Hokey Hokies, and links

Some Friday linkage while wondering if this garb being sported by Virginia Tech's baseball team is the worst-looking uniform ever ... or the best-looking uniform ever.

Evidently the ensemble is borrowed from the old Houston Astros threads:

The Leggett argument

The recent past, the present, and the future under Jack Leggett have been the topic of serious and polarizing debate lately on the message board.

Phil Steele speaketh

I've always wondered what Phil Steele's office looks like.

Some other questions about the famous college football guru:

The BCS and bad business

My eyes tend to roll whenever there's news about Congressmen trying to take on the BCS.

While their actions might be well-intentioned -- might -- you just don't get the sense that these folks are serious college football fans. And yeah, there are plenty of pressing things going on in the world that are more worthy of their focus.

That said, there are flaws in the BCS system that are hard to deny.

Can they host?

After Clemson's baseball players received their ritual dousing of beer (and who knows what else) from the "Cheap Seats" crew following Saturday's division-clinching win over Florida State, they all walked within a few feet of us reporter types on their way back to the dugout.

The dedicated folks in the Cheap Seats, perched just above the fence in far right field, are good people. Their name also fits perfectly given the apparent choice of beer they chose to discharge onto the players.

SEC to Big Ten: meh

Whenever I hear someone complain about the media scrutiny of our college sports programs in South Carolina, I chuckle.

It's not necessarily the tamest I've seen. But the pressure cooker is nowhere near as stifling as some other locales.

Such as Alabama.

On illegal immigration (sort of)

A few years ago, while driving in lovely Charleston, I was startled by a bumper sticker on a car in front of me:

"GO BACK TO OHIO! (But leave your daughters here)"

Hey, at least we know where the dude stands.

More on turnover margin

The one thing that sticks out in researching the ACC's turnover-margin stats from the last five years is the remarkably wild swings in the statistic from year to year.

Let's take N.C. State, for example.

Let's make a (TV) deal

Before we get to the major news of this apparent new TV deal that's been struck between the ACC and ESPN, we will ask the question that is surely consuming everyone right now:

Will Doc Walker be back?

True colors

It's a long baseball season, so it's usually not wise to make season-long judgments on the strength of a mere weekend series.

But Greg Wallace of the Independent-Mail says this Clemson team showed its true personality in a series defeat at lowly Wake Forest, and it's hard to disagree at this point.

Murphy Holloway and the media

After hopping on the board Friday morning, I saw a question from clemtiger117 that asked a general question about the pressure to break news, and whether that pressure leads to poor journalism.

I initially decided to make the answer to that question the topic for today's blog post, and to answer it largely in the context of the Murphy Holloway fiasco. Cris opted to put it on the front page, but we're posting it to the blog as well.

Generally speaking, absolutely the pressure to be first leads to poor journalism. Now more than ever. All over the place, and not just in sports coverage.

More on the record books

Everyone knows the ACC has been a Hokie world since the conference expanded, so was no surprise to see Virginia Tech atop the wins list in the latest installment of our "TI Trends" series.

Over the last five seasons, here's what the overall and ACC records look like:

More on running-game trends

Raise your hand if you feel old looking at the above picture of James Davis. That's him making an immediate impact in his first college game, a 25-24 victory over Texas A&M in 2005.

Doesn't seem like five years, does it?

Anyway, last night we unveiled the first of our series of "TI Trends" pieces. We opened by examining Clemson's running game in the first five years of the 12-team ACC, and the Tigers' 162.8-yard average ranks third in the conference over that period behind Georgia Tech (216.8) and Virginia Tech (164).

Here's a look at the complete list:

The N.C. State comparison

If you're of the opinion that Clemson's athletics department is in a sorry state right now, a look at N.C. State's current predicament shows that it could be a heck of a lot worse.

The academic (ad)mission

Ron Morris' lastest column outlines a premise that basically says college athletics departments should begin giving every penny of their profits to their universities, and I'm having a tough time reconciling that notion.

Maybe it's because I cover sports for a living, and my occupation sort of hinges on the sports I cover not becoming intramural endeavors that are secondary to the "academic mission" of universities.

I consider myself a realist, and the reality I've long held to be the truth is that academics for college athletes are often little more than a charade.

Unhappy campers

If you're a Clemson fan, it's hard not to be irate in the wake of this Murphy Holloway story.

Not going to try to get into the details, because all the details are not entirely clear.

Money matters: Clemson vs. USC

Some Clemson fans probably laugh at the notion of getting all worked up over South Carolina, and it's hard to blame them.

Doesn't take much research to discover that it really hasn't been much of a rivalry lately.

Even though the Gamecocks pasted the Tigers last November in Columbia, Clemson fans have plenty of ammo to quiet down any smack talk.

TDP and the future

In June of 2007, I sat down with Terry Don Phillips for an interview that focused on his first five years at the helm as Clemson's athletics director.

Plenty of good things had happened over that five-year stretch, but it was hard to ignore the overall lack of ACC titles collected by the Tigers' athletics programs.

Here's an excerpt from the article, which appeared in The Post and Courier:

The Jimbo transformation

Fine piece of recent writing and reporting by Dennis Dodd, who traveled to the Redneck Riviera to do a piece on Jimbo Fisher and his traversing of the booster-club circuit.

This isn't your ordinary story that interviews boosters in between bites of rubber chicken. It's really the most definitive piece I've seen on the Fisher transition. Or maybe transformation is the better term.

A few things struck me while reading the piece:

Auburn names starter; LW names new blog

So it's moving day for the "Eye on the Tigers" blog archive.