mike

After today’s announcement of the student ticket lottery for bowl tickets talk of the trip is finally turning serious. Well, serious for a larger number of people. I’ve known for a few weeks now that if the bowl is Orange, then I will be there. Janos had the foresight to order Orange Bowl tickets while we still had 2 games left. Wasn’t all that big of a risk, if we wind up in a different bowl then you sell them, hopefully for the same amount that the bowl ticket we need is going for.

The focus is still on Orange. We have been led to believe by just about every sports reporter that Notre Dame is going to the Fiesta Bowl. Not that they even deserve a BCS bid, but thats a story for another time. Here are the details as far as Orange was concerned. The original plan, after Janos first bought the tickets would have been to fly to Orlando and hopefully have lodging at the Crawford residence. Then drive the 3.5 hours to Miami for the game and somehow drive back after. With more people starting to jump on board plans have to change. First, would be a dream scenario if everyone were able to find a place in the Orlando area we could call up our good friends at Carl’s Rent-A-Van and get a sweet ride. The dream of renting a van from Carl dates back to Sophomore year when a whole bunch of people were interested in going on Spring Break, we all know how that story ended. However finding enough space in Orlando would require a few hotel rooms and why pay for rooms in Orlando, go to Miami. So with our good friend Expedia we looked into the options. Turns out it may be cheaper to get a package from Expedia than to do it in pieces. We found an excellent Indian Casino across from Everglades National Park. Package includes airfare and a rental car. Four people per room and car, $311/person for 3 nights. Unbelieveable! I should do this anyway, bowl game or not. I even changed some options, if you add days it gets cheaper, I guess the plane ticket is the largest portion of the price. When I changed the trip from 1/1 to ¼ to 1/1 to 1/6 it went down to $283 a person.

Anyway this is all up in the air. Our students need to get themselves tickets. We need to root this weekend for UCLA and Colorado, and even Virginia State (cause I want them to win the ACC, I said early in the season that I thought the most fun bowl matchup we could have would be Virginia Tech). It really doesn’t matter what happens, a trip is going to happen and its going to rock. If we stay at an Indian Casino, well then this trip really will have no ceiling for greatness.

Saw this today, check out the list.

Just from the title you know this is something worth reading. By now you should know of my numerous problems with ESPN and also how much I enjoy lists, especially ones with 52 items.

Some that I agree are terrible that I’d like to mention:
Stu Scott
The Hot Seat (I’d include any of the stupid non-sports segments on Sports Center)
Scoreboard Sound Effects – I’ve been complaining about this for a while. I have a lot of problems with score bugs in general but sound effects are not needed.
Ron Jaworski not used enough – I can’t stand Jaws, his ‘backseat role’ should be pushed further back in the car.
All of points complaining about Chris Berman.
Lee Corso
Mike Gottfried – I actually didn’t notice how terrible he was until he covered the Penn State-Michigan State game. For fun I’d like to see him call a hockey game, he talks so slow he’d only be mentioning when a goal is scored.
John Clayton and Sean Salisbury – I actually thing Clayton would be ok on his own. I was rooting very hard for Salisbury to take that coaching job this past offseason so that I would not have to listen to him anymore.
Woody Paige
World Series of Poker – The list only seems to have a problem with the marathons. Poker should not be on ESPN at all, maybe on ESPN2.

Ones I don’t Agree with:
High School athletes committing to college. I think its great they cover this. When D-Will made his announcement I watched ESPNEWS all afternoon.
Mark May – The only college football analyst I actually like. They had him paired with Trev Alberts before Trev got fired. Treb by the way was the worst college football analyst.
PTI – They don’t complain about the show but don’t blame PTI for anything. Its the second best show on the network, behind Baseball Tonight of course.

Things that need to be on the list:
Bottom Line – I don’t mind it on Sports Center but get it off the screen during games, get it off ESPN2 while you’re at it.
Kirk Herbstreet – Corso is on the list but no Kirk? They should be combined in to one, or put next to each other to pad the number of items on your list. Keep Fowler and start over on Gameday.
The Top 10 List – Its not difficult to rank plays in a decent order, yet they screw it up nightly.
Did You Know? – The best part of Sports Center when I was little.
Highlights on Sports Center – I can analyze on my own, just show me what happened.
Stats on Sports Center – I really stopped watching when they stopped showing the full screen stats after each highlight. The Bottom Line should not contain more stats than on the screen and I shouldn’t have to wait for them if I’ve just watched the highlight.

I hope I get back to this topic soon enough. I watch ESPN so rarely now, if anything I’ll watch ESPNEWS during the day and then College Football on the weekends.