Miles Bennett-Smith – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Sat, 03 May 2014 19:06:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Miles Bennett-Smith – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Stanford’s upset of Kansas in photos https://stanforddaily.com/2014/03/26/stanfords-upset-of-kansas-in-photos/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/03/26/stanfords-upset-of-kansas-in-photos/#respond Wed, 26 Mar 2014 11:21:35 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1083762 The Cardinal punched its ticket to the Sweet 16 with one of the most unexpected wins of this year's tournament.

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For The Daily’s full recap of Stanford’s 60-57 win against Kansas, click here.

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Rowing on a roll heading into IRA championships https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/30/rowing-on-a-roll-heading-into-ira-championships/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/30/rowing-on-a-roll-heading-into-ira-championships/#respond Thu, 30 May 2013 07:48:53 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077512 With this weekend’s forecast at the 111th Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships (collegiate rowing’s national title) calling for temperatures nearing 100 degrees, it’s only fitting that Stanford’s Varsity Eight is getting hot at exactly the right time.

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(MICHAEL PIMENTEL/StanfordPhoto.com)
Stanford men’s rowing (above) enters this year’s Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships ranked higher than it has been in eight years as the the No. 4 seed. (MICHAEL PIMENTEL/StanfordPhoto.com)

With this weekend’s forecast at the 111th Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships (collegiate rowing’s national title) calling for temperatures nearing 100 degrees, it’s only fitting that Stanford’s Varsity Eight is getting hot at exactly the right time.

Two consecutive impressive performances on the water has the Cardinal right in the thick of things, ranked No. 4 and poised to go stroke for stroke with the top 22 teams in the country starting Friday at Lake Natoma in Sacramento.

“Stanford hasn’t been this highly ranked going into the regatta since 2005,” senior captain Oivind Lorentzen said. “We have our own heat that we are favored to win and we’ve just come into this with a lot of confidence.”

Turning the tables on California will do that for a boat, as the Card knocked off its rival Golden Bears and won the Schwabacher Cup earlier this month for the first time in five years. It was at the Pac-12 Championships, however, when Stanford really began to believe, hanging with No. 1 Washington for part of the race and roaring past Cal in the final 500 meters to grab the silver medal and a boatload of swagger.

“Beating Cal again at Pac-12s proved that [the first victory] wasn’t a fluke and it gave us an edge and the confidence we need to put us in a very good position,” Lorentzen said.

Competition at the IRA Regatta consists of heats (all composed of five or six boats), repechage (second chance races), semifinals and finals. In the varsity eight heats, the two fastest crews advance to the semis, while the rest are relegated to the repechage race, where the top three boats will gain entry back into the semifinals. In the semis, the top three crews advance to the six-boat Grand Final. The remaining crews will race in the Petite Final.

Included in the Stanford Varsity Eight’s first heat on Friday are No. 5 Northeastern, No. 13 Penn, No. 12 Wisconsin, No. 20 Holy Cross and No. 21 George Washington. The II Eight boat, seeded 13thoverall in the “B” class of the regatta, will compete against No. 12 Penn, No. 4 Princeton and No. 5 Harvard.

Because the racing calendar is filled mostly with regional regattas and competitions that don’t foster too much competition amongst the country’s heavyweights, this weekend is Stanford’s first good look at those boats as well as the rest of the class of the East Coast, which includes No. 2 Harvard and No. 3 Brown.

The Huskies, however, are clearly the class of the field, beating Stanford’s Varsity Eight by 5.4 seconds at the Pac-12 Championships as well as earning victories over Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth en route to an undefeated regular season for the sixth time in the last seven years.

“Washington certainly has a mystique to it,” Lorentzen said, “and they are the top team in the country. But we are going to go out and try to beat them. They’re not unbeatable, and if we can get to that position in the Grand Final first, then we’ll let all cannons fire. If you shoot for Washington and come up short, you’ll likely be second overall.”

Harvard, too, figures to be right up there with the rest of the big boys, having proved itself as the class of the East with a win at the Eastern Sprints and a tradition of placing well at IRAs (the Crimson has medaled in three straight years). Brown is no slouch either, finishing second at IRAs last season and securing the No. 3 seed thanks to a runner-up finish behind Harvard at the Eastern Sprints earlier this month.

All three schools ranked ahead of the Cardinal are sending a virtual armada of boats to IRAs, with, in some cases, five different boats qualifying for different classes at the competition. With a long legacy of excellence in the sport, these programs boast Olympic pedigrees up and down the oar ports, not to mention height and power. The Huskies have 13 rowers listed as 6-foot-5 or taller on their roster; Harvard and Brown both have many more.

Stanford, on the other hand, prides itself on being a group of somewhat undersized rowers that can thrive in the underdog position, according to Lorentzen, in addition to having possibly the best collegiate rower in the country, junior Austin Hack.

“Everyone [besides the 6-foot-8 Hack] is kind of relatively small,” he said. “But we’re all fit and we pride ourselves on being a tight-knit group of guys in the boat. Unlike a lot of teams, we’ve been rowing the same lineup since the beginning of the season and, while other guys on teams like Cal might have better erg scores, it just shows that ergs don’t translate well to races. It might be a surprise to a lot of people that we are so fast, but it’s not a surprise to us.”

Like most of the top teams, Stanford’s crew has been training for the race all week on Lake Natoma, a bit of a home water advantage. Lake Natoma is a 2,000-meter course 15 miles northeast of Sacramento, widely considered one of the best venues in the United States for intercollegiate rowing as the annual host of the Pac-12 Championships.

Despite the added pressure of completing homework and assignments from off-campus—a slight disadvantage considering the majority of the other schools have closed their academic years—Lorenzten said that being able to spend the week training on familiar water is already paying dividends for the Cardinal.

“Most teams come out to train pretty early, and usually the IRAs are on the East Coast; the competition rotates annually but was last on the West Coast in 2009,” Lorentzen said. “But for us not to have to deal with a time change and acclimate faster is good. It’s been very nice to get away from school and the distractions and concentrate on rowing for a week, and with really good water to practice on we’ve been getting significantly faster, even in just the last few days. We’re a lighter, fitter crew, and who knows, maybe the East Coast teams are not used to this dry heat.”

Stanford will find out how high it can set the bar when the starting gun goes off for the first heat at 8:45 a.m. Friday morning. The events will be streamed live in their entirety, with video feeds available at http://d3cast.com/rowing/ira.htm.

 

Contact Miles Bennett-Smith at milesbs@stanford.edu

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Letter from the Editor: On Libel, Due Diligence and Intimidation https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/15/letter-from-the-editor-on-libel-and-intimidation/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/15/letter-from-the-editor-on-libel-and-intimidation/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 08:02:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077204 The University sent me a message that carried with it the threat of libel, a message that I felt at least in some way had to be sent with an air of intimidation.

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I woke up early this morning, rolled over, checked my laptop and opened an email labeled URGENT. It was from a senior University official informing me that The Daily had published a libelous story.

Uh oh.

The next 10 minutes of my browser history are filled with Google searches for “defamation lawsuits with newspapers,” Supreme Court case briefs and blogs on libel..

But as I continued to comb through the Internet, fearing perhaps that I had fallen asleep in my journalism ethics class or in the host of communications classes that have touched on libel, slander and the like, I began almost to laugh.

It certainly wasn’t because I (and the rest of the staff here at The Daily) take the accusation of defamation or libel anything less than extremely seriously. (My news editor would call me some hours later in somewhat of a panic after waking up to the same email.)

No, my amusement was rather directed at the gall of the University to send me a message that carried with it the threat of pursuing a libel case, a message that I felt at least in some way had to be sent with an air of intimidation.

The story in question was one I believe is of extreme importance to the student body and Stanford community. “Case study finds flawed, slanted judicial process” details a case study put together by three students and their alumni representatives, including Bob Ottilie ’77, after a 2011 judicial proceeding. The students say that several of their rights under the Student Judicial Charter of 1997 were obstructed and that it seemed unlikely that their case was merely the outlier in a system that saw 154 allegations of violations (resulting in 93 official charges) of either the Honor Code or the Fundamental Standard in 2010-11.

This should matter to you, students, and to you, alumni, and to you, staff, faculty and administrators. The case study is thorough, and if half of the allegations of misconduct are true, students should simply be scared enough to call for more transparency in the judicial affairs process as a whole.

And if the allegations are false, then I beg the University to call Bob Ottilie and these three students out for concocting a gross lie. I beg them to call me out for believing in the charade. But at this moment, I have heard nothing of substance that would lead me to believe that this study is anything but true.

I know there are privacy laws that must be obeyed, and I know this might put an unfair expectation on University officials to answer questions they say they are not allowed to on advice of counsel. This, then, appears to be an unfortunate impasse for both parties, as we at The Daily must deal in facts and quotes to retain any real credibility.

But to that end, The Daily’s reporters went through a follow-up investigation of the case. And in the subsequent interviews that we conducted, University officials noted disagreements with some aspects of the case and contested the light in which it paints some of the officials involved. Dean of Student Life Chris Griffith notes in a letter to the editor that “to extrapolate from a single anomalous case that an entire system is flawed is simply wrong.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

However, Griffith also says despite being “seriously flawed and inaccurate” in many instances, “the case study was helpful in some limited respects.”

If the study was helpful, does that not mean that at the very least, some of what was said was accurate? Does that not imply that somewhere in the wealth of evidence that Otillie and these students provide (the case study itself is over 50 pages), something stuck?

That’s what it says to me, and that is what scares me, because in my mind that begins a descent down a slippery slope that trends towards students not being aware of many of the rights they possess and ultimately ends with an innocent student being convicted in an unfair process. I am not saying that this has occurred, as I have no knowledge of any such case, but I am saying that it is our role at The Daily to be vigilant and watchful and to report on issues that we believe should be moved further into the light of day.

In short, this is a story worth telling, and I hope administrators can appreciate that just as there is value in doing their jobs to the best of their abilities with the goal to improve Stanford, student life and the world, there is value in my job and The Daily’s job to educate and inform students and the community about relevant issues.

And while I have no way of knowing whether or not the actions of the senior official who contacted me were at the direction of the general counsel or any other group of University administrators, they felt and read strongly like intimidation.

Perhaps I am overreacting, and the email, as well as the phone call I received 20 minutes after the email, were just misguided attempts to warn me of my exposure at The Daily. Certainly the call was neither intimidating nor berating as I explained my confusion as to how the story we published would in any way qualify as libel.

In fact, after I noted that The Daily had done its due diligence and was neither malicious nor negligent in its coverage of the story, the official was very agreeable. But that does not make the email go away nor change the tone of what read as a threat of a lawsuit should The Daily not take the story down and redact the names of the officials alleged to have done wrong.

Just as I believe that students care enough about what happens on this campus to find the truth for themselves, I believe The Daily has a responsibility to inform its readers of potential misconduct, and we will continue to do just that, right alongside the overwhelming body of outstanding work that emanates from this institution.

Miles Bennett-Smith

Editor in Chief

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Mark Madsen introduced as head coach of Los Angeles D-League franchise https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/14/mark-madsen-head-coach-nba-d-league-los-angeles/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/14/mark-madsen-head-coach-nba-d-league-los-angeles/#respond Tue, 14 May 2013 23:54:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077184 Stanford men's basketball assistant coach Mark Madsen '00 announced today that he will step away from the Farm and return to the professional game, accepting the head coaching position with the Los Angeles D-Fenders of the NBA's D-League.

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Stanford men’s basketball assistant coach Mark Madsen ’00 announced today that he will step away from the Farm and return to the professional game, accepting the head coaching position with the Los Angeles D-Fenders of the NBA’s D-League.

Former Stanford great Mark Madsen '00 is taking over as a head coach for the D-League Los Angeles D-Fenders after a one-year assistant coaching stint on the Farm. (KYLE TERADA/StanfordPhoto.com)
Former Stanford great Mark Madsen ’00 is taking over as a head coach for the D-League Los Angeles D-Fenders after a one-year assistant coaching stint on the Farm. (KYLE TERADA/StanfordPhoto.com)

“I am very grateful for the opportunity that Coach Dawkins gave me to join the Stanford program and learn under his direction and mentorship,” Madsen said. “I appreciate the support, encouragement and feedback of Coach Dawkins in particular over the past several weeks during this decision-making process. I whole-heartedly express my personal gratitude not only to Coach Dawkins, but to every player, staff member and coach I had the chance to work with this year. I also look forward to following the team’s success next year and wish them the best of luck.”

A two-time All-American on the Farm, “Mad Dog” was a member of the 1998 Final Four team and averaged 10.9 points and 7.9 rebounds for his Cardinal career while ranking among the school’s top-10 all-time performers in field goal percentage (fourth at 58.7 percent), and total rebounds (sixth with 857).

Madsen went on to play in the NBA for nine seasons, including a stint as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers for three seasons, helping the franchise capture two consecutive championships in 2001 and 2002. He gained notoriety for his dance moves at the Lakers’ Championship Parade, and was a fan favorite throughout his time in L.A.

After retiring from the NBA, Madsen worked as an assistant coach in the D-League with the Utah Flash in 2009-10 before returning to Stanford and earning his MBA from the Graduate School of Business in Public Management in 2012.

Stanford head coach Johnny Dawkins hired Madsen as an assistant coach for the 2012-2013 season, and noted that he was particularly happy for Madsen to be moving up the coaching ladder.

“I am truly excited to see Mark earn an opportunity to be a head coach at the professional level,” Dawkins said. “Mark proved to be a terrific role model for our student-athletes on and off the court while several of our post players improved tremendously under his guidance. Mark’s professionalism and enthusiasm were invaluable assets to our program over the past year.”

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Jenna Rich breaks Stanford Softball’s career RBI record in win over Cal https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/03/jenna-rich-breaks-stanford-softballs-career-rbi-record-in-win-over-cal/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/03/jenna-rich-breaks-stanford-softballs-career-rbi-record-in-win-over-cal/#respond Sat, 04 May 2013 04:25:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076950 Senior shortstop Jenna Rich continued her assault on the Stanford Softball career record book, breaking the all-time record for RBI with a three-run home run on Friday night against Cal.

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Senior shortstop Jenna Rich continued her assault on the Stanford Softball career record book, breaking the all-time record for RBI with a three-run home run on Friday night against Cal.

Senior Jenna Rich broke the all-time program record for RBI on Friday night. (SIMON WARBY/The Stanford Daily)
Senior Jenna Rich broke the all-time program record for RBI on Friday night. (SIMON WARBY/The Stanford Daily)

The El Segundo, Calif. native jumped on the first pitch she saw from Nisa Ontiveros in the third inning, sending it the other way and out of Berkeley’s Levine-Fricke field. It was Rich’s 43rd career home run, and the three RBI were enough to break Sarah Beeson’s school record of 201, set in 2002.

Stanford upset the No. 13 Bears 13-5, and Rich finished the game 3-5 with four RBI. She now has 204 in her career.

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Former Stanford basketball star Jason Collins comes out in historic announcement https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/29/jason-collins-stanford-star-first-openly-gay-athlete-nb/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/29/jason-collins-stanford-star-first-openly-gay-athlete-nb/#respond Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:29:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076806 Former Stanford basketball star Jason Collins '01 became the first active male athlete in a major US professional sport to come out, an historic announcement revealed today in a story for Sports Illustrated.

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“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

With 10 short words, former Stanford basketball star Jason Collins ’01 became the first active male athlete in a major U.S. professional sport to come out, a historic announcement revealed today in a story for Sports Illustrated.

“I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport,” Collins wrote in the first-person article. “But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, ‘I’m different.’ If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.”

Former Stanford star Jason Collins came out publicly today in a landmark announcement for gay athletes in professional sports (Photo courtesy of Stanford Athletics).
Former Stanford star Jason Collins came out publicly today in a landmark announcement for gay athletes in professional sports (Photo courtesy of Stanford Athletics).

Initial responses to Collins’ announcement were overwhelmingly positive, with NBA star Kobe Bryant tweeting “Proud of @jasoncollins34. Don’t suffocate who u r because of the ignorance of others #courage #support #mambaarmystandup #BYOU.” That tweet so far has garnered over 26,000 retweets and was favorited more than 9,000 times in the first two hours after it was posted.

NBA commissioner David Stern was also quick to support the 34-year-old Collins, who is currently a free agent after spending last season with the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards.

“As [deputy commissioner] Adam Silver and I said to Jason, we have known the Collins family since Jason and Jarron joined the NBA in 2001 and they have been exemplary members of the NBA family,” Stern said in a statement. “Jason has been a widely respected player and teammate throughout his career, and we are proud he has assumed the leadership mantle on this very important issue.”

Collins’ twin brother Jarron ’01 summed up his feelings simply.

“At the end of the day, this is what matters: He’s my brother, he’s a great guy and I want him to be happy. I’ll love him, and I’ll support him, and, if necessary, I’ll protect him.”

But the announcement is having an equally large impact outside of the professional basketball bubble. Chelsea Clinton ’01 was a classmate of Collins and tweeted, “Very proud of my friend Jason Collins for having the strength & courage to be the first openly gay player in the NBA.”

Her father, former President Bill Clinton, also voiced his support.

“Jason’s announcement today is an important moment for professional sports and in the history of the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community,” he said in a statement. “It is also the straightforward statement of a good man who wants no more than what so many of us seek: to be able to be who we are, to do our work, to build families and to contribute to our communities.”

Drafted by the New Jersey Nets with the 18th pick of the 2001 NBA Draft, the seven-foot-tall Collins is a self-described enforcer on the court with career averages of 3.6 points and 3.8 rebounds in 11 years in the NBA. But his gritty defense and reputation for doing the dirty work on both ends of the court endeared him to coaches and fans alike. Collins came off the bench as a rookie to help Richard Jefferson and Jason Kidd lead the Nets to the best finish in franchise history and a berth in the NBA Finals. He became the starting center the next season, when the Nets lost in the Finals once again.

It was in his years on the Farm when he really shined on the court, however.

A rash of injuries, including a dislocated wrist and knee surgery, limited Collins in his first years for Stanford. But paired up with 6-foot-11 Jarron and finally healthy, Jason led Stanford to the Elite Eight in 2001. He was named to the All-Pac-10 First Team and was an All-American after leading the Cardinal in rebounding (7.8 rebounds per game) and finishing second on the team in scoring (14.5 points per game).

Jason finished his collegiate career averaging 10.8 ppg and 7.8 rpg, and his career field goal percentage of .608 put him first in the Cardinal record book of those with enough attempts to qualify.

Stanford assistant coach Mark Madsen, a teammate of Jason for three years before heading to the NBA, tweeted a response to the news earlier this morning, writing, “Played NBA +college w/ @Jasoncollins34 -tremendous human being and PHENOMENAL teammate, leader, friend. Look forward 2his continued success!”

“Jason Collins is one of the greatest people you will ever meet in your life,” Madsen said in a press release. “He is one of my all-time favorite teammates, both here at Stanford and for one season together in the NBA with Minnesota. What stands out to me about Jason is his leadership and sense of humor. Even at Stanford, Jason was involved with campus life outside of basketball.

“On NBA teams, he was a guy who kept everything loose and was able to bridge a lot of different gaps, whether it was international players, veterans or rookies. Basketball does not define Jason Collins. His decision to come out publicly doesn’t define Jason Collins. What defines Jason is, he is a first-rate human being who made a huge contribution to this University and every team or community he has been a part of.”

Stanford Athletic Director Bernard Muir similarly gave Collins his support in a written statement released today.”I am proud to hear that Jason, one of our Stanford sons, has taken a leadership role on this topic,” Muir said.

“Now I’m a free agent, literally and figuratively,” Collins wrote. “I’ve reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful.”

Collins’ revelation did not come without some negative backlash. Several posts on Twitter referenced Jason’s penchant for post play with crude references to his sexual orientation. User @DanielG93435786 tweeted, “I know know why Jason Collins liked basketball…bumping with other men in the paint, fag.” 

Sports radio personality Mike Francesca drew criticism for saying on air, “It means less than nothing to me that there is a gay player now out in the NBA. SI going to reveal this this week in—I don’t know why—I guess a dramatic attempt to sell a magazine, I guess.”

ESPN basketball analyst Chris Broussard also noted that he has talked to some players in the NBA who “would be a little uncomfortable with [Collins’ sexual orientation], particularly in the shower.”

Those sentiments are likely to be reduced to little more than whispers, however, as few people are “going to come out and say anything publicly because of the climate we live in,” Broussard said.

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Evidence of further plagiarism by former Review columnist surfaces https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/22/evidence-of-former-stanford-review-writer-plagiarizing-other-texts-in-columns/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/22/evidence-of-former-stanford-review-writer-plagiarizing-other-texts-in-columns/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:17:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076596 After a former Stanford Review columnist came under fire last week for alleged plagiarism in a 2012 article, evidence of further plagiarism in some of the columnist’s other articles has come to light.

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After a former Stanford Review columnist came under fire last week for alleged plagiarism in a 2012 article, evidence of further plagiarism in some of the columnist’s other articles has come to light. As of Sunday night, all but one story attributed to the former columnist—Vasant Ramachandran ’11 M.S. ’12—had been removed from The Review’s website.

