/ **SPORTS** / FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Whoever said, 'It's not whether you win or lose that counts,' probably lost."
Martina Navratilova
FACT OF THE DAY
Last season, Toben Opurum led the Jayhawks in rushing and will now play linebacker this season. Angus Quigley played linebacker last season and is now the feature back for the upcoming season.
Kansas Athletics
TRIVIA OF THE DAY
Q: Who are the top three RBs on the KU depth chart?
A: Angus Quigley, Deshaun Sands, Rell Lewis
-Kansas Athletics
CORRECTION
The Kansan misidentified defensive coordinator Carl Torbush in a photo caption related to the story "Offensive line still progressing" on page 1B of Thursday's paper. The Kansan regrets this error.
WOMEN'S BASKETBALL
Top defensive player commits to Kansas
Catherine "Bunny" Williams, a high school senior from DeSoto, Texas, verbally committed to the Kansas women's basketball team.
Williams is a 6-foot-2 post player who averaged 13.5 points, 6.4 rebounds, 1.4 steals and one block per game. Williams was named Texas district 7-5A defensive player of the year in 2010.
According to ESPN.com, she ranked No.75 among other recruits who are forwards and she received a grade of 84 out of 100 on its recruiting scale.
Williams will have her first chance to officially sign a letter of intent this November.
Her older brother Shawn is a redshirt freshman at the University of Texas also playing basketball.
— Kathleen Gier
MLB
Matusz and Orioles beat Texas Rangers
BALTIMORE — Rookie Brian Matusz pitched eight innings, and the Baltimore Orioles used a four-run seventh to defeat Colby Lewis and the skidding Texas Rangers 4-0 on Thursday night.
Matusz (5-12) gave up five hits, walked one and struck out six. Only two Rangers reached second base and none advanced to third.
It was the fourth straight defeat for the Rangers, who were coming off a three-game sweep in Tampa Bay.
Associated Press
Fan finds the value of fantasy football
MORNING BREW
The end of August is quickly approaching and for most people my age that means the end of a
care-free, adult beverage-filled summer. Weeknight parties and morning hangovers are replaced with morning classes and nights of studying.
Fall is something to dread for most students because it means work and responsibility, but I look forward to it because it also means Fantasy Football.
I am by no means an expert. I've only played for one year. I did take second in my league last year. I would have been first, but Brandon Marshall had to be a prima donna and Josh McDaniels had to try to make an example out of him. I do put an obsessively large amount of effort into it. The type of effort that, if applied to my school work, would guarantee me a 4.0 and entrance into the nation's top graduate schools, but that's not important.
One thing that my elders can never understand, and that I never understood before last season, is why put so much effort into these imaginary teams? I couldn't tell you all the amendments or who the president of Nigeria is, but last fall I knew the top five rushing leaders (Chris Johnson, Steven Jackson, Thomas Jones, Maurice Jones-Drew and Adrian Peterson). Before last season, I pictured a bunch of geeky guys sitting
BY SAMANTHA ANDERSON
sanderson@kansan.com
around in a circle in front of a chalkboard-filled room with statistics, all of them unshowered and without a whim of a social life. I thought it was pretty much the grownup, guy version of Barbie dolls or a jockier version of Dungeons & Dragons.
Once I started playing, however, I got it. Maybe it was because I was the only girl and I felt like I had to represent my gender, or because I am extremely competitive, in an unhealthy kind of way. Football on Sundays was more than rooting for my team, the Steelers, or whoever was playing the Ravens. It was desperately looking through stats and searching NFL.com, praying that Romo would throw a touchdown pass or that the Giants would get an interception. Fantasy crosses team loyaltyies. I actually rooted for the Patriots if it meant that Randy Moss would score me some more points. It's become much more than a
simple game. It's an industry. Websites and magazines take advantage of our nation's statistical addiction to TV shows, T-shirts and chatrooms devoted to this little game.
How has this become such a large entity? It's been around for much longer than commonly thought. The Internet has helped boost its popularity, but it was actually formed in 1962 by the Oakland Raiders owner Wilfred Winkenbach. He started the first-ever league with Bill Tunnell, the guy in charge of public relations for the Raiders, and Oakland Tribune reporter Scotty Stirling. This was more of an old boys club, open to the sports elite and educated, so no hungover college frat boys. In 1969, a bar owner brought Fantasy to the public at King's X, an Oakland sports bar.
For a while Fantasy was just that. Groups of guys would play it in local bars or man-hideouts away from screaming kids or nagging wives. But when the personal computer and the Internet took off in the early '90s, the Fantasy industry did too. Fantasy players could check stats at any minute and change their starting lineup right up till the beginning of the game. Everything became so accessible, so quick.
The reason for its continued popularity is because picking a fake team and
deciding who we want to play is probably the closest many of us will ever get to the actual game of football. I know I could never strap on some pads and tackle some guy that weighs 100 pounds more than me. We like it for the same reason that we like Madden and calling into sports radio shows. We like to feel like we can interact with what's important to us.
It's one thing to flip on ESPN and listen to Chris Berman chant "he could go all the way," but it's quite another to know that the football player running up the sideline is the player you picked for your team and is on his way to scoring you seven points, plus yardage. It's football's answer to baseball's trading cards, just more fun.
Edited by Alex Tretbar
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Mountain West eyes BCS spot with two new teams
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Hans Mueh was wondering, like most everyone else, about the future of the Mountain West early Wednesday. By the end of the day, the Air Force athletics director liked what he saw.
