Cornell out for 3-4 weeks with knee injury

Here's a little item the Tech coaches managed to keep quiet for weeks and weeks. Cornell Brown injured his knee in the BC game, and after it continued to get worse, he finally had surgery on it yesterday. Doctors say that Cornell had a ligament tear, the origins of which actually date back to last year. They went in, repaired the damage, and cleaned the knee out, and Cornell should be back for either the Southwest Louisiana game or the ECU game. I hope he makes it back for SW Louisiana, because that'll give him a chance to get back in the swing of things before the ECU game. Let's be thankful we have only three games, all of them winnable, in a five week span. The timing of this injury could have been a lot worse.

Parker reinstated

I received an interesting email from Paul Johnson, a Hokie Central reader who hypothesized that if Marcus Parker took a redshirt year, then he wouldn't really be getting "punished" for his shoplifting incident, since he would still have two full years of eligibility left. True punishment, Paul reasoned, would only occur if Parker lost games from his full four years of eligibility. Not that Paul's a Parker-basher. He was just making a point. The point turns out to be moot, however, because it was announced yesterday that Parker has been reinstated, and he will play in Saturday's game against Temple.

This really surprises me. Parker had been asked to redshirt by the coaching staff, and I thought he would. Marcus must have refused, preferring instead to play a partial year this year, when the Hokies are going to have a better, more experienced team than they will next year and maybe even the year after that. Interesting. For those of you who are going to be at the Temple game, let's give Marcus a nice welcome back. He's done his time, and there's no reason to keep beating on him. Especially while possible arrests from the Blacksburg Brawl, a much more serious incident in my opinion, still loom in the future.

Quote of the Week

"I think we have better athletes. We have a better game plan. We have better coaches. I think we can play with them and easily beat 'em." - UVa running back Tiki Barber, one day before Georgia Tech upset the Virginia Cavaliers 13-7 in Atlanta. I catch some flack from some of my readers for even mentioning "Charlottesville High School" on a Tech sports page, but I couldn't resist this one.

Other Notes:

• The Miami game has officially been picked up by CBS as a regional telecast. The WVU game (ESPN) and the ECU game (ESPN2) are still just "potentials" at this point.
• Antonio Freeman continues to have a great year for the Green Bay Packers, catching two TD's in Sunday's action. One catch, an acrobatic grab over the defender's back in the end zone, was the Isuzu Play of the Day in Sunday night's TNT broadcast. Freeman had 7 catches for 146 yards and is one of the benefactors of a year that is turning out to be a good one for Green Bay QB Brett Favre and the Pack in general. Freeman is the Pack's leading receiver in terms of catches and yards, with 25 receptions for 410 yards.
• Conversely, Bryan Still is almost absent from the San Diego stat sheet. He has no catches so far this year and has two kickoff returns for a 28.0 yard average. As recently as September 19th, he was the fourth receiver on the team, according to the coaching staff, but progress is slow, stat-wise.
• Tickets for the WVU game, previously sold out, are now available. The students didn't pick up their full allotment, so the remainders were put back on sale to the general public. Before you go raging on the students for being slack fans, you should know that there were tents camped out for pickup, and the WVU game falls on Tech's week off (beginning of Thanksgiving break). So the full allotment was not claimed, because not enough students are going to be here for the game. My guess is that most students will return early for the UVa game, but not enough could stay late for WVU and return early for UVa.
• Apparently, the Hokie football team got worse during the week off, at least if you believe the polls. The Hokies lost four spots in the all-mighty AP poll, dropping from 26 to 30 and once again proving how smart the sportswriters are and how much respect they have for the Hokies. In the CNN/USA Today coaches' poll, the Hokies dropped one spot from 22 to 23. Sigh. Two more weeks like this, and we'll disappear entirely. I think it's "statement time" against Temple, much like it was against Akron last year.
• Lastly, a message for Tony Riley: the email address you sent to me didn't work. I think my mail server got confused by all the "dots" in the address, so we have completely lost the ability to trade messages. I like hearing from you Tony, so continue to write to me. Just be aware that for now, I can't answer. Ain't technology grand? As another reader that I was having difficulty corresponding with said, "So much for open systems." (anyone know what he meant by that?)

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