FCS National Championship Game Becomes a Frisco (TX) Treat

This FCS offseason, there was a spirited battle going on. No, not for recruits, but for the new site of the FCS National Championship game. Chattanooga, the host for what seems like forever, suddenly had someone to bid against: Frisco, Texas, who boast Pizza Hut Park, home of Major League Soccer's Dallas Burn.

Today, the NCAA made it official: the first FCS championship game to be played in January will also be played in a new venue. In a town where there is no FCS team, next year's championship will be played about a half hour north of Dallas.

And "Big Tex", the iconic mascot of the Texas State fair, isn't the only one who's smiling: the Southland columnist at the College Sporting News is also smiling pretty broadly as well. In his excellent blog posting covering the announcement, he details the reaction across the country - and the happiness the bid is bringing to members of the Southland conference. (And in Ralph's Rag over there as well, you can read more about the announcement too - and why three out of the four major news organizations got the announcement wrong.)

Me? It simply inspired me to make jokes: the Top 10 reasons why Frisco was was selected. (more)

Reprinted from my blog at the College Sporting News, I couldn't resist: here's my (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek list as to why Frisco, Texas - a town without a FCS team to call home - won the bidding to become the home of the FCS National Championship game for the next three years.

10. After Chattanooga tripled their bid, the NCAA managed to negotiate free wings to go with their free one-topping pizzas for life from Pizza Hut.

9. Because the NCAA thought it was high time that "Tree City USA" got a postseason game.

8. This way, Dallas can at least crown [I][B]one[/B][/I] champion for the next three years, since it's not like the Cowboys, Stars or Mavericks are ever going to get it done.

7. The NCAA was reportedly unimpressed with the slogan "Amtrak-it to Chatty"!

6. Because J.R. told them to. (Which, ironically, was reportedly the slogan Frisco brought up with them to Indianapolis to make their pitch.)

5. The Cotton Bowl will need somewhere for the fans to go when they can't get scalped tickets to their non-championship game, and when they realize that a true champion is going to be crowned in Frisco they might just stay.

4. The NCAA thought it was better to issue the game to a place best known for being a watering-hole for trans-continental railways than the main railway hub after the civil war.

3. The IKEA in Frisco is just bigger - just like everything else in Texas.

2. This will do wonders for Dallas Baptist's bid to join the Sun Belt. (Of course, they'll have to start a football team first.

And the No. 1 reason why Frisco is now the site of the 2010 FCS National Championship Game:

1. Big Tex needs something to do in between state fairs.

(Photo courtesy Dallas Observer).

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who

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