[NU Sports] NU bowl stuff plus signing day

[Jim Bendat]

Okay, Alan, you wanted my reply!  Happy New Year, by the way.  I choose 
to respond only to the very sad part of your post that relates to your 
ten-year old son.  While it is certainly true that SC's academics have 
improved,  this change has nothing to do with the football team.  My 
NU-student daughter has a very close friend who goes to SC.  What I hear 
is that the SC football players live in a world unto themselves, not 
living with or relating to the student body as a whole.  They still take 
classes that are a joke, just as they were in the McKay and Robinson 
days.  It's not like NU, where our players live in dorms and take 
regular classes with everyone else.  But, I digress.  Back to your son!  
In response, I can tell you what things were like around my house just a 
few years ago as my three kids were being raised.  Like most kids, they 
would see toys and they would say, "I want this.  I want that."  After a 
while, I would simply say, "Just tell me what you don't want."  My kids 
would then say, "I don't want to go to SC!"  -- Jim B.

Abrahamson, Alan (NBC Universal) wrote:
>    My 10-year-old son has discovered football this year and has become
> a complete and total USC honk. This may have something to do with the
> fact that his uncle went there, his cousin went there, etc., or the
> notion that, like all 10-year-old boys, he is a front-runner and he and
> his fourth-grade crew have seen USC lose only a handful of times since
> the crew started out together in kindergarten. It's something of a
> mystery to me since, of course, Northwestern football is my own
> particular brand of mental illness and the boy's mother, the hot blonde
> wife, went to Berkeley. (Many mother-son bets were made in the stands
> this year during the Cal-USC game.)
>    By the way, few things in life are as fantastic as the moment when
> your son becomes conversant enough in football so that you can have a
> real discussion with him about, say, John David Booty's worthiness as a
> successor to Matt Leinart or whether the Saints with Reggie Bush are
> likely to make it to the Super Bowl. At any rate ...
>    And now, Mr. Bendat, and others, I await your spirited replies! I don't
> intend to take up a full-scale defense of USC. Just noting what anyone
> who has paid attention to what's been going on down there at Figueroa
> and Exposition can readily see ...
>  Alan
>   
>     
>