Today’s Duke Chronicle reports on the results of Ted Roof’s latest efforts to dupe impressionable 18-year-olds into coming to Durham to play a sport other than basketball rebuild Duke’s football program on the recruiting trail, said efforts yielding (of all things) a pair of Swedes. As in kids from Sweden. I shit you not. I didn’t realize Malmö was such a hotbed of gridiron talent…

Meanwhile the best football player on campus is still pursuing the revenue sport Duke doesn’t suck at. Go figure.

Maybe the news that NFL Network will show eight regular-season games in the upcoming season will finally get Time-Warner here in Durham off their collective asses. High-def would be nice, but even the standard-definition channel would make me happy (or happier, at any rate).

One of these decades, I’ll master the black art of taking photos with my camera phone. Until then, here’s the fruits of my labor—a scoreboard shot from the women’s basketball game after the Blue Devils denied Pat Summit her 901st win as a head coach on Monday night:

The Rebels picked up commitments from former UT quarterback Brent Schaeffer and Meridian High running back Cordera Eason on Friday, putting an exclamation point on what already was a top-15 recruiting class for Ed “You Need A Hummer” Orgeron. Say what you will about the guy on the sidelines or the practice field, but he at least seems like he can recruit players…

Yes, I will celebrate, even if the Pats did get jobbed.

Daniel in comments at EDSBS:

Bush’s announcement tomorrow is a lose-lose proposition for USC. If Bush declares for the draft, they lose Bush, of course. Should he announce he is staying, it would demonstrate that someone could spend three years in school at USC and still be the dumbest guy in the country.

Of course, with LenDale White’s draft declaration today, if Bush stayed he would at least have a chance to move up to be indisputably his team’s best rusher…

Seeing your students covered in blue paint: meh.
Teaching late enough in the day that I don’t have to worry about students skipping: ok.
Getting a break from student emails: nice.
Dick Vitale’s microphone not working for the first few minutes: priceless.

Former Miami offensive coordinator Dan Werner is now OC for the Ole Miss Rebels, with fellow ex-Miamian Art Kehoe likely to follow as the new offensive line coach in Oxford. The Rebels will also have Robert Lane back in the backfield, likely back at quarterback (even though Lane’s performance at fullback was one of the few bright spots on offense in the latter half of the season).

þ: Fanblogs and EDSBS.

Just when you thought Marcus Vick couldn’t sink to any further lows, he manages to plumb new depths of idiocy by allegedly pulling a piece during an argument with some high school kids in Virginia. Between Virginia Tech and Miami (aka “The U,” whose football lineups are often confused with the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List), one wonders if the schools’ administrations thought “ACC” stood for “All-Criminals Conference” when they ditched the Big Least.

ABC/ESPN’s use of the Skycam to show the quarterback walking to the sideline after calling a timeout. At least Fox and CBS seem not to be doing it today.

Marcus Vick, younger brother of Atlanta Falcons QB Michael “Ron Mexico” Vick, has been kicked off the Virginia Tech football team after his latest transgressions: an unprovoked on-field spiking of Louisville defensive end Elvis Dumervil in the Gator Bowl, and being ticketed for speeding and driving on a revoked license in Virginia. ESPN.com columnist Ivan Maisel has more.

þ: EDSBS.

So, when do I get my apology from ESPN for their declarations over the past month that this year’s University of Southern California team is the greatest in the history of college football?

Oh, and huzzah and kudos to the Texas Longhorns on the occasion of their victory.

I’m safe and sound in the Hotel Intercontinental Buckhead, which may be the first conference hotel I’ve ever been at that’s actually worth what I’m paying for the room (you’re paying for the lobby at the Palmer House in Chicago; the rooms aren’t anything special).

As is the nature of the small universe that political scientists inhabit, the first person I saw in the lobby, other than the receptionist, was Bill Jacoby.

Now I’ll be incommunicado while watching the Rose Bowl. If it’s anything like the other BCS games have been, this will be a real barnburner.

As the 2005 NFL season draws to a close, so too do the existing television contracts. John Cole tries to sort out the details as they relate to the ESPN/ABC family of networks, which also include the end of NFL SuckTime PrimeTime and its presumed migration to the Monday NFL Countdown slot on Mondays.

