The B1G has been bounced out of the NCAA Baseball tourney. Michigan State's season ended as noted below, with a loss to Fresno State. Purdue lost their first game to Kent State, and was eliminated by Kentucky after Kentucky also lost to Kent State in 21 innings.
And how 'bout Kent State? They beat Purdue, and beat Kentucky twice to advance to a super regional. Two things about that deserve mentioning. First - Kentucky can STFU about not hosting. Second - streaks. Kent State is on a 20-game winning streak. Now, take that concept, stick it in your CFB playoff idea and smoke it. Who's the best team now? The streakiest one that wins the national championship, or that one that had the best regular season?
MSU Baseball Season Ends With 8-2 Loss To Fresno State - The Only Colors
MSU baseball's season ended with an 8-2 loss to Fresno State in the NCAA Tournament regional.
2012 NCAA Baseball Tournament: Purdue Bows Out With 6-3 Loss To Kentucky - Hammer and Rails
When it comes to tournament baseball, often the little things decide games between evenly matched teams. That exactly what happened to Purdue. Saturday night, a close ball call on a 3-2 pitch with two outs kept an inning alive for Kent State to score five of their seven runs. Today, Mother Nature conspired against us as a lazy fly ball to center was lost in the sun and bounced off a glove. That led to four of Kentucky's six runs.
Conference issues won’t stop Erstad - Omaha.com
The problem is climate, and a mid-February season start date (still too early up north). It’s travel burdens (fiscal and physical). It’s academic concerns (Big Ten squads can miss no more than eight class days). It’s the NCAA tournament selection process and the overvalued RPI.
It’s an investment in facilities (the Big Ten’s made recent strides), thus a lack of attendance and interest. It’s oversigning rules that Big Ten schools must abide by that most conferences don’t have; before finalizing annual rosters, the Big Ten allows its teams to commit one extra scholarship to no more than two players.
I commend Erstad on his attitude and I hope I'm wrong, but I have to wonder if Erstad would be better off figuring out how he's going to work with the Big Ten coaches to get changes made in how things are done in college baseball.
Seriously - is there something horribly wrong if the CWS were played in July in Omaha instead of June? Please inform me on that one because other than the southern teams wanting to maintain their obvious advantage, why can't this be changed?
B1G 2012 // Keeping the Enemy Close: Bitterness, Thy Name Is Nebraska - Off Tackle Empire
Howdy, Big Ten fans. This is typically the space where a B1G blogger jumps in to poke one of its rivals with a stick, but Nebraska being a new member of the clan and all, your local overlord decided to give the stick to a Texas fan. Which makes sense, considering that getting clobbered with blunt instruments by Texas over and over was the reason Nebraska ran away from the Big 12 in the first place.
HA! I missed this Friday, but OTE decided to have that Peter Bean guy from Texas write a hate-based article about Nebraska. Funny thing about it - many of our fellow B1G fans thought the hate was weak and end up hating Texas more than Nebraska. Read the comments, it'll make for something fun on Monday.
And hating Texas? They're so in the past.
College Station’s mayor won’t let Will Muschamp’s comments about her city die | Dr. Saturday
This is one of those stories that will not die. Muschamp made an innocent comment and now Texas A&M can't move on. Move on, Texas A&M, move on.
Graham Watson over at Dr Saturday has a nice youtube of College Station's mayor responding to Will Muschamp's dig on her city, but I don't understand Watson's response. Move on? Hell, if I'm a mayor, I'm sure as hell not forgetting someone taking a shot at my city without a response. That's in the mayor's job description.
Will Muschamp isn't Steve Spurrier. He isn't Urban Meyer. And he sure as hell isn't Les Miles. Muschamp hasn't earned the right to insult anyone. Maybe he could get the Gator offense into the top 100 in total offense before he starts taking unnecessary shots at other programs. What a buffoon.
UPDATE: Stoneburner, Mewhort Suspended Indefinitely - Land-Grant Holy Land
We'd wondered what punishment would be befitting Buckeyes tight end Jake Stoneburner and offensive lineman Jack Mewhort after a weekend which saw them arrested following urinating in public and running from police after being confronted during the incident. We got our answer.
Per David Briggs of the Toledo Blade and the players' lawyer, Urban Meyer has suspended both Mewhort and Stoneburner indefinitely. Will they actually miss time or does this provide the cover for Meyer to handle matters internally? It's difficult to say.
It'll be interesting to see what happens here with regards to how Meyer is going to handle punishment at Ohio State. Granted - these guys were arrested for public urination, then running away from a policeman, which is really kind of dumb, but in the big scheme of things, pretty innocuous.
Husker DB Washington leaves program
Junior defensive back Dijon Washington has decided to leave Nebraska's football program, coach Bo Pelini confirmed Saturday.
Sad but true, Nebraska isn't losing a lot here. For whatever reason, despite being a highly recruited guy, Washington's career didn't work out. We wish him the best.
Eric Hagg penciled in as Browns new free safety | ProFootballTalk
The Cleveland Browns have a hole to fill at free safety with the departure of Mike Adams to Denver. Second-year safety Eric Hagg is getting the first crack.
B1G open to compromise, favors committee - Big Ten Blog - ESPN
This much is known: the Big Ten strongly favors a selection committee to determine the playoff participants. Eliminate bogus polls. Eliminate most if not all the computer rankings. Assemble a group of senior officials with strong representation throughout college football who meet and decide the four teams. Bottom line: the human element should be paramount.
There will be more out today after the Big Ten's conference call this morning. What do you favor more, humans making the decision by committee, by polls, or having them done by computer geeks making formulas that figure in rankings? (Being a computer geek, I have to laugh when they say "computer polls" as if the computers came up with it themselves. (SKYNET ALREADY EXISTS!)
Steven M. Sipple: Pelini strongly opposes playoff of any sort
"Be careful what you ask for," he said in March. "We have a pretty good product in college football right now, with the bowls. ... There are a lot of good things going on in college football. How do you get a four-team playoff without messing up a pretty good thing?
The longer this goes on and the more it gets played out in the media, I'm beginning to think that the current system isn't so bad. It seems so many fans want a playoff just because it's a "PLAYOFF" and that's what they want without reading the fine print.
Ohio Online School Graduates Largest Class in the Nation
More than 2000 Ohio graduates received diplomas from ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow), the nation's largest K-12 online charter school, in a ceremony Sunday, June 3 at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Hey! It's one of those things that aren't like the others, one of those things that just doesn't belong!
This is here because I want you to think about the future.
The internet has been a disruptive entity since it entered the commercial world. It's changed everything. It's also caused the death of industries, and continues to destroy many more (newspapers, for example). One area that's remained relatively immune to the internet is education.
Now, you could say that's not true, that the internet has made education much more ubiquitous. If I want to take a class on Chinese Mandarin, it's more much readily available than it used to be, even at the elementary level.
What has not changed is the need for brick and mortar. The vast majority of children still go to an elementary school, then a middle school and a high school. If they wish to continue their education after high school, they go off to a college, where they're generally wined and dined, treated like royalty and then (mostly) put out into a world in massive debt.
While I realize that there are some degrees that cannot be obtained without research labs or similar resources - don't you think that sooner or later this concept of shipping our kids off to a building or a college campus to be educated is going to end?
And when/if that happens, what happens to college athletics as we know it?