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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, December 09, 2004

UD HAS DECIDED SHE'S TOTALLY ON BOARD FOR THIS!

HOW ABOUT YOU
?




"Sick of bad BCS joke? Join the Boycott College Sham movement.

By MIKE NADEL
STAFF WRITER

There are 28 bowl games, and I plan to avoid watching even one second of any of them. Please join me in this fan's BCS - Boycott College Sham.

The people who run NCAA football don't care about the athlete-students they claim to represent. They don't care about fairness. And they certainly don't care about you and me.

So let's celebrate this holiday season by skipping the Holiday Bowl. The 27 others, too.

None of them mean a rat's rear anyway.

Including the Orange Bowl.

Especially the Orange Bowl.

National title game? Please. Why are USC and Oklahoma more deserving than Auburn, Utah or a half-dozen others? Because sportswriters, coaches and computers say so? Right.

The evening of Jan. 4, I will go to a high school basketball game, take my wife to a movie, play board games with my kids - anything but watch a sham title game.

I have been in this business for 22 years and have been a fan a lot longer than that, and I'm still waiting to hear one good reason why Division I-A football should be the only NCAA sport lacking an equitable way to crown a champion.

And it's not just the title game. The entire system is a mess. A joke. A billion-dollar sham.

Coaches are sniping at each other for refusing to make public which six colleagues downgraded Cal in the ESPN/USA Today sham poll.

In the AP's sham poll, several writers also mysteriously changed their minds, unwittingly conspiring with the coaches to send Texas, not Cal, to the Rose Bowl for a $15 million payday.

Hmmm. In Journalism 1, I was taught we should report the news, not make it.

OK, I'm willing to make news, too - by leading operation Boycott College Sham.

Don't watch bowls. Don't buy products sold by bowl sponsors. Show the sham artists exactly what you think by giving them the attention they deserve: none.

Twenty-eight bowls. Not one second of our time. Are you with me?"