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Sports

The Sports Sermon

Christmas break is tough. I was forced to linger in bed well past noon and suffer the day away, trapped within the suffocating confines of an oversized couch. From that couch all I could possibly do was watch game after game of college football as I slipped in and out of sleep, rising from a prone position only to consume such awful foods as hot wings and chips.

Sports

Hoyas can’t cage the Cardinals

The women’s basketball team failed to grab a second Big East home win Tuesday night. The ladies got their first BE win on the road last Saturday against St. John’s, but coming home they fell 57-54 to 17th-ranked Louisville. This dropped the Hoyas’ record to 11-6, 1-3 BE, and upped Louisville to 17-1, 3-1 BE.

Sports

BS in BCS

I didn’t watch last week’s Fiesta Bowl in its entirety. I did, however, watch the last 15 minutes. That thrilling ending was enough to point to one conclusion: college football needs a playoff system. I had actually tuned in a bit earlier in the game, when Boise State had built up an 18-point lead. Assuming that things were wrapped up, I changed the channel. The next time I flipped back to check the score, Oklahoma had the lead 35-28 with only one minute and three seconds left in regulation. The luck of the underdog appeared to have run out, but a perfectly executed “hook and ladder” on fourth-and-18 extended the game into overtime. Something I love about college ball is the overtime scenario. Both teams get a crack at scoring, starting at the opposing 25 yard line. If the first team scores, the second team must match that score in order to continue the series, or beat the score in order to win the game. I like this scenario a lot better that the NFL rules. In professional football, the first team to score wins the game, placing an enormous amount of importance on something as small as a coin toss. Oklahoma played offense first, and scored immediately on an Adrian Peterson run. Boise State coach Chris Peterson appeared to have given up on a conventional victory, opting instead to empty out all the tricks in his playbook. Faced with another fourth down, Coach Peterson called a direct snap to the wide receiver, who rolled out to the right and completed a touchdown pass. The play he called, the “Statue of Liberty,” is almost never seen outside of playgrounds and videogames, but like everything else in the fairy tale game, it worked to perfection. Quarterback Zabransky acted as if he would pass with his right hand but instead handed Johnson the ball behind his back with his left. Ian Johnson,the running back who sauntered into the endzone for the win, proceeded to ask his girlfriend, Boise State’s head cheerleader, to marry him on national television. This game had everything, didn’t it? My understanding is that Disney is working on a screenplay as we speak. There was just one thing missing: a game against Florida to determine the best team in college football. I won’t repeat all of the arguments we’ve heard in favor of a playoff system over and over again. But the fact remains that BSU was the only Division One team to finish the season undefeated. And yet, in a recent AP Poll after the Sugar Bowl, they were ranked #5. Maybe BSU were the best team this season, and maybe they weren’t. But they deserved the chance to prove themselves one way or another. There won’t be any changes until Fox’s four-year $320 million TV deal ends with the 2010 bowls, and even then the most that is currently being discussed is a plus-one model which would create a four-team playoff. While an improvement, this simply isn’t going to be good enough, particularly with a field of teams this large. If fans want a full NFL-style playoff format, now is the time, before 2010, for them to make their voices heard. The 2007 Fiesta Bowl is all the evidence you need.

Leisure

Pan’s Labyrinth is a-maze-ing

For every child, the characters from fairy tales can creep from the pages of a book into the child’s bedroom and consciousness. No movie in recent memory conveys this message with as much skill and raw emotional power as Pan’s Labyrinth, opening in D.C. this Friday.

Leisure

The Poverty Chic Travel Guide: three days in New York

You’ve blown through your Christmas cash, your new job hasn’t started yet, and book buyback netted you a whopping $3.80.

Leisure

About town: your guide to January

Concerts Camera Obscura – Jan. 22 @ 9:30 Club Not to be confused with the California indie rock outfit of the same name, this Camera Obscura hail from the twee... Read more

Leisure

Love and narcissism

Self-destructive mania has never been on my list of laughing matter. At least, not until I read Patricia Marx’s fiction debut “Him Her Him Again The End of Him”, a refreshingly bold and humorous take on the repercussions of fatal attraction that stands out from the chick-lit canon.

Leisure

Restaurant Week

Ever dreamed of knowing the difference between a salad fork and an olive fork? Foodophiles take note the Washington Resaurant Week is back.

