The College Humor guys showed up at halftime of the Maryland-Wake Forest game last night, and all kinds of hysterical heck broke loose!

Here’s their version, and here’s a clip from the stands…  what makes it funnier is that the fans don’t realize that the “Maryland student” really isn’t. 

Um.  We feel a little dirty for having watched this.

Twice.

Carry on.  Nothing to see here.

(h/t Bruins Nation via Deadspin)

Clearly this was the tune streaming through Digger’s swiss-cheesed head throughout…

The west coast has the sunshine
And the girls all get so tanned
I dig a french bikini on hawaii island
Dolls by a palm tree in the sand

I been all around this great big world
And I seen all kinds of girls
Yeah, but I couldnt wait to get back in the states
Back to the cutest girls in the world

I wish they all could be california
I wish they all could be california
I wish they all could be california girls

Hey, did you guys hear that a ‘reporter’ asked UConn coach Jim Calhoun last weekend if he, as Connecticut’s highest-paid public employee, planned on doing anything to assist with the nearly-$1B budget deficit that the state is facing?  “Not a dime,” Calhoun joked.  This story took on a life of its own throughout the entire last week, as various Connecticut legislators and public dignitaries weighed in on the weighty subject of Calhoun’s salary, not to mention the many in the chattering class who quickly and assiduously came to his defense.

Well, it’s high time for a positive story about a coach’s salary.  The NY Times’ college sports blog, The Quad, reported today that Southern Miss head coach (and former party dude) Larry Eustachy has decided to give back a $25,000 bonus that he earned based on various incentives.  From the article, Eustachy said:

“The university, fans and administration have been so supportive. I am part of the Golden Eagle family and I want the team and program to succeed more than anyone else does. To that end, until I can turn around the program I have told the administration that I do not want a contract extension and I will donate part of my compensation package back to Southern Miss to help during these difficult economic times. I want to win a championship at Southern Miss and I know that we can do it.”  Southern Mississippi Athletic Director Richard Giannini accepted Eustachy’s offer.  “I think it displays the sincerity he has for trying to turn the program into a successful program,” Giannini said. “I respect him for what he did. He knew the economic times we were having and we need to use every dime we can find.”

Larry Eustachy is Providing His Own Stimulus Package

We really have to try hard here to not take the cynical standpoint and view this as a last-ditch effort to save the job of a coach who has yet to  near matching the success he had at his previous stop, Iowa St.  In Eustachy’s five seasons in Hattiesburg, Southern Miss has yet to make an NCAA Tournament or an NIT, and at 14-14 this season there is virtually no chance of a postseason again this year.  It would be easy to put yourself in Eustachy’s shoes, thinking, after all, $380k (Eustachy’s base salary) isn’t as good as $405k, but it’s light years better than $0.

But there’s too much cynicism in this world already, so we’ll give Eustachy, a recovering alcoholic, the benefit of the doubt here.  It’s not like coaches who are clearly on their way out the door (ahem, Jerry Wainwright) make it a common practice to give back their bonuses in trying economic times, or like, ever.  So Eustachy should be genuinely commended for this selfless act – heck, something like this is so uncommon that Southern Miss should give the guy a lifetime contract for his largesse.

Now, if we could just get some of the other basketball CEOs around the nation who are regularly stealing taxpayer dollars to start giving something back.  Not to point fingers, but we’d start in Eugene, keep going east through Boulder and probably settle in Raleigh.  Just sayin…

We’re total suckers for this kind of thing (h/t TSN). 

Clemson University’s physics department (Clemson has a physics department?  who knew…) has come up with some contraption (pictured) that supposedly can tell us just how much force a basket is subjected to when a large athletic manchild decides to jump up, grab it, and throw an orange ball through the middle of it as hard as he possibly can.

We’re having a little trouble believing that Clemson could come up with something like this – a dunkometer – but if it’s actually reliable, score one for State U. over the nerds at MIT and Cal Tech.  According to the CU spokesperson, who doubtless was the guy with one of the lovelies pictured below: 

Ray Sykes had a nasty dunk at the East Carolina University game,” said Jonathan Cox, one of the students working on the project. “It peaked at a little over 30 g’s, one of the highest recorded so far. That’s awesome when you consider an earthquake’s ground motion produces accelerations around point five and one g.

So they’re saying that Ray Sykes’ dunk was 30-60 times more powerful than an earthquake?  What does that even mean?  Part of us wonders if this isn’t a prank by the three nerds at Clemson on the rest of the campus…  “see what happens when you put a 40 up there!…  watch how crazy they’ll get!”

We would be interested in learning what this particular dunk would have scored, though.  Probably 100 Hiroshimas combined with 50 earthquakes. 

There’s been a lot of “Duke Love” around here today, so let’s continue the festivities with a Youtube video of Elliott Williams’ intrepretive dance routine known as The Pivot Foot from last night’s Wake Forest – Duke game.   (h/t Brahsome)

We knew there’s a reason we secretly love the lads from College Park.  In anticipation of Maryland’s Wednesday night game with Duke, let us present Terp fans’ latest and greatest evisceration of Duke on Facebook,  Operation: Scheyerface v2.0. 

