College Football

[innocentbystander]

The following is entirely Tongue-in-Cheek. Enjoy.

A heartbreaking column from Stewart Mandel today on the financial carnage being wrought upon the bowls this year. Note the following:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/colleg ... &eref=sihp

overall attendance figures declined by more than two percent for the second straight year. According to AL.com's Jon Solomon, this year's average bowl attendance (49,222) was the lowest since 1978-79

and

the announced attendance at the Jan. 2 Sugar Bowl: 54,178. A game featuring Florida, an SEC powerhouse ranked No. 3 in the country, produced the 79-year-old event's lowest attendance total since 1939. Gators fans purchased just 6,500 of their allotted 17,500 tickets to the game.

and

Elsewhere, Florida State sold less than a third of its 17,500-seat allotment to the Orange Bowl, and Nebraska sold only roughly 4,000 Capital One Bowl seats. Even LSU and Clemson failed to sell nearly 13,000 combined tickets for their intriguing, geographically convenient matchup.

Awful. What's worst is the treason being committed against these programs:

For the most part, however, it's become unrealistic for schools to sell expensive full-price tickets when there are drastically cheaper seats available via secondary outlets like StubHub. That site had tickets to the Northwestern-Mississippi State Gator Bowl available for as low as $2.50 leading up to the game.

What I'm concerned about is what happens to the bowl scouts when people refuse to purchase tickets at full price to attend these games. As a bowl selection committee, you can blow off a bowl-eligible BC on Selection Day--that's the smart play of course.

But when Bubba from Shreveport skips out on LSU's Sugar Bowl, or Candi (with an "i") at FSU asks her benefactor to take her to Cancun for New Year's rather than to Miami for the Orange Bowl...well, s**t just got real.

Without ticket sales, bowl selection committees lose their market power. Pretty soon, what you see below will be how it "used to be"...and that's what's heartbreaking in all this:

http://college-football.si.com/2012/02/ ... #more-4947

The Outback Bowl employs five year-round staffers; the Music City Bowl has nine, most of whom double up with duties to the Nashville Sports Council; and the Orange Bowl has 30...
for a game like the Chick-fil-A Bowl, which draws from two of the more voluminous conferences, scouting all potentially eligible teams in person in a single season is a daunting task. Volunteer CFA scouts go out in Week 1 to begin assessing various SEC and ACC squads...

yes, paranoid tailgaters: Visiting scouts assess the campus environment everywhere they go to gauge fan engagement, so look alive out there...

Under the new system, what happens to those trips? If the bowls lose power, does Leeman Bennett have to cut back on his delicious dinners out at the finest restaurants the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions have to offer? How is a bowl going to select the most marketable program if they can't get University-paid trips week-after-week to assess each program's suitability to compete in the game? How does the "All-22" game film give you the perspective you get sitting in a luxury box eating free chicken wings and cruidites?

To the student who visits StubHub, it's "I saved a few bucks". To a member of the Team Marketing and Selection Committee, it's real life.

[Jungle Rat]

Anybody?

[sardis]

Nothing like a cigarrette and fresca to get you ready for the second half of a Super Bowl...

[sardis]

Here's the link. Not sure why the picture won't show.

http://life.time.com/culture/super-bowl ... n-1967/#14

[Bklyn]

Vlade Divac was notorious for smoking at halftime.

I remember I saw a guy on a bicycle, in full cycling tights with helmet, stopped halfway up a hill leading to my parents house, smoking a cigarette. He was sweating like a crazy person, too. Nicotene is a helluva drug.

[hedge]

Seems like I read that Bob Lanier was a big smoker, too...

[hedge]

SN: You may be shy, but you were Roger Murdock—that means you’re also funny. What’s your funniest basketball story?

ABDUL-JABBAR: The ball boys in Detroit would complain because Bob Lanier and one or two of his teammates, at halftime they had to smoke cigarettes. They really needed them. They would go into the shower and smoke cigarettes and come out and play the second half.

SN: Wait, the shower?

ABDUL-JABBAR: Because it wouldn’t contaminate the atmosphere for the other guys on their team. The coach even did it, Ray Scott -- he smoked in there, too. But I knew if Bob did that he couldn’t run in the second half, so I made sure I was always able to run. He’d be in so much pain.

[Jungle Rat]

Cigs are the devil!!!

[aTm]

Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend was a hoax and did not exist.

http://deadspin.com/5976517/manti-teos- ... -is-a-hoax

[AlabamAlum]

I dated Teo's dead girlfriend.

[AlabamAlum]

[AlabamAlum]

Musberger still thinks Teo's girlfriend is SMOKING HOT!

[AlabamAlum]

I bet Te'o lied about the apostrophe.

[AlabamAlum]

George O'leary wants to be part of the fact-finding team on the imaginary dead girlfriend.

[AlabamAlum]

Since Te'o is mormon, how many dead imaginary girlfriends are there?

[AlabamAlum]

Te'o met Katherine Webb on-line and considers her his girlfriend, as well.

[T Dot O Dot]

he's GAY, plain & simple

there's no other explanation

[Bklyn]

Just because he killed her doesn't mean he's gay.

Donald Trump is sending a team of investigators to Hawaii to find the girl's birth certificate. We'll get to the bottom of it.

[Cletus]

[AlabamAlum]

lol