Father's Day weekend is upon us and there's a lot going on in the world around you, so here's what you need to know to be up to date:
- The College World Series is underway and the votes are in regarding the eventual national champion. Of 100 votes cast, 13 went to teams (Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas) who have since been eliminated from the tournament and an additional trio of ballots was cast in favor of the ever-popular "none of the above" (which is already getting votes in the new Dawg Sports poll). Top-seeded Clemson (which scored eight runs in the eighth inning to claim victory in the first game in Omaha) garnered 13 votes and 11 more went to second-seeded Rice. Cal State Fullerton and Georgia Tech secured five votes apiece and the remaining 50 went to---you guessed it---the Diamond Dogs. I hope the Dawg Sports readers who participated in the poll are right, but I have my concerns. The first pitch of Georgia's opening game with the Owls is at 2:00 this afternoon.
- The SportsBlogs Nation family continues to grow, as yet another intercollegiate athletics weblog has been added. Please join me in welcoming Block U, a Utah Utes weblog whose title is explained in the site's first posting. (I wouldn't want anyone to take the Utah weblog's name the wrong way and leave a comment reading, "Block me? Well, block you, too!") Welcome aboard, Block U!
Block U . . . answering the perennial question, "What is a Ute?"
- Also in SportsBlogs Nation news, Bruins Nation has celebrated its first anniversary. Bruins Nation is one of the most impassioned college sports weblogs out there and it ought to be among your daily reads, even if you don't care a whit about U.C.L.A. athletics.
- Normally, I don't share my private correspondence on the web, but this was just too good not to disseminate among a wider audience. I have family members who have relocated to New York City and, ordinarily, they love the experience of living in one of the world's grand cities. Sometimes, however, there are drawbacks to being in the Big Apple, as this recent e-mail from one of my relatives there confirms:
As if I needed further proof of this, it seems I can't go anywhere these days without hearing people talk about the World Cup. Now I should mention that I hate soccer with a passion that most sports fans reserve for televised bowling - in fact, it's so far from my mind that when somebody on an elevator was talking about Brazil winning over some other South American country, I thought there was a war going on down there I didn't know about. The other day I was taking a peek at those college football preview magazines (even in New York I can find those in a bookstore or two) so I've got football on the brain, but nobody here cares enough about that great American sport to have a semi-informed conversation about it. I live in a neighborhood with lots of European immigrants, too, so they insultingly refer to soccer as "football" and it's damn near killing me.
Artist's rendering of a New York-based World Cup soccer fan.
- If you want to know why the Georgia Sports Blog occupies the first chair in the orchestra that is the Bulldog blogosphere, this week serves as a reminder, as SaxonDawg's list of Father's Day gifts for South Carolina fans and Paul Westerdawg's list of host organizations in Omaha are top-drawer comedy material. Good stuff.
- Georgia's Jennifer Dahlgren has been declared the co-winner of the U.S. Track and Field Cross Country Coaches Association's Women's Field Athlete of the Year Award, alongside Arizona State's Jacquelyn Johnson. I don't know anything about Johnson, but Dahlgren can throw a hammer 75 yards, which sounds pretty impressive to me.
Hammer time. (Photograph courtesy University of Georgia Athletic Association.)
That should be all you need to know to get through your weekend. Don't forget about the baseball game this afternoon and I'll talk to y'all again soon.
Go 'Dawgs!