Know Your Canon Fodder

UNC-Radford: From this Radford-NCAA-party, pick the "hey we're on TV!" bench guys and the "Dang- Carolina?"-starter:

so Radford's domain is runet.edu, huh? Well, if you look up RU.edu, you don't get rutgers or rice or regent or anywhere in russia. You get Rogers State, which is in Oklahoma. Rogers State also has RSU.edu locked up, which really seems greedy.
(radford also owns Radford.edu).

So Radford is in - wait for it! - Radford VA, which is, err, in Virginia, nearer mountains than a beach, to judge from the aeriel pics.


Morgan State-OU:

All you need to know about Morgan State.

The favorite with 5 to go to finish the summer as my favorite Alphabet clip.

Memphis-Cal State Northridge: I'm fairly certain CSUN ("C-sun", or alternately "Cal State-Northridge" or as Bill Simmons says with hilarious cluelessness, "C-S-Northridge") is the most famous bad school in America. CSUN is the state U that serves the San Fernando Valley, miles below the academic mastiffs of nearby LA and the state's UC campuses. It has long been the go-to punchline school for Los Angeles, which means that over the years that status has proliferated nationally thanks to jokes on TV and movies and just-often-enough peripheral appearances from its baseball and bball team.

The town of Northridge is a ridge-less valley city squeezed between the more-famous Reseda (Tom Petty), Granada Hills (better sports) and Chatsworth (you know why), and is distinctive in absolutely no way at all except for being the epicenter, and popular name, of the worst LA earthquake of the TV era.

Perhaps ironically, on the same day CSUN makes its Memphis curtain call (March 19), China Sunergy (CSUN-nasdaq) willl announce is full year 2008 earnings. Not sure what to expect on the call, but consider: CSUN Dec 28, 2007 - 17.07; last Friday: 1.65. So 2008 didn't have the pop for CSUN LLC it did for the CSUN Matadors.

Somebody should offer a parly of spreads of CSUN vs. Memphis against CSUN vs. FY08.

Binghamton-Duke: It either is or was SUNY-Binghamton, after beginning life as a branch of Syracuse after its founding by The Guy behind IBM. But henceforth, in deference to its upstate NY lineage, we'll call it "the Bing". The Bing may not have the basketball pedigree - or any pedigree - of Duke, but that that doesn't mean they won't give Duke all the entitled smugness they can handle. From the top of the Bing's About Page:

The best public university in the northeast. Period.

Oh my.

On the same terribly self-impressed page, the Bing reports this at-first-blush impressive stat -
Students in top 25% of their HS class: 84%

Let's break that down just a bit... what percent of any HS class goes to ANY 4-year school? Less than 50% right? 25-30 go to work, 20-25 go to JC or less? So about 50? So 3 out of every 20 Bing students were NOT in the top half of their college-bound peers?
Period.

However, if the Bing is not quite the Harvard-on-the-Susquehanna it likes to think it is, it's no CSUN. First of all, the campus has a really terrific housing/dorm naming system. Each block of dorms - "college" - has a theme, and the names of the buildings follow the theme. So for the College-in-the-Woods, your building is named after an Iriquios Tribe. In the Hienman College, your dorm is named for former NY Govs (no word on the Spitzer Quad). The buildings in Hillside college are all named after NY state parks, and those in Susquehanna college are all named after - get this - tributaries to the Susquehanna, which flows through campus.

I ain't gonna lie: that's all cool as hell.

Another way in which the Bing differs from CSUN: it's shaped like a brain.

from wiki:

A unique feature of the main campus is that it is shaped like a brain. The primary road on campus creates a closed loop to form the cerebrum and cerebellum, and the main entrance road creates the spinal cord which leads up to a traffic circle (representing the medulla). The main road is thus frequently referred to as The Brain.

and, well, here it is: