Clearly, Mother Nature is angry at the Texans for not drafting Reggie Bush:

About 4,000 customers lost power in the Houston area, where streets flooded but no serious damage was reported, authorities said.

In Liberty County, northeast of Houston, officials reported damaged homes and toppled trees.

Her aim is a bit off, though: the worst damage occurred in the Gainesville area, which is much closer to Dallas than to Houston. See what you’ve done, Texans??? You’ve subjected your whole state to nature’s wrath, even innocent Cowboys fans! :)

“I hate people. I hate everyone on earth.” –overheard in the LaFortune basement.

Exam season breeds misanthropy, I guess. :)

The Saints took Reggie Bush #2. The Titans picked Vince Young #3. The Jets are on the clock.

Whither Matt Leinart? Some mock drafts believe he’ll fall to #10 and the Arizona Cardinals. As a soon-to-be Phoenix resident, I think that’d be great!

UPDATE: The Jets took D’Brickashaw Ferguson. Green Bay is on the clock. Leinart still waiting.

UPDATE 2: The Packers took A.J. Hawk, a.k.a. Brady Quinn’s sister’s boyfriend. The 49ers are on the clock.

UPDATE 3: It’s all playing out as planned, so far. The Lions are on the clock at #9. Hopefully they don’t take Leinart to set up a reunion with Mike Williams.

UPDATE 4: WOOOO!!! Arizona is on the clock, and Leinart is still on the board!

UPDATE 5: YAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!!! Leinart is an Arizona Cardinal!!!!!!!

UPDATE 6: And a fellow Trojan joins Leinart, as Arizona takes OG Taitusi Lutui with its second pick (41st overall). Meanwhile Winston Justice goes to the Eagles (39th pick) and LenDale White goes to the Titans (45th). Rose Bowl foes White and Young are now teammates!

P.S. SI’s Don Banks writes: “The Cardinals franchise is changing its name once again, this time to USC East.” Heh.

According to a CNN article (and elsewhere), all the TVs in the White House, Air Force One, etc. are tuned to one station: Fox News. This is hardly surprising, but it seems it’s been getting a little old for the White House press corps:

During a briefing led by White House spokesman Scott McClellan as President Bush was traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana, the Washington Post’s Jim VandeHei asked why the White House televisions always seemed to be tuned to Fox News and if it was possible to have them tuned instead to CNN.

“It’s come to my attention that there’s been requests — this is a serious question — to turn these TVs onto a station other than Fox, and that those have been denied,” VandeHei told McClellan, who is soon to be replaced by former Fox anchor and self-described conservative Tony Snow.

“My question would be, is there a White House policy that all government TVs have to be tuned to Fox?” VandeHei asked.

To McClellan’s credit, he honored the request, and at least some of the TVs will now show CNN. :)

New allegations against Reggie Bush, which push his possible alleged ineligibility back to 2004, mean USC’s 2004 national championship could be in jeopardy, after all:

BCS officials told Yahoo! Sports on Friday that if Bush is ruled ineligible by either the Pacific 10 Conference or the NCAA for even one game during the 2004 season, the BCS will discuss amending its rules to allow it to force the Trojans to vacate the national championship.

“This is the type of thing the BCS might have to look into if other governing bodies, the conference and the NCAA, take action,” BCS administrator Bill Hancock said. …

Officials at New York’s Downtown Athletic Club, which award the Heisman Trophy, have said that they could take back Bush’s [2005] honor if he is deemed ineligible by the NCAA. Now the 2004 season, which USC went 13-0, is under question.

The NCAA itself does not crown a champion in Division I-A football. Officially, USC captured the 2004 BCS national championship, which is administered by a consortium of major football conferences. As a result, while the NCAA could strip the Trojans of all their victories in 2004, it could not force USC to vacate its title because the BCS championship is administered outside of NCAA jurisdiction.

The BCS currently has no policy on possibly forcing a school to give up its championship, according to Hancock.

“The BCS is not a governing body,” said BCS coordinator Mike Slive, who is also commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.

However, in the wake of the latest details involving Bush, discussion has occurred within the BCS that if the NCAA or the Pac-10 were to rule that USC must forfeit any or all games from the 2004 season – including its Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma – the BCS could rewrite its bylaws and retroactively take away the Trojans’ championship.

Only seven times has the NCAA forced a school to vacate a national championship but never in any of its marquee sports. The most recent examples are 2002 with the Hawaii men’s volleyball team and 1995 with the UCLA softball team, both for using ineligible players.

Here are news stories about those Hawaii and UCLA teams.