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The original controversy centered on a 2012 Review article—Should College Athletes Get Paid? by Ramachandran—which bore extensive similarities to a 2006 article—The Other Side: College Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid, by Dan Cassavaugh—published in Imprint Magazine.

While that article was quickly removed from The Review’s website on Thursday, The Daily used an online plagiarism checker tool to examine the other stories listed on Ramachandran’s Review archive.

The checker highlighted two of 15 stories written by Ramachandran as containing “possible plagiarism.” Daily editors subsequently compared the original articles line-by-line with Ramachandran’s works, both of which offered fairly clear evidence of plagiarism from the previously published sources.

In a May 2011 column titled Conservative Prison Reform: Less Crime, Less Waste, Ramachandran wrote about conservative lawmakers latching onto prison reform in a piece that bore extensive similarities to a Los Angeles Times article—on the same subject—written four months earlier.

In addition to sharing a nearly identical tone, structure and message, one paragraph was in effect lifted directly from the earlier article, with the only alteration to a complex concluding sentence being the addition of quotation marks.

Another of Ramachandran’s columns, which was published in February 2011 and which focused on fixing California’s rising high school dropout rate, offers similar indications of plagiarism, borrowing from a piece by Tom Elias that had been published by The Record Searchlight a few weeks before Ramachandran’s column.

For one sentence, only the beginning’s structure and a few of the connecting words have been changed. Another section offers more differences between Ramachandran’s column and Elias’ piece, but retains—unaltered—a phrase commenting on “the rise of charter schools and the proliferation of private schools.”

Current Review Editor in Chief Judith Romea ’14 made the decision to remove the remainder of Ramachandran’s articles from The Review’s site over the weekend until their staff could check them for signs of plagiarism.

“We took them [all of Ramachandran’s articles] down to ensure that they did not contain any other evidence of plagiarism,” Romea said. “The ones that we deem to be original we will put back up immediately.”

Kevin Baumgartner ’11, who was The Review’s opinion editor from February to June 2011, said that he was able to find Ramachandran’s original rough draft on the California high school dropout rate. According to Baumgartner, that draft was also flagged as “possibly plagiarized” by an online plagiarism detection tool.

“The evidence you’ve presented is overwhelming,” he wrote in an email to The Daily, “and I’m forced to conclude that the [three articles] you highlighted were probably plagiarized. To the best of my knowledge, the Review had no policy mandating plagiarism checks for any section, neither during my term nor during the tenure of my immediate predecessor.”

“Obviously, I should have been more diligent,” Baumgartner added. “I regret being involved in this incident and apologize on behalf of the 2010-2011 Review. I am confident that the current Review leadership will respond to this incident quickly and firmly, and I hope that they will consider tightening the pre-publication editing and assessment process.”

Romea said that The Review will release an official statement this morning. As of Sunday evening, The Daily has not been able to reach Ramachandran for comment.

 

Sam Fisher contributed to this report.

The two articles above, and the first column discovered on Thursday, were the only potential incidents of plagiarism flagged by the free version of the online checker used by The Daily.

 

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Defending champion Stanford to host Stephen F. Austin in NIT https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/17/defending-champ-stanford-to-host-stephen-austin-in-nit/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/17/defending-champ-stanford-to-host-stephen-austin-in-nit/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 03:43:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075916 Stanford men's basketball might have missed out on the midnight train to Georgia (the Final Four is in Atlanta), but the Cardinal will open the defense of its National Invitational Tournament title on Tuesday night at 8 p.m. at home against Stephen F. Austin.

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Stanford men’s basketball might have missed out on the midnight train to Georgia (the Final Four is in Atlanta), but the Cardinal will open the defense of its National Invitational Tournament title on Tuesday night at home against Stephen F. Austin.

A four-seed in the NIT after losing to Arizona State in the first round of the Pac-12 Tournament last week, Stanford (18-4, 9-9 Pac-12) is hoping to follow in the footsteps of St. John’s (1943, 1944) and South Carolina (2005, 2006) as the only teams to capture back-to-back NIT championships. The Cardinal rode junior Aaron Bright to last year’s title, defeating Minnesota 75-51 in the championship game.

But the opening-round matchup with SFA will be a battle. The Lumberjacks (27-4, 16-2 Southland Conference)) have the most wins in the 32-team field, and was destined for the NCAA Tournament until Northwestern State made a second half run and pulled out a 68-66 upset win over the `Jacks in the championship game of the Southland Conference Tournament on Saturday.

In addition, SFA upset Oklahoma (a No. 10 seed in the NCAA Tournament) earlier this year on the road in Norman, Okla.

(Bob Drebin/stanfordphoto.com)
(Bob Drebin/stanfordphoto.com)

The ‘Jacks aren’t usually in the NIT, having played in the tournament just three times and not since 2008 when they lost to UMass in the opening round.

“Our guys have put together a very special season, and we cannot forget that it is not over yet,” SFA coach Danny Kaspar said. “We came up just short of our ultimate goal of the NCAA Tournament, but these guys still have earned a conference championship ring and have a chance to make some noise in the NIT.”

Stanford is 35-20 all-time in 23 postseason appearances overall, including 12-4 in six NIT appearances. The Card is 3-1 all-time against teams from the Southland Conference, most recently defeating Central Arkansas 91-52 last season, but this will be the first meeting between Stanford and Stephen F. Austin.

The first three rounds are played at campus sites, with the semifinals and championship game played at Madison Square Garden in New York on April 2-4. A win over the Lumberjacks would send Stanford to the second round against either No. 1 seed Alabama or No. 8 Northeastern. Maryland, Iowa and Virginia (bubble teams for the NCAA Tournament) are all on Stanford’s half of the draw, with Kentucky, Arizona State, Washington and Tennessee all on the other side of the bracket.

Tickets for Tuesday’s game will go on sale Monday, March 18, at 9 a.m. Courtside seating is priced at $30, lower level reserved seating is priced at $15 and upper level general admission is $10 ($8 for children and seniors). Admission is free for all Stanford students. Tickets can be purchased online at www.gostanford.com, by calling 1-800-STANFORD or in person at the Stanford Athletic Ticket Office.

Tipoff from Maples Pavilion will be at 8 p.m. and televised on ESPN2.

 

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Stanford loses overtime heartbreaker to Arizona State at Pac-12 Tournament https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/13/stanford-loses-overtime-heartbreaker-to-arizona-state-89-88-at-pac-12-tournament/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/13/stanford-loses-overtime-heartbreaker-to-arizona-state-89-88-at-pac-12-tournament/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:50:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075879 Stanford men’s basketball team has known for several weeks that the only path to the program’s first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2008 was winning four games in four days to earn an automatic berth at the Pac-12 Tournament. The Cardinal didn’t get past Day One, losing a thrilling overtime game against Arizona State 89-88 on Wednesday afternoon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

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Las Vegas — Stanford men’s basketball team has known for several weeks that the only path to the program’s first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2008 was winning four games in four days to earn an automatic berth at the Pac-12 Tournament. The Cardinal (18-14) didn’t get past Day One, losing a thrilling overtime game against Arizona State 89-88 on Wednesday afternoon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

The Pac-12 Tournament at the MGM Grand Garden Arena (MILES BENNETT-SMITH/ The Stanford Daily)
The Pac-12 Tournament at the MGM Grand Garden Arena (MILES BENNETT-SMITH/ The Stanford Daily)

The first half was a series of back-and-forth pushes by both teams without either really gaining the upper hand. Sun Devils freshman guard Jahii Carson had a coming out party, the conference’s Co-Freshman of the Year showing real star potential as he flashed a variety of hesitation dribbles, step backs and lay-ups on his way to a game-high 34 points—he also set the record for most points by a freshman in tournament history.

Stanford’s initial man-to-man defense was no match for Carson’s quickness, and the Card’s attempt to play zone backfired as the Sun Devils hit shots from all over. ASU (21-11) was 11-22 from behind the arc as a team, while Carson, Carrick Felix and Jonathan Gilling went 10-15 from three-point range.

Carson himself hit 14 of 22 shots and had four assists while just missing the school freshman record of 35 points.

“We tried to squeeze the court on Jahii Carson to shrink the floor so he doesn’t see as much space, and he was still able to squeeze through gaps and made plays,” Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins said. “He was that good.”

But what put the Cardinal in a hole was the team’s inability to capitalize on the few miscues the Sun Devils made. With a chance to cut a four-point lead to two at the 5:48 mark in the second half, senior Gabe Harris and junior Aaron Bright weren’t on the same page on a two-on-one fast break and ASU took the missed layup the other way to kill Stanford’s momentum and push the lead back to six.

Likewise, when Bright hit a layup and then drained another three (one of a career-high six on the afternoon) to cut the lead to just one with 4:25 to play, Stanford gave up a Carson jump shot and then allowed ASU to convert another Cardinal turnover into an easy layup.

Down by eight with a minute and a half to play, Stanford was forced to foul Arizona State intentionally and hope the Sun Devils missed free throws. They did, at least initially, as Evan Gordon made four straight from the line. But then Bright dropped in another three-ball, Gordon missed the front end of a one-and-one and Huestis drained a three to cut the lead to 77-75 with 53 seconds remaining.

When Stanford fouled Gilling, one of ASU’s best shooters, however, and he calmly sank two more from the line, the Card was in need of a miracle down by four points and just 45 seconds to go.

Bright delivered.

In what should go down as Stanford’s best play of the year, the Seattle native came down the right side of the floor and launched a deep three. The shot was clean, but Gilling could not say the same about his close out, knocking Bright down and sending him to the line with a chance to tie things up at 79. Bright knocked down the Cardinal’s only free-throw attempt of the game (no typo), and the few hundred Stanford fans who had made the trip down from the Farm roared in approval.

A strong defensive possession for the Card forced Carson into a tough look at the buzzer, and the game went to overtime with the Sun Devils seemingly shocked to have blown an eight-point advantage in under a minute and a half.

And it looked like ASU was still a little shell-shocked as the extra period began. Powell stole the tip-off and battled for several boards before hitting a jump shot to give Stanford an 81-79 lead at the 3:33 mark. Another block from Huestis (his sixth of the game) gave Stanford the ball back with an opportunity to really put pressure on the Sun Devils.

Powell’s turnover ended that threat, however, and Carson made Stanford pay with a three-pointer that put ASU back on top with two minutes to play.

This time, there was no miracle comeback.

Another turnover, this time by senior Andy Brown, led to a layup for Carson, and although Huestis tipped in a loose ball to cut the lead to one, Stanford again had to hope Arizona State missed free throws down the stretch and this time they did not. Gordon went 5-6 at the line in the final 27 seconds and Huestis hit a meaningless three-pointer as the buzzer sounded to provide the final margin, 89-88.

“They played with a sense of desperation,” Dawkins said, “and really stepped up and made shots.”

It was almost a fitting end for a Stanford season filled with bitter losses. The Cardinal slipped to 2-6 in games decided by five points or fewer, and are likely destined for a second-straight season in the NIT, which they won last year.

“We’ve been in a lot of close games,” Dawkins said, “and that’s good thing. We have to learn how to close those games. Some of that comes down to maturity, some of that comes down to guys stepping up and making plays that are there to be made. I thought Aaron is a prime example of that. We don’t look like we have a chance to win that game, he steps up hit a big three that turned into four. That’s stepping up and hitting a big play.

“And that’s what we have to do, and we have to grow into that. Guys have to learn how to do that. You’re fortunate if you have a Jahii Carson, but there aren’t that many Jahii Carson’s in the country. That’s something that guys develop that as they grow up and mature, and that’s part of the process,” Dawkins said.

Powell, who was named the most improved player in the conference and earned a spot on the All-Pac-12 First Team, had 23 points, nine rebounds and four assists. Bright had 27, Huestis had 17 and junior John Gage had 13, but just five players scored a point for the Cardinal in the game, and only Bright attempted a free-throw (ASU had 17 attempts). That negated Stanford’s lead from behind the arc (15 made to 11 for the Sun Devils) and slight edge in rebounds and assists.

“We had to get to the line more,” Bright said. “I thought in the first half we settled for jump shots instead of just attacking, and that’s what they did to us. They drove the ball and they got to the line more, which is a big part of winning.”

Bright also talked after the game about missing out on a chance to make the NCAA Tournament.

“That’s everybody’s goal before the season starts to make the [NCAA] tourney,” he said. “Whatever tournament that we get into and whatever opportunity that we have, we’re going to try to fulfill it.”

With just one senior out of eligibility next season (Harris), Stanford will have one more year to put the pieces together and return to March Madness.

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Pac-12 Tournament: Stanford loses thriller to Arizona State in overtime, 89-88 https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/13/pac-12-tournament-stanford-vs-arizona-state/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/13/pac-12-tournament-stanford-vs-arizona-state/#respond Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:01:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075865 Hello and welcome to The Daily’s liveblog of the 2013 Men's Pac-12 Tournament and the first round matchup between No. 8 seed Stanford and No. 9 seed Arizona State. Wisconsin. We’ll be updating this page with instant coverage and analysis. Please refresh this page for the most recent updates. All times are Pacific.

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Hello and welcome to The Daily’s liveblog of the 2013 Men’s Pac-12 Tournament and the first round matchup between No. 8 seed Stanford and No. 9 seed Arizona State. Wisconsin. We’ll be updating this page with instant coverage and analysis. Please refresh this page for the most recent updates. All times are Pacific.

2:16: Huestis hits a three-pointer as time expires, so the final score is Arizona State 89- Stanford 88. Tough loss for the Cardinal to swallow as they lose yet another one-point game and one in which they had a late lead.

2:15 PM: ASU misses the first, but hits the second, and with eight seconds to go it’s all but over for the Cardinal. A missed shot goes out of bounds and Stanford has the ball with 1.5 to go. Still down 89-85.

2:14 PM: Gage gets two back with a tip in, but still little hope here in overtime.

2:14 PM: John Gage throws the ball away into the hands of an ASU defender and it’s a wrap at MGM arena with fifteen seconds to play and ASU up by 5.

2:13 PM: ASU gets it in, might have committed a backcourt violation but it isn’t called. Then Gordon hits two free throws when Stanford fouls, and now has the ball back. Here we go, down by three need a good look.

2:11 PM: ASU almost does’t get the ball inbounds, forced to call timeout with 40.1 to go and try once more to inbounds. They can’t get it in again and once more have to call timeout. This is insane. INSANE.

2:10 PM: Here we go. Bright and Carson dueling at MGM arena. Bright has 27, Carson with 34. Powell with 23. Who will ASU go to though?

2:06 PM: And down the stretch we go! Randle with a great hesitation and head fake, misses at the rim but Huestis there for the follow up. 84-83 ASU with 40 seconds to go. To foul or not to foul??

2:05 PM: Carson responds with a big three to give the Sun Devils a one-point lead with 1:35 to play.

2:02 PM: Huestis and Powell send Carson away at the rim. Huestis manning up today, now with six blocks in the game.

2:00 PM: Stanford wins tip but can’t covert on offense. Powell is HACKED down low but can’t get a whistle. He goes to the half hook and its all net.

1:56 PM: I don’t believe it. Stanford forces overtime as ASU can’t hit a contested three-ball at the buzzer. After being left for dead, this game has five more minutes to play.

1:55 PM: UNBELIEVABLE!!! BRIGHT HITS A THREE AND IS FOULED. TIE GAME 79-79 with 38 seconds to play. IS THIS REAL LIFE??

1:54 PM: Woah woah woah, ASU misses a free throw, Huestis gets a friendly roll and it’s a two-point game!!!

1:52 PM: Card trying to make it interesting as Bright hits a three to cut lead to five, but just 1:03 left now. ASU will have to miss free throws for Stanford to have any hope. One foul away from the double bonus as well. Stanford calls its last timeout. Also, timeouts today seem to be like three times as long. More time for the Cardinal to stew over missed opportunities.

1:51 PM: Stanford forced to foul down the stretch here, and Sun Devils making free throws. 77-69 with 1:10 to play.

1:49 PM: Sun Devils up by eight with 1:25 to play.

(Bob Drebin/stanfordphoto.com)
(Bob Drebin/stanfordphoto.com)

1:45 PM: Jahii Carson stepping up big in his first tournament game. 29 points after two big buckets to give ASU a six-point lead.

1:37 PM: Bright with a BIG three. Stanford down by just one. ASU comes back and scores, but we have a legitimate barnburner on our hands here in Vegas. With 3:41 to play it’s now 68-65.

1:36 PM: Harris still killing it on defense, forcing a turnover and now Stanford down by four with the ball and just over four to play.

1:35 PM: Important sequence blown by the Card, as Harris with a steal and then he and Bright bungle the ensuing 2-on-1. ASU comes right back down and makes the Card pay. 66-60 with 5 to play.

1:33 PM: Jahii now has 20 points, and Stanford is doing well on the offensive end but still struggling to contain ASU on defense. 62-57 with six to play.

1:29 PM: It’s a three-guard lineup on the floor for Stanford with Harris, Bright and Randle. They throw inside to Powell for, imagine that, an easy lay up. FEED HIM.

1:22 PM: Nasty, nasty, nasty dunk from Dwight Powell. Bright misses a runner and Dwight is there to go up and SLAM it down. Dirty. You might see that one on SportsCenter. But ASU still with a four-point lead…and time’s running out.

1:20 PM: Stanford has to close out on shooters. I don’t know what else to say. Gilling hits another bomb in the corner as the shot clock winds down.

1:17 PM: Sun Devils faithful whistle in appreciation as ASU is locked in from behind the arc. Another three-ball gives them a six-point lead at 49-43 with 13:36 to play. Not bad when you’re 8-15 from behind the arc. Stanford must find a way to shut that part of ASU’s offense down because it is going to knock them out of the tournament in a hurry.

1:15 PM: ASU back to a three-point lead, but then Aaron Bright with a highlight-reel behind the back fake out and layup to cut the lead back to just one.

1:12 PM: Corner three by Randle makes it 41 all, and Stanford is hanging in there. Where is John Gage?

1:08 PM: Sun Devils bounce back quickly. Gilling hits a three and freshman Jahii Carson continues to prove he is the real deal, as he now has 16 points and is all over the floor. 41-38 ASU

1:05 PM: Back under way at MGM arena, and Stanford comes out firing. Huestis showing how much he has improved as a shooter with a pure three-point jumper and the Card retakes the lead, 36-35.

12:53 PM: Back to basketball. Stanford led by Powell, Bright and Gage. DP33 has 11, Bright and Gage with 8. Card needs to clean up on the glass better in the second half. Also need to close out better on ASU’s three-point shooters, which are 5-8 from downtown and killed Stanford’s momentum several times. Huestis is protecting the paint well, however, with five blocks and four boards. Dawkins should go back to Powell and Huestis inside and then let them kick out to the shooters as opposed to swinging the ball around and then ending up with tough looks.

12:52 PM: The cast of Rock of Ages performing Journey on the floor for halftime. Crowd not into it. Pretty brutal as more like a wannabe High School Musical concert. Great voices though…

12:47 PM: Harris forced to throw up a deep three with shot clock expiring, ASU can’t convert with 2.8 seconds to play and we go to the half ASU 35, Stanford 33.

12:45 PM: Gabe Harris draws a charge on a fast break with 40 seconds in the half. Big play giving Stanford a chance to tie things up or take the lead going into halftime.

12:35 PM: Plenty of reasons why the Card has climbed back into the game, but the play of senior Gabe Harris has definitely been one of them. Solid contribution off the bench, active hands on defense.

12:29 PM: Stanford getting bailed out on offense with a lot of whistles from the referees. ASU fans not pleased, and maybe not unreasonably with several no-calls on Stanford.

12:26 PM: 6:52 left in first half, Arizona State leads Stanford 31-24. Sun Devils still hot from the floor, shooting 61.9% and 5-6 from long range.

12:22 PM: Don’t look now but Arizona State has scored 10 unanswered points to take a 23-16 lead with 10:33 on the clock. Sun Devils 10-18 from field, Cardinal 7-17.

12:20 PM: Arizona State’s Jahii Carson with nine early points on 4-4 shooting. Stanford limited Carson to 15 points on 7-16 shooting back in January.

12:14 PM: ASU can’t miss either though, as Jahii Carson hits quick back to back buckets to tie things up at 11. Finally at the first media timeout, Arizona State leading 18-16 with 12:53 to play. Stanford shooting 7-11 from the field, Arizona State 8-13. Both teams with a couple three-pointers in a closely-contested first 7 minutes.

12:09 PM: Stanford getting some good looks early on. Cardinal shooting 4 of 5 as Huestis knocks down a jumper for the first basket of the game, Powell gets two quick looks and we’re off and running.

12:06 PM: 15th consecutive game with starting lineup of Aaron Bright, Chasson Randle, Andy Brown, Josh Huestis and Dwight Powell. That fivesome has an 8-6 record in previous 14 games.

12:05 PM: A rousing national anthem and starting lineups out of the way and now Stanford turns to business. This is and every game this week is a must-win for the Cardinal if it has any hope of getting to the NCAA Tourney.

