DC -

I didn't catch on at the time but you mentioned the Trilateral Commission & Freemasonry in a response to a post I wrote when I wrongly claimed that Bellotti was coming the UCLA, which are obvious references to the New World Order conspiracy theory in your latest response to one of my diary responses. 

My research in the BCS Controversy has led me to the Rockefeller empire, following and connecting the dots from the Oil and Gas empire.   What can you tell me as far as what you know from the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group and the New World Order.  So far I have connected 15 business model characteristics that are strikingly similar in comparing the business models of the BCS and the New World Order.

I am writing a piece for the Denver Broncos Fan Page MHR here on SB Nation on the History of the PAC 10 and then more importantly our beloved Trojans. Can anyone provide me with links to Information regarding both the History of the PAC 10 and the History of SC in football? Also if you are interested Check out the Mile High Report for information of football tactics and schemes titled MHR University. Thanks folks and GO Trojans!

Funny story  over on Wolf’s Blog

A recruit said Monday that UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel is alerting recruits to this USC walk-on tryout video and emphasizing the amount of profanity used as a negative characteristic.

Brennan Carroll Video

Sure Rick you have never dropped an F-bomb in practice. Negative characteristic? Maybe if you used a few more F-bombs and kicked a little ass your players wouldn’t have “gone over the wall” and blown a practice off.

Yes, this is negative recruiting and everyone does it, but couldn’t you have used something more emphatic? I mean come on, the F-word as a negative characteristic?

Riiiiight…

Bumped- Not really surprised but this cannot continue in the future-  Paragon

The NCAA Academic Progress Report was just released and USC men's basketball was called out for missing the mark. The team scored an 863, while the minimum score to avoid penalties was 925. The data collected represents the 4-year period from 2003 to 2007. Yes, the calculation is negatively impacted by any underclassmen who bolt for the NBA without finishing out the school year, but that can't be the only excuse. This is clearly an area of concern for Coach Floyd and Mike Garrett moving forward, since we lost 2 scholarships because of it. The bottom line is that the men's basketball team is now limited to awarding only 11 scholarships next year.

No other USC teams missed the mark, and most were way above it (kudos to women's golf and cross country for rocking perfect scores of 1000). The football team came in with a 948, which has us tied with Washington at 3rd in the Pac 10, following Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Here's a link to the story in USA Today (NCAA links included in that):

Link

UPDATE:

From All Things Trojan:

USC was informed of the punishment in the fall and given the option of taking the hit this past year or next year. They decided to take the hit sooner rather than later.

The lost scholarships were a result of Gabe Pruitt, Lodrick Stewart, and Nick Young not attending classes after the 2006-07 season.

USC officials are optimistic that things will improve next year because O.J. Mayo and Davon Jefferson did finish out their classes this semester.

Ahhhhh.......the gift that keeps on giving

 

Hey Conquest Chronicles,

Today is the big day. We've switched your community over to the new SB Nation sports blog platform. My name is Trei, and I'm here to help you get adjusted to the new home we've built for you. If you have questions or trouble with the new system, post a comment in this thread and myself or one of the team (lovitt, sixfoot6 or odacrem) will try to point you in the right direction.

Before we begin, I want to let you know we still consider this a beta platform, so don't be surprised if you find a few bugs or if everything isn't exactly right yet. We hope you'll take the time to report any problems you encounter at bugreport@sbnation.com. We'll be continuing to make changes and improving things.

Please take a few minutes to read about what's new below. But if you just can't wait to jump in, here are some quick things to check out:

1. Sign up for your SB Nation network account and claim your old blog accounts
2. Once you're logged in, press your  Z  key in any thread with new comments
3. Explore your dashboard and setup your profile
4. Read the guide to the new FanPost editor
5. Install the FanShot bookmarklet and post videos to Conquest Chronicles from YouTube or images from Flickr
6. Click the "Rec" button on posts and comments to help other people find the good stuff.
7. Customize display options on your Edit Settings page

What Has Changed

SB Nation Network Accounts - the Big Change

Readers across all of our blogs told us they wanted one account to use on every SB Nation blog. To make this work, we're requiring that everyone create a new SB Nation network account. In most cases you should be able to keep your old username, but a few of you may have to choose something new, since every other community in SB Nation will be going through this same transition. We tried to be as fair as possible in deciding who gets to keep which name, using a formula that takes into account length of membership and frequency of activity.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate on all of our blogs, but we don't want to encourage everyone to start visiting rival team blogs and initiating flame wars. To maintain friendly communities we ask that you explicitly join each blog in order to participate. It's a two-click process, but it does means accepting each blog's community guidelines. Just as you join each blog individually, you can be banned on each blog individually.

