8:00 PM CSN Baltimore has video of Marcus Smith, a U.S. soldier who dressed as a minor league umpire to surprise his children at a Bowie Baysox game with a home visit from Afghanistan.
7:45 PM A Japanese Harley-Davidson motorcycle that was swept out to sea during last year's tsunami washed up on a shore in British Columbia last month. The bike's owner asked that the motorcycle be displayed at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee as a memorial to the tsunami victims.
7:30 PM Buffalo Bills receiver David Clowneytweeted the results of his HIV test which came back negative. And to the critics of his decision to share his results, Clowney added: "Some people are Ridiculously stupid ... And can't see the bigger picture about things that are important in this world."
Last week a Lee County (AL) grand jury indicted four former Auburn University football players on felony robbery charges stemming from a March 11 incident at a local trailer park. Michael McNeil, Antonio Goodwin, Shaun Kitchens and Dakota Mosley each face five counts of first-degree robbery, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of third-degree theft of property in connection with the alleged robbery.
Worth noting that the Lee County District Attorney’s Office submitted a witnesses list for the case that included current Auburn star running back Michael Dyer and current AU football players Neiko Thorpe, Anthony Morgan and Deangelo Benton.
So what drove the four former Auburn players to risk their football scholarships to the school?
In one indictment of all four of the accused ex-AU players last week, the Lee County Grand Jury gave us a pretty good clue:
“[Michael McNeil, Antonio Goodwin, Shaun Kitchens and Dakota Mosley ] did knowingly obtain or exert unauthorized control over one (1) safe, the property of [victim name redacted] of the aggregate value of One Dollar ($1.00), with the intent to deprive the owner of said property.”
Now there’s a bad break.
Who could’ve possibly known a safe house at an Auburn-area trailer park offered no quarter?
Cam Newton’s game-worn football pants from the BCS National Championship Game are being auctioned off on the official Auburn University athletic department website.
(Poor lighting why Cam’s pants don’t look white?)
Description:
“This pair of authentic Auburn football pants was worn by Heisman Trophy winner and 2011 NFL #1 Overall Draft Pick Cam Newton in the BCS National Championship game on January 10, 2011 in Glendale, AZ. The inside waistband of the pants is marked with Newton’s locker number (102) and the outside of the pants still retain grass stains from the game. This item comes with a certificate of authenticity from the Auburn Athletics Department.”
But didn’t Newton wear white pants during the game?
Or are the pants actually white, with the photo subject to extremely poor lighting and/or processing?
At any rate, at any other school, a Heisman Trophy winner’s national championship slacks would certainly be the fanciest pants on campus.
“This pair of authentic, lake-worn Auburn pants was worn by former AU head football coach Pat Dye. You are also bidding on the contents of Coach Dye’s pants pockets, which include: Half-pint bottle of Ancient Age (empty), a Cam Newton bottle cap keychain, a satellite phone (Interpol registration expired) certified to be untappable (inside Lee County lines only) and a wallet. The items come with a certificate of authenticity signed by the late [name identified upon purchase] night manager of the Phenix City Econo Lodge. (Now closed.)”
In what will surely be the biggest college football news you will not hear about from the main media this summer, Alabama Senate President Del Marsh said this week that Auburn super-booster Bobby Lowder’s re-nomination for the Auburn Board of Trustees will not go through.
Lowder, whose dubious influence on the Auburn football program has often brought disgrace to the school, has previously served on the all-powerful AU Board of Trustees for nearly three decades and has long been charged with annually formulating the school’s entire yearly budget.
But instead of a seven-year re-up, thanks to a deciding vote by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, who recently signed off on Lowder after the Auburn powerbroker’s wife donated $25,000 to Bentley’s re-election campaign fund, Lowder’s bid for another term is officially finished.
On April 20, 2011, the Auburn football program landed a verbal commitment from highly-touted Kentucky high school quarterback prospect Zeke Pike.
The 6-foot-5, 220-pound quarterback from Edgewood, Ky., picked the Tigers over Michigan, Arkansas, Clemson, North Carolina, Tennessee, Southern California, Purdue, Florida State, Miami and Penn State.
And Alabama.
At the time of Pike’s verbal commitment, which was an enormous recruiting coup for Auburn, Pike was asked if he had been concerned about Auburn assistant coaches abandoning the team thanks to the possibility that the school’s football program could be hit with NCAA sanctions.
Pike’s response:
“They (Auburn) just won a national championship and they have one guy on their staff who left for the NFL and that’s their defensive line coach (Tracey Rocker). If they thought they were going to be in any kind of NCAA (trouble) I think a lot of their coaches would have left.
“Coach (Gus) Malzahn their offensive coordinator turned down $15 million to stay there (head coaching offer from Vanderbilt).
“Coach Trooper (Taylor), their receivers coach, turned down his favorite team of all-time, the Dallas Cowboys, to stay there.
“Whatever, let people say what they’re going to say. That’s a Mississippi State problem, that’s not an Auburn problem.”