Oh Yes.

Yeah You Got It!

Ready For Some of This?

Oh My.

Update:  850 the Buzz found an alleged transcript of more Maryland fan zaniness.  

“Hello, this is ****** with the Washington Times, sorry to bother you at this hour Mr. Paulus, but we are running a small piece tomorrow and I was hoping to take 2 minutes and ask you a question?”

Him: “Uhhh, sure”

“If you had to choose between Deron Washington, Danny Green, and Dwayne Collins, who’s nuts would you say tasted the best?”

Him: …click.

College kids today… they just don’t take their schoolwork seriously.  Especially ones that haven’t taken a class in over fifty years.

(photo credit: Roane State College)

Ken Mink, the septuagenarian who couldn’t be slowed by the ticking clock with respect to stepping on the basketball court and competing with players one-quarter his age, was declared ineligible by the National JuCo Athletics Association (NJCAA) due to a pesky Spanish class that he needed to pass.  From the FoxSports report:

Fearing he might fail the Spanish class, Mink said he enrolled in a Sociology class on another campus, hoping that a passing grade there would give him the credits he needed to retain his eligibility. But that class was apparently completed too late to apply to the semester in question.  “This is not an academic issue, it’s an administrative issue,” Mink wrote in an email to the News Sentinel on Friday. “… the NJCAA is ruling me ineligible because the NJCAA contends Roane State did not follow administrative procedures in restoring my eligibility after the NJCAA had questioned whether or not one of my courses was completed within the fall semester.  “Coach Nesbit supplied the NJCAA all the documentation proving my academic eligibility. Coach Nesbit knew I had met the requirements and restored me for play, but the NJCAA has contended the coach (or school) had not checked with the NJCAA a second time before restoring me to play.”

In what is becoming standard Mink-speak, it wasn’t his fault!  Recall that the given reason Mink was kicked off of his Lees (KY) Junior College team in 1956 was that he was falsely accused of spraying the coach’s office with shaving cream.  Fortunately for Mink’s version of this story, the aggrieved coach and his teammates are no longer alive or competent to answer questions.  Now we’re hearing from Mink that it wasn’t the fact that he failed Spanish class, it was that there was an administrative problem with his eligibility.  Somehow we’re having more and more trouble believing that Mink wasn’t involved as the evil mastermind behind the shaving cream incident a half-century ago.

What’s all this mean?  Well, Roane St. will have to forfeit a game from Feb. 7 against Hiwassee where he played and scored two points.  Given all these administrative headaches and public attention, maybe he should just shut it down and declare for the NBA Draft.

Weird incident after today’s UConn-South Florida thrashing.  Jim Calhoun was questioned by a reporter named Ken Krayeske, a local gadfly who was trying to make a point about the salary of the state of Connecticut’s highest paid official (i.e., him) during hard economic times, but it got lost in the back-and-forth which culminated in Calhoun yelling at Krayeske to “get some facts.”

What seemed to set Calhoun off was a question relating to something about a “Comcast deal,” and we’ll have to defer to our more enlightened UConn fans as to what that actually means.  A quick google search didn’t come up with anything relating to Calhoun and Comcast.  Of course, we’re not sure what Krayeske’s real beef was, as Calhoun’s salary isn’t paid from general fund dollars anyway.

Actually, our favorite part of this whole scene was the part where Krayeske made reference to himself having to ask such tough questions because “these guys won’t do it,” referring to the other reporters in the room.  There was a collective grumble reminiscent of the British House of Commons scenes we sometimes catch late at night on BBC.

We’ll update this if we learn more, but feel free to edify us in the comments.

No, this is not a typo…

Penn St. really did win a 38-33 thriller in Champaign tonight.

Apparently, with six minutes remaining, the score was 31-24 in favor of the Illini, but PSU made a mad rush to outscore Bruce Weber’s team 14-2 down the stretch (a veritable blitzkrieg) to secure the win.  Or, as ESPN’s copy editors put it, Penn St. powered past Illinois.

The two teams combined to shoot 28-96 (.292) from the field and 6-33 (.180) from three, which by any objective measure is also known as an abortion on the court.  There were more bricks thrown up in this one than in Modesto and West Palm during the height of the housing bubble.   One of our earliest memories of basketball was this crime against hoops-manity which helped inspire the original 45-second shot clock in 1985-86; it’s nice to see that we can count on the Big Ten to set new modern records for offensive futility.  The combined total of 71 pts is the lowest output in four years (since Monmouth defeated Princeton 41-21 in 2005).  We have no idea how long it’s been for a BCS conference, but this might just be the worst of the shot-clock era.  Ugh.

We just saw ESPN break down the NCAA Tourney chances of both of these teams, and we’re disgusted that either of these teams are even in the conversation given the putrid display they each put forth tonight.  Oh, it was a defensive battle, right?