News the News Media does not want you to see - Trump gets triumphant welcome to NCAA National Championship - What no jeers just cheers?

LSU defeated Clemson last night 42-25 to win the national championship but President Trump may be the biggest winner as the crowd went wild when the President and First Lady were introduced at the beginning of the game.

Tens of thousands of fans stunned the announcers and the tens of millions watching this classic when they gave Trump a thunderous standing ovation for minute after minute breaking into chants of "USA! USA!" and "Four more years!"

Trump at NCAA Championship Game - Hear the truth while you listen to the deafening crowd reaction to the President.  Double click for full screen.

Here were headlines not in the mainstream media.

Trump and Melania Get Hero’s Welcome At College National Championship Game That’ll Make Your Spine Tingle

President Donald Trump gets raucous welcome at College Football Playoff title game

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP GOT ROARING CHEERS DURING ENTRANCE AT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME, GETS ‘USA’ CHANT

History - 150 Years ago the first College Football Game was played in New Jersey - Rutgers versus Princeton

The first college football game

College football generates billions of dollars each year in the U.S. But the game looked very different 150 years ago.

Rutgers and Princeton, two New Jersey colleges, faced off in the first match on Nov. 6, 1869, in front of about 100 spectators. Each team had 25 men on the field, and the ball couldn’t be carried or thrown — players advanced by kicking or batting it with their hands and feet.

On the field in 1869.  Rutgers University

The rules had been established a few years earlier by the London Football Association — meaning they were a lot closer to what the rest of the world would call football and Americans would call soccer. The game also featured elements of rugby.

The play was frantic and rough, and the men wore no padding or helmets. At one point, a distressed professor waved his umbrella and shouted, “You will come to no Christian end!”

Princeton had more muscle, but Rutgers was faster and better organized, according to an account in the Rutgers student newspaper. Rutgers won, 6-4.

'College GameDay' a major coup for Cats - as in University of Arizona

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Publisher's note - Arizona is my alma mater...

If your school is selected to host ESPN’s “College GameDay”, it’s like somebody scheduled a parade and everybody you know is going to be there.

About two million people climb out of bed every Saturday morning to watch the show and it almost never disappoints. It’s Army-Navy, Kansas-Missouri and in 2001, 2001, 2008 and 2009 it was Texas-Oklahoma in the Red River Rivalry.

Eleven hours before Saturday’s Arizona-UCLA kickoff, GameDay will be live on the UA mall.

“It’s cool,” said UA junior nose tackle Sani Fuimaono. “It’s what I used to wake up to watch when I was in high school.”

GameDay goes beyond cool. What’s a good word? Nirvana. It’s got to have a little music to it.

GameDay used to be snooty. It used to be Alabama-Auburn and Nebraska-Notre Dame, and an excessive diet of Wolverines, Volunteers and Buckeyes.

But over the last 15 years, GameDay has become monument to all the people of college football. It has given us Harvard-Penn, Army-Navy, Southern-Grambling and, believe it or not, North Dakota State-Incarnate Word.

The NDSU Bison hosted GameDay twice. That’s one more time than Arizona State, whose lone appearance as a host was in 2005. (The Sun Devils lost to No. 1 USC, 38-28).

“It’s gonna be big,” Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez said Monday. “I’m tickled to death they are here.”

GameDay was once the center of all “East coast bias” in college sports. Its first 24 locations were so far from the Pac-12 that when it finally erected a stage for the November 1998 Oregon-at-UCLA game — its first game at a Pac-12 venue — that the crew looked around Pasadena and realized “hey, this is where they play the Rose Bowl!”

But until Pete Carroll turned USC into a powerhouse, GameDay went 49 consecutive shows, from early 2001 to late 2004 — without a Pac-12 host.

All of that has changed. USC has since been host to 10 GameDay shows; Oregon eight.

Arizona and Stanford have twice been hosts. No other Pac-12 school has had more than one hosting role; Washington State and Cal have none.

“Just to show off our campus and the city of Tucson; it’s all positive,” RichRod said.

ESPN won’t divulge the identity of GameDay’s much-anticipated “guest picker” until Saturday.

In 2009, when Arizona lost 44-41 to Oregon in its Tucson GameDay debut, the guest picker was Olympic swimming gold medalist Amanda Beard. She was underwhelming, to put it politely.

Perhaps this time GameDay will fly Arizona alumnus Bob Baffert in from a California race track. Or maybe Steve Kerr can squeeze in a visit before the Golden State Warriors open training camp. They would fit nicely with the list of guest-picking celebrities that have ranged from Ken Griffey Jr., father of UA receiver Trey Griffey to Alice Cooper and Bubba Watson.

