DBD 7.30.10: Pac-12 Basketball: Round Robin or Tournament?

PASADENA – Cal head coach Jeff Tedford and preseason honorable mention All-American linebacker Mike Mohamed completed a busy day of interviews at the West Coast Pac-10 Media Day on Thursday. Both spent nearly five hours conducting interviews with media outlets from across the nation on a beautiful, sunny day at the Rose Bowl.

The activities began when Pac-10 Commissioner Larry Scott addressed a large media crowd from a stage set up near the 50-yard line at 9:30 a.m. The head coach and one player from each of the conference’s teams then spent nearly the next three hours in 15-minute intervals taking questions at the front table from the assembled media.

http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/073010aaa.html

PAC-10 PRESEASON MEDIA POLL
Team – First-Place Votes (Points)
Oregon – 15 (314)
USC – 12 (311)
Oregon State – 3 (262)
Stanford – 1 (233)
Arizona – 2 (222)
Washington – 1 (209)
Cal (134)
UCLA – 1 (134)
Arizona State (81)
Washington State (39)

http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/073010aab.html

http://espn.go.com/blog/pac10/post/_/id/11359/video-cal-coach-jeff-tedford

With USC the only league team that can’t go to the Rose Bowl this season – though the Trojans will face UCLA here on the final day of their season – the other nine teams are talking about the wide-open race in the Pac-10.

Cal has the most experienced quarterback in the conference in fifth-year senior Kevin Riley ; the Golden Bears also have running back Shane Vereen, who rushed for 952 yards despite spending most of the season as a backup to Jahvid Best.

http://collegefootball.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1107603

The DBD title isn’t a yes or no question.

Track and Field is smart:

California track & field added to its total of athletes receiving All-Academic status when three men were named to the coaches’ association team Thursday. Including the eight women who were honored earlier in the week, the Golden Bears had 11 members earn the prestigious status.

The Cal men announced as part of the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) squad were:

Kari Karlsson – 3.285 GPA, operations research and management science major
Patrick Kowalsky – 3.319 GPA, media studies and political science double major
Mark Matusak – 3.366 GPA, psychology and integrative biology double major

As lose to Texas:

When you think your team is going to lose before the pitch is thrown, well, you’re either going to be right, or pleasantly surprised.

Curse you, AN, for being right.

Vin Mazzaro didn’t have it from the outset, and seemed to be at his worse after his teammates gave him a run or two to work with, which happened to be all they gave him to work with.

With Daric Barton and Jack Cust sitting this one out, the A’s offense was predictably stagnant, managing only a Rajai run in the first, and a pair of scores in the sixth following a bobbled double-play grounder that would have ended the inning.

AN interviews Craig Breslow, Part I:

Nico: So just to start off I wanted to give you a chance to talk about: What do you most want fans to know about pediatric cancer, the “Strike 3 foundation,” and the event coming up?

Breslow: OK, so I guess the salient points are that I started the “Strike 3 Foundation” about two years ago in 2008 and at the time I was pretty deeply rooted in Connecticut, I was playing for the Red Sox at the time, I had gone to school in Connecticut, and felt like it was a good time for me to do something in the community to give back.

Obviously since that time I’ve spent of different stints with a number of different teams and traveled around the country, and now feeling like I’ve kind of entrenched myself in the Bay Area, I feel it’s a good time to try to extend our scope out this way.

Info on being an extra in the Moneyball movie filming now at the Coliseum:

Advice based on last night’s experience….everyone else who was there, chime in.

Arrive 30-60 minutes before the time the BeInAMovie people told you was when the doors open. I arrived at 9:45 for the 10:30 shift which was supposedly as early as possible, and I was in line until 11:30 PM.

Arrive with a full stomach and all the food and drink you wish to consume and share while you are there. There is horrible airline coffee with powdered creamer, water, trail mix, and hard candy. That’s it. No vendors (although a couple of Coliseum vendors are playing themselves walking around the stands, they have no food.)

McC discusses Marlins one hitting Giants:

See, that’s the problem with winning baseball. When a pitcher shuts your team down, you can’t fall back on snarky jokes. You can’t assume that Anibal Sanchez was just lucky to face the Giants instead of a major league team. The Giants have held their own against Josh Johnson, Clayton Kershaw, and Johan Santana over the last couple of weeks. So when Anibal Sanchez absolutely dominates the Giants — one hit! — the only responsible thing to do is to praise his performance.

