Joe Buck and His High Horse School of Journalism

“Hi Class, thanks again for showing up to Lazy Journalism 101, I’m professor Joe Buck and our motto here is, “Beat that dead horse that nobody cares about until people start caring about it.” Let’s jump straight into this week’s dead horse story: OJ Mayo taking money from a shady agent’s rep. Who would like to comment on this story? Anyone? Anyone? Nobody wants to get fired up and worked up into a tizzy about this? Oh, I see a hand in the back there, Pat Forde, please share your thoughts.”

“Well, teach…it’s like this:

"When you recruit someone radioactive, you better have everything checked down to the smallest detail. Or else your program turns into Three Mile Island."

“Very well done, Mr. Forde. Equating a broke kid from middle-of-nowhere West Virginia whose mom didn’t have enough money to pay for a cell phone bill to a nuclear disaster is a great use of hyperbole and I commend you greatly. Who would like to piggyback on Mr. Forde’s statement?”

“Professor Buck?”

“Yes? Who are you? I’ve never seen you in this class before, Mr.--?”

“Yeah, it's BG and actually I was looking for the bathroom but I wanted to say that I don’t think anybody really cares about this story. Are we really supposed to be surprised? Didn’t SLAM Magazine write the whole ‘Mayo signing with SC thing seems fishy’ article like a year ago? This sort of thing happens all of the time.”

“You seem pretty sure of yourself, but how can you argue that this doesn’t compromise the integrity of the NCAA, the NBA and American society as we know it?”

“Seeing as how the NCAA makes billions of dollars off of these players, seeing as how their coaches make hundreds of thousands if not millions off of these players, why not pay them a stipend? Say $20,000 for each full scholarship? Then if they are still greedy and can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar then slap them with a lifetime NBA ban. If I was OJ Mayo I probably would have held out for a hell of a lot more than a TV and a new iPhone.”

“You would make a terrible talking head and there’s no room for you in this class, get the hell out of here and please don’t trip over my soapbox on your way out the door. Class, please pay no attention to that man. There is always outrage to be found in every story. Now go out there and find it."

WAC, Mountain West be stupidest

Not sure why EastCoastSPN hasn’t picked up on this yet, but report cards are out and the NCAA has slapped 218 teams at 123 schools with sanctions stemming from poor academic performance as defined by Academic Progress Rates.

Teams had to meet an APR of 925, which equates to graduating about 60 percent of a team’s scholarship players.

While the numbers are getting better overall, a number of programs are still looking dumb and are losing scholarships in the process. And the WAC and Mountain West are looking really stupid (6 of the 7 football teams on notice out West).

The best West Coast teams in both football (USC) and men’s basketball (UCLA) made the cut, but there are some big names on there, including Hawaii in football and USC in men’s basketball. Also, GSnides and BG have been served notice down there at UCSB. Quit ditchin’ class to write your blogs fools.

Here are the West Region dummies in football along with the number of scholarships they’ll be limited to (out of 85) for at least another year:

Hawaii: 84
Idaho: 77
New Mexico State: 82
San Diego State: 79
San Jose State: 67
UNLV: 84
Washington State: 77

Here are the West Region dummies in men’s basketball with the number of scholarships they’ll be limited to (out of 13):
Cal State Northridge: Public notice
Cal State Sacramento: Limit of 12 next year
Colorado: Public notice
Colorado State: 11
Fresno State: 10
Hawaii: 11
Idaho: 12
New Mexico: 12
New Mexico State: 12
Portland State: Public notice
San Francisco: 12
San Jose State: 11
Southern Utah: 12
Texas State: Public notice
UC Santa Barbara: Public notice
USC: 11
Wyoming: 12