Many readers here already know that my wife and I are expecting our first child, a daughter, any day now. In fact, we figured she’d be born by now even though her due date is April 15th. Obviously, I’m concerned with making sure that she has all the environmental sports influences that she needs to be afforded the opportunity to embrace sports as an interest. I’m not gonna lie, I’m absolutely determined to make this a reality. Whether she turns out to be a girly girl or tomboy, I just want her to like sports. Seriously, nothing frightens me more than the thought of having no kids that like sports. *shudder*

One of the things that I admire most about my dad is that he managed to instill sports-love to varying degrees in all of his kids. Given that he and my mom have nine kids, I consider it a real feather in my dad’s cap. My mom doesn’t really like sports much at all, so he pretty much did it all by himself. I hope that I can echo his success with my own kids. If anyone has any suggestions for raising sports-loving kids, I’m all ears…or eyes, since I’d be reading it. It could be something you did for your kids or something your dad or mom did for you. Seriously, I really want to know. And I don’t want to hear, “You just have to let your kids be themselves and accept them for who they are.” I think we can all agree that giving kids a complex by forcing your interests on them is bad. I’m trying to cultivate sports-love in a positive way, such that the kids will choose it for themselves. That’s obvious, right?

Another question: Does having a kid mean you have to grow up? I’m pretty much a kid trapped inside of a man. I can’t imagine myself not being the big goofy nerd that likes video games, superhero stuff, and Star Wars. How do I survive this transition with my identity intact? Can it be done? I need to know. Much like the chest surgery I had a few years back, I’d still go through with it if I knew what I was in for, it would just be a lot easier to know ahead of time what it will be like.

OK, some BYU stuff: if you’ve been paying attention to all of the spring practice stuff, you know that the offense is struggling a bit with both of the QB candidates. I’m not worried about the offense, because they won’t see many defenses this season that are as stout as their own. My concern is that since neither QB is standing out, Bronco Mendenhall will probably have to extend the derby through the summer and into fall camp. It’s like the U.S. forces setting sail for Normandy without having chosen a commanding officer. You can’t reach summer workouts without a clear leader, especially at Quarterback U. Obviously, there are extenuating circumstances here. Lots of offensive starters are sitting out the spring with injuries, so neither quarterback has the optimum of talent supporting him on the field. Max Hall and Cade Cooper seem to be alternating good days, which means they are really competing and pushing each other. That’s a plus.

Another potential problem was raised by Gordon Monson on 1280 The Zone the other day (and I completely concur): the longer this QB derby goes, the more divided the team is going to become over this issue. Everyone saw it with Matt Berry and John Beck during the Crowton Era and even the first spring with Bronco. Players inevitably choose up sides. No matter how much Bronco preaches unity, each player has his own opinion of what’s best and the difference of opinion is only going to widen. Bronco needs to go with his gut and anoint a starter at the conclusion of spring ball so the team can start summer workouts with a unified approach.

All right, remember to email me your sports dad suggestions and everybody who can should come out to the annual Blue/White Scrimmage coming up next week!

Just a quick note to all members and visitors that I will be experimenting with the theme and layout of the blog over the next couple of weeks in an attempt to eliminate elements that are unnecessary or detract from the visual appeal of our current situation. Don’t be surprised to see a different looking site from day to day.

Thanks to everybody for your continued participation. Big things are in the works this year!

One more thing: I’ve been learning a lot about how everything works on the back end of this site and have pondered the idea of ditching the membership idea, as it kills our daily hits statistics. I don’t know if any of you knew, but when a member visits the site, it doesn’t count as a hit. In the not-too-distant future, my goal is to upgrade to the full Wordpress suite and pay for web-hosting. I’d at the very least like the site to pay for itself, whether through ads on the site or SCL merchandise, but I need to have documentable proof of our traffic in any case.

Let me know your thoughts. My priority is to make this a great community. If you like the membership thing, I’m open to keeping that going. Anyway, I just wanted to open the dialogue on this. I’ll check back on this quite a bit the next few days and respond so we can iron out our path. Thanks again, everybody!

Good afternoon, ladies and gents! We’re here at the prestigious Shirts’ north Orem office desk for the handing out of the most ignominious sports awards in all of SCLdom: the Bibbies, so named for the 1999 BYU football uniforms that were so ugly, the NCAA quickly drafted a rule to make them illegal (much praise be to the NCAA). Having repented of their stupidity by changing the design, BYU’s higher brass has obtained forgiveness and BYU fans have pledged to remember the bibs no more…except that our award is named after them.

And so it is on this slow news day in college football that we pause to recognize the worst of the worst-looking to have blighted the playing field this season. We abhor you, the recipients of the 2006 SCL Bib Awards. May your colors burn unceremoniously in a sudden flare of common sense!

• The second runner-up in the 2006 Bib Awards goes to…the University of Wyoming! Powder River let ‘er buck! It’s been a while since Wyoming has received any kind of award, and they should be proud to receive this distinction among such stiff competition.

• The first runner-up in the 2006 Bib Awards goes to…Boise State University! No matter how well the Broncos play on the field, it’ll never be considered pretty until somebody knocks some fashion sense into the school’s administration. I mean, it is Idaho, but an improvement is definitely possible.

• And the winner of the 2006 Bib Award goes to…dang, I can’t get this envelope open. Who glued this thing shut? Oh, there we go…the University of Oregon. Never has such bounteous funding resulted in such a design disaster. The sophistry and bravado of Nike has inflicted optical suffering upon all, proving once again that money can’t solve your problems, especially if you’re a Ducks fan. If my child were the one to produce such a heinous set of football robes, I would never come out during the daylight hours again.

Scoring was tabulated by the Chief Vote Counter Guy with 3 points awarded for a first place vote, 2 points for a second place vote, 1 point for a third place votes, and no points awarded for 4^th or 5^th place. Voters were painstakingly selected based on the criterium of membership in Shirts’ Cougar Legion. All votes have been verified and are available for public viewing on the SCL website.

The search engines have recently been yielding a few hits here and there. I thought you might like to see our rankings and perhaps get a good laugh.

We have had some surprisingly high rankings in Google recently (NOTE - these are only the rankings that have produced hits, as those are the only ones Wordpress tells me about):

• funny poll question (#5)
• who has the ugliest colors in college football (#5)
• byu football 2006 against the spread (#7)
• ben criddle (#27)

The award for the “Go-Figure Ranking of the Month” goes to:

• rice’s fight song (#62)

I don’t know what’s funnier - the fact that we got ranked for that keyword phrase, or the fact that we actually got a hit for that phrase on the seventh page of Google results!

Feel free to look up any of these keywords for yourself to see how we got the ranking. That Rice one is pretty funny. Once the site goes big time next July (more information on that may be obtained from me directly), I want to sign up for Google Analytics so we can get some real meaty goodness on our web visibility and be able to track that kind of stuff.