The urge to complain about the Rowand/Renteria/Pitcher bottom of the order? Save it. The itch to chew out the entire lineup for mad flailing? Don’t scratch it here. The familiar feeling of nausea that started around 2005? Quash it. Grit your teeth and remember that the Giants have won 13 of their last 17. Sometimes good teams get shut down by great pitching performances. And if you think I’m comparing the 2010 Giants to the ‘27 Yankees, you’re wrong; Lou Gehrig couldn’t play catcher.

First Day of Raiders camp is recapped:

Enough preambling jibberish, there is real football action to report…kind of. So, without further ado and from my first hand knowledge of other’s first hand reporting, bullet points that may be of interest (each word is a separate link to my “sources”).

    * Chaz Schillens left the field early and did not return. There is, as of yet, no word on why. He was not limping when he left. In other words, I have no idea if I should panic yet or not.
    * Khalif Barnes also walked off the field early with a member of the training staff. He was not limping either.
    * Cable had a long talk with Mario Henderson after practice. No idea what it was about, but I am guessing it wasn’t Cable lavishing praise upon him.

Hit the jump for news that doesn’t blow.

[1]

Amare’s trip to the Holy Land

For those of you (like me) guilty of getting carried away by the news that Amare Stoudemire made a special trip to Israel to investigate the possibility of Jewish roots in his family — and immediately started dreaming of Amare switching national-team allegiances someday to join Sacramento’s Omri Casspi in Israel’s frontcourt — we are forced to issue a couple of reality checks.

…WHAT

Silver Screen And Roll looks at new NBA Jam:

Behold, earthlings! A screen grab from EA Sports’ reboot of NBA Jam, courtesy of the handsome cads over at NintendoLife. As luck would have it, they chose to show us a grab featuring a certain Mr. Kobe Bryant, about whom we know a thing or two around here. Let’s assess the realism of the image with a little pro-con, shall we?

Pro: The Staples Center court looks like the Staples Center court.

Con: Whatevs. For years now basketball video games have rendered the Staples court pretty convincingly. That’s nothing new.

Pro: Kobe looks great. Nearly lifelike.

Con: The Laker Girls are in red and white, for some reason.

Pro: One of the guys on the bench looks like Derek Fisher, which is exactly where he’d be if you had to pick a couple Lakers to play some two-on-two.

Con: Who the hell are the other dudes on the bench? I don’t recognize any of them.

The Ms. and I are deciding whether to make the trip this weekend. Yes, no? I haven’t booked a hotel or anything just because I wasn’t planning to go.

How do people do it?? I thought I’d give it a go today, but after 20 minutes, I just could not find a combinations of jeans + button-up shirt + belt I felt comfortable with! Casual is too hard…

Questionable Dell customer representative plus naive Dell customer = nude pics on Interwebs.

Tara Fitzgerald of Sacramento needed help. The nude photos she had taken for her boyfriend were nowhere to be found on her computer, so she called Dell in December 2008. She was patched through to support tech Riyaz Shaikh, an employee of call service center in India, and gave him permission to search her PC remotely. What happened next was horrifying, said Fitzgerald:

“I watched him take the pictures out of my e-mail. I watched him.”

More than a dozen of those pictures ended up on a site called “bitchtara.”

A Teacher’s Value: $100 per Percentile Point

A kindergartner with a very good teacher will later earn about $100 more annually for every percentile gained during the kindergarten year, according to a team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. So a student who went from the 50th to the 60th percentile could expect to earn about $1,000 more annually at age 27, say the researchers, who studied nearly 12,000 children, now grown. Adding up the additional earnings for a class of 5-year-olds, Chetty says an outstanding kindergarten teacher is thus worth about $320,000 per year.

Source: The New York Times

Researchers have identified rocks that they say could contain the fossilised remains of life on early Mars.

The team made their discovery in the ancient rocks of Nili Fossae.

Their work has revealed that this trench on Mars is a “dead ringer” for a region in Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth has been buried and preserved in mineral form.

