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.

When police investigated the newspaper incident, Morris had this to say about his players and their behavior:

“I’m proud of my players for doing that,” Morriss said, according to a police incident report. “This was the best team building exercise we have ever done.” — via The Associated Press.

The university’s student newspaper editor, James Bright, believes the loss cost about $1,100. But don’t tell that to Morriss. According to the AP report, Morriss told police that he couldn’t understand how or why boosting 2,000 copies of a newspaper so that no one could read its contents would constitute stealing.

Hilariously, that school’s athletics director told investigators that the incident flummoxed him in part because he “didn’t think they were smart enough to do this on their own,” according to an investigative report.

Well, at least the apples don’t fall far from the tree in the Texas A&M-Commerce football program.

Looking stupid isn’t anything new to Morriss. Perhaps his most enduring image from the days when he coached big time college football was when his Kentucky Wildcats were about to upset heavily-favored No. 14-ranked Louisiana State in 2002. In that game, Morriss’ Wildcats had a 30-27 lead late in the game, prompting Morriss to get a Gatorade bath from players celebrating victory before time expired.

But then LSU launched a Hail Mary pass with no time left from 82 yards away, whereupon an LSU receiver eluded Kentucky’s inept defenders and dashed to the touchdown for an improbable victory. Morriss got to stand there on the sideline, soaked and cold, reflecting on his brilliantly-drawn up last play and the irony of his victory bath as LSU celebrated.

Check it out for yourself in this video clip, particularly the :56 second mark.

And then Morriss went off to what he thought were greener pastures at Baylor, which hasn’t had a winning season since 1995. There, he racked up an 18-40 record before getting cast aside like any one of those 2,000 newspapers his current squad allegedly stole.

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.

An AM 810 sports radio broadcaster in Kansas City, Kevin Kietzman, started the Bobby Knight pile-on by launching an online petition on Tuesday calling for ESPN to can Knight and his play-by-play man Brent Musburger. The reason? Well, check out the Web site. It’s not clear at all. It appears that this sports radio jock thinks Knight doesn’t know much about basketball, even though there’s no mention of Kietzman’s extensive basketball background on his radio station bio. But he does admit he makes a lot of mistakes (hey, don’t we all?).

Acting almost on cue, Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock followed the next day with several hundred words devoted to calling for Knight’s head. Whitlock’s reason? Knight’s suggestion during the Kansas Jayhawk’s Monday night victory that coach Bill Self remove All-American sharpshooter Sherron Collins at the beginning of a second half against Texas A&M when Collins, by Whitlock’s own estimation, was having a terrible game.

The same day, the Lawrence Journal-World, the hometown newspaper for the Jayhawks, ran a piece quoting Self on a radio show responding to Knight — a color man — expressing an opinion that Self’s best player should get benched. The article frames Self as “keeping his cool” as he crafted a response, as though everyone were expecting Self to blow his top over Knight’s benign comments. Apparently Self didn’t agree with Knight but also didn’t seem to care all that much.

Nevertheless, that makes at least two news media outlets publishing or broadcasting screeds calling for the silencing of a broadcaster.

So much for the media sticking up for First Amendment rights.

Knight’s actually a breath of fresh commentary in sports television to anyone who understands the game. As a championship NCAA coach, he clearly knows his game. He’s also not afraid to criticize player for taking bad shots or coaches for questionable decisions rather than sucking up to athletes. Most importantly, he sees no need for threadbare cliches that most color men spend like millionaires with on-air currency. Never do you hear Knight saying that so-and-so “just loves to play the game” or that so-and-so can “elevate his team to the next level” or other such nonsense we’ve become used to hearing from the likes of Chris Collinsworth.

True, Knight’s not particularly politically correct. But neither was Howard Cosell.

True, Knight’s prone to making a mistake or two during a broadcast. But so was Harry Carey.

By Tuesday, Kietzman’s online petition had gathered a yawn-inducing 1,500 electronic signatures. We’re guessing that by the time the petition gets delivered to Big 12 Conference Commissioner Dan Beebe in March, it won’t have the billion or so signatures it would require to even have the administrator give it a second thought.

