All about the student-athlete? Congressman Glenn "GT" Thompson and State Congressman Charlie Dent have signed off on a letter to our pal Mark Emmert, requesting that the 40 scholarships taken from Penn State be immediately restored.
"I want to make it clear to the NCAA who they are really hurting with this scholarship reduction," Dent said in a press release. "It’s not Jerry Sandusky and it’s not the University. They are hurting young people who are completely innocent of anything relating to the Sandusky situation and who through no fault of their own are being denied a chance to get a great education."
I may be biased, but it's hard to argue against the two congressmen in this case. By eliminating scholarships from a program, the NCAA is just taking away the opportunity for someone to receive a free education. If the NCAA truly wanted to use scholarship reductions as a deterrent against cheating to gain a competitive advantage (??), they should find a way to allocate the scholarships elsewhere so they aren't taking away someone's education. By now, we all know there's a slim chance of the NCAA doing anything logical when it comes to helping student-athletes gain an education.
A Rat in Tom's House Might Eat Tom's Ice Cream: Speaking of education, Yahoo! Sports had some nice coverage of Penn State starting guard John Urschel who also happens to teach trigonometry.
Urschel graduated in three years with a degree in mathematics and is currently in graduate school. He’s already published a 32-page paper titled, "Instabilities of the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem" in the online journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.Um, wow.
As many of you know, Urschel has built a reputation as likely the most intelligent person ever to suit up in a Penn State football uniform in addition to mauling B10 defensive linemen. Based on the video, Urschel has the personality to bring out the most of his students in the classroom.
So It's All Come to This:s Akron's basketball team will start wearing the team's Twitter handle on the back of the jerseys. So for those of you scoring at home- Twitter handles on the back of jerseys are fine, but don't even think of honoring a former player that died in a tragic car accident well before his time.
Stars Matter? The ESPN B10 blog takes a look back at the 2009 recruiting class to see how the highly-touted players panned out for each program. The "stars don't matter" crowd will definitely want to add this information to their arsenal.
Letters from Mauti: It was obvious to anyone who watched Michael Mauti play during the past season that he had an undeniable passion for the game of football. In case that was missed on anyone, Mauti recently sat down and wrote letters to all 32 NFL general managers to put into words just how much the game of football means to him. All I know is that one NFL team will gain an extremely talented linebacker who is brimming with leadership this April.