On Iowa Daily Briefing 6.26.12 -- Amari Spievey battles back from a concussion, Matt Kroul is a center

Things I've never tried: Veal. 5-hour Energy. Veal-flavored 5-hour Energy.

HLINKS

-- This story is a couple weeks old now, but I didn't come across it until this week. It's about former Iowa defensive back Amari Spievey of the Detroit Lions, the concussion he didn't report five months ago, and the postconcussion symptons that he says are just now starting to subside. This excerpt is from the Detroit Free Press story on Spievey:

"I was having bad headaches," Spievey said. "That's going to happen when you're having a concussion, but they weren't going away."

Spievey said he took part in the first week of the off-season conditioning program in April, but when he informed trainers "my head was killing me afterward," they immediately pulled him out of workouts.

"Ever since then I've been back and forth to the hospital getting medicine and taking tests," Spievey said. The headaches, which he said he's still taking medication for, "recently just slowed down. For like a couple months I had them constantly -- like every day, all day."

-- Matt Kroul, defensive end.

Matt Kroul, center?

The former Iowa Hawkeye was a defensive player from the time he got to Iowa City from Mount Vernon until last season. Then, he converted to offensive guard to try to make the New York Jets' roster.

“It was guard in camp, and then I played scout center all last season,” he said in this story on Randy Lange's blog at the Jets' website. “I've pretty much been center these first three phases [of the offseason schedule].”

-- Iowa football fans don't care for Northwestern. But you have to give the Wildcats their due. They led Big Ten football in 2010-11 APR (Academic Performance Rate) with an NCAA Division I-A high score of 995. Iowa was eighth of the then-11 Big Ten teams, and would have been ninth of 12 had Nebraska been in the league at that time.

Iowa State was ninth of the then-12 Big 12 football teams.

Boise State tied Duke for second in the overall rankings.

-- Wisconsin has a verbal commitment from a football player from Iowa.

Defensive tackle Sam Raridon of West Des Moines Valley is joining the Badgers.

-- Missouri's football stadium seats 71,004. Its average home attendance in 2011 was 62,095.

But Mizzou wants to add 6,000 seats to Memorial Stadium. It's in the SEC now, and wants to be ... bigger.

Eight SEC stadiums have capacities of 80,000 or more.

-- Two more essays involving Jerry Sandusky and Penn State:

1. Phil Mushnick of the New York Post finds the phrase “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims.” to be more than a little insincere. He wrote:

I had no idea that college football coaches and athletic directors - those who knowingly recruit high-risk characters to their campuses, lest the other guys recruit them to their campuses - were so thoughtful and prayerful.

And college presidents and administrators - academic and social fraud enablers - hired and paid to look the other way while counting the house money, the TV money and the Nike money - apparently now suppose we believe that they're immersed in thought and bowed in prayer.

Seems that if the authorities in and around Penn State - in and around all football and basketball insane asylums - had been more thoughtful when it counted, they wouldn't now have to be so prayerful.

2. Jon Wertheim of SportsIllustratedCNN.com said there have been plenty of Sanduskys in the world, but "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the sports component was the accelerant that turned this into the nationwide (worldwide?) firestorm it became."

Sports, not religion, is today's opiate of the people; as organized religion declines steadily, our appetite and fondness for sports verge on insatiable. Sundays are defined by games, not church services. More of us identify with coaches than with clergy. Even if we weren't familiar with Sandusky, who among us didn't know about the reputation of the Penn State football program or iconic Joe Paterno?

-- George Vecsey, who graced the pages of the New York Times for many years, is now retired. And blogging.

He's always been a thoughtful and elegant writer. He went to a Yankees-Mets game over the weekend as a fan in the stands, and here is his entertaining account. A sampling:

After Cano's homer put the Yankees ahead, one Yankee female offered a large box of fries to the Mets fan.

I don't want Yankee fries, the Mets mother sniffed. They have 27 more grams of sodium.

Several rows of fans laughed. 

Nice one, the Yankee woman replied with a true New Yawkuh appreciation of a zinger.