I’ve already expressed my opinion about the Orwellian absurdism of these retroactive forfeits. I suppose I can see the logic behind it if the team knew at the time that it was using an ineligible player… but to declare a player ineligible long after the fact, because of conduct that the team knew nothing about, and then to change the results of the team’s games on that basis? That strikes me as totally ridiculous and lame. It would be a different situation if the allegations involved something that changed the competitive balance of the game(s) in question (e.g., performance-enhancing drugs, gambling on the outcome, etc.)… but if not, and if the team was itself innocent of any deliberate wrongdoing (or willful blindness), then I’d say the punishment doesn’t fit the crime… especially given that the punishment does violence to common sense by literally rewriting history. (And for the record: “Well, what else can we do?” is not a valid reason to impose an otherwise unsupportable punishment.)

On a lighter note, over at ND Nation, they’re recalling that the Irish’s 31-point loss to USC in 2004 was the “last straw” that got Ty Willingham fired, and hoping that if the Trojans are forced to forfeit that game, “the NCAA doesn’t make us rehire him retroactively.” Heh.

As for the other breaking-news story about Reggie Bush — the fact that he unexpectedly won’t be the #1 pick in the morning’s NFL Draft — ESPN Page 2’s Chuck Klosterman writes:

I have only been alive for 33 years, but I’ve spent 25 of them watching football, and I have never seen a better college player than Reggie Bush. When Marcus Allen was a senior, he was awesome — but Bush was more versatile. It’s possible that Barry Sanders was better as a junior, but Oklahoma State was on probation that year, so they were never on TV; as such, I can’t legitimately compare them. But I can’t imagine how Sanders (or anyone else) could have been any more electrifying and unhittable than Bush. In fact, ESPN Classic just rebroadcast the USC-Fresno State game this very afternoon, and it seems wholly impossible that anyone could be better at running away from people than this particular human. Moreover, everyone alive seems to know this: not only have I never met a Reggie Bush skeptic, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t consider Bush to be a transcendent superhuman. He possesses the kind of greatness that a child can see.

Yet the Texans have nonetheless convinced themselves that they will be better off selecting Mario Williams, the tall, speed-rushing defensive end from North Carolina State. I suspect Williams is potentially stellar. In time, he could be Pro Bowl caliber player. And the Texans’ reasoning (I assume) is that (a) you build a team around defense and pass rushing; (b) they already have a decent running back; (c) Bush might be hyper-expensive; and (d) Reggie’s parents appear to be living in a free house, which seems a tad sketchy. This is all fine and reasonable. The only problem is that Gary Kubiak has failed to weigh these points against the opposing argument, which is that REGGIE BUSH IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TACKLE. HE IS WAY, WAY BETTER THAN ALL OF THE OTHER DUDES WHO ARE ELIGIBLE TO BE DRAFTED. WHEN REGGIE BUSH IS RUNNING WITH THE FOOTBALL, THOSE ATTEMPTING TO KNOCK HIM TO THE GROUND CANNOT SEEM TO DO SO. THIS QUALITY IS ADVANTAGEOUS WITHIN THE GAME OF FOOTBALL, AS THAT IS PRETTY MUCH THE TOTALITY OF THE SPORT.

Obviously, this decision is wolf-face crazy. It’s the kind of decision you make when you are drunk, and on cocaine, and on deadline, and on fire. It’s going to define the future of the Houston franchise, and it will potentially wreck it (at least for a decade). … The Texans talked themselves into picking an inferior player; they created reasonable, intellectual reasons to make a terrible move. And I realize Houston needs help on defense, but remember — they had the first overall pick because they were the worst team in the league. They need everything. And while you can’t get everything at once, the closest singular equivalent is usually the single-best force. But they took the wrong guy.

Gee, tell us how you really feel, Chuck. :)

The Sabres lost Game 4 last night, so the series is tied 2-2 heading back to Buffalo. So far, the home team has won all four games (contrast that to the WhalersHurricanes-Canadiens series, in which the home team has lost all four games). If the home-ice advantage persists, that whould be good news for the Sabres (knock on wood), since they have Game 5 and potentially Game 7 at home. The bad news? They looked like crap in Game 4. Hopefully they can pull it together before Sunday’s game, which will be on NBC at 2:00 PM.

P.S. In the spirit of the “L.A. Angels of Anaheim,” is it OK if I refer to the Carolina Hurricanes as the “Hartford Whalers of Raleigh”? :) Speaking of which… I’ve done some memory-lane stuff for our resident Sabres fans… well, here’s something for my fellow Connecticutians who remember the good old days:

source file

Not that I ever went to a Whalers game or anything, but whatever. I was sufficiently aware of their existence that I remember the song… :)

Meow! Woof! More after the jump.

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