You can claim old accounts from multiple SB Nation blogs, and your new username will be retroactively attached to all your old comments and diaries. So now you'll be able to access all your writings from your single profile page... like magic.

To get started, click here to claim your old blog accounts and create a new SB Nation network account.

FanPosts (the Section Formerly Known as Diaries)

We changed their name. Why? Because we took this major upgrade as an opportunity to leave behind some vocabulary that never made much sense for a sports blog. SB Nation is the network of, by and for fans, and these are the blog posts we make. So we call them FanPosts. When you're at a bar telling someone to check out your online sports opinions, you don't have to suggest they read your diary.

FanPosts are displayed differently on the homepage - we include your avatar to give more credit for the time you spend writing great posts. The new post editor has a WYSIWYG view that provides easy formatting. It also auto-saves drafts so you don't have to worry about losing your work when you compose a post within the web browser. And you can now associate teams, players and games with your posts: these tools promote your FanPosts on our new team, player and game pages - across the entire network.

The new system does not work like the old diary editor. For example, in HTML mode the new editor doesn't auto-create a new paragraph from two line breaks. But it does offer a whole array of new features. Look for the blinking help button on the right side of the FanPost editor for quick tips, and take a look at our full guide to writing FanPosts on the new platform.

IMPORTANT - if you write your posts in Microsoft Word or some other off-line editor, you will get the most reliable behavior if you cut & paste your post into the HTML view of the FanPost editor. And if you do that, remember to wrap <p></p> tags around each paragraph so your text doesn't run together.

Visual Redesign

This one is probably the most obvious change of all. Like other major websites working to improve readability for their audience, we've adopted a fixed-width layout optimized for the 1024 x 768 resolution used by the majority of Conquest Chronicles and SB Nation network users. Use the switcher below the user menu if you prefer the wider layout designed for 1280 monitors. We've introduced a top navigation bar with quick links into old and new sections of the site. We also polished a few edges, made some things larger, others smaller and moved a few boxes here and there. More changes and adjustments to come.

Search

We've completely replaced the old search engine with a new one. We're excited to make it easier to find old posts and comments, but we've only taken our first pass on the tools we're offering. We're focused on making search even better than what you had before, so please know that we're aware search is missing key features and we're working on it.

What's New

Schedule, Scores, Stats and Roster

Conquest Chronicles now has all the basic information about the USC Trojans and hundreds of other teams. During games you'll see a regularly updated line score, and as the season progresses we'll track team stat totals and leaders. This is just our first step, so look for us to publish more detailed and archival stats in the future. The best part about all this sports data is that we've integrated it directly into the blog so. We now have special pages that aggregate all blog posts written about games, players and teams.

Recommending FanPosts

Some writing deserves more attention and more conversation. If you want to bump a FanPost up to the top and keep it there for awhile, just click the 'Rec' link under the body of the post. When a FanPost receives enough recommendations it will make the recommended list.

Auto-refreshing Comments

You no longer need to refresh the page to see new comments. If you're logged in, new comments will automatically appear on the page every few seconds. When you post a comment, the page will not refresh either. If you want to quickly cycle through all the new comments, you can press the C key on your keyboard. Unmark a new comment after you've read it with the X key. And use the Z key if you want to umark comments as you're cycling through them.

As you use these shortcuts to cycle through comments, press the R key to reply to the current comment. All these helpful keyboard shortcuts are listed at the top of each comments section for reference.

Recommending Comments

Now you can reward those folks who take the time to look up stats and make smart arguments in the comments. Next to each comment there is an 'actions' link that you can click to find the recommend and flag options.

Flagging Comments

To help the moderators on a site, we've built-in tools that let you flag comments that are spam, trolling or just plain inappropriate. Only moderators can see those flags.

FanShots

Many members of the community just want to post that one link, video, photo or quote, but don't need a full FanPost. We've got you covered: FanShots let you share YouTube videos, Flickr or PhotoBucket photos, quotes from articles, portions of chat transcripts, top 5 lists and simple links. If it's a video or image we'll put a thumbnail on the homepage when you post it.

