First, the good news: Jameis Winston, the nation’s No. 1 quarterback recruit according to Recruiting Nation, has signed his letter of intent with Florida State and faxed it in. Better late than never. Winston didn’t sign on Wednesday, national signing day, because he was in Austin, Texas, at a high school all-star game. He returned home Thursday and made it official on Friday. Now the bad news: West Virginia has officially backed out of its 2012 game with Florida State scheduled for Sept.

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Good news, bad news for FSU
Filed under Football, News by on Feb 4th, 2012. Comment.
Oklahoma State has avoided any major surprises on Wednesday, but got welcome news when its top recruit, Dominic Ramacher, faxed in his letter of intent just before 9 a.m. local time, the school announced. Ramacher is the nation’s No. 3 tight end and No. 126 on the ESPNU 150. The Denton (Texas) Guyer star joins two of his former teammates as highly-recruited stars to make the move from Denton to Stillwater. Quarterback J.W. Walsh and receiver Josh Stewart just finished their freshman seasons for the Cowboys, who won the Big 12 title.

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Cowboys’ lone ESPNU 150 signee is official
Filed under Football, News by on Feb 1st, 2012. Comment.
Texas coach Mack Brown on the passing of Joe Paterno: “I’ve known Coach Paterno since I started coaching. Sally and I built a great relationship with him and Sue over the last 10 to 15 years, and we shared many great times. I know our lives are better because we had the opportunity to spend time with them. He was a gift to us, and when we heard the sad news today, we both openly wept, not only because college football lost a great man, but we lost a great friend.

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Mack Brown statement on Joe Paterno
Filed under Football, News by on Jan 22nd, 2012. Comment.
Baylor quarterback and Heisman winner Robert Griffin III will hold a news conference in Waco, Texas Wednesday to announce whether he’ll stay for his senior season or leave for the NFL. A family source told colleague Chris Mortensen this week that Griffin will turn pro and was in the process of selecting an agent. The deadline for underclassmen to formally petition for the NFL draft is Sunday. Griffin is projected as a top-10 pick and several personnel officials believe he could go high as the first or second choice depending on his pre-draft workouts and evaluations.

Filed under Football, News by on Jan 11th, 2012. Comment.
USF defensive coordinator Mark Snyder has accepted the same post at Texas A&M, according to multiple reports Monday. Coach Skip Holtz confirmed the news to Greg Auman of The St. Petersburg Times. Snyder has been USF defensive coordinator in the two years Holtz has served as head coach. Before that, Snyder was head coach at Marshall for five seasons. New Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin has ties to Conference USA, having just been hired from Houston.

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Report: USF DC Snyder to Texas A&M
Filed under Football, News by on Jan 9th, 2012. Comment.
An hour-long press conference from Texas head coach Mack Brown on Friday touched on numerous topics, including whether the school will pursue a JUCO/graduate transfer quarterback, attrition, injuries, and everything else an information-hungry Longhorn fan might want. Gorge yourself at the buffet of news!
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Mack Brown Bowl Presser: JUCO QBs, Attrition, Injuries, and More
Filed under Lets Talk Texas, News by on Dec 15th, 2011. Comment.
Houston had last Saturday off after easily dispatching Tulane on a Thursday night. Coach Kevin Sumlin was at home watching the end of the wild Texas A&M-Kansas State game when his phone started ringing. Text messages started flying in, too. He had one good guess about what was happening. TCU had beaten Boise State 36-35, opening the way for the Cougars to get an automatic bid into the BCS. “Nobody really calls me a lot on Saturday night, so I figured that’s what happened,” Sumlin said at his news conference this week.

