Thought I had posted yesterday about Bill Stewart kicking three players off the football team — fast — but for some reason it didn’t appear. In hindsight, it was unnecessary to post and discuss because I think everyone would share some form of the same opinion, that being Stewart is making his stance right away and that the former coach wouldn’t have been so emphatic.

Eh, perhaps, but I think it’s ridiculous people would think Stewart is ruling while remembering with something as distant and irrelevant as Adam Lehnortt’s trouble in 2004. And why are we talking about Dan Mozes and his arrest? Remember, too, that he was kept on the team and became a consensus All-America center. One has nothing to do with the other and I think it’s unfair to coaches and players to invoke the names of Chris Henry or Pacman Jones as if they have some influence over what happens inside the football program.

This is simply about three kids getting caught — side-note: I only interviewed James Ingram once, so I don’t know very much about him and what makes him tick aside from the fact he’s from the greatest city in the world, but I cannot believe he told the sheriffs he had more tree at his house — and one coach sticking to his principals. Best of luck to all three and one wonders if the university will and/or should help them in their legal proceedings as the it did for troubled players before them.

Onto the Feedback. As always comments appear as posted. In other words, if you make a mistake, you can’t take it back. Isn’t that right, Ronald Ramon?

Foul shot said:

Coach Huggins, can you please, please, please tell these guys to relax and make some foul shots? I know that you feel the same as we can see your pain each time a foul shot clanks off the rim. WVU should have beaten OK, Georgetown and now Pitt if they could just make some darn foul shots.
It appears that the makeup of the WVU hoops team is such that they are a decent NIT team but don’t quite have the ability to make or win anything in the NCAA Tournament (March Madness.)
We know that Huggins will get this worked out over time as he keeps getting guys like Thouroughman who hustle and think and not guys who get brain freeze such as the group who could not switch on their screens last night against Pitt. It is quite hard to keep taking these losses in winnable games.

A slam dunk, which, by the way, the Mountaineers could use right about now. Imagine if WVU makes its free throws and wins those games. Where are they at 19-4 and 7-3 in the Big East? I think it’s presumptuous to say free throws are the only problem because there are a number of other plays in those games that would have helped had they gone in WVU’s favor, but the truth here is the simplest skill in the game has escaped the players. Worse, they know it. Let’s not forget the team’s top three scorers are in a funk all at once and the same team that has lost three of four has lost to Georgetown and Pitt by one point. It’s not over and it reasons to say those three might soon come around and start hitting. Defense is not the problem and if WVU gets some offense, things will change.

 5thyearsenior said:

I saw that earlier today too and laughed a little until I really thought about how that kid must feel. It is just amazing to me that someone could do this to another person let alone an innocent high school kid that just wants to get an education and play football. I hope they uncover who was behind this and figure out a way to lock them up.

Probably some smart mouth kid from Stanford playing a trick to make Cal look bad…

So began the responses to the Kevin Hart Debacle and I honestly believe people felt for the kid. Then the heart stopped aching and the head started thinking…

BeeZee said:

yikes… gotta do your homework on this kinda stuff. this is obviously too bad, but shouldn’t Kevin Hart probably know what Jeff Tedford looks like, and have required a visit to campus, before making his decision? please excuse my ignorance if i am missing part of the recruiting process, but i would think a campus visit is normal for all recruits, before signing day.

… and then we pretty much stopped feeling bad for the kid …

Mack said:

I used to wonder who fell for the e-mail scams from Nigeria… I think I now know.

Does Oregon get some negative press in this story for being rejected in favor of Cal? What is the early favorite for first television show for this kid to appear on? My heart says Letterman, but my head says Today.

… and we realized he was a liar. Probably pathological, too. He became a sad character for a different reason.

thacker said:

Well, kids do stupid things. Goes with the territory. Sometimes they do really stupid things such as: “Deputy, I have more drugs at the apartment. Wanna see?” Reference to the three WVU ballplayers charged with felony drug possession. Kids. Go figure.

