(H/t Stampede Blue) The Washington Post has a feature on Marvin Harrison. Perhaps one day Harrison will get his due. This article is a start. It reveals what Colts’ fans already know. Harrison is humble, a relentless worker, and a great wide receiver, not a loud mouthed glory hound like so many of his wide-receiving peers.

Stampede Blue is reporting that the Colts obtained Anthony “Booger” McFarland. Stampede Blue also suggests that Mike Doss was involved in the trade, but that information is not at the Colts.com press release.

I am dead ignorant on this subject (“What else is new, Doug?”) but the folks at Stampede Blue are of the opinion that Booger will really help our run defense. Certainly couldn’t hurt.

Mike Chappell has the story for the Indy Star. His story doesn’t mention Doss either but says that the Colts traded a second round draft pick in the ’97 draft.

For the Colts fans out there, check out Stampede Blue – a Colts blog that seems quite worthwhile. (h/t X-tra Rant).

Andy Katz has an article for ESPN on Kelvin Sampson becoming IU’s new head basketball coach.

“He’s not running from Oklahoma,” [Kelvin’s son] Kellen Sampson said. “He’s running to Indiana. There’s nothing wrong with running to a top five program.”

That’s because this is Indiana, where basketball is king. Sampson had been at football-dominated Oklahoma for a dozen years, reached a Final Four in 2002 (ironically losing to Indiana in the national semifinals in Atlanta) but may have grown tired being in Norman.

So when Indiana called last week, he listened — and listened hard. Multiple sources have told ESPN.com that the Indiana search committee looked at Gonzaga’s Mark Few and Memphis’ John Calipari. There were, according to sources, inquiries into West Virginia’s John Beilein as well. But interest and buyouts prevented any of those conversations going too far. Calls were never made to IU alumni Steve Alford (Iowa) or Randy Wittman (Orlando Magic assistant). Indiana athletic director Rick Greenspan said he wouldn’t discuss the search process but said someone on the committee first brought up Sampson’s name.

. . .

“Guys like me don’t get jobs like this,” Kelvin Sampson said. “I was a guy that coached NAIA basketball and was a grad assistant [at Michigan State under Jud Heathcote] and then coached at Washington State before Oklahoma and now Indiana. I’ve had kind of a nondescript college career.”

Two major concerns are Sampson’s NCAA recruiting violations and his low graduation rate. He has apparently been under investigation for violating a rule concerning the permissible number of phone calls to potential recruits, and in 2002 when Davis’s IU team beat Sampson’s Oklahoma team in the national semi-finals, Sampson’s team graduation rate was 0%. Also, the futures of Indiana’s current players, particularly D.J. White and Robert Vaden are uncertain. They might decide they don’t want to play for IU if they’re not playing for Coach Davis.

I’m willing to give him a chance, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how he does. Run a clean program and win some Big Ten titles, and that will keep everybody happy for a while.

I’m easily amused, but I got a chuckle out of the typo in this preview of the upcoming game between Gonzaga and Indiana:

Gonzaga coach Mark Few knows the talent level between the highest and lowest of seeds isn’t as big as it once was, leaving any favored team vulnerable to an upset.

“There might be one or two great seeds out there, I don’t know if there is a great team out there,” Few said. “There are so many good teams right now.
There’s just a tremendous amount of parody in college basketball.”

So, does he think there is a lot of equality or is he just being funny?
Tip off is at 8:10 p.m. EST.

That last second shot by Northwestern State to beat Iowa busted up my bracket real good. I understood it was a bit of a longshot for Iowa to win the entire tournament as a 3 seed, but going out in the first round? Yeesh! Marquette and Syracuse were disappointing to me as well.

Yesterday IU beat Wisconsin in the Big Ten tournament 61 to 56. They face Ohio State this afternoon at 4:05. Jason Kelly, writing for the South Bend Tribune, has an amusing column on the way IU has been playing lately. He suggests that since Mike Davis resigned, he and the Hoosiers have relaxed and, consequently, have been playing better.

A paragraph I liked:

As the tension built for Davis, it showed in the uptight way Indiana played. Now the Hoosiers exhibit the messy freedom of a child’s birthday party, a merry atmosphere that spilled into that postgame stand-up routine where the players laughed right along with Davis.

Jason Kelly has a readable column on the IU-Purdue rivalry in the South Bend Tribune entitled “Remember when they were good?”

Mainly I like the intro:

Once upon a time, Indiana and Purdue were basketball royalty.

This goes way back.

There
are children old enough to dismiss that idea as a bedtime fairy tale intended to lull them to sleep like the tedious games those teams play now.

But it’s true.

Feared ogres ruled both teams, not the presumptive prince of the Purdue program and the Indiana lame duck in charge these days.

They\ snarled and breathed fire. They threw blazers, and fits at the officials, and even a chair once. Most of all, they forged teams that played games that mattered in the Big Ten and beyond.

I think he overstates the case, particularly with respect to Indiana. Not too many years ago, the Hoosiers under Mike Davis played in the National Championship game against Maryland and this year, they rose in the rankings to 8th in the country. But, certainly the rivalry has lost its edge of late, in part because IU has won 9 of the past 11.

Mike Davis will resign as head coach of IU’s basketball team according to a story at the Indy Star (and elsewhere.) I have seriously mixed feelings on this. I’m certainly not one who was calling for Davis’s head from Day 1. I liked Coach Knight, but did not resent Davis for replacing him. I was particularly excited when Davis led the Hoosiers to the championship in 2002. I don’t really think that would have happened under Bob Knight. 2003 was a decent season. Since then, however. No NCAA bids. It looked like it was going to turn around this year. We were 12-3 and ranked in the top 10. But since then we’ve gone 1-6 and lost 5 games on the road in the Big Ten including games at Penn State and Minnesota.

If this truly is the end of the Davis era, I think I’ll view it as a dramatic rise followed by a long, slow decline, beginning in December of 2002 when he ran onto the court to berate the officials at the end of the Kentucky game. After that, his teams didn’t seem to have the same spark somehow. His team finished the 2002/2003 season with a whimper followed by poor performances from 2003-2005. This 2005/2006 season looked to be different. I don’t know if it was the loss of DJ White or something else. Purely on the merits, I think it is appropriate for Davis to step down. But I feel a little bad about it because there are a lot of fans who never really gave him a chance. They’ll feel vindicated about now, I suspect. But possibly things would be different if they were not calling for his head from Day 1.