Minor mistake in my La Salle game report - it was Troy Manns who was whistled for a technical late in the game, not Brendan Dunlop. At the time, Bill Roth and Mike Burnop called it as Brendan, and after the game ended, I missed the correction because I switched off the radio and immediately started typing up the post-mortem.

My apologies if my minor error greatly altered anyone's life for the worse. I'll try not to do it again.

And oh, yes, David Jackson was fouled on the last play. La Salle's Donnie Carr even admitted it, saying through a smile, "I hammered him." I saw a clip of it on the sports news Tuesday night, and he was definitely fouled, although David may have doomed himself to not getting the call with an overstated acting job. David laid out and fell on the floor like he'd been gunned down by an Uzi, and you know how the refs are - "Just ignore those Jackson kids. They do that kind of stuff all the time."

But you know the drill. If we had just hit our free throws and avoided the technical, then Donnie Carr could have tackled Dave and it wouldn't have made any difference.

The Big East football meetings convened in Fort Lauderdale Sunday, and so far, all the talk has been about Temple and UConn. League members are sweating the future of the football conference, and they're discussing how to get rid of Temple and whether or not UConn will be coming in.

Don't interpret that as meaning that Temple will be booted and UConn will replace them. The two issues are completely separate.

As you've probably heard, the league is considering drafting minimum standards for league membership that would include an attendance average that Temple could not possibly meet. The Owls averaged about 4500 fans per game in 1995 and 6500 fans in 1996.

Another criterium being batted around is requiring league members to have "their own" stadium, of which they are the primary tenant, and that's another one that Temple would have trouble meeting (the Owls play in Veteran's Stadium in Philly).

Temple is in no immediate danger, but the handwriting is on the wall: get better or get out.

As for UConn, they are considering a move from 1-AA to 1-A football, which would automatically come with the added benefit of Big East football membership (it's in the league's charter). The big stumbling block for UConn is that being a 1-A team, according to NCAA rules, requires having a stadium with a seating capacity of at least 30,000. Whether or not the Huskies can meet that requirement centers around whether or not the state legislature will approve the building of a multipurpose stadium in Hartford. UConn has until the end of calendar year 1997 to make its intentions known to the Big East.

With BC's gambling scandal and Tech's off-the-field woes, along with the Temple and UConn situations, the Big East member schools are just generally fretting about the state of their league, which is, in my opinion, the most fragile of the major conferences in existence. Well, boo hoo. Maybe if they had offered Tech full membership and never offered Temple membership at all, they wouldn't have this problem.

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