Category Archives: Sports

Two bits of extra credit reading

Posted on December 16, 2011 by | 1 Comment

I’m not procrastinating from finishing up my fall term– honestly, I’m not!  Well, maybe a little.  In any event, I thought I’d pass along two links to things that I thought would be of interest here.

First, there’s  ”Bowling for Chumps,” by Pete Kotz in The Village Voice.  Alert EMUTalk reader Dick Schwarze posted this in the comments and I thought it deserved a promotion to the main part of the site.  Kind of a long piece, but an extremely detailed account of the highly dubious world of college bowl games.  Makes me glad that the Emus didn’t quite get there this year.

Second, there’s “What is College For?” a column in the “opinionator” part of the New York Times by Gary Gutting.  It simply puts out there an answer to the question at hand that is a useful reminder that college is about more than job training and that both faculty and students have an obligation to remember that.  I found it an inspiring way to get to that pile of grading.

Speaking of which….

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Posted in Academics, Blogosphere, Faculty Life, In the media..., Sports, Student Life

“Women defeat U of M, James sets EMU record”

Posted on December 12, 2011 by | 2 Comments

I haven’t been following basketball too closely yet, but as the Echo reported, it would appear the women’s team is doing pretty well– at least they just beat Michigan and they’re 6-3 right now.  I have no idea if U of M’s women’s basketball team is any good this year– and guessing from this game, I’d guess not– but it’s still always good to see the Emus come out on top of that other university in town.

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Posted in College Fun, In the media..., Sports

At the EMU-MSU game, perhaps the ZOOperstars were the highlight

Posted on November 28, 2011 by | 6 Comments

I’ve been pretty busy with the ol’ day job since returning from my undisclosed location over the Thanksgiving break, so my apologies for some of the layout issues with the banner pictures on the site.  I’m hoping to fix that yet this week if things slow down a bit.  But I did have time to notice in my news feed that Michigan State came out a little ahead of EMU on Sunday’s game.  And by “little ahead,” I mean that MSU didn’t lap EMU; rather, they only won 72-40.  Holy cannoli, that ain’t good.  And there were only 3,711 folks there?  Really?

 
Well, at least there was this bit from some group/person/fake animal called the ZOOperstars:

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Posted in College Fun, In the media..., Sports

Emus get flushed by the flashes

Posted on November 20, 2011 by | 2 Comments

I think it is fair to say now that the Emu’s chances for a football bowl game, even in something like the Scruffy McFerson’s Chicken Pick’in Bowl, are now zero with the loss to the Kent State “Golden Flashes.”

Here’s a link to the annarbor.com story; here’s a link to the emueagles.com story.  Either way, they lost to Kent State 28-22, which means the Emu’s only chance at a bowl at this point (and it’d only be a “chance,” not a guarantee) is to beat a favored Northern Illinois team in Illinois.  Which means no one ought to be buying plane tickets to New Orleans or whatever other bowl town just yet.

So, let’s just assume for a moment that things go as expected at Northern Illinois and the Emus lose.  Stranger upsets have happen, so this is by no means a forgone conclusion– I mean, it’s not like their last game is against Michigan or something.  But again, let’s just assume that what comes to pass and the Emus finish 6-6 overall and 4-4 in the conference.  What have we learned here?

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Posted in In the media..., Sports

“Penn State could learn lessons from EMU’s failure to report crime”

Posted on November 19, 2011 by | 1 Comment

annarbor.com ran an article called “Penn State could learn lessons from EMU’s failure to report crime,” which is really about this article on the ABC News web site, “Lessons for Penn State:  Cover-Ups Cost Money, Student Lives.”  By the way, annarbor.com seems to do this a lot, running stories as if they came up with them from other web sites.  Kind of like this blog, only a) I’m always pretty clear on giving credit, and b) I don’t claim to be a news source– more a rumor source, frankly.  But I digress.

Anyway, I think the ABC story is actually kind of a mish-mosh mess and I don’t really see the connections to the Dickinson murder.  Oh, don’t get me wrong– Dickinson’s rape and murder were obviously horrible, and the EMU administration’s cover-up of it was also obviously horrible.  But the botched handling of Dickinson’s murder happened in a short period of time and among a relatively small group of administrators, whereas the child abuse scandal at Penn State seems to have gone on for years and it involved a lot of people.

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Posted in Dickinson Murder, In the media..., Sports

“Hrabowski: An educator focused on math and science”

Posted on November 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

To take folks into the weekend, I thought I’d share this video from a story about Freeman Hrabowski that was on 60 Minutes last weekend.  Here’s a link to it if the embedded video doesn’t work.

Hrabowski is the President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which is a university sorta/kinda like EMU in some ways– both are regional institutions with a history of working with “at risk” and otherwise non-traditional students, commuters, etc.  It’s an inspiring piece about the ways that he’s leading innovation there.  Anyway, one of the things he talks about in this interview (albeit briefly) is football.  From the transcript:

Hrabowski: We need hands on experiences. We need to be encouraging that curiosity. And people cannot– should not be allowed simply to sit back and be bored.

