I actually know only one person who attended Stanford, and as I watched the second half of the Fiesta Bowl at 8 a.m. UAE time, I was thinking of his (and other Stanford fans) suffering. Frankie, my condolences. I feel your pain. Fourth-ranked Stanford contrived to lose to third-ranked Oklahoma State, 41-38, in overtime, in […]

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To “sort out” is Brit-speak, and it commonly is used when referring to soccer and describes the process by which good defenses deal with attacking players. It implies a sort of impudent coming forward of small men with high-skill … for whom the antidote is a few hard men of limited finesse but grim countenance, […]

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Joe Paterno, fired tonight by the Penn State board of trustees. He had to be. No coming back from this. The scandal surrounding the alleged child-molestation incidents involving the former Penn State defensive coordinator … well, “radioactive” was the first word that came to mind and it still seems best. All Penn State could do […]

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What. A. Mess. I have no special insights-gained-from-personal-experience … with Joe Paterno or Penn State. I may have been in the same room with the 84-year-old football coach once or twice (the 1995 Rose Bowl would be the best bet), but that’s it. Never been to the Penn State campus, and I can think of […]

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A strange coincidence. Waking up in the middle of the night in Abu Dhabi, turning on the television to see if ESPN Classic was showing a baseball playoffs game … and there was Navy playing Air Force, and I will watch almost any college football game for X number of minutes. Even if it’s several […]

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Good news. I get ESPN America over here, and I actually can see some college football live for the first time in two years. So it was, tonight, that I remembered that it was Saturday afternoon back home, and I knew the colleges were playing lots of game on the last non-NFL weekend, and the […]

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I wrote about the BCS championship game for the Monday editions of The National. Keep in mind, probably 90 percent of our readers are unclear on the concept of American football … never mind college football … not to mention the states of Oregon and Alabama. (How many Americans know where Sussex is? Or the […]

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I said the other day I miss watching college football bowl games. And I do. But some weird stuff, some disturbing stuff, is going on over there. Changes I was not completely up to speed on because the disconnect between U.S. college football and the Middle East is just about total. To wit:

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I am excited about the idea of the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series. And they are one game away now, with three shots at securing their first championship since 1954 — or four years before they moved to San Francisco. Growing up in Los Angeles, as a Dodgers fan … I spent decades […]

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I saw the story on espn.com … taken from wire services … from the hefty Sports Illustrated piece in which a former football agent talks about making cash payments to college players during the 1990s. I should have thought of R.Jay Soward immediately. Instead, it was more of an “well, of course” moment, when I […]

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