Cleaning out the Inbox

    Time to clean the inbox with various articles of note.

Most people who know me know how much I love "The Office" and while I did know that Steve Carell had played hockey (watching him skate on the show, you knew he had to have played hockey at some time!) I didn't know and learned from the Athletic that Carell actually played college hockey!

Carell was the netminder for Denison College in Ohio. While Denison was considered club level, it's still college hockey, and Carell is still listed on hockey's Elite Prospects website with his own page! 

Carell didn't comment on the story but several of his teammates did and the article covers his years at Denison both on and off the ice.

The Athletic is next with two articles from the Great Britain side of the Atlantic with the first one writing about Kenilworth Road, home of the recently promoted to the Premier League Luton Town, and a stadium so quaint that Luton had to spend millions of dollars to bring it up to the bare minimum of Premier League standards for television.

The home of Luton Town was built in 1905 and is located in a residential section of Luton that you wouldn't expect to see a stadium.

The article also talks to the neighborhood residents about the pros and cons of such a unique stadium.

Luton is building a new home for their team but due to their Premier League promotion were forced to spend money to upgrade Kenilworth Road.

The other offering from the Athletic also concerns an English stadium, this time in Rotherham with Millmoor. This stadium has been unused for soccer since 2008 and is next door to the home of Rotherham United, yet has no plans for renovation or removal.

It's strange to have a stadium stand that long and have no future plans at all.

ESPN.com takes over with two articles of note with the first dealing with the futures of Oregon State and Washington State without the Pac 12 but digs deeper into how the loss of Power Five conference sports will affect the homes of the two schools, Corvallis Oregon and Pullman Washington.

The article also mentions the possible end games for the pair and legal measures that the two schools working together are attempting to try to secure their futures.

The second article from ESPN concerns the planned move of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas.

It covers the city of Oakland's attempts to build a stadium, why Athletics owner John Fisher decided to move the team, how things became so bad for the team and the city, and what Oakland may want in return for allowing the team to continue to play there while their new home in Las Vegas is built.

I'm torn on this because I do think that the Bay Area is a bit small to have two teams and both are healthy financially.

History has shown it is very rare that both the Giants and Athletics are doing well at the gate and I can see why the Athletics want to leave.

I do wonder about Las Vegas though as it's actually a smaller market than Oakland, although growing and more affluent, and there won't be a sweetheart expansion deal to turn a bad baseball team around as the city received from the NHL with the Golden Knights.

We wrap with a stop at SABR  BaseballGaming with a writer's look at a game from the seventies- Sports Illustrated's All-Time All-Star baseball.

The author writes of how he discovered the game in a toy store, how the game wasn't his first choice,  how the game played, and why he moved on from it to another baseball dice game three years after purchasing it.

I Tell Ya Herbie

     Time for more college football thoughts with "I Tell Ya Herbie", our weekly ramble on various topics in college football.

I Tell Ya Herbie:

                           I'm not sure I see the hand-wringing on the rule changes in an attempt to shorten college games which really do last much longer than their professional counterparts but while the changes haven't made a big difference in game times, there has been one change that wasn't anticipated.

Undermanned teams are attempting to milk the clock in an effort to shorten the game and improve their chances of winning.

There is nothing wrong with that at all and I even applaud those coaches for giving their teams their best chance to win.

I've said a million times- when you are undermanned, you either play super conservative, run the clock and hope for some breaks or throw everything at the wall- anything in between is doomed to fail but it's been boring football often and it isn't solving the problem that it was created to solve.

I Tell Ya Herbie:

                            Most of the chatter after Miami's win over Texas A&M was about the status of the contract that now looks to be the most questionable in the game (Pending Mel Tucker at Michigan State) of the Aggies with Jimbo Fisher but give the Hurricanes some credit as well for fortitude in victory.

In recent years, Miami had tended to fold their tent once things turned against them, and in the first half, Texas A&M blocked a punt and recovered a fumble on a punt with the Aggies scoring on both chances.

Jacolby George was the player who muffed the punt but would catch three touchdowns in the second half and the special teams that were so bad in the first half would return a kickoff for a score in the second in the 48-33 victory.

In a season that already is stuffed with schools that are supposedly returning to past prominence, I'm not ready to give Miami that credit yet- BUT playing in the ACC and should they survive October games on consecutive Saturdays at North Carolina and home against suddenly questionable Clemson, Miami could be 9-0 entering Tallahassee for what could be an undefeated old school showdown against the Seminoles.

I Tell Ya Herbie:

                           I'm a Big Ten guy and I rarely root against Wisconsin but I had to feel good for Washington State's upset of the Badgers in Pullman.

The constant churning of conference realignment appears to have doomed Washington State and Oregon State to an eventual fall to the Group of Five status unless their lawsuit to hold the Pac 12 name and dollars wins and forces much of the Mountain West to join the "new" Pac 12 eventually.

Even that may not matter if the playoff committee decides under the circumstances to drop from six automatic bids to the new playoff next season to five but unless they are playing your team, it will be very hard for any college fan to root against either the Cougars or the Beavers this season.

I Tell Ya Herbie:

                            There won't be any Group of Five threatening to be a playoff buster this season as after two weeks of play there isn't one ranked G-5 team.

It's going to be very interesting to see who emerges with the New Year's Day appearance with  San Diego State and Tulane with a defeat, Boise State with two, and the loss of Cincinnati, BYU, and Central Florida to the Big 12.

I'm even going to make an early season prediction- I think the Sun Belt will earn their first automatic bid to a New Year's Day bowl and only such a deep league could cost that bid.

Marshall may be the league's best team but will play Virginia Tech and N.C. State in two of the next three weeks, Appalachian State lost in double overtime to a ranked North Carolina team on the road, Georgia Southern dumped UAB and if they could pull over a massive upset in Madison against Wisconsin this Saturday would be in the hunt.

Add James Madison, who beat Virginia last week, if they are deemed eligible by the NCAA and the Sun Belt has several contenders, if only they don't knock each other off!