They report the findings in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The team, led by a scientist from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (Seti) in California, believes that the same “hydrothermal” processes that preserved these markers of life on Earth could have taken place on Mars at Nili Fossae.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10790648

The Koenigsegg CCXR and a £350,000 Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SuperVeloce were both clamped on the afternoon of 22 July.

Kensington and Chelsea Council said the light-blue vehicles were in serious contravention of parking rules.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-10810772

Welfare officials had tried to meet Mr Kato since early this year. But when they went to visit, family members repeatedly chased them away, according to Tomoko Iwamatsu, an Adachi ward official.

Authorities grew suspicious and sought an investigation by police, who forced their way into the house on Wednesday.

They discovered a mummified body, believed to be Kato, lying in his bed, wearing underwear and pyjamas, covered with a blanket.

Mr Kato’s relatives told police that he had “confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha,” according to a report by Jiji Press.

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower’s pension payments via Mr Kato’s bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10809128

G.M.’s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks … but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volt’s development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.

In short, the Volt appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build. Unfortunately for this theory, G.M. was already committed to the Volt when it entered bankruptcy. And though President Obama’s task force reported in 2009 that the Volt "will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term," it didn’t cancel the project.

So sayeth the NY Times

The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether drunken drivers injured in accidents they cause can sue the liquor establishments that served them. State insurance law bars them from bringing personal injury claims against other drivers, but the court has never ruled on whether that statute takes precedence over the dram shop act, which makes liquor establishments liable for serving visibly intoxicated patrons.

CGB Lawyers! What say you?

Law.com Article

So that would mean 22 conference games. Isn’t the NCAA rule now a maximum of 30 regular season games, excluding conference tournaments and a handful of other exempt games (e.g., Coaches v. Cancer, preseason NIT)? So if there are 22 conference games, would the conference members be limiting themselves to only 8 nonconference games as a general rule? And at least one (for some teams 2) of those nonconference games might already be devoted to the Pac-10/Big XII (or is it Pac-12/Big XII Lite) Hardwood Series.

BTW, is the Pac-10/Big XII Hardwood Series still alive beyond next season after these conference shakeups?

Full disclosure: it’s a Jon Wilner article from the SJ Merc

The Pac-10 has won more NCAA championships than any other conference, but its future success in everything from volleyball to water polo depends on closing the $100 million revenue gap with the Big Ten and Southeastern conferences.

And there’s only one way to do that — only one major source of untapped revenue: football media rights.

“We cannot compete with the Big Ten and the SEC if we don’t close that gap,” Washington athletic director Scott Woodward said. “We cannot afford to pay top coaches, or build facilities. All this emphasis on souping up our brand — it’s all about staying competitive.”

And continuing to provide the broad-based athletic opportunity at the heart of the league’s sporting mission.

An extra $5 million could have saved Washington’s swimming programs, which were cut because of budget woes. It could have saved Arizona State’s men’s tennis team. It could have saved jobs at Stanford [sic] and Washington.

And an extra $5 million would do wonders for Cal, where jobs and sports are in jeopardy because of the athletic department’s $7 million-$10 million annual deficit.

“Preserving sports is a hot topic at Cal,” Scott said. "How we do (at the negotiating table) will have a direct impact on the future of a number of sports.

And Taylor Mays and Navorro Bowman, too

Been meaning to ask about this…I got one and spent a lot of time giving detailed answers…sad life that I lead this is something I really care about…anyone else…anyonce heard from them or seen the results????

It was dull over at AtQ… and I come here – and this is all I get?!?!

Where are the dancing robots, and the Honking Bears?

I’m ready for football

http://caldanceteam.berkeley.edu/pics/igallery/iphoto119-3.jpg

For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/nyregion/30medschools.html?src=me&ref=homepage

Previous top 10 include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia Tech, LSU, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Washington, and Washington State

Chris Fetters, Scout.com

We have our first two entries into the CGB Hall Of Fame from 2010:

Aaron Rodgers
Glenn Seaborg

I thought by this time last year (or even earlier) we got the basketball schedule. It would be nice to know the schedule so I can plan fall semester conflicts ahead of time. Also I might be going on a winter break trip, so i’d like to know what games I’m going to miss. (The conference schedule seems to mirror the volleyball schedule though, if last year’s an indication)