Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Arizona Bowl would like Air Force but ESPN may ground that mission
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Updated
Arizona Bowl founder Ali Farhang traveled to frigid Laramie, Wyoming, for Saturday’s Mountain West Conference championship game, Wyoming vs. San Diego State.
Neither the Aztecs nor the Cowboys will play in the Dec. 30 Arizona Bowl at Arizona Stadium; Farhang’s mission was to do some last-day lobbying with MWC commissioner Craig Thompson.
Farhang and his Tucson group want the Air Force Academy Falcons to be the marquee team in Arizona Bowl II. That would be a coup of significance; the Falcons are 9-3 and their military connection to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base would swing the game’s marketing campaign.
Ideally, Air Force would play bowl-starved Idaho, which has played just two bowl games in history and plans to drop to the FCS (non-bowl) division in 2018. But ESPN programmers have intruded on an AFA-Idaho game in Tucson and are likely to put the Vandals in nearby Boise for a wintry, Dec. 22 Famous Potato Bowl.
Farhang and the Arizona Bowl will announce game pairings Sunday afternoon. The Sun Belt Conference representative could be Appalachian State, Troy or Arkansas State, or a Louisiana school with a hyphen in its name. If none of that works out, Tucson could get a 5-7 team from a Big Boy league, possibly Mississippi State.
Farhang, a Tucson attorney, declined to comment on the possibility of Air Force meeting an SEC team like Mississippi State, but he did laugh about visiting with the czars of the MWC in, of all places, the December tundra of Laramie.
“Maybe I should pitch the idea of playing their league championship game in Tucson,” he said with a laugh.
The Arizona Bowl’s affiliation with the MWC is a good one. If the Air Force connection doesn’t work, potential fall-back teams are Colorado State and New Mexico, although it’s more likely the Lobos will stay in Albuquerque for the hometown New Mexico Bowl.
“As we discovered last year, a lot of this goes to the 24th hour,” said Farhang. “We could be on the phone all morning Sunday, putting this thing together.”
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Tucsonan Susie Meyers, a 1980s UA golfer who played in four U.S. Women’s Opens, has been chosen by Golf Magazine as one of America’s Top 100 golf teachers. The list will be published in the magazine’s March issue.
Not only that, Meyers has written a book “Golf From Point A,” which is available on Amazon and through Barnes & Noble. Meyers, whose son, Chris Meyers, plays at Stanford, and whose husband, Dan Meyers, is a former Arizona Amateur champion, teaches at Ventana Canyon Golf Club. She is known most for instructing PGA Tour regular Michael Thompson, a former Rincon/University High golfer, but she has taught and instructed hundreds of Tucson golfers of all age groups. Her book touches on the swing, the short game and the mental side of golf. Meyers has a background that includes working with some of golf’s most reputable teachers, including Hank Haney and Jim McLean.
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Rob Gronkowski, out for two months with a back injury, his fifth major football injury, turns 28 in May. If he didn’t play another down, he might still be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Only eight tight ends are in the Hall of Fame: Dave Casper, Mike Ditka, John Mackey, Ozzie Newsome, Charlie Sanders, Shannon Sharpe, Jackie Smith and Kellen Winslow. Gronk has caught 68 touchdown passes; none of the Hall of Famers caught more than 62. Gronk has 6,095 receiving yards, topped by Sharpe’s 10,060 and also by Winslow, Smith and Newsome. But Gronk’s longevity will be a factor. Beset by injuries, he has played just four full seasons in his 7½ NFL years. Gronk has been voted to four Pro Bowls. Except for Newsome, every Hall of Fame tight end has at least five.
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Sahuarita High grad Manny Barreda pitched a no-hitter on Nov. 26 for Cañeros de Los Mochis of the Mexican Winter League. He struck out the side against Hermosillo in the ninth inning and missed a perfect game by walking a batter in the sixth. Barreda, a 12th- round draft pick of the Yankees in 2007, no longer pitches in the U.S. minor leagues, and instead spent the summer playing for Tijuana in the Mexican League. He pitched 246 minor-league games and topped out at Double-A.
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Arizona passed on recruiting Mike Bibby Jr., and he ultimately signed with South Florida. The son of Arizona’s All-America point guard averaged 7.8 points in USF’s first six games this year, with two starts.
