LSU and Ark

Mizzou - rah!

Kansas No.1?

I'm a Longhorns fan and I switched em off to watch LSU. That's a game for ESPN classic.

Lots more room here on cloud 9 you know

Thanks for the post my Friend. I hope this game saves Houston Nutts Job.

I'd rather win 28-0. Or lose 28-0. Triple overtime is hard on the psyche.

I'm an LSU alum, so I'm a little disappointed, but my family is from Arkansas so it's a win either way.

Arkansas usually loses so I'm glad that they got this one. It was a well deserved win and my mom needed the pick me up!! :D

They are a fit for C-USA, the SEC really should have held out for someone else on the expansion.

A disgruntled SWC fan feeling all the lumps received by the Hogs, the only non-Texas and non-cheating team in the grand old conference? And whom should they have held out for? Rice? Arkansas has the best sporting venue of any team in the SEC, most likely the nation. I invite you to visit Fayetteville any time. But, go ahead, insist the SEC kick the Hogs out. That should be quite the laugh fest.

SEC.

Big 12 maybe or C-USA.

that perspective. And not to be a friday night pain in the ass, but if you could offer some specifics I'd appreciate it. For me CUSA - no way. Big 12, the Hogs would provide much needed class that Colorado has never come through with. But who courted whom when the SWC dissolved because of Texas chicanery? The SEC jumped at the chance to put the Hogs in their stable. The attempt to make LSU-Arkansas a rivalry game has been an abject failure but to say that the Hogs do not belong in the best football conference in the country has no merit. If Texans had not fucked up and ruined a fine conference, this conversation would be moot. Texas-Arkansas, home and home starting next year (I think.)

The Big-12 deal with the Texas schools was a political fix to get Texas Tech and Baylor into it. I hate to defend the SWC but it was the NCAA that killed it with the death penalty on SMU. And it's why they haven't issued and probably never will issue another death penalty.

It's not a matter of thinking if they can or can't play in the SEC, I mean Vandy has 7-4 seasons with bowl games from time to time as well. It's about where they do and don't fit. Just because Ohio State wouldn't go 0-8 in the SEC doesn't mean they belong in it.

Missouri, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State as rivals make the Big 12 a better fit. As would Memphis and Tulsa as rivals in C-USA.

The high point of the Southwest Conference was when President Nixon attended the Arkansas - Texas game and declared Texas the national champion.

The SWC was far the worse for losing Arkansas. Not so much for losing Houston.

What a game. I was in Fayetteville that cold, cloudy, rainy day. Not at the game but in Fayetteville. The sky was filled with helicopters. Heartbreaker for Hog Fans everywhere. Probably the low point of Frank Broyles career. According to conservatives Bill Clinton had climbed up a tree near the Stadium and was protesting the Vietnam war that day in Fayetteville. Pretty cool trick since Bill Clinton was in Cambridge England that day.

The Big 10 is mediocre nowadays.

I'm a Pac-10 fan, so I don't really have a stake in that argument other than to say the Pac-10 isn't as good as the SEC, but is better than the Big 10.

They've all been upset. Who has the toughest schedule?

:D

As he's shown with his work on the now-indicted Barry Bonds, the lost Republicans of NASCAR racing, and last summer's scandals of sports and the Bush administration, Lipsyte, author most recently of the young adult novel Yellow Flag, is always ahead the game -- not to speak of behind, around, and underneath it. College? Football? By the time he's done with the money politics of that "sport," you're bound to wonder whether it's not, like "late capitalism," a classic oxymoron.

Corruption 101, Gladiators and Beer
Why Bowl Games Are the Real Final Exams

By Robert Lipsyte

1. Roar, Lions!

"I don't think of intercollegiate sports as something extracurricular." -- Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University.

Columbia football was a comforting joke when I was there in the 1950s. We thought losing teams meant we had our priorities straight. Why wouldn't we rather be closer to the rigorously intellectual University of Chicago, which had dropped football altogether in 1939, than to, say, Auburn, an undefeated football team that needed a university of which it could be proud?

College football was a bigger deal than the professional game in those long-gone days, although that was already changing. The phrase "student-athlete" was being crafted for widespread dissemination by the executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Previously, it was assumed that athletes were students, even if they were majoring in left tackle. Somewhere between 1969, when Chicago restored football, and 2002, when Lee C. Bollinger, champion of affirmative action and the future scourge of Iran's President Ahmadinejad, arrived at Columbia from gridiron powerhouse Michigan, everything changed.

The National Football League (NFL) had become America's number one sport -- and the college game, its minor league. The NCAA had become a highly effective marketing organization with rules carefully written to prevent spending free-for-alls and the sort of obvious corruption that would damage the "industry." The most dedicated football factories from the NCAA's highest league -- Division 1A -- now formed powerful conferences that vied to play in sponsored Bowl games. TV money was the fuel (and gambling an important side business). To stay competitive at the new, high-stakes level, colleges had to cheat and players had to juice.

<edit>

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174865/robert_lipsyte_the_quagmire_of_college_football

Lengthy article but worthy.