Salute to NCAA college sports (2 of 3)....

The following student athletes are as follows: 1) Greg Pryor, men's basketball, Chattanooga; 2) Brittnay Howard, women's volleyball, Stanford; 3) Emmet Cordrey, men's lacrosse, Princeton; 4) McKenzie Wofford, women's gymnastics, Oklahoma; 5) Steve Racine, men's hockey, Michigan, and 6) Tina Roy, women's basketball, South Carolina.........

NCAA College Gymnastics Championship Tweets: This is Not a Contact Sport

Today marks the start of the NCAA Women's College Gymnastics Championships in Forth Wroth, Texas, and apparently we will get hate mail if we refer to the city as a suburb of Dallas.

As of this writing, three teams have advanced to tomorrow's Super Six with three more to join them tonight. SPOILER ALERT: Florida, Stanford and Utah advanced, while Michigan, UCLA and Georgia did not.

Here are tweets from before and after the early session meet. The gymnast pictured here is former Florida Gators gymnast Randy Stageberg, yes, we are aware that is not a typical woman's name!:

1) Nebraska Women's Gym: Today's the day. The NCAA Championships are about to get a taste of the hashtag-perfect storm.

2) Some guy named Casey: Waiting for the doors to open!!! Can't wait to cheer for StanfordWGym to the super six. hashtag-fearthetree.

3) Samantha Peszek: It's game time Bruins, lezzzgooo

4) UCLA Gymnastics: All gymnasts master difficult skills. Danuscia Francis likes to invent new ones.

5) Stanford Gymnastics: Stanford's final score of 197.175 is its third-highest at any NCAA Championship.

6) Florida Gators Gymnastics: Gator senior Rachel Spicer returns to Texas as NCAA Championships cap emotional senior year.

7) Oregon State Gymnastics: Congrats to UtahGymnastics and StanfordWGym making it to Super Six! hashtag-BackthePAC

8) Illionois Women's Gym: Giana O'Connor totals a 39.425 that finishes tied for 3rd in the semifinal session.

9) UCLAGymnastics: Samantha Peszek has qualified for event finals on beam and floor and is a 1st-team All-American on those events.

Very Cheap Things to Buy for the Holidays

On our other blog "The Daily Vampire" http://www.nocturnalguy38.blogspot.com we loved at some very expensive things one could get for the holidays, including a $600,000 ocean-front property in Nags Head, NC, in the Outer Banks.

Here we are looking at considerably more inexpensive things, and we will go from the cheapest item to the most expensive, which happens to be a velvet Jesus painting, like the one below.

1) 1984 Topps baseball card for Billy Sample, who is arguably the most-famous pro athlete from my hometown of Roanoke, Va: $0.84

2) Crayola crayons (8-pack) $0.99

3)"Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits" on vinyl (pictured center) $0.99

4) Candy Land Gingerbread Pawns game $4.50

5) Dashboard Buddhist monk (pictured top) $7.95

6) Velvet Jesus painting $32.99

SIDEBAR: Well, we were going to tell you some exciting women's college volleyball games to look for this Thursday and Friday, but we will go ahead and give you our final four selections: Oregon, Penn State, Stanford and USC. The finals will take place in Louisville, Ky. We are going to project third-ranked Stanford as the women's volleyball champ for this year.

http://www.neildiamond.com

http://www.thevelvetstore.com

http://www.gostanford.com

Sports Desk- Utah Edges Stanford in Women's Gymnastics

Senior Kyndal Robarts scored individual victories on the vault beam helping the Utes win its home meet over Pac-12 rival Stanford 196.3-196.1. Robarts had a career-high 9.975 on vault, a 9.875 on beam and a 9.80 on floor.

Robarts was also awarded with the Special Performance of the Week for the Pac-12 Conference; she became the third Utes awarded with that title this season.

Her teammates senior Cortni Beers and sophomore Corrie Lothrop are the other Utes gymnast who won the honor.

In a vastly different part of the country in Ithaca, NY, on the campus of Cornell University, the home team Big Red finished second to the Penn Quakers at the Ivy League classic over the weekend. The other two Ivy schools with women's gymnastics programs Brown and Yale, finished third and fourth respectively.

Tiffany Chen of Cornell won the Ivy title on vault. The Big red scored a 191.85, the team's highest score of the year.

For the Quakers, senior Laura DiPaolo helped pave the way to victory with a 9.725 on vault, and her freshman teammate Amber Woo scored a 9.725 on beam.

The scores for the visiting teams were: Penn (192.65), Brown (191.075) and Yale (190.725).

Quote of the Day/Week- John Elway

In honor of the upcoming Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and New York Giants, a rematch of a game which lead to the Giants stopping the Patriots from having the first perfect season since the Miami Dolphins accomplished the feat in the 1970s, we are quoting Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks.

Initially, John Elway and the Denver Broncos lost the Super Bowl in 1990 to Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers. But, Elway came up victorious over the Green Bay Packers and the Atlanta Falcons to win two Super Bowls. Elway retired after the Broncos' Super Bowl win over the Falcons.

Today, Elway is the executive vice president of the Broncos, and the current quarterback Tim Tebow has been a source of controversy as he has made a warrior-stance prayer which has become known as 'tebowing.' As Matt Taibbi pointed out in a column for "Rolling Stone," there was an ironic moment during the NFL season when a defensive player from another team sacked Tebow and made the same warrior-stance prayer, thus leading to term "tebowing Tebow."

Here is the quote from Elway, who played college football for Stanford:

"I don't know if I like being the sentimental favorite."

Bonus Road Trip (9 of 10)_ Should-Be Ivy League Schools

Today, we are asking blog readers how long this very long road trip between Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, and Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, would be.

