Reliabull

Congratulations indeed. You young'uns did miss something in not seeing the Heintz/Gload era Bulls. -- Heintz was and is still clearly the best team leader USF ever had. His nickname was Sarge and he earned it. -- When injuries depleted the catcher ranks, Heintz volunteered to play there. He started as a SS, played some OF and wound up at 3B -- anywhere EC needed him. -- Set an NCAA record for sac flies in a season. -- Hit 3 HRs in a regional game against NC State. -- Won an NCAA postgraduate scholarship for academics. Just a great guy and not heavily recruited -- the kind of guy some on this board would sneer at because the big boys didn't want him. In fact, I met the retired coach at U of Penn in the stands this fall during a scrimmage. He said he thought he'd recruited Heintz until the last minute (his brother Bob, the PGA golfer, played golf at Yale).

Not necessarily in the doghouse, but I think he's been playing hurt and in a slump as well. Karns has recovered pretty much from an early injury.

BIG EAST Overall W L T Pct. W L T JoeB: Here are the rest of the games... West Virginia 3 0 0 1.000 13 5 0 Rutgers 3 0 0 1.000 12 10 0 Connecticut 2 1 0 .667 8 10 0 USF 4 2 0 .667 18 8 0 Louisville 2 1 0 .667 16 8 0 Pittsburgh 3 3 0 .500 9 11 0 Villanova 1 2 0 .500 9 8 0 Cincinnati 1 2 0 .500 12 12 0 Notre Dame 1 2 0 .333 9 11 0 St. John's 1 2 0 .333 8 10 0 Georgetown 0 3 0 .000 9 16 0 Seton Hall 0 3 0 .000 5 12 0

West Virginia 2-0 Rutgers 2-0 UConn 2-0 Cinci 1-0 USF 3-2 Louisville 1-1 Notre Dame 1-1 Villanova 1-1 Pitt 1-3 Seton Hall 0-2 Georgetown 0-2 St. John's 0-2

Not so long ago, you did NOT want to travel to the Pit. Not only was the gym sold out, but the Lobos fans were/are extremely vociferous. It was a tough place to play and not many teams went in there and came out with a victory. UNM basketball has, until recently, been very good and occasionally excellent. For many years, UNM, UTEP (with Don Haskins at the helm),BYU and Utah made the WAC a tough conference.

Highlight of the night, besides Quevedo's great effort, goes to Yuri Higgins, who (a) tackled Rocky when he led a small child in a race to home plate, and ( grabbed a mike and came into the stands to lead the crowd in YMCA between innings... That's something never seen at Red McEwen before...

That's odd -- I'm looking at last year's schedule and all of those dates are included. And, in fact, I'm very sure those were included on the schedules going back to '90s.

Saturday games are at 6 p.m. now.

He pulled his name because when the time comes for him to move up, Grant's going to a much higher profile program. We've got plenty of other possibilities out there.

As a former resident of Texas who lived in both places, let me assure you that you will want to spend much more of your time in Austin than in Waco. There's plenty of great stuff in Austin besides college sports -- I can't say the same for Waco.

Oral Roberts University has a player with probably the single greatest name in the entire history of NCAA Basketball... Kenn Tutt (he was born in Arizona...lived in a condo made of stone-o)

Central Michigan wins 6-2 on a 2-hitter. USF committed 6 errors and looked even worse than that. It looked like we were suffering from a UF hangover and Central Michigan took advantage. Daniel Thomas pitched OK, but had to burn a lot of pitches to get out of lengthy innings. 2,300 of those 2,426 fans forgot to show up Friday night.

Typically, artificial noisemakers are not allowed in NCAA events. But don't tell that to the fans at Mississippi State.

It's difficult to hear other sections of fans at Red McEwen and I've sat/stood in all of them. If you're down a baseline, you can't hear the bleachers very much. If you're in the bleachers, you can't hear the USF dugout unless you go down very close to the field by the dugout. So I suspect it was really wasn't as quiet overall as you might think. And, Collin, I loved Lollygaggers. I could stand Lollygaggers every game. And, come to think of it, you could add Candlesticks to the mix for mound conferences as well.

Thoughts from the game: Great crowd and a great game with an ending that wasn't what we wanted. JoeB, I thought the pitch to LaPorta was a good one, but like the great player he is, he went down and got it. To me, the play that sent us off-kilter was the walk and so-called wild pitch. Everyone, including Prado, thought the umpire had signaled a balk and that would have nullified the pitch. It looked screwy and I think the umpire did the equivalent of swallowing his whistle. I've seen coaches that want their kids to be vocal like Prado and I've seen others who wanted less rah-rah and more focus on the game like Cardieri (though his later teams were more vocal than they were in the '90s). Neither system is wrong. But when things go south, a change always seems to help. Someone please let the support staff know that if you get 2,400 for a game, you need more portapotties.