I guess this is my problem. I can’t figure. That’s my own hurdle to overcome. I do, however, see bigger things in the future for Kevin Hart as opposed to the Collington, Holmes and Ingram.

glibglub said:

Talk about forwarding an agenda. You sir, are trying to “stop . . . . Hammer time!”

Nice! I maintain The Hammer is a bad nickname. And unfortunately, we could not find a nickname for Joe Alexander — and this might not change. Judging by the comments, it seems some of you do not like Joe very much. I’m not going there and I’ll explain why. 

JP said:

Vanilla Sky is pretty funny. Kid needs to start taking over games or hitting game-winning shots before he gets a nickname though. Otherwise he’s just an average Joe that has good hops but is short on skills.

OK, the nickname isn’t meant to put him on a pedestal that he doesn’t already occupy. He’s the team’s best player. Period. When he’s good to great the team is good to great. The opposite is true, too. Again, though, the nickname is not to reward him for being anything more than a popular and intelligent kid with some clearly fascinating characteristics. Hell, I had nicknames growing up and I had none of the things Joe has to his story: He lived in Asia most of his life, speaks a bunch of languages, can jump to the moon, didn’t play organized basketball until high school, had no real scholarship offers, voluntarily went to military school and hardly played, earned a scholarship to WVU, basically learned to play the game in the Big East, went from shy and quiet to living to liven up interviews and is prone to peaks and valleys. Yet he remains a little enigmatic. We know a lot about him, but we don’t know much about him. In all, so much about Joe — How’d he do that? Did you see that play? What’s his background? What’s wrong? What got into him? — is one big question mark.  Wait, is that a nickname?  

Hey, big-time high-five — we made it this far with no Rich Rodriguez junk! (pause) OK, how about some Rich Rodriguez junk?

WVU’63 said: 

Mike:
I expected the response NOT to be a bombshell; that was all attorney fluff.
However, the most serious charge –that of racism against Calvin Magee by ‘an administrator’–continues to languish out there.
I cannot believe that someone –the Black Coaches Association, WVU AD, the AP,
your newspaper, the Gazette, has not said squat since that sleazbag Brown fed the story to the Pittsburgh paper.
What are you hearing??

I’m hearing what I’m writing. Sometimes there is nothing where there is nothing.

WVUfaninNC said: 

RR needs to look in the mirror and see what a fool his legal team and Brown have made him into.

I have said this in other post, I think the road to the town of Blame runs through Brown Town.

Mike Brown has nothing to lose, no matter how this turns out. He will always have clients, he will always make his commisions. And when it is all said and done with, the only parties that will be tied to this are Rich Rodriguez, WVU and UM. The WVU fans will always be acused of being the “jilted lover” and whinners. Brown will slither away searching for his new victom unscaved!

Hmmm, then I shouldn’t tell you who he represents in the upcoming NFL Draft?

Shannon said:

Now, I’m all for public institutions and its foundations, especially university foundations, being open to inspection. As a nonprofit organization, the WVU Foundation would have to file Form 990s, which are public records, and can be requested. You can go to Guidestar.com, and download the Form 990s through Tax Year 2005. Those, however, only show how much an organization brought in for the year, the top salaried employees, and other assets and liabilities.

What Rodriguez and his camp are doing is the legal version of throwing a spitball to the wall and hoping that it will stick. This defense doesn’t stick and is quite laughable. If this is the best that Rodriguez’s crack legal team can do, I would seriously considering hiring new counsel.

If only the teacher would yell at him for throwing the damn spitballs. To continue the school analogy, I think he needs to drop a few courses and add some class(es).

Thacker said:

This comes from Ed Cunningham, an ESPN commentator, within a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette commentary:

If you’re Bill Stewart, maybe you can turn it around and turn it into a lesson for your kids: ‘This is how bad adults can act. People can become petty and selfish, and let’s not do that.’

