Derek Dooley is playing a dangerous game with Bryce Brown

When Bryce Brown was the #1 recruit in the nation coming out of Wichita in 2009, you just knew his college ride wouldn’t be a smooth one.  Back then, his street agent Brian Butler actually implied he might advise Brown to skip college altogether and play in the Canadian Football League.  Nah, that shouldn’t have sent up red flags to anyone.

Butler’s basically a college football version of Sonny Vaccaro, meaning that he’s a slimeball of the highest order.  The guy actually sold updates of Brown’s recruitment for $59 a year.  And I’m sure he cashed in many other ways as well when he was shopping his prized blue chipper around to colleges.

Brown settled on Tennessee as his college choice, and if you pay any attention at all to college football, it’s been a pretty tumultuous year for that program.  Between the player arrests and the sudden defection of Lane Kiffin, there’s been more heartache than glee lately in Volunteer Nation.

So with the hiring of Derek Dooley as the new coach, everyone is hoping for a fresh start.  That includes Bryce Brown, but the fresh start he’s looking for is back at Kansas State.  Brown let Dooley know about his decision to transfer to Manhattan, but he did it via text message this past Tuesday night before heading back to Wichita.  Way to man up, Bryce.

Dooley has now confirmed that he hasn’t granted Brown a release and apparently doesn’t intend to do so. Here’s the rationale he provided to Austin Ward of the Knoxville News Sentinel:

Citing three main areas of evaluation, Vols coach Derek Dooley confirmed late Friday night that Brown will not be released from his scholarship - and the fact his request was made in a text message appears to have little to do with the ultimate decision.

“As with the other players who have asked for a release, I went through the same process with the same criteria with Bryce,” Dooley said. “These are the three key factors - what their personal investment into the program was, did they have their heart into it and did they give it a good, fair shot. No. 2, the harm that their departure creates for the organization. No. 3, how they handle it as a professional.

“I’ve done that with every one of these guys — with Aaron (Douglas), with Todd Campbell, with Nick Stephens, Nick Lamaison and now Bryce. So now my decision based on those three factors with Bryce is not to release him.” (Knoxville News Sentinel)

In a meeting with Dooley a few days before sending his now infamous text message, Brown apparently didn’t hint at wanting his release.  All parties involved (including Brown’s father Arthur) agree on that:

“Bryce met with Coach Dooley on Saturday for about 30 minutes and Dooley asked him not to tell anyone they talked,” Arthur Brown said. “I’m really not sure why.”

Dooley acknowleged he met with Brown on Saturday but said he was not asked for a release.

Arthur Brown also said his son, one of the nation’s top recruits entering last season, did not ask Dooley for a release at that meeting. This week Dooley said that the reason Bryce has not been released is because he “has not come to me, looked me in the eye and said, ‘I want a release.’” (ESPN.com)

I’m absolutely positive that the moves Bryce Brown has made this past week were in large part influenced by Brian Butler.  And the train wreck that has ensued says all you need to know about Butler’s ability as an adviser as well as the Brown family’s collective judgment in steering Bryce in the right direction.

Brown should have stepped up, met with his coach and politely asked for his release.  But after years of being a coddled blue chipper whose strings are being pulled by a two bit con man, I wonder if he even has the capability to do something that classy.  That might be asking too much of the kid.

On the flip side, I think Dooley’s playing a dangerous game.  Let’s not be naive, Butler was selling Brown’s services in 2009.  So when Brown ended up at Tennessee, well, I’ll let you fill in the rest.

If Kiffin and Company found out a way to make it worth Butler’s while to get Brown to become a Vol, then Dooley really should sever ties as quickly as possible.  If this drags out and Brown gets frustrated, who knows what sort of information regarding his recruitment might come to light.

If something were to surface, the NCAA won’t nail Kiffin because he’s already long gone.  And Brown?  He’ll just go about his business at K-State.  No, it’ll be Dooley who has to deal with the wreckage in Knoxville.  Smarten up, coach.

ESPN’s Mat Hoffman profile dredges up my vomit soaked nightmares

What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever witnessed in person? For me, it was the time in college when my sober ass was driving my drunken roommate’s ass home after a night in which he’d done about ten keg stands too many.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had to haul his drunk ass to the apartment, so at first it really wasn’t that big of a deal. The distance home? Four miles, a piece of cake.

As we were approaching the first intersection on our way back, though, things got ugly in a hurry. In one fluid motion he said, “I’m gonna puke,” opened the car door, leaned out and vomited. Just like that. I didn’t really have a chance to decelerate.

While I was glancing over trying to figure out how much of his upchuck had gotten on my upholstery, he put his hand in his mouth. After a few seconds, a look of horror came across his face. Before I could ask what was wrong, he uttered eight words that haunt me to this day: “I think I puked out my fake tooth.”

