I'm in the dungeon all day, so I'm taking a break from reading about corporations -- it's as thrilling as it sounds -- to update the K-State news. Later on, we'll have a weekend open thread for the K-State/Texas Tech baseball series this weekend. For more on Tech, be sure to check in with Seth over at Double T Nation. Like, seriously. He has some good info on Tech baseball over there.
What? Baseball? The KC Star apparently just discovered this week that Big 12 schools -- well, 10 of them, anyway -- play baseball in the springtime. After making such a momentous discovery, the sports editors dispatched K-State beat writer Howard Richman to find out how K-State is doing. Fair Howard discovered that, well, they aren't doing very well, but they haven't given up, either.
All of which led to this brilliant headline on the Star's sports page today:
K-State baseball team hasn’t given up hope of reaching NCAA tourney
Thank goodness the players and coaches haven't given up because, well, you just never know (I was going to link to something involving that other school's national championship, but I didn't want to be civilly liable for any of you being injured by such a site). But things are looking pretty far gone right now, what with our last-place conference standing and all.
Fake Football! Get ready fans, because on Saturday at Bill's House, you can see K-State take on K-State. To the winner goes a dinner of steak and lobster, to the loser a bologna sandwich.
Here are the rosters for the game, and as you can see the White squad looks pretty strong. It features Josh Freeman, working behind Alesana Alesana and Jordan Bedore, with Antwon Moore and Ian Campbell roaming the field on the other side of the ball.
Blazing Media Hypocrisy: A few months ago, I wrote wrote a post about the Kansas and Kansas City media's apparent indifference toward the news that KU had recruited Jocques Crawford, a young man who was accused of aggravated rape before pleading down to misdemeanor simple assault. At the time, I considered this quite curious, because the same media outlets had almost uniformly excoriated Bill Snyder for recruiting Marcus Raines.
But now, not only do we not have the Kan./KC media outlets condemning Mark Mangino, but we have a national sports columnist (Dennis Dodd) praising him for giving Crawford a second chance.
While I don't accuse Dodd of hypocrisy for his article, it is unbelievable that in this situation nobody can keep straight who deserves criticism. Observe this quote from John Dowtin, who was one of Crawford's high school coaches in Memphis.
The coach was so incensed by the invective against Kansas on a Kansas State message board he reminded posters that their school once recruited Marcus Raines. The former JUCO linebacker pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter before eventually signing with Southern Miss. Dowtin went so far as to post his phone number so he could explain Crawford's situation to Wildcats fans. One poster called him.
I note that Dowtin also emailed me after my initial post regarding Crawford, and we had an amicable discussion of the situation.
First of all, our invective should not be aimed at KU (at least not in this situation). They are giving a kid a second chance that is probably deserved. In 2004, Bill Snyder was willing to give Marcus Raines a second chance that was probably deserved. Likewise, our invective should not be aimed at Crawford, because there is significant controversy regarding what really happened and there never was a full adjudication of the facts. But what Dowtin and others don't realize is that it continually blows me away that the media has knighted Mangino for giving a kid a second chance, while just a few years ago it villified Snyder for trying to do the same thing.
My Ignorance, Revisited: Back on national signing day, or more accurately shortly thereafter, I wrote a long, nonsensical post about K-State's 2008 recruiting class. In the post, I noted that I didn't understand how we would sign more than 25 players, which was pretty dumb on my part because a little simple research would have provided the answer.
Anyway, the venerable blog Sunday Morning QB has a comprehensive look at this phenomenon, especially in regard to the continuing trials and tribulations of Nick Saban at Alabama. Boiled down: while we oversigned this year, we're not anywhere near the public-relations disaster that is impending at Alabama, where Saban is quite likely to be forced either to pull a scholarship offer (or several) from a recruit who signed a letter of intent, or to pull a scholarship (or several) from a returning player who has made fairly significant contributions to the program.
As usual, I'm quite thankful not to be an Alabama fan.
More later. Back to shareholder voting rights.