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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.”

The words “heckuva job” a few years ago became part of a haunting phrase in New Orleans. As anyone with a even a rudimentary memory of Hurricane Katrina recalls, then-President George Bush offered beleaguered FEMA director Michael Brown a “You’re going a heckuva job, Brownie,” even though he arguably wasn’t.

Much will be made in the coming days about the Saints victory and its weight in New Orleans. The media will surely gush platitudes about how a Super Bowl victory become a defining moment for the rebuilding of a city decimated by a hurricane more than four years ago.

In this context, was Caldwell making a dig at New Orleans?

It may be a stretch. Perhaps we’re reading way too far into this. Was it a mistake? Very well could have been. Was it a poor choice of words? Probably. Was it a conscious choice of words? Who knows?

As for Brown, he told the media who he wanted to win the Super Bowl a couple days ago. He wasn’t rooting for the Saints.

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.

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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.

And the NFL tried to say after all these years that it’s their trademark right before the Super Bowl. The organization also tried to lay claim to trademark rights over the fleur-de-lis symbol that adorns the Saints helmet and the black and gold colors that the team wears on its uniforms.

This made retailers and merchandise-peddlers fear the NFL’s retribution for selling items containing the “Who dat?” phrase. So politicians in Louisiana, ranging from Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to U.S. Sen. David Vitter flogged the NFL publicly, leading to the NFL’s capitulation.

Trademark enforcement is a legitimate business right for anyone or any organization looking to protect its intellectual property. But the NFL only would have had to spend a few minutes on the Internet to see it had no inherent trademark right to customs and symbols that even predate the NFL’s existence.

A search on Google Books for “Who dat?” shows the phrase was appearing in books as far back as the 1922 edition of the Journal of American Folklore. And then dozens of times since then.

And black and gold is hardly the exclusive color scheme of the Saints, as a quick tour of a Google image search turns up several other teams with similar colors.

Finally, one could be completely ignorant of French history and still know the fleur-de-lis traces its origins back for centuries.

So nice try, NFL. Just let the fans enjoy this one.

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The Detroit News today summarized the indignities that fans of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings suffer when they attend home games at Joe Louis Arena.

Among the atrocities that Detroit fans endure to watch hockey, according to the article, are:

• The steps leading up to nosebleed seats are steep;
• It doesn’t smell too great inside the arena;
• Seating in the arena isn’t roomy enough — “Maybe they can have those seats like in the movie theater where you can lean back a little bit,” said Lawrence Westerfield of Detroit;
• The scoreboard isn’t extravagant enough;
• It takes a few minutes to pay a visit to the restrooms, particularly for women;
• It takes a little while longer to get out of the parking lot after a game.

The cost to remedy all these injustices? The Red Wings acknowledge that it would cost $10 million. But the Red Wings don’t want to do this. They’re letting their lease expire and instead want a new arena in downtown Detroit.

The funny thing is that all of these travesties that Joe Louis Arena throw at fans haven’t stopped those fans from turning out in droves to watch the Red Wings — since 2007, the Red Wings have filled The Joe to no less than 94 percent capacity, making them one of the very top draws in the NHL. It also hasn’t kept the Red Wings, who were the league runner-ups last year, from being arguably the most successful franchise in North American professional sports in the last 20 years.

Nevertheless, Red Wings owner Michael Ilitch is demanding a new arena, and as The Detroit News dutifully points out, the Red Wings may have trouble raising the money on their own. Not that professional sports franchises ever really count on covering the nut on their own facilities. Now it’s time to wait before the Red Wings hit up Detroit taxpayers to subsidize a new arena.

Of course, no one needs to explain how badly Detroit has been hit during this recession.

But perhaps someone should explain some context about $10 million in renovations compared to the cost of a new arena.

Since no proposal exists for a new Red Wings arena yet, let’s look at the newest NHL arena. That belongs to the as-of-yet-unopened Consol Energy Center for the Pittsburgh Penguins. It’s expected to cost $321 million.