12:01 PM: We are in the building, and the building is huge. The MGM Grand is hosting the tournament this year and plenty of fans from all over the conference packing the lobby. Not so much in the arena itself, which went with a shade of aqua marine for its seats that would be better noticed on TLC’s “What not to wear.” Seriously.

 

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Adam Jahn breaks through for first professional goal with Earthquakes, a candidate for MLS Player of the Week https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/11/jahn-scores-earthquakes-win-mls-player-of-wee/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/11/jahn-scores-earthquakes-win-mls-player-of-wee/#respond Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:21:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075779 Coming on in the 66th minute of San Jose's marquee matchup against the New York Red Bulls on ESPN2 on Sunday night, Jahn endeared himself to the Earthquakes faithful, as well as coach Frank Yallop, with a late equalizing strike that is a finalist for MLS Goal of the Week. Not bad for someone who didn't have a bio in the game notes.

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Stanford men’s soccer fans are used to seeing Adam Jahn’s name on the scoresheet. A product of Jesuit High School in Sacramento, Calif., Jahn ’13 found the back of the net 13 times in 2012 to lead the Cardinal and the Pac-12. But what really piqued the interest of several MLS teams was the combination of Jahn’s 6-foot-3 frame with his delicate touch and deft skill on the ball.

After being passed over in the MLS’ SuperDraft, the San Jose Earthquakes liked enough of what they saw to draft Jahn in the Supplemental Draft. A strong preseason and injuries to several Quakes attackers gave Jahn a window of opening through which he climbed nimbly onto the first team roster.

Coming on in the 66th minute of San Jose’s marquee matchup against the New York Red Bulls on ESPN2 on Sunday night, Jahn endeared himself to the Earthquakes faithful, as well as coach Frank Yallop, with a late equalizing strike that is a finalist for MLS Goal of the Week. Not bad for someone who didn’t have a bio in the game notes.

“It’s unreal,” Jahn said after the game. “I can’t really describe it. I’m in shock right now.”

His lunging, sliding volley met Sam Cronin’s cross at the back post and flew just under the crossbar.

“Before I went in, our coaching staff told me, ‘Just get in the box, fight for balls,’” Jahn said. “So I just went back into the thick of things. And I noticed a lot of people were making good runs near post, so I just peeled around to the back. Sam Cronin played a beautiful ball and I was just there to tap it in.”

Just minutes later, Jahn, a three-time All-Pac-12 Second Team selection and 2012 First Team pick on the Farm, rose to meet another cross and earned what would turn into the game’s decisive penalty kick when his flick was handled by the Red Bulls in the box. A native of  El Macero, Calif., Jahn certainly is no stranger to highlight-reel finishes–his chested half-volley last season was certainly up there with the best in the Pac-12 campaign and he notched his first collegiate hat trick in his last collegiate action at California.

But even he was at a loss for words when asked whether he he could remember a goal as special as this his first professional goal.

“Not quite that awesome,” Jahn admitted. “That was pretty special.”

Find the full game recap on www.sjearthquakes.com

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Hennessy, tech industrialist look to future of computing https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/09/hennessy-tech-industrialist-talk-computing/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/09/hennessy-tech-industrialist-talk-computing/#respond Sat, 09 Mar 2013 10:50:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075719 The Daily sat down with John Hennessy and Hossein Yassaie to talk about the acquisition as well as the history of MIPS and the realities of information technology and startup companies.

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After seven years as a professor in the electrical engineering department, President John Hennessy took a sabbatical from Stanford in 1984 to found MIPS Computer Systems Inc. and commercialize his work with RISC processing. The company went public shortly thereafter and enjoyed great success as the pioneer of MIPS architecture. Sir Hossein Yassaie is the CEO of Imagination Technologies Group, which acquired MIPS Technologies last year to use in future CPU development.

The Daily sat down with both Hennessy and Yassaie to talk about the acquisition as well as the history of MIPS and the realities of the semiconductor IP (intellectual property) business and startup companies.

 

(IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily)
(IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily)

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Can you just explain a little bit about how things happened with the early days of your company and what led up to this point with the MIPS technology?

John Hennessy (JH): The MIPS [Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages] architecture had its roots in a research project here at Stanford started in the early 1980s with the simple question: What would the age of single chip CPUs mean for how we should design processors? Stanford, together with Berkeley and IBM, really…stumbled upon an incredible discovery about a better way to design instruction sets for modern computers than had been previously thought about.

And I say “stumbled upon” because really what happened was the constraints of having to fit a processor with the limited number of transistors at that time meant that we had to rethink the whole process of how to design the interface between the software system and the hardware system. That’s what led to the fundamental discovery, but I think it wasn’t until some years later that people really realized how fundamental it was.

In fact, in the beginning there was a lot of skepticism. The IBM project was kept secret for many years, and people didn’t know about it. And it became very easy for many people in the industry to say, “This is a bunch of crazy academics here — this isn’t really a great idea.” It had to prove itself over time.

In more recent times, the emergence of the embedded computer space, with everything from smartphones and tablets to all kinds of smart desktops to really high-end computer video game systems, has meant that an architecture that could deliver a combination of high performance low cost and be able to operate in a regime with low power had real advantages.

What emerged were the second-generation advantages of the RISC [Reduced instruction set computing] approach that we piloted here and at the other institutions. That’s in fact been the driver for the last few years as the computing world has shifted increasingly away from desktops and big machines to things that people carry around or they use in many ways outside of the context of a normal computing task. So that’s sort of a capsule history of 25 or so years with.

We started the company not because we wanted to be entrepreneurs. We were, in fact, reluctant entrepreneurs — we started the company originally because a famous computer scientist convinced us that, if we didn’t start the company, the technology would just languish on the shelves. [The technology] was very threatening to the existing players out there and their machines, and if they adopted this technology, it was going to obsolete their products.

Gordon Bell was then the founder of the second-largest computer company [Digital Equipment Corporation], and he said, “You’ve got to go do this yourself, otherwise you’re going to have a bunch of papers sitting on a shelf that nobody’s ever going to use.” And, in retrospect, it turned out to be very insightful.

Digital Equipment Corporation actually had a person working with us on sabbatical and when they wanted to take the research and transfer it to their headquarters back East, they couldn’t convince the people to take it. IBM cancelled their first attempts with the technology.

In fact, one of the founders of MIPS helped me found the company, because when IBM cancelled the project, he so believed in this technology that he said, “I’m not going back to IBM. If you guys want to do something here, I’m in.”

And, at the time, people were making big computers that cost a lot of money. Room-sized. And we were talking an improvement by a factor of five in cost, conservatively, and maybe a factor of 10. So it was a big change. People were thinking, “Well, I’ll just sell fewer computers, and I’ll make less money,” instead of saying, “Suppose you delivered that much power — what could it do in terms of what could it do and how many people could afford them?” They didn’t see that, and it was early on.

And that’s another reason I say it often takes an entrepreneur to really take it out there, somebody’s who is really been involved in the creation of something. If you’re involved in it, you see the glass as half full. Yeah, there are some problems to be solved, but the key insight is there. Everybody else sees the glass as half empty and says, “This isn’t going to work. This is a research project.”

I still remember this funny story — I was on a panel with Dave Patterson, who was doing a similar project at Berkeley with IBM. And somebody says to him, just after we had started the company, “You know Hennessy here on the panel? He just got a million dollars to invest from the venture capitalists, and he’s going to start this company. If this technology’s not going to work, what should he do? Take the money and go to South America.” [Laughing]

 

TSD: How does acquiring MIPS accelerate your activities at Imagination, and what was the thinking behind the move?

Hossein Yassaie (HY): We fundamentally believe that the processor market is a big market and is an area that is growing. As I think John touched on, this market started with areas such as game consoles and embedded applications and then mobile phones happened and tablets, which is a very big area.

On the horizon, everyone talks about connected devices and Internet of Things. We went from tens of millions to hundreds of millions to a few billion, and now I think we’re heading toward tens of billions of things which are clever and smart so the processor business is very important for us.

We’re a key IP company with significant customers, so we’ve had our own processor development internally since 1995, and it’s very much a philosophy along the same lines as MIPS that we were working on in terms of multithreading and RISC architectures. But it’s just in the last year in discussion with the MIPS executives and team [that] it became clear that there is a mechanism for us acquiring MIPS in a structure that means we double the team size.

We [had] about 200 people on our processor team, and now we’re double that, and that combination means [that], in terms of capability and know-how, and the additional ecosystems MIPS brings to us — particularly with the fact that MIPS is in the Android tree — our process of getting where we want to be with the processor technology scaled up, both in times of resources and where we are in the marketplace.

 

TSD: There was some speculation in the early 1990s that MIPS and other powerful RISC processors would overtake the Intel IA32 architecture for desktop and mobile computers, but this hasn’t really been the case. Were you surprised that this didn’t catch on and why do you think that the architecture never really caught on and has stayed mostly out of the desktop?

JH: I think lots of things evolved as the technology shifted. There are a whole lot of complicated reasons for why things happened on the desktop the way they happened. One of the very hard things to do is to get companies to collaborate, even if by collaboration they would be stronger than if they fractured themselves.

Intel was the big player outside the RISC space, and in the RISC space things just fractured. A couple of times we had a shot at bringing it all together and getting enough players on one platform that you would have a shot at Intel, that never quite happened for a number of complicated political reasons.

Then what happened was the rise of this shift to mobile and embedded technologies — it happened on Internet switches, it happened on desktops, on desktop machines supporting television sets and set-top boxes. And that market and the video game, the high-end video game market just took off. Boom. Exploded.

And all of a sudden that was growing much faster than the main desktop business. And things have shifted dramatically. Now if you look beyond ARM and MIPS, they dominate the rest of that marketplace out there and Intel still has this standardized marketplace. But the advantages that the RISC architectures have in terms of efficiency, both in use of silicon which means they are cheaper and, equally importantly, power. Power has become a big, big issue in these things. Unlike a big computer somewhere [when] you have a fan to cool it [or] you have it plugged into the wall, you don’t have that.

 

TSD: Are those factors you talked about with efficiency things that make MIPS attractive in low-cost markets maybe for the future?

HY: From Imagination’s point of view, we completely agree with the comment John just made about power. One of the major constraints in mobile devices is that there is not a cable that is plugged into power and there is not a fan in there. So you have a set power envelope that you have to live with. And not only that, the demands that consumers have: they want it be to be as good as their PCs.

And actually we’re pretty much there. That’s really, if you look at the history of Imagination, we built our business in the mid-90s saying, “OK, graphics is a big deal for mobile. Against all the odds let’s put our efforts into creating a very powerful solution for mobile and get graphics into the devices and handsets.”

Now going forward, everything needs to be smart, everything needs a CPU and power is still a constraint. We certainly believe MIPS is one of the most efficient architectures that exists on this planet and certainly have expectations and aspirations that it will grow from this base with the help and energy we can put behind and become a big player in the market space.

 

JH: Efficiency has become the key issue — that’s the key phrase. It was less important early on when people were not as cost sensitized. It’s one thing when you’re building computers that cost several thousand dollars. It’s another when you’re building a smartphone that only cost $200 or you’re building an embedded device that may only cost $50 or $25. Then it’s a completely different game.

 

HY: There’s also another interesting thing that has happened recently. If you go back in the early days of say the mobile phone market, a lot of these systems were closed. A particular operating system, a particular manufacturer — it wasn’t really an open market.

With what is out there with Android and the Linux environment that exists, the market is there and as long as there is a good architecture that can deliver the performance and power and cost, amazing things could happen.

The other aspects of this for Imagination is that MIPS is a fantastic architecture, and there are a lot of great people in that company. In the licensing business, stability is very important. Once you have a long-term plan and commitment  behind an architecture and there’s no changes and concerns and issues, then things will change.

Existing markets that MIPS has been in, such as network or set top boxes, wherever MIPS was a key driver, those customers will feel once again much more confident about the future and the security of MIPS.

There’s a lot of people out there, their lives and engineering work in some way have been touched by MIPS. They have true love for the architecture. We’re counting on this to allow us to take MIPS to the highest level of success and glory that is possible.

 

TSD: Do you think attempts at developing the MIPS Architecture are going to happen organically as you try to become more efficient, or are you stepping back to take a direct approach to make bigger leaps and bounds?

HY: From my point of view, both of those things are certainly on the cards. There’s a lot of good stuff about MIPS architecture, one of the amazing things about it is that it’s the first 64-bit microprocessor on the planet. And the world is heading that way fast. So there’s a lot of things you can build on.

But when it comes to low power and efficiency there’s always new things you can add and apply. We certainly plan to build around what is there in terms of the history, knowledge and experience and combine that with what we’ve learned in our work in the mobile space from the graphics or what have you and press on and take this architecture forward.

 

TSD: Now that the technology is out there, how do you balance turning a profit with the need to keep improving and innovating with the architecture?

HY: We are a public company, and I can tell you that, when you are a public company, you have to keep many people happy, internal and external, and it’s a tough challenge. But my approach to these things is that, at the end of the day, I am a mathematician and a scientist and an engineer.

I’m doing what I’m doing because I think there’s a good chance of success. You have to do the right thing. Of course profit and revenue is important, but not at the expense of doing the wrong thing. You have to have a balance — you cannot jeopardize the long-term future for short-term decisions, particularly in the IP business.

We generally have five-year plans, and one of the big things I’ve started is getting my team together and telling them, “Ok guys, it’s time to fix and finalize the roadmap for the next few years. You have to do that and put the investment in, and that’s the nature of the beast. It’s a long-term business with long-term focus but you have to find ways to keep the money side also delivering.

 

JH: I think this is true for not just tech companies, but all companies right now. The fundamentally difficult problem is keeping long-term innovation alive and doing that while keeping your current business running, which you have to do. If you’re a public company, the shareholders will desert you quite quickly.

But all companies have that fundamental problem of how do you keep that innovation engine alive because that’s the secret of growth and taking advantage of new markets and new opportunities.

 

TSD: If you were to go back to when you first started this work, could you have anticipated this level of success with the MIPS architecture? And when you’re looking back 50 years from now, what do you hope people are saying about it?

JH: We knew that we had discovered something fairly fundamental — we understood that. We didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together. The leap generated by the early MIPS architecture the very first RISC architecture, and it was significant enough that you could say this really was a breakthrough.

You never know what the successes will be like. Especially when you’re at a small company, and you’re fighting for your life, and you’re up and down. At one point, the company was down to 10 days of operating capital — this was many years ago in the early ’80s — but with 10 days of operating capital, you have to do something or you’re going to be out of business shortly.

And that’s what its like for startup companies. The fact that the architecture bloomed, it really bloomed with this movement out into the embedded space. And I’m excited to see Imagination pick up and build on this incredible history and take this to the next level as we go forward. I think the world is going to get better, and we’re going to see lots of interesting breakthroughs and uses of this technology, and I’m excited to see Imagination do it.

 

HY: I think in particularly having been to a couple of exhibitions recently and talking to customers, there’s definitely strong support and interest for the growth and success of MIPS. This is important for Imagination as it is for the industry.

The industry needs alternative CPUs giving choice to people, and we certainly recognize the history of MIPS, and our aim is to develop and safeguard and be a good custodian taking this architecture forward and creating a kind of solution in IP that many customers can use and commit to for the long range.

 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

 

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Hennessy, tech industrialist look to future of computing https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/07/hennessy-tech-industrialist-talk-computing-2/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/07/hennessy-tech-industrialist-talk-computing-2/#respond Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:41:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075811 The Daily sat down with John Hennessy and Hossein Yassaie to talk about the acquisition as well as the history of MIPS and the realities of information technology and startup companies.

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After seven years as a professor in the electrical engineering department, President John Hennessy took a sabbatical from Stanford in 1984 to found MIPS Computer Systems Inc. and commercialize his work with RISC processing. The company went public shortly thereafter and enjoyed great success as the pioneer of MIPS architecture. Sir Hossein Yassaie is the CEO of Imagination Technologies Group, which acquired MIPS Technologies last year to use in future CPU development.

The Daily sat down with both Hennessy and Yassaie to talk about the acquisition as well as the history of MIPS and the realities of the semiconductor IP (intellectual property) business and startup companies.

 

(IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily)
(IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily)

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Can you just explain a little bit about how things happened with the early days of your company and what led up to this point with the MIPS technology?

John Hennessy (JH): The MIPS [Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages] architecture had its roots in a research project here at Stanford started in the early 1980s with the simple question: What would the age of single chip CPUs mean for how we should design processors? Stanford, together with Berkeley and IBM, really…stumbled upon an incredible discovery about a better way to design instruction sets for modern computers than had been previously thought about.

And I say “stumbled upon” because really what happened was the constraints of having to fit a processor with the limited number of transistors at that time meant that we had to rethink the whole process of how to design the interface between the software system and the hardware system. That’s what led to the fundamental discovery, but I think it wasn’t until some years later that people really realized how fundamental it was.

In fact, in the beginning there was a lot of skepticism. The IBM project was kept secret for many years, and people didn’t know about it. And it became very easy for many people in the industry to say, “This is a bunch of crazy academics here — this isn’t really a great idea.” It had to prove itself over time.

In more recent times, the emergence of the embedded computer space, with everything from smartphones and tablets to all kinds of smart desktops to really high-end computer video game systems, has meant that an architecture that could deliver a combination of high performance low cost and be able to operate in a regime with low power had real advantages.

What emerged were the second-generation advantages of the RISC [Reduced instruction set computing] approach that we piloted here and at the other institutions. That’s in fact been the driver for the last few years as the computing world has shifted increasingly away from desktops and big machines to things that people carry around or they use in many ways outside of the context of a normal computing task. So that’s sort of a capsule history of 25 or so years with.

We started the company not because we wanted to be entrepreneurs. We were, in fact, reluctant entrepreneurs — we started the company originally because a famous computer scientist convinced us that, if we didn’t start the company, the technology would just languish on the shelves. [The technology] was very threatening to the existing players out there and their machines, and if they adopted this technology, it was going to obsolete their products.

Gordon Bell was then the founder of the second-largest computer company [Digital Equipment Corporation], and he said, “You’ve got to go do this yourself, otherwise you’re going to have a bunch of papers sitting on a shelf that nobody’s ever going to use.” And, in retrospect, it turned out to be very insightful.

Digital Equipment Corporation actually had a person working with us on sabbatical and when they wanted to take the research and transfer it to their headquarters back East, they couldn’t convince the people to take it. IBM cancelled their first attempts with the technology.

In fact, one of the founders of MIPS helped me found the company, because when IBM cancelled the project, he so believed in this technology that he said, “I’m not going back to IBM. If you guys want to do something here, I’m in.”

And, at the time, people were making big computers that cost a lot of money. Room-sized. And we were talking an improvement by a factor of five in cost, conservatively, and maybe a factor of 10. So it was a big change. People were thinking, “Well, I’ll just sell fewer computers, and I’ll make less money,” instead of saying, “Suppose you delivered that much power — what could it do in terms of what could it do and how many people could afford them?” They didn’t see that, and it was early on.

And that’s another reason I say it often takes an entrepreneur to really take it out there, somebody’s who is really been involved in the creation of something. If you’re involved in it, you see the glass as half full. Yeah, there are some problems to be solved, but the key insight is there. Everybody else sees the glass as half empty and says, “This isn’t going to work. This is a research project.”

I still remember this funny story — I was on a panel with Dave Patterson, who was doing a similar project at Berkeley with IBM. And somebody says to him, just after we had started the company, “You know Hennessy here on the panel? He just got a million dollars to invest from the venture capitalists, and he’s going to start this company. If this technology’s not going to work, what should he do? Take the money and go to South America.” [Laughing]

 

TSD: How does acquiring MIPS accelerate your activities at Imagination, and what was the thinking behind the move?

Hossein Yassaie (HY): We fundamentally believe that the processor market is a big market and is an area that is growing. As I think John touched on, this market started with areas such as game consoles and embedded applications and then mobile phones happened and tablets, which is a very big area.

On the horizon, everyone talks about connected devices and Internet of Things. We went from tens of millions to hundreds of millions to a few billion, and now I think we’re heading toward tens of billions of things which are clever and smart so the processor business is very important for us.

We’re a key IP company with significant customers, so we’ve had our own processor development internally since 1995, and it’s very much a philosophy along the same lines as MIPS that we were working on in terms of multithreading and RISC architectures. But it’s just in the last year in discussion with the MIPS executives and team [that] it became clear that there is a mechanism for us acquiring MIPS in a structure that means we double the team size.

We [had] about 200 people on our processor team, and now we’re double that, and that combination means [that], in terms of capability and know-how, and the additional ecosystems MIPS brings to us — particularly with the fact that MIPS is in the Android tree — our process of getting where we want to be with the processor technology scaled up, both in times of resources and where we are in the marketplace.

 

TSD: There was some speculation in the early 1990s that MIPS and other powerful RISC processors would overtake the Intel IA32 architecture for desktop and mobile computers, but this hasn’t really been the case. Were you surprised that this didn’t catch on and why do you think that the architecture never really caught on and has stayed mostly out of the desktop?

