Football. Seriously. Come on.

Your ability to correlate bad news with basketball's good news is simply uncanny. Help yourself out here and just throw us something, anything, positive. Give me a solid day in the weight room, someone playing a clever, but still lighthearted and harmless practical joke, some special teams guy is secretly a really good chef, anything.

Anyway, Kragthorpe announced today that running back George Stripling has been dismissed from the team for a violation of team rules.

Stripling had been suspended for all of spring practice.

The good news (it's a start) is that if the Cards could afford to lose a player at any position, it'd be running back. With the return of Bilal Powell and Brock Bolen, as well as the spring emergence of Vic Anderson and the eligibility of Dale Martin, touches were likely going to be hard to come by for Stripling in his senior season anyway.

We all had pretty high hopes for George after the shows he put on at the end of blowouts when he was a freshman and the stellar first half of his sophomore season, but he was never the same player after Petrino punished him for losing the ball a couple of times against Kansas State and Middle Tennessee State in 2006. He didn't play at all in the monumental win over West Virginia, and carried just twice a week later against Rutgers. He appeared far less quick and far more unsure of himself throughout his junior season, and ran for only 258 yards as U of L's third-string tailback.

We'll always have Miami, George...and your highly overrated self on NCAA Football 2008.  

I will miss the dreads.