NCAA Football College Sports

Be sure to check out the link and see their theme picture: cheeseburger guy. Among the range of topics addressed at the "NCAA Gender Equity and Issues Forum" this week was childhood obesity. How so?

[NCAA] administrators are wondering whether increased obesity rates may have an adverse effect on the quality of prospective student-athletes in years to come.

Somehow I doubt the NCAA needs to worry about this. Youth sports are seemingly endless in number and yearlong in availability. The pool of quality athletes talented enough to compete at an NCAA level is more likely determined by young people's interest in those sports than obesity factors. It's a self-selecting phenomena. Obese kids truly passionate about sports and who have talent should and will generally find a way to be fit and compete.

Plus, at least with football, bigger kids are always in demand. Healthy kids are an important issue, but the NCAA is both over-extending itself considering this topic and is making much ado about nothing as far as future pools of quality athletes. High-level athletics requires fitness, and if kids are truly passionate about competing at the NCAA level, they'll be fit. The NCAA's focus should be on directing passion and energy into these sports which leads to able bodies, not hand-wringing over the larger obesity issue.

I covered some of the scenarios in Saturday's Ice Sheet, but we know more now.

The field for the 2008 NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Championship won't be official until Sunday afternoon's selection show. However, thanks to a transparent mathematical system being used to rank the teams in Division I and select the at-large teams, we know now who will make the tournament.

With this year's selections will come a lot of controversy, as a Wisconsin team (pictured to the right celebrating their 2006 NCAA title) that finished the season under .500 overall will make the field of 16 as an at-large team. It's not unprecedented for sub-.500 clubs to win a conference tournament to get an automatic bid (Alabama-Huntsville did it just last year). However, it's crazy to think that a team that couldn't even win half its games is good enough to earn an at-large bid to a national tournament.

It might be crazy, but it's happening. The folks at College Hockey News and U.S. College Hockey Online have both updated their "Pairwise" rankings. These rankings are a replica of the mathematical formula the selection committee will use to pick the field as they gather this weekend.

After the jump, we'll tell you who's in the field, and also reveal another crazy fact about this tournament that works heavily in Wisconsin's favor (as if their mere inclusion in the field wasn't a crazy-enough circumstance).

It's red ink from a lack of money at the Rutgers Athletic Department. Barely noted in the euphoria of last season and that Rutgers football was actually making money for the first time, was the fact that Rutgers was cutting 6 Olympic or non-revenue sports from the Athletic Department for budgetary reasons.

Athletic Departments cutting the non-revenue sports is nothing new. Schools have been doing it for years. They usually blame it on Title IX and/or budget issues. Still, it's all new area for Rutgers and after all the positive attention they had been receiving it can be a bit jarring to read as efforts to save the sports failed.

It was a rare defeat in Rutgers' magical sports season. The football team upset No. 3 Louisville en route to its 11-2 record; and the women's basketball team made it to the championship game of the NCAA tournament, an event marred by shock jock Don Imus's on-air ridicule of the women's appearance, leading to his dismissal.

The glow of athletic successes made cutting six teams all the darker. Men's swimming and diving, and tennis, men's and women's fencing, and men's lightweight and heavyweight crew have all ended their tenures at Rutgers as varsity sports. They will continue as club sports, a change not unlike going from baseball's majors to Little League.

The coaches, students and parents affected had organized to try and save the sports. They had received pledges totaling nearly $1 million and had the New Jersey Legislature ready to offer the same.

Back in April, an 18-year-old college student from the Twin Cities area alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a group of men, later found to all be members of the Minnesota Gopher football team.

Three players were arrested in early April, and were detained for a weekend while authorities tried to piece together what happened. When charges weren't ready to be filed by the following Monday, the players were released without being charged. At that point, officials said the investigation would continue.

As we pointed out earlier this week, the Sunday night arrest of another player, cornerback Dominic Jones, is related to the case. Jones was charged with third-degree criminal sexual conduct on Monday, and the rather graphic charging document alleges Jones engaged in a sex act with a drunk woman described as "physically helpless".

At his initial court appearance Tuesday, Jones did not enter a plea (he was not obligated to do so). He said nothing besides "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to the judge and bail was set at $25,000. Jones has since been released on bail. Attorney Earl Gray, representing Jones, said Jones intends to fight the charges, and he would like to play football again if he is acquitted.

University of Wisconsin hockey player Kyle Klubertanz and former hockey player Jeffrey Slinde were each fined $200 for tipping over a cow last August in front of the Kohl Center, where the Badgers play their home games. But Wisconsin's hockey program need not worry about being targeted by animal activists, the way the Atlanta Falcons will be this year. The cow these players tipped was a sculpture.

The cow they tipped was one of the more than 100 sculpted cows in Madison last summer for the Wisconsin CowParade.

Both Slinde and Klubertanz were charged with a misdemeanor count of criminal damage to property, but those charges were lowered today to county disorderly conduct, a forfeiture action which leaves the pair with no criminal record. Along with the fine and court costs, each has already finished 30 hours of community service by volunteering at youth hockey camps, said attorney John Hyland, who represented Klubertanz.

