Jerry Tarkanian once threw out one of our favorite quotes ever about the idiot outfit known as the NCAA.  He said, “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, they just gave Cleveland State two more years of probation.”

Substitute in USC for Kentucky and SE Missouri State for Cleveland State, and you’ll have summed up this story.  The NCAA has given the school 3 years of probation and vacated a number of the school’s wins over the past few years for, among other things giving “impermissible extra benefits were given to two men’s basketball student-athletes: one in the amount of $239 for unpaid institutional fees in August 2007, and the other when the former assistant coach drove a student-athlete 171 miles from campus to Memphis in October 2006.”

Word on the street is that the ride was so a player could go home to visit his newly born baby.

You can check the story here or here.

Way to go NCAA!

(On a side note, USC continues to cheat and cheat and cheat without ever getting in trouble.)

It was just announced that Texas Tech running back Baron Batch will miss 3-6 weeks with an apparent arm injury.

Mike Leach responded by saying, “What?  We have a running back on the team?”

As you may have heard, Tiger Woods was critical of a rules official at this past week’s World Golf Championship for putting Padraig Harrington and him on the clock with 3 holes to play Sunday.  Tiger stated, “I thought they would have used better judgment on that considering we were the ones that were probably going to win the golf tournament in the last group. We separated ourselves.”

Initially, a PGA Tour official announced that Tiger had been fined for his comments.   Earlier this morning, however, Tiger stated that he had not been fined.

Our inside source claims that Tiger has now actually been fined for publicly stating that he was not fined.  “We have to draw the line somewhere,” yet another PGA official told our source.  “It’s one thing to criticize a rules official, but it’s an entirely different story when you say you weren’t fined after the PGA announces you were fined.  That’s unacceptable.”

When asked if Tiger really was fined for saying that he was not fined, the PGA official reminded our source that the PGA does not make its fines of players public.

ESPN is reporting that Michael Crabtree’s adviser, David Wells, claims Crabtree will be willing to sit out the entire NFL season and re-enter the draft next year if the 49ers do not make him a reasonable contract offer.  Crabtree was taken 10th and think he is not getting the respect he deserves in San Fran.

Apparently, Wells based his advice to Crabtree on his negotiations back in 1998 with the Yankees.  “I told Mike a little story,” Wells said, “about how in ‘98 when the Yanks offered me a contract that said I could not drink more than 10 beers a day.  I told them to go to hell, and then signed with the Padres.”

That worked out well, right?

More hi-jinx from Larry and Matthew Dukes…

We took in the final 2 hours of NBC’s “The Storm” last night.  While watching this horrendous 2 hours of TV, we realized something… the writers so whole-heartedly bought into the theory that Marisol Nichols forces the cancellation of shows that they did not even start writing part 2 of the mini-series until this past Wednesday.

There’s no other explanation.  Part 1 of the event was not good, but certainly entertaining.  Part 2, however, was purely just painful.  We can only imagine the writers scrambling on Tuesday night when they got the call that yes, NBC was planning on running part 2 of the mini-series.  Hence, they stuck to 2 common themes - James Van Der Beek runs from bad guys in the rain and some woman has a baby during a storm.  There you have it.

And we’ll close with a nice line from the NY Times review of the show: “NBC has given its current batch of Sunday night mini-series a name: Survival Sundays. It refers to the survival of the human race, but it could just as easily refer to the survival of the viewer’s brain.”

(PS - that line from the review barely beat out this one as our favorite: “’The Storm’ packs an hour and a half of story into its four hours.”)