Oral Roberts beats depleted No. 8 Xavier 64-42

Latest News - All the three players could do was sit and watch one of the worst moments in Xavier’s recent history.

Dominique Morrison scored 19 points Sunday, leading Oral Roberts to a 64-42 victory over previously unbeaten Xavier, which couldn’t do much with three of its starters sitting on the bench because of suspensions.

The eighth-ranked Musketeers (8-1) didn’t have point guard Tu Holloway, shooting guard Mark Lyons or freshman forward Dez Wells, who account for 40 percent of their points. The trio was suspended for a brawl eight days earlier against crosstown rival Cincinnati.

The players began paying the price on Sunday—their first loss of the season.

“We just weren’t ourselves today on both offense and defense,” coach Chris Mack said.

The depleted lineup couldn’t get in sync or keep up with the experienced Golden Eagles (8-4), who start three seniors and two juniors and knew they had a good opportunity with Xavier so short-handed.

“Full-strength it might have been a different game, but they weren’t here to play so we don’t know,” Morrison said. “We can’t control what happened last week. We could only control what happened on the court today.”

They were fully in control after the opening minutes.

Travis Taylor scored 11 points for Xavier, which lost for only the second time in the last 46 games at the Cintas Center. It was the Musketeers’ worst loss at Cintas, which opened for the 2000-01 season, and their worst home loss overall since an 80-49 defeat to La Salle on Jan. 23, 2000 at Cincinnati Gardens.

Xavier had the week off since its 76-53 win over Cincinnati on the Musketeers’ home court. The game was called with 9.4 seconds left when a brawl broke out. Each team suspended four players.

Holloway, one of the nation’s top point guards, got a one-game suspension for instigating the brawl with his trash talking. Lyons got two games and will also miss Xavier’s opening game against Long Beach State in the Diamond Head Classic in Hawaii on Thursday.

Wells got a four-game suspension, along with walk-on Landen Amos. They were all in street clothes on the bench for the game. Holloway was the last one out of the locker room, walking slowly across the court by himself in a yellow button-down shirt.

Mack went to midcourt and spoke for 55 seconds before the player introductions, wanting to address the fans directly.

“We were all embarrassed by our behavior last weekend,” he told the crowd of 9,678. “It’s extremely disappointing and in no way was a representation of what our university and our basketball program is all about.”

Junior guard Brad Redford and freshman point guard Dee Davis made their first career starts for the Musketeers, who were missing their top two scorers in Holloway (17.6 points) and Lyons (17.4). Davis had 10 points, Redford two.

Xavier center Kenny Frease played with a prominent cut and bruise below his left eye, caused by a punch from Cincinnati’s Yancy Gates during the brawl. Frease needed seven stitches. He finished with four points on 2 of 9 shooting.

“A lot of things broke down,” Frease said. “It wasn’t just one thing that they did better than us.”

Frease had Xavier’s first field goal, a bank shot that fueled a 5-1 opening spurt against Oral Roberts, which was coming off a 67-61 loss at Gonzaga on Thursday night. The Golden Eagles then patiently took advantage of the Musketeers’ inexperience on the court in every way.

“Well, it was a tough week for our program, even tougher today,” Mack said. “It’s disappointing. From tough times, tough people last, and we certainly have to get better and improve. Some of the reserves on our team didn’t play particularly well, and I didn’t coach particularly well.”

Damen Bell-Holter got open under the basket for two uncontested layups during a 12-0 run that put the Golden Eagles ahead to stay, 16-7. Xavier missed seven of its first 10 shots and couldn’t get into a flow offensively without its top two ball handlers.

The defense was a problem, too, with Golden Eagles getting wide open.

“As a team, we didn’t step up to the challenge of guarding every play like it was the last play we’d ever play,” Xavier forward Andre Walker said. “They didn’t do anything differently. Our defensive coverage would break down, one guy wasn’t sure what the other would do. Then we were just frazzled for the rest of the game.”

Warren Niles hit a 3-pointer and a pull-up jumper during a 10-point run that pushed it to 31-14. Xavier shot only 36 percent from the field and had 12 turnovers in the half, which ended with the Golden Eagles up 36-19—Xavier’s lowest-scoring first half in more than a year.

Xavier never got closer than 16 points in the second half, with the lead getting as high as 30 points.

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Dawkins out against Patriots with neck injury

Latest News - Broncos safety Brian Dawkins will miss the game Sunday against the New England Patriots with a neck injury.

Dawkins was hurt while making a tackle last weekend in a win over the Chicago Bears.

