Temple: We’re No. 118!

There are 119 Division I-A football teams. ESPN.com is ranking all of them over the past decade. And guess who’s right near the bottom?

Oh, too lovely. You will note that although Temple is not ranked last, the Owls did lose to the program ranked last in 2006. But, hey, at least the basketball team is still… oh.

Cellar dwellers hoping to live the Boise State dream [ESPN.com]

Study Reveals: Boston College Not Near St. Joe’s

It’s been just a few weeks since St. Joseph’s decided to adopt Boston College as its football team so the kiddies have a football team to root for in the fall.

Well, the St. Joe’s campus is up in arms (well, not really) and today there are dueling columns in the school newspaper (The Hawk) about the subject. While the pro column makes the usual points — hey, cheap trip to Boston, which is “a very fun city” — but I’d like to look at the con column:

This convenience perspective is probably most effective in capturing the true absurdity of the idea. A quick search on Mapquest.com [apparently, this column was written in 1999 —ed.] shows that Boston College is located nearly six hours northeast of the St. Joe’s campus, a seemingly unreasonable and prohibitive distance for the program to succeed.

I can picture the St. Joe’s brass slapping its collective forehead about now. “Six hours! Why didn’t we look that up first?” Also, who needs to look up how far away Boston is? Okay, a better question: Who would admit to doing that?

Program offers a new sport for fans to enjoy [The Hawk]
Football is unecessary luxury for a small school [The Hawk]
[via Soft Pretzel Logic]
March 2: St. Joe’s To Combine Hawk, Eagle In Mad Experiment

St. Joe’s To Combine Hawk, Eagle In Mad Experiment

The city’s Division I college football team lineup is about to get a little bigger.

No, St. Joe’s isn’t starting a football team. But the school is set to adopt fellow Jesuit institution Boston College’s football team. Wait. Guh-wah?

A survey at St. Joe’s last year revealed some kids who go to Joe’s miss having a football team on campus. Of course, a football team is expensive — “The University has so many financial commitments at the present time that creating a football team would be prohibitively costly.” — so the school just decided to create a partnership with BC instead. The adoption, the school paper says, will allow St. Joe’s students to go up to BC for a game and root, root, root for the Eagles.

Or, perhaps, the Eagle-hawks:

The Oct. 2, 1987 edition of The Hawk contained a letter to the editor with a poll to select a team for St. Joe’s students to follow through The Hawk sports section. The Auburn Tigers collected the most votes, and from 1987-1991 the students of Saint Joseph’s embraced Auburn University’s football program as their own.

Hawk articles referred to the Auburn team as the Tiger-Hawks, and students could follow the ups and downs of this adopted team through the student newspaper.

In the first year of the adoption, approximately 100 Saint Joseph’s students went to take part in Auburn’s 1987 Homecoming. Auburn offered free tickets for their Homecoming game to anyone presenting a Saint Joseph’s I.D.

Students trekked to Auburn for a second time in 1988 and again in 1989.

Saint Joseph’s interest in Auburn eventually waned following an unsuccessful 1991 season that was further tainted with play-for-pay allegations made by former Auburn defensive back Eric Ramsey.

Ain’t that how it always is? You adopt a random football team in Alabama to root for, and then that team ends up paying its players. If I had a nickel for every time that happened…

St. Joe’s adopts BC football team [The Hawk]
The enemy of my enemy [Soft Pretzel Logic]
[Original photo from BC Eagles Football]