Athletics

Rutgers University’s newly expanded football stadium was jammed with 52,737 boisterous fans for the 2009 home opener against the Cincinnati Bearcats, a sellout crowd that brought in $1.6 million in ticket sales, shattering attendance records.

Early one morning last week, inside Columbia’s subterranean athletic center in Upper Manhattan, M. Dianne Murphy leaned over a conference table and wrapped her fingers around a disposable cup of coffee. There was no time to sleep these days, she said.

UND President Robert Kelley's memorandum, which recounts recent legislative action allowing the transition to proceed, states that he has “directed the Athletics Department and the Office of University Relations to initiate transition processes with the goal of substantially completing them by the end of December,” as directed on Aug. 15 by the State Board of Higher Education.

Penn State University is reassessing the role of its giant football program in the wake of a child sexual abuse scandal that has led to criminal charges against a former assistant football coach and the ouster of iconic head coach Joe Paterno.

A study released Monday of the 70 Football Bowl Subdivision schools that will participate in the upcoming college football bowl season showed continued academic progress, but that the gap between white and African-American players continues to persist.

A decade of declining state funding for the University of Missouri enhanced the appeal of switching conference alignments from the Big 12 to the more financially stable and lucrative Southeastern Conference, the university's chancellor said Monday.

Officials will announce this week or early next week how the transition will proceed.

Stern emails and promises of a free trip to a bowl game were apparently not enough to stop the UW-Madison student section's sophomoric tradition of yelling chants laced with four-letter words.

Bernie Fine was fired Sunday by Syracuse University after a third man accused the assistant basketball coach of molesting him nine years ago.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Penn State alumnus, Jeff Jubelirer watched helplessly as his beloved alma mater became engulfed in an explosive child sex-abuse scandal this month. As a crisis communications specialist, he cringed.