The Patriots are without receiver Deion Branch (groin), linebacker Brandon Spikes (knee), offensive tackle Sebastian Vollmer (back/foot), running back Shane Vereen (hamstring) and safety Patrick Chung (foot).

With Dawkins sidelined, the Broncos altered their secondary. Rookie Quinton Carter will slide over and play strong safety while fellow rookie Rahim Moore takes over at free safety.

Denver also was without special teams standout David Bruton (Achilles).

Cornerback Andre’ Goodman was cleared to play after sustaining a concussion last Sunday.

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Penn St. coach says he saw, reported molestation

Latest News - As soon as he walked into the Penn State locker room, Mike McQueary heard running water and rhythmic, slapping sounds of “skin on skin.” He looked in a mirror and saw a naked Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach, holding a young boy by the waist from behind, up against the wall in the campus shower.

“I just saw Coach Sandusky in the showers with a boy and what I saw was wrong and sexual,” McQueary recalled telling his father that night in 2002. He repeated it the next morning to coach Joe Paterno, who slumped deep into his chair at his kitchen table.

“He said, `I’m sorry you had to see that,”’ McQueary said.

McQueary’s testimony Friday at a preliminary hearing for two Penn State officials accused of covering up the story was the most detailed, public account yet of the child sex abuse allegations that have upended the university’s football program and the entire central Pennsylvania campus. Paterno and the university president have lost their jobs, and officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are accused of lying to a grand jury about what McQueary told them.

A Pennsylvania judge on Friday held Curley, the university’s athletic director, and Schultz, a retired senior vice president, for trial after the daylong hearing.

Curley said that McQueary never relayed the seriousness of what he saw, and said he was only told that Sandusky was “horsing around” with a boy but that his conduct wasn’t sexual.

He said he told the university president about the episode and the top official at a children’s charity that Sandusky founded, but never told university police. “I didn’t see any reason because I didn’t think at the time it was a crime,” he told the grand jury, according to testimony read into the record on Friday.

Curley, Schultz and Paterno have been criticized for never telling police about the 2002 charges. Prosecutors say Sandusky continued to abuse boys for six more years. Sandusky has denied having inappropriate sexual contact with boys.

In about two hours on the witness stand, McQueary said again and again that what he saw was a sexual act, although he stopped short of saying he was sure that Sandusky, now 67, had raped the boy.

“I believe Jerry was sexually molesting him and having some type of sexual intercourse with him,” McQueary said on Friday. He said later he “can’t say 100 percent” that Sandusky and the boy were having intercourse because he was seeing Sandusky from behind.

He said after talking to his father, he went over to Paterno’s home the next morning and said that what he had seen “was way over the lines, it was extremely sexual in nature.” He said he would not have used words like sodomy or intercourse with Paterno; he did not get into that much detail out of respect for the coach, he said.

Paterno told the grand jury that McQueary said he saw Sandusky doing something of a “sexual nature” with the youngster but that he didn’t press for details.

“I didn’t push Mike … because he was very upset,” Paterno said. “I knew Mike was upset, and I knew some kind of inappropriate action was being taken by Jerry Sandusky with a youngster.”

Paterno told McQueary he would talk to others about what he’d reported.

McQueary said he met nine or 10 days later with Curley and Schultz and told them he’d seen Sandusky and a boy, both naked, in the shower after hearing skin-on-skin slapping sounds.

“I would have described that it was extremely sexual and I thought that some kind of intercourse was going on,” said McQueary.

McQueary said he was left with the impression both men took his report seriously. When asked why he didn’t go to police, he referenced Schultz’s position as a vice president at the university who had overseen the campus police

“I thought I was talking to the head of the police, to be frank with you,” he said. “In my mind it was like speaking to a (district attorney). It was someone who police reported to and would know what to do with it.”

The square-jawed, red-haired assistant coach spoke in a steady voice in his first public account of the alleged abuse, sometimes turning his seat and leaning toward defense lawyers to answer questions. His voice rose a few times and he blushed once when describing the sexual encounter in the shower.

Defense lawyers for Curley and Schultz argued that a perjury charge should not be based solely on a person’s testimony under oath contradicting someone else’s testimony. The defense said uncorroborated testimony from McQueary is not enough and sought to pick apart the ways he described the shower scene differently to different people.

The defense noted that McQueary admitted changing his description of the shower encounter when speaking with Paterno—enough so that the coach didn’t believe a crime had occurred.

McQueary said he had stopped by a campus football locker room to drop off a pair of sneakers in the spring of 2002 when he saw Sandusky with the boy, who he estimated was 10 or 12 years old.

