Oh, those wacky Daily Campers!
THE GOOD
Volleyball: Ponies split with Rice and Houston (last weekend), take on Tulsa.
Men's soccer: Ponies wax FIU in C-USA tournament, await rematch today with UAB, the only team that beat SMU this year. Should be front page, but that's OK - at least it's in there.
Women's soccer: Ponies won first round of their tournament, and will play Colorado College in the second round.
Football: Excellent by someone named Jordan Hofeditz about where the Ponies stand now, and what needs to happen for SMU to win the C-USA West, compete in the conference championship game, etc.
THE BAD
NASCAR: The Daily NASCAR Newsletter is at it again, with a story on the front page about how Kinky Friedman is sponsoring a car driven by an SMU alum. OK, a little latitude gets granted here because of the thin SMU connection, but a color picture on the front page of a parker car, instead of front-page coverage of men's soccer (No. 2 in the nation, seeking revenge), women's soccer (hoston coverence tournament) or football (trying to reach a bowl for the first time since the mid-80s? That's just wrong. Yes, there are nascar fans at SMU -- nobody disputes that. There also are Tiger Woods fans, and dammit, where's my story on him? There are golf fans at SMU, too, you know. This one can slide, because of the SMU alum angle and the fact that Kinky Friedman is rather relevant at the moment. But this is a small back-page blurb, at best.
THE UGLY
A SECOND NASCAR STORY: Seriously! TWO in one issue of a campus newspaper? Don't start with the "it's the only paper students read" rant. If they care about nascar, and admittedly there are some who do, every one of them knows how to turn on any of a zillion racing-related websites. That's not valid. This second story says that there are three races, or three series of races (or something) this weekend at Texas Motor Speedway, which is just off the edge of campus in a suburb of Seattle - or at least it's close to that far away. Best part: "For continuing coverage of the race weekend at Texas Motor Speedway, visit
www.smudailycampus.com. WHAT? Anyone who cares about the race - and again, there are a lot who inexplicably do - is either going to be at the race or parked in front of a TV with bags of pork rinds and still-collared-but-somehow-empty six-packs of Coors Light. If there is a high-tech racing fan out there with a wireless laptop, aren't there a few other racing sites that might be higher on the list. Those folks already know the racing tree in the Labonte family, and they might even care that the Aikman/Staubach car is going blue-and-silver. Who knows - they might even care!
It's clear the guy who writes this nascar stuff is a fan, and a huge one, and undoubtedly already has the RV with the laptop and the satellite dish out there at TMS. Great. He also might be into painting pet rocks and president of a Yanni fan club, but those stories have no more business being in a campus newspaper than this stuff does.
"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."
...
"Hit it."