A Debbie Downer Day Today …

There is an ongoing mess in Las Cruces, NM these days and it has nothing to do with “problems at the southern border”.  New Mexico State University first suspended its new head basketball coach, Greg Heiar, and subsequently fired him and then the school has cancelled the remaining the games scheduled for its men’s basketball team for the rest of the season.  The Aggies will forfeit all of their remaining games.  Obviously, something rather drastic happened in and around that basketball team.

The current problem involves “hazing incidents”.  Press reports – – based on police reports – – say that three players on the basketball team may have been involved in activities that could be:

1. False imprisonment
2. Harassment
3. Criminal sexual contact

The alleged victim in this matter is a teammate of the three players who may have hit that trifecta of potential offenses.  According to the police report the three alleged aggressors

” … held [the victim] down with him facing down, removed his clothing exposing his buttocks and began to ‘slap his ass.’ [The victim] also went on to state that they also touched his scrotum.”

This is not the lone outrageous event involving this year’s New Mexico State basketball team.  In November 2022, the Aggies were in Albuquerque to play New Mexico; one of the players was out and about after curfew and was attacked by 4 students from New Mexico.  That player had or came into possession of a gun and in the melee he shot and killed a freshman student at New Mexico.  The police considered that this was a case of self-defense but there was one interesting loose thread to that story:

• The gun was eventually found in the hotel room of one of the Aggies assistant basketball coaches.

If River City Iowa thought it had “Trouble – with a capital T” in the movie the Music Man, then I guess Las Cruces has “TROUBLE – all in caps” these days…

In college football news, there is still some speculation that the PAC-12 Conference may implode.  Certainly, the conference was severely damaged by the loss of USC and UCLA to the Big 10; those schools were nationally recognized to a greater extent than the other schools and those two schools presence in Los Angeles brought a lot of media desirability to PAC-12 athletic broadcast rights.  Now, according to various reports, the PAC-12 is having difficulty selling its broadcast rights for what it considers to be the minimum it can take for those rights to keep the conference afloat.

According to one report I read, the Big-12 is interested in poaching the “Four Corners Schools” (Arizona, Arizona St. Colorado and Utah) from the PAC-12 to expand the Big-12 to 16 teams.  If that were to happen, the six teams of the PAC-12 North  would be in a bad situation.  Perhaps Washington and Oregon might find a perch in a conference of consequence but Washington St., Oregon St., Stanford and Cal would be left to try to cobble some sort of meaningful relationship out west with the likes of:

• Boise St.
• Fresno St.
• San Diego St. (rumored to be a PAC-12 recruit already)
• SMU (rumored to be a PAC-12 recruit already)

That would be an 8-team conference with very few intriguing pieces beyond the annual Cal/Stanford game.  And even if Washington and Oregon remained in some sort of 10-team conference, it would be clearly last on the pecking order of the “Power 5”.  [Aside:  You would not have difficulty in convincing me that the “Power 5” had devolved into the “Power 4”.]

The PAC-12 is not in good shape; were it a person, it would not be quite ready for admission to the ICU, but it would have already been admitted to a hospital.  If the rumors come to pass that the quartet of “Four Corner Schools” split and head elsewhere, then the conference that used to like to call itself “The Conference of Champions”, will fade into memory.

Finally, a friend forwarded me an excerpt from a letter written by Ernest Hemmingway in 1952 to an art historian, Bernard Berenson.  This has to do with symbolism in Hemmingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea.  I wish I had known about this letter when I was in 12^th grade English class:

“There isn’t any symbolism.  The sea is the sea.  The old man is an old man.  The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.  The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse.  All the symbolism that people say is shit.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………