Tag: oklahoma

TVlog: 5 Minutes of ESPN Firsttake

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Since Jonathan Lee Riches decided to give me a day off by suing Martha Stewart for the benefit of Rachael Ray, I had to come up with a new subject. So, in a first for NerdsOnSports, I’m going to write running commentary on what I’m watching on TV. At 11 AM. I don’t have a job to go to until Monday. So I watch things like “Firsttake” (f/k/a “Cold Pizza”) on TV. It really is this bad.

All times EDT.

11:00: OK, They’re talking about Steve Spurrier’s history vis-a-vis LSU. Interesting, perhaps, but I tuned in right in the middle, so I’m really not sure what the operative thesis is here. I think it’s something about how Spurrier’s had a great coaching career and has performed well against LSU, or hasn’t, either way he’s a football coach. Read More

Oklahoma’s 2005 Season Erased; Time/Space Continuum In Peril

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NCAA erases Oklahoma’s 2005 Season

OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma must erase its wins from the 2005 season and will lose two scholarships for the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, the NCAA said Wednesday.

The penalties stem from a case involving two players, including the Sooners’ starting quarterback, who were kicked off the team last August for being paid for work they had not performed at a Norman car dealership. The NCAA said Oklahoma was guilty of a “failure to monitor” the employment of the players.

The Sooners went 8-4 and beat Oregon in the Holiday Bowl to end the 2005 season. Records from that season involving quarterback Rhett Bomar and offensive lineman J.D. Quinn must be erased, the NCAA said, and coach Bob Stoops’ career record will be amended to reflect the erased wins, dropping it from 86-19 in eight seasons to 78-19.

NCAA Commissioner Myles Brand declared the sanctions in a press conference on Wednesday, standing in front of the NCAA’s TimeScrambler 2000, which he used to go back in time and rewrite the face of history.

“The evidence seems clear,” Brand said, yelling to be heard over the time machine’s buzzing and whirring. “This level of corruption could only have succeeded with the support of the university’s athletics department.”

Commissioner Brand then entered the appropriate spatio-temporal coordinates into the TimeScrambler, pausing only to don lead-lined goggles.

Budweiser stock (symbol: BUD) gained 4.8 points on the day, as the undoing of Oklahoma’s 2005 wins resulted in 741,500 gallons of beer going unconsumed. Nine maimings resulting from postgame brawls were instantly healed, forty-one vandalized cars restored to their pre-victory condition, and three children born to Oklahoma co-eds winked out of existence.

“You see this after most major disciplinary actions,” said Dr. Anton Parallax, NCAA director of temporal anomalies. “It’s not as devastating as you’d think, because there’s no actual harm done. The affected parties never existed.”

Parallax cited the 1988 censure of St. Meinrad University for a decades-long conspiracy to inflate the grades of their student athletes. The NCAA erased thirty-two years of wins, resulting in a temporal flux so severe that St. Meinrad became a Benedictine abbey instead of a Division I technical school and their division rival, the previously unheralded University of Notre Dame, became a storied powerhouse. Few fans have complained about or even noticed this revision of history, even though, as Parallax says, Notre Dame “really isn’t that good.”