I am still ignorant regarding the dynamics of how fake teeth stay in place because I’m lucky enough to still have all of my originals. But what I do know is that the torrent of projectile vomit coming out of his throat had sufficient force to dislodge something that shouldn’t, in my mind, be that easy to dislodge.

I turned the car around, parked it at the gas station at the intersection and then walked across the street with him to help search for his missing tooth. As I read back over that I swear it sounds like the setup to the most elaborate redneck joke that Jeff Foxworthy could dream up. But it wasn’t a joke…I lived it.

Normally, a search like that would be pretty difficult because (A) it’s the middle of the night and (B) it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where a fake tooth dropping out of a moving car may have landed. But luck was on our side because we could focus our search grid on the puddles of vomit on the asphalt.

Amazingly, we weren’t more than a minute into it when he spotted his tooth and picked it up. Of course, it was covered in vomit, so he did what any drunk person would do…he wiped it on his shirt and put it in his pocket.

The smells wafting up from that road combined with the sight of him using his own shirt to wipe vomit off of his fake tooth made me want to add to the puddles of puke already on the ground. Yup, that was an interesting night.

The reason I just put those horrible images in your head is that something helped revive them in mine: ESPN’s 30 for 30 profile of BMX star Mat Hoffman entitled “The Birth of Big Air.” Huh?

Let me explain. You see, Mat Hoffman crashed and injured himself so many times in pursuit of BMX greatness that he started carrying around a surgical kit that he used to STITCH HIS OWN WOUNDS UP (see below).

I vaguely recall John Rambo doing the same in “First Blood,” but that was the movies, you know?  There couldn’t possibly be people that badassed walking around in real life, could there?

No, actually, Mat Hoffman is that badassed. The film contains footage of him sewing up a massive gash on his own ankle. Oh yeah, I was completely grossed out, that image was as cringe inducing as any morning pee I’ve ever taken in my life. EVER.

In my car this morning I was thinking about Hoffman and his self suture kit and I wondered, “Had I ever seen anything that gross in person?” It took a few seconds and then, “WHAM!,” an image of a vomit covered fake tooth came back to me. Thanks, Mat Hoffman, thanks a bunch.

Overall, I’ve been fairly impressed with the 30 for 30 offerings. They’ve run the gamut from the truly compelling (”The Two Escobars” is excellent) to the truly snooze inducing (Peter Berg’s take on the Gretzky trade is pure Lunesta). If you come across “The Birth of Big Air,” though, consider yourself warned…it could pull your grossest memories out of the deepest recesses of your mind.

Today’s weird top 10: top 10 most gang affiliated hats in sports

On Marc Ecko’s Complex magazine web site, they presented the oddest top 10 of not only this day, but probably a lot of days to come. Ladies and gentlemen, here are the top ten sports hats based on gang affiliation:

1. Los Angeles Dodgers
2. Cincinnati Reds
3. Oakland Raiders
4. Chicago Bulls
5. Los Angeles Kings
6. Houston Astros
7. Los Angeles Dodgers
8. Minnesota Twins
9. Georgetown Hoyas
10. Oakland A’s

A couple of things jump out at me on this list, foremost of which is the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago gangs. Either this guy’s on the Chicago PD’s gang task force or he grew up in Cabrini-Green, one or the other.

Secondly, you’ll notice what’s missing: there’s only one NBA hat and only one NFL hat ($1 to Jeff for refreshing my memory on who’s in the NBA). My theory on that?  MLB’s hats feature a bunch of traditional hats where the logo is only a single letter, a letter that can come to represent anything to the person wearing it. “Do I cheer for the Red Sox? Hell no, I bought this hat because my name’s Butch.”

On the other hand, NBA and NFL logos are more mascot driven (the Celtics’ leprechaun, the Colts’ horse shoe, the Vikings’ horn, etc.) and not as open to re-interpretation.

I found the author’s take on why Georgetown hats make the list to be especially fascinating:

With the Complex list in mind, here’s my completely unscientific look at the top 10 least gang affiliated hats in sports:

1. UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs (If it was just the word “SLUGS,” then gangs could get behind this one. But the Banana Slug mascot sewn on the side? Not so much.)

2. UT San Antonio Roadrunners (If any gangs get into cross country running, this hat will blow up.)

3. Chattanooga Lookouts (Hard to be menacing in this hat.)

4. Montreal Alouettes (Not even the most bloodthirsty gang could make this logo work.)

5. Portland Beavers (Here’s the one hat the Baseball Furies won’t touch.)

6. Aberdeen IronBirds (Shockingly, every gang in Aberdeen took a pass on this one.)

7. Miami Dolphins (Since no founder of any major gang was a dolphin lover, this hat gets no love.)

8. Tennessee Titans (Just an excuse to show how odd the Titan logo is. Lotsa stuff going on there.)

9. Utah Jazz (If a gang favored this hat, would they roll around town with Wynton Marsalis blaring from their speakers?)

10. Austin Peay Governors (A gang tried to rock this hat once but gave it up when they were all mistaken for being Associated Press reporters.)

