Last week the SEC donated $500,000 to the University of Alabama to assist with tornado relief in Tuscaloosa. This is a worthy use of the conference's lucre, certainly much more than paying the salaries of some of the conference's referees.
Just wait. You'll never guess.
In the New Orleans Times-Picayune, guess who is the preseason No. 1 team. Ready? It's LSU! Yeah, I'm as shocked as you are. Seriously though, the Bayou Bengals aren't a bad national championship pick, given that they won the last two national title games held in NOLA. The paper hedges a bit with Alabama as a No. 2 team though, and it's got Arkansas lurking in the six spot.
There's no such thing as too many too-early polls.
CBS has its post-spring top 25 out too, but it has everyone's favorite Oklahoma on top with Bama second and LSU third. It also has the Razorbacks 12th, a bold pick in Auburn at 15, South Carolina at 18, Mississippi State at 20, Georgia at 23, and Florida at 25.
Can someone explain this to me?
Supposedly, something about these less redacted versions of Jim Tressel's emails indicate there was a cover up at Ohio State. At least, that's what everyone's been saying. However, we knew the confidentiality excuse was bunk for a while. We knew Tressel forwarded the emails to Ted Sarniak for a while. We've known for a couple of weeks that OSU didn't release some of the emails initially, something the school called inadvertent for what it's worth. So what exactly is new here?
Apparently Ohio State fans are getting even more annoying with their playing the victim here, so the sports director for the local sports radio station warned them to pipe down. Apparently the station is getting tons of tips that it's investigating, and the guy flat-out told fans that it's "only the beginning." What other sordid details are going to come out of Columbus?
None of this is new news per se, but Hog Database compiled a list of all of the NCAA violations by and allegations thereof against Auburn into a single post. Essentially, pay-for-play got started there back in the '50s, and there's not been so much as a five-year window without it allegedly going on in either football or basketball since the mid-'70s. It's a bit jarring to take in all at once.