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Yesterday Sam Bradford, the Oklahoma freshman quarterback, threw four touchdown passes against the in-state rival Oklahoma State Cowboys enroute to a decisive 49-17 victory. The victory gave the Sooners the outright division championship of the Big 12 South and bragging rights in the state for another year.

The four touchdown passes brought Bradford’s total to 32 for the season. And that, my friends, is an NCAA freshman record. Yes, I know it’s just a freshman record, and nowhere near the all-time records of 61 thrown by Brett Elliot at Linfield College or 58 by Colt Brennan at Hawaii, but the fact that a quarterback at Oklahoma holds any kind of passing record is rather amazing in itself.

Over the last nine seasons Coach Bob Stoops has certainly changed the look of the Oklahoma offense, and the quarterback’s passing skills are among the major factors. Compare that to the years when I was a student there, when Thomas Lott’s passing stats were often something like: 5 attempts, 3 completions, 62 yards, 1 touchdown, 0 interceptions. In fact, there were games when Barry Switzer’s Sooners attempted no passes the entire game! It’s true, you can look it up. That’s not a knock, that’s a praise. But times have changed.

I remember watching a replay of an Oklahoma game from the 1970s on ESPN Classic. The Sooners had a drive of about 70 yards, where they ran the same option play, either right or left, for 9 straight plays until they scored a touchdown. The Sooners didn’t pass because they didn’t have to.

In 1999, Bob Stoops’s first season as coach, Josh Heupel set the new standard for Oklahoma quarterbacks. That season he broke the Oklahoma all-time record with 33 touchdown passes. He threw 20 more touchdowns the next year in leading the Sooners to the 2000 National Championship. In 2003, Jason White threw 40 touchdown passes in his Heisman Trophy year, before finishing his career with an Oklahoma record of 79.

There are no guarantees in sports, and quarterbacks are probably more vulnerable than other players, but Sam Bradford’s future at Oklahoma sure looks bright.

Tags: News, Sports by BrokenClaw
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It was all over the Internet and television news the past few days. Bette Midler was in big trouble for cutting down over 200 trees on her property in Hawaii without the proper permit. The story was more newsworthy because Ms. Midler has been an advocate and spokesperson for environmental causes for many years now. The news about her arboreal faux pas broke earlier this week when the Board of Land and Natural Resources finally took official action, recommending a $6500 fine and a replanting program.

Most of the early news stories failed to report that the misdeed actually took place last fall. On October 17, 2006, conservation workers noticed the trees being cut down and reported it to the proper authorities. Ironically, it was only eight days after Ms. Midler made news in New York City with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and her New York Restoration Project, where she and Bloomberg planted the first ceremonial tree in the Million Trees initiative. In other words, while she was promising a million trees for NYC, she was already planning to cut trees on her Hawaiian property.

By all accounts, Ms. Midler was unaware that she needed a permit to clear the land. After her people were notified, Ms. Midler hired a botanists to survey the damage and identify the fallen trees. In retribution, earlier this year she also hired professionals from the National Tropical Botanical Garden to design a replanting program. Her lawyer said she was concerned with replacing some of the non-native trees with native Hawaiian species, and that she would not contest the fine.

The missing part of the story is that no one asked, or at least no one reported, who actually cut the trees down. I’m fairly certain that Bette wasn’t out there with a chain saw. Did she just hire some guys off the street? If she hired an actual landscaping or tree service, why didn’t they know about the permit? Why weren’t they named in the investigation? It sounds like they got off without a scratch. Hey, maybe they can use this incident to their advantage. They could use it as a slogan: “Permits? We don’ need no stinkin’ permits!”

Yes, I know that’s not how the line went in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but that’s the way that most people know it, and that’s the way they repeated it in Blazing Saddles.

Tags: Humor, News, Opinion by Smilodon
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We’ve all heard the discussions. Does the millennium end on December 31, 1999, or does it end on December 31, 2000? If the first year was Year 1, then the first decade ended at the end of Year 10, then the first century ended at the end of Year 100, then the first millennium ended at the end of Year 1000. Therefore, the second millennium must end at the end of Year 2000, not at the end of Year 1999.

This seeming contradiction arises from the fact that the Julian calendar started with Year 1 A.D. The year before that is designated Year 1 B.C. There was no Year 0, which complicates arithmetic calculations of time.

Incidentally, the abbreviations A.D. (Anno Domini) and B.C. (Before Christ) have been replaced in politically correct usage with CE and BCE. These new abbreviations originally referred to the term Christian Era, trying to dissociate their meaning from the actual person of Christ. Now the abbreviations refer to the Common Era, which dissociates their meaning from the entire European Christian tradition. Nonetheless, the years’ numbers are the same, and we all know how they were assigned.

The question remains: Will January 1, 2000, be the first day of the new millennium? The answer is an emphatic, Yes! By popular demand, the second millennium will last only 999 years. The new millennium will begin. Armed with the logic described above, academicians may proclaim that the millennium won’t end until after the year 2000. But the fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter. Popular culture has proclaimed a new millennium. You may ask what pop culture has to do with it. It has everything to do with it. The millennium is not an astronomical event; it’s an arbitrary cultural event, based on an arbitrary calendar. Only 400 years ago, the Julian calendar was corrected by the Gregorian calendar. Only in our recent past have the masses of people routinely been aware of what year it is, much less cared about what decade or what century. Only 250 years ago, the British Parliament officially moved the start of the year from Spring to the first of January. Those who were unaware of the change, or refused to change, continued to celebrate New Year’s Day on April 1. We know them as April Fools. Perhaps we’ll have a new batch of Millennium Fools on January 1, 2001.

Tags: News, Opinion by BrokenClaw
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