JH: I think lots of things evolved as the technology shifted. There are a whole lot of complicated reasons for why things happened on the desktop the way they happened. One of the very hard things to do is to get companies to collaborate, even if by collaboration they would be stronger than if they fractured themselves.

Intel was the big player outside the RISC space, and in the RISC space things just fractured. A couple of times we had a shot at bringing it all together and getting enough players on one platform that you would have a shot at Intel, that never quite happened for a number of complicated political reasons.

Then what happened was the rise of this shift to mobile and embedded technologies — it happened on Internet switches, it happened on desktops, on desktop machines supporting television sets and set-top boxes. And that market and the video game, the high-end video game market just took off. Boom. Exploded.

And all of a sudden that was growing much faster than the main desktop business. And things have shifted dramatically. Now if you look beyond ARM and MIPS, they dominate the rest of that marketplace out there and Intel still has this standardized marketplace. But the advantages that the RISC architectures have in terms of efficiency, both in use of silicon which means they are cheaper and, equally importantly, power. Power has become a big, big issue in these things. Unlike a big computer somewhere [when] you have a fan to cool it [or] you have it plugged into the wall, you don’t have that.

 

TSD: Are those factors you talked about with efficiency things that make MIPS attractive in low-cost markets maybe for the future?

HY: From Imagination’s point of view, we completely agree with the comment John just made about power. One of the major constraints in mobile devices is that there is not a cable that is plugged into power and there is not a fan in there. So you have a set power envelope that you have to live with. And not only that, the demands that consumers have: they want it be to be as good as their PCs.

And actually we’re pretty much there. That’s really, if you look at the history of Imagination, we built our business in the mid-90s saying, “OK, graphics is a big deal for mobile. Against all the odds let’s put our efforts into creating a very powerful solution for mobile and get graphics into the devices and handsets.”

Now going forward, everything needs to be smart, everything needs a CPU and power is still a constraint. We certainly believe MIPS is one of the most efficient architectures that exists on this planet and certainly have expectations and aspirations that it will grow from this base with the help and energy we can put behind and become a big player in the market space.

 

JH: Efficiency has become the key issue — that’s the key phrase. It was less important early on when people were not as cost sensitized. It’s one thing when you’re building computers that cost several thousand dollars. It’s another when you’re building a smartphone that only cost $200 or you’re building an embedded device that may only cost $50 or $25. Then it’s a completely different game.

 

HY: There’s also another interesting thing that has happened recently. If you go back in the early days of say the mobile phone market, a lot of these systems were closed. A particular operating system, a particular manufacturer — it wasn’t really an open market.

With what is out there with Android and the Linux environment that exists, the market is there and as long as there is a good architecture that can deliver the performance and power and cost, amazing things could happen.

The other aspects of this for Imagination is that MIPS is a fantastic architecture, and there are a lot of great people in that company. In the licensing business, stability is very important. Once you have a long-term plan and commitment  behind an architecture and there’s no changes and concerns and issues, then things will change.

Existing markets that MIPS has been in, such as network or set top boxes, wherever MIPS was a key driver, those customers will feel once again much more confident about the future and the security of MIPS.

There’s a lot of people out there, their lives and engineering work in some way have been touched by MIPS. They have true love for the architecture. We’re counting on this to allow us to take MIPS to the highest level of success and glory that is possible.

 

TSD: Do you think attempts at developing the MIPS Architecture are going to happen organically as you try to become more efficient, or are you stepping back to take a direct approach to make bigger leaps and bounds?

HY: From my point of view, both of those things are certainly on the cards. There’s a lot of good stuff about MIPS architecture, one of the amazing things about it is that it’s the first 64-bit microprocessor on the planet. And the world is heading that way fast. So there’s a lot of things you can build on.

But when it comes to low power and efficiency there’s always new things you can add and apply. We certainly plan to build around what is there in terms of the history, knowledge and experience and combine that with what we’ve learned in our work in the mobile space from the graphics or what have you and press on and take this architecture forward.

 

TSD: Now that the technology is out there, how do you balance turning a profit with the need to keep improving and innovating with the architecture?

HY: We are a public company, and I can tell you that, when you are a public company, you have to keep many people happy, internal and external, and it’s a tough challenge. But my approach to these things is that, at the end of the day, I am a mathematician and a scientist and an engineer.

I’m doing what I’m doing because I think there’s a good chance of success. You have to do the right thing. Of course profit and revenue is important, but not at the expense of doing the wrong thing. You have to have a balance — you cannot jeopardize the long-term future for short-term decisions, particularly in the IP business.

We generally have five-year plans, and one of the big things I’ve started is getting my team together and telling them, “Ok guys, it’s time to fix and finalize the roadmap for the next few years. You have to do that and put the investment in, and that’s the nature of the beast. It’s a long-term business with long-term focus but you have to find ways to keep the money side also delivering.

 

JH: I think this is true for not just tech companies, but all companies right now. The fundamentally difficult problem is keeping long-term innovation alive and doing that while keeping your current business running, which you have to do. If you’re a public company, the shareholders will desert you quite quickly.

But all companies have that fundamental problem of how do you keep that innovation engine alive because that’s the secret of growth and taking advantage of new markets and new opportunities.

 

TSD: If you were to go back to when you first started this work, could you have anticipated this level of success with the MIPS architecture? And when you’re looking back 50 years from now, what do you hope people are saying about it?

JH: We knew that we had discovered something fairly fundamental — we understood that. We didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together. The leap generated by the early MIPS architecture the very first RISC architecture, and it was significant enough that you could say this really was a breakthrough.

You never know what the successes will be like. Especially when you’re at a small company, and you’re fighting for your life, and you’re up and down. At one point, the company was down to 10 days of operating capital — this was many years ago in the early ’80s — but with 10 days of operating capital, you have to do something or you’re going to be out of business shortly.

And that’s what its like for startup companies. The fact that the architecture bloomed, it really bloomed with this movement out into the embedded space. And I’m excited to see Imagination pick up and build on this incredible history and take this to the next level as we go forward. I think the world is going to get better, and we’re going to see lots of interesting breakthroughs and uses of this technology, and I’m excited to see Imagination do it.

 

HY: I think in particularly having been to a couple of exhibitions recently and talking to customers, there’s definitely strong support and interest for the growth and success of MIPS. This is important for Imagination as it is for the industry.

The industry needs alternative CPUs giving choice to people, and we certainly recognize the history of MIPS, and our aim is to develop and safeguard and be a good custodian taking this architecture forward and creating a kind of solution in IP that many customers can use and commit to for the long range.

 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

 

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Casa Italiana’s Pizzeria sells out in eight seconds https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/03/pizzeria-sells-out-in-eight-seconds/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/03/pizzeria-sells-out-in-eight-seconds/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 07:41:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075492 Next Saturday's Pizzeria event at La Casa Italiana sold all 340 available slots in a record eight seconds on Sunday night. Demand was so high that 140 people sent in the form in the two seconds it took for GoogleDocs to register that the form had been closed.

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All 340 seats for the upcoming Pizzeria event were sold out in eight seconds on Sunday night. (ALISA ROYER/The Stanford Daily)
All 340 seats for the upcoming Pizzeria event were sold out in eight seconds on Sunday night. (ALISA ROYER/The Stanford Daily)

It took a mere eight seconds for students to snap up all 340 available spots at Casa Italiana’s March 9 Pizzeria event, cutting in half the previous record for fastest sell-out time in Pizzeria history, Casa Financial Manager Mak Klein ’14  said on Sunday night.

The link went live on the Pizzeria Facebook page at 9 p.m. Sunday night, and demand was so high that in the roughly two-second gap between when Klein clicked to deactivate the online application (when all 340 seats had been requested) and when Google registered his command, 140 more seats had been requested.

“I posted the link just after 9 o’clock,” Klein said, “and all of the requests [up until the point when no more seats were available] came in between 9:00:20 and 9:00:28.”

The miniscule window for reserving spaces was made even more incredible by the fact that students had several fields to fill out: they had to enter their full name, the size of their party, their email address and also select between two seatings (5 and 7:30 p.m.).

Students were allowed to make reservations for up to 15 people for next Saturday’s event, with each ticket sold for $15. According to Klein, most reservations were for groups of 10 to 15.

“[Pizzeria] is different from an event like a frat party, but it’s still a really social scene,” Klein said. “Much like popular events at theme houses, French House’s Crepe Night or Haus Mitt’s Beer and Pretzels, [Pizzeria] appeals to a different population of people.”

Originally a semi-weekly dinner for the Casa Italiana residents, Pizzeria has undergone a rapid transformation from a popular quarterly event offering salad, pizza, gelato and wine (for the over-21 crowd) into the toughest ticket on campus.

The event sold out in four hours last spring and 22 seconds for the most recent Pizzeria in the fall.

Several students who did not manage to reserve a slot posted their incredulity at the tight opening to grab a ticket. Their comments on the event’s Facebook page ranged from shock (“I clicked on it the second you posted it HOW DID THIS HAPPEN”) to disbelief (“right…two seconds…gone”) to sadness (“I love pizza 🙁 and wine”). Klein said that with such high demand it was all but impossible to avoid turning away students who were waiting to sign up immediately after the link was posted. He also noted that the staff at Casa Italiana is always looking for ways to improve the event and might consider other models to take reservations in the future.

Students who received confirmation of their reservation for Saturday’s upcoming Pizzeria must pay for their entire party before Wednesday at 8 p.m. or risk losing their seats.

 

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Bret Baumbach wins individual Pac-12 crown https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/03/bret-baumbach-wins-individual-pac-12-crown/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/03/bret-baumbach-wins-individual-pac-12-crown/#respond Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:09:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075494 Redshirt junior wrestler Bret Baumbach won the individual Pac-12 title at 165 pounds with a dominating 7-1 decision over No. 1 seed Seth Thomas on Sunday, simultaneously earning a coveted automatic berth in the NCAA Championships. Just the 15th conference-champion in school history, Baumbach moved to 21-10 on the season with a 4-1 victory over […]

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Redshirt junior wrestler Bret Baumbach won the individual Pac-12 title at 165 pounds with a dominating 7-1 decision over No. 1 seed Seth Thomas on Sunday, simultaneously earning a coveted automatic berth in the NCAA Championships.

[Hector Garcia-Molina/StanfordPhoto.com]
Redshirt junior Bret Baumbach (above) is on his way to the NCAA Championships in Des Moines, Iowa. [Hector Garcia-Molina/StanfordPhoto.com]
Just the 15th conference-champion in school history, Baumbach moved to 21-10 on the season with a 4-1 victory over Oregon State’s Holden Packard in the tournament semifinals, held at the Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe, Ariz.

That set up a matchup with Thomas in the finals just a few hours later, and Baumbach took full advantage, working Thomas over for the full seven minutes and never truly being threatened.

The win means that Baumbach, a native of Council Bluffs, Iowa, will return to his home state for the NCAA Championships, which will be held in Des Moines, Iowa, March 21-23.

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Powell’s dunk too late as men’s basketball drops heartbreaker to Colorado https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/27/powells-dunk-too-late-as-stanford-mens-basketball-drops-heartbreaker-to-colorado/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/27/powells-dunk-too-late-as-stanford-mens-basketball-drops-heartbreaker-to-colorado/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:50:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075398 Dwight Powell's game-tying dunk attempt came a split-second too late as Stanford men's basketball dropped a close Pac-12 matchup at home against Colorado, 63-65.

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Junior forward Dwight Powell brought the Maples Pavilion crowd to its feet twice on Wednesday night with monstrous dunks. With 2.4 seconds to play and Stanford down by two, Powell caught an inbounds pass at the three-point line, took two dribbles and soared once more for a vicious one-handed slam. It was majestic, it was stunning and it was worthy of SportsCenter’s Top Plays.

And it was too late.

Junior John Gage found his stroke from beyond the arc, snapping a cold streak with a three-ball against Colorado on Wednesday (Mike Kheir/ The Stanford Daily).
Junior John Gage found his stroke from beyond the arc, snapping a cold streak with a three-ball against Colorado on Wednesday (Mike Kheir/ The Stanford Daily).

The buzzer sounded and the clock hit zero with the ball still cradled in Powell’s hands below the rim, allowing Colorado (19-8, 9-6 Pac-12) to escape with the win and leaving the Cardinal (16-13, 7-9) to shake its head at yet another loss that featured a missed opportunity in the closing seconds.

“[Powell] didn’t have time,” head coach Johnny Dawkins said after the game. “He should’ve laid the ball up. I thought the move was great. He caught the ball where we thought he’d catch the ball. I thought he’d have a chance to go ahead and get a strong finish, but the fact that he caught it a little bit further out, he got bumped on the catch, and by the time he turned around, time was being eaten up.”

But the road to that final sequence was almost as interesting as the play itself.

The Buffaloes held the lead only once (at 2-0) in the first half thanks to some awful shooting–the Buffs started 2-13 from the field–but Stanford couldn’t really find its groove either and let Colorado climb back into the game by halftime.

A slim 32-31 lead for the Card at halftime quickly grew to 10, however, as sophomore guard Chasson Randle dropped in a three-pointer from the corner that had the small crowd into the game.

Stanford would not score for the next six minutes, going 1-8 from the field and turning the ball over twice as Colorado’s 1-2 scoring punch of Spencer Dinwiddie and Andre Roberson led an 18-5 run.

Roberson finished with a career-high 24 points, which included 16 in the second half and a deep three as the shot clock expired to pull Colorado within one point at 45-44.

Another triple and layup by Roberson helped the Buffs seize a 51-45 lead, sucking the air out of Maples.

The Cardinal, however did anything but fold, showing plenty of fight as Randle hit a three and senior Andy Brown tipped in a shot for two of his team-high 17 points.

“I thought Andy was terrific,” Dawkins said. “I thought it was one of his best games in a Cardinal uniform. I thought, all game long, he made great plays, big plays, offensive rebound putbacks, big shots for us from the field. He rebounded well. I was really proud of him, because he’s been struggling a little bit with his legs and for him to come out and play the way he did was very exciting to see.”

The game continued to teeter-totter along as neither team could shoot well enough to make any more serious runs. And the excitement continued to build thanks to some sensational individual efforts.

First it was Dinwiddie electrifying the small, but rowdy, Colorado cheering contingent with a posterizing dunk over junior Josh Huestis. But on the very next possession, Powell rose to the occasion with a put-back jam of his own.

Huestis shook off a dismal shooting night (2-12) to tip in a bucket and get Stanford back within two points with 58 seconds to play.

The Buffs appeared to have things salted things away up four with 27 seconds left, but Dinwiddie was called for a technical foul when he tapped the ball away from Powell after a made basket.

Junior guard Aaron Bright made just one of the two free throws, however.

Dawkins defended Bright and Randle, who failed to convert at the line during one-and-one with under four to play.

“Those are our best free-throw shooters, so you expect them to step up there to knock them down and unfortunately they didn’t,” Dawkins said. “I’ll go with those guys at the line every time in those situations. We had Aaron with the technical and we had Chasson with the 1-and-1, and unfortunately they didn’t go. But those guys have made big free throws all season long. They’ve made big free throws their entire career, so I’ll go down with them at the line every time.”

After Roberson went 2-2 at the line himself to boost the lead back to five with 15 seconds to play, putting Stanford back in a deep hole.

But Randle’s fourth three-pointer of the game gave the Cardinal a glimmer of hope, and a missed free-throw by Dinwiddie on the front end of a one-and-one gave Stanford the ball back with 2.4 seconds to play.

It all went for naught, however, when the buzzer sounded and the ball was not out of Powell’s hand.

The players were visibly dejected after the game.

“This one hurts bad,” Brown said. “Anytime you lose at the buzzer it’s never a good thing, but all the plays leading up to that were the cause of it, so we can’t look at it and say it was the last play’s fault, because it’s not. We built some good leads on them and our defense just didn’t hold up. I mean, we were up by 10 and then all of a sudden they cut it to two in about a minute, minute and a half. And we can’t let that happen. When we get a lead we have to keep on building on those, and we didn’t do that tonight.”

Outside of Powell, Brown and Randle, who combined for 45 of the team’s 63 points, no one else was able to step up for the Card and it paid the price. Stanford shot 39 percent from the field, staying in the game in large part because thanks to 9-20 shooting from behind the arc.

The Buffs’s good shooting in the clutch, however, gave them their first ever win in Palo Alto (they’d previously been 0-4 at Maples) and allowed them complete the season sweep and avenge two blowout losses to the Card last year.

With just two games left in the regular season, Stanford’s path to make the NCAA Tournament will come at the Pac-12 Tournament, where the Cardinal will have earn the conference’s automatic qualifying bid by winning four games in four nights.

If Stanford is to replicate Colorado’s impressive run to last year’s title and automatic berth, the team will have to get over the hump and close out games down the stretch, something not lost on Brown.

“We ended up getting back in the game,” he said, “but we never should’ve been down by that many, and that ultimately led us to lose tonight.”

First up for the Cardinal, however, is a chance to build more confidence with a matchup with Utah on Saturday. Tip from Maples will be at 2 p.m.

 

Contact Miles Bennett-Smith at milesbs”at”stanford.edu.

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Kelsey Stevens throws perfect game, Stanford beats UVA in Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/23/kelsey-stevens-throws-perfect-game-stanford-beats-uva-in-mary-nutter-collegiate-classic/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/23/kelsey-stevens-throws-perfect-game-stanford-beats-uva-in-mary-nutter-collegiate-classic/#respond Sun, 24 Feb 2013 07:26:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075242 Freshman pitcher Kelsey Stevens was perfect in the circle with 10 strikeouts as the Cardinal beat the Cavaliers 4-0 at the Cathedral City Classic in Cathedral City, Calif.

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Twenty-one Virginia hitters came to the plate on Saturday night, and 21 went right back to the bench as Stanford pitcher Kelsey Stevens threw a perfect game and the No. 17 Cardinal beat the Cavaliers, 4-0.

The freshman from Albuquerque, N.M. was dominant in victory, striking out 10 batters and needing just 94 pitches to set the Cavaliers (6-7) down in order. She threw 67 of her 94 pitches for strikes and just one batter earned a three-ball count.

Freshman pitcher Kelsey Stevens (above) threw a perfect game on Saturday night.
Freshman pitcher Kelsey Stevens (above) threw a perfect game on Saturday night.

It trumped what was also Stanford’s best hitting performance of the season, as the Card (12-3) had a season-high 15 hits. Sophomore Cassandra Roulund went 3-3 with three RBI, including a key two-run single with the bases loaded to break a scoreless tie in the bottom of the third inning. A sac fly from Roulund in the sixth tacked on the fourth and final run, before Stevens came out and retired the final three batters, the last on a fly ball to center fielder Sarah Hassman.

It was not the only impressive performance from Stevens on the day, however, as earlier in the day Stanford beat No. 13 Georgia 6-0 with Stevens allowing only four hits in the circle.

The Cardinal followed that up with a loss to Oklahoma State, 4-1, failing to score with the bases loaded and two outs in the top of the fifth inning and then only plating one run with the bases loaded and nobody out in the sixth.

Stanford will complete its tournament with a double-header tomorrow against No. 23 Florida State and Syracuse beginning at 11:30.

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Softball’s Kelsey Stevens named Pac-12 Pitcher of the Week https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/19/softballs-kelsey-stevens-named-pac-12-pitcher-of-the-week/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/19/softballs-kelsey-stevens-named-pac-12-pitcher-of-the-week/#respond Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:55:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075058 Freshman Kelsey Stevens was named Pac-12 Pitcher of the Week after a nearly perfect weekend at the Stanford Nike Invitational--she posted three shutouts as the No. 20 Cardinal swept all six games to win the title.

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Freshman Kelsey Stevens was nearly perfect in the circle this weekend at the Stanford Nike Invitational, giving up just four hits (all singles) en route to posting three shutouts as the No. 20 Cardinal swept all six games to win the title.

Stevens was rewarded Tuesday with the Pac-12 Pitcher of the Week award, the first career award for the Albuquerque, N.M. native.

Freshman pitcher Kelsey Stevens (above)
Freshman pitcher Kelsey Stevens (above) was named Pac-12 Pitcher of the Week on Tuesday (SIMON WARBY/The Stanford Daily).

Now 5-1 on the season, Stevens leads the team with a 1.50 ERA and 49 strikeouts on the season, and in Stanford’s 12-0 win over CSU Bakersfield and 8-0 win over UC-Davis, she tossed consecutive one-hitters. Batters hit just .075 against her on the weekend and she allowed just three walks.

Stanford and Stevens will head to the Cathedral City Classic in Palm Springs, Calif. this weekend.

 

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Stanford’s Mariah Stackhouse shoots record 61 to win Peg Barnard Invitational https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/17/stanfords-mariah-stackhouse-shoots-record-61-to-win-peg-barnard-invitational/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/17/stanfords-mariah-stackhouse-shoots-record-61-to-win-peg-barnard-invitational/#respond Mon, 18 Feb 2013 02:18:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075006 Mariah Stackhouse set a course record with a round of 61 (-10 under par), including an astonishing 26 on the front nine, en route to winning the Peg Barnard Invitational.

