Cal

April 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Cal

 

If there is one university in the state of California that has maintained many school traditions for all these years, it is the University of California at Berkeley, also known as Berkeley, UC Berkeley California, or simply Cal. This university, which was established in 1868, was the first public university in the state to be called the University of California. Nowadays, however, University of California system is composed of many UC universities all across the state.

 

One of the traditions that stuck to Cal since its foundation is the school colors, which are gold and blue. The founders of Berkeley chose gold to represent the Golden State and blue, which came from Yale blue, because most of the founders of this university came from Yale. Ever since the athletic teams of the University of California at Berkeley started to join intercollegiate games in 1882, they already wore gold and blue. The school’s sports teams, alumni, and students are called the Golden Bears. It all started in 1895 when the track and field team impressed a lot of people by winning five of the eight competitions. As a result of the remarkable wins, Berkeley became known across the US as a formidable athletics team. In honor of the stunning performance of the track and field team that year, UC Berkeley professor Charles Mills Gayley created a song entitled The Golden Bear. Since then, the California sports teams have been called by that name. Berkeley’s mascots before 1941 were live bear cubs. However, for the safety of the spectators, the school decided to use costumed mascots instead. In 1941, Oski the Bear, the official mascot of Berkeley, was introduced. The name of the mascot came from the Oski-wow-wow yell. Nowadays, there is an Oski Committee whose sole purpose is to take care of the costume and also to keep secret the identity of the person wearing it.

 

In order to guard the Big C - which was often vandalized by students of Stanford College - and other traditions and school spirits of Cal, the UC Rally Committee was established in 1901. The members of this committee have always been present at main spirit and sports events, they are charged with maintaining and caring for the large California banner, the Big C, the California Victory Canon, Card Stunts, and the five Cal flags. Moreover, the Rally Committee is also responsible for keeping the Stanford Axe whenever it is in the possession of the University of California at Berkeley.

 

The California Victory Cannon and the Card Stunts are two of the original Cal school traditions. The victory cannon, first used in the Big Game in 1963, is fired off at the start of every football match, every time the Golden Bears scored, and also after a win. The first time that the cannon ran out of ammunition was on September 7, 1991 when the Golden Bears won a match against the Pacific. The Card Stunt, also known as the bleacher stunt, is something that Cal students invented. The card stunts, consist of a blue Big C and a Stanford Axe picture, were first conducted during a 1910 Big Game.

Buffalo Bills

April 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Sports fan from all over the country and even the rest of the world know that the Buffalo Bills are the members of the professional football team from Buffalo, New York. This team, which played seven of its eight home games in Orchard Park, competes in the National Football League, Eastern Division. The franchise started in 1960 as one of the American Football League’s charter members. The team was also first to join the NFL after the merger of the AFL and the NFL in 1970. The Buffalos have become famous when they won two consecutive AFL championships in 1964 and 1965. However, after the merger, the club has yet to win a single title. The franchise got its Buffalo Bills name after the All-American Football Conference Buffalo Bills team. The AAFC Buffalo Bills team, in turn, got its name from William Frederick Cody. It is also important to note that the Bills are not the only NFL franchise that hail from New York State. Other New York NFL teams are the New York Giants and the New York Jets.

 

Much like any other NFL teams, the Buffalo Bills sported many team traditions that have persisted throughout the years. First of which is the Buffalo Jills, who simply are the cheerleaders of the Buffalos. In 1960, Buffalo cheerleaders were composed of only 8 members and they were just known as the Buffalo Bills Cheerleaders. However, in recent years, a group of women who wore revealing wool costumes formed the Buffalo Jills. Unlike other NFL teams’ cheerleaders, the Buffalo Jills are not really sponsored by the team they are cheering for. Instead, they are sponsored by WGRF, WEDG and WHTT stations of Citadel Broadcasting.