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Former Sunnyside High basketball standout Jacob Inclan leads the ACCAC in scoring and rebounding as a freshman at South Mountain College. Inclan, who has had five double-doubles this season, will play against hometown Pima College on Saturday afternoon in Phoenix.
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Retired Tucson educator Jim Fogltance and longtime Pac-12 football referee Cleo Robinson were selected by the Pac-12 to be the TV replay officials for Friday’s league championship game, Washington vs. Colorado, in Santa Clara, California. That position is awarded on merit; it suggests that Fogltance and Robinson will be chosen to work the college football playoffs as well.
- Updated
Will Kreamer, one of the leading figures in the history of Tucson football, a key player on Tucson High’s undefeated 1970 state championship team, is retiring from coaching. “I will reintroduce myself to my golf clubs and spend a lot of time at our cabin in Greer, in my float tube with fly-rod in hand,” he said. Well deserved. Kreamer was the head coach at Santa Rita, Sahuaro and Tucson, and an assistant at Pima College and completed his career as offensive line coach for Sabino’s 3A state runner-up last week. He was also a head coach of an Italian semipro team for three years and an AD at Ironwood Ridge, Tucson and Sabino. Quite a career.
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Coming out of retirement will be Dick Tomey, who lives part-time in Tucson. The 14-year Arizona head coach will be part of Pima College’s spring football training sessions. Tomey will help PCC coach Jim Monaco with defense and special teams and, more so, with his perspective on building a winning team.
- Updated
The glory days of the golf community on Dove Mountain peaked when Tiger Woods won the 2008 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship on the Gallery Golf Club’s south course. The tournament then moved to the rival Ritz-Carlton Golf Club for six seasons. Now the Gallery and the Ritz-Carlton golf facility, named the Dove Mountain Golf Club, are one. The Escalante Golf group of Fort Worth, Texas, has agreed to buy the Gallery’s 36 holes and return it to all-private status; it had recently been operated by Troon Golf. The Dove Mountain course will also revert to private status, with limited availability to guests at The Ritz-Carlton hotel.
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David Lockwood, one of the three defensive coaches fired at Arizona last December, sat out the season after moving to Delaware. He watched his son, ex-Tucson High standout Jeff Lockwood, play for 11-win Middletown High School. Now David Lockwood is expected to be hired as the new defensive backs coach at UNLV. It’s unlikely UA offensive line coach Jim Michalczik would leave his $290,000-a-year job in Tucson to rejoin his long-time Cal Bears boss Jeff Tedford, the new head coach at Fresno State. FSU’s money pool for nine assistant coaches is about $1.6 million, or roughly $177,000 per assistant.
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Southern Arizona’s three world-class rodeo competitors, Sherry Cervi, Cory Petska and Matt Sherwood, are competing for world titles at the ongoing National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. Cervi, a Marana High School grad, is in her 19th NFR. She earned $11,000 in Thursday’s opening barrel racing competition to increase her yearly official earnings to $112,000. Petska and Sherwood, who compete in team roping, earned $84,000 and $78,000, respectively, in the regular season.
- Updated
Arizona’s 1988 Final Four teammates Steve Kerr and Jud Buechler both became first-team All-Pac-10 players in their Tucson days. Last week, their daughters were named honorable-mention selections to the Pac-12 volleyball all-star team. Reily Buechler is a junior at UCLA and Maddy Kerr is a senior at Cal. Maddy was also named to the All-Pac-12 Academic first team, the first Cal player to do so in consecutive years. She has a 3.76 with a double-major of Rhetoric and Media Studies.
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Former Sabino and Palo Verde baseball coach Rod Allen will teach a Sports Officiating class at Pima College’s Fitness and Sports Science center next semester. It will be a foundation for those wishing to begin officiating careers for the AIA or NJCAA in soccer, volleyball, basketball, football, softball and baseball. Given that the Pac-12 now pays basketball officials between $3,000 and $4,000 per game, it can be a financially rewarding career. Veteran local referees and umpires will be featured in the Monday night (6:30-8:20) classes. Information can be found on PCC’s website.
- Updated
The power of football vs. basketball and ESPN vs. Fox Sports 1: The UA-ASU Territorial Cup football game on ESPN drew 1,672,000 viewers, according to the Nielsen TV Ratings people. An hour later (8:30 p.m., Tucson time), the Arizona-Butler basketball game on Fox Sports 1 drew a surprisingly small audience of 150,000. Butler isn’t a big name, obviously, and the game tipped off at 10:30 p.m. in the east.