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When freshman Mariah Stackhouse teed off Sunday morning at the Stanford Golf Course, her gallery was at most 10 people deep, including her mother. By the time she tapped in for par on the 18th green, over 150 spectators gave a loud roar of approval for one of the greatest individual golf efforts ever seen at Stanford–Stackhouse set a course record with a round of 61 (-10 under par), including an astonishing 26 on the front nine, en route to winning the Peg Barnard Invitational.

“After I had the eagle on No. 7, honestly it was like I was a spectator watching myself. I was just kind of like ‘what is going on?’

“I knew one day I was going to have an epic front nine, [I wondered when that happened] would I be nervous? But it was just so much fun…On No.9 and No. 7, I was like ‘man you’ve been making putts all day, it would be funny if this went in.’ And then it went in again and I was like, ‘well, cool!’”

Freshman Mariah Stackhouse (above) shot a record-breaking final-round 61 as Stanford won the Peg Barnard Invitational on Sunday (Miles Bennett-Smith/The Stanford Daily).
Freshman Mariah Stackhouse (above) shot a record-breaking final-round 61 as Stanford won the Peg Barnard Invitational on Sunday (Miles Bennett-Smith/The Stanford Daily).

Stackhouse had command of every club in the bag, beginning on the par-5 first hole, which she eagled. A birdie on No. 2 got her to three-under par, and she didn’t cool off at all with birdies on Nos. 3 and 4.

But it was the flatstick that literally could not have been hotter. Sitting at five under through six holes, the highly-touted Stackhouse (a high school All-American and participant at the 2011 Ping Junior Solheim Cup) drained a 40-footer for eagle on the par-5 seventh, at which point the crowd following her group really began to swell.

“[It was] absolutely amazing,” Stackhouse’ mother Sharon said. “You come out just to support your daughter and the team and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. To witness a round like that, you can never see that coming. It was just amazing–I was in awe. [Around the eight or ninth hole] it was like something really special is going on today.”

After sticking her approach on the eighth hole and making birdie, Stackhouse was eight-under heading to the par-four ninth. A nice drive put her in good position but her second shot was too deep and left her with a tricky downhill putt about 30 feet above the hole.

It hit nothing but the bottom of the cup.

That left her with a front-nine score of 26, which is a stroke lower than the best 9-hole score ever recorded on the PGA Tour and three strokes better than anything done on the LPGA Tour. The Riverdale, Ga. native took just nine putts.

“It’s actually ironic, because the front nine is my least favorite nine,” Stackhouse said. “My goal on this golf course is always to get through hole 10, try to be at one or two under, and then really try to have a good round the rest of the way.”

Instead, she was 10 under par after a birdie on No. 12 and the magical round of 59 was certainly within reach with the course playing firm and fast under sunny skies and just the hint of a breeze.

But what was perhaps more impressive than shooting a 59 was Stackhouse’s composure after she showed the first sign of nerves on the 13th and 14th holes, including a 2-foot putt that she stood over for a little longer than usual before missing.

She bounced back almost immediately, however, munching nonchalantly on a sandwich as she walked up the 15th fairway and settling back into her grove with back-to-back birdies on 16 and 17.

“The one thing that really separates Mariah, at least right now, is her demeanor,” said Stanford head coach Anne Walker. “She is really able to focus on whatever shot she is hitting at that moment. When you shoot 10 under, which few people ever have, you really have to be able to stay in the present. For her to go bogey-bogey and then jump back with birdie-birdie tells me she was absolutely in the moment on every shot.”

The par on No. 18 gave her a round of 61, two strokes better than the score her teammate, sophomore Mariko Tumangan, posted last year in establishing the Stanford Golf Course record.

“I think this [record] is going to vibrate through the country,” Walker said of Stackhouse’s effort, which Walker noted was likely an NCAA Div. I record as well as tying Tiger Woods’ 61 at the 1996 Pac-10 Championship for the lowest round by any Stanford golfer in competition.

It drew the attention of recent Stanford men’s star and current Web.com member Joseph Bramlett, ’10, who was following the event on his phone while hitting shots on the range and made his way over to follow Stackhouse’s effort live. His father went even more out of his way, stopping midway though a round of his own in San Jose to drive up and walk with the group for the final couple of holes.

“It was a buzz,” Walker said. “Mariah was five under and word started spreading. All of a sudden, everyone just started showing up. It was a great time.”

But lost in the shuffle of Stackhouse’s individual play was a nice start to the spring season by the women’s team as a whole. In a field that included No. 2 Washington and No. 10 UC-Davis, the No. 18 Cardinal ran away from everybody to finish the two-day event at 569 (+1), 14 shots clear of second-place California and 20 clear of UC-Davis.

Freshman Lauren Kim finished tied for fifth at 142 (70-72) and notched five birdies of her own on Sunday. Tumangan herself finished 16th at 148 (75-73) and senior Sally Watson tied for 17th at 149 (75-74).

Junior Danielle Frasier came back four strokes in the final round to record a 152 (78-74) and senior Kristina Wong, who played as an individual, tied for 54th at 159 (81-78).

The day belonged to Stackhouse, however.

“Anytime you win, it’s a special time,” Walker said. “To watch Mariah win her home tournament as a freshman, this will be something she will always remember.”

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Running back Tyler Gaffney returning to Stanford for final year of football eligibility https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/11/running-back-tyler-gaffney-returning-to-stanford-for-final-year-of-football-eligibility/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/11/running-back-tyler-gaffney-returning-to-stanford-for-final-year-of-football-eligibility/#respond Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:54:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074820 Running back Tyler Gaffney announced that he would be leaving his professional baseball career behind and return to school to complete his degree and use his final year of football eligibility.

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Less than a week after 12 high school recruits committed to playing for the Cardinal, Stanford’s football team regained a familiar face for the 2013 season on Monday when running back Tyler Gaffney announced that he would be leaving his professional baseball career with the Pittsburgh Pirates behind and return to school to complete his degree and use his final year of football eligibility.

Senior running back Tyler Gaffney will return to school for his final season of football eligibility in the fall. (Don Feria/isiphotos.com)
Senior running back Tyler Gaffney will return to school for his final season of football eligibility in the fall. (Don Feria/isiphotos.com)

“This is the ideal time for me to return to the Farm and complete the work toward my degree from Stanford University,” Gaffney said in a statement released Monday morning. “As a freshman at Stanford in 2009, I had three goals: play football and baseball at Stanford and receive my degree. Two of the three have been accomplished; I eagerly look forward to completing the third.

“Additionally, I intend to rejoin my Cardinal football family and play my senior year of college eligibility. As I have grown and matured over the past year, I have come to realize how much I missed my football family at Stanford and how much I missed the game of football,” he said.

Gaffney’s return could pay immediate dividends for Stanford, which needs to fill the hole left behind by graduating senior running back Stepfan Taylor, who leaves the Farm as the all-time leading rusher in program history on the heels of three consecutive 1,000-yard seasons.

The 6-foot-1, 225-pound Gaffney will be a leading candidate to feature in the backfield alongside Anthony Wilkerson, Remound Wright and Kelsey Young. Head coach David Shaw said Monday that he was quite pleased to welcome back one of his veteran leaders.

“I’m very proud of Tyler Gaffney making the decision to come back and finish his degree, while also rejoining the football team,” Shaw said. “Tyler’s first three years at Stanford, he contributed to a lot of big games and a lot of big wins. He will join a talented and diverse group of running backs, which, as a unit, we believe is as good as any in the nation.”

The San Diego native Gaffney completed his junior season with a career-high 449 yards (6.1 yards/carry) and seven touchdowns on the ground, plus 79 receiving yards and one more touchdown. He ranked second behind Stepfan Taylor among Stanford rushers in 2011 and has rushed for 791 total yards with 12 touchdowns, plus 178 yards and three touchdowns receiving, in three years on the Farm.

After the conclusion of his junior year, Gaffney was selected in the 24th round by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 2012 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft. He signed with the organization and looked to be fitting in nicely with Class-A affiliate State College Spikes, hitting for a .297 average and recording a .483 on-base percentage as the starting center fielder.

That career now appears to be on hold, if not over entirely.

“I am thankful to the Pittsburgh Pirates organization for allowing me the opportunity to play professional baseball,” Gaffney said. “They are a great organization, who permitted me to grow and mature in character. With the benefit of this experience, I will continue to learn about myself and follow the path where my truth will lead me.”

Stanford returns to the practice field for the start of the spring season on Feb. 25, although Gaffney will likely rejoin the team when spring quarter begins on April and he is able to re-enroll in classes.

 

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Softball’s Jenna Rich named espnW Preseason All-American https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/06/softballs-jenna-rich-named-espnw-preseason-all-american/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/06/softballs-jenna-rich-named-espnw-preseason-all-american/#respond Thu, 07 Feb 2013 03:30:28 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074690 Senior shortstop Jenna Rich was named to espnW’s All-American Second Team on the eve of Stanford’s season debut at the Kajikawa Classic today. A three-time All-Pac-12 selection and two-time All-West Region First Team honoree, Rich led the Card in several offensive categories while playing second base last season.

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Senior shortstop Jenna Rich was named to espnW’s All-American Second Team on the eve of Stanford’s season debut at the Kajikawa Classic today. A three-time All-Pac-12 selection and two-time All-West Region First Team honoree, Rich led the Card in several offensive categories while playing second base last season.

Her 66 RBI tied a Stanford single-season record and led the Pac-12 and ranked 12th nationally. And her career numbers continue to climb up the program’s all-time lists. She is currently fourth in slugging percentage (.595), fifth in home runs and RBI (33 and 162, respectively), seventh in batting average (.332) and 10th in runs scored (123).

The Cardinal, ranked No. 21 in the preseason, will have little time to settle in as it opens the 2013 season against Bradley from Tempe, Ariz. today at 3 p.m. PST. Stanford will meet No. 2 Oklahoma and the reigning Collegiate Player of the Year in pitcher Keilani Ricketts tomorrow morning.

—Miles Bennett-Smith

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Why Johnny Dawkins is coaching for his job https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/01/why-johnny-dawkins-is-coaching-for-his-job/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/01/why-johnny-dawkins-is-coaching-for-his-job/#respond Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:26:42 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074554 Why do you make it so hard for me to hate you, Johnny Dawkins? Why do you exude a professionalism I can only assume was ingratiated in you as a child, cultivated as a star for Michael William Krzyzewski’s Blue Devils and refined as a protégée of “Coach K” when you were done doing your […]

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Why do you make it so hard for me to hate you, Johnny Dawkins?

Why do you exude a professionalism I can only assume was ingratiated in you as a child, cultivated as a star for Michael William Krzyzewski’s Blue Devils and refined as a protégée of “Coach K” when you were done doing your thing in the NBA?

Why do you seem to welcome the media at a time when more and more coaches — ahem, Kevin Sumlin — are closing practices, reducing availability and giving answers that would make Jim Harbaugh proud?

I think I know the answer: You’re a good dude. You paid your dues as a player, and a great one at that, then as an assistant coach learning from the master at your alma mater. I know firsthand that the Farm is a great place to be, so I know why you wanted to be here.

On the day you were hired almost five years ago, you said it took you and your wife “about 10 minutes” to think before accepting the job — it’s taken me two years for me to come around to the idea that this should be your last one at the helm.

There is a disclaimer before I really dive in, however. Firstly, I don’t believe this will be your last as head coach for the Cardinal. Secondly, if you can keep the boys in the win column for the rest of this season and snag an NCAA Tournament berth, I will devote another column to the wonderful taste of crow.

I sincerely hope to be coughing up black feathers come March.

But for now, I feel a responsibility to ask the hard questions and take whatever flak may come my way. And it seems like the more questions I ask, the fewer answers I get.

That’s a problem, especially when my first question is: Why haven’t we played in the NCAA Tournament since the Lopez twins led us to the Sweet 16 a month before you arrived?

I was more than willing to give the squad a nice little grace period, maybe three full years even, for you to retool, rebuild, instill whatever offensive and defensive systems you wanted.

Losing Brook and Robin to the NBA was a major blow, and not just because two more seasons of twin 7-footers would have likely resulted in two automatic appearances in the Sweet 16. No, it was a lose-lose because it sapped the talent out of the program in one fell swoop and made it very hard for you to recruit blue-chip talent to the Farm, a difficult enough chore already given Stanford’s academic requirements.

But you knew that would be the case. And you knew there would be injuries cropping up along the way and that nothing would go the way you wanted it to because it’s your first head coaching gig and that’s just life. But you signed up for this, and at the introductory press conference you said as much.

“There will be a number of things that pop up that I don’t expect at the moment,” you said. “But you know what, that’s part of the process. That’s part of the growth you go through. I think I’m prepared for it.”

I agree with that statement, I think you were prepared for it. But unfortunately there is one, and only one, ultimate judge of your performance: wins and losses.

In 2008-09, the team went 20-14, which is nice on the surface, except that it went 6-12 in conference play, which was good for ninth in the Pac-10. But I can explain that year away purely based on the talent on the floor.

I’ll do the same for 2009-10, when Landry Fields was about the only thing you had going for you. But 14-18 was not a good record for a school that made 11 consecutive appearances in the Big Dance from 1995-2005, and then two more in 2007 and 2008.

Which brings us to year three. It fell flat, and there isn’t much else to say. Sure, injuries to Andy Brown and Josh Owens did you no favors whatsoever, but another sub-.500 season kept fans, as well as recruits, away. If winning is a recruiting tool money can’t buy, losing is… well, it’s just bad.

It was during that season that I first began to question our relationship, Johnny. On the court, I saw no offensive blueprint for success and none of the creativity I thought you would bring to coaching given your playmaking ability as a player.

Maybe my expectations were too high. But all I had to go on was what you said, and what you said had me dreaming big. “I believe in an up-tempo game,” you said. “I believe in man-to-man defense. I believe in an offense that is predicated on good ball movement and player movement.”

Yes! That’s more like it! Except that didn’t happen.

Because what you put in place, or at least what your players decided to run on the floor, was more like the next part of your quote. “Some semblance of the motion offense, along with some sets.”

Uh oh. Perhaps I should have been worried when you said you wanted to run a motion offense, but not really, with sets, but not many of them.

Even in the struggling Pac-12, that won’t cut it. I thought we were supposed to be good last year, when we beat Oklahoma State and played tough against Syracuse in the preseason. And I still thought you had us rolling when we started Pac-12 play 5-1.

Then we lost to Washington State. And Washington. And Cal. And Arizona. And UCLA. And Oregon. And Utah! Seventh in the conference doesn’t work, not with Dwight “The Canadian” Powell, John “I love Seattle” Gage, Josh “Big Country” Huestis, Aaron “Fresh Cuts” Bright and Andy “White Mamba” Brown.

But I bit my tongue because I wanted to give you, and myself, one more chance to travel to a men’s NCAA Tournament game where my school was actually playing. That was supposed to be this year, when your “Pick Six” class was playing its junior season and was ready to rumble.

Instead, we’ve stumbled. A preseason schedule that saw us beat no one good, then two losses to open conference play, then an embarrassing loss to Colorado that came just days before we pulled the pants off of Utah. Why?

I know you weren’t the one out there missing shots (last in the Pac-12 in shooting percentage) or getting outrebounded (minus-1.4 differential in league play before Wednesday). But you were the one on the sideline and you get the credit whether we win or lose.

All of your work on the defensive end — and that’s where I seriously compliment you, because the team has usually kept up the intensity on the defensive end even when we couldn’t score — goes to waste when the ball doesn’t go through the hoop.

It’s sad, but heads have to roll.

The talent is there; clearly the performances against Utah and Oregon proved that this week. But there is no time left to blame the players. Something has gone wrong. I don’t think they trust you, I don’t think they believe, because it’s a fine line to walk between searching for a good rotation and starting different players on any given night, and I feel you might have lost track of that line.

I’m not sure they understand why the hot hand doesn’t play, like when John Gage literally couldn’t miss against Cal and then started the first seven minutes of the second half on the bench. Or why the cold hands aren’t told to try something different, when jumper after jumper isn’t falling.

Perhaps it’s just all lost in translation, and certainly I’m no expert sitting in the stands and not privy to what goes on behind closed doors and on the practice floor. But Bernard Muir is an expert, and I don’t know how long his patience will last either.

I think it’ll last until next spring, when your best and biggest recruiting class are seniors and cannot possibly not go dancing. There are factors other than winning in play in the decision, like contracts and upheaval.

But I don’t have that long. And while I don’t agree with it a lot of the time, the sports world requires success the day before yesterday.

I’d like to let you have the last word, because I talk a lot and ramble on. So as I take my leave of the sports department, I’ve picked another of your quotes from that first presser, and I’d like to imagine that it symbolizes the philosophy of any good partnership, be it at The Daily, in the Stanford basketball program or in life.

“We talked about trusting one another, because for us to do anything good, we have to know that we are telling each other the truth.”

You’re a good man, Johnny Dawkins. Let’s go win the Pac-12.

Miles Bennett-Smith has been Dawkin’ around with Daily sports for too long. Welcome him to his upcoming tenure as editor in chief at milesbs@stanford.edu and follow him on Twitter @SmilesBSmith.

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Stanford basketball routs No. 10 Oregon, shaking up Pac-12 race https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/31/stanford-basketball-routs-no-10-oregon-shaking-up-pac-12-race/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/31/stanford-basketball-routs-no-10-oregon-shaking-up-pac-12-race/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:57:42 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074524 Maybe it was the announcing team of Brent Musberger and Bill Walton. Perhaps it was the rowdy student section overfilled with frats and sororities that unexpectedly rolled out in force on a Wednesday night. It’s possible that Dwight Powell, Josh Huestis and Aaron Bright simply ate their Wheaties in addition to getting fresh haircuts. Whatever […]

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Maybe it was the announcing team of Brent Musberger and Bill Walton. Perhaps it was the rowdy student section overfilled with frats and sororities that unexpectedly rolled out in force on a Wednesday night. It’s possible that Dwight Powell, Josh Huestis and Aaron Bright simply ate their Wheaties in addition to getting fresh haircuts.

Dwight Powell (above) had a double-double with 13 rebounds as Stanford cruised to a 20-point win over No. 10 Oregon on Wednesday night (Stanford Daily File Photo).
Dwight Powell (above) had a double-double with 13 rebounds as Stanford cruised to a 20-point win over No. 10 Oregon on Wednesday night (Stanford Daily File Photo).

Whatever the reason, the Stanford men’s basketball team put on a high-flying, hot-shooting, highlight-reel worthy performance in a 76-52 rout of No. 10 Oregon at Maples Pavilion on Wednesday night.

The Ducks (18-3, 7-1 Pac-12) had entered the game on an eight-game winning streak, sitting atop the conference, thanks to a strong offensive attack and a knack for pulling out close victories.

Stanford (13-8, 4-4) made sure there would be no chance of Oregon pulling out another win by taking the Ducks out of their game from start to finish.

The effort certainly made coach Johnny Dawkins happy. “I just thought it was a great game,” he said. “I thought our atmosphere was terrific, you know, our student body, our band. I just really thought it was a great atmosphere for our guys to play in, and I thought our guys really responded. So I think that combination of having great support along with the way our guys played inspired us this evening and made for a fun game for us.”

The Cardinal carried over the pure shooting stroke it had displayed in Sunday night’s 31-point rout over Utah on the court against Oregon. Guards Chasson Randle and Aaron Bright couldn’t miss from behind the arc — literally, going 6-6 from downtown — and combined for 29 points.

Inside, where Stanford had been wary of the Ducks’ size and aptitude for crashing the glass, the Card again did not back down. Forwards Josh Huestis and Dwight Powell had 13 boards apiece, repeatedly boxing out well and snatching rebounds on both the offensive and defensive ends of the floor.

“To be honest, I keep repeating it but just that mindset that we were going to do whatever it takes [to win the battle on the glass],” Powell said. “[Oregon’s Tony] Woods and [Arsalan] Kazemi were great rebounders, great offensive rebounders, so just we went in with that awareness and tried to take them out as best as we could. And the guards did a good job of boxing them out and helping, so the balls, we were able to get to them.”

Most importantly, however, was the defensive effort for Stanford.

While the Ducks were missing their starting point guard, Dominic Artis, due to injury, it might not have mattered as the Cardinal’s defense was swarming from the opening tip. Two steals in the first 94 seconds gave the student section some life, waving giant cutout heads of UCLA legend Bill Walton, who was announcing the game for ESPN, and Andrew Luck.

Five turnovers and a missed dunk didn’t help the Ducks’ cause, as they fell into an early 12-point hole. Immediately after Kazemi threw down a dunk for Oregon’s first points of the game, Stanford went on a three-point barrage, with Powell, Randle, Bright and junior John Gage each raining down a three-pointer that had the crowd roaring in appreciation.

The Ducks scored just two points in over five minutes of play and trailed by 13 at the break. Another two-handed slam by Kazemi near the end of the half was the only real highlight Oregon had in the first twenty minutes.

“We were just trying to be as intense as possible and as aggressive as possible, helping each other out,” Powell said. “We spent a lot of time watching film on them and watching their offensive schemes, so just trying to be prepared for the types of screens they set.

