Thursday Tidbits
December 18, 2008 04:13 PM | General
Earlier this week following Cleveland State’s buzzer-beating victory at Syracuse, ESPN’s Andy Katz identified three additional games he thought could be upsets this week. One of his picks happened to be this Saturday’s meeting in Morgantown when West Virginia takes on 6-3 Miami University.
The Red Hawks have won four straight following a seven-point loss to Xavier, including victories over Temple and Valparaiso. Keep in mind Temple had little trouble handling Tennessee last week. Miami’s three losses this year have all come against ranked teams: UCLA, Pitt and Xavier.
For the record, Katz’s other two upset picks were Oakland over Michigan and East Carolina over N.C. State.
Katz is 0-1 so far following State’s 87-76 win over ECU yesterday.
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| Randy Meador |
Andress made his ESPNU debut during a Syracuse-Connecticut football telecast on ESPNU in November. Andress is a senior communications major from Philadelphia.
"To be honest with you, he was a very hard kid to study because he played in that wide open college system at West Virginia," Kubiak was quoted in Sacramento Bee reporter Jason Jones’ blog. "He wasn't asked to protect much. His carries were coming out of the shotgun, so we're sitting there trying to project him in our system, lined up behind the quarterback, doing the things we want to do. The things we did know, we knew he was a very tough young man, with big play ability, and the thing that we really liked about him was how sharp he was when we talked football with him at Indianapolis and spent time with him at the combine, we knew he would catch up with what we want to do very quick. But he's been more than we expected. He's been a pleasant surprise.”
That’s an understatement. Although Slaton didn’t make the Pro Bowl team instead being chosen as an alternate, he could have very easily made the AFC roster. Slaton is presently second among rookie rushers in the NFL with 1,124 yards. Slaton is also nearing 1,500 yards from scrimmage this season.
Slaton has now moved up to seventh among NFL rushers with an average of 80.3 yards per game and has topped 100 yards in four of his last five games.
Slaton may be poised for another big game this weekend at Oakland. The last two times the Texans played the Raiders in Oakland Ron Dayne ran for 217 yards and a TD in a pair of Houston victories.
Among WVU players in the NFL, only Adrian Murrell has managed to run for more than 1,000 yards in a season. Murrell did it three times, twice for the Jets and once for the Cardinals.
Cummings, 32, has spent the last 10 seasons in the minors pitching for 11 different organizations.
The Orange Bowl is in an even bigger predicament. Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer recorded a video imploring Hokie fans to travel to Miami to watch the game, while Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly told a Cincinnati TV station that he will go door-to-door to sell tickets personally to make sure the Bearcats use their allotted 17,500 tickets.
Cincinnati is in much better shape than Virginia Tech with a reported 10,000 tickets already sold.
I also happened to notice that the Bearcats began bowl preparation earlier this week with temperatures in the 30s. Cincinnati does not have an indoor practice facility.
We’ll see if that impacts Cincinnati on game day against the Hokies.
Well, coming in at 18th with a football recruiting budget of more than $1 million is West Virginia University. The only other Big East program with a recruiting budget of more than $1 million was Syracuse, which spent a conference-high $1.1 million on football recruiting in ‘07.
Tennessee ($2 million) spent the most money of any school on football recruiting expenses during the 2006-07 academic year.
According to this study, during a five year period from 2002-07 West Virginia more than doubled its football recruiting budget. That is an example of Ed Pastilong’s athletic department being serious about fielding a first-class football program.