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Houston controls its BCS destiny
Filed under Football, News by on Nov 17th, 2011. Comment.
Kirk Bohls: The Horns’ J’Covan Brown has an offensive mindset that has him looking for 30 points or 30 shots, whichever comes first. But here’s the really good news. He’s going to have help. Lots of it. Texas’ freshman class is “as good as advertised.”
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Longhorns will benefit from strong crop of freshmen
Filed under News by on Nov 15th, 2011. Comment.
Every week, your humble college basketball hoops blogger (er, me) will respond to your questions, comments and nonsensical rants in this here Hoopsbag. To submit a query, visit this page by clicking the link under my name in the upper right-hand corner of the blog. You can also email me or send me your entries via Twitter . (Honestly, the best way to get me is Twitter.) Per the usual, we begin with video. @ Purdidit writes : Each year has one or two: Which preseason top 10 team is most likely to fail to live up to expectations? Eamonn Brennan : This one’s actually pretty easy. It’s Memphis. For much of the summer, I thought the Tigers’ preseason ranking was going to be too high; with all this young talent, it’s easy to forget that Memphis was basically a so-so C-USA team for much of the 2010-11 season. Sure, the Tigers finished strong, and there’s reason to expect scaled improvements from a team that features so many sophomores that played big minutes as freshmen. The addition of highly-touted recruit Adonis Thomas helps, too. But top 10? Didn’t that seem just a little optimistic? What was I missing? I put Memphis at No. 17 in my preseason top-25 ballot . I thought that seemed fair. Then Ken Pomeroy released his preseason rankings (Memphis is ranked No. 20) and ESPN Insider and Basketball Prospectus maven John Gasaway broke things down in this Monday piece for Insider , and I’m more convinced than ever that Memphis isn’t a top-10 team. As John wrote, that doesn’t mean they won’t be a top-10 team by the end of the season. It may even be earlier than that. But the team with the worst offense in Conference USA — the only team to score less than a point per possession in C-USA last season — can’t possibly be the ninth-best team in the country. It may happen at some point, but I’d be shocked if the Tigers didn’t struggle at times, especially early in the season. People will say they were overrated. But whose fault is that? (Speaking of Memphis, by the way: Josh Pastner just keeps snatching up elite recruits . The present was already bright, but jeez, that future! Look out.) @ LakeRosenberg writes : In honor of The Mid-Majority , what team from below The Red Line can go the furthest in the NCAA Tournament? Brennan : It’s a new season with (hopefully) new readers, so I won’t assume everyone knows what The Red Line is. You can get up to speed right here . The short version: The Mid-Majority’s Kyle Whelliston wanted to define what, exactly, a mid-major is. He cut through the usual nonsense about tournament bids and school enrollments (people used to come up with some really wacky mid-major arguments) and instead created an intuitive, simple mechanism: The Red Line. If your conference’s average athletics department spends more than X number of dollars, you’re a high-major league.

Filed under Basketball, Football, News by on Nov 9th, 2011. Comment.
1. Penn State coach Joe Paterno does not want to address at his weekly Tuesday news conference the scandal that has engulfed his beloved university, not to protect himself, but because it will shift the spotlight even farther away from his overlooked No. 12 Nittany Lions. Roll your eyes until they fall out of your head, but that is how he thinks. Surely he knows that the assembled media will ask him anyway. The guess here is that the adjectives “cantankerous” and “crusty” will apply. 2. Bored with the status quo? Here’s why: the top seven in this week’s BCS standings all started out in the top nine in the AP preseason poll. The only ones to disappear from that first poll are No. 6 Florida State (6-3) and No. 8 Texas A&M (5-4). If you’re looking for the happiest surprises of the season, look to the ACC, where Wake Forest (5-4, 4-2) and Virginia (6-3, 4-2) control whether they will win the Atlantic and Coastal divisions, respectively. 3. When Houston Nutt leapt from Arkansas to Ole Miss four years ago, I thought of a rebound romance. His tenure with the Razorbacks ended in acrimony and Nutt may have been served by sitting out a year to refresh and recharge. When he led the Rebels to consecutive Cotton Bowls in his first two seasons, I put the thought out of my mind. It turns out my first instinct was right. Now Nutt and athletic director Pete Boone, who ran off Nutt’s predecessor, the estimable David Cutcliffe, are both out of a job.

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3-point stance: Surprises in the ACC
Filed under Football, News by on Nov 8th, 2011. Comment.