- Updated
Four postseason thoughts about Rich Rodriguez and the trajectory of Arizona’s football program:
1. The most interesting transaction of the offseason will be whether AD Greg Byrne rolls over RichRod’s contract for a fifth year, through 2021, which has become somewhat routine in big-money college sports. But in March, UCLA basketball coach Steve Alford apologized to Bruins fans for finishing 10th in the Pac-12 and asked the school to delete the fifth year of his contract. Stay tuned.
2. According to a November 2014 Board of Regents meeting, RichRod was to be paid a $375,000 retention bonus last Thursday. He will not be paid $75,000 for a low-level bowl appearance, as per his contract. His offensive coordinator, Calvin Magee, and defensive coordinator, Marcel Yates, will not realize bowl-game bonuses of about $42,000 each, per their contracts. If defensive backs coach Donté Williams leaves for Nebraska, as expected, Yates could coach defensive backs and hire a linebackers coach.
3. Talent drain: Arizona did not place a player on the All-Pac-12 first or second teams last week, the first time it's happened since Arizona joined the Pac-10 in 1978. Worse, the UA had just three honorable-mention selections (receivers Samajie Grant, Nate Phillips and Trey Griffey), the fewest HM picks at Arizona since 1980. All of that lack of star power leads to last place.
4. RichRod’s post-Territorial Cup statements included this: “I think it’s going to certainly be one of the best (recruiting) classes we’ve had and maybe the school’s had.”
Without going back to the Desert Swarm-building classes of 1989/1990, or to the 12-1 Holiday Bowl classes of 1995/1996 — or to the bountiful recruiting periods of the early 1980s — let’s go back to Mike Stoops’ Class of 2010.
It included multi-year starters Shaquille Richardson, Sani Fuimaono, Fabbians Ebbele, Mickey Baucus, Jonathan Mc-
Knight, Marquis Flowers, Austin Hill, Dan Pettinato, Jourdon Grandon, Derek Earls and Paul Vassallo, among others.
Stoops’ second-to-last UA class was the nucleus of RichRod’s 2012 and 2013 bowl teams. If RichRod can merely match Stoops’ recruiting efforts of 2010, it would be considered a triumph.
Arizona Bowl founder Ali Farhang traveled to frigid Laramie, Wyoming, for Saturday’s Mountain West Conference championship game, Wyoming vs. San Diego State.
Neither the Aztecs nor the Cowboys will play in the Dec. 30 Arizona Bowl at Arizona Stadium; Farhang’s mission was to do some last-day lobbying with MWC commissioner Craig Thompson.
Farhang and his Tucson group want the Air Force Academy Falcons to be the marquee team in Arizona Bowl II. That would be a coup of significance; the Falcons are 9-3 and their military connection to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base would swing the game’s marketing campaign.
Ideally, Air Force would play bowl-starved Idaho, which has played just two bowl games in history and plans to drop to the FCS (non-bowl) division in 2018. But ESPN programmers have intruded on an AFA-Idaho game in Tucson and are likely to put the Vandals in nearby Boise for a wintry, Dec. 22 Famous Potato Bowl.
Farhang and the Arizona Bowl will announce game pairings Sunday afternoon. The Sun Belt Conference representative could be Appalachian State, Troy or Arkansas State, or a Louisiana school with a hyphen in its name. If none of that works out, Tucson could get a 5-7 team from a Big Boy league, possibly Mississippi State.
Farhang, a Tucson attorney, declined to comment on the possibility of Air Force meeting an SEC team like Mississippi State, but he did laugh about visiting with the czars of the MWC in, of all places, the December tundra of Laramie.
“Maybe I should pitch the idea of playing their league championship game in Tucson,” he said with a laugh.
The Arizona Bowl’s affiliation with the MWC is a good one. If the Air Force connection doesn’t work, potential fall-back teams are Colorado State and New Mexico, although it’s more likely the Lobos will stay in Albuquerque for the hometown New Mexico Bowl.
“As we discovered last year, a lot of this goes to the 24th hour,” said Farhang. “We could be on the phone all morning Sunday, putting this thing together.”
