The no fun college town

Did Crockett and Tubbs pull up stakes, head up I-95 and end up in Amherst, MA?  Word came earlier this week that four UMass football players have been suspended following their arrests on drug charges.  The suspended Minutemen are junior DB James Carven, junior DL Bob McLaughlin, junior LB Mike Mele and sophomore DB Shane Viveiros.

My buddy Sean V. would say that these dudes all sound white, so they must have been busted for pills, but I have no idea what these guys were caught with.  Interestingly enough, these arrests came on the heels of news that the Amherst police are cracking down on unlicensed kegs being purchased within city limits.

Licensing a keg in Amherst involves going to the police station and filling out paperwork listing the people who live at the residence where the keg will be taken to.  Now that’s a royal pain in the ass for the college kids just hoping to get obliterated on the cheap following a long week of skipping classes.

This crackdown comes in the wake of an unusually high number of hospitilizations related to binge drinking by UMass students.  Damn, maybe they should start putting a time limit on keg stands up there.

With all the keg crackdowns and football player drug busts, can any fun be had by UMass students anymore?  It could be worse, they could reside in the worst college party town in American, that being Pullman, WA.  For years, Wazzu students have had to drive over the border to Moscow and party with University of Idaho students.  What’s the second worst college party town in America?  You guessed it…Moscow, ID.

How to not go out in style

Tom Osborne, now there’s a football coach who knew how to get out when the getting was good.  His record during his last five years as Nebraska’s coach?  A sterling 60-3, including a 4-1 record in bowl games.  That lone bowl blemish was a close loss to Bobby Bowden’s Florida State team in the ‘94 Orange Bowl.

Speaking of Bowden, he’s now become a guy who can only wish that his departure from the college game was as glorious as Osborne’s was.  As Bowden nears the end of a fantastic career, he’s become a strange icon…Florida State fans love him, but most don’t want him around anymore.

Foremost among those fans is Jim Smith (is that the most generic name in the history of generic names?), who happens to be the chairman of the Florida State University trustees.  He’s an FSU grad and he loves him some Seminole football, and he gave the following nugget to the Tallahassee Democrat the other day:  “We’re not paying to support an average or mediocre program.  We’re paying for a quality program, and we’re not getting that right now.”

OUCH.  Smith could probably be taken to task for a lack of gratitude, but hey, this is college football, where you’re only as good as your last 10-win season and BCS appearance (just ask Tommy Tuberville).  Bowden built a great program, but along with that he built up the expectations of the Seminole fan base.  Today, those expectations appear to be unrealistic for him to meet.

For now, I think the succession plan involving Jimbo Fisher taking over the coaching reins after Bowden’s retirement (forced or not) appears to have the green light.  But as the team’s offensive coordiator, hasn’t Fisher had a direct hand in the current train wreck that is Florida State football?  Lucky for him, Darth Vader isn’t overseeing the program.  Vader didn’t promote underperforming middle managers, he choked them to death with that Force thing.

Oh, one more nugget concerning trustee honcho Jim Smith…the program’s record during his time as a student at FSU?  15-20-5.  Thankfully for him, FSU gave Bowden the job back in the 70’s instead of bringing in some dunce like like Lee Corso.  That hiring led to the type of quality program that Smith didn’t get to enjoy during his days as a pimply faced undergrad.

Top recruit abandoned in Athens

Speaking of old coaches, Penn State’s Joe Paterno isn’t going to get his team into a BCS title game this season, but he’s busy laying the groundwork for subsequent Nittany Lion teams to take a crack at it.  This week he got another quality verbal commitment, this one from Connecticut prep star Khairi Fortt, one of the nation’s most highly regarded linebackers.

Penn State’s main competition up to this point had been Georgia, but apparently, the hospitality down there wasn’t quite what Fortt had expected when he visited Athens recently, as he told the Stamford Advocate:

“Two guys left me.  I was left at a dorm party with people I didn’t know.  Once I was just walking alone in the streets.  Georgia is a school in the south, in a top conference, the SEC, the weather is warm, I have a lot of family there and the academics are good. (The final decision was about) how I connected with the players.”

Man, that laissez faire attitude that Mark Richt has with his players is something to behold.  You would think that he would make them accountable enough to at least be good hosts to recruits, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  That dude is just too cool for school, man, just too cool for school.

While I’m on the subject of Richt, isn’t it ironical that the coach who sent his entire team onto the field to draw a celebration penalty against Florida a few years back would get victimized by a celebration penalty after a late go ahead touchdown against LSU?  Ahhhh, karma.

That bitterness will eat you up

When Auburn hired Gene Chizik away from Iowa State last year, the majority of pundits panned it as a bad hire.  Here’s a sample of the criticism to scan over.

I recall that folks at Iowa State didn’t seem too upset over losing Chizik, but after his 5-19 record at the school, you couldn’t really blame them.  Fast forward to the present, and Chizik has already matched that win total with a 5-0 start at Auburn.

All of a sudden, I’m detecting a lot of bitterness in Cyclone Nation that didn’t seem to exist just a few months ago.  Take a look at the Auburn-Tennessee picks last week from the sportswriting staff at the Iowa State student paper:

“9. Auburn @ Tennessee

Nate – Tennessee – Auburn rolled to a 4-0 record, but the streak comes to a halt in Knoxville.

Michael – Auburn – This will be a battle of two of the most respectable coaches in the SEC.

Jake – Tennessee – Auburn isn’t as good as advertised. I hope.

Chris – Auburn – It’s Ivan Drago vs. Tommy Gunn on the sidelines; Two villains in orange ready to tangle for mediocrity in the SEC.

Kayci – Tennessee – I will pick any team, any time that plays Auburn.”

The way I see it, Chizik’s reversal of fortune seems to be a case of a good football coach blossoming after he got away from a bad football school.  THerefore, the bitterness on the part of Nate, Michael, Jake, Chris and Kayci (Kayci?!?!) is easily explained.  It’s a case of die hard Cyclone fans coming to grips with the fact that they’re pulling for one of college football’s true bottom feeders.

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