Headlinin': Hot BCS title tickets still leave Auburn, Oregon in the red

Making the morning rounds.

• Worth every penny. Auburn and Oregon combined to lose nearly $1 million on their trip to the BCS Championship Game, mostly due to eating costs on unsold tickets: Auburn took a $781,825 hit from 2,456 unsold seats that it was obligated to buy from the game, and Oregon lost $555,575 – this on a game that was reportedly one of the hottest tickets in sports history before kickoff. (Note that "unsold" doesn't mean they were available and people didn't buy them: The school gave them to certain bigwigs and other members of the traveling party.) If not for the ticket racket, both schools would have come out in the black despite traveling halfway across the continent with a cast of hundreds. [Birmingham News, al.com]

• Next you'll be telling me there are no leprechauns. Sincere readers will be shocked – shocked! – to learn that the well-traveled 31-second audio file purporting to be a voice message from infamous stage father Cecil Newton attempting to solicit money from someone named "John" is "not authentic," according to the man on whose phone it was reportedly left, former Mississippi State quarterback John Bond. On Wednesday, Bond promised during an interview on a Huntsville radio station to provide a "snippet" of a conversation between himself and Cecil Newton that will "exonerate" Bond and a former MSU teammate, Bill Bell, in the alleged pay-for-play scheme that threatened Cam Newton's eligibility last fall. But the fuzzy, barely audible clip that made the rounds this week is clearly "fake," according to Bond's attorney, as well as pretty much everyone who strained to decipher it. [Clarion-Ledger]

• The rap sheet, "feets don't fail me now" edition. Washington running back Johri Fogerson was arrested early Thursday morning for possession of marijuana and resisting arrest after allegedly fleeing police on foot during a routine traffic stop (a headlight was out on his Lexus), only to turn himself several hours later. According to Washington State Patrol, Fogerson – a former Seattle Times State Player of the Year as a high school senior in 2007 – bolted after police spotted "a baggie" of weed in the car and tried to handcuff him, but called a dispatch center to give himself up after conferring with his mother. [Seattle Times]

• I resemble that remark! Former Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt defended his team from the implication in this week's Sports Illustrated cover story that the Wannstedt-era Panthers were leaders in college football thuggery, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that a string of violent arrests last summer was just one of those things: "We had an unfortunate stretch of incidents last summer but I am very proud of our body of work during my six years with regards to players behavior," Wannstedt said. "Every player [we recruited] was evaluated and scrutinized and we tried to project whether they would become productive members of our football program as well as the university at large. … [A]lmost all of the incidents resulted in either a suspension or a player being eliminated from our program and many of the incidents in question did not result in a conviction of any kind. Our players understood their responsibility, they graduated and for the most part, they did the right things." [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

Quickly… Despite rumors to the contrary, George O'Leary says incoming quarterback DaMarcus Smith is "100 percent a Knight." … Shocking crosstown vandalism at SMU. … Al Golden's talkin' 'bout practice. … Oklahoma State quarterback Brandon Weeden, former pro baseball player, also has a "nice little jumper." … Tennessee lineman Cody Pope on playing through a career-threatening injury. … Brandon Boykin likes Georgia's hunger. … Cool newsreel footage of Alabama and Cal in the 1938 Rose Bowl. … And one guess which school woos recruits by having the former secretary state talk to them about Moammar Gadhafi.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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