 

Still like other NFL franchises, the Buffalo Bills have also undergone several logo and uniform changes. In the 1960s, the team colors were white, royal blue and silver. These colors were very much similar to the ones used by the Detroit Lions. In 1962, the Bills changed not only their helmets from silver with blue numbers to white with a bison logo, but they also changed the colors to red, blue and white. In 1965, the team added blue and red stripes on the helmet. At present, the Bills wear scarlet helmets with two white, one navy blue, two nickel, and two royal blue stripes plus a white facemask. Meanwhile, the bison logo is now royal blue with a streak of scarlet, white horn, and an eyeball with a pupil that is royal blue. The most famous fight songs of the team include “Talkin Proud” by Alden Schutte, “Go Bills!” by Marv Levy, “Buffalo Bills Shout” by Buffalo Bills All-Star and “Feel the Power” by an unknown artist.

 

Even if the Buffalo Bills have not won a single championship since the 70s, the team boasts of very popular personalities. Probably the most popular player of the team is OJ Simpson, who was a running back in the class of 1985. Other Hall of Fame players from the Buffalo franchise include James Lofton, Thurman Thomas and Marv Levy.

The Wisconsin Badgers football team is the University of Wisconsin-Madisonýs college football program. The Badgers compete at the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision, and is a member of the Big 10 Conference. Their home games are played at the Camp Randall Stadium. They have a win-loss-tie record of 575-451-53 and a winning percentage of 53%. The name of the team is a reference to Wisconsin stateýs early history. Sometime in the early 19thcentury prospectors came to Wisconsin to look for minerals, particularly lead. During winter, the miners had to seek shelter inside tunnels that were burrowed in the hillsides, and thus lived like badgers. Their territory came to be known as the ýBadger State.ý Currently, as of 2008, the Badgers head coach is Breat Bielema, their offensive coordinator is Paul Chryst, and their defensive coordinator is Dave Doeren.

Member of the Big 10

The Big 10 is one of the major conferences in college football and is the oldest Division I college athletic conference in the country. It has a total of eleven members including the Badgers with teams that are primarily located in the Midwestern part of the U.S. It includes Pennsylvania in the East and stretches from Iowa and Minnesota in the west. Nine of the eleven conference schools in the Big 10 are considered to be Public Ivy Leagues, including the University of Wisconsin. It enjoys the prestige of both athletic and academic excellence. The conference competes in the NCAA Division I. The Big 10 member teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly Division I-Aýthe highest level of the NCAA competition. The member schools also are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, an educational consortium. Despite the name Big 10, there are 11 members, with the Penn State joining in 1990. The Big 10 center is located in La Porte County, Indiana.

Badgers Various Incarnations

Throughout the years, various forms of badgers have represented the team as the school mascot. The current mascot is named Bucky, wearing the teamýs colors of cardinal and white in a letter sweater. This mascot was first drawn by artist Art Evans in 1940. The badger mascot went by many names such as Buddy, Benny, Bobby, Bernie, and Bouncey. It was Art Lentz, then publicity director for the athletics department who brought the mascot to life. The badger mascot of yesteryears was known to be rowdy and out-of-controlýsince it was a real live badger! The badger was known to run amok and frighten fans and players alike. It was decided for everyoneýs safety that the badger was better off in the Madison Zoo and did not belong in the school or in football games. The badger was then replaced by a tamer but still no-badger, small raccoon aptly named Regdab (which was badger spelled backwards) passed off as a badger in a raccoon coat. In 1949, Connie Conrad, an art student in the university, made a badger head molded from papier-mýchý. Cheerleader and gymnast, Bill Sagal, wore the outfit during a homecoming game. A contest was held to name the mascot and the winning name was ýBucky,ý which pushed the football team to ýbuck right through that line.

The Ohio State University is a public research university that has a proud tradition of fielding a top-notch football team. The university is one of the older schools in the country and was founded in 1870 and a land-grant university after the end of the Civil War. It is a single-campus school and is the largest of its kind in the country. It is considered one of the top of the twenty public universities in the USA.

