s: downtown St. Petersburg can't support an MLB franchise. The St. Pete Times and the city council rammed the deal through to build a stadium despite having told by MLB there was no promise that would get them a team, while Tampa was intelligent enough to wait until they knew there was a reason to build it. St. Pete correctly guessed that having the stadium would eventually get them the team, but because the stadium was an ugly mid 80s rush job that was in a crappy part of town it was doomed to failure. Put a modern stadium (the kind with activities people enjoy going to even when there's no game, like in San Diego or Phoenix) in downtown Tampa on the waterfront, and the team will finally have a shot to draw fans. Only the folks responsible for the fiasco in St. Pete are still willing to pretend it can work there.

Another BCS bowl has lost its sponsor. The folks at Citi told ESPN they would walk away from the Rose Bowl rather than agree with the network's plan to force them into more spending more money during the regular season. When this happened with the Orange Bowl they were able to fill the spot quickly, so no leverage for a move away from the BCS was created. We'll see if ESPN has another sponsor ready to jump in or not.

Ohio State has lost a player who might not be a familiar name to college football fans yet, but his absence will affect the Buckeyes. Duron Carter is a talented guy on the field, but Cris Carter's son apparently doesn't have the same skills in a classroom. OSU needs more weapons to emerge in the passing game, and Carter was one of the guys they felt was most likely to do that. Maybe Carter will get his act together in junior college and return to Columbus, but that doesn't help Jim Tressel's team any for this season. Even when you do have superstar recruits they may add up to nothing, as was the case with Darrrell Scott. The onetime top player in the country is now happy to be getting a chance at USF when other programs had lost interest.