“[Oregon star E.J.] Singler’s always a threat, so we were keying in on him and trying to make sure he didn’t get off, because he’s a playmaker and a scorer for them, so we always had an eye on him and Andy [Brown] did a great job sticking with him. But I think it just came down to having that intensity and that mindset that we were going to dig in tonight and do whatever it takes,” he said.

A three-ball from Singler brought the Ducks within 10 to open the second half, and then Stanford took off once again. Powell, Randle and Bright all hit shots to key the offense, and the Card capitalized on more of Oregon’s 20 turnovers. A massive putback dunk from Huestis put Stanford up by 22, with under six minutes to play, sent the few Oregon fans in the building heading for the exits.

As the final seconds ticked down, the student section’s chants of “overrated” rang out for the first time in quite a while — the Card hadn’t beaten a ranked opponent since Jan. 13, 2011, when it topped Washington 58-56 at home. Stanford’s last upset over a top-10 team came in a 67-65 overtime win at Washington State on Feb. 2, 2008.

Randle, for one, hopes the two-game winning streak is indicative of good things to come for Stanford, which desperately needs to string wins together in order to make a run at an NCAA Tournament bid in March. “Really, I just hope we can look at this game and just look at it as a stepping stone,” he said, “just keep going up and keep being better every single day. And look at this game and really see the things that we did well, and even the things that we can improve on. This was a great team that we faced tonight, and we beat them on our home floor. If we could do that on the road that would be great.”

First, though, Stanford must take care of business again on its home court when Oregon State (11-9, 1-6 Pac-12) rolls into town on Sunday. Tip off from Maples is slated for 3 p.m.

Contact Miles Bennett-Smith at milesbs@stanford.edu

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M. Basketball: Ducks land on Farm https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/30/m-basketball-ducks-land-on-farm/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/30/m-basketball-ducks-land-on-farm/#respond Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:08:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074478 Flying high after throttling Utah on Sunday evening, the men’s basketball team faces its most important game of the season to date tonight as the Card welcomes No. 10 Oregon to Maples Pavilion. Recent history is not in Stanford’s favor. You have to go back to January of 2011 to find Stanford’s last win over a ranked opponent, an upset of then-No. 17 Washington, and the Card has lost four games in a row against top-25 teams. The last time Stanford beat a top-10 team was 2008, and the last home upset of a top-10 team came in 2007.

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Flying high after throttling Utah on Sunday evening, the men’s basketball team faces its most important game of the season to date tonight as the Card welcomes No. 10 Oregon to Maples Pavilion.

Road losses to USC and UCLA, coupled with a home loss to Washington put Stanford (12-8, 3-4 Pac-12) in a sizeable hole to start Pac-12 play. An up-and-down preseason also has failed to build the Cardinal’s NCAA Tournament resume, which likely means that in order for Stanford to put on its dancing shoes in March, it must either go on a remarkable run in conference play or win the Pac-12 Tournament.

The Ducks (18-2, 7-0), currently leading the conference, present a great opportunity for the Cardinal to kick off just such a run with a marquee win on a (somewhat) national stage.

Recent history is not in Stanford’s favor. You have to go back to January of 2011 to find Stanford’s last win over a ranked opponent, an upset of then-No. 17 Washington, and the Card has lost four games in a row against top-25 teams. The last time Stanford beat a top-10 team was 2008, and the last home upset of a top-10 team came in 2007.

But as mighty as the Ducks are on paper, riding a nine-game winning streak and undefeated in league play, they are plenty of reasons for Stanford to be hopeful that tonight is the night to spring an upset.

The Ducks have been living dangerously for most of the season on the offensive end, averaging a conference-worst 15.7 turnovers per contest. Their last six wins have come by an average of only 5.0 points, and while they shot 57.8 percent from the field, they committed a season-high 23 turnovers in an 81-76 win over Washington on Saturday.

Oregon head coach Dana Altman acknowledges that his team is far from perfect. “The turnovers really took away from the performance,” Altman said of his team’s effort against the Huskies. “We made a lot of bad decisions, things that we’re going to have to work on.”

In contrast, Stanford finally put together all the pieces for 40 minutes in its last performance, a 31-point rout of the Utes on the road over the weekend. Junior forward John Gage continued his white-hot shooting, hitting all four of his three-point attempts to make it eight-straight over two games, on his way to a career-high 19 points

The rest of the team was not far behind, as Stanford shot 50 percent from the field with 17 assists. Sophomore guard Chasson Randle kept up his scoring spree, chipping in 17 points as he continues to climb back from his early-season shooting struggles — over his last six games Randle is averaging 16 points.

And that leaves out the strong play of junior forward Dwight Powell. An All-Pac-10 All-Freshman selection in 2011, Powell is finally fully healthy and has been able to showcase the dynamic and athletic all-around game that made him a blue-chip recruit coming out of high school. In addition to averaging 14.5 points and 7.7 rebounds, Powell is shooting 47.7 percent overall and 80.4 percent from the foul line.

The problem against the Ducks will likely come on the defensive end, however, as E.J Singler, younger brother of former Duke star and current Detroit Pistons player Kyle Singler, is scoring buckets in bunches as one of five players averaging in double digits.

Oregon also is committed to pounding the glass on both ends, as Arsalan Kazemi has pulled down 11 rebounds in each of his last three games and is averaging 9.6 boards per game.

Part of what made Stanford so successful against Utah was its 43-27 rebounding advantage, a big improvement over the team’s previous league contests. The Card had a minus-1.4 rebound differential in conference play before Sunday — Oregon leads the Pac-12 in that category at plus-8.9 boards per game.

“I thought our guys did a good job for the most part of putting bodies on guys and making plays on the basketball,” said Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins. “That’s something we’ve got to continue to do.”

In order to return to its winning ways against the Ducks after getting swept in both meetings last year, Stanford certainly will need to keep the rebound total close, and possibly exploit the Ducks’ guard situation — starting point guard Dominic Artis is expected to miss the game with a left foot injury.

Tip-off from Maples Pavilion, where the Card is 60-20 during Dawkins’ tenure, is scheduled for 8 p.m. with national television coverage on ESPNU.

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No. 3 Michigan hands men’s gymnastics first loss of season https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/29/no-3-michigan-hands-mens-gymnastics-first-loss-of-season/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/29/no-3-michigan-hands-mens-gymnastics-first-loss-of-season/#respond Tue, 29 Jan 2013 09:01:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074437 On the surface, Stanford versus Michigan does not seem like much of a natural sports rivalry. The maize and blue of Michigan are lost in the frozen tundra of Big 10 country while the Cardinal soaks up the sun of the Pac-12. But on Saturday, both played roles as titans of the men’s gymnastics world […]

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On the surface, Stanford versus Michigan does not seem like much of a natural sports rivalry. The maize and blue of Michigan are lost in the frozen tundra of Big 10 country while the Cardinal soaks up the sun of the Pac-12. But on Saturday, both played roles as titans of the men’s gymnastics world in a clash that saw the No. 3 Wolverines overpower No. 2 Stanford from the beginning of the meet.

The loss was the first of the season for the Cardinal (4-1) in the preseason, and a bit surprising given the hot streak Stanford had been on with a win at the Stanford Open that featured victories over three top-10 opponents.

Michigan, however, was unimpressed.

With a crowd of 1,095 taking in the Wolverines’ home opener, Syque Caesar’s NCAA-record performance on the parallel bars was enough to counter several solid individual efforts for Stanford as Michigan won by 10.4 points.

On the rings, the only event the Card won on the night, seniors James Fosco and Jordan Nolff continued their dominance, scoring 15.200 and 15.100 respectively en route to a 1-2 finish, the duo’s third consecutive top-3 finish this season.

It would not be enough as the Wolverines were on their game from the get go.

The first event of the night for Stanford was the pommel horse, and while junior Chris Turner turned in a third-place score of 14.400, with senior John Martin just behind at 14.200, Stanford posted its lowest score on the event this season: 69.750.

That put the Card five points behind Michigan, which did quite well in its first rotation on the floor exercise. The Wolverines began the competition on floor, where Stacey Ervin paced the competition with a 15.40 to place first. Caesar followed with a career-high 15.25, and Adrian de los Angeles registered a score of 15.20 to help the Maize and Blue begin the night with a 74.75.

In its next event, floor exercise, the Cardinal received solid routines from Michael Levy, Jonathan Deaton and Paul Hichwa, with each scoring in the 14.000s. Levy led the group with a 14.800 and was followed by Deaton (14.550) and Hichwa (14.350). Unfortunately, the three performances weren’t enough, and the Cardinal tied its season-low team score on the event with a 70.600.

Deaton continued to contribute to the comeback cause on vault, delivering a new career-best of 14.800 to earn a fourth-place finish in the meet. The rest of the Cardinal scored in the low-to-mid 14.000s on the event, recording its highest team-score on an event to that point (72.650).

But then came the high bar, where Stanford struggled on the comeback trail. Led by seniors Cameron Foreman and Eddie Penev, who scored 14.400 and 14.150, respectively, Stanford recorded its lowest team-score of the meet with a 69.450.

In the meantime, Michigan went to town on the parallel bars, scoring a 74.50. On the parallel bars, Caesar posted an NCAA-record 15.90 score — besting the old record of 15.85 set by California’s Tim McNeill in 2008 — to record his second of two individual event titles. De los Angeles was close behind, putting up a score of 15.40 to place second.

But with victory likely out of reach, the Cardinal still ended its meet on a high note when its turn came on the parallel bars. Penev finished third with a new career-high score of 15.250 and Foreman finished tied for fourth with a 15.050.

Stanford will not compete as a team for four weeks, as six members of the Cardinal will compete in the Winter Cup Challenge — a competition hosted by USA Gymnastics to help determine the 15 men who will be selected for the U.S. Men’s Senior National Team. The Winter Cup Challenge will take place in Las Vegas on Feb. 7-9.

The team will return to action Feb. 17 at home for the Big Flip Off against rival California. The meet will be broadcast live on the Pac-12 Networks.

Contact Miles Bennett-Smith at milesbs@stanford.edu.

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M. Water Polo: Bowen, Bonanni named to the men’s water polo U.S. Senior National Team roster https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/m-water-polo-bowen-bonanni-named-to-the-mens-water-polo-u-s-senior-national-team-roster/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/m-water-polo-bowen-bonanni-named-to-the-mens-water-polo-u-s-senior-national-team-roster/#respond Fri, 25 Jan 2013 07:36:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074334 Just a few months removed from a season-ending loss in the MPSF Tournament, men’s water polo standouts Alex Bowen and Bret Bonanni earned spots on the U.S. Senior National Team roster.

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Just a few months removed from a season-ending loss in the MPSF Tournament, men’s water polo standouts Alex Bowen and Bret Bonanni earned spots on the U.S. Senior National Team roster.

The announcement came a week before the UANA World Aquatic Championship Qualification Tournament, where Bowen and Bonanni will join Jeffrey Schwimer ’11 to compete for Team USA against Canada, Brazil and Argentina. The two top teams will advance to July’s FINA World Aquatic Championships in Barcelona, Spain.

The tournament will mark the Senior National Team debut for both the sophomore Bowen and freshman Bonanni, as well as Schwimer. Each had spent time with the various youth national teams in the past. Bowen and Bonanni also account for two of the three current collegians on the U.S. roster, being joined by USC’s Nikola Vavic.

Bowen and Bonanni, Stanford’s top two goal scorers in 2012, combined to net 137 goals over the campaign. Bonanni led the team with 73, the highest output in the program since 2004. The Huntington Beach native’s strong debut season led to his being named MPSF Newcomer of the Year as well as to the All-MPSF First Team.

After being named 2011 MPSF Newcomer of the Year last year, Bowen responded with 64 goals in his sophomore season, also earning a place on the All-MPSF First Team. The San Diego native scored a team-high 11 goals at the MPSF Championship in Los Angeles, while sharing the team lead of 12 hat tricks with Bonanni.

Schwimer was a two-time All-American for the Cardinal (2009-10) during his four-year career on The Farm (2007-10). The crowd-favorite utility from Beverly Hills scored 84 goals during his collegiate career, maxing out with 33 in his senior campaign of 2010 in which he was named to the ACWPC All-America Second Team and All-MPSF First Team. In 2008 Schwimer scored 18 goals, including the game-winner in Stanford’s 6-5 National Collegiate Championship semifinal win over Loyola Marymount, as the Cardinal reached the National Championship Game.

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Men’s basketball looks to continue dominance against Colorado https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/mens-basketball-looks-to-continue-dominance-against-colorado/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/mens-basketball-looks-to-continue-dominance-against-colorado/#respond Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:50:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074281 Fresh off a rejuvenating victory over Bay Area rival California, the men’s basketball team heads out onto the road to face another Pac-12 foe: Colorado.

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Fresh off a rejuvenating victory over Bay Area rival California, the men’s basketball team heads out onto the road to face another Pac-12 foe: Colorado.

Junior forward John Gage was the Cardinal's spark plug against Cal last weekend, as he contributed 14 bench points and 4-for-4 shooting from behind the arc. (SIMON WARBY/The Stanford Daily)
Junior forward John Gage was the Cardinal’s spark plug against Cal last weekend, as he contributed 14 bench points and 4-for-4 shooting from behind the arc. (SIMON WARBY/The Stanford Daily)

While it’s normally quite chilly in Boulder this time of year, the mercury has actually been hovering a bit higher in the “Centennial State” than it has been on the Farm, although the Cardinal is hoping the Buffaloes continue to be cold from the field tonight.

Colorado is last in the conference in three-point shooting (25.8 percent) while Stanford is riding the hot hand of John Gage (4-4 from behind the arc last game) to a nice 40.2 percent clip on the year.

But if history is any indication, the game won’t be easy for the home side and rebounding figures to be the main storyline from tonight’s matchup at the Coors Events Center.

Last year, the Cardinal managed to manhandle the Buffs in both regular season matchups despite Colorado finishing the year with a better record and making a surprising run in the NCAA Tournament.

“They whipped our ass, there’s no politically correct way to say it,” Colorado head coach Tad Boyle said. “They whipped it in every way, shape and form. At home, on the road, rebounding, offense, defense, loose balls<\p><\_><\p>you name it.”

The two scores (84-64 at Stanford, 74-50 in Boulder) did a decent job of describing the Cardinal’s dominance, as well as the 85-53 two-game edge in rebounding.

“When we played them here, it wasn’t a great feeling seeing your fans leave not even halfway into the second half,” CU junior wing Andre Roberson said. “It was just kind of disappointing. We let (Buffs fans) down with that.

“This year, I feel like we’re going to come ready to play…capitalize on the game plan and come out ready to compete. We know what they’re all about; we have to be physical and aggressive.”

But it was the backcourt duo of junior Aaron Bright and sophomore Chasson Randle who really gashed the Buffs last year and allowed the frontcourt to thrive. Bright averaged 11.5 points and 4.0 assists while shooting 6-12 from the field. Randle averaged 19.0 points while connecting on 13-21 overall.

Nevertheless, it will be important for Stanford’s “bigs” to step up and fill the void left by graduated seniors Andrew Zimmerman and Josh Owens, who were the main contributors down low for the Cardinal last season and at 6-foot-8 and over 230 pounds each, gave the Buffs plenty of trouble in the paint and spread the floor for Bright and Randle to drive.

At 6-foot-10, junior Dwight Powell has made the transition from the small forward position to the power forward and center spot this season, and Boyle said he is “much improved” from last season and a threat on the offensive end.

Powell is averaging a team-high 16 points in Pac-12 competition and collecting 8.6 rebounds a game. Teamed with junior Josh Huestis, who is averaging 9.8 rebounds per game, Stanford is fourth in rebounding margin (plus-1.8) while Colorado is eighth (minus-2.0).

But despite the downward trending stats, the Buffs started the season off in the top-25 and are a dangerous squad. They have lost just once at home in eight games, and beat Dayton, Baylor and Murray State to earn the Charleston Classic title in the preseason.

Led by Spencer Dinwiddie on the offensive end, 14.6 points per game, the Buffs are averaging over 70 points per game this year.

Diwiddie said the page on last season’s lopsided losses to the Cardinal has been turned and the Buffs aren’t dwelling on redemption: “It’s a new year, new team. We fully understand what happened last year. We understand we got out-bounded on the glass and they blew us out both times. We’re looking to come out and play physical and tough and set the tone.”

Colorado’s most recent win in the series with the Cardinal came on Dec. 23, 1990, with the Buffs booking an 89-79 decision in Boulder. Stanford hopes to extend the drought tonight with tip-off from Colorado coming at 8 p.m. MST on ESPNU.

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No. 10 men’s tennis hosts three ranked teams for ITA Kick-Off Weekend https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/no-10-mens-tennis-hosts-three-ranked-teams-for-ita-kick-off-weekend/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/no-10-mens-tennis-hosts-three-ranked-teams-for-ita-kick-off-weekend/#respond Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:47:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074294 After a nice 7-0 win over Sacramento State to open the season last week, the No. 10 men’s tennis team is back on the court tomorrow and Saturday, hosting a pair of matches as part of the ITA Kick-Off Weekend at Taube Tennis Stadium.

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After a nice 7-0 win over Sacramento State to open the season last week, the No. 10 men’s tennis team is back on the court tomorrow and Saturday, hosting a pair of matches as part of the ITA Kick-Off Weekend at Taube Tennis Stadium.

Senior Matt Kandath dropped the first set of his season-opening match against Sacramento State 0-6, but bounced back with a pair of 6-3 wins to earn his first victory of the season. (NICK SALAZAR/The Stanford Daily)
Senior Matt Kandath dropped the first set of his season-opening match against Sacramento State 0-6, but bounced back with a pair of 6-3 wins to earn his first victory of the season. (NICK SALAZAR/The Stanford Daily)

One of 15 host sites around the country, Stanford is hosting No. 27 San Diego, No. 29 Texas Tech and No. 26 Texas A&M with San Diego and Texas Tech squaring off Friday morning before Stanford and the Aggies meet in the afternoon. The winners will play Saturday to determine who advances to the National Team Indoor Championships, which will be held Feb. 15-18 in Seattle.

Stanford’s pod is definitely one of the toughest in the draw, with each team ranked in the top 30, but the Cardinal will benefit from being at home and has some momentum after last week as well as sophomore Robert Stineman’s run to the Consolation Final at the Sherwood Cup earlier this week.

Head coach John Whitlinger was impressed with Stineman during the preseason. “Robert has improved,” Whitlinger said. “He knew what he had to work on over the summer, and to his credit, really got out there and put in the time to work hard and get better. I think Robert is primed for a pretty good year as well, and I’m ready for some big things from him.”

If the Card is to advance this weekend, however, Stineman’s classmate John Morrissey will also need to step up. Morrissey is the lone nationally-ranked player on the roster right now, and Whitlinger said he was hopeful that even with just a year of varsity experience Morrissey could thrive.

“John had a good fall,” Whitlinger said. “He played well at the ITA All-American Championships and ended up winning a round after getting through the qualifying portion. John is getting better and better. He’s coming off a big year and I’m interested in seeing what he can do higher in the lineup.”

It won’t be easy against the Aggies.

“We are very excited to get the season underway,” Aggie men’s tennis head coach Steve Denton said. “Our team has been beating up on each other during our preseason camp. Coach (Bob) McKinley and I are very impressed on how well our young team has competed thus far against each other. We have had some very spirited practice sessions.”

The Aggies return seven members from last season’s 14-15 squad that advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament before falling to the eventual national champions in USC. Headlining the group of returners are sophomores Jeremy Efferding and Jordan Szabo, ranked No. 87 and No. 103, respectively, in the preseason ITA singles rankings.

In addition, junior Junior Ore and sophomore Behzad Minavi, who claimed the singles (Ore) and doubles (Ore/Minavi) championships at the Rice/MET Indoor Tennis Tournament last weekend, look to use that victory as a springboard for the upcoming season. Other notable returners with varsity experience are senior Niall Angus, junior Alberto Bautista and sophomore Jackson Withrow.

Regardless of who steps onto the court for A&M, Stanford is eager to return to relevance in the tournament, having last captured the hardware at this tournament in 2002 with a 4-3 win over Illinois.

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San Jose Earthquakes take Adam Jahn in first supplemental round of MLS draft https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/22/san-jose-earthquakes-take-adam-jahn-in-first-round-of-mls-draft/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/22/san-jose-earthquakes-take-adam-jahn-in-first-round-of-mls-draft/#respond Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:48:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074241 Stanford senior Adam Jahn, who led the men's soccer team this season with a career-high 13 goals and 30 points, was selected by the San Jose Earthquakes with the 15th overall pick in Tuesday's MLS Supplemental Draft. The Davis, Calif. native Jahn was invited to the MLS pre-draft combine and named among the top-60 draft-eligible players in the country, but he was very pleased to be selected by a team so close to home.

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Stanford senior Adam Jahn, who led the men’s soccer team this season with a career-high 13 goals and 30 points, was selected by the San Jose Earthquakes with the 15th pick in Tuesday’s MLS Supplemental Draft. The Davis, Calif. native Jahn was invited to the MLS pre-draft combine and named among the top-60 draft-eligible players in the country, but he was very pleased to be selected by a team so close to home.

