Archive for January 24th, 2008

Big East Teleconference pWned!!!

24 January 2008

This snippet from the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg about the Big East teleconference getting tapped into by some outsiders and some obscene questions asked to Coach Huggs (among others).

A shiny penny to anyone who can tell me what was actually said in the teleconference.

I’m not surprised something like this hasn’t happened a lot sooner. I can remember about six or seven years ago, just surfing around on the Big East website and finding the phone number and access code for the teleconference readily avaible. Of course that is probably no longer the case, I would hope anyway, but apparently somebody found it fairly easily. Congratulations, all that dumpster diving outside newspaper offices paid off.

I commend these guys for the cojones to pull the prank (not sure of the illegality of it, but still pretty fearless). Of course I think the spirit of the prankster was kind of broken with the crude language and such. It would have been a lot better prank overall if it was a little more subtle and ironic. This could pretty much kill off the teleconference as a way for journalists to do business, but you’d think there would have been a better way by now anyway.

UPDATE (1/26): Audio was posted on YouTube. Visit Troy Nunes is An Absolute Magician to hear. Parental discretion advised.

Who is Jeff Mullen?

24 January 2008

So, Coach Stewart today named his offensive coordinator. If you read this blog then you know I was calling for an exciting, big name hire to fill out Stew’s staff. As it turns out, Jeff Mullen, quarterbacks coach of Wake Forest was today named to the position. My first though is, what, we couldn’t get the offensive coordinator from Wake? Sure, they aren’t a whipping boy in the ACC any more and even went to a BCS bowl a couple years ago. And they run some version of the spread offense. But, here’s a guy with no West Virginia ties (I’m not saying he HAS to have them, but since you’re going with that theme you should either get that or a more recognizable name) that has been tethered to Jim Grobe first at Ohio then Wake.

According to Stewart, Mullen will introduce motion and movement into the pre-existing form of the spread that we have. Will we continue to no-huddle? Guess that remains to be seen. Zone blocking? More svelte, athletic offensive linemen? We’ll find out eventually. Mullen’s top accomplishments were coaching up quarterbacks Ben Mauk (who really didn’t do a whole lot at Wake), Cory Randolph (have you heard of him before?) and Riley Skinner (a serviceable college QB). But now he is responsible for making Pat White and Jarrett Brown top players in college football? I think that’s a lot of responsibility. I hope there was something that Coach Stew saw in this guy, because to me this hire makes almost no sense and we’re running out of room on our staff for that final great coup.