The appeal of GameDay is now part of America’s football fabric. This is Year 23, but ESPN didn’t always have such a willing audience.

When ESPN decided to televise the 100th meeting between Division III football rivals Amherst and Williams, the Lord Jeffs against the Ephs, the Amherst administration of 1985 balked.

They left the decision to football coach Jim Ostendarp, who famously said “we’re in the education business, not the entertainment business.”

You almost expected a poetry reading.

Twenty-two years later, the Ephs and Lord Jeffs met again, a showdown for the 2007 Little Three championship, and when ESPN’s GameDay crew erected a stage three days in advance, the population of Williamstown grew and grew and grew, from 2,500 to almost 14,000.

People camped on every available plot of grass near the Massachusetts-Vermont border.

When the ESPN people flipped the switch early Saturday morning, downtown Williamstown was transformed into a mobile fraternity party. Dozens of people dressed in purple cow costumes (the Eph mascot is a purple cow). Others held signs that said “FEAR THE COW” and “AMWORST MUST GO.”

On Saturday morning at the UA mall, scores of bleary-eyed Wildcat fans will sway behind the GameDay stage. If you’re going to be part of the crowd, jot down these words and put them on a red and blue sign:

PLEASE COME BACK

ESPN News

The original wildcat mascot arrived on campus October 17, 1915, and was introduced to the student body the following day at assembly in Herring Hall.

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It is FOOTBALL Season American Style so No offense to the Brits and Football Soccer Teams

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Who owns the right to call football football?  And just what is football?



Listen to this Andy Griffin classic - What it was was football!

It seems all the rest of the world is lined up against America in claiming that Soccer is really Football and Football in America should be called something else, but is the rest of the world right? Well we at the CPT make it a point to tell you the truth so here it is.

The games of football, rugby football, soccer football, American gridiron football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, as well as the variations of the games in various countries all share the same history.

While it is widely assumed that the word "football" (or "foot ball") references the action of the foot kicking a ball, there is a historical explanation, which is that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot. These games were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports (such as polo) often played by aristocrats. There is no conclusive evidence for either explanation, and the word football has always implied a variety of games played on foot, not just those that involved kicking a ball. In some cases, the word football has even been applied to games which have specifically outlawed kicking the ball.

For that reason all forms of football share and can claim ownership of the term for it has always applied to all of them. Now to get specific, medieval Europe was the time from 500 CE to 1,500 CE so we are talking about a name in use 500 to 1,500 years ago, long before the modern games came into existence.

In the ancient days, well before the time of Jesus, according to the Greek history, the first Olympic Games in the Greek Antiquity can be traced back to 776 BC. The Games continued through the rise of the ancient Greek empire and for almost 12 centuries, until the Roman Emperor Theodosius banned them, in 393 AD. The Games had gradually lost their importance when the Romans conquered Greece and when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. So ended a period of one thousand years during which the Olympics were to be conducted every four years thereafter.

The Olympic games were revived by the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin in the late 19 th century. The Games of the Olympiad, also known as Summer Olympics, taking place every four years since 1896 onwards, with the exception of the years during the World Wars.

As for football and the Olympics, in 1900 soccer became a demonstration sport and by 1908 medals were granted to winners. Rugby Sevens will debut as an Olympic sport at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted to include the sport at the IOC Congress on 9th October 2009.

Documented evidence of an activity resembling football can be found in the Chinese military manual Zhan Guo Ce compiled between the 3rd century and 1st century BC. It describes a practice known as cuju (literally "kick ball"), which originally involved kicking a leather ball through a small hole in a piece of silk cloth which was fixed on bamboo canes and hung about 9 m above ground. During the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), cuju games were standardized and rules were established. Variations of this game later spread to Japan and Korea, known as kemari and chuk-guk respectively.   This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 AD.

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, or prehistoric ball games, played by indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in 1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit (Eskimo) people in Greenland. There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal. In 1610, William Strachey of the Jamestown settlement, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman. In Victoria, Australia, indigenous people played a game called Marn Grook ("ball game"). An 1878 book by Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes a man called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841, that he had witnessed Aboriginal people playing the game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a possum and how other players leap into the air in order to catch it." It is widely believed that Marn Grook had an influence on the development of Australian rules football

The modern rules of many football codes were formulated during the mid- or late- 19th century. This also applies to other sports such as lawn bowls, lawn tennis, etc. The major impetus for this was the patenting of the world's first lawnmower in 1830. This allowed for the preparation of modern ovals, playing fields, pitches, grass courts, etc. Apart from Rugby football, the public school codes have barely been played beyond the confines of each school's playing fields. However, many of them are still played at the schools which created them.

