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Colorado College drops the (foot)ball

Colorado College has a football program with a 127-year history, but like many schools across the country, it also has budget problems.

After the board of trustees forced the athletic department to cut spending by $8 million to $12 million, Colorado College said goodbye to tradition and announced it was dropping football along with softball and water polo, effective at the end of the spring season.

This greatly upset one notable Colorado College alumnus, Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films and a former running back at the school.

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“There isn’t one person on that board of trustees who ever stepped foot in a locker room,” Sabol told the Times’ Sam Farmer. “It was done without any warning to the alumni.”

Sabol said “a special circle in hell should be reserved for the members of the board of trustees who made this decision without notifying us.”

The situation sounds sort of like a reel of football follies, only without the humor.

Trivia time

How is it possible to be the official winning pitcher in a baseball game without throwing a pitch to a batter?

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Omission with a mission

One more thing about that full-page ad ESPN ran in Monday’s Times to promote its new West Coast “SportsCenter” show:

Reader Hans Hof of Westchester notes, “There was nothing tongue-in-cheek about their leaving the Kings off their list of ‘pretty good’ teams.”

Curse of the Lions

Basketball teams are now a combined 0-5 after dressing in the locker room of the Detroit Lions at Ford Field, the Associated Press reported.

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Connecticut became victim No. 5 with its 82-73 loss to Michigan State in a national semifinal on Saturday.

Michigan State is 0-2 after dressing in the room that has apparently been jinxed by the Lions. The Spartans have played several regular-season games at Ford Field.

The Spartans stayed out of the cursed locker room, but it didn’t help them. Nothing would have, short of bringing a few high-profile members of the Lakers out onto the court with them.

Trivia answer

The pitcher enters the game as a reliever with two out in the top of the ninth inning. His team is losing, so the pitcher he replaces cannot be the winning pitcher. The reliever picks off a baserunner before throwing a pitch to a batter. In the bottom of the ninth, his team scores enough runs to win the game, thus making the reliever the winning pitcher.(Question and answer provided by Sanderson Smith of Santa Barbara.)

And finally

Dan Daly of the Washington Times, on the birthplace of new Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler -- Santa Claus, Ind.: “Well, that explains his coolness in the pocket when the defense is Blitzen.”

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