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Friday, May 26, 2006
College football all figured out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s Memorial Day weekend, and we’re all thinking … college football? Sure we are.
We are, after all, in the South, and the glossy preseason magazines, which used to arrive in July, are already dotting the newsstands. So really, what better time than Memorial Day to skip past summer and decide what will happen come the fall? What better time for our annual long-range look at the One True Sport?
• We start with Georgia Tech, which will start and end the regular season in fine style. The Jackets will beat Notre Dame on Sept. 2 and will beat Georgia — finally! — in Athens on Nov. 25. Being its schizo self, Tech will still manage to lose three games, including one it shouldn’t — Virginia and Maryland, which bracket the Jackets’ trip to Blacksburg, look particularly scary — and will finish second to Miami in the winnable Coastal Division.
• After a one-year cessation of BCS-inspired angst, full-throated howls will return when unbeaten West Virginia, scourge of the defoliated Big East, finishes unbeaten but is passed over for the Fiesta Bowl in lieu of once-beaten Auburn.
• Auburn will essentially win the SEC West on Sept. 16 when it beats LSU in Jordan-Hare Stadium. Auburn’s loss will come against Georgia, which will dress up an ordinary (by Mark Richt’s lofty standards) season by winning in the epic series distinguished by its utter disdain for home-field advantage.
• Notre Dame will lose three regular-season games, one more than last season, and one or two Irish fans will wonder if extending Charlie Weis’ contract through 2015 might have been a stretch. (In 2015, Weis will be coaching guys who aren’t yet in junior high.)
• Ohio State will win the national championship. Auburn will put up a Fiesta fight but lose by a field goal. Crestfallen West Virginia will lose its no-consolation bowl game to Texas, which will be dealt out of the Fiesta picture by an early loss to the Buckeyes in Austin but will still beat Oklahoma and take the Big 12 title.
• Matthew Stafford won’t start against Western Kentucky on Sept. 2. After Georgia loses to South Carolina the next week, Stafford will be promoted to No. 1. He’ll beat Tennessee and Auburn but will lose to Florida and Tech. The Bulldogs will finish behind the Gators in the SEC East.
• Even so, Florida will enter its bowl game with four losses — two to Auburn (the second in the SEC championship game), one to Florida State and one to LSU. And the burning question — Is Urban Meyer the next Spurrier or the next Zooker? — will flame ever hotter.
• Oklahoma’s Adrian Peterson will win the Heisman. Auburn’s Kenny Irons will finish third. Notre Dame’s Brady Quinn will finish fifth.
• For all the mileage the ACC got from its draft-day success, the expanded league will struggle to generate a single top 10 team. Clemson and Virginia Tech lost their quarterbacks. Miami fired half its coaching staff. Florida State is in clear decline.
• That said, the ACC championship game will be the one the ACC hopes to get every season — FSU against Miami. For no real reason, FSU will win.
• For the second year in a row, Miami and LSU will meet in the bowl formerly known as the Peach — it’s now just the Chick-fil-A, and really, what signifies Atlanta more than a chicken sandwich? — and the Hurricanes will well recall the Tigers’ two fake kicks at the end of last season’s 40-3 wipeout. LSU will again win the game but will lose the 10-minute fight that ignites at the coin toss.
• As a freshman, Reggie Ball was knocked out of the Georgia game in the first half. As a sophomore, he infamously lost track of downs. As a junior, he threw a killing interception in the Red Zone. As a senior, he’ll throw a fade that Calvin Johnson snatches for the winning touchdown with 10 seconds to play. That detailed enough for you?
Permalink | Comments (51) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Duke women show lack of sensitivity
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
I wasn’t in the room. I don’t know what happened any more than you do, any more than the Duke women’s lacrosse team does. But unless they’re in possession of some secret video tape, the Duke women shouldn’t proclaim it’s going to write, “Innocent!” on its wristbands for an NCAA tournament game any more than I should write a story about rape allegations with a headline that screams, “Guilty!”
I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. They weren’t there.
If you missed it, the Duke women’s lacrosse players stretched the bounds of free speech past the stupidity dividing line. They said they would wear sweatbands with the word, “innocent,” on their arms and legs for Friday night’s national semifinal against Northwestern. It would be a show of support for the men’s lacrosse team, specifically the three players who have been indicted for rape.
Somebody must have been scorched by the backdraft. When the players walked out for warm-ups at Boston University, players had motivational words, “No excuses, no regrets,” written on the bands. But several wrote the numbers 6, 13 and 45 on bands around their lower legs, obvious references to David Evans (6), Collin Finnerty (13) and Reade Seligmann (45), who have been indicted for rape.
“The damage already has been done,” said Kathy Redmond, anticipating the women’s team might back off its threat. “They made a knee-jerk decisions that probably caused more reaction than they thought. These are stupid, spoiled little girls. It smacks of high school. Maybe one day when they’ll read about one of their friends who was raped. Then they’ll rethink this.”
Maybe you’ve heard of Redmond. She wasn’t in the room either. But she’s closer to an expert on this case than the rest of us. She founded the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes in 1997. She became high profile in 1995 after alleging former Nebraska defensive lineman Christian Peter raped her. The case never went to trial and a subsequent civil lawsuit against Peter and the school was settled out of court.
Redmond also is a lacrosse player. She competed at Nebraska. She still plays today. She understands the culture of lacrosse athletes, and believes the public stance of the women’s team stems primarily from a we’re-all-in-this together mentality.
“More than any other sport, there’s this mentality with women lacrosse players of, ‘We’re as tough as the men,’” Redmond said. “It’s almost like a competition. It’s like they try to carry themselves with a masculine edge. They want to be looked at as being just as good as the men, yet they still look to the men for validation. It’s a very weird dynamic that you don’t see in women’s basketball or any other sport. It all goes back to the elitist class issue in this case. It’s like, ‘We all come from the same place.’ Lacrosse is still very much a niche sport, and there are cliques involved.”
Redmond believes that if it were Duke basketball players who were being accused of rape, “The women’s basketball team wouldn’t think of taking this public stance.”
Neither Duke nor the NCAA objected to the threatened wristbands. Kerri Fagan, the NCAA’s associate director of championships, said Friday there is no bylaw that prohibits the message. She actually put it in the same category as players wearing a number as a way to honor a deceased teammate. “It’s an institutional decisional,” Fagan said.
That institution, Duke, even allowed women’s coach Kerstin Kimel to invite fired men’s coach Mike Pressler to address the team this week.
“I’m surprised [the women players] didn’t fear any reprisals from Duke,” Redmond said. “It tells me that the school is still taking this less seriously than it should.”
She was not surprised by the NCAA’s stance, saying: “The NCAA is a nice figurehead organization that collects a lot of money. But they’re basically worthless. They could do a lot about the culture and violence that exists in college athletics. But they’re making a lot of money, so they don’t.”
A 27-year-old African American stripper says she was raped by three white lacrosse players from one of the nation’s most prestigious universities. That’s going to incite emotions on several levels.
But for college athletes to take their opinion of rape allegations onto the field of an NCAA championship event crosses a line. This isn’t an on-campus war protest. It’s rape. And I would imagine that if the women believed something illegal had occurred at that men’s lacrosse party, nobody would write, “Guilty!” on their jersey.
Permalink | Comments (71) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