$10 million is 3.12 percent of $321 million.

So now let’s think about this on a smaller level. Let’s say you had a few minor repairs to make on your house, like those that are apparently needed at Joe Louis Arena. The median house price in Detroit is $70,000. 3.12 percent of $70,000 is $2,184. Would you buy a whole other house rather than pony up $2,184 to renovate your place?

If you could spend someone else’s money, you probably would. Now you know how a sports franchise owner thinks.

Of course, Ilitch has a net worth of $1.5 billion, so paying $10 million on his own for the renovations wouldn’t be too tough on him. In fact, that’s less than 1 percent of his net worth. A new arena, using the $321 million figure, is 21.4 percent of his net worth.

Let’s hope if Ilitch is going to build a new downtown arena that he does the right thing for Detroit and pays for it himself.

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Reports have surfaced that University of Southern California head football coach Pete Carroll has reached an agreement to coach the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. He will reportedly be introduced as the team’s new head coach on Monday, just days after the organization kicked last season’s coach Jim Mora to the curb.

At first blush, it’s a puzzling deal for Carroll, who endured a lousy run in the NFL, logging a vanilla 33-31 record through two coaching stints with the New York Jets and New England Patriots.

Then he went to coach USC in 2001, where he seemed to hit his stride in the college ranks and elevate a once-moribund Trojans program. His teams there were always contenders for the national championship, even winning a pair in 2003 and 2004.

Why Carroll would leave USC and return to the vastly different culture of the NFL is anyone’s guess for now, but we’ll take a stab at what might be going on.

It will be very interesting to see if any additional shoes are getting ready to drop at USC as it pertains to various investigations with ongoing alleged player scandals. The best known is the Reggie Bush Affair, where the former Heisman-winning running back has been accused of taking thousands of dollars worth of gifts from hangers-on looking forward to making money off of his professional career. More recently, Trojans running back Joe McKnight faced scrutiny for driving a car around USC campus that belongs to a local businessman, a transgression patently against NCAA rules. McKnight was held out of the Trojan’s Dec. 26 Emerald Bowl victory over Boston College due to the investigation.

Whether Carroll  is running from these investigations remains to be seen, but the advent of coaches leaving teams just before the NCAA slaps a program with sanctions is not without precedent. In 2002, the NCAA imposed sanctions against the University of Colorado and its football team for various misdeeds while Rick Neuheisel coached there. Sports followers may remember that Neuheisel abruptly left Boulder for the University of Washington as NCAA investigations began picking up steam. While the NCAA did lightly sanction Neuheisel when he arrived at Washington, the Colorado Buffaloes football program bore the brunt of the NCAA’s penalties.

More recently, former University of Memphis Tigers head basketball coach John Calipari hot-footed it to the University of Kentucky just months before the NCAA handed down sanctions against his erstwhile team for transgressions that occurred under his watch. The NCAA vacated all of Memphis’ victories from its 2007-08 championship runner-up season because former star Derrick Rose was supposed to be ineligible, among other things. True, Calipari’s move to Kentucky made him the highest paid coach with a far more prestigious program than Memphis, but the timing was certainly convenient for Calipari, much like his departure from the University of Massachusetts in 1996 to coach the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, the year UMass went to the Final Four. That appearance was later vacated by the NCAA, too, for Calipari-era transgressions.

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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion money grab passed in an effort to defibrillate a flatlining economy, create or save jobs and…put asses in football stadium seats?

For the second time we know of — there may well have been others — self-interested stadium proponents are trying to secure federal stimulus funding to make improvements to a football stadium.

The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., is reportedly eyeing a Dec. 31, 2010 deadline to secure its allowance from Uncle Sam to replenish what its supporters describe repeatedly as a stadium in decline. It’s a strange characterization, given that the stadium was good enough to host the college football Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day and will host the upcoming Bowl Championship Series finale.

