First Post

At the urging of more than one person, I finally decided to put out my own blog.  Mostly on sports, because that seems to take up too much of what I talk about in my free time, but occasionally on other things.  Just a forewarning, some things that you could expect being referenced in about every report will be: any and all Pittsburgh teams, ultimate frisbee, and probably some obscure Greece/Archaeology reference.  Pittsburgh holds my three favorite sports teams so expect to hear about them most directly, but I am starting off here with something way more national: college football.

As everyone who checks espn.com daily like me now knows, Texas Christian University (TCU) has decided to move to the Big East.  It makes logical football sense, its a BCS bowl eligible conference year in and year out, if my favorite broncos at Boise State had won out they would have potentially kept TCU out of any BCS bowl, which would stink, and it eliminates the whole they-don't-play-in-a-real-conference-argument-they-don't-deserve-to-be-that-high-in-the-rankings argument (but only if you count the Big East as a legitimate football conference, which they really aren't, but that's another rant for me to start later).  This all makes sense.  One thing glaringly wrong with the decision is the distance.  TCU is in, well Texas, and the Big East is not so close to Texas in terms of its sphere of influence.  What's wrong with that? Well, let's say your a division I athlete, even in a sport other than football.  This means all of your conference games/matches happen about a thousand miles away, leaving you far away from the classroom, missing days of class and time you could spend studying, even if you are someone who can study on a plane.  I play ultimate frisbee, and I am away only on weekends, and even then, some people find it necessary to miss a tournament from time to time.  While the people you find on a frisbee team are not the same people you would find on a Division I sports team, you mean to tell me that the some athlete on, say, the TCU women's basketball team, who could play somewhere around three to four games in the course of the week is now supposed to just miss class.  That's eliminating the student out of student-athlete pretty quickly and its the wrong message to send an 18-22 year old boy or girl.  The overemphasis on sports that bring money into a school in this case may have disastrous implications on how we handle college sports. 

I expect several articles from such places as ESPN.com and other sources to start coming out in the next few days saying the same thing, and America in general should take a good look at itself before it thinks of how to deal with this kind of thing. (Best case scenario: BCS system gets eliminated for idiocy, but that is just too much to ask for).  Hello sports world: this is wrong.

IM THE WHITE MAMBAAAAAA!

I will have a lighter topic next time, I promise
-Luke