Arizona Fans firous with Direct TV.

http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/ariz/genrel/auto_pdf/2011-12/misc_non_event/directv-letter.pdf?hq_e=el&hq_m=313468&hq_l=13&hq_v=c50c165e68

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On the move:

Criminal assault and trespassing charges against two Arizona Wildcats football players won’t be pursued in court, and their suspension from the team will likely end quickly. The case against defensive back Jourdon Grandon has been dismissed, and the lawyer for offensive tackle Fabbians Ebbele told the Star Friday that he anticipates the same happening for his client soon. City prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss Ebbele’s charges on Wednesday. He is scheduled to appear in court again May 17. “The case should be done,” said Skip Donau, Ebbele’s lawyer. “I haven’t seen the signed order yet, but I anticipate it any day now.” Source: http://tucsoncitizen.com

John Button Salmon: Trashed Football field

John Button Salmon: Trashed Football field: Zona football field April 5, 2012 Photo coming soon....

Trashed Football field

Zona football field April 5, 2012
Photo coming soon....

Zona field destroyed?

http://www.pdc.arizona.edu/webcam/NorthEndZone.aspx
This morning the camera scanned the entire work area including the south end zone and the field. The field is almost destroyed by heavy equipment running over it.  It will be impossible to play a game on it this fall.
So, is there a secret plan to move a thousand workers in to put down artificial turf before kick-off ?????
Will Zona have to play home games some where else???????

Stoops Speaks Truth:
Stoops, now the defensive coordinator for his brother Bob at Oklahoma, said of the UA program during his time at Arizona: “We may have got it as good as it can get.”

“You have to be realistic with what your expectations are and you should have high expectations, I certainly did. But what you’re capable of and what the circumstances that are dealt to you, it’s hard to achieve those big goals of winning a championship there."

“There’s a reason they haven’t won a championship at Arizona and it’s not bad coaching or bad players. You can blame it on anything you want, football and championships are about commitments made university wide. It’s a commitment made to winning, not at all costs but there is a cost.

“When you don’t have a football facility and every Mountain West team has one and you don’t, that’s a problem. We were playing at a BCS level and I feel like I was fighting with a toothpick and they’ve got a bat.”

Well, don’t hate Stoops because he’s right about what has been a lack of university-wide commitment. The football facilities have been behind the times, inadequate when compared to UA’s peers.

That facilities gap is being at least partially erased with the current $72 million north end zone project. In addition to being practical, that construction sends a message: Arizona is committed to football.

For decades, it was hard to make that case, and Stoops is hardly alone in thinking so.“It’s wonderful that Arizona, after many years of lip service, is finally making a commitment to football excellence, because I don’t think they have done that,” former coach Dick Tomey (1987-2000) told TucsonCitizen.com in January.

“They have done it in little bits and pieces, but they are making a major commitment.”But Stoops is wrong to make it sound like a bigger commitment to football from the university was the only thing, or even the main thing, holding him back for winning bigger at Arizona. Tomey twice won 10 games in a season and produced many of the finest players in school history.

Stoops didn’t last long enough to benefit from the north end zone project, so we’ll never know how he would have fared with upgraded facilities. But the lack of those didn’t stop him from making a serious run at the 2009 Rose Bowl — a goal that might have been reached with a healthy Rob Gronkowski.

Gronk’s back injury is a good a reason as any as to why Arizona hasn’t won a championship.So, let’s not focus too much on facilities. If Arizona didn’t have a second-half collapse at Cal in 1993 or could cover UCLA’s Danny Farmer in 1998 or could have made one more play against Oregon in 2009, it would have some championships.

College football success is as much about the force of the head coach as anything else. Stoops rebuilt the Cats to a respectable level, but the fact that he didn’t deliver Arizona to “as good as it can get” is as much on him as the university’s previous commitment to football.
Source: http://tucsoncitizen.com/ above and below:

UA football coach Rich Rodriguez laments lack of intensity in first practice in pads
by Anthony Gimino on Mar. 22, 2012, under Arizona Republic News:

Rich Rodriguez wasn’t smiling much at Wednesday’s practice.
It’s a line that new Arizona Wildcats football coach Rich Rodriguez has used several times already. The process of starting something new, of changing schemes on both sides of the ball, of creating a new standard of excellence in offseason workouts is a discovery of “finding out the guys who really love football and the guys who just kind of like it.”

He said that before Wednesday’s practice, the third of the spring and the first in pads.He talked about being eager to begin to gauge how physical the players were, to see increased intensity.

More than a couple of hours later, it seemed as if his guys just kind of like football. Rodriguez was so unhappy with what he saw that he barred the players from their usual post-practice media availability and headed over himself to speak with reporters again.


“It wasn’t good,” he said of practice.“We’ve got some pretty good kids and some pretty good players, but I want all the guys, all the time, to have the same sense of urgency that the best guys do.

“There are different levels in the sense of urgency. I know our fan base has it. I believe our coaches have it, although we have to show it. We have to have a sense of urgency to have a championship culture. I didn’t feel that was there today.”

Early in spring practice is the right time to send a message, and Rodriguez will see if this one hits home when the Cats convene again on Friday for another practice in pads. He wants that one to go well enough that he is comfortable doing plenty of situational scrimmaging Saturday, when the team is hoping to show off for Phoenix-area fans at Glendale Community College beginning at noon.

“I’d like to be able to scrimmage and let the fans watch and have some fun,” he said. “If we don’t do well on Friday, then Saturday won’t be as entertaining as I’d like it to be.”

Arizona hadn’t practiced since March 7, taking a break for spring ball and to, hopefully, allow the players to digest some of the new information being throw their way. Rodriguez said before practice that he expected it could be “a little sluggish” and that the coaches would “try to yell them through that.”

Apparently, they didn’t yell loudly enough.Rodriguez wondered afterward if the coaches were putting in too much of the playbook, that maybe the players were over-thinking on the field. But he said before practice that he thought the coaches have been moving deliberately.

“We’ve really limited our installation and are keeping it really simple,” he said.“Maybe after this week we will be more than halfway through with what we want to put in on offense and defense. We might not go much further than that. … Our guys have so much to learn, so much to think about from a different scheme standpoint, that we’re just going to go slow with it.”

"... We’ll get it fixed. It starts with the coaching staff having things ready to have the type of practice I think a championship team has to have.”