The Ohio State University Buckeyes have a football team that is an intercollegiate team and is part of the Big Ten Conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They play at the Football Bowl Subdivision level. The team gets their nickname from the state tree of Ohio, the Buckeye. The team plays their home games in the Ohio Stadium and has done so since 1922.

They have a history of five times consensus Division IA National Champions and can claim seven national championships. The Buckeyes beat Ohio University in 2008 for their 800th victory. This has made them the fifth team of the FBS to have ever done so.  Of the seven times National Champions that they can claim, their coaches were Paul Brown in 1942 and then Woody Hayes took the team to five of the remaining six titles. He did so in the years 1954, 1957, 1961, 1968, and 1970. The last championship won was in 2002 under the direction of Jim Tressel.

The Buckeyes have also had some undefeated seasons to brag of. They have been spread out over the years and are nine in total years.

It was in the year 1912 that Ohio State joined the Big Ten. Before that they belonged to the Ohio Athletic Conference and had won two of the OAC titles. The school has won a Big Ten championship thirty-three times. This is second most in the conference and the third most conference title of any school found in any conference. The coaches that can lay claim to leading the team to these great stats are Albert E. Hernstein, John Richards, John Wilce, Francis Schmidt, Pau Brown, Carroll Widdoes, Wes Fesler, Woody Hayes for a total of thirteen times, Earle Bruce for four times, John Cooper for three times, and Jim Tressel for a total of five times.
There have been seven Ohio Buckeye players who have won the Heisman trophy. This record it tied with Notre Dame and USC for the most ever players from any school.

The Buckeyes played their first game in 1890 against Ohio Wesleyan University and they won. The school football team has been a great community tradition in Columbus, Ohio ever since. Their first home game was on November 1, 1890 and they lost to the University of Wooster 64-0. The part that the Buckeyes took away from this game was that they needed to be in shape with a training regime if they were to have a winning team. This started a rigorous training program that still exists today.
 
The school started off with winning football games after that and only stumbled early in the 1942 season when 22 of their veteran players were lost to the military service as the USA entered into World War II. They even lost their coach Paul Brown as he accepted a commission in the United States Navy in 1944, However, also of note at this time was the fact that Buckeyes had a star football player on the team from 1942-44 who was the first African American star football player, Bill Willis.

When Paul Brown came home from the war, he did not return to the Buckeyes but went into professional football. This was the beginning of a small slump for the team and they did not really bounce back until the year 1957 when they won most of their games and laid claim to the Big Ten championship.
The Buckeyes have had their ups and downs but football is a big tradition on the campus and in the state of Ohio and will be very important to the university and state for years to come.

The Titans of Tennessee have not always been called as such. They are originally from Houston, Texas and were relocated to Tennessee in 1997. They played their first season in Memphis, Tennessee before moving to the city of Nashville. As a matter of fact, they were known as the Tennessee Oilers for two years before they were renamed the Titans in 1999.

The history of the Tennessee Titans cannot really be told unless you include the history of the Houston Oilers in to the telling. The team started out as a charter member of the AFL in 1960. The original owner was Bud Adams, a big Houston oilman from the area. He is considered by many to be the number two most influential man of the original eight AFL owners. The Oilers first years were great ones and in the early 1960s were a powerhouse of the AFL.
When the NFL-AFL merger happened in the 1970s they struggled for a couple of years but bounced back with the arrival of Bum Phillips in 1975 and other stars like Billy Johnson and Elvin Bethea. Football legend Earl Campbell joined the team as a draft pick in 1978 and the Oilers made their first appearance in an NFL playoff.

The 1980s first years were tough again for the team and in 1981 the team lost 23 consecutive away games, which was an all-time NFL record until the Detroit Lions broke that record with a 24 straight road game lose in 2003. The team had some good years from 1987-1993 and made the playoffs every year even though they never made it to the Super Bowl.

The Astrodome needed repairs badly in the 1980s and Bud Adams thought about moving the team to Jacksonville, Florida unless the Astrodome was modernized. There were only about 50,000 seats in the facility at the time and this was the smallest seating arrangement in the NFL. So the city came up with $67 million to make the improvements to the Astrodome. These improvements included an additional 10,000 seats and 65 luxury boxes.