A New York Times article from last week does a fine job of burying the main news when it casually mentions in the fifth paragraph that the Rose Bowl is eligible for federal stimulus financing for $164 million in supposedly much-needed renovations to the stadium.

To be fair, the 92,542-seat Rose Bowl is owned by the city of Pasadena, which makes it somewhat less obtuse than the billionaire private owner of the New England Patriots seeking federal stimulus money for an improvement to Gillette Stadium parking lots.

Still, the notion that a stadium is the highest and best use — or any kind of use — for stimulus funding is fairly nauseating.

Here’s why: The same article points harkens back to the old Orange Bowl stadium, which locals in Miami worried would become an eyesore the older it got. That’s after the former Miami Dolphins owner couldn’t convince city leaders to back his expensive upgrades to the stadium in the 1980s. So he built his own stadium elsewhere in Miami, which shows that rebuffing an NFL owner’s request doesn’t automatically mean the franchise will leave the area. A new stadium for the Dolphins got built across town. The Orange Bowl did malinger until 2008 when it was destroyed, only to eventually be replaced by a new baseball stadium in 2012 for the Florida Marlins. That project requires $347 million in public financing from Miami-Dade County. One stadium replaces another and public money is the magic that makes it happen.

If the Rose Bowl does decide to go forth with a request for federal stimulus money for its upgrades, here’s to hoping they miss their deadline a little less than a year from now.

The Rose Bowl’s Web site describes the facility as “America’s Stadium.” What could be more American than using tax money to subsidize sports entertainment?

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Finally, the NCAA has a prime opportunity to prove that it is an effective and devoted defender of its mission: amateur college athletics. Or it could just prove that it is a Trojan horse to its own cause.

The University of Southern California imposed sanctions upon itself for the scandal that enveloped its basketball program and its former star, O.J. Mayo, who was accused of taking improper gifts while playing under the guise of NCAA amateur athletics. The Los Angeles Times reports that the USC Trojans athletics department will not let its surging men’s basketball team play in the PAC-10 Conference tournament or the NCAA postseason tournament this year. That’s the worst of it, as it renders the Trojans season, which is riding the wave of a eight-game winning streak, essentially a waste. The program will also lose one scholarship this season and the next, as well as vacate all its 21 victories from the 2007-08 season, the season Mayo played for the Trojans.

These penalties do not preclude further penalties by the NCAA, but the Trojans administration surely understands that slapping itself on the wrist usually means the NCAA won’t do so afterwards.

If the NCAA is at all serious about upholding the thinly-veiled amateur status of college athletics, it will impose much stricter and much longer penalties than the ones USC has put upon itself.

Baylor University was given similar sanctions after a sordid affair with its men’s basketball program resulted in a player being murdered by a teammate and the team’s erstwhile coach imploring players to lie to investigators about the player’s death in 2003. It was perhaps the most pathetic college sports scandal to ever happen. Aside from a few peripheral penalties, all the NCAA did was bar the team from playing non-conference games for the 2005-06 season. Since that truncated season, Baylor Bears basketball has only gotten stronger, making the NCAA or NIT postseason tournaments twice since the 2007-08 season whereas the program hadn’t made the NCAA tournament since the 1987-88 season.

Clearly, the O.J. Mayo situation is not as significant as the Baylor Bears saga. Mayo was accused — and apparently found responsible — of accepting thousands of dollars in gifts from a sports promoter ostensibly hoping to cash in on Mayo’s future fame in the NBA, where he now plays. Clearly, this does not comport with the NCAA’s stated mission of supporting amateur college athletics, from which the organization derives its tax-exempt status.

So how should the NCAA handle the USC Trojans, now that the matter rests squarely in its hands? USC has not been found guilty of major infractions by the NCAA since 2001, according to the NCAA’s sanction database. Therefore, the university is not eligible for the NCAA death penalty, which would bar the university from fielding a team for a season or more.

Short of that, though, the NCAA should institute a major penalty for such a major infractions that are so crosswise to amateur athletics. The NCAA should prolong USC’s self-imposed postseason ban from one year to four, a move that would wipe out interest from significant incoming recruits for several years. It would be a meaningful penalty and would send a clear message to other schools to take amateur rules seriously.

