Buckeye Blogger Network
What’s really important
Continued thoughts and prayers to our friends in Cowboy and Sooner land… soundtrack should be obvious for today.
Buckeye 411
Simon’s contract has a total value of $2.545 million, including a $385,652 signing bonus. The deal includes base salaries of $405,000, $495,000, $585,000 and $675,000.
It’s not summer yet, no matter how many days of 90+ degree weather that we have in Los Angeles… but the summer blockbuster season is upon us. With that in mind, let’s revisit an SBP favorite for this week’s soundtrack.
Buckeye 411
It’s Disney? Rats…
The beauty of it is, kids are kids and people are people, and if they first and foremost feel that you care about them and that you really are there to serve them, it’s easy. I’ve had the chance to hone those skills for many, many, many years, and to me it’s second nature to want to see what I can do for someone.
This also sounds familiar,
That marketing and television and all of the funds that are involved in major college athletics have certainly taken a little bit of control, not just for the institution, but I think it’s affected the experience for the youngsters. It’s not necessarily what I believe in, and I worry a little bit that there’s so much time invested into that singular passion, that — are we giving them the experiences that they are going to need through the rest of their lives?
Akron students… I hope you know how fortunate you are.
Buckeye Hoops
The past six months have seen lots of talk about conference realignment and as a result many teams will be finding new homes in the next couple years and some conference will be almost unrecognizable after the massive reorganization. The Big Ten will not see any change in its membership until 2014 but Big Ten fans won’t have to wait that long to see the effects of conference realignment. While everyone who is a college sports fan, at least beyond their own team, will likely see the impact of conference realignment beginning this fall, Big Ten fans will feel the direct impact of the realignment come December. This week the matchups for the annual Big Ten-ACC Challenge in men’s basketball were released and for those fans who missed out in all the realignment talk, the list of matchups will cause a large amount of confusion. In addition to announcing the matchups for the challenge, Yahoo sports has ranked the matchups in terms of interest and while I generally agree with much of Yahoo’s coverage, there are several issues that I have with their ranking of matchups.
My issues with Yahoo’s rankings begin almost immediately as they ranked Michigan-Duke as the most interesting matchup. Sure, to the casual fan who for some reason give Michigan basketball more historical credit than it deserves and ignores the whole NCAA ruling on the Fab Five, this may seem like an intriguing matchup of two teams with a rich history, it actually won’t be that good of a game. The Wolverines lose their star player as Trey Burke declared for the draft and in early December the team will still be looking to fill that hole, they will also be looking to find someone who can randomly put up ill-advised shots as Tim Hardaway Jr. is also leaving. Meanwhile Duke returns a very talented team and will be adding star freshman Jabari Parker to the mix. Add in the fact that Coach K is a far better coach and this one shouldn’t even be close.
Welcome to another Monday Musings episode, I’m glad that you stopped in. Grab your beverage of choice and let’s get to this.
A Bit of Context
This past Saturday marked the 43rd anniversary of one of the more horrific events in war/policy protest, free speech exercises, 1st Amendment type of stuff. May 4th 1970 was a sobering, tragic day at Kent State University; the day of the Kent State Shootings when 4 students were killed and nine injured. May 1970 was spring of my freshman year at Muskingum, which is just less than two hours south of KSU.
The period of late 60’s/early 70’s was a turbulent period; really the first that I can remember of an “us vs. them” mentality. Somehow the fact that we were all Americans escaped a lot of people. As a nation, we’ve seen much worse, and managed to work our way through it. There is currently divisiveness in various political/social topics. Frankly, the “us vs. them” mindset is a false dichotomy. My father had a saying that’s appropriate here; “folks are the same as people”. Indeed. So my advice is to relax, we’ll get through this.
Welcome to Wednesday, the first of May… it’s officially grilling season (unless you live in California, where it’s always that time). Here’s today’s soundtrack; if you don’t know why, then… well… keep reading.