McQueary, 37, said he has never described what he saw as anal rape or anal intercourse and couldn’t see Sandusky’s genitals, but that “it was very clear that it looked like there was intercourse going on.”

In its report last month, the grand jury summarized McQueary’s testimony as saying he “saw a naked boy … with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.”

McQueary said he peeked into the shower three times—the first via a mirror, the other two times directly. The last time he looked in, Sandusky and the boy had separated, he said. He said he didn’t say anything, but “I know they saw me. They looked directly in my eye, both of them.”

McQueary said the entire encounter—from when he first entered the locker room to when he retreated to his office—lasted about 45 seconds.

Curley told the grand jury that he couldn’t recall his specific conversation with McQueary, but McQueary never reported seeing anal intercourse or other sexual conduct. He said he spoke to Sandusky about it, who first denied having been in the shower with a boy, but later changed his story.

Schultz said he remembered McQueary and Paterno describing what the younger coach saw only in a very general way.

“I had the impression it was inappropriate,” Schultz told the grand jury. “I had the feeling it was some kind of wrestling activity and maybe Jerry might have grabbed a young boy’s genitals.”

Under cross-examination, McQueary said he considered what he saw a crime but didn’t call police because “it was delicate in nature.”

“I tried to use my best judgment,” he said. “I was sure the act was over.” He said he never tried to find the boy.

Paterno, Schultz and Curley didn’t testify, but District Judge William C. Wenner read their grand jury testimony from January at the Dauphin County hearing.

Curley’s attorney, Caroline Roberto, said prosecutors “will never be able to reach their burden of proof at a trial.”

Schultz’s attorney, Tom Farrell, predicted his client would be acquitted.

He also took a shot at Paterno, saying, “I’m an Italian from Brooklyn, and he may not have called the police but he may have done what I would have done, which is get the boys in the car with a few baseball bats and crowbars and take it to the fellow.”

Sandusky says he is innocent of 52 criminal charges stemming from what authorities say were sexual assaults over 12 years on 10 boys in his home, on Penn State property and elsewhere.

Curley, 57, was placed on leave by the university after his arrest. Schultz, 62, returned to retirement after spending about four decades at the school, most recently as senior vice president for business and finance, and treasurer.

Posted on 11:44 PM / 0 comments / Read More

Pujols, Angels reach $254 million, 10-year deal

Latest News - Albert Pujols could have been a wealthy Cardinal for life, planning for the day his statue would be erected outside Busch Stadium next to those of Stan Musial, Bob Gibson and the other St. Louis greats.

Instead, exactly six weeks after leading the Cardinals to a second title in one of the most thrilling World Series ever, he decided to accept the second-highest contract in baseball history for a new future in southern California with the Los Angeles Angels.

The three-time NL MVP agreed Thursday to a $254 million, 10-year contract with the Angels, leaving behind a heartbroken fan base by jilting one of the sport’s traditional teams for an expansion club with only one championship in its half-century.

Many top stars have changed teams in their careers, from Babe Ruth to Willie Mays to Barry Bonds. But this is perhaps the best player in the game over the past decade, exiting shortly after one of the great postseason power shows.

A big and burly offensive force with a shaved head, the nine-time All-Star has a room full of honors, winning the 2001 NL Rookie of the Year award, NL MVPs in 2005, 2008 and 2009, a batting title in 2003 and a pair of Gold Gloves at first base. Who would have predicted that when the Cardinals selected him in the 13th round of the 1999 amateur draft with the 402nd overall selection?

And now, he’s going West.

As his deal fell into place on the final day of the winter meetings, the Angels struck another big agreement, a $77.5 million, five-year contract with left-hander C.J. Wilson, the ace whose Texas Rangers lost to the Cardinals in the seven-game World Series.

“This is obviously the moment where we have thrown our hat in the ring,” new Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto said.

Had he stayed in St. Louis before packed, adoring crowds, Pujols would’ve established a Cal Ripken-like legacy of loyalty, a rare modern star who remained with a franchise from first at-bat to final swing.

Instead, some of his former fans will see him as a sellout.

Pujols rejected a multiyear extension last offseason that was said to include a small percentage of the franchise and cut off negotiations a day before he arrived at spring training. St. Louis also offered the slugger a 10-year deal that chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. said was in excess of $200 million.

“I would like our fans to know that we tried our best to make Albert a lifetime Cardinal,” he said in a statement, adding later in a telephone interview: “They were substantially higher than our bid.”

