Soft Pretzel Logic

There's been a lot of good stuff out there the last few days, so I thought I'd try to bring it all together this morning.

We begin in State College, where the word of the week is "Grump."

Rich Hofmann would like Joe Paterno to get off his, and say something about the Austin Scott case. Even if it's just saying that he won't say anything more about the case.

Bob Ford goes with the adjective form of the word in this week's Riffing with the Writers video, wondering if JoePa is "getting too grumpy to run the team."

We then move across the Turnpike and across the Delaware to Rutgers, which looks to upset South Florida and screw up the BCS even more tonight. For that reason alone, let us hope they do.

Ford tried to figure out exactly what South Florida is, and it seems like he did so. He took the question up with Phil Sheridan in another Riffing With the Writers segment, noting along the way that the Big East is "a big football conference because they were too big for Temple."

Writing for washingtonpost.com, John Feinstein fires a few good broadsides at the BCS, the NCAA and Myles Brand. Shocking, I know, but it's good stuff. Such as explaining why Brand won't move for a football playoff:

He and his cohorts in Indianapolis are too busy changing the names of division 1-A and division 1-AA and passing rules to make sure basketball coaches stay inside coaching boxes.

It being Thursday, we have Mike Kern's college football column. He leads with Temple trying to manage expectations after winning two in a row, which doesn't exactly happen often. He also previews Miami (Ohio) vs. Temple and Yale vs. Penn.

We also have Joe Juliano's notebook from the local football coaches' luncheon.

We move basketball, and reports from CAA media day in Washington yesterday. Drexel was picked to finish fifth, and George Mason to finish first.

Kevin Tatum writes that Bruiser Flint has made his peace with last year, while Mel Greenberg writes that the Dragons' women's team will stick their projected eighth-place finish on the bulletin board.

There's better news at the DAC, though: the men picked up a recruit, while the women will take inspiration from Hodgkin's lymphoma survivor Nicole Hester.

And finally, a scary prospect for Penn fans. Princeton's athletic director, Gary Walters, has made a statement you might actually agree with. As reported by (Princeton alumnus) Frank DeFord of NPR and Sports Illustrated:

"Is it time," [Walters] asks, "for the educational-athletic experience on our playing fields be accorded the same ... academic respect as the arts?"

I know that for most of us, this isn't even a question because of the value of sports in bringing together the campus community at all of the schools in the City Six.

But DeFord and Walters nail the point that there are still some schools out there are full of people who see sports as a lowbrow, mass-culture thing not worthy of their upturned noses. Including quite a few that play Princeton on a regular basis.

Your thoughts?