By the way, the NCAA is currently investigating former football running back Reggie Bush, who has been accused of taking improper gifts from other hangers-on hoping to make a buck off of his NFL fortunes. If found guilty, that would be a second major infraction within five years, assuming the NCAA can ever get is investigation wrapped up. If that happens, the death penalty, which hasn’t been used in any meaningful fashion by the NCAA since imposing it upon Southern Methodist University’s notoriously corrupt football program of the 1980’s, would seem appropriate.

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“We’re really disappointed these guys didn’t come through,” said Southern California Trojans head football coach Pete Carroll. “They had all the help in the world to get it done, and they didn’t do it.” via the Los Angeles Times.

No, Carroll is not referring to the results of the long-running NCAA investigation into his former player Reggie Bush, who is accused of illegally accepting thousands of dollars of gifts from marketers hoping to sign the 2005 Heisman Award winner once he went to the NFL.

Nor is Carroll speaking on behalf of the USC athletic department on the NCAA’s findings of its investigation into allegations that star Trojans basketball player O.J. Mayo similarly took cash and other high-priced gifts while playing under the guise of amateur college athletics.

The bad news coming out of Southern California is academics. Three football players for the Trojans didn’t do well enough in class to play Boston College in the school’s Dec. 26 Emerald Bowl game. Starters Anthony McCoy and Tyron Smith and utility defensive tackle Averell Spicer didn’t meet the NCAA’s low-bar academic standards to continue playing this Saturday.

As Carroll alludes to in his statement, it is true that NCAA student-athletes get everything they need to stay eligible — free tutors, athlete-only computer labs, priority class enrollment and so forth.

But it seems that at USC, student-athletes may be getting another type of help that isn’t allowed by NCAA rules — improper payments and support from boosters, agents and marketers hoping to cash in on certain athletes’ success.

Late last week, news surfaced that Trojans tailback Joe McKnight faces scrutiny from the USC athletics department for perhaps driving a car belonging to a local businessman, which is definitely against NCAA rules.

But one has to wonder what rules mean to the NCAA, if anything. Multi-year investigations into USC have revealed nothing.

The NCAA has been looking into the Reggie Bush matter since 2006. A New York Times reporter, Don Yaeger did not need much time to do his own investigation into the Bush matter. He published a book in 2008 about Bush’s suspicious relationship with marketers who allegedly curried favor with the running back and his family through exorbitant gifts while hoping they could earn his business when he went to the NFL. Yaeger’s book isn’t the definitive investigation of Bush, but it throughly documents a number of questionable transactions involving Bush and these sports agents, such as this receipt for $1,574 in charges for Bush to stay at a hotel — a $639 room rate coupled with a $42 breakfast room service and various other charges — on the agent’s dime while Bush was still supposed to be an amateur athlete.

So while the NCAA has been languishing on the Bush investigation, it decided to roll up the Mayo investigation into the Bush affair. But nothing has come of that, either. The Orange County Register reported last week that the NCAA is trying to build a case to demonstrate USC’s “lack of institutional control,” which is NCAA-speak similar to a judge telling a defendant, “I remand you to custody of the Bureau of Prisons.”

Except NCAA sanctions rarely have that kind of teeth. The NCAA found the University of Kansas lacked institutional control in 2006 due to several athletic department violations, but the school just got put on probation. That means a few sports will lose a couple scholarships and a promise that they won’t screw up again, but that’s about it.

Of course, the NCAA could be dragging its feet on the USC case because it may not have much of one. Maybe Bush and Mayo and McKnight are being railroaded unfairly. But anyone familiar with the NCAA and the way it handles investigations of big college sports programs, particularly successful ones, knows that these investigations have an air of finality to them. Little, if anything, will ever come of them. The NCAA can’t afford to to throw a program like USC to the enforcement wolves.

After all, it’s not like Bush and Mayo were flunking their humanities courses. Imagine if that had been the case.