Boise State and Idaho hate each other? Who knew!?!

In the history of recorded time, a university president has never called out another school the way Boise State’s Bob Kustra called out Idaho. Here’s his response to an article from the Argonaut, the Idaho student newspaper:

“This is a great example of why my wife and I no longer travel to Moscow games,” Kustra said. “It’s a culture that is nasty, inebriated and civilly doesn’t give our fans the respect that any fan should expect when visiting an away team. … I don’t think at Boise State you’re going to find that, so for me personally, when I read what Pete said I knew, I knew.”

“For me, this is not about football. For me, this is a cultural issue. It’s about fans having to learn how to treat other fans and universities. What bothers me more than anything else, is that the fans are not about denigrating our athletic program. … What bothers me personally is the denigration of our academic programming. That’s what I simply can’t tolerate.”

“I’ve seen rivalries all over America, Oklahoma-Oklahoma State, Texas-Texas A&M, Kansas-Kansas State, but you can go inside those rivalries and you’ll find all kinds of slams and digs and whatever, but I’ve never seen the nastiness aimed at the quality of our academic program that I find here in Idaho from the University of Idaho Vandals and as long as that goes on, why would I want to encourage a game where people don’t know how to act like grownups?” (Idaho Statesman)

Damn, I had no idea that Idaho and Boise State had this level of animosity toward one another.  But Kustra’s being more than just a little naive about how other rivals in the college sports world treat each other.  When Alabama and Auburn fans get together, EVERYTHING is fair game.  His head would spin if he were president of either one of those fine institutions.

But can you imagine if Kustra were Georgia Tech’s president and he made those comments about Georgia? Or if he was the top guy at Florida and implied that FSU had an inferior football culture?  He’d need a permanent security detail for the rest of his life.

In terms of the actual on the field rivalry between Kustra’s school and the drunken bastards up in Moscow, there’s actually not much of one lately.  Since Idaho notched a 36-35 overtime win in 1998, Boise State has won the last 11 games in the series.  Average score in those games?  51-18.

Not only has Kustra chimed in from the Boise side, but so has Bronco head football coach Chris Peterson.  Here’s what he had to say about the rivalry during the WAC football media preview:

“Why would we (go to Moscow)?” he said. “I don’t think our fans even like to go up there. Most of Idaho’s fans are in Boise anyway.” (Idaho Statesman)

Now that Boise State is leaving the WAC and joining the Mountain West, the game against Idaho won’t automatically appear on Boise’s schedule.  In 2011, the two sides won’t play because Boise is already booked solid.

After that, the two schools could get right back to playing each other…but what does Boise have to gain from that?  From a financial standpoint (which is what drives college football these days), a trip to Moscow to play Idaho doesn’t benefit Boise at all.

With just a hair over 16,000 permanent seats, Idaho’s Kibbie Dome is the smallest venue in all of FBS.  With that in mind, Peterson’s comments make a little more sense.  I don’t think the coach is saying he wants ties to be completely severed, he’d just like it better if Idaho made the trip to Boise every year.

As it stands, Bronco Stadium doubles the capacity of the Kibbie Dome, and plans are in the works to increase capacity to around 50,000 in the not too distant future.  With the facility as the game’s permanent host, Idaho could be the designated home team in alternate years and a majority of seats could be given over to its fans.

That’s if Kustra and the powers that be at Boise State even want to keep the series going.  In terms of recruiting, it would probably benefit his school’s football program a lot more if Idaho were dumped in favor of out of conference games that would provide more exposure (home-and-home deals with Pac-10 schools, road games against Big 12 schools, etc.)

And the very thought of having Vandal fans outnumber Bronco fans every other year in his own stadium is probably hateful to Kustra.  In the first year of such an arrangement, the postgame scene would probably be a hundred times more chaotic than anything LaGarrette Blount could generate.

Tim Tebow gets into the unmentionables business

Tim Tebow, whose jersey continues to be the fastest seller at NFLshop.com, is now tied to other stuff you can wear around.  The rookie quarterback has been named as the new spokesperson for Jockey:

“Tim is a highly gifted athlete with a positive attitude and an admirable character,” Jockey chairman and CEO Debra S. Waller said in a statement. “We at Jockey see a very bright future with Tim, and believe that he is an excellent representative for the brand. Tim is genuine, smart and driven and those qualities align well with Jockey. We look forward to building a long and collaborative relationship with him in the coming years.” (USA Today)

Maybe Jockey will come out with a new “Shroud of Tebow” line of t-shirts, with the image of his iconic face burned into the fabric.  I doubt there’ll be any Shroud of Tebow undies, though, because the thought of skidmarks across Tebow’s face would be pure sacrilege to Florida fans.

CNBC’s Darren Rovell got wind of all this and felt compelled to ask Tebow the question that millions of jean short wearing women have been dying to know the answer to:

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