Not guilty, y'all got to feel--wait, check that, that's definitely a guilty plea: Defensive lineman and overall heroman Adrian Clayborn's day in court was set to come this March 1, and it appears that he doesn't want to go through all the legalin' and the trialin'; as the P-C reports, he has apparently agreed to a guilty plea:

Clayborn, a key member of the Hawkeye’s 11-2 season, was arrested in March 2009 and charged with assault causing bodily injury for allegedly punching a cab driver in the face.

Clayborn’s trial was scheduled to begin March 1. However, according to online court records, a guilty plea/dispositional hearing has been set for March 19. Clayborn has been ordered by Sixth Judicial District Judge Sylvia Lewis to be at the hearing.

According to a criminal complaint, Clayborn, 21, was tied up in traffic on Jan. 18, 2009, at S. Johnson and Bowery streets when a cab driver honked at him. Police said Clayborn got out of his car, walked over to the driver and punched him in the face through the driver’s side window.

One of the popular rumors at the time was that a--nay, the racial slur came from the cab driver and prompted the punch; whether that's true is probably irrelevant in the long run. Facepunching is still facepunching, and Clayborn's strong enough that he's lucky to not have been charged with attempted murder. That's an exaggeration. Sort of.

It's worth noting that Ferentz didn't levy any punishment on Clayborn at the time of either the initial incident or the arrest; he deferred to the legal system at the time, and we're about to find out sometime next month what that system has decided. Morehouse thinks Clayborn won't face any additional punishment, since his last 13 months have been pretty quiet. We're thinking he might get a one-week vacation when Eastern Illinois comes to town. Either way it probably doesn't matter.

No telling whether Lickliter went for the UP TOP after the quote in question: We're still in favor of Todd Lickliter getting another season to keep trying to get this basketball program turned around, but there's something repulsive about this quote:

It seems strange to most observers that Cougill didn’t play. After all, starting center Jarryd Cole fouled out, which left only one available post, sophomore Andrew Brommer. When asked if Cougill was hurt, Iowa Coach Todd Lickliter said after the game, "No, maybe his feelings. He is fine. No problems."

WOW. Even [IOWA COACH REDACTED] thinks that's a PR misstep not worth taking. Is there something we're missing here? Did he really bench Brennan Cougill in favor of a dozen minutes from Andrew Brommer, then preemptively call Cougill a bitch while he was at it? There must be a deeper allusion here we're missing, right?

Making the quote even more egregious was this from Lickliter in regards to Anthony Tucker's departure:

"I think we’re playing good basketball," Lickliter said last week after a 78-65 pummeling of Northwestern. "I like our rotations. We mutually agreed there’d be an opportunity for him (Tucker) to practice and prepared to compete and if we called upon him, to be ready. My feeling was we liked where we were going and what we were doing, and I was going to continue along those lines because I saw the results we were getting."

So the rotations are set, and then he turns around and gives Cougill's ass chairsores so Andrew Brommer can play bad defense and go 0-5 from the field? That really happened? We get it if Lickliter doesn't want to be some lackadaisical "players' coach," but there's some middle ground here that he seems to be intent on nuking out of Earth's gravitational influence. There really isn't any other way to take all this.

In fact, we'll just say this: we're really glad this isn't part of a larger pattern of poor behavior; if it were, it would closely mirror behavior in which we'd indulge if we were trying to get fired without ruining our chances of rehire. 

"Big Ten Expansion" is the new "Tim Tebow Girlfriend," and Texas just made it to the final 24 on American Idol:  Yes, we've been hitting the Big Ten expansion talk since the BXI first broached the subject; complain if you must, but we find the subject purely fascinating. Hell, if we weren't willing to put $40 on even odds that ISU wasn't in a BCS conference 36 months from now, we wouldn't have written that last dialogue. But that's the point: there's a really good chance that the Big Ten expands west, and it remains to be seen if the BXI shears that sheep, skins it, or harvests its vital organs while its family watches. The shearing is taking only Missouri. Skinning is taking half of the Big XII North. And eating its heart on webcam solely to spark revulsion from PETC (conferences, not animals) would be taking Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma, then telling OU they're athletic prostitutes and can't be in the academic consortium. Go on, tell Jim Delany he can't do that. You might as well be daring him. If the objective is killing the Big XII--and it kind of is--Delany wants to bathe in the XII's blood in the process.

Bloggeur extraordinaire Frank The Tank knows this, and issued a list of refutations for every lazy argument as to why Texas wouldn't join the BXI. #4 should send chills down the spines of every partisan XII fan:

4. Texas has the nation’s wealthiest athletic department IN SPITE of the Big XII (not because of it) – Following up on points #2 and #3, the notion that Texas won’t move because it already has the nation’s richest athletic department is the same thing as arguing that a minimum of $10 million extra per year isn’t a big deal and the Longhorns should pass that up so that they can preserve road trips to Lubbock. Texas isn’t competing with Texas Tech and Baylor in order to win the Texas state college championship. On the national scene, it’s competing with Florida, Alabama, Ohio State and Penn State, all of whom will each take in about $100 million more than Texas over the next decade just for showing up to play if the Longhorns stand pat. That’s going to have a material long-term impact on Texas competing at a national level. Texas might be the wealthiest athletic department in the nation today, but that’s IN SPITE of the Big XII and its poor prospects for television revenue as opposed to because of it.

Of course, that assumes a static television situation, and Big XI commish Dan Beebe would be insane not to spend every waking moment these days trying to fix that. Still, contracts are contracts, and Beebe's league may be mortally doomed because of theirs.

And we're not kidding: this could absolutely end in ISU as a mid-major school. Keep watching.

THREE YARD BUTTONHOOKZ:

No, you should not say "YouTube Dancing": Kige Ramsey has a John Wall dance, and it is terrifying:

We're not ones to screw with tradition, but it might be "Just Northwestern" with a capital J at this point: Holy mother of God. Penn State 81, Northwestern 70... in Evanston. Granted, the Northwestern crowd makes 2010 Iowa fans look like 15,500 Iowa fans (bet you didn't see that joke coming), but still, it's good to see that the Northwestern players have given up on basketball and are now focused on dousing their fans' hopes in kerosene gasoline industrial-strength jet fuel and committing mass felony arson. Seriously, they've gone from "bubble team" to "losers to the two worst teams in the conference." What more needs to be said? 

Three games against the Missouri Valley is like... oh, who are we kidding, Iowa would go 6-10 in the MVC: UNI center Jordan Eglseder--whose name melted my spellcheck--was recently busted for DUI in Cedar Rapids. His punishment? Three whole games, or roughly 9% of the regular season. ESPN is unamused.

Now, in terms of games per season, three basketball games equates to about one football game, just for a DUI. We'll just relish in the fact that Iowa would never issue such a light punishment for an oh-dub, then go back to polishing the picture frames in our borderline illegal shrine to Kyle Calloway. 

If MSU is "Sparty no!", Purdue is "Boiler exploded and killed several migrant workers in their faces": RossWB's excellent Aughts in Review series prompted one of he most depressing comments in BHGP history. In fact, we're calling it the most depressing non-personal comment, since nobody's mom got cancer or anything; this is just one fan reflecting on the innumerable amount of times his team has blown it. It's so sad, and so so hilarious.

Best highlight reel ever? Yes, best ever: We're mainly upset that we never thought of this during our own (equally fruitless) high school/D-III football days. Mike Nobler, you are a hero to all athletes with absolutely zero athletic future everywhere.