What the heck, let's do one of these. I guess I'm all fired up after watching Gus dunk on a guy last night and seeing the Bulls pass the ball around a zone and get a bunch of open shots. All that competence got me tingly! Let's have some links!
1. You've probably seen the newly-designed GoUSFBulls.com. It looks really sharp on the outside, but like a lot of things in Athletics, it doesn't stand up as well when you do some digging. You notice that they didn't take the opportunity to update a lot of the information, and especially the stat archives, for sports other than football. I'm a bit biased because maintaining Web content is a big part of my day job, but eventually other people will notice, too. It's easy to outsource the design of your site to a third party (and schools often use the same templates for their sites). They all look good, but you still need your own people to keep the site up to date and make sure Seth Greenberg's name is spelled right. Of course, that takes money to pay those people, and we know how nickels are treated like manhole covers in that office.
2. I can't tell when the article was posted, so I don't know if Ken got to this already, but the 2012 baseball schedule is out. Incredibly, the Bulls play 27 of their first 28 games in the area, only leaving Tampa Bay to play to UCF on February 28. After an exhibition with the New York Yankees on March 2, USF has a nice 20-game homestand, which also includes the first six games of Big East play. I'm not sure the team will be a lot better than last year, but their schedule appears much more manageable.
3. We haven't brought up the Sun Dome, which is most definitely under renovation now. The official site has a new photo gallery of the permanent seating being installed on the old Level 2. No word on whether they've found the chair that Federico Peruzzo couldn't guard. Sorry, that was a cheap shot.
4. Yesterday we also found out that the women's basketball team is going to play the rest of the season in the Upper Gym, which just feels so chintzy. Sure, they'll probably draw better in there because fans are used to watching games on campus, and they can create an atmosphere in there. But compared to the men getting to play in the St. Pete Times Forum, this still seems so cheap and bush league. They're going to be practicing in a better facility than they're playing in.
5. This is going back a little bit, but just a quick thought about the new "Tampa Bay" tagline at the end of the University's logos. I don't think everyone here agrees with me, but I don't see the big problem here. It's not in the actual name of the school, and we've seen how many people in sports media, even some who should know better, get USF confused with other schools. Every little bit helps. And if you haven't noticed, USF's been tagging themselves as being in Tampa Bay in the institutional commercials you see during football and basketball games for several years now. (The new commercial... well, that's another post for another time.)