In St. Louis, Pujols has accomplished so much that he would have been beloved no matter his future performance. But in Anaheim, he will have to prove himself anew.

“I think his body’s going to start breaking down and he’s not going to be good for 10 years,” said Katie Coyle, fitness coordinator at the Webster-Kirkwood YMCA in Missouri, a die-hard fan who wore team colors to work during the playoffs. “I think he’s going to regret leaving here. If he’d have stayed here and signed a long-term deal with the Cardinals, they’d have had compassion for him because they’ve seen him at his best.”

Pujols’ contract, which like Wilson’s is subject to a physical, is only the third to break the $200 million barrier, following Alex Rodriguez’s $252 million, 10-year deal with Texas before the 2001 season and A-Rod’s $275 million, 10-year agreement with the Yankees before the 2008 season.

“This is a monumental day for Angel fans and I could not be more excited,” said owner Arte Moreno, who bought the team for $184 million from The Walt Disney Co. in 2003, a year after its only title.

Despite a top-four payroll this year, the Angels languished to a second-place finish behind Texas in the AL West. They spent $331.5 million on just two players, capping an unusual winter meetings in which the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox watched while the Angels and Miami Marlins spent as if they were the sport’s financial elite.

Moving into a new ballpark next season, the Marlins failed to reel in Pujols but acquired All-Star closer Heath Bell, All-Star shortstop Jose Reyes and left-hander Mark Buehrle for $191 million, meaning the two clubs committed $522.5 million to just five free agents.

“I think baseball needs to have a steroid-testing policy for owners,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economics professor at Smith College.

At the very same hotel 11 years earlier, teams spent $738.95 million on 24 free agents and none of the three big deals worked out as planned. Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez ($160 million over eight years with Boston) and Mike Hampton ($121 million over eight years with Colorado) all were traded during their contracts.

Pujols became the first player to hit 30 home runs in his first 11 seasons and the second after Al Simmons (1924-34) to reach 100 RBIs in his first 10. He has a .338 average with 445 home runs and 1,329 RBIs to become a franchise icon second only to Musial, and is fourth in career slugging percentage at .617, trailing only Hall of Famers Ruth (.690), Ted Williams (.634) and Lou Gehrig (.632).

But Pujols’ numbers in nearly every major offensive category are on a three-year decline. He had his poorest season in 2011 with a .299 average, 37 homers and 99 RBIs. He batted just .240 in the Series but had a night for the ages in Game 3, joining Ruth and Reggie Jackson as only the third player to hit three home runs in a Series game.

“We understand that players will go through peaks and valleys of sort,” Dipoto said. “Albert has spent many years operating at peak, and if we want to call a decline going from superhuman to just great, I don’t think we’ve seen the last great days of Albert Pujols, obviously, or we wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

Some have speculated he is older than the listed 31 and he could be a full-time designated hitter within a few years. “Albert Pujols’ age to me is not a concern,” Dipoto said. “I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you where he is, but I can tell you he hits like he’s 27.”

The Angels made the move as the financially troubled Los Angeles Dodgers are in the process of being sold by Frank McCourt in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, a deal that could give the region’s NL team a new, wealthy owner. The Dodgers could aggressively bid for talent a year from now, giving them a boost in the regional competition for fans’ attention.

“Winning breeds interest, and we are setting ourselves up to start next season with an opportunity to get good,” Dipoto said.

Pujols agreed in 2004 to a $100 million, seven-year contract, a deal that— with a 2011 option and bonuses—wound up paying him $112.55 million over eight years.

Cardinals fans already lamenting the retirement of manager Tony La Russa won’t get to see Pujols up close for a while—his old and new teams don’t meet in interleague play next season.

“He left a pretty good impact over there. I don’t think fans will soon forget what his contributions were,” said former Cardinals manager and star Joe Torre, now an executive with Major League Baseball. “I still think the St. Louis fans are going to be more appreciative than angry.”

Pujols’ agent, Dan Lozano, split off last year from the Beverly Hills Sports Council to form his own agency, and Pujols’ negotiations seemed like an attempt to surpass A-Rod’s landmark first big deal.

“This is a footprint contract, because it follows the footprint laid by other great players,” said agent Scott Boras, who negotiated Rodriguez’s agreements. “Putting a hitter like Albert Pujols in a big market, where he can be a DH, I think it’s a win-win for everybody.”

Other teams were somewhat surprised by his decision, but not shocked in a sport that has often seen stars shift for larger salaries. Reaction depended on the league.

“For 2012, two wilds cards and no Albert Pujols,” New York Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said. “I’m happy.”

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