For those of you who are experienced internet hunter-gatherers of USC Trojans material, install the bookmarklet onto the links bar of your browser and share FanShots with the community from wherever on the web you find that killer quote or photo.

Archives

It's much easier to find that post about a certain deadline trade or prospect retro feature. You can browse by year and month.

Avatars

Upload an image so folks can see your custom avatar on your profile, your FanPosts, and all your comments.

Network Profiles

Now that we have unified SB Nation network accounts, your profile will be your central hub for all of your activity on any blogs where you are a member.

Network bar

The top bar stays with you on all SB Nation blogs. It's a quick way to login and logout. When you're logged in, you'll see your avatar and screen name which links to your profile. The icon to the right leads to your Dashboard area where you can edit your settings, profile, account details and any FanPosts or FanShots you've published. As we add more blogs to the new SB Nation network, the My Blogs menu will be a handy way to navigate between the blogs you've joined.

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There are plenty more small changes and additions we've made, so please take a careful look around and explore this new system. We appreciate your patience and hope you'll help us improve the new platform for this and all the other SB Nation blogs.

And in case you missed it, you'll want to start by claiming your old blog accounts and creating a new SB Nation network account.

All Things Trojan is asking both USC and UCLA fans to sign a petition that lobby for both teams to wear home jerseys when we play each other.

What I haven't seen enough of is the tradition where both USC and UCLA wear their home uniforms when they play for the Victory Bell. Both used to host home games in the Coliseum, so naturally they would wear cardinal and powder blue when they faced off. Shortly after the Bruins moved to the Rose Bowl, the NCAA changed the rules and visiting teams were forced to wear white.

710 ESPN's Dave Dameshek recently got Pete Carroll and Rick Neuheisel on the record to support a return to the good ol' days. Unfortunately, there's more to it. The schools will need to ask the NCAA for a waiver, and you know how red tape can be. Instead of sticking cheerleaders outside of some administrators door, Dameshek (with help from Joyless Joey) is building support with a petition. I'm on board.

You can fill out the petition here.

There is nothing to buy and there is no special code...just go and sign it.

Lots of people say they don't care about it, but I do, and I'm glad we finally won it after building up a seemingly insurmountable lead early in the year.  Although the bruins kept chipping away at it, we held serve and, short of losing men's and women's track, women's rowing (we've never lost to them since the gauntlet was founded), AND playing them in men's baseball in the postseason (very low probability), we've got it back at USC.

Congrats to a great year for USC athletes and athletics!!!

Update [2008-5-3 14:34:46 by USCLink]:Women's rowing beats the bruins to clinch the gauntlet!

There was a segment on blogs and their place in sports media on Bob Costas' HBO show last night.  Old Media wasn't well represented, from the accounts I've read.  Anybody see this?  If you're interested in blogger accounts of it, Fire Joe Morgan has a post as does Dodger Thoughts.  Deadspin, too, I guess, but that shouldn't shock you....

Ouch...that's going to hurt.

Due to a poor Academic Performance Rate, the NCAA is ready to levy sanctions against the WSU football team, Jim Sterk and Paul Wulff said on Thursday.

The APR, which is a compilation of statistics on graduation rates for Division I teams, was created in 2005 as a way to punish athletic programs that fail to graduate approximately 50 percent of their players. In WSU's case, attrition during the Bill Doba era could potentially haunt the Cougars for the next few seasons.

"When I got the job we knew we were going to take a hit this upcoming year," Wulff said. "We have to go in with a mindset that this next year we're going to play with 79 instead of 85."

Good luck with that!

Well this is sad news.  While Pat Cowan plays for our arch-rival, he has my respect as a true warrior out there on the field.  The kid just absorbs punishment, and I'm sure if he could be out there, he would want to play through the pain and sacrifice his body for his team.

Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.  The task of rebuilding the bruins is going to take a couple seasons.  The offensive line is average at best, and whoever plays QB is bound to be taking a lot of punishment.  Ben Olson will probably return to the starting job after losing it to injury last season.  It remains to be seen if the injury prone Olson can make it through an entire year without getting hurt.

I'm very sorry that he won't be taking the field with the bruins this coming year.  Good luck and get well Pat Cowan.