A problem arose in the mid-nineties when Adams wanted a new stadium so soon after the Astrodome was renovated. The major of Houston, Bob Lanier, turned Adams down and so Adams began to look for other cities to move the Oilers to. Nashville looked good and at the end of the 1995 season, the city of Houston received the news that they would be losing their football team to Tennessee. It was at that point that any city support for the Oilers disappeared. The city of Houston wanted a pro football team but did not want to give Bud Adams the amount of money that he wanted to keep the team there. Needless to say, the 1996 season was pretty awful for the Oilers. The crowds in the Astrodome were less than 20,000 and the games were so notoriously quiet that anyone could hear individual conversations on the field from up in the grandstand. The games were disheartening for the Oilers but they still finished the season with an 8-8 record. Of course, they won most of their games on the road with a 6-2 record for away games and a 2-6 record for their home games. It was at the end of this season that the city agreed to let the Oilers leave town a year early. Adams was let out of his lease and he then quickly moved the team to Tennessee.

In 1998, Adams was getting so much fan pressure for a team name change that he decided to change the Oilers’ name to something better suited to Nashville.  Adams retained the rights to the Oilers’ name; he just would not be using it anymore. The advisory committee that Adams formed came up with the name of Titans in 1998 and the name was official for the new season in 1999 and has been with the team ever since.

Dan Mullen is sitting in his expansive office on an early April afternoon, surrounded by pictures of football players like Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, various plaques, stenciled footballs, and other accoutrements of his successful coaching career. He’s not in coach mode right now, though.

No, he’s in Cousin Eddie mode.

“I don’t know if I oughta go sailin’ down no hill with nothin’ between the ground and my brains but a piece of government plastic,” Mullen says with a passable Southern accent. “The plate runs right under my part. If it gets dented, my hair ain’t gonna look right.”

As Mullen gestures and gets fully into character, he is absorbed for a moment in his re-enactment of a scene from the 1989 movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” His guest is in stitches.

Mullen perfected the routine growing up, when he and his family would celebrate Christmas in part by staging their own production of the Griswolds’ holiday misadventures. As he effortlessly channels Cousin Eddie, the 36-year-old Mullen is flashing his social dexterity. There’s no doubt he could keep up with college-aged kids who can have entire conversations without voicing one original thought.

It’s critical that Mississippi State’s first-year coach be able to communicate the X’s and O’s of his spread offense to his players, but just as important - perhaps more so - is his ability to communicate with them on a personal level. He has a history of jumping across the generational divide, and he’s doing it in Starkville.

Mullen can easily be found on Facebook, the wildly popular social networking Web site. His list of 76 friends is limited to current players, high school prospects, and assorted friends and family.

Mullen signed up for Facebook in March and has found several uses for it, including communicating with his players, monitoring them, and drawing recruits to the program.

He also has an iPod full of current music: P. Diddy, Tupac, Eminem. He’s got a good bit of country and ’80s music, too.

“I don’t have any Little Jeezy on there,” he said.

Actually, it’s Young Jeezy, but the point is, Mullen thinks it’s vital to keep up with technology and pop culture.

“My career is based on decisions of 17-year-olds and the actions of 18- to 22-year-olds,” he said. “That’s the people that you’re dealing with right there, you’d better immerse yourself in that world. I try to listen to the music they listen to, talk to them about what’s going on in today’s world, find out the TV shows they like, try to watch the TV shows, just keep up with all the things that are going on out there in the world that these 17-, 22-, 23-year-olds, (what) kind of encompasses their life.”

Family guy

Every year, Gary Nelson and several other of Mullen’s old teammates from Trinity High School in Manchester, N.H., travel to one of their former quarterback’s games. It’ll be LSU this year.

Nelson has seen first-hand how well Mullen connects with players.

“Me and my buddies visit all these places every single year,” Nelson said, “and these kids love him.”