I wonder if the idea of combining Chris Berman and Stuart Scott’s powers of suck on the new Monday NFL PrimeTime will cross the minds of the ESPN powers that be. If so, we may observe some sort of implosion of the universe, as Berman’s lame nicknames (and combover) and Scott’s bogus street talk (and Urkel glasses) converge to form an intellectual black hole in Bristol on a weekly basis.

Maurice Clarett, the hero of the 2002 Ohio State national championship team, is wanted by police for allegedly robbing two people at gunpoint in Columbus early New Year’s morning, according to ESPN.com. At the time, Clarett was apparently on the cusp of signing a deal to play in NFL Europe in the hopes of returning to the NFL proper; one suspects that opportunity has now evaporated completely.

ESPN.com’s John Clayton ponders the NFL playoff format, which has contributed to a Week 17 full of uninteresting contests. While Clayton is lukewarm about expanding the playoffs (a position I agree with), he does have a more interesting suggestion:

Another idea that should be tossed around is seeding the playoffs by victories instead of giving the division winners the top four seeds. Most of this weekend’s games are meaningless because teams that have locked up home games for the playoffs will rest their key players .

If the Patriots had to worry about playing in Jacksonville instead of opening the playoffs at home against the Jaguars, they might have a big sense of panic heading into this weekend’s game against the Dolphins. Too many of this weekend’s games are like preseason games.

I’d favor a smaller adjustment: guaranteeing the top two seeds to the best two division winners in each conference. In practice, it is unlikely that this would be much different from Clayton’s proposal.

Ethan Flatt, the on-again, off-again starting quarterback of your Ole Miss Rebels, has decided to take his bachelor’s degree and run rather than return for his senior season, a move that had been widely speculated in the media. More likely than not, this will mean a return under center for Robert Lane (most recently seen at fullback), as he’s the only QB left on the depth chart with any playing time whatsoever.

Steven Taylor asks:

[I]s the Heisman ceremony boring and, well, lame?

Yes, and, um, yes. I’d also add anticlimatic.

I’m pretty sure dressing like this young woman (NSFW) would get you kicked out of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. And Lafayette County.

Geaux to hell, LSU, geaux to hell! Losing to Georgia is at least a nice start…

I can’t even pretend to care about the ACC-Big Ten challenge (much less college basketball in general), and I was falling asleep on my sofa a few hours ago while watching good TV, yet for some silly reason I’m wide awake and watching Duke–Indiana on TiVo delay with Dickie V anyway.

They must put drugs in the water supply here; that’s the only explanation.

Brian from MGoBlog and Mark Hasty add to the list of reasons to dislike ESPN, pushing it well over 100 entries.

þ: EDSBS, of course.

The EDSBS crew compiles a list of 52 reasons that ESPN sucks, and somehow manages to leave out the Sunday Night Football crew and Jeremy “I’m not Dick, but I am one” Schapp.

You know, if I were an Ole Miss chancellor looking for a pretext to can Coach O, the evidence of his apparent attempt to poach players from Tulane’s football team might be a good place to start. The allegations at this point seem to contain a lot more smoke than fire—there’s no evidence, for example, that Orgeron or his subordinates actually contacted any Green Wave players—but nonetheless the whole episode appears rather unseemly.

Well, that sucked.

Update: More thoughts from BigJim. Is it a “gots-to-go situation” for Coach O? Probably not immediately, but with disgruntled players continuing to bolt and ineptitude that goes well beyond the parts of the game under the control of the allegedly-already-fired OC Noel Mazzone, the Orgeron honeymoon is going to be shortlived. That may be bad for Orgeron’s career prospects in Oxford, since it’s likely his legendary recruiting prowess won’t even yield substantial dividends on the field until the 2007 season due to redshirting.

And the $64,000 “what-if” questions surrounding the firing of ex-coach David Cutcliffe probably aren’t going away either. Would QB “guru” Cut have gotten more out of Spurlock, Flatt, and Lane? I don’t know, but if things turn around in Knoxville next year (and, realistically, they probably will; a team with UT’s talent almost never goes under .500 in college, no matter how poorly they are coached) a lot of the credit will go to Cutcliffe.

One final thought: a lot of the Rebel’s woes can be traced to two positions on the field: place kicker and punter. Thirty-yard punts and regularly missed field goals don’t add up to scoring or good field position. Kicking may be the Rebels’ most glaring deficiency, even if it seems to be lost in the discussions over the revolving door at QB.