As my loyal readers know I went back to school this semester down at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. To my less loyal readers I say now you know, and read more often ya fucks. To my stalkers I say hello and I’ll see you at the Breezeway Food Court around 1pm. The talk of the campus this past month has been about the school’s decision to sell naming rights for the stadium to the GEO Group. This issue has come up for discussion in every class that I’m in at some point and I have even written two papers for classes on the topic. It’s really galvanized the student body to unite in their backlash against the college, it’s been quite inspiring actually. It even resulted in an occupation of the administration building by a group of students that would have made The Dude proud.
For those hermits that avoid the news and cokeheads who never leave the bathroom, the brief story is that FAU sold/gave the naming rights for the football stadium to the GEO group. GEO is a Boca Raton based company that runs private prisons. The GEO Group has very close ties to FAU as its CEO Dr. George Zoley is an alumnus and has served as the chairman of the board of trustees at the university. GEO has been accused, and even found culpable of numerous human rights violations in the prisons that they run. These have ranged from atrocities including rape by guards, to simple gross negligence and intentional indifference. A Justice Department review of a GEO Group run prison in Mississippi found that countless rights violations had in fact occurred, but they held the Mississippi Department of Corrections culpable for being the ones that had outsourced the work to GEO Group.
The American Civil Liberties Union has spoken out against FAU for this jumping into bed with the GEO Group, and the negative press has been substantial. The donation that the GEO Group made was for $6 million dollars to be paid out over 12 years. This was the largest donation that the school had ever received. Yet there has to be some thought to given to where the money is coming from. Now it seems that the school wasn’t jumping INTO bed with the GEO Group, as they were already there, yet this display is the most public. You can be friends with non-reputable sorts behind closed doors, but going and naming the stadium after them is a little much. Sure we’re friends and all, but don’t tell anyone all right.
There have at least been some good names for the stadium brought up out of all this. The official name is just going to be the lame uncreative “GEO Group Stadium”. However there have been some good unofficial names bantered about. The most popular one seems to be “Owlcatraz”. While my favorite, with it being Boca Raton and all, is “Owlschwitz”. We got to at least have a little fun with this thing.
I decide to dig around for some more information on this issue. I always go to any means necessary to get the inside scoop, that’s my commitment to my readers, this blog, and Tyler Durden. So I know this girl that works in the athletic department who is always giving me seductive looks, I decided to see if I could get anything out of her. The other day I flashed her a little of my trademark grin and took her over to Coyote Jack’s after class and started pumping some beers intp her. I don’t drink anymore, but it was all right because she drank enough for the both of us. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any info, she kept diverting it to dumb stories about shopping. It was frustrating. When she invited me back to her dorm room I figured maybe I could find some documents laying around that I could steal. Yet when we got back there all she wanted to do was get in my pants. So for the sake of the investigation I obliged, after our third session she finally started to sing.
As she laid there recovering, from what naturally was the best sex of her life, she informed me that in fact Hooters restaurant had offered the FAU athletic department MORE money than the GEO Group. I found this startling. So it couldn’t have been all about the money. It seems there had to be darker forces at work here. She said that they were told that the negative publicity from the women’s groups would be too much for the school to name the stadium after a place like Hooters. After pumping all the information in and out of her that I could, I faked a phone call from Florida basketball coach Billy Donovan and made my exit.
On the way out, after apologizing for the noise to the group of scantily clad coeds gathered outside her door, I began thinking about this alleged bad publicity. Surely the honchos at FAU couldn’t have possibly thought that the publicity would be worse for naming the stadium after a chicken wing joint that employs big breasted women, than it would for a group that beats and rapes people. You don’t even need a Public Relations AA degree from Palm Beach State College to figure that out. Hooters even has a nice tie in to the whole Owl theme with the hooting and the owl’s known fondness for large breasts. This had to be a cover story, and a bad one at that.
So I decide to take it right to the top. I sprayed some Hugo Boss on and I made a beeline for the president’s office. I wondered who I was going to have to sleep with there to get some information, hopefully they’re good looking. When I got there everybody was very tight lipped. It seemed they had been shaken up by the previous student occupation and security was on high alert. I saw two guards at the front door and had to come up with a plan. I remembered how zealously they had shot a homeless man on the roof a few weeks back and figured bloodlust was their weakness. I ran up in a panic mentioning that I thought I saw a dirty hippie man walking around wielding a pointy spatula. They ran off in hot pursuit talking about being on the big news.
With them gone, I was able to slip into the President Mary Jane Saunders inner sanctum. I stuck my head in and peered around, secretary in a flannel shirt, uh oh. Over by the water cooler I saw two women, acid wash jeans and Bieber haircuts. FML, it’s the impenetrable lesbian wall of silence. My journalistic skills here would be rendered mute. It was like Superman and kryptonite. I had never known that President Saunders swung that way. Yet all the telltale signs were there, married only after her professional career had taken off, only a daughter from her husband’s previous marriage, bad hair and not enough makeup. Ugh, her sexual life was a big a sham as the PR cover story I was trying to crack, the irony at least made me chuckle.
My investigation it seems had ended. Some facts had emerged. I knew that FAU wasn’t all about the money since Hooters had offered them more money. I knew that FAU and the GEO Group were up to something. I knew that President Saunders was a big time carpetmuncher. I knew that my investigative journalism techniques needed some work as I can’t just be a one trick pony that has to sleep with women to get information. One day all these pieces will come together. Somebody big is running things down in Boca Raton that’s for sure, and I can assure you it’s not being the Boy Scouts.












