Nitt Picks Agrees That Losing Is A Shame

Earning it.  Penn State Baseball 2010 is on its way after this past weekend's Big Ten/BIG EAST Challenge.  Game winners early and often:

In the three games of the Challenge, Penn State won in 12, won in 13 and lost in 10. They haven't yet played a regulation baseball game.

As for the rest of the league, Ohio State leads the early standings at 5-1; they also sit atop the RPI ranking list.  

One of the things that came up when we were all talking about Texas and Big Ten expansion was the minor issue of them having a real baseball team and the midwest conference having none.  Although quite early, you get a glimpse of this when you look at the Big Ten's current RPI rankings, topping out at 90 and dipping way, way down below that.  A look at the 2009 final RPI says this is about right although a bit weighed down: the league finished last season with two teams in the top 50 and seven lower than the 100 spot.

(Industrial-sized T/F/J to UncleLar at Happy Valley Hardball, who is your go-to-guy for all things Nittany and baseball.)

The most meaningless thing in sports.  Or almost:

Bruce is one of the good guys, I don't mean to rag on him specifically because this is a whole culture I'm starring at, but: really, man?  If Bowman had run, say, a 4.70, 2 one-hundredths of a second faster, he'd have finished in the top ten amongst linebackers...and we would know nothing more about him than if he had run a 4.80.  

I know this is a tired rant, but even while I hear over and over again that 40 times are overblown, I seem to actually be hearing more and more about 40 times.  There are hundreds of hours of game tape on this guy, dozens of coaches that can talk about his strengths and weaknesses, and we're talking about a padless run of an arbitrary length that doesn't actually correlate very well with the linebacker position anyway.  Why?

All your Playstations are belong to Moye. The Wide Receiver is your champion:

The wide receiver won the eight-man NCAA 10 tournament against teammates at Damon's Grill as part of the second annual video game challenge to raise awareness for Global Rare Disease Day. Moye beat Nerraw McCormack in the final, 17-7.

But poor form, sir:

Moye played with Texas during the head-to-head games against teammates portion of the competition before going with Penn State when he had to play against the Georgia winner. Moye lost that game and said having to switch teams threw him off a bit.

Texas?  For shame.

Message board hot-button Lynn makes an appearance, in which he assures everyone: "As long as I'm on the field I'm happy."

Who needs a quarterback, anyway. Orson is funny and sarcastic and just totally nails it:

Pryor is already working on strengthening the knee with weight training and drills, but shouldn't be full speed for spring drills. In his place, Tressel plans to go without a quarterback, which Ohio State does every third year or so, and is really no problem since they manage to somehow win ten games whether they actually use a quarterback or not.

I've mentioned this before, but just so we remember going into Hype Season: Only two times all year, in the Purdue loss and the bowl game, did Pryor ever throw over Daryll Clark's 2009 average of 29 attempts.  His "arrival" is hardly something the stats suggest actually happened.

In scores of other games.  Brian Billick is "quite forceful in arguing that finding a quarterback is very difficult, saying that nobody knows anything."   Orson (yes, this is his second link) says the same thing in the EDSBS style you've come to expect.