ESPN will be removing their ticker during college football games.
and that's fine by me......i think they're kind of annoying.
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/espn-r...50650.html
Tim Curry has passed, as well. Most famous for Rocky Horror, though played in many many well known movies and plays. Creative guy willing to push traditional limits. . . .RIP Tim!
It's about time to start a new thread - as there's some surprising - or perhaps not surprising news for the tennis team. Alexis Blokhina is on the roster, and making her return to collegiate tennis after a brief stint as a pro. That's monumental news as we look to build a team that can be a contender. Preseason rankings have dropped, and we have six players ranked:
#18 Valerie Glozman
#19 Monika Ekstrand
#29 Alyssa Ahn
#87 Alexis Blokhina
#119 Tianmei Wang
#123 Katerina Shabashkevich (#6 Freshman per TRN and a Blue Chip, #18 newcomer)
In doubles, we have
#21 Blokhina/Glozman
#81 Ahn/Wang
If we're able to be healthy this year, we should be able to surprise some teams with Sein Myoung and Kaia Giribalan providing some depth on top of our top 6 - a nice change from past seasons where we had Emma Sun or Morgan Shaffer to turn to if someone was injured.
In looking at the rankings, there are definitely some stacked teams if people are healthy.
Ohio State is absolutely loaded with a top four of #3 Luciana Perry, #4 Teah Chavez, #37 Sophia Cisse-Ignatiev, and #39 Nao Nishino and a fifth in the top 120. Duke has picked up two highly touted freshmen in Nina Vargova and Mimi Xu - and should be a tough out for any team. I'll be curious to see how things begin to shake out in the coming weeks as we learn more.
ITA All American Championships will kick off the season on September 19-27th - with multiple individual championships to follow this fall. We likely won't see the team play together likely until the winter for ITA Kickoff Weekend where we have elected to go to a tough regional with #16 Vanderbilt, #19 Tennessee, #28 Stanford, and #33 Arizona. That's almost as tough as the teams going to #13 USC with #17 ASU, #18 Florida, and #25 Clemson going there, and #15 UCLA getting #20 UCF, #21 TCU, and #22 Cal. By contrast - NOBODY wanted to go to #9 Pepperdine with their highest competition being #49 North Florida.
Quote:Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:
Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?
New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.
Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.
The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/nf...=url-share
Dolly Parton passed today at 80. Great human being, the world is a little dimmer today without her. RIP Dolly.
https://stanforddaily.com/2026/08/23/for...ug-24-2026?utm_campaign=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_content=Aug-24-2026
From the Daily the other day. Full metal is this new or you posted about in several months ago.
Nice story about Sam Fuld, '04, the "crash test dummy with a death wish" in the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/sports/baseball/sam-..._permalink
After his 8-year career in MLB, he was hired into the Philies organization under future Giants manager Gabe Kapler. Three years later, he became the Phillies new General Manager. Then, two years ago, he enrolled in Business school at Wharton to pursue an NBA, with an eye on becoming the team's President of Business Operations.
Quote:It isn’t uncommon for former players to lead a team’s baseball decisions. But there is virtually no precedent for what Fuld is attempting on the business side.
I didn't realize that Fuld came back to Stanford to pursue a master's degree in statistics (though he didn't finish it because he was called up to the big leagues). But it explains how he was a good fit in his first front office job as "major league player information coordinator", and why he didn't have much trouble with the "nasty math course" on applied probability models. Future looks bright for him:
Quote:When the 70-year-old Dombrowski eventually retires, Fuld could be in line to become the overarching team president in charge of both baseball and business.
BC
We attended the pro women's soccer match between the San Diego Waves and Utal Royals last Friday. Three Stanford alums were on the roster: Kennedy Wesley, Kiki Pickett and Nya Harrison. A fourth (Catarina Macario) was recently acquired from Chelsea but has yet to play for them as she's recovering from an injury. Camille Ashton who is also a Stanford alum is the GM. And of course Naomi Girma used to play for the Wave until she transferred to Chelsea.
It was my first time watching a pro women's soccer match and it was a blast. I enjoy the women's game more because there's more passing. You can see plays develop unlike the men's game where sometimes the scoring comes out of nowhere. There also isn't nearly the same amount of flopping and theatrics as the men's game.
Texas Tech has Cody Campbell, Oregon has Phil Knight... Who do we have?