Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to your morning Skull Session! Hopefully you are dealing with the extreme heat that has recently gripped a large part of the country, at least better than I am, because I am literally going insane as my brain (which is essentially a flimsy jell-o mold floating in a miso soup) boils within this lumpy container that I call a skull.
I'm pretty close to attempting the Homer Simpson solution to heat waves, because even though my power is on, I live in an apartment complex where the average age hovers somewhere around "angry, handwritten letters to the editor about the newspaper using a soy-based ink" and as a result the A/C is basically the equivalent of a gerbil fanning a block of ice in one of my vents. Yes, that was one sentence; it's so hot that I find it difficult to format my thoughts into anything but rambly, semi-coherent mutterings.
In any case, this is the second week in a row that I've made an overt Simpsons episode reference in the Skully intro, meaning I only have like 500 more weeks to go before I'm completely tapped for ideas. Let's just hope the heat lets up soon so my brain can process things other than cartoons buried in the back of my consciousness.
NOT ALL THAT GLITTERS IS AAU Science joke! I guess it was inevitable; as shady as college football recruiting can be at times, it pales in comparison to the utter horrorshow that is basketball recruiting, and it seems like the NCAA might (might!) finally be ready to start trying to clean it up a tad.
Basically the NCAA made three AAU teams persona non grata because of their relationship with an agent, as evidenced by some damning e-mails that were mostly incoherent unless you are a large shoulderpadded 90's agent dude:
“I get tired of being the 1 guy that has to get the 1st rd [sic] picks every year. I’d be happy to help you get guys + lend support. You have to want it + have to hustle. To create situations to manifest chaos + plow down walls to open up new opp’s [sic],” the email stated. “...Am I getting the level of production in return that I want or expect?...You decided to be apart [sic] of it on some level…Do more than just give it thought, act on it.”
Uh, yeah! Okay! Incentivize! Disintermediate to the max! Equate your potentiality!
HUMAN GEOGRAPHERS, GO NUTS From the black, fetid swamp that is 90% of Reddit comes a set of very interesting data, which basically looks at the major college football stadiums in each state, and stacks it up against the total population of that state, to get a (very) rough approximation of what percentage of the state's population is in football stadiums watching a game at any given time.
Now, obviously there's a lot of flaws in doing this; not ever team can play a home game, the numbers rely on stated capacity when teams either don't sell out or actually exceed capacity, and not every fan in any given stadium is from the state that it's in. Still it's an interesting little bit of number crunching. Ohio Stadium, at present stated capacity, accounts for 0.89% of Ohio's population on a given Saturday.
The big winner? Wyoming's War Memorial Stadium, which, when filled to capacity at 32,580 heads, accounts for a hilarious 5.73% of the entire state.
Wyoming goes hardHOT DIGGITY DOG EDSBS/SBN's Spencer Hall decided to enter a hot dog eating contest on our 4th of July holiday, and I don't think I'm spoiling anything by telling you that he doesn't win. But, he doesn't win in spectacular fashion, complete with flower pot barfing and a distinct look of "Oh God. I've entered into a hot dog eating contest that I am now obligated to actually compete in" that crawls across his face about two minutes in.
As an aside, I had three hot dogs on the 4th and was like "That's enough. That's enough hot dogs." Because it freaking is.
JAMES FRANKLIN, PHILOSOPHER KING Rhetorical questions are the best, aren't they?
Seriously take away ur allegiance 2 a specific school & now as an EDUCATED,mature adult,if given the ability 2 choose,where would u go?
— James Franklin (@jamesfranklinvu) July 5, 2012
Of course, as the Commodores' head football coach, he wants you to say Vanderbilt, but it's an interesting question regardless. I probably would've gone to OSU anyway; I liked the big city vibe and the chance to be in their teaching program more than I liked the idea of popping my many collars at Miami or becoming an obsessive Widespread Panic fan at Ohio U in Athens. But I guess today I posit the same question to you that Coach Franklin posited to Twitter: all things being equal, which college do you think you would've gone to?
LINKS AWAKENING Ohhh, now I get it... A guide to Mike Tyson's one man show... MAKE THIS HAPPEN MIKE SLIVE... Sa-wing and a miss... No you do not... Classy dog... Netflix and birds over boys