Mullen was very close to Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, who he has called “the best young man I’ve ever met.” Upon Mullen leaving Utah after the 2004 season, quarterback Brian Johnson was reduced to tears. Another Utah QB, eventual No. 1 NFL Draft pick Alex Smith, was in the Mullens’ wedding.

Although a couple of Bulldogs - junior cornerback Anthony Johnson and athlete Montario Patterson - have left the team this spring, the players as a whole seem to be fully embracing their new coach.

“No one would ever disrespect just because how he’s a nice coach; at the same time, he ain’t going to play with you,” said juco transfer Pernell McPhee, a defensive lineman. “I love Coach Mullen, though.”

Most coaches have an open-door policy, and Mullen’s no different - except that it’s the door of his house that remains open.

When he was hired in December, he said his wife, Megan, had “just adopted 85 young men.” The Mullens bought a large house for the express purpose of fitting all his players in it at once. It’s more than 9,000 square feet, or about four times bigger than what Mullen said he, Megan, newborn son Canon and the family dog, Heisman, would actually need.

He’s had the team over several times, all at once and a few at a time. Most recently, a handful dropped in Easter Sunday to watch the Masters and eat supper.

It’s an unfamiliar experience for the players. Former coach Sylvester Croom would have them over, but as senior cornerback Marcus Washington said, “It was more like a reward thing. But now, Coach Mullen says any time you want to come by there, you can. It’s just great to know the head coach’s house is open to you like that.”

Megan Mullen was stunned to learn how rare such gatherings were.

“So many of them came up and were like, ‘Wow, we’ve never done something like this before.’”

Now, when Megan returns home from the grocery store, she’ll often see players fishing in the pond at the entrance to her neighborhood.

Opening their hearts

She said these young men have opened their hearts to them quicker than any of the other players Mullen coached.

“I think they know they’re as much a part of our life,” she said, “as we are of theirs.”

This is a result of the family ethic Mullen is working hard to establish. It’s an ethic he grew up with in New Hampshire and still holds dear.

Barbara Mullen, who hails from North Wales, England, and runs the Londonberry Dance Academy, always demanded honesty from her three children, Dan, Patrick and Katie. When problems arose, the family would sit around the kitchen table and hash it out.

“It has always been, lay the cards on the table, this is what is. Accept responsibility for your actions,” Barbara Mullen said. “Now we’ve discussed that, if there is punishment, there is punishment; if not, how do we proceed and go on from this moment.”

Such honesty is demanded of the Bulldogs.

“If you mess up, just come to him and let him know what you did, and just be honest to him,” senior linebacker Jamar Chaney said. “Because he don’t like people to lie to him, that’s one of the first things he said when he came in.”

Getting a college-aged kid to bare his soul can be like trying to uproot a giant oak with your bare hands, but Mullen has opened those doors by showing genuine interest in each and every player.

His first weekend on the job, Mullen spent 16-hour days meeting individually with players. He continues to spend one-on-one time with them.

“You might be a walk-on, or you’re one of the best on the team,” Chaney said. “He’s always going to be there for you and talk to you. You feel like he’s your coach, but it’s like he’s one of your teammates, too.”

If a player has an issue he’d rather not discuss with Mullen or the other coaches, they can turn to Megan.

“When we decided to come here, I talked to her in depth and asked her if she was ready to do this,” Mullen said. “To run the program like I want to run it is not a one-person job, it’s a two-person job.”

It’s not like Megan didn’t have her own ambitions. She was a television anchor for The Golf Network but quit in January of 2008 to devote more time to supporting Dan and his players at Florida. Back then, it was just a few offensive guys.

Now, of course, it’s a whole team. Full-time work, and Megan’s loving it. She’s at every practice, with Canon and the excitable Heisman, a Wheaton Terrier, in tow. She makes sure to walk back toward the locker room with a different player each day, getting to know them, just like her husband does.

The Bulldogs have yet to play a game under Mullen. Heck, they met him barely four months ago.