Fresno State and Nevada might not be able to join the Mountain West until 2012, as Western Athletic Conference commissioner Karl Benson — who called the schools "selfish" during a teleconference Thursday — tries to make the schools pay a price for leaving. He also plans to hold the schools to an agreement to pay a $5 million exit fee.
But if the Mountain West's plan was to weaken the WAC — the conference that was poised to land BYU's non-football athletic programs, while BYU's football team became an independent —
The Mountain West added Fresno State and Nevada, and at least for the moment had not lost BYU. Although the two new conference members have had mediocre attendance figures and offer no obvious boost to the conference's hopes of getting an automatic spot in the Bowl Championship Series, Mueh said he thought the future of the conference was brighter with additions.
"I think we're in great shape." Mueh said. "We've arguably added the two best programs left in the WAC."
"Right now BYU is still in the league and nothing has happened to change that, so I'm assuming we're going to have 11 teams," Mueh said. "BYU is a very powerful program. They've brought a lot of status to us in a lot of sports. Would we drop a little bit with them out of the league? Probably. I think we're a stronger league with them in it."
BYU might end up in the WAC, but that conference has only six members after Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada agreed this year to join the Mountain West. The West Coast Conference is another rumored option for BYU. Mueh said he thought the two new teams put the WMC closer to automatic qualifying status for the BCS, but the conference takes a hit if BYU leaves.
Making concessions to BYU to keep it in the conference isn't something officials want to do. MWC commissioner Craig Thompson said Wednesday that the conference has never made
CURRENT MOUNTAIN
WEST CONFERENCE
MEMBERS
then it worked. The Mountain West is still maintaining that BYU is part of the league, and could stay despite other options.
Air Force Brigham Young University Colorado State New Mexico San Diego State University Texas Christian University University of Nevada, Las Vegas Utah Wyoming
FUTURE MEMBERS
Boise State
Fresno State
Nevada
concessions to any member.
Mueh said he believes in true revenue sharing in a conference.
Even if BYU leaves, the Mountain West will still exist. That didn't seem like a sure thing when it seemed the Cougars were headed out, but Thompson and school presidents scrambled to add two teams.
Mueh credited the homework the MWC had previously done on Fresno State and Nevada.
"Craig Thompson has become one of the great commissioners in the NCAA," said Mueh, who is admittedly good friends with Thompson.
Whether Fresno State and Nevada give the Mountain West a huge boost will be debated. Fresno State's attendance for football last season was just 33,578 per game, and Nevada drew 17,500 per game. And while both programs have won consistently, neither has won more than eight regular-season games in a season over the past five years.
Air Force coach Troy Calhoun said that he thought the conference was "absolutely" stronger.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Stanford will count on Luck this season
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
One never really knows what's going to come out of Jim Harbaugh's mouth next, or his playbook. So it was that Nov. 14 at the LA Coliseum, Harbaugh pointed his Stanford football team toward a two-point conversion, no matter that he was leading. 48-21.
"What's your deal?" USC coach Pete Carroll asked Harbaugh at midfield after the watershed 55-21 whupping, an answer that Harbaugh has never really satisfactorily supplied.
"I don't know why they did it," USC linebacker Michael Morgan told me recently, adding, "We got something for
If nothing else, it did give rise to a clever Cardinal marketing campaign. The "What's Your Deal?" package gives a buyer the USC game this minor, less the element of Carroll, plus two others of choice.
Carroll might dispute that last part, but here goes Stanford, embarking on the post-Toby Gerhart era, which probably means a full dose of Andrew Luck rather than the previous controlled one.
"There are no weaknesses. He's as accurate as any quarterback I've ever seen ..."
JIM HARBAUGH Standford coach
In the meantime, that leaves Harbaugh to say things like the Pac-10 is a "mighty-man conference," that fullback-linebacker Owen Marecic is "the perfectly engineered football player," and that, "besides treating people in a first-class manner, winning the conference championship is our No. 1 goal."
If nothing else, Harbaugh hints at the shift in emphasis with his assessment of Luck, a third-year sophomore.
but given that Gerhart charged, battered and bucked for 1,871 yards and finished second in the Heisman Trophy race, it almost has to be. The Cardinal set a school record with 2,837 rushing yards.
It's assumed that Luck, the quarterback, is an NFL first-round draft choice in the oven, even as his numbers were relatively understated last season: 13 touchdown passes, four interceptions.
"He comes with no red flags," Harbaugh says. "There are no weaknesses. He's as accurate as
Harbaugh doesn't concede that it's going to be a lot different,
Stanford has several candidates to step in for Gerhart, most notably 218- pound senior
any quarterback
I've ever seen,
he's athletic — he
rushed for 354
yards — he can
throw it 70 yards
taking one step,
and he's a brilliant
kid."
"It not going to be easy, but it's something we have to do," said sophomore guard David DeCastro of Bellevue. "We can't lean on Toby anymore."
Jeremy Stewart and 216-pound sophonore Tyler Gaffney. But it's Luck who is the Cardinal's leading returning rusher.
No doubt Harbaugh will be intent on not conceding aty of the physical culture he has developed up front at Stanford. In 2009, the Cardinal rushed for a remarkable 1,044 yards more than opponents.
"You don't want to lose that"
DeCastro said.