Tucsonan Susie Meyers, a 1980s UA golfer who played in four U.S. Women’s Opens, has been chosen by Golf Magazine as one of America’s Top 100 golf teachers. The list will be published in the magazine’s March issue.
Not only that, Meyers has written a book “Golf From Point A,” which is available on Amazon and through Barnes & Noble. Meyers, whose son, Chris Meyers, plays at Stanford, and whose husband, Dan Meyers, is a former Arizona Amateur champion, teaches at Ventana Canyon Golf Club. She is known most for instructing PGA Tour regular Michael Thompson, a former Rincon/University High golfer, but she has taught and instructed hundreds of Tucson golfers of all age groups. Her book touches on the swing, the short game and the mental side of golf. Meyers has a background that includes working with some of golf’s most reputable teachers, including Hank Haney and Jim McLean.
Rob Gronkowski, out for two months with a back injury, his fifth major football injury, turns 28 in May. If he didn’t play another down, he might still be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Only eight tight ends are in the Hall of Fame: Dave Casper, Mike Ditka, John Mackey, Ozzie Newsome, Charlie Sanders, Shannon Sharpe, Jackie Smith and Kellen Winslow. Gronk has caught 68 touchdown passes; none of the Hall of Famers caught more than 62. Gronk has 6,095 receiving yards, topped by Sharpe’s 10,060 and also by Winslow, Smith and Newsome. But Gronk’s longevity will be a factor. Beset by injuries, he has played just four full seasons in his 7½ NFL years. Gronk has been voted to four Pro Bowls. Except for Newsome, every Hall of Fame tight end has at least five.
Sahuarita High grad Manny Barreda pitched a no-hitter on Nov. 26 for Cañeros de Los Mochis of the Mexican Winter League. He struck out the side against Hermosillo in the ninth inning and missed a perfect game by walking a batter in the sixth. Barreda, a 12th- round draft pick of the Yankees in 2007, no longer pitches in the U.S. minor leagues, and instead spent the summer playing for Tijuana in the Mexican League. He pitched 246 minor-league games and topped out at Double-A.
Former Sunnyside High basketball standout Jacob Inclan leads the ACCAC in scoring and rebounding as a freshman at South Mountain College. Inclan, who has had five double-doubles this season, will play against hometown Pima College on Saturday afternoon in Phoenix.
Retired Tucson educator Jim Fogltance and longtime Pac-12 football referee Cleo Robinson were selected by the Pac-12 to be the TV replay officials for Friday’s league championship game, Washington vs. Colorado, in Santa Clara, California. That position is awarded on merit; it suggests that Fogltance and Robinson will be chosen to work the college football playoffs as well.
Will Kreamer, one of the leading figures in the history of Tucson football, a key player on Tucson High’s undefeated 1970 state championship team, is retiring from coaching. “I will reintroduce myself to my golf clubs and spend a lot of time at our cabin in Greer, in my float tube with fly-rod in hand,” he said. Well deserved. Kreamer was the head coach at Santa Rita, Sahuaro and Tucson, and an assistant at Pima College and completed his career as offensive line coach for Sabino’s 3A state runner-up last week. He was also a head coach of an Italian semipro team for three years and an AD at Ironwood Ridge, Tucson and Sabino. Quite a career.
Coming out of retirement will be Dick Tomey, who lives part-time in Tucson. The 14-year Arizona head coach will be part of Pima College’s spring football training sessions. Tomey will help PCC coach Jim Monaco with defense and special teams and, more so, with his perspective on building a winning team.
The glory days of the golf community on Dove Mountain peaked when Tiger Woods won the 2008 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship on the Gallery Golf Club’s south course. The tournament then moved to the rival Ritz-Carlton Golf Club for six seasons. Now the Gallery and the Ritz-Carlton golf facility, named the Dove Mountain Golf Club, are one. The Escalante Golf group of Fort Worth, Texas, has agreed to buy the Gallery’s 36 holes and return it to all-private status; it had recently been operated by Troon Golf. The Dove Mountain course will also revert to private status, with limited availability to guests at The Ritz-Carlton hotel.
