First off, I'm humbled whenever one of my fellow bloggers has anything nice to say about BSD, which is why I want to take a moment to thank Lake The Posts for awarding BSD an LTP Bloggy Award.
Goes to Black Shoe Diaries. I don't care that there is no name on their jersey, BSD sets the bar for pregame analysis position by position. Perhaps Mr. Colby should have been paying more attention to BSD?
I don't know who the hell Mr. Colby is, but he doesn't sound like a very smart guy if he's not reading BSD. For that matter I don't know who the hell Dave Eanet is either, but he sounds like a pretty smart guy if LTP associates BSD with him. But thanks to Lake the Posts, both my favorite and least favorite Northwestern blog.
The men's basketball team made it two in a row with a 61-38 victory over Princeton. Not exactly dancing monkey material, but we're talking baby steps here, people. Baby steps.
I'm looking at the boxscore now, and without having seen the game the stat line of Jeff Brooks caught my attention. In 14 minutes he had 6 points on 3-of-4 shooting, four rebounds, an assist, two blocks, and three steals. Hopefully the freshman is starting to build some confidence. If so our bench will be very impressive.
But the stat of the game is the continued woes at the free throw line. I thought shooting 50% was bad. Against Princeton the Lions shot a lowly 4-of-12 (33%). That's terrible, and if they don't get better we're going to have a tough time winning games when conference play starts.
Speaking of basketball, I'm sure if you're all like me you lie awake at night wondering what ever happened to Joe Crispin. Well, Big Ten Chronicle has your answer. So sleep well tonight. No charge.
Moving on to football we have a few things to discuss. First, Kermit Buggs has been named safeties coach to replace Brian Norwood. There are rumblings among various insiders that the way Brian Norwood was unceremoniously asked to leave the team wasn't pretty and several assistant coaches are pissed off to the point of thinking about leaving. I won't go into the details other than to tell you rumors are floating around. We'll have to sit tight and see how things pan out.
In other news, good bye Arkansas State and hello Oregon State in 2008.
The Beavers will visit Beaver Stadium on Sept. 6, 2008, replacing Arkansas State on next year's slate. Oregon State is the only Pacific-10 Conference team Penn State has not faced on the gridiron.
Great move by Curley to bring in a quality opponent, though some insiders would tell you this was Curley scrambling to find an opponent after it was Arkansas State who backed out of the deal with us. In either case playing the Beavers will give us a lot more credibility in the eyes of the voters. Unfortunately all credibility will be shot when we only score 33 points against Coastal Carolina.
And finally, congratulations to Dan Connor for being named a Two-Time First Team All American by the Associated Press. I guess he doesn't suck as bad as the Ohio State bloggers would lead us to believe.