Students can also get jobs and internships at one of 76 companies located on campus. Most are technology startups. They get help growing their businesses and tax credits, along with access to students and faculty. One thing you won’t find at UMBC…

Pitts: You had a chance to get a football team at UMBC, right? And you said no?

Hrabowski: People talk about that. Right. I mean, well– well, first of all, it takes a lot of money for a football team to win.

Hrabowski prefers to win on different playing fields. Incoming freshman Francois Rice noticed right away.

Francois Rice: It seems like everything’s flipped. Where, you might go to another university and the football team might be top dog. Here, it’s the chess team that’s top dog. And it’s–

Pitts: The chess team?

Rice: Yeah, it’s cool to be smart.

Rice is part of the 23rd incoming class of Meyerhoff Scholars – a program that recruits high achievers in math, science and engineering who are aiming for graduate degrees and careers in research.

Oh, if we had only put our money into the chess team.  Or academics, or something.

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Posted in Academics, Budgets, EMU President, In the media..., Sports

EMU women’s basketball wins a close one

Posted on November 14, 2011 by | Leave a comment

No, not really.  annarbor.com said it was 110-31 over Marygrove.  Good lord, that’s what I call a blow-out.

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Posted in In the media..., Sports

“Bowl Worthy?”

Posted on November 14, 2011 by | 19 Comments

annarbor.com is wondering aloud about all this: “Bowl-worthy? Eastern Michigan football team hammers Buffalo, 30-17.”  Here’s a quote:

The Eagles are 6-4 (4-2 Mid-American Conference). They went 2-10 last season and 0-12 the previous season. It’s the most victories in the regular season they’ve had since they went 6-5 in 1995.

By no means, however, does reaching seven wins guarantee Eastern Michigan a bid to play in a bowl game. Just three MAC teams are contracted to receive bids, while as many as seven could be eligible. Eastern needs seven wins because it has two FBS victories and only one counts for bowl eligibility.

It’s good to see the team has improved quite a bit– though we can’t forget that this improved team has cost EMU a lot of money it doesn’t have.  A LOT of money.  But a bowl game?

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Posted in College Fun, In the media..., Sports

Sports, sports, and more sports

Posted on November 12, 2011 by | 5 Comments

I feel like it’s ESPN around here, what with basketball and football in full swing, not to mention all the other sports going on around now.  Just a few highlights heading into the weekend:

  • Yahoo sports has the Emus only a slight favorite over the Buffalo Bulls for today’s football game at 1, which kind of surprises me because Buffalo kinda sucks, having not won a road game all year and with only one conference win over Ohio.  Speaking of road games:  this is apparently the Emu’s last home game, but they still have three games on the road yet this fall, which is all to say that this is still a season that could go either way.
  • Men’s and women’s basketball both won last night, though I assume that in both cases, that was to be expected (I think?)  I don’t know how either team is predicted to finish the season, though I assume the men’s team will be so-so at best while Murphy figures out what to do and starts bringing in recruits.
  • A colleague of mine and basketball enthusiast was telling me that for tickets to the EMU vs. MSU game (that’s right, we’re playing Michigan State at home this year) was telling me that to get tickets for that game, you had to buy a bundle of five tickets for other games, too.  A pretty smart idea for EMU sports to sell some tickets, obviously.  I was all set to buy until I saw that the game is at noon on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which is when I am likely to be driving back to Ypsilanti from undisclosed extended family locations.  Doh!

Anyway, go Emus.  Oh, and go Hawks too, a slight underdog today against MSU in Iowa City.  But I suppose a lot of eyes will be on the Penn State-Nebraska game, which this article on Yahoo sports describes as possibly the strangest game ever.  I don’t know if the game will be that strange, but yeah, a lot on everyone’s mind that doesn’t have to do with football.

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Posted in In the media..., Sports

“Penn State Said to Be Planning Paterno’s Exit Amid Scandal”

Posted on November 8, 2011 by | 19 Comments

This is a little off-topic, but the sex scandal in the football program at Penn State is such a big story, and now comes this from the New York Times,“Penn State Said to Be Planning Paterno’s Exit Amid Scandal.”  Here are the opening paragraphs:

Joe Paterno’s tenure as coach of the Penn State football team will soon be over, perhaps within days or weeks, in the wake of a sex-abuse scandal that has implicated university officials, according to two people briefed on conversations among the university’s top officials.

The board of trustees has yet to determine the precise timing of Paterno’s exit, but it is clear that the man who has more victories than any other coach at college football’s top level and who made Penn State a prestigious national brand will not survive to coach another season. Discussions about how to manage his departure have begun, according to the two people.

I guess we’ll find out more as this thing unravels.  On the one hand, it seems to me that if he reported this when he found out about it, he did his part.  On the other hand, maybe just reporting and washing his hands of it was not enough, and the allegations of abuse are bad enough that just reporting it and hoping it works out really is not enough.

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Posted in In the media..., Sports