Monday evening Cardinal news and notes

What. The hell. Are you talking about?

or something? Dude.

I’ve hit a ball on the highway, but I never found out where the ball ended up.

You should check out this story, it’s an eye opener. Frank Deford has called it “the most important article ever written about college sports.” I’m not going to agree or disagree with that; but, it is eye opening on a level that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen before. If you haven’t heard about it, or read it already,…. then you definitely need to.

Using the "student-athlete" defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases. On the afternoon of October 26, 1974, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were playing the Alabama Crimson Tide in Birmingham, Alabama. Kent Waldrep, a TCU running back, carried the ball on a "Red Right 28" sweep toward the Crimson Tide’s sideline, where he was met by a swarm of tacklers. When Waldrep regained consciousness, Bear Bryant, the storied Crimson Tide coach, was standing over his hospital bed. "It was like talking to God, if you’re a young football player," Waldrep recalled.

Waldrep was paralyzed: he had lost all movement and feeling below his neck. After nine months of paying his medical bills, Texas Christian refused to pay any more, so the Waldrep family coped for years on dwindling charity.

Through the 1990s, from his wheelchair, Waldrep pressed a lawsuit for workers’ compensation. (He also, through heroic rehabilitation efforts, recovered feeling in his arms, and eventually learned to drive a specially rigged van. "I can brush my teeth," he told me last year, "but I still need help to bathe and dress.") His attorneys haggled with TCU and the state worker-compensation fund over what constituted employment. Clearly, TCU had provided football players with equipment for the job, as a typical employer would—but did the university pay wages, withhold income taxes on his financial aid, or control work conditions and performance? The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football. (Waldrep told me school officials "said they recruited me as a student, not an athlete," which he says was absurd.)

The long saga vindicated the power of the NCAA’s "student-athlete" formulation as a shield, and the organization continues to invoke it as both a legalistic defense and a noble ideal. Indeed, such is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.

But if Mizzou joins the SEC East then UK probably won’t want to play us, unless they don’t plan on ever attending a bowl game ever again.

It’s more than just “NYC Viewers”. It is the NYC DMA, which encompasses all of North/Central Jersey, Downstate, NY, Long Island and the like. The reason that it appears that Ville/RU doubled the ratings, is because 80% of NJ’s population is located in the NYC DMA. The TVs that were watching the game were, in fact, Rutgers fans in NJ, not just NYC people. It’s a pretty standard concept that RU fans refuse to understand because they can’t comprehend anything that isn’t a helicopter, stump with an axe in it, or Jon Bon Jovi. It’s sad that NJ.com fails to mention that parts of PA (PENNSYLVANIA) is in this “NYC DMA”, and nearly all of NJ residents, too. It’s crazy how these things are misconstrued to make one team look better than another. No one has NYC. Rutgers does own NJ, however. As they should. And NJ still sucks.