Archie’d
Buckeye 411
This is part two in my series on Ohio State Women’s basketball. Originally had intended to do these in back to back weeks, but it became apparent early on that Coach Foster may have been coaching his last season, and that became true. So with the help from Charles, this is the finishing product on the women’s dominance of the B1G. Check out my previous article here.
After the firing of Nancy Darsch following the 1997 season, the Buckeye brass wasted little time stealing Beth Burns 
away from San Diego State. Coach Burns returned to SDSU after her brief stint with the Buckeyes form 1997 to 2002 at which point she was replaced by Jim Foster. After a combined 16 seasons at SDSU before and after OSU she resigned unexpectedly recently. Let’s take a good look at her term with Ohio State.
She finished her stint 81-65 overall and never really hit her stride while in Columbus. A tenacious and aggressive style of coaching along with a great knowledge of the game never really paid off with players that were left from the Darsch era and the players that she brought in ended up not fitting in either. The stigma of three 8th place finishes, one 4th and a 5th in the B1G even took Foster a couple years to get things rolling.
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It’s starting to make sense now…
Welcome to another Monday Musings episode, glad that you stopped by. We made it past the Spring Game and now enter relative sports doldrums. Nonetheless, we’ll come up with something. First stop is The James, then we’ll wend our way through various sports and wind things up on a lighter note. After the horrendous week the nation has gone through, let’s get settled in for something fairly harmless. So, grab your cuppa joe and let’s go.
The James/Wexner
Several updates on the medical front this week. Below are lead-ins, please click on titles to view the articles.
OHIO STATE LUNG CANCER RESEARCHER RECEIVES LANDON FOUNDATION-ACCR INNOVATOR AWARD
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Lung cancer expert David P. Carbone, M.D., Ph.D., who leads the thoracic oncology center at The James, received the Sixth Annual Landon Foundation – AACR INNOVATOR Award for International Collaboration in Cancer Research presented by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the Kirk A. and Dorothy P. Landon Foundation at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013, held in Washington, D.C., April 6-10.
The Award for International Collaboration in Cancer Research supports an established international cancer research collaboration involving institutes in multiple countries by supplementing existing funding and providing the means to facilitate travel, training in new techniques and disseminating scientific knowledge gained from the collaboration.
A great example of the staff at OSUCCC-James driving research on an international scale. Cancer knows no borders, nor does The James research collaborations.
As Ken reported on Tuesday, after four weeks of searching, Ohio State announced the hiring of Kevin McGuff as the new women’s basketball head coach. While McGuff doesn’t have the level of name recognition as some of the other candidates for the job, he is a far better hire than many people realize and is the type of coach that I wanted when the job search began. McGuff is a relatively young be coaching standards, he is 43, and is an up-and-comer who has a very solid resume that has shown that he can build programs.
Like many of Ohio State’s recent high profile head coaches, Kevin McGuff has ties back to the Buckeye state. McGuff was born in Hamilton, Ohio and after leaving the state to attend Saint Joseph’s College in Indiana, returned to begin his coaching career as an assistant coach at Miami of Ohio. The next step in McGuff’s coaching career saw him travel back to the state of Indiana where he served as an assistant coach at Notre Dame under Muffet McGraw where he was part of the program that won the 2001 national title. Unable to stay away from the state of Ohio, McGuff got his first head coaching gig at Xavier in 2002.
At Xavier, McGuff compiled a 213-73 and led the Musketeers to 4 Atlantic Ten tournament Championships, 3 WNIT appearances, and 6 NCAA tournament appearances. While McGuff’s Xavier teams didn’t have great success in the postseason, they did make the Elite Eight in the 2009-2010 season and came within a minute of upsetting Stanford to make the Final Four. A big part of McGuff’s success was his recruiting and despite the small profile of Xavier in women’s basketball, McGuff had good success on the recruiting trail, signing several players who could have easily played at major conference schools, most notably Ta’Shia Phillips and Amber Harris who were the only two players from non-BCS schools invited to attend the 2011 WNBA draft in person.
