Just another manic Monday…

H ope everyone had a good weekend. The work week is back, and it is time for the final push in spring practice as Alabama heads to the annual A-Day game Saturday.

With the new week, let us all hope we won’t hear any more about Don Imus or Sports Illustrated writers calling Nick Saban a jerk.

Ok, now that the naive sentiments are out of the way. Let’s get down to business.

Football
Alabama’s second scrimmage of the season was held in rainy conditions. The rain hurt the offense, with several passes dropped in part due to the weather.

Also, Saban told the press he isn’t paying much attention to the stats. In fact, despite some bad numbers, Saban sees offensive improvement.

With intense practice comes bumps and bruises, and sometimes more. Alabams is nursing a host of injuries as the A-Day game nears.

And with the spring practice season winding down, the Tuscaloosa News reports Matt Caddell wants to “turn it up a notch” for his final season in Tuscaloosa.

And as a reminder that college football is big business, A-Day could generate $10-15 million for the Tuscaloosa economy. That’s big dollars. About double the usual impact for spring practice.

Other items:
The Birmingham News continues its excellent reporting on the two-year college scandal. On Sunday, it exposed how one Gadsden legislator was awarded a job at Gadsden State due in large part to the representative’s standing on the Appropriations committee.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. This is corruption. When state lawmakers are paid with state dollars to do other jobs, which then benefit (or could benefit) from the lawmaker’s position in Montgomery—that is unethical. The reforms proposed shouldn’t stop with the two-year system. We need to get legislators and their families out of K-12 and the four-year college system as well.

Since I mentioned the Imus fiasco earlier, I can’t help but mention this idiotic quote from a Newsweek story on the situation: This is not Dr. King’s promised land, but it is a changing land—a truth Don Imus, and his court, just learned in the hardest way possible, as the grace and dignity of female scholar-athletes toppled one of the media powerhouses of the age.

Grace and dignity? Scholar-athletes? WTF? I think this guy must have been watching another basketball team. The Rutgers team was composed of inarticulate, semi-literates. Imus got what he deserved, but let’s not get lost. The fact is that this wasn’t the chess team he made fun of.