WhistlinDixie

The Maurice Clarrett Saga Gets Funnier

This just in from ESPN: the Denver Broncos are going to cut Maruice Clarrett tomorrow morning. The saddest part about this is that the Broncos are probably the best team in the league when it comes to taking sub-par running backs and making them big producers. What was even funnier was Maurice’s contract that he signed. He was originally offered a contract with a signing bonus. He instead opted to negotiate a contract with no signing bonus and instead laced with performance-based incentives. That means that he will get exactly $0 from the Broncos. Who knows, he might actually get an NFL paycheck one of these days. All I can say is that he had it coming to him.

Finally, Some Respect

I’m sure that most of you probably remember all of the OSU bashing that ESPN has been airing since we won the national championship in 2002. Always saying how we didn’t deserve it and how Miami actually beat us and we just got lucky because of an official’s call. Then they started talking about Maurice and how stupid he was and then all of the allegations against us for the alleged academic affairs of our players (none of which ended up turning into anything).

Well, it appears that it might be coming to an end. I was watching the College GameDay season preview special yesterday morning and, as usual, the hosts did a pole of Heisman hopefuls and conference favorites and who would go to the national championship game (the Rose Bowl this year). I was a little peeved when they barely mentioned Ted Ginn at all. About all they said is that if we lose to Texas, he’ll be out of the running. When it came to national title discussion, I expected USC and U of M to dominate discussion since a lot of the people were high on Chad Henne (QB) and Michael Hart (RB). As I expected, everyone had USC making it to the title game, and I believe that they all said that they would come in with a perfect record. The surprise came in when, first off, U of M did not come out of any of their mouths. Instead, both Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit put OSU in the title game. Not only that, but they also said that OSU would win and end the evil West Coast/USC empire! It’s nice to finally get some much deserved attention. Of course, the other two guys, Mark May and Trev Alberts, both looked at them like they were idiots. What else do you expect? They were the two that came down on OSU the hardest over the past few years.

BTW, sorry about being so silent the past few weeks. I’ve been busy doing other things, like homework. I’ve also been messing around with a program called MoveableType (used by LiveJournal) that I might employ in my blog so I don’t have to hand-edit the code for my web page every time I want to make an update. Not only that, but it would give me the ability to edit it from anywhere that had a web browser, instead of being anchored to my laptop.

One last thing. I will be coming home over Labor Day weekend, so if you want to get together, give me a call.

From First to Worst

It’s amazing how much things can change in a year. Last year, the CIA intramural soccer team took first place in the recreational league tournament. Tonight, our season ended a little prematurely. You see, we didn’t win a single regular season game this year. In fact, we got outscored 7-1 in the three games that we played. Our worst loss of the season was a 3-0 decision against Fiji (the brothers of Phi Gamma Delta). Guess who we, the last seed in the tournament, got paired up with? That’s right, Fiji, the top seed. (Don’t you just love the standard tournament format?) Needless to say, we lost. The margin by which we lost was what surprised me: 7-0! What was really bad was that tonight was the first night that we fielded a full team (nine players) from the beginning of the game. Up till now, we usually spent the last minutes before the game started frantically calling people and begging them to come out and play with us, so we could have the minimum of seven players to avoid having to forfeit. Tonight, we even had an extra offensive weapon that we had been without this season.

That puts me O-fer in the tournament win category since soccer last summer. I guess that your hopes can be easily inflated by having German foreign exchange students on your team. I guess that’s what we’ll have to do before next summer, persuade German foreign exchange students to come to Kettering just so we can have an awesome soccer team again. I can dream, can’t I?