Uh, Cunningham, like .. uh .. didn’t they already sort of demonstrate that like .. uh .. back in a January ballgame? Well, one thing that this mess has shown is the dual brain brontosaurus mentality of a lot of the sports guys, that brain in the head and the second one in the tail … takes time for everything to connect.

The fatal blow within the litigation against the university will come with two things within Rodriguez’s response:

1. WVU directly “enraging and inciting certain fans and causing them to make threats upon [Rodriguez], his family and his property”.

I wonder if they will submit into the evidence that dastardly photo of James Manchin with his hands open, thumbs in his ears, waving and while sticking out his tongue.

2. The most dastardly of all: mailbox tossing.

Hell, for anyone living in Appalachia, rural mailboxes have more gunshot holes in them than the recipients of the St. Valentines Day Massacre. Rural mailboxes should come with a set of deer antlers to mount on top of the mailbox.

One thing is certain, that after the end of this litigation with attorney fees alone, Rodriguez could very well end up having a negative net worth after the expiration/termination of his current contract. Sort of shoots that ‘I want a new job for more money’ thing in the foot. Sort of places emphasis on working like hell to get picked up by the pros and skittering off from collegiate coaching.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette author, Chuck Finder, pointed out, in the above referenced article, “For one thing, West Virginia is a small state, numbering some 1.8 million residents, with a small chip on its shoulder.”

Chuck, with this mess, that ain’t no chip. That is K2and it makes Spruce Knob look like a Girl Scout cookie in comparison. Shhh. This hillbilly is damn proud of it, too. If you glance over to the other shoulder, you will see Mt. Everest. [Insert appropriate Clint Eastwood quote HERE].

I love Sunday morning wisecracks.

… what? I’m supposed to add to that? Moving on…

p.i. reed said:

Those Michigan boosters are going to want some serious payback – and soon – on their investment for paying Shredriguez’s $4mill. And it won’t come anytime soon if Pryor goes to Ohio State. Ouch, the first loss to the Buckeyes. That’ll sting

He’s not going to Michigan, not according to what I hear from people I trust to get my news. And has a WVU fan base ever been as interested in a recruit it has no chance to land? This is latest and maybe the greatest illustration of how deep this rift runs. And is it just me or does Pryor’s saga seem to now hinge on for whom he plays basketball? And does that 5-17 squad in Ann Arbor seem inviting? Just asking. By the way, in the summer of 2006, the Pittsburgh JOTS won the AAU tournament in Morgantown and featured Pryor, St. John’s D.J. Kennedy, Pitt’s DeJuan Blair and New Mexico State’s Herb Pope, who was regarded as the best of the four.

JX said:

Where would Pryor signing with Ohio St. rank on Bill Simmons “Levels of Losing?”

Easily a “Gut Punch” but we could be working with some potential unheard of Combos.

At the rate things are going in Ann Arbor with the QB situation in relation to the offense, if Pryor doesn’t sign on the dotted line….Rich and Co. may have to find themselves an athletic DB, RB or WR to convert to QB since NOBODY on the roster could possibly run the spread in the slightest.

Me thinks Ann Arbor is in for a long season in 08 (in the vein of Notre Dame in 07…hell, even with Pryor they might be looking at a Notre Dame in 07 type of season.)

I’d say it’s on par with “Eli Manning Spoils 19-0 season.” 

More Rich: Let’s get back to the fact former UM quarterback Ryan Mallett wants the NCAA to exempt him from sitting out this season after he transferred to Arkansas. Mallett says he doesn’t fit with Rodriguez’s  system.

jmbwvu said:

A decision that should have been made a long time ago by the NCAA. It’s not fair to the student-athlete to have to sit out a year if the coach who recruited them up and leaves or retires.

OB1 said:

^^^or the school that recruited him hires Satan as their head coach. 

^^^Joke to be included in Laura Weisberger’s new book “The Devil Wears Wristbands.”