Thursday, December 31, 2009

Happy New Year!!!!

Happy New Year to everyone out there! As one Vince Finney would say "Have a Happy and a Healthy". Hope everyone got what they wanted for Christmas and had a safe holiday season.

Speaking of holiday season its holiday bowl season. This is the time of the year that ESPN, ABC, FOX, and the NFL network have 32 bowl games in a period of 3 weeks. This is the best present for fans who like to watch tons of sports on TV. Some of the best bowl names out there are the Little Caesars Bowl, the Humanitarian Bowl, the Emerald Bowl, the Papa Johns Bowl, and who can forget about the Grand Daddy of then all the Rose Bowl. Take all the college football you can in during this period because there has been and will be more great games to come in the New Year. One game to highlight is the Fiesta Bowl matching the two undefeated schools from the WAC and the Mountain West Boise St and TCU. It's going to be a great game so check it out.

That's all for now look for more posts to come in the New Year and Sports Observer Monthly will be all over the NFL playoffs in January leading up to the ultimate TV event the Super Bowl on February 7th 2010.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Rock Chalk Babies!

Last night as the Observer was scanning web sites for material to write about, the article about the resignation of Mark Mangino showed up on espn.com. Mark Mangino was the football coach at The University of Kansas. Now being a student at KU during the dark days of the Terry Allen regime when KU was the laughing stock of the Big 12 I felt KU slipping back into the dark days. He resigned because of allegations by certain soft players that he was too hard on them. What a bunch of cry babies a lot of kids across this country would give everything they had to put on the pads and jersey on Saturday afternoons in the fall. Yet these pansies had to call out the coach for being too hard, and this led to an investigation and this led to Mangino leaving the program.

Mangino has been the most successful coach at Kansas in a long long time. He took Kansas to four bowl and won three of those bowl including the 2008 Orange Bowl. No other coach has ever done that in the 100 plus years of KU football. He was the first coach to lead Kansas to back to back bowl wins. He turned around a joke and made it a successful respectable football program. I know that after a 5 and 0 start in 2009 the Jayhawks lost 7 in a row and missed out on a bowl this year but people need to look at his body of work. Overall Mangino had been a great coach for KU football and now he's gone and who knows where the program will go from here.

Being an alumni for KU I feel a lot of pride for the University as a whole. I hope going forward KU can find a coach that will keep the program strong and competing for a Big 12 Championship. If they don't hire a coach that will provide discipline, toughness, and a plan to beat the Big 12 South KU will go back to the laughing stock of the Big 12.