Malzahn did receive a reported $15 million offer to take over the Vanderbilt football program, a long-noted coaching graveyard because of high academic standards and lacking facilities.
Pike’s statement about the so-called “Mississippi State problem” is a reference to the fact that Cam Newton’s father Cecil Newton has admitted to the NCAA that he solicited MSU coaches for a payment of up to $180,000 in exchange for his son signing to play football for the Bulldogs. (Cam Newton later committed to Auburn, obviously.)
Because of Cecil Newton’s admission, the NCAA rendered Cam Newton ineligible for one day, then reinstated him for the remainder of the 2010 season.
While Pike’s statement about Malzahn may or may not be accurate, at the very least it isn’t completely unreasonable. Likewise his supposition that Mississippi State may not yet be in clear with the NCAA as it pertains to the recruitment of Cam and Cecil Newton. After all, MSU didn’t report any NCAA irregularities involving Cecil Newton to the SEC or NCAA until after Cam had signed with Auburn.
In other words, even after MSU coaches knew of Cecil Newton’s NCAA violation - which directly involved Cecil’s solicitation of them - the Bulldogs tried to lure Cam Newton to Starkville to the very end.
But from what I was told by two sources inside the Dallas Cowboys organization today, Pike’s comment about Auburn wide receivers coach Trooper Taylor and the NFL team is dead, flat false. Read more…
On March 3, Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports broke the news that NCAA officials were investigating a $25,000 payment made in 2010 by the University of Oregon to a Houston man, Will Lyles, for providing recruiting services for the school’s football program.
After Robinson’s report, Ken Goe of the PORTLAND OREGONIAN reported, “Lyles has a mentoring relationship with Oregon running back Lache Seastrunk.” (From 2009-2010, Seastrunk was a heavily recruited high school football prospect from Texas.)
11 days after Robinson’s initial report, Thayer Evans of FOXSports.com reported that LSU had paid Lyles $6,000 in 2010 for providing recruiting services for the school’s football program.
After noting that Lyles had told him he made $36,000 in 2010, Whitlock asked Lyles:
“You got a check for $25,000 from Oregon, where was the other $11,000?”
Lyles:
“The other $11,000 was $6,000 from LSU and the other $5,000 was from Cal-Berkeley.”
On Feb. 26, 2009, Greg Biggins of ESPN.com reported that then-Texas high school football prospect Lache Seastrunk took a recruiting visit to Cal the last week of February.
In the same piece about Cal’s “Junior Day” recruiting event, Biggins noted of then-Louisiana High School recruit Trovon Reed:
Trovon Reed (Thibodaux, La.) was expected to be on hand but won’t be able to make it. Reed is one of the elite receivers in the South and is holding offers from schools like Texas, Georgia, Ole Miss and Arkansas.
“I couldn’t get out there but I’m going to try and make it for their next Junior Day,” Reed said. “I like Cal and I liked how they used Desean Jackson. They want to use me in a similar way so I’m definitely interested in checking them out.
On April 1 I reported of Reed’s close association with Lyles and Seastrunk. Excerpt from that report:
On Feb. 16 I broke the news that NCAA officials had recently visited Thibodaux, Louisiana, to investigate the recruitment of a current Auburn football player, Trovon Reed, and a recent football signee to the school, Greg Robinson.
At the heart of that NCAA investigation was Thibodaux resident Sean Nelson. Nelson, who is an associate of Reed and Robinson, has been characterized as a street agent who exerted possible undue influence on the two recruits in their decision to choose Auburn. Nelson is also a known associate of the NCAA’s current public enemy #1, Will Lyles. Lyles’ one-man recruiting service was recently paid $25,000 by the University of Oregon for recruiting videos that the school has yet to produce to the public.
Oregon has, to this day, not produced any materials to the public that it received from Lyles for his recruiting services.
Speaking of Cal, on March 13, Thayer Evans reported on the relationship between Lyles and Houston-area high school football prospect Trevon Randle:
Randle said Lyles talked to him a lot about California and Miami. He said Lyles didn’t have to talk to him much about Oregon, because “I told him about Oregon.” But Randle said Lyles knew Ducks coach Chip Kelly well.
Just over a month after meeting Lyles, Randle committed to LSU at a Tigers junior day. Randle said he consulted with his parents before choosing LSU, but said his father is “pretty tight” with Lyles.
Having committed to LSU, Randle said he later spent time with Lyles while attending LSU summer camps. He said Lyles was particularly close with (LSU Assistant Coach Brick) Haley, who recruited him for the Tigers.
It was Haley who cut the $6,000 check to Lyles on behalf of LSU.
Despite that transaction, and LSU commit Randle saying Haley was “particularly close” with Lyles, Haley denied even knowing Lyles in the same FOXSports.com story:
A week later, (Trevon Randle’s Clear Springs (TX) High School Football Coach Clint) Hartman crossed paths with Lyles again. This time he was with LSU defensive line coach Brick Haley, who had come to see Randle. When Lyles tried to walk onto the field, Hartman told him to return to the parking lot.