Senior Adam Jahn was selected by the San Jose Earthquakes in the first round of Tuesday's MLS Draft. (Stanford Daily File Photo).
Senior Adam Jahn was selected by the San Jose Earthquakes in the first round of Tuesday’s MLS Draft. (Stanford Daily File Photo).

“Oh, it’s great,” Jahn said about landing with the Earthquakes. “I get to stay local around my friends and family and try to play for a team that I know a lot about and I’ve followed for a long time. I’m really excited about the opportunity.”

After helping Stanford make an appearance in the NCAA Tournament as a sophomore, the 6-foot-3 forward helped the Cardinal to a 9-8-1 overall mark, and a third-place finish in the Pac-12 with a 5-4-1 conference record.

He was named to the All-Pac-12 First Team for his standout senior campaign, making him a four-time all-conference selection for his career. Jahn twice earned the Pac-12 Player of the Week honor in 2012, the second honor coming Nov. 13 after posting his first career hat trick, and the first Cardinal hat trick in 11 years, in Stanford’s 6-1 away win at arch-rival California. In the match Jahn netted the equalizer and go-ahead goals either side of halftime, then added the third by rifling a shot into the roof of the net in the 77th minute.

Jahn, who started all 18 matches for the Cardinal in 2012, provided a team-best four match-winners on the year. His match-winners included Stanford’s away wins over ranked teams such as No. 11 UC-Irvine on Sept. 7 and No. 25 UC-Santa Barbara on Oct. 26, in addition to an 86th-minute winner in a 3-2 home win over Oregon State on Oct. 18.

He ends his Cardinal career with 24 goals, 12 assists and 60 points. His 13 goals in 2012 is the highest tally for a Stanford player in 12 years.

As Jahn transitions to the professional ranks, he said he expects to join the Quakes in their preseason camp on Wednesday. He considers Quakes target men Alan Gordon and Steven Lenhart as role models.

“Definitely Lenhart and Gordon are two guys I try to play like. They have big bodies,” Jahn said, who has played with the under-18 national team. “I like to think that I have good skill and a soft touch, and I like to be the target guy and connecting play. I think that’s a big strength of mine.”

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Wrestling hosts ranked Air Force, Oregon State https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/18/wrestling-hosts-ranked-air-force-oregon-state/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/18/wrestling-hosts-ranked-air-force-oregon-state/#respond Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:14:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074190 Despite suffering through last weekend’s tough road trip that included losses to Brown, No. 21 Maryland, Harvard and American, Stanford’s wrestling team is excited to be back at home to host No. 25 Air Force tonight and visit No. 9 Oregon State tomorrow night for a Pac-12 dual.

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Despite suffering through last weekend’s tough road trip that included losses to Brown, No. 21 Maryland, Harvard and American, Stanford’s wrestling team is excited to be back at home to host No. 25 Air Force tonight and visit No. 9 Oregon State tomorrow night for a Pac-12 dual.

Wrestling hosts ranked Air Force, Oregon State
Although the team struggled during last weekend’s road trip, Stanford has several wrestlers who have been performing well on the mat lately and are expected to give No. 25 Air Force a handful tonight. (MICHAEL KHEIR/The Stanford Daily)

“The team did have a rough weekend,” redshirt junior Bret Baumbach said, “but all we can do is bounce back and look forward to tonight. After that we can think about Oregon State, but our focus right now is going to battle against Air Force.”

The Falcons enter tonight’s match on a bit of a hot streak, having won three straight dual meets. Two of Air Force’s wrestlers are also ranked in the top 10 in the country: senior 149-pounder Cole VonOhlen (21-2) is No. 4 in his weight class, and freshman Josh Martinez (18-6) is No. 10 at 125 pounds.

With VonOhlen and junior Josh Kreimier, the Falcons have two veterans with NCAA Championships experience, which could be critical against a relatively inexperienced Stanford squad.

And that Cardinal team has been struggling a bit of late, posting a 4-10 overall record through the first 14 matches. Youth has certainly been an issue, as coach Jason Borrelli’s probable lineup features no seniors and likely just three juniors.

Nevertheless, Baumbach (165 pounds), junior heavyweight Dan Scherer and redshirt freshman Evan Silver (125) pounds had good outings last weekend. Baumbach went undefeated, including recording a fall while wrestling up a weight class at 174 pounds.

Silver and Scherer also had three wins apiece, with Silver upsetting No. 17 Shane Gentry of Maryland.

“It’s great to see individuals flourish at certain spots,” Baumbach said. “It’s great to see Evan pick up a huge win and see him and Dan both go 3-0 on the first day. But after that day ends, you kind of have to forget about it and move on. What we take from it is that we do see that there’s improvement, which is what coach says is how you can evaluate where you are, by how much you’re improving.”

Things won’t get any easier on Saturday against Oregon State in the Card’s second Pac-12 dual of the year. The Beavers (4-3, 1-1 Pac-12) are the highest-ranked Pac-12 squad in the latest polls and boast five wrestlers ranked in the top 10 of their individual weight classes. Seniors Chad Hanke (heavyweight) and Mike Mangrum (141 pounds) lead the way at No. 4. Junior 149-pounder Scott Sakaguchi and sophomore 197-pounder Taylor Meeks both come in at No. 8, while junior RJ Pena (157 pounds) is No. 10.

In addition, the schedulemakers at the Pac-12 did the Cardinal no favors in pushing the dual against Oregon State from its originally scheduled slot on Sunday up to Saturday night. Stanford will fly out early Saturday morning and head from the airport straight to the arena for a prematch workout designed to help the team make its second consecutive weigh-in in less than 24 hours.

“That’s not something that’s easy,” Baumbach said of the schedule. “It’s very stressful and plays a big part kind of in the background. It doesn’t make or break anything, but it is an obstacle to get around. There’s not a lot of down time in a stressful 24-hour period, and it’s something we don’t see very often.”

Stanford takes on the Falcons from Burnham Pavilion tonight at 6 p.m., with Saturday’s match against Oregon State set to start at 7 p.m. from Corvallis, Ore.

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Manti Teo’s fake girlfriend, and how we missed it https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/17/manti-teos-fake-girlfriend-if-only-id-known/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/17/manti-teos-fake-girlfriend-if-only-id-known/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 09:08:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074147 I do not like Notre Dame for many, many reasons, but I hope that Manti Te’o comes out today for his press conference and stares at the sea of reporters, all salivating over a chance to tear Notre Dame’s fallen star to shreds, and tells them to shove it.

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There are no secrets on the Internet.

Manti Te’o begs to differ.

And I, for one, am on his side.

I do not like Notre Dame for many, many reasons, but I hope that Manti Te’o comes out today for his press conference and stares at the sea of reporters, all salivating over a chance to tear Notre Dame’s fallen star to shreds, and tells them to shove it.

I hope that before they get to lay into him and spin him in circles with their questions about Lennay Kekua and how he possibly could have been duped into such an incredible story and how he could have perpetuated this myth and how he could possibly not have anything to do with the hoax — before all of that — I hope he asks the media assembled in front of him why they did not do their due diligence to help him out.

Because that should just about shut everyone in that room up. Because they all missed it. And I missed it. And the world of journalism missed it.

For that I am sorry, and for that Manti Te’o should really be upset. Imagine the shame and misery and pain we could have saved him if we had just told him, “hey, Lennay Kekua didn’t die because she never existed.”

It would have been quicker, easier, and maybe then he wouldn’t have been a Hesiman candidate, because the voters wouldn’t have been able to fall back on the hype and the “intangibles” and the “heart” that he showed in preserving through such a tough season.

And at the very least, we would have preserved the memory and passing of Teo’s grandmother, who beneath all the layers of hoax did in fact die a few days before Notre Dame played Michigan State.

Instead we are left with a mess bigger than what I imagine happened after Azia Kim was discovered hiding in the lounge at Okada.

And personally, I am left to wonder exactly how I could possibly have missed this story. Because I should have been the one to tell this story, or perhaps Sam Fisher, or Joey Beyda, or George Chen or Billy Gallagher or even maybe Brendan O’Byrne.

Not a senior at Columbia who works for Deadspin. Me. Here’s why I’m still not famous….

In every story you will ever see about this hoax, Lennay Kekua will forever be remembered as a former Stanford student who met Te’o on the field, near the field, in the stands, at a club, by the team bus — well, no one is sure where it allegedly took place if it even was a physical meeting and not just a message via Twitter.

In any case, Kekua will be remembered as a Stanford student who was in a tragic car accident, then found out she had leukemia and underwent cancer treatment all while maintaining a relationship with Te’o.

It was an incredible story, the kind that movies are made out of, especially when the Notre Dame star linebacker who wore his heart on his sleeve lost both Kekua and his grandmother in supposedly a six-hour window just days before taking on Michigan State.

You can watch the Youtube video of Te’o being interviewed after the game, where he is very emotional and clearly pained as he discusses his loss. ESPN picked it up and put it into the hypemachine, in a major, almost-worthy-of-TimTebow way.

And as the season went on and Notre Dame kept winning, Te’o’s story became even bigger and better.

Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel took the mantle of chief Te’o trumpeter when he wrote a cover story for the magazine in October. In it, Thamel reported the precise date of Kekua’s supposedly almost-deadly car accident (April 28) and stated that her “relatives told [Te’o] that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.”

He went on to sound Te’o’s praises again in December when he explained that Kekua wrote Te’o a series of inspirational notes before her passing, and that her brother Kainoa and sister U’ilani “would read the letters to Manti” to help soothe his pain. “It’s given me a sense of strength and perseverance,” the Heisman Trophy finalist told the Thamel.

Except that it Kainoa and U’ilani can’t exist either… not the point, ok let’s refocus.

In none of all of that major coverage of Te’o and Kekua, however, did any reporter mention that this girl had supposedly attended Stanford. Oh, how I wish they had, because if anybody on my sports staff had caught a sniff of Lennay Kekua, Stanford student and told me, I would have lost my mind.

Sure it’s easier to say this in hindsight, but there is no chance that I don’t have an inkling of a girl that was in a major car accident, then has leukemia, and all the while is the girlfriend of a major star in Manti Te’o. No way.

I would have been writing that story when Te’o played Stanford, like every year. It would have been a good angle in 2010, and in 2011 and in 2012. But the only outlet to report it apparently was the South Bend Tribune, which has very conveniently pulled that story from its web site. Very clearly in a story from October 12, The Tribune wrote that “Kekua, who eventually graduated from Stanford, was, in fact, doing so well that she was released from the hospital on Sept. 10.”

The New York Times also identified her as a “Stanford graduate” in a story the day after, so I guess that was my best chance to call baloney and I didn’t read it. But I also feel no one else on campus did either, because I would have expected any of you to also be suspicious that this Stanford grad wouldn’t have friends, a vigil, a million RIP Facebook posts, something.

Which is no excuse for the media’s mishandling of the situation. Maybe the Tribune made that part up or ran with it with no sources and only a faint rumor. I don’t know, I’d never willingly go to their site in my life.

Which is why I accept your criticism, and I welcome it because you are right to be disappointed with us at this time.

Don’t accept ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski’s lame response that he couldn’t find an obituary for Lennay Kekua and couldn’t find any records about a car accident and ignored the obvious red flags because essentially Te’o told him to back off.

“And so in that instance, and at that moment, you simply think that you have to respect those wishes,” said Wojciechowski. “Short of asking to see a death certificate, I’m not sure what most people would do differently in that case.”

We should have done better, because as any journalist knows, there are always secrets on the Internet and it’s always our job to find them.

Miles Bennett-Smith is President of Stanford’s student catfishing group. To make a donation or learn where to attend the next virtual meeting, you can email Miles at milesbs@stanford.edu and follow him on Twitter @Smilesbsmith.

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Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend Lennay Kekua is a hoax https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/16/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-lennay-kekua-is-hoa/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/16/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-lennay-kekua-is-hoa/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2013 23:43:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074122 Manti Te'o's alleged girlfriend, who supposedly died of leukemia six hours after Te'o's grandmother passed away, is revealed to be a hoax. Lennay Kekua was supposed to have attended Stanford University and met him on campus after a game in 2009.

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Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend Lennay Kekua is a hoax
Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend Lennay Kekua is revealed to be a hoax. Kekua had allegedly attended Stanford.

The jig is up.

Manti Te’o, the All-American linebacker and Heisman runner-up for Notre Dame, garnered off-the-field attention this season after the death of his girlfriend, an purported Stanford graduate named Lennay Kekua, to cancer and his grandmother, Annette Santiago. It was reported the deaths had been six hours apart.

Now Lennay Kekua was revealed by Deadspinto be fabricated, and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick held a press conference Wednesday night to address the story, which the school claims was an elaborate hoax.

“On the morning of December 26th, very early morning, Manti called his coaches to inform them that, while he was in attendance at the ESPN awards show in Orlando, he received a phone call from a number he recognized as having been that he associated with Lennay Kekua,” Swarbrick said. “When he answered it, it was a person whose voice sounded like the same voice he had talked to, who told him that she was, in fact, not dead.”

Swarbrick also went on to say that the relationship between Te’o and Kekua was “exclusively an online relationship.”

Reports in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and elsewhere told the story of  Te’o putting up 12 tackles and an interception as he led the Fighting Irish in an emotional 20-3 upset of Michigan State after he learned of the deaths.

ESPN picked up on the supposed heartbreak and had Te’o appear on College GameDay to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her battle with leukemia. He sent a letter to the parents of a child with cancer, discussing his experience with disease and grief.

Teo’s grandmother, Annette Santiago, died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration (SSA) records. But there is no record of the death of Lennay Kekua at that time or any other. There is also no report of the severe auto accident involving Lennay Kekua that Te’o also said had occurred back around February of last year.

According to the South Bend Tribune, the young couple’s first meeting supposedly came after Kekua–then a Stanford student–met Te’o after a football game at the Farm in 2009.

But the Stanford registrar’s office as well as University spokesperson Lisa Lapin say that there is no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. Deadspin reports that outside of a few pictures on social media sites, Kekua is “a ghost.”

In fact, the photographs identified as Kekua—mainly in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from a 22-year-old Californian’s social media accounts: her name is not Lennay Kekua.

According to Swarbrick, after Te’o came forward with his suspicions, Swarbrick arranged a meeting for Dec. 27, and said Te’o shared with him the details of the relationship. Notre Dame then hired an outside firm to investigate the case, receiving a final report with the investigation’s findings on Jan. 4.

“Our investigators through their work were able to discover online chatter among the perpetrators that is sort of the ultimate proof of this, the joy they were taking, the sort of casualness with which among themselves they were referring to what they had accomplished and what they had done,” Swarbrick said.

Te’o’s personal tragedy is what many people believe boosted his Heisman campaign as well as the Irish’ return to stardom as they went 12-0 to open the season and made it to the BCS National Championship.

But Swarbrick also said that there were “several meetings” set up between Te’o and Kekua, including in Te’o’s home state of Hawaii, but Kekua always backed out at the last moment for some reason or another.

“Every single thing about this was real to Manti,” said Swarbrick. “There was no suspicion. The grief was real, the affection was real, and that’s the sad nature of this cruel game.”

Swarbrick said he was under the impression Te’o would address the situation further on Thursday.

Here is the statement Te’o has released, as well as Notre Dame University’s reaction.

Statement from Te’o: “This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone’s sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating. It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother’s death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life. I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been. In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was. Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I’m looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft.”

From Notre Dame assistant vice president Dennis Brown: “On Dec. 26, Notre Dame coaches were informed by Manti Te’o and his parents that Manti had been the victim of what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia. The University immediately initiated an investigation to assist Manti and his family in discovering the motive for and nature of this hoax. While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception to entertain its perpetrators.”

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Stanford tennis sweeps Sacramento State 7-0 https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/15/stanford-tennis-sweeps-sacramento-state-7-0/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/15/stanford-tennis-sweeps-sacramento-state-7-0/#respond Tue, 15 Jan 2013 09:05:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074103 An impressive 7-0 showing against Sac State at Taube Tennis Stadium proved that the Cardinal team makes up for the absence of last year's stars Bradley Klahn and Ryan Thacher with plenty of depth.

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Ahead of Tuesday’s season opening match, men’s tennis coach John Whitlinger acknowledged that it would be all but impossible to replace two players as dominant as graduated seniors Bradley Klahn and Ryan Thacher.

“When you have two guys who have been at the top of the lineup for basically the last four years, a doubles team that’s been among the best in the nation, you’re talking about very big shoes to fill,” Whitlinger said. “Now, I know there are guys on the roster who can step up for us. I just have to see it once we get out there.”

But with an impressive showing against Sac State at Taube Tennis Stadium, the Cardinal proved that the team makes up for its lack of star power with plenty of depth.

Without Klahn, a six-time All-American and NCAA singles champion in 2010, and Thacher, a three-time All-American, Stanford swept all six singles matches en route to a 7-0 win over the Hornets.

After senior Matt Kandath and sophomore John Morrissey opened the match with a 8-6 win in doubles, Morrissey cruised to a 6-1, 6-3 victory over Aliaksandr Malko in the No. 1 spot.

Despite losing six consecutive games and the first set 6-0, Kandath roared back to beat Marek Maksoo 0-6, 6-3, 6-3 in the No. 2 slot.

Nolan Paige’s 6-3, 6-1 victory over Sean Kolar in the No. 3 position was technically the match’s clincher, but Stanford didn’t stop there as Trey Strobel, Maciek Romanowicz and Robert Stineman completed a perfect afternoon for the home side.

Paige, Strobel and Romanowicz are all freshmen, something Whitlinger alluded to on Monday when he said that he “wouldn’t be surprised if two, or even three, of the freshmen cracked the singles lineup. Their IQ for the game and work ethic are very good. Nolan played well at ITA Regionals and two of his wins were top-conference guys in Kyle McMorrow and Riki McLachlan. Maciek has a great attitude on the court, Trey is ranked in doubles with junior Jamin Ball at No. 57 and Anthony is a crafty player who I can also see stepping up and winning a match.”

With the Hornets out of the way, Stanford turns its attention to the Aggies of Texas A&M, who will visit the Farm on January 25th for the first round of the National Team Indoor Championships.

Although the Aggies are currently No. 26 in the country, anyone else Stanford faces in the championship rounds will likely be a top-20 opponent. The Cardinal’s path to Seattle, the site of the finals to be held mid-February, is one of the toughest in the draw. If Stanford can get past A&M, No. 27 San Diego or No. 29 Texas Tech await.

Stanford last captured the hardware at this tournament in 2002 with a 4-3 win over Illinois.

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Bennett-Smith: Will Lance Armstrong apologize on Oprah’s magical couch? https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/14/will-lance-armstrong-apologize-oprahs-couch/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/14/will-lance-armstrong-apologize-oprahs-couch/#respond Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:40:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074076 But I love Oprah, really I do. Because she apparently is the best person to turn to when you want the truth. I don’t know why we bother interrogating anybody these days--I’d say two minutes on Winfrey’s couch would turn even the most hardened men into songbirds.

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If anyone could let me know which channel Oprah’s show is on, I’d be eternally grateful.

Seriously, I need to know, because the whole O Network thing is kind of confusing for me, and in three years of having cable television, I have yet to come anywhere near noticing it, let alone turning to it. Does it even come in basic cable? Ahh, the important questions in life.

Perhaps I’ve really been missing out. Well, probably not.

But I love Oprah, really I do. Because she apparently is the best person to turn to when you want the truth. I don’t know why we bother interrogating anybody these days–I’d say two minutes on Winfrey’s couch would turn even the most hardened men into songbirds.

Exhibit A: Tom Cruise.

Exhibit B: Tom Cruise.

Exhibit C: everybody else who has ever appeared on the show, as the list includes mass murderers confessing their sins, authors admitting to plagiarism and fiction, Michael Jackson at his personal theme park, drug addicts… I mean, I don’t know where to stop.

Perhaps I’ll just get to the point: Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong is the reason I need to know where to find Oprah these days, and why I must delete an old episode of Nashville in order to make room on my DVR.

Today, Oprah sits down with the man who beat testicular cancer, won seven Tour de France titles in a row and raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research. And he’s going to admit he cheated the whole way.

At least that’s what the liberal media tells me.

And that’s not all they say. Most of the media tells me that I should despise Armstrong as the ringleader of perhaps the greatest cheating scandal sports has ever seen. I should see Armstrong as a manipulating, lying, cutthroat ass who intimidated and threatened his way to the top of the world of cycling and profited like few ever have before. They say I should never let Armstrong back into the spotlight because what he did was unforgiveable.

It sounds like a challenge.

You should know by now that I’ve never shied away from an argument in my life. I love Tim Tebow and Jordan Williamson, and I think Bonds and Clemens deserve to be in the Hall of Fame just as much as Babe Ruth does. Need you know more?

But I digress. What I mean to say is I also think Lance Armstrong deserves to keep all those yellow jerseys no matter what he injected into his veins for all those years.

I’m sorry to keep subjecting you to this abuse about steroids, and I promise this is my last post on the subject for at least the next month, but my argument is simple: Lance Armstrong made cycling relevant for the first time in this country, raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research and did exactly what he needed to do in order to win in his sport.