They “get” him, though, because he gets them. He understands them, and he’s building bonds that can’t be measured on a stat sheet.

He turns 37 next Monday, but his age is irrelevant.

“It’s real good to have a young coach like that,” said Washington. “He’s young and energetic, just like us, and he wants to wi

Tampa Bay Bucs

April 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, also known affectionately as the “Bucs” are the pro football team located in Tampa, Florida. One of three pro football teams in the state of Florida, they are members of the Southern Division of the National Football Conference that is part of the National Football League – the NFL. They joined the NFL in 1976 as one of two expansion teams of the AFC West. The other team was the Seattle Seahawks. The Bucs lost their first 26 games and were not really very popular with the local fans in the Tampa Bay area. They had a short winning season in the late 1970s and the early 1980s but the team did suffer through a bad fourteen season losing streak after that time period.

They have been pretty consistent as a team since 1996 and have been playoff contenders on a regular basis. They won Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003 and that has been their only Super Bowl appearance up till now.

The expansion franchise for Tampa Bay was originally awarded to Tom McCloskey but soon he was replaced by Hugh Culverhouse from Jacksonville, Florida.  The Buccaneers got their name through a contest of name-the-team and were named after the Gasparilla Pirate Festival which occurs yearly and is located in Tampa, Florida. The team plays their home games in the Tampa Stadium and it seats a little over 72,000 fans for every game.  The team’s first quarterback was Heisman trophy winner Steve Spurrier.

They started out with a rocky beginning and their first two seasons were winless. They had an overall record of 0-26 before they finally won their first game in 1977. They beat the New Orleans Saints in New Orleans and then went on to win their next game at home with a victory over the St. Louis Cardinals.
 
The team faced some financial problems when the team’s original owner passed away in the 1980s and the team had to be sold by the family heirs. By 2002 though, the team had recovered under the new owners and the coaching of Jon Gruden. Gruden was from the area and was only too happy to come home to coach the Tampa Bay Bucs. He immediately changed the offense to a more efficient powerhouse and at the same time the Bucs were placed in the new NFC south Division. They had a superb defense that led the league and this led to the 2002 season to be the Bucs best season ever. They won the NFC South title and had a record of 12-4 that year. They then went on to win against Jon Gruden’s former team, The Raiders of Oakland. Even though the Raiders were reputed to have the nation’s top offense, the Bucs prevailed and won the Super Bowl XXXVII with a score of 48-21.

They had slump years in 2003 and 2004 but returned to their winning ways in 2005 and marked their 30th season as members of the NFL. They won the NFC South division that year with an 11-5 record. They went on to lose though in a Wild Card round game to the Washington Redskins.
2006 saw a bad year for the Bucs with injuries and a lot of their starters being rookies. They finished the year with a 4-12 record and were forced to spend money in the free agency that year in order to get some fresh talent for the team.

The 2007 season had the team winning the NFC South title and ended the year with a 9-7 record. Along with this they got the 4th seed in the NFC. This made their 2nd division crown in three years under the direction of Jon Gruden. The Wild Card playoff game played in January of 2008 found the Bucs losing to the to-be Super Bowl Champs, the New York Giants with a score of 24-14.

The sky is the limit for the Bucs and hopefully 2009 will find the team healthy and with a will to go the distance.

St Louis Rams

April 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment

The St. Louis Rams are an older NFL team. They began playing in 1936 and were originally in Cleveland, Ohio. They were previously the Cleveland Rams and were a charter member of the second American Football League. At present they play in the Western Division of the NFC in the National Football League.  The team has two NFL Championships under their belt and one Super Bowl victory.
The team became known as the Rams of Los Angeles after they moved to Los Angeles, California in 1946. Then after the 1979 season, they moved to the south suburbs in Orange County next door and started playing their games in the Anaheim Stadium. They played there for 15 years and kept the Los Angeles name. Then the team was moved to St. Louis just before the 1995 season.
Homer Marshman was the Cleveland Rams founder in 1936. Their name came from the nickname from Fordham University. Rams was a term that was used to honor the football players’ hard work ethic that came from the University of the same name. They were originally of the new American football League and they finished their first year with a 5-2-2 record.