David Lockwood, one of the three defensive coaches fired at Arizona last December, sat out the season after moving to Delaware. He watched his son, ex-Tucson High standout Jeff Lockwood, play for 11-win Middletown High School. Now David Lockwood is expected to be hired as the new defensive backs coach at UNLV. It’s unlikely UA offensive line coach Jim Michalczik would leave his $290,000-a-year job in Tucson to rejoin his long-time Cal Bears boss Jeff Tedford, the new head coach at Fresno State. FSU’s money pool for nine assistant coaches is about $1.6 million, or roughly $177,000 per assistant.
Southern Arizona’s three world-class rodeo competitors, Sherry Cervi, Cory Petska and Matt Sherwood, are competing for world titles at the ongoing National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. Cervi, a Marana High School grad, is in her 19th NFR. She earned $11,000 in Thursday’s opening barrel racing competition to increase her yearly official earnings to $112,000. Petska and Sherwood, who compete in team roping, earned $84,000 and $78,000, respectively, in the regular season.
Arizona’s 1988 Final Four teammates Steve Kerr and Jud Buechler both became first-team All-Pac-10 players in their Tucson days. Last week, their daughters were named honorable-mention selections to the Pac-12 volleyball all-star team. Reily Buechler is a junior at UCLA and Maddy Kerr is a senior at Cal. Maddy was also named to the All-Pac-12 Academic first team, the first Cal player to do so in consecutive years. She has a 3.76 with a double-major of Rhetoric and Media Studies.
Former Sabino and Palo Verde baseball coach Rod Allen will teach a Sports Officiating class at Pima College’s Fitness and Sports Science center next semester. It will be a foundation for those wishing to begin officiating careers for the AIA or NJCAA in soccer, volleyball, basketball, football, softball and baseball. Given that the Pac-12 now pays basketball officials between $3,000 and $4,000 per game, it can be a financially rewarding career. Veteran local referees and umpires will be featured in the Monday night (6:30-8:20) classes. Information can be found on PCC’s website.
The power of football vs. basketball and ESPN vs. Fox Sports 1: The UA-ASU Territorial Cup football game on ESPN drew 1,672,000 viewers, according to the Nielsen TV Ratings people. An hour later (8:30 p.m., Tucson time), the Arizona-Butler basketball game on Fox Sports 1 drew a surprisingly small audience of 150,000. Butler isn’t a big name, obviously, and the game tipped off at 10:30 p.m. in the east.
Four postseason thoughts about Rich Rodriguez and the trajectory of Arizona’s football program:
1. The most interesting transaction of the offseason will be whether AD Greg Byrne rolls over RichRod’s contract for a fifth year, through 2021, which has become somewhat routine in big-money college sports. But in March, UCLA basketball coach Steve Alford apologized to Bruins fans for finishing 10th in the Pac-12 and asked the school to delete the fifth year of his contract. Stay tuned.
2. According to a November 2014 Board of Regents meeting, RichRod was to be paid a $375,000 retention bonus last Thursday. He will not be paid $75,000 for a low-level bowl appearance, as per his contract. His offensive coordinator, Calvin Magee, and defensive coordinator, Marcel Yates, will not realize bowl-game bonuses of about $42,000 each, per their contracts. If defensive backs coach Donté Williams leaves for Nebraska, as expected, Yates could coach defensive backs and hire a linebackers coach.
3. Talent drain: Arizona did not place a player on the All-Pac-12 first or second teams last week, the first time it's happened since Arizona joined the Pac-10 in 1978. Worse, the UA had just three honorable-mention selections (receivers Samajie Grant, Nate Phillips and Trey Griffey), the fewest HM picks at Arizona since 1980. All of that lack of star power leads to last place.
4. RichRod’s post-Territorial Cup statements included this: “I think it’s going to certainly be one of the best (recruiting) classes we’ve had and maybe the school’s had.”
Without going back to the Desert Swarm-building classes of 1989/1990, or to the 12-1 Holiday Bowl classes of 1995/1996 — or to the bountiful recruiting periods of the early 1980s — let’s go back to Mike Stoops’ Class of 2010.
It included multi-year starters Shaquille Richardson, Sani Fuimaono, Fabbians Ebbele, Mickey Baucus, Jonathan Mc-
Knight, Marquis Flowers, Austin Hill, Dan Pettinato, Jourdon Grandon, Derek Earls and Paul Vassallo, among others.
Stoops’ second-to-last UA class was the nucleus of RichRod’s 2012 and 2013 bowl teams. If RichRod can merely match Stoops’ recruiting efforts of 2010, it would be considered a triumph.
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