Guy Morriss sounds like quite a guy. Casual college football fans might remember Morriss for coaching moribund football teams like Kentucky and Baylor and elevating them to simply bad. But for the last year, he’s been toiling at Texas A&M-Commerce, a Division II school with a title that sounds more like a credit union for the flagship university than an educational institution.

Morriss is back in the news for applauding players on his football team for stealing as many campus newspapers as they could on Feb. 25. Those copies of The East Texan were carrying a front page article about players on the team getting accused of drug charges.

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Behold the herd mentality of sports journalists.

The latest strange display of sports writers parroting one another without providing much actual thought comes from the Midwest, where sportswriters and commentators are calling for ESPN to fire former college hoops head coach Bobby Knight from serving as color man for Big Monday basketball broadcasts.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Not long after the clock expired on the New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl victory over the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday night, Colts head coach Jim Caldwell made himself available for the always-somber post-game interview.

As these interviews go, they’re usually a bunch of non-questions posed by a reporter trying to look sympathetic, which are met with non-answers from a grim-looking coach. Nothing discussed in these interviews are usually worth remembering.

Caldwell’s responses generally fell along these lines, except when he offered the obligatory give-the-winner credit line. Describing the Saints, he said “they did a heckuva job.” continue »

Anyone who has read this page for any length of time can see that I like to point out the foibles and missteps made by other people and organizations in the sports world. And since I do that, I would be remiss in not pointing out and acknowledging my own screw ups.

A couple weeks ago, I criticized ESPN — and by extension, Kansas State men’s basketball coach Frank Martin — for giving credit to Martin for having won two consecutive basketball championships during his tenure as a high school basketball coach in the late 1990s when those teams had been stripped of one of them for player eligibility improprieties. Those teams were stripped of a championship, but it was the one that would have been their third in a row. So ESPN and Kansas State had it right. It was a detail — an important one — that I didn’t full understand in my research, which I typically spend a lot of time doing before writing anything here.

I took that post down so as not to perpetuate that mistake to anyone landing on it in Google search terms. And in doing so, I apologize to ESPN, to Martin and K-State and to readers.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s nice to finally see that Louisiana politicians can actually accomplish something other than being on the business end of criminal indictments.

On Tuesday — notwithstanding all the other issues going on in Louisiana — politicians of various stripes banded together to thwart the NFL’s efforts to trademark various customs surrounding the New Orleans Saints in the days leading up to Super Bowl XLIV.

USA Today reports Tuesday that the NFL dropped its claim to have exclusive ownership rights to the silly saying that Saints fans have been fond of for years, “Who dat?” among other things.

“Who dat” is a quip culled from an old poem that Saints fans have for some odd reason chanted at games for years. “Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat the Saints? Who dat? Who dat?” goes the whole chant.

It sounds kind of idiotic, but Saints fans seem to love it and for one season in their otherwise lackluster history, they have good reason to be proud getting caught saying such nonsense in public.

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