As Randball notes, when police asked the players why they did it, they gave the oldest explanation in the book: "We were stupid."

I know I'm not supposed to blog about Louisville in the College World Series, but Louisville shortstop Chris Cates is worth seeing:

At just under 5-foot-3, Cates is the shortest player in Division I baseball. Cates was 1-for-5 with an RBI in the Cardinals' 15-10 loss to Rice in their first College World Series appearance Friday. He also committed two errors. If the Cardinals come back to win the College World Series and Cates gets a couple of "clutch" hits, I have a feeling he'll be named the MVP. And I know someone who's going to puke.

There's a good chance you've seen this video of ESPN sideline reporter Erin Andrews before, but it's important to get a good look at her to understand why Louisville's baseball coach has some concerns:

Aaron Fitt of Baseball America reports that Andrews is one of the many potential distractions to players in the College World Series:

"I don't want to hide from the fact that the kids are going to be excited, I don't want them to try to act too macho," Cardinals coach Dan McDonnell said. "The coolest they tried to act was when they met (ESPN's) Erin Andrews in the lobby. I told them, 'guys, stop acting like you're so cool and macho.' This is a kids' game, and they should be excited."

Sounds like they are excited. Hat tip: Relentless Grace.

Four days after the NCAA kicked sports writer Brian Bennett out of a baseball game for live blogging about the game, a lawyer for Bennett's employer, the Louisville Courier-Journal, says the paper will consider filing a lawsuit.

the newspaper is weighing a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds - the right to free speech as it applies to reporting news in a public place.

Jon Fleischaker, a lawyer representing The Courier-Journal, said yesterday that such a challenge might be made, within the next 10 days, because the event took place at a public facility and because the eviction was enforced by the University of Louisville, a public institution that was the host university.

The NCAA's lawyer says there is no First Amendment issue because it has the right to determine who is and is not entitled to press credentials. It seems unlikely that this dispute could be resolved before Louisville begins play in the College World Series.

The case of the Louisville Courier-Journal reporter who got kicked out of an NCAA baseball game because he was live-blogging it is getting a lot of attention, and there are two basic arguments.

The first is whether the NCAA had the right to throw reporter Brian Bennett out of the game. And most people think the NCAA did have that authority. The Courier-Journal's story today quotes two attorneys who say this is not a First Amendment issue because the NCAA has the right to issue or deny press credentials to whomever it chooses. So a lawsuit probably wouldn't do the paper much good, as long as the NCAA doesn't also take steps to try to stop someone from live blogging a game by watching it on TV.

But the second issue is whether the NCAA was smart to eject Bennett from the game, and the results are just about unanimous that the NCAA's decision was stupid. Even ESPN, which was televising the game and was presumably the entity that the NCAA thought it was protecting, says it had nothing to do with the NCAA's move.

And that makes sense, because a reporter blogging about the game wouldn't draw any fans away from the TV broadcast. I've never asked a friend to get together to watch a game, only to have him say, "No, I'm going to sit in front of my computer and read a live blog instead."

So what the NCAA is guilty of here is making a really stupid decision. As Peter Schmuck notes today, college baseball would benefit greatly from more media attention, and the NCAA is standing in the way of that.

Previously at FanHouse:
When Dealing With Online Rights, Bloggers Are in a Gray Area
NCAA Clashes With Louisville Paper on Baseball Blog
NCAA Kicks Blogger Out of Baseball Game

Earlier today at the Fanhouse, Michael David Smith pointed to the story about how Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Brian Bennett was tossed out of the press box at an NCAA regional baseball playoff game for blogging about it in real time -- something he had done without incident through the rest of his coverage of Louisville's playoff run to the College World Series.

When I first read about this story, I was disappointed but not surprised. After all, I covered 35 NHL games this past season from the press box at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. and I never intentionally liveblogged a word. Most nights, I would start off with a few pre-game posts during warmups before going dark with the drop of the puck. For the rest of the game, I would continue to live blog, but wouldn't publish anything until after the game was over -- most nights, if there wasn't any trouble with the arena's Wi-Fi connection, that meant we had the first account of the game available on the Web.

Meanwhile, down at ice level, one of my photographers would take a break from shooting in between periods to post photos to the Web, just like any other photo agency does through Yahoo Sports. In addition, I'd also publish a post game update if I was able to get anything interesting out of the locker room or the coach's press conference, and maybe insert a couple of photos directly into the text.

Why did I go to all that trouble? Because before I ever climbed in the press box, I was well aware of the restrictions that the NHL, like other sports leagues, places on real-time accounts of games in progress. After all, what red-blooded American kid can't recite the following line from memory:

Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited.

I've been hearing that standard disclaimer for as long as I can remember, and it's funny how it's still covers all the bases today even with all the changes in technology in the decades since then. So why does the NCAA have its undies in a bunch about this? After all, what could the harm be of allowing somebody to liveblog from the press box the same way any other pajama-clad blogger could from home?