The Backyard Brawl comes to Twitter

BracketCat's football roster countdown is a double header to mark 38 days to kickoff: fullback Winston Dimel and long snapper Dalton Harman.

Jon Morse helps with 2015 preseason conditioning, this time with a thought-provoking analysis of whether soccer-style relegation is still a good idea. Oh, and he previews North Star and Mid-States football.

Kansas State has announced the 2016 Hall of Fame class. The group includes Steve Anson (baseball), Michael Bishop (football), Dawn Cady (volleyball), Martin Gramatica (football), Max Moss (men’s basketball), Nicole Ohlde (women’s basketball), Sean Snyder (football), Connie Teaberry (track and field) and Kendra Wecker (women’s basketball), along with former Voice of the Wildcats, Mitch Holthus. Jon Morse reported on this in detail.

Who are the top-20 student-athletes in the state of Kansas? Well, this piece suggests that most of them are from Wichita State and Kansas, with only Joe Hubener and Wesley Iwundu making the grade for Kansas State.

The (in)famous Backyard Brawl between Pittsburgh and West Virginia is now a thing of the past, the two teams having moved on to greener pastures in different conferences. But the acrimony remains, as demonstrated by the recent Twitter exchange between Pat Narduzzi and Dana Holgorsen (David Hale, ESPN). Narduzzi, in trying to revive the dormant rivalry with Penn State, ticked off Holgorsen and an epic spitting contest on Twitter ensued (Matt Hauswirth, WV Illustrated). All this begs the question: where are the parents and why are these children not better supervised?

The dread pirate Mike Leach is never far from our thoughts. One of our commentariat even suggested Leach as a possible replacement for Bill Snyder, and he's certainly an intriguing prospect. But today, he's in the news for a different reason. Leach riffed on Tom Brady and #DeflateGate, noting that the inflation of a football has little impact on the outcome of the game and that the entire fiasco is a red herring keeping the NFL from focusing on the important issues. And because this is Mike Leach, he somehow managed to drag the British royal family into this discussion (Mark Schlabach, ESPN).

Kansas State's Connie Jaffrey is among the field of golfers teeing off at the 2015 British Open starting today at Turnberry in her native Scotland. Jaffrey, a rising sophomore, qualified via the the Ladies Golf Union Order of Merit, which takes into account players’ performance during a number of European Ladies Amateur events throughout the year.