Sports

Hoya offense comes alive against JMU

The Verizon Center was half empty for Tuesday night’s game against the Dukes of James Madison. That’s the Dukes of James Madison, not to be confused with the Duke Blue Devils that defeated the Hoyas over the weekend.

Sports

Relax Hoyas

Now everyone can take a deep breath, right? It’s going to be ok, isn’t it?

News

Cafeteria worker pleads guilty to manslaughter

Judge rules against former Marriott employee in mother’s death

News

Neighbors pass resolution opposing keg ban

The Advisory Neighborhood Commission unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday night stating its opposition to the proposed on-campus keg ban.

News

Will 9:30 Club sing the blues?

The National Capital Revitalization Corporation is in the midst of negotiations with the owners of HOB Entertainment, Inc. to build a House of Blues Club in D.C.

News

Apostles for Peace and Unity back down

Highly publicized townhouse will downsize to six permanent residents

News

Free speech or bigotry? Panelists discuss cartoons

Although it never reached the point of physical violence, tension ran high in Copley Formal Lounge during a forum yesterday about the cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last year.

News

Goodbye, Tony

City on a Hill: a bi-weekly column on D.C. politics

Sports

Ladies to test win streak against UConn

Girls just want to have fun. After the Georgetown women’s basketball team smacked Navy 51-34 to extend its current win streak to seven games, who wouldn’t be having a good time?

Sports

Focus on the big men

Expectations for the men’s basketball team were so high entering the season that no one ever expected home losses to Old Dominion and Oregon, or a 5-3 record overall. Still, all you restless fans out there, have faith. Don’t jump off the bandwagon just yet. It has only just turned December and Big East basketball is a month away. Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert are too good and Coach Thompson has too much experience to let this slow start become a trend. The Hoyas will be fine. However, there are a few things that are troubling and need immediate attention. After falling out of the top 25 it is necessary to reevaluate what is working and what is not.

Sports

Sports Sermon

I sometimes take it for granted that everyone is a fan of basketball and that everyone understands the “Princeton Offense” concept. After going into what has seemed like a weekly tirade about our inability to run it effectively, however, I was answered with only blank stares. In all fairness, there aren’t many NCAA teams that run the offense, but it is a big part of current Georgetown basketball and is therefore important for fans to understand.

Features

Flerbis

Georgetown Voice Short Story Contest 2006 Winner

The oldest of Tessa Riley’s sons was fourteen when she started shaving her children’s necks. Every morning she lined her children up from oldest to youngest: Jacob, Jordan, Justin, and Jessica. They sat side by side in a row on wooden chairs that earlier in the morning had surrounded the breakfast table.

Tessa sat behind them in her rolling, leather desk chair and worked her way down the line, gliding across the tiled kitchen floor, quickly but carefully trimming the extra hair on the back of their necks.

Editorials

Giving professors a deadline

Course selection period can be a rough time for students as they attempt to strike a delicate balance between hard and easy classes. They try to put together the ideal schedule by avoiding 8:50 time slots and bypassing Fridays while still fulfilling requirements. But the situation is exacerbated by the fact that many of the courses listed online don’t include up-to-date syllabi or even a course description at all.

Editorials

And now, our feature presentation

Far too frequently, it is not the professor so much as the students who are acually teaching the material. You are forced to listen to the student who happens to be doing a “class presentation” that day.

Editorials

War, hugh, what is it good for?

Last week, campus religious groups united to memorialize the massive loss of life that has flowed from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They covered Copley lawn with red flags, each symbolizing 100 Iraq War casualties. The flags were so numerous that the lawn became practically unusable, and the statement was impossible to overlook. Such demonstrations are encouraging, but they do not occur frequently enough.

Voices

Georgetown can’t handle the truth

After half a semester of backyard noise, late night weekend parties and one living room rock concert, an anonymous neighbor complained about a radio station event at my house to the University as well as the police in the early hours of Sunday, Oct. 12. Two days later, my housemates and I trudged into the Office of Off Campus Student Life to meet with Chuck VanSant about the incident, and were summarily punished for our honesty.

Voices

Negating affirmative action

Last Monday night I felt like the white kid from a black school in a white state sitting in a room full of black students at a white university. Issues of race, usually lurking in the unspeakable shadows, were then front and center in a panel discussion that dealt with whether the historically ivory tower of academics would be able to keep embracing students of color through affirmative action in the future, a possibility that I, apparently alone in my stand, look at with dismay. I see a legitimate alternative: class-based affirmative action, unfairly discounted by backward-looking ideology at American universities.