rcade

It's hard to be a huge Sun Belt fan when the games aren't on TV. It's a brilliant idea for the Sun Belt to approach Netflix. Imagine having a Sun Belt Network on a reliable streaming provider like Netflix. The schools could put their own content on it to supplement what the network could provide.

I think in a free country, any drug that's no more harmful than alcohol or cigarettes should be legal. You would bring back Prohibition if you could. I think Prohibition was one of the biggest mistakes the country ever made. Why should millions of people who consume alcohol responsibly have to lose out because of the small minority who can't? The same would be true of marijuana. As for whether marijuana is "ingrained" in our society, 42 percent of Americans have tried it at least once, according to a 2008 Time Magazine article.

So we should all just shut up and let the cops and prosecutors keep self-justifying their work prosecuting a drug significantly less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes? If Emmitt or somebody else who deals directly with potheads wants to share tales of how using it ruins lives, be my guest. There are countless stories like that about drugs like meth. It's a scourge here in Florida. I know a bunch of people who've hurt themselves with alcohol. I know some who've hurt themselves with cigarettes. I don't know a single person who hurt himself with pot.

The U.S. prison population has quadrupled since 1980 because of mandatory sentencing laws, many of which came about because of the war on drugs. There are around 33,000 state inmates and 10,000 federal inmates in the U.S. imprisoned for marijuana-related offenses. It costs taxpayers $1 billion a year to jail them. Add the costs required to catch, prosecute and convict them, and the cost of probation officers, and you're looking at many billions more.

No, it's just my taxes.

Of course it affects you. THAT IS THE POINT. I can't believe there are so many UNT graduates who need remedial tips on pot. I thought this was a hippie school.

There are plenty of other reasons people smoke marijuana. It's even being prescribed as a medicine. Chemotherapy patients do it to reduce nausea, for one thing.

So you're in favor of making alcohol illegal too? Sporting events put a lot of drunks back on the road after games. Should they stop selling beer at Cowboys games? I think I'll pass.

Seems like a colossal waste of court and probation system resources to me. Since you're the expert, how about comparing what you see weed doing to people versus what meth is doing to people?

Are you comparing somebody selling $40 of pot to Pablo Escobar flying hundreds of kilos of coke across the Rio Grande? My granddad drove a carload of illegal hooch from Iowa to Texas during Prohibition. My uncle George slept on the boxes in his baby carrier. Oh, the shame!

My point is that $200 of weed (you said $40 earlier) shouldn't be a felony. I'd rather see cops spend their time on real criminals. I don't need to be a cop to know how stupid the laws are regarding pot. I'm not a smoker, either. I just can't believe we waste so much time on a drug significantly more harmless than alcohol that has genuine medical use. As for the idea legalizing pot would be political suicide, 50 percent of the public believe marijuana should be legalized, according to an October Gallup poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150149/record-high-americans-favor-legalizing-marijuana.aspx That's up 25% since 1996.

Emmitt just said delivering $40 of weed is a felony. If that doesn't show you how utterly ridiculous and draconian the pot laws are in Texas, I can't make the point any clearer.

Responding to this point, rather than the TCU controversy as a whole ... Speeding is illegal too. Everyone who does it is perfectly aware they are doing it. Speeding can kill people. Should an athlete caught speeding be kicked off the team? I think the prosecution of pot smokers is a crime. How many violent criminals get out early because of prisons overcrowded by non-violent drug offenders?

To those who've been debating whether the Sun Belt has become a better conference than the WAC, Karl Benson has cast his vote.

Get well soon, Coach.

My perception of SMU is that they've been fighting to keep us out of their conference every time the possibility was raised the last 40 years, because they're afraid it would eventually make us a better football school than them. They're happy to have this enormous public university in DFW stuck in mediocre conferences. SMU has also refused to schedule us regularly, which would pack our stadium and be our biggest rivalry game of the year. When I was a student in the late '80s, SMU came to Denton and the game was epic. A fight broke out between the two teams and the coaches at halftime.

True, but that's the level of coach a lot of Penn Staters thought they could get to succeed Paterno. They've been yelling at their trustees at public meetings over the O'Brien hire.

McQueary's a whistleblower, which makes it more legally difficult to fire him. But he told players he was out as a coach there.

If Penn State had hired Bradley, it risked the possibility of finding out later that he knew something about Sandusky. The only way to completely turn the page on the sex scandal was to get an outsider and dump the coaching staff. The only two coaches who weren't let go were the ones most engaged in recruiting. I'll be surprised if they're still around in a year.

Yep. I would've been shocked if a single top recruit stuck with Penn State. The PSU message boards really wanted Urban Meyer to succeed Paterno. It has to be exceptionally galling that he poached their four top-250 players for Ohio State.

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/colleges/penn_state/138454604.html As colleges secure players on National Signing Day, Penn State's recruiting class for 2012 fell apart after the child sex abuse scandal and the slow hire of new coach Bill O'Brien to succeed the late Joe Paterno. Seven players cancelled their commitments to the school after the scandal, including four ranked in the top 250 by Rivals. All four signed with Ohio State. The best recruit going to Penn State is probably Eugene Lewis of Plymouth, Pa., a quarterback projected to play wide receiver. "I'm excited for him to be my coach," Lewis said of O'Brien. "He's definitely a guy I want to play for." Penn State didn't get a single big-impact recruit from the state of Pennsylvania, reports PennLive: "[A]ll of the big names PSU once had its mitts on are gone."

This is good for the Belt, but Cristobal is taking a heck of a risk by not jumping to a BCS school when he had the chance. FIU could take a nosedive and his coaching stock will drop.

Yep. McQueary, Curley and Schultz all could have done the right thing and saved Paterno's reputation. Instead, he had to save it himself by standing up and doing the right thing, and he failed.

Horrifying, isn't it? For decades Joe Paterno and Penn State were held up as the most moral college football program in the country. So much for that idea.

Weak. Let's ask the kids Sandusky molested in 2002 and later about Paterno's great character and kindness.