To me, that sounds like the American dream. I know that steroids are bad, that they can kill you and should not be taken by any young athlete. I also know that blood doping is dangerous and can kill you. I also know that people like Armstrong cannot help but be role models and that people will look up to them and kids will want to emulate them and that cheating is a terrible example to leave.

That’s why we hate Ray Lewis, right? Why we shun the man who very likely killed two men with a knife and at the very least is responsible for bringing his two friends to the fight and allowing them to do the job. Which is why we banned NFL wide receiver Donte Stallworth for life after got into his car with a BAC of above .120 and soon after struck and killed a man who ran across the road trying to catch a bus to work.

I know my argument is weak if all I do is toss up examples of other people who should be punished but somehow escaped. But I don’t think that it’s criminally weak to point out that Armstrong cheated during an age of cycling in which some people close to the issue think upwards of 50 percent of the field was doping in some manner or another.

If you wanted to award a title for the 2003 race, you’d have to give it to the fifth-place finisher, Haimar Zubeldia, who was the only rider in the top-eight not to be caught by a drug test.

In 2005 once again, seven of the first eight finishers have been caught doping.

The list goes on, and what I have to say about that might not matter to you all that much, but I find it unfair that Lance Armstrong would finish behind all those riders by not using EPO.

This, I suppose, naturally leads to the idea that I also should feel sorry for the 50 percent that didn’t cheat and ended up suffering for it. I do feel sorry for them, but I don’t blame Armstrong.

No, I blame a society that allowed the Tour to go on year after year when allegations of doping have been extremely widespread in the sport for decades and that championed honesty and integrity only until those athletes stop winning.

Lance Armstrong used his pedestal to do plenty of good for the world in my opinion, and he also used it to do harm. I guess he is human after all. That’s pretty much how I felt when the lies began to realllllyyyy unravel.

I hope he admits he cheated for the first time today, not for me or him, but so that all the people who want to hear him apologize for being a terrible person and trying to win at all costs, knowing that even beating cancer and being one of the better athletes in the world–which I challenge anyone to prove that he of the 32 beats per minute heart rate would not be if he didn’t dope–would not have brought him fame or fortune or the success that we applaud our citizens for dreaming of one day having.

I’m sorry too, because that last sentence was way too long. But you won’t convince me that Lance Armstrong is worse than Ray Lewis or Tiger Woods or any other athlete who has skeletons in the closet.

At least not unless you get me on Oprah’s couch…

 

Miles Bennett-Smith is on record saying that Jordan Williamson will win the Lou Groza award next year, and he will not apologize for it. Send your love mail to milesbs@stanford.edu and follow him on Twitter @Smilesbsmith.

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Pac-12 releases Stanford football schedule for 2013, this time officially https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/10/pac-12-releases-stanford-football-schedule-for-2013-this-time-officially/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/10/pac-12-releases-stanford-football-schedule-for-2013-this-time-officially/#respond Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:55:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073984 After accidentally releasing an early look at Stanford football's 2013 schedule, the Pac-12 on Thursday officially announced the full slate of games for next season highlighted by a November 7th showdown with Oregon likely broadcast on national television.

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After accidentally releasing an early look at Stanford football’s 2013 schedule, the Pac-12 officially announced the full slate of games for next season on Thursday, highlighted by a Nov.-7 showdown with Oregon that will likely be broadcast on national television.

Pac-12 releases Stanford football schedule for 2013, this time officially
Stanford’s early-season schedule was unkind to starter Josh Nunes (above) in 2012. As a redshirt sophomore, Kevin Hogan looks to have an easier opening stretch in 2013. (SIMON WARBY/The Stanford Daily)

Here is the schedule in full:

Sept. 7 – vs. San Jose State
Sept. 14 – at Army
Sept. 21 – vs. Arizona State
Sept. 28 – at Washington State
Oct. 5 – vs. Washington
Oct. 12 – at Utah
Oct. 19 – vs. UCLA
Oct. 26 – at Oregon State
Nov. 2 – BYE
Nov. 7 (Thursday) – vs. Oregon
Nov. 16 – at USC
Nov. 23 – vs. Cal
Nov. 30 – vs. Notre Dame

Dec. 7 (Saturday) – Pac-12 Championship Game

Quick hits: The big game on the schedule is clearly the clash against the Ducks on a Thursday night, which could once again have national-title implications. Hopefully having nine months to prepare will allow Stanford Stadium to fill for what should be a battle for the Pac-12 North Division title.

The traditional rivalry with California is back to its traditional pre-Thanksgiving slot, Nov. 23rd.

The back end of the schedule is absolutely loaded. After a pretty breezy six-game stretch to open the season, although San Jose State might start the year ranked and Washington is definitely no pushover, the final month of the season has Oregon, USC, Cal and Notre Dame in that order. Three of the four teams, sorry Bears, have the potential to be top-10 teams. Talk about brutal.

For more detailed analysis, check out Sam Fisher’s reaction here.

 

 

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Potential 2013 Stanford football schedule released early by Pac-12 https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/10/stanford-football-schedule-2013/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/10/stanford-football-schedule-2013/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:12:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073975 Stanford’s 2013 football schedule may have been accidentally released Wednesday evening, although not officially by the Pac-12, and it appears as though the road back to Pasadena—the host site for next year’s BCS National Championship Game—will be anything but easy for the Cardinal.

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Stanford’s 2013 football schedule may have been accidentally released Wednesday evening, although not officially by the Pac-12, and it appears as though the road back to Pasadena—the host site for next year’s BCS National Championship Game—will be anything but easy for the Cardinal.

Potential 2013 Stanford football schedule released early by Pac-12
This screenshot showing a potential Stanford football schedule for 2013 was posted by Todd Husak on Wednesday evening.t

It is uncertain exactly how this schedule was made available to the public, but Todd Husak, who provides color commentary for Stanford football’s radio broadcasts, tweeted a picture of a screenshot of the schedule at 7:51 p.m. on Wednesday night, saying “Look @StanfordFball schedule for 2013. Great slate of home games, but a brutal stretch to end the season.” The supposed schedule contains at least one error, as it shows Stanford playing at California, while the 116th Big Game is due to be played at Stanford Stadium.

A link to a short clip announcing Stanford Football’s schedule appeared briefly on the Pac-12 web site Wednesday night, which is when Husak posted the screenshot to Twitter, but it has since been taken down. No mention of the leaked schedule or other postings appear to have circulated on the Internet at this time, and all of the Pac-12’s other schedules remain blank for the upcoming football season.

The schedule lists Stanford as kicking off the season with a home game against San Jose State on Saturday, September 7. In an alternating home-away format that continues throughout the season, Stanford then plays at Army, home for Arizona State, at Washington State, home for Washington and at Utah.

Then things get interesting.

Starting October 19th, the schedule has Stanford playing a stretch to rival anything the SEC goes through in conference play: home for UCLA, at Oregon State, home for Oregon on November 7th for what is ostensibly a nationally-televised Thursday night game, at USC, at Cal, and finishing on November 30th with a home game against Notre Dame.

Led by Oregon and Notre Dame, which were No. 2 and No. 4 respectively in the final AP ranking, five of the six teams are likely to be ranked in the top-25 to open next season.

The game against California is almost certain to be incorrect, at least in that the traditional rotation means that Stanford would host the 116th Big Game, not play on the road against the Golden Bears as is listed on the schedule.

There is also somewhat of another obvious oddity in that the Pac-12 Championship Game is set for December 7th, a Saturday. The first two Pac-12 Championship Games have both been played on Fridays.

However the poor attendance when Stanford beat UCLA to win the 2012 Pac-12 Championship front of a crowd of just 31,622 that was hampered by the 5 p.m. start time on a Friday evening could have persuaded Pac-12 officials to adjust the schedule accordingly. (Most of the major conferences play their conference championships on the first Saturday in December.)

Four of the games on the schedule are highlighted in yellow–home against UCLA on October 19th, home against Oregon on November 7th, at Cal on November 23rd and home against Notre Dame on November 30th–perhaps implying national television exposure, but no start times are listed for any of the games and in the past most games have had flexible starts that were only determined a week or so in advance.

The schedule, if accurate, is much more favorable to Stanford fans than it was in 2012, particularly the students. Stanford played three home games before classes were in session, including a rivalry game against USC that was a nationally televised showdown between two top-25 teams. In addition, Oregon, Notre Dame and Cal are always big draws for Stanford fans and all three games will be played at home in 2013.

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Football: Tight ends Ertz and Toilolo off to NFL Draft https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/football-tight-ends-ertz-and-toilolo-off-to-nfl-draft/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/football-tight-ends-ertz-and-toilolo-off-to-nfl-draft/#respond Wed, 09 Jan 2013 05:24:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073925 All-American tight end Zach Ertz and fellow senior tight end Levine Toilolo both announced on Monday that they would declare for the NFL draft and not be back for their final year of eligibility at Stanford. Their departures, while not entirely unexpected, slightly dampened the excitement generated by classmates and defensive stars Ben Gardner, Shayne […]

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All-American tight end Zach Ertz and fellow senior tight end Levine Toilolo both announced on Monday that they would declare for the NFL draft and not be back for their final year of eligibility at Stanford.

Football: Tight ends Ertz and Toilolo off to NFL Draft
Tight end Zach Ertz was by far the Cardinal’s top receiver this season, reeling in 69 catches for 898 yards. On Monday, he and fellow senior Levine Toilolo passed up their respective fifth years of eligibility to declare for the NFL Draft. (MIKE KHEIR/The Stanford Daily)

Their departures, while not entirely unexpected, slightly dampened the excitement generated by classmates and defensive stars Ben Gardner, Shayne Skov and Trent Murphy all declaring that they would be back on the Farm for a run at the BCS title in 2013.

Ertz in particular will be missed from the Stanford offensive unit next season. The latest in a series of outstanding tight ends that gave the Farm claim to “Tight End U,” Ertz was the Cardinal’s leading receiver with 69 receptions for 898 yards and six touchdowns.

He is following in the footsteps of Coby Fleener, drafted 34th overall by the Indiannapolis Colts last year, Jim Dray (2010) playing for the Arizona Cardinals and Konrad Reuland (2011) for the New York Jets.

“Stanford’s had a lot of great tight ends for sure,” Ertz said. “Guys like Jim and Konrad really started it lately, and I’m just thankful to have been a part of it.”

“The Stanford (positives) speak for themselves, and I’m going to miss it,” added Ertz, who is projected to be selected late in the first round or early in the second.

“I’ve had a lot of great experiences. But I gathered all the facts and made the decision,” he said.

He is a senior academically and on track to earn his degree this spring in management science and engineering.

Toilolo started every game alongside Ertz in Stanford’s two-tight-end formation, averaged 16.4 yards per catch and scored four touchdowns. He is considered an intriguing NFL prospect because of his 6-foot-8-inch frame and agility.

“After much thought, prayer, and discussion with my family, I have decided to forgo my senior season of eligibility and enter the NFL draft,” Toilolo said in a statement released by the school.

Ertz has not picked an agent and will train for the draft workouts at California Strength in San Ramon, the same facility used by former Stanford players Ryan Whalen and Chris Owusu. He plans to withdraw from school for the winter academic quarter in order to participate in the pre-draft process. He will re-enroll for the spring quarter and graduate in June.

With both players leaving, as well as graduating senior running back Stepfan Taylor, Stanford will have to find new sources on offense alongside the emergence of redshirt freshman quarterback Kevin Hogan.

Freshman Luke Kaumatule and sophomore Devon Cajuste will be in the mix to replace both next season. Standout fullback Ryan Hewitt also has played tight end sparingly, and has showed great potential catching passes out of the backfield. Stanford coach David Shaw said last week that tight ends have been his biggest focus in recruiting.

“Kevin’s special, man,” Ertz said by phone. “All those guys coming back on defense, I think they’re going to be one of the best teams in the country next year. They’re going to be really good. But at the same time, I have to do what’s best for me and my family at this time. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”

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Wrestling: Card drops three duals in weekend action https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/wrestling-card-drops-three-duals-in-weekend-action/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/wrestling-card-drops-three-duals-in-weekend-action/#respond Wed, 09 Jan 2013 04:54:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073919 It was a difficult weekend for the Stanford wrestling team, which fell to Arizona State (30-7), Penn (27-6) and Rutgers (33-3) on Sunday at the Stanford Duals in Burnham Pavilion. The Cardinal dropped to 4-6 overall and 0-1 in the Pac-12. ASU now stands at 6-4 overall and 2-0 in the Pac-12, while Penn improved […]

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It was a difficult weekend for the Stanford wrestling team, which fell to Arizona State (30-7), Penn (27-6) and Rutgers (33-3) on Sunday at the Stanford Duals in Burnham Pavilion. The Cardinal dropped to 4-6 overall and 0-1 in the Pac-12. ASU now stands at 6-4 overall and 2-0 in the Pac-12, while Penn improved to 4-1 and Rutgers is 10-1 on the year.

Wrestling: Card drops three duals in weekend action
It was tough sledding for the Stanford wrestling team on Sunday, as the Card fell to Rutgers, Arizona State and Penn. Redshirt junior Bret Baumbach, however, earned two victories at 165 pounds. (MIKE KHEIR/The Stanford Daily)

The Cardinal dropped eight of 10 bouts to ASU, but Bret Baumbach’s performance against the Sun Devils was a rare bright spot on the afternoon. The redshirt junior scored Stanford’s first points of the dual with an 11-3 major decision over Hans Rasmusson at 165 pounds. Baumbach led 6-1 after the first period as he scored two takedowns and registered two back points.

Rasmusson chose down to start the second and Baumbach capitalized with two more near fall points. He chose down to start the third and recorded the escape. After Rasmusson scored a takedown, Baumbach tallied another escape and tacked on his final point with 3:09 in riding time.

Stanford got back on the board in the final bout against the Sun Devils, when redshirt freshman Evan Silver picked up a 3-1 decision over Dalton Miller at 125 pounds. A takedown in the first period for Silver proved to be the difference-maker.

All in all, Stanford was outscored 74-21, with the Sun Devils earning three major decisions.

Against Penn, Baumbach was again one of just two Cardinal wrestlers to earn a win. He posted an 8-4 decision over Brad Wukie at 165 pounds. Trailing 4-3 after the first period, Baumbach tallied a takedown in the second to capture the lead. He finished off Wukie in the third with an escape and another takedown.

Junior heavyweight Dan Scherer also scored points for Stanford against Penn. He recorded a 3-1 sudden victory decision over Steven Graziano. Each wrestler scored an escape to force the extra time, where Scherer capitalized with a takedown.

Silver registered the lone win for the Cardinal against Rutgers. The 125-pounder trailed 4-3 after two periods. He chose down to start the third and scored an escape to force overtime. There, Silver recorded a takedown against Joseph Langel III for the sudden victory decision (6-4).

Also against the Scarlet Knights, true freshman Dylan Morris put up a good fight against 10th-ranked Greg Zannetti at 174 pounds. Morris came up just short in the final period, falling 7-5.

In the other duals of the day, Rutgers defeated Arizona State, 21-12, and Penn topped the Sun Devils, 27-10.

Stanford hits the road next week, travelling to the East Coast for four duals. The Cardinal will take on Brown, Maryland and Harvard on Saturday, Jan. 12 in College Park, Md. Stanford will wrap up the weekend at American University in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Jan. 13.

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Football: Alabama a unanimous national champion, Stanford finishes seventh in final AP poll https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/football-alabama-a-unanimous-national-champion-stanford-finishes-seventh-in-final-ap-poll/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/football-alabama-a-unanimous-national-champion-stanford-finishes-seventh-in-final-ap-poll/#respond Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:06:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073906 Alabama cruised past an overmatched Notre Dame squad 42-14 to win the BCS National Championship, then wrapped up its ninth Associated Press championship on Monday night with all 59 first-place votes. Stanford finished seventh in the AP final poll and sixth in the final coaches' poll.

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Alabama cruised past an overmatched Notre Dame squad 42-14 to win the BCS National Championship, then wrapped up its ninth Associated Press championship on Monday night with all 59 first-place votes. Stanford (12-2) finished seventh in the AP final poll and sixth in the final coaches’ poll.

In the second-to-last year before a national playoff system will be used to determine the national champion, Alabama (13-1) avoided most of the potential controversy by pushing Notre Dame (which came into the night ranked No. 1 in the BCS) all over the field at the Orange Bowl.

The Fighting Irish (12-1) dropped to No. 4 in the final AP rankings, which had Oregon (12-1) second and undefeated Ohio State (12-0) third despite being banned from the postseason because of NCAA sanctions.

Georgia and Texas A&M tied for fifth, with Stanford, South Carolina, Florida and Florida State rounding out the top-10.

The SEC once again led the way with six teams in the final ranking, while the Pac-12 finished with three teams in the Top-25.

Four of Stanford’s opponents finished ranked the final AP poll: No. 2 Oregon, No. 4 Notre Dame No. 20 Oregon State and No. 21 San Jose State. Rose Bowl opponent and Big 10 Champion Wisconsin was unranked.

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M. Basketball: Stanford drops Pac-12 openers at USC, UCLA https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/07/m-basketball-stanford-drops-pac-12-openers-at-usc-ucla/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/07/m-basketball-stanford-drops-pac-12-openers-at-usc-ucla/#respond Mon, 07 Jan 2013 09:33:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073914 The Stanford men’s basketball team has picked an inopportune time to go ice cold shooting the basketball, as a strong defensive effort in the second half had the Cardinal thinking upset before losing a second-straight Pac-12 game on the road at UCLA Saturday, 68-60.

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The Stanford men’s basketball team has picked an inopportune time to go ice cold shooting the basketball, as a strong defensive effort in the second half had the Cardinal thinking upset before losing a second-straight Pac-12 game on the road at UCLA Saturday, 68-60.

M. Basketball: Stanford drops Pac-12 openers at USC, UCLA
Junior forward Dwight Powell had 18 points in Stanford’s first two conference games of the season as the Cardinal fell to 0-2 in Pac-12 play. (MIKE KHEIR/The Stanford Daily)

Coming on the heels of a bitter 71-69 loss at USC (6-9, 1-1 Pac-12) on Thursday night, head coach Johnny Dawkins’ team stayed in the locker room at Pauley Pavilion for 56 minutes after the loss, trying to get back on track in a hurry or risk missing out on the NCAA Tournament for the fifth consecutive season come March.

The disappointing weekend was just the fourth time head coach Johnny Dawkins’ team has lost back-to-back games since the start of last year, and had a much better start than the final record might indicate.

Led by a superb effort from Andy Brown, the senior forward had 17 points off the bench, Stanford (9-6, 0-2 Pac-12) took a commanding nine-point lead into halftime against the Trojans.

But after the break things quickly went downhill. USC cut the lead to five within two minutes, and tied things up at 51 with 11 minutes to play. Stanford shot a sold 51 percent in the first half, but just 26 percent in the second period (8-30).

Down by two with seconds to play, sophomore guard Chasson Randle couldn’t convert a driving layup and junior forward Dwight Powell’s dunk attempt slammed off the rim and out as the Trojans celebrated.

“We knew USC would come out in the second half,” Dawkins said after the game. “I talked about that during halftime, though we did a great job of regrouping and building a lead back up. However, they cut the lead and kept fighting and made plays at the end. It was a great conference game. They made some crucial plays at the end and we didn’t make the plays we need to make.”

Against the Bruins the script was somewhat reversed, with UCLA going on a small run to close the half with a 30-22 lead. It was all Wear twins, all the time, as junior twins David and Travis scored UCLA’s first 15 points.

The cold shooting continued for Stanford, however, with the Card hitting just 7-26 shots (27 percent), several of which were from close range.

”We held UCLA way under their scoring average,” Dawkins said, “but we have to do a lot better at making shots. We missed too many point-blank shots. Some of our guys are still getting comfortable in new roles along with freshmen coming in.”

The Bruins kept building their margin, taking a 15-point lead with 6:33 to play. But the Cardinal showed some resolve in the final minutes as UCLA got sloppy and committed eight turnovers

Stanford scored nine of the next 11 points to close to 57-49. Junior forward John Gage scored five of his 10 points in a row during the spurt.

Larry Drew II, who had seven assists, made a layup that restored UCLA’s lead to 10 points, but Randle hit a layup and 3-pointer to get Stanford to 59-54 with 47 seconds left.

It wasn’t until the Bruins went 9-10 from the line in the final minute that the game was decided. Shabazz Muhammed scored 17 of his 23 points in the second half for UCLA, winners of seven straight.

Dawkins continues to search for consistency out of his starting unit, as Gage and Brown both started and became the 11th and 12th players to start for Stanford this season.

And after the game, the team spent close to an hour in a closed-door meeting before heading back to the Farm.

”I don’t think we should forget about this game but we have to move on,” Dawkins said after the USC loss. “There are some lessons we can learn from this game. I will take the lessons we learn and that will help us improve. This is a long race and it’s only one game.”

The race continues this week with Pac-12 clashes at home against Washington State on Wednesday and Washington on Saturday.

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