We are saying these are Should-Be Ivy Leagues because they both have high academic standards, and here in the United States, major conference expansion because of major revenues sports is getting so absurd that soon San Diego State will be playing football in the Big East Conference against the likes of the University of Connecticut. For those of you Europe, this would be like Manchester United playing soccer games against teams from Dubai!

For our comparison, we are selecting two coffeeshops: Brew Nerds located in the heart of downtown Winston-Salem and California Cafe which is in Palo Alto.

Both schools lost their respective football bowl games as Wake Forest fell to Mississippi State in the Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 30 by a score of 23-17. And, the Stanford Cardinal, which had a very succesful season, lost to Oklahoma State 41-38 at the Fiesta Bowl near Phoenix, Arizona, on Jan. 2.

Wake Forest will be playing Virginia Tech at home in men's basketball within the hour. The team's next home game in the sport will be against North Carolina State on Jan. 14 at 1:00 p.m., local time.

As for Stanford, the school has a highly competitive women's gymnastics team which has its home opener on Jan. 22 against Washington.

So, just how far apart are these two schools?

Is the answer?:

A) 39 hours

B) 40 hours

C) 41 hours

D) 42 hours

Yes, we think it would be better to fly too!

SIDEBAR: The answer to yesterday's Bonus Road Trip was C) 6 hours, 45 minutes. We forgot to mention that we used Blake's Tavern in Providence, RI, and the Ithaca Ale House in Ithaca, NY, as our points of destination.

Also, former Brown gymnast Alicia Sacramone actually posed completely nude for the ESPN Magazine photo shoot in which she was standing unclothed on a balance beam, but only the rear portion of her body was visibile to the camera.

We also wanted to clarify that Brady Quinn, the Denver Broncos quarterback she was dating (editorial comment: lucky guy!) is still on the team roster. Though we don't follow pro football very closely, we gather that the team is now starting Tim Tebow instead. The Broncos have a playoff game this weekend, but we are more likely to know how the Russian soccer CSKA Moscow is fairing!

This and That- Apparently Smart People Have Intimacy Issues

I was thumbing through the current issue of "Psychology Today" this afternoon in a public library when this article caught my attention. The headline read something like: "Why Smart People Have Less Sex."

I did not take any notes from the article, but my assumption is that if a guy is reading Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in its entirety, well yes, it might well take precendent over other things.

The article did mention (I believe) that if men make more money, they are more likely to have more sex. I did not see any mention in the article of how income levels affected women's sex lives.

But, I found out tonight, that this matter has been discussed for a while. In a Sept. 2008, a blogger from Palo Alto, Calif., where Stanford- a smart school-is siad that a recent test had found that teenagers with low iqs in the 100 range were up to five times more likely to be sexually actually than teens with high iqs in the 1200-1300 range.

The blogger later mentioned that only 56 percent of undergrads at Priceton University were having sex while only 65 percent of MIT grads had found time to make love and presumably kick butt on their final exams.

All of this could be argued though I suppose, as everything these days seems to be argued irregardless if it is from the ACLU or the Tea Party (editorial comment: we prefer the ACLU). And, there is the case of Karen Owen, a Duke University student who made a Powerpoint presentation on her thesis in 2010 about her college romps which included having sex with 13 male Blue Devils athletes, most of whom were reportedly lacrosse players. Maybe, those guys weren't reading Tolstoy.

Perhaps, It's a Good Thing I'm Not a Sportscaster

When it comes to predicting the outcomes of collegiate sports, my forecasting would assuredly have me fired from ESPN. Not only, did I miss every single game of the men's Final Four in basketball, I did the same for the women's Final Four in basketball and the Frozen Four in men's hockey over the weekend.

I had also only picked two games right in the men's and women's college basketball quaterfinals respectively as I missed all four games in the men's final eight!

As for the Frozen Four, which took place in St. Paul, Minn., from Thursday to Saturday, local favorite, the Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs, won the team's first NCAA title in the sport.

Kyle Schmidt, a senior left winger, scored with 3:22 left in overtime to score the game-winning goal over the University of Michigan Wolverines. Max Tardy, a freshman who is actually from Duluth, Minn., and Travis Oleksuk, a junior from Canada, also scored for the 'dogs in their victory.

In the first two games of the Frozen Four, the Bulldogs beat Notre Dame 4-3 and Michigan stunned North Dakota, the favorite to win the championship, by shutting down the Fighting Sioux 2-0.

My predictions in women's college gymnastics, my favorite sport, has been equally futile as I projected the Stanford Cardinal to win their first NCAA title in that sport this year.

But, the Cardinal came in fourth place at regionals in Ann Arbor, Mich., as the host Michigan Wolverines qualifed for the finals this weekend in Cleveland along with second place Kent State.

Nevertheless, both Ashley Morgan, daughter of baseball great Joe Morgan, Shelley Alexander and Danielle Ikoma, the team captain, had outstanding years for the Cardinal. Ikoma was also cited by Pac-10 for her outstanding academic accomplishments along with five other Stanford gymnasts.

So, if I take a resume up to Bristol, Conn., where ESPN's main offices are, I have a feeling the elevator person won't let me past the second floor.

NOTE: The image above is from the original 1977 version of the film "The Bad News Bears" about a losing baseball team that eventually somehow gets its act together.

PS_ We forgot to mention that the University of Connecticut beat out Butler for the men's basketball title. Ironically, it was the school's women's team that was favored. But, the Lady Huskies fell to Notre Dame in the Final Four. Then, the Lady Figthing Irish met with Texas A & M since the Aggies had upset Stanford. The Aggies then pulled another upset as they beat the Fighting Irish to capture the women's basketball title. Of course, I saw none of this happening!