It was the next year that the team joined the NFL and was placed in the Western Division. They were like a lot of the teams from that era in that the manpower shortages caused by World War II caused them to have to suspend play during the 1943 season. They did resume play in 1944 and had a winning season in 1945 in Ohio. They had a 9-1 season record and won their first NFL Championship. They beat the Washington Redskins in December 16, with a score of 15-14 at home.

It was in 1946 that the Ram’s owner became fed up with poor attendance at the games at Cleveland Stadium and decided to move the Rams to Los Angeles. This made them the first NFL pro football team on the west coast. They leased the Los Angeles Memorial coliseum and the team played there from 1946-1979. When the owner, Dan Reeves passed away in 1971, the Colt’s owner took over the team. His name was Carroll Rosenbloom. He was instrumental in having the Rams began the move to play in Anaheim Stadium in 1980.

Georgia Rosenbloom inherited the team after her husband’s death in 1979 while her stepson became the team’s manager. Two weeks later, she fired him.
In the 1995 and 196 seasons the Rams were coached by head coach Rich Brooks. Then dick Vermeil was hired as head coach in 1997. He stayed with the team until he retired after the 2000 season. This was the season where the Rams won Super Bowl XXXIV against Tennessee Titans. Mike Martz was the coach for the next year where the Rams were again in the Super Bowl but got beat by the New England Patriots. That year saw the beginning of a type of downward spiral for the Rams. They do have some outstanding players that have been very successful with the team. One is the talented Steven Jackson from Oregon State.

After a 28 year colorful ownership stint of the Rams, Georgia Frontier passed away in January of 2008. The ownership of the team has been passed down to the son Dale “Chip” Rosenbloom and her daughter Lucia Rodriquez. Chip Rosenbloom is the new Rams majority owner.
The Rams are known to be first pro football team to have a logo on their helmet. A team halfback by the name of Fred Gehrke painted “ram Horns” on the team’s helmets for the 1948 season. This has been the club’s logo ever since.
The team has changed colors several times. They were red and black in 1937 and changed to yellow and blue in 1938. Then they went to solid yellow in the mid 1940s with the yellow gold horns on a blue helmet. Then in 1964, the colors were again changed to blue and white. They have changed around their colors on a consistent basis and in 2008 the team was wearing a white jersey with blue pants when they beat the Dallas Cowboys in October by a score of 34-14.

The University of Notre Dame du Lac is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the USA. It was originally an all-make school founded by Roman Catholic Father Edward Sorin in 1842. It is a private Roman Catholic research university and is located in Notre Dame, Indiana. The area that the school sits on was first settled as a mission by the Catholic Church over 300 years ago. There are five colleges and one professional school on the campus today and the first degree from the school was awarded in 1849. There are 32 Master’s degrees and 25 Doctoral degree programs at the school today. 80% of Notre Dame’s undergraduates live in single-gender residence halls and intramural sports are very important. To say that Notre Dame considers sports to be an important part of a student’s education is very astute of the observer.

The university is highly regarded for its sports programs, most especially the football team. The “Fighting Irish” is the school name and it was adopted in the 1920s. The Notre Dame football team has eleven national championships to its name. There have been seven Heisman Trophy winners to grace the halls of the university and sixty-two former Fighting Irish are members of the College Football Hall of Fame. The team competes as an Independent with the NCAA Football Bowl subdivision level.  The team has also produced more All-American football players than any other Football Bowl Subdivision school in the country.

There is only one other Catholic university that fields a football team at the Football Bowl Subdivision level. The other school is Boston College. The home field for the Fighting Irish is on the Notre Dame campus at the Notre Dame Stadium. It is also known as the famous “House the Rockne Built”. The stadium can seat 80,795.