Its not often that a player from a smaller school really becomes must see TV in the college basketball world. Much less from a Mormon college, and even rarer for that to carry into the country’s prison system. That however is exactly what has happened in the case of Jimmer Fredette from BYU.
This year’s NCAA tourney is set to be a big stage that Jimmer could use to further cement himself in college football lore. These hopes did seem to take a big hit though a few weeks ago when the extremely rule heavy BYU kicked 2nd leading scorer and leading rebounder Brandon Davies off the team. This happened because Davies was determined to have violated the school’s archaic “honor code”. What was his mortal sin to necessitate such a heavy reaction you might ask? The troubled Mr. Davies had the weak moral character to have consensual sex with his girlfriend, oh the horror. Of course even if they are bounced this year, Mr. Fredette already cemented himself in my book last year when he poured in 37 points, including 2 killer 3′s in double OT, to lead BYU over my beloved Florida Gators.
Fredette of course vividly remembers his experiences playing at the prison. Everything from the armed guards standing around for protection, to the big mountain of liability paperwork he had to fill out, to the extreme by any standards trash talking he had to put up with. According to Fredette the experience was a great help to his game. “Obviously there are a lot more people in big arenas in college, but what they say to you doesn’t bother you because I heard pretty much everything in those prisons,” Fredette said. “I think that helped me get better at blocking the crowd out and just focusing on the game.”
This past Saturday in Newark, NJ (affectionately known as the Brick City by some people I know) Georges St. Pierre, the welterweight champion, took on Englishman Dan Hardy as the main event of UFC 111. There was a whole lot of buildup to this fight and a few left disappointed by the dominant performance that St. Pierre put on to beat Hardy by a unanimous decision. However, I think things are not nearly as simple as they seem.
Before the fight on Saturday I think it was a very safe bet to say that most people didn’t like Dan Hardy. He’s an easy guy not to like. He’s brash, arrogant, and English; that’s 3 strikes against him for most people. With his trademark red mohawk and red contact lenses he’s like the Dennis Rodman of UFC, except without the teddy bear like quality that Rodman possesses. With Hardy its either you love him, or you hate him. Its also a safe bet that a whole lot more people were on the hate side of that equation.
This is going to go a long way for Hardy I think. He gained a whole lot of both respect and fans with his performance on Saturday night. The fans he gained were people that had been some of his biggest detractors before the fight. Sure Hardy’s ego may have taken an initial blow from the loss, but he’s certainly going to emerge a stronger more dedicated fighter from it. I think when we look to this fight in the future were going to see it as the turning point in Dan Hardy’s career. He gained more from this loss than the 7 consecutive wins he had going into it.
I know its awful early to start talking about the National Championship game, but the day the first BCS standings of the season comes out seems like as good enough a time as any to start. Today the powers that be released their first standings in the popularity/computer contest to determine who gets the opportunity to play a game to declare themselves the best team in America. I say that way because its often times not the two best teams in the country, its the system we got though so its what we’re gonna go with her.
The tricky thing is that Alabama and Florida both play in SEC conference. Now they don’t meet during the regular season this year, as each team has one team they play from the other division every year and the other two spots rotate. All signs however, most certainly point to Alabama and Florida meeting up in the SEC Championship game at the end of the year. Last year Alabama and Florida were #1 and #2 going into the SEC Championship game as well, which Florida won on their way to an eventual National Championship. The difference this year though is that its highly likely that both teams could reach that game with both being undefeated.
The crazy thing is that at that point you might even be better off losing the SEC Championship game then winning it. We all know how hard it is to beat the same team twice in the same season. In those types of rematches the advantage is often with the loser of the first game. Now I know that neither team would take that into account when their playing in the SEC Championship game, there’s too much uncertainty involved.
In case you missed it, and I’m sure most of you did, the Fed-Ex Cup finished this weekend with Tiger Woods emerging as the champion. I know a good majority of people are sitting around here thinking, what the fuck is the Fed-Ex Cup? So let me explain.
At least it never should happen. This weekend I came home to one of my roommates actually watching Golf instead of football. I thought I had stepped into some parallel universe. Now I’m a golf fan, I enjoy playing it a whole lot and do enjoy watching it. There’s just no way when football is on. If golf is really that much concerned with TV ratings, then their going to have just install lights and have all their events on prime time during the week because here in America, football rules the day during the weekends.
I think the PGA recognizes that this thing has failed and I hope they pull the plug on it soon. The Fed-Ex Cup was only introduced in 2007 and they have already adjusted the rules and point scoring setup every single year since its introduction. Their trying to tinker with the thing and make it work rather than just give it the proper burial that it deserves. From their standpoint its pretty much win win because they get to sell Fed-Ex the naming rights for something that’s pretty much invented out of thin air. However its gotten to the point that its distracting and taking away from the true nature of the game. Phil Mickelson was the winner on Sunday after playing some excellent golf, yet his thunder and accolade was stolen by Mr. Tiger Woods and his mythical Fed-Ex championship, that’s a dam shame.
If anyone doesn’t know the story of Donte Stallworth by now let me give you a quick recap. Its pretty simple really, he was speeding down the road in Miami Beach early one morning in his Bentley when he struck and killed a pedestrian.