Hartman later called Haley and told him that Lyles was never to return to Clear Springs High.
“I didn’t know the guy, Coach,” Hartman recalled Haley saying of Lyles. “He showed up and said he was helping the last guy here for LSU.”
Hartman knew that wasn’t true. After all, LSU had never previously recruited at Clear Springs High.
“I want to call them characters in the nicest possible way that we’ve been seeing this offseason on the fringes of recruiting. How do you and your staff address those types of situations?”
“Obviously everyone uses recruiting services but that’s just to gather data and not depend on what they have to say or what their opinions are or anything like that. It’s really solely collection the information that you need on where the prospects are so you can have a pretty good idea on where to go recruit.
“But as far as people being involved, we haven’t really run into that. We’re really just focused on what important to the kid and go through the school and his coaches.
” … You do have to keep your head on a swivel and you have to know what’s going on out there because you don’t want to bury your head in the sand but on the other hand you really need to keep everything close to us and try to communicate as much as you can just with the recruits, the student-athletes and their families to make sure the lines of communication are open and everyone is on the same page.”
The year before Cal and Tedford paid $5,000 to Lyles for his recruiting services - and three weeks before Lyles associate Lache Seastrunk made a recruiting visit to the Cal-Berkeley campus - Tedford said the following at Cal’s 2009 signing day press conference:
“It’s a little unsettling because sometimes they go underground and you can’t get hold of them. You don’t know what’s happening, so you just continue to try. With not being able to text now, now you just have to call and you get an answering machine. So you’re really at their mercy. It’s a helpless feeling when you don’t know the information. You can’t counterpoint something you don’t know about, so that’s some of it. But it’s so competitive. No one’s going to give up. Everybody is going to always continue to battle right down to the end. Obviously, the people we are recruiting against are very good programs and very competitive that way.”
Is it unreasonable to think that at least part of the reason Tedford’s Cal paid Lyles $5,000 was to ensure a unique level of access to Seastrunk and other Texas recruits associated with Lyles?
That isn’t to say that Tedford was directly involved in the recruitment of Seastrunk. That duty fell to Cal football recruiting coordinator Kenwick Thompson, who shares a hometown with Lyles: Houston.
There’s nothing wrong with Lyles tipping off schools to talent in his area. Nor is there his taking money for such services, regardless the amount. (Because the NCAA does not stipulate a limit.)
Though Lyles’ “Compete Scouting Services” does not come close to fulfilling the NCAA’s official definition of what constitutes a legitimate recruiting service, the NCAA rules regarding such activity are so vague that until the NCAA gets serious about governing them, it’s hard to hold even Lyles to any sort of NCAA-borne standard.
During the same interview last week in which he confirmed receiving a $5,000 payment from Cal and a $6,000 payment from LSU, Lyles was asked by FOXSports.com columnist Whitlock:
Here’s a short ESPNU clip featuring Auburn football coach Gene Chizik after his team’s recent spring football game.
Chizik to the Auburn players: “Being great is what?”
Auburn players: “Expensive”
Chizik to Auburn players: “Being great is what?”
Auburn players: “Expensive”
Chizik to Auburn players: “Gonna cost you a lot, gonna cost you a lot. But we can get there. Saw a lot of good flashes of some things that happened, today. But being great is really expensive.”
Hearing that, I can’t help but think back to this excerpt from a profile of Auburn Executive Associate Athletics Director Tim Jackson authored by Kevin Scarbinsky and published in the BIRMINGHAM NEWS two months ago: Read more…
On February 18, Harvey Updyke was released from a Lee County jail after being charged with poisoning Auburn’s University’s venerable Toomer’s oak trees.
Only one TV news outlet was tipped off to Updyke’s quiet release from custody that day, CBS 8 in Montgomery. It was that station, which is based outside the Auburn over-the-air viewing market, that procured the footage of Updyke making an obscene gesture as he left an Auburn-area jail.
Yesterday, CBS 8 was also the first media outlet tipped off to an alleged attack on Updyke at an Auburn-area gas station. Read more…
Three weeks ago I noted that Sunday’s NASCAR Aaron Rents 499 at Talladega would feature Michael Waltrip driving an Auburn-themed entry. The AU paint-schemed car was part of a Talladega salute to the BCS Champion Auburn football team.
Also present for the festivities yesterday was Auburn football coach Gene Chizik, who served as the race’s Grand Marshal.
So how’d NASCAR fans react when Chizik was introduced before the race?
Hint: The pre-race invocation was punctuated by a “roll tide!”
Sunday night on ESPN’s classroom-themed Gruden’s QB camp, Jon Gruden asked Cam Newton to recall what it was like under to run the Gus Bus.
Gruden to Newton: “Call something at Auburn that’s a little verbal. What would be a little verbal? Any recollection on that?Gimme something. What’s an Auburn play sound like?”
From Newton’s response, think Auburn offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn will feel the need to actually install a steering wheel this season?