Notre Dame can claim a total of 11 consensus national championships. But many say that they have actually accrued 13 national championships. The 1953 and 1938 football seasons are the reason that there is a difference in the numbers. The school has been voted the “national champion” by at least one more selector in eight additional seasons. These were for the years as follows: 1919, 1920, 1927, 1964, 1967, 1970, 1989, and 1993.
The coach for the first three years that Notre dame claimed the national championship was Knute Rockne. The coach for the next four national championships was Frank Leahy, followed by two years under Ara Parseghian and then Dan Devine and Lou Holtz. This has to be one of the most impressive lists of all-time famous college coaches to ever be put together on the same page.

There is only one other team to have a higher winning percentage in the NCAA history and that is Michigan. The Fighting Irish are tied with USC for the most Heisman trophy winner with a total of seven.  The school has had 79 players named to the All-American and there are 48 coaches and players representative of Notre Dame in the College Football Hall of Fame. There are ten former Fighting Irish players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. This puts them second to USC in that regard. The Notre Dame Football program had produced more players that have gone on to the NFL than any other collegiate program in the country. This is quite an accomplishment. As of the NFL draft for the year 2008, there were 463 former Notre Dame players that had gone on to play in the National Football League.

The prestigious school is also second only to Nebraska University in the number of Academic All-Americans.

Notre Dame is truly one of the USA elite when it comes to producing top-notch American football players.

The University of Miami has a football team with a very appropriate name for the region. They are known as the Miami Hurricanes. The team is a member of the Division I Bowl subdivision conference known as the Atlantic Coast Conference. The football team is a fairly older team and was begun in 1926. They also have a record of being one of the most winning programs of the past 25 years. They have won five national championships in the years 1983, 1987, 1989, 1991, and 2001. Two players from the team have won the Heisman Trophy and they have the longest winning streak in the history of the NCAA with straight victories is 58 games.
The home games are played in the famous Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. But before the present time, the team had a shaky start as far as where their home games were to be played. In 1926 work began on their temporary campus structure that was to seat 8,000 people. However, the day after the ground-breaking ceremony, a hurricane leveled most of South Florida and this put the project on a shelf. So for the next 11 years, the University of Miami played their home games in a stadium that was near Tamiami Park and also played some games at Moore Park.

Due to the storm in 1926, the new football team did not play its first game until October of that year and they won that game with a 7-0 win over Rollins. There were 304 people at the game. That season saw the team with two wins. They won a Thanksgiving Day game in Miami and then won again on Christmas Day of that year.

Their first name was the Miami “Warriors” and they kept this name until Jack Harding became the new head coach in 1937. The great coach was the Hurricanes coach from 1937-1943 and then again from 1945-1947. The reason for the 2 year gap was the same as it was for a lot of other college programs at the time. Jack Harding took a two-year break from coaching to serve for the US in World War II. When he returned to coaching it was to take the Hurricanes from the ranks of a small town college football status into the major college status.  He was helped by the swelling enrollment of the University of Miami with hundreds of newly returned men from the fighting ranks of the USA as they took advantage of the new GI Bill. That first season after the end of World War II found the Hurricanes with a 9-1-1 record that included their winning the Orange Bowl that year.

The Miami Hurricanes have been blessed with a string of dedicated coaches that have given their all for the school football team. This string of coached includes Jack Harding, Andy Gustafson, Charlie Tate, Lou Saban, Howard Schnellenberger, Jimmy Johnson, Dennis Erickson, Butch Davis, and Larry Coker. 

By the team’s playing in their 3rd National championship in 1989 since 1983, the Hurricanes would become the collegiate Team of the 80’s in a lot of people’s eyes.

The thing about the Miami Hurricanes that is most striking is that not only does the team have to compete on the football field but it also has to deal with weather factors. The aftermath of the real hurricanes, such as Hurricane Andrew, would be hard for any team to overcome just once. But the Miami Hurricanes keep bouncing back after each natural disaster and appear to become stronger than ever. Maybe the saying is true about becoming stronger after that which does not kill one. At least in the case of the Miami Hurricanes that saying does seem to be true.

— keep looking »

Blogroll

WP Themes