One of the longest running football competitions is in Australia, the Cordner-Eggleston Cup, contested between Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College, Melbourne every year since 1858. It is believed by many to also be the first match of Australian rules football, although it was played under experimental rules in its first year. The first football trophy tournament was the Caledonian Challenge Cup, donated by the Royal Caledonian Society of Melbourne, played in 1861 under the Melbourne Rules.

The oldest football league is a rugby football competition, the United Hospitals Challenge Cup (1874), while the oldest rugby trophy is the Yorkshire Cup, contested since 1878. The South Australian Football Association (30 April 1877) is the oldest surviving Australian rules football competition. The oldest surviving soccer trophy is the Youdan Cup (1867) and the oldest national soccer competition is the English FA Cup (1871). The Football League (1888) is recognized as the longest running Association Football league. The first ever international football match took place between sides representing England and Scotland on March 5, 1870 at the Oval under the authority of the FA. The first Rugby international took place in 1871.

Modern American football grew out of a match between McGill University of Montreal, and Harvard University in 1874. At the time, Harvard students are reported to have played the Boston Game — a running code — rather than the FA-based kicking games favored by U.S. universities. This made it easy for Harvard to adapt to the rugby-based game played by McGill and the two teams alternated between their respective sets of rules. Within a few years, however, Harvard had both adopted McGill's rugby rules and had persuaded other U.S. university teams to do the same. In 1876, at the Massasoit Convention, it was agreed by these universities to adopt most of the Rugby Football Union rules, with some variations. Princeton, Rutgers and others continued to compete using soccer-based rules for a few years before switching to the rugby-based rules of Harvard and its competitors. U.S. colleges did not generally return to soccer until the early twentieth century.

By the 1820's and '30's Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Yale were playing versions of football, often changing rules at halftime. It was so brutal it was called "mob football". On November 6, 1869, Rutgers University faced Princeton University in a game that was played with a round ball under "Football Association" rules (i.e. soccer) and is often regarded as the first game of intercollegiate football. The game was played with 20 players per team at a Rutgers field under Rutgers rules.

Another game claiming to be first was played in November 1875 at New Haven, Connecticut between Harvard and Yale, and was part rugby and part soccer. The two teams played with 15 players on a side instead of 11 as Yale would have preferred, and Harvard won by 4 goals and 4 tries, or touchdowns, to none.

In 1880, Yale coach Walter Camp, credited with being behind many of the modern football rules, devised a number of major changes to the American game. Camp's two most important rule innovations in establishing American football as distinct from the rugby football games on which it is based are scrimmage and down-and-distance rules.

So there you are, and you can thank the Ivy League for bringing football to America. Of course it was so brutal that there were 18 deaths and many serious injuries, and was banned on most college campuses, before President Teddy Roosevelt saved the sport by revising the rules when the situation came to a head in 1905 with 19 fatalities nationwide. President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to shut the game down if drastic changes were not made. They were made and modern football was finally born in America.
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College Football Top 25 from CPT Sports Research

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It is that time of the year when the bad stuff, politics, gets pushed off the front pages and the good stuff, college football, gets pushed on and this year there are some new wrinkles that could influence the outcome of games more than crooked agents whose influence hopefully will fade away.

This is the year major college conferences lost their minds and now have names with little relation to their membership. Follow me? Then try this. Perennial powerhouse Nebraska is leaving the Big 12 after this season and joining the Big Ten. Colorado will be leaving the Big 12 for the Pac 10.

By next year the Big Ten will have at least 11 teams but still be called the Big Ten while the Big 12 may still be called the Big 12 with only 10 teams and the Pac 10 will probably still be called the Pac 10 though they may have 12 teams.

If you can follow all that there is a place for you on the Obama economic team. If not trust me. I should know about the conferences. You see I was born in Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa from the Big Ten and I grew up being fed a steady diet of Big Ten games. Earthquakes took place when Ohio State or Michigan squared off on the gridiron with the Hawkeyes.

When I was a Big Ten diehard the only outside schools that had a chance of beating the Big Ten were Notre Dame and Penn State except for those crazy teams in the PAC Ten we faced in the Rose Bowl every year. When the Big Ten played USC or UCLA on New Year's Day very strange things happened out west. However, in the late '50's Iowa won two Rose Bowls as the Big Ten Champion so all was well.

Of course no other conference in the country could compete with them, until I went to school in the mid '60's at the University of Arizona who had just joined the Pac 10 when I got there. Suddenly the run and gun offenses of the Pac Ten became a focus of attention and my view of the western boys changed ever so slowly.

By the late '60's I had moved to Nebraska and in Big