Lovingly curated bits of light reading to speed you through to the weekend:

• A hit, a palpable Hokie hit. Boston College blog BC Interruption goes logo-trolling, with splendid results.

• Jock exams. Andy Staples takes the NCAA rules test, discovering that “An institution may send an institutional postcard, provided its dimensions do not exceed 4 1/4 by 6 inches, it includes only the institution’s name and logo or an athletics logo on one side when produced and it includes only handwritten information, (e.g., words, illustrations) on the opposite side when provided to the recipients,” and maybe learning a little something about life along the way. [banjo twang]

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CBS’ Bryan Fischer directs you to the seven-minute mark of this CBS Sports video, where you will find NHL commissioner Gary Bettman making the following statement regarding the Winter Classic: “To have imagined that the event would be this spectacular, particularly when you’re there, to imagine that we would own New Year’s Day, which used to be for college football, nobody could have imagined it.”

Securing “ownership” of Jan. 1 became a little easier, we suppose, when no college football games were played on New Year’s Day 2012. Hockey’s case is somewhat weakened, however, by not having played on New Year’s Day 2012 either for fear of competing poorly against Sunday NFL games.

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“Football – The compliance office aproved the use of mini basketballs during a football winter conditioning drill.”

— Eleven Warriors (@elevenwarriors) May 24, 2012

Mini basketballs. Where does Urban Meyer’s treachery end, PAAAOWL? (11W also has a full list of OSU’s latest piddling violations, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Could Kyle Brotzman’s notorious miss against Nevada in 2010 be a boon for Boise State? (Peter Read Miller/SI)

Stanford’s offensive coordinator position was recently endowed by an anonymous donor to honor Andrew Luck (gross autoplay video alert at that link). The donation got friend of the program The Gurgling Cod thinking about how to turn this into a rivalry game:

UGA FAN PROTIP — make anon gift to GT, name OC position after Reggie Ball. #trollanthropy espn.go.com/college-footba…

— The Gurgling Cod (@TheGurglingCod) May 23, 2012

Monied fans, you have your marching orders. Our previous bloggy home has just wrapped up an annual charity drive in which donations are given to match rivalry scores (say, $70.33 for enthusiastic fans of January’s Orange Bowl outcome), but an endowment? Oh, that’s a gift that lasts and lasts. We have 10 modest suggestions for our readers overburdened with spite and disposable income:

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From the “This is news because it is May” department: If you only watch one long-snapping trick shot video today, make it this one.

The music screams 1998. The hair wails immortality.

[Video via Brett.]

Cam Clear, pictured here on National Signing Day 2011, was arrested after stealing a laptop from a Tennessee baseball player. (Landov)

Continuing a proud tradition of SEC football players named Cameron operating in a state of blissful oblivion regarding how easy stolen laptops are to track, backup Tennessee tight end Cam Clear was arrested Tuesday for felony theft after being caught with a Vol baseball player’s laptop. This being a college-athlete-swiping-electronics story, it will not surprise you to learn that he was apprehended in the dumbest possible fashion:

UT police detected Tuesday someone was using the laptop to log into the university’s wireless network and caught Clear sitting at the keyboard, according to the warrant.

We’ve said this before in about five different ways, but in today’s rapidly evolving world of technology, it disturbs us deeply that young Americans can reach their majority without understanding how easy it is to track gadgetry. Clear regretfully neglected to finish the drill in classic Cameron fashion by printing his name on the computer in letters visible from space or flinging it out the window in an effort to evade capture. No word just yet on his status with the team (UPDATE: indefinite suspension, ahoy!), but best case scenario, a stint in junior college and monster one-year career with an SEC West team will precede early entry into the draft. (Worst case scenario, he ends up in the What To Expect When You’re Expecting sequel.)

*And what the blue heck is James Cameron up to on the bottom of the ocean, all by himself? We’ll never really know, will we?

An SEC television network could be a thing! (Again!) From Sports Business Journal:

The 14-team conference has been negotiating with both networks this year after the SEC expanded with Texas A&M and Missouri. That triggered a clause in the SEC’s deal that allows the league to go back to the negotiating table with its partners [...] The bigger negotiation is with ESPN, and talks appear to revolve around an SEC-branded cable channel that could launch as early as 2014.

For viewers of a certain age, this reemerging possibility triggers one thought and one thought only:

Is the SEC Network going to get Dave, Dave and Dave back together?I hope so.

— CAPS LOCKA FLAME (@matt_T) May 21, 2012

I suppose this would be the ideal time to bring our secret Jefferson Pilot Sports Preservation Society aboveground. #teamdave #allofthem

— Holly Anderson (@SIHolly) May 21, 2012

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Learn something new every day. Dan Mullen just sat down and played “Stairway to Heaven” on the baby grand piano here at event.

— Joe Galbraith (@joestate) May 21, 2012

[UPDATE: Now with photo evidence!] Our enthusiasm for sitting through the polo-shirted cattle call of SEC Media Days just spiked mightily. We have already secured a borrowed keyboard for the occasion, and will be installing it in the lobby and shrieking requests at Mullen every time he passes. Top five, in descending order: 1. “Free Bird,” 2. Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 3,” 3. “Shine On Harvest Moon,” 4. the entire songbook of Show Boat, 5. “Hot Cross Buns.”

Former West Virginia head coach Bill Stewart died Monday afternoon, the school announced, after collapsing on a golf course while suffering an apparent heart attack. Good football moments were trickier to come by on his watch in recent years, but our favorite Mountaineers game of the Stewart era was his first: that fateful date with Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.

He is survived by his wife, Karen, and son Blaine. Our sincere condolences to the Stewart family. RIP, Whittlin’ Bill.

Beth Mowins (above) could see her profile increase after Pam Ward’s bump off the college football beat. (Porter Binks/SI)

More than a decade after becoming the first woman to call a college football game for a national TV network, Pam Ward is being moved off the beat in 2012. Via SI’s Richard Deitsch, here is ESPN’s statement on reassigning Ward away from college football coverage: ”For a decade, Pam has been a trailblazing voice on college football. She will continue to be a big part of our coverage plans across multiple sports including college basketball, softball, the WNBA and more.”

It’d be some kind of reverse sexism to defend Ward’s body of work because she has lady parts. I was never a particular fan. I like my announcers openly and brazenly biased (think the pair of relentless homers who do Hawaii games on the island’s local feed), unable to contain their glee (Verne Lundquist, whose chortles are a national treasure) and susceptible to stunts (Tessitore-Gilmore, who were famous for rifling through college students’ unmentionables on camera long before they became America’s Friday-night shootout sweethearts). But I can and will envy her ascent* and freely admire that she was there at all.

I’m also not big on the concept of “favorite female sports announcer,” because it’s a tiny pool and needlessly lops off a big swath of the population doing the exact same job that doesn’t change on account of plumbing. (It’s like saying “favorite freckled barista.”) But if I had one, it’d be Beth Mowins. If the Ward move leads to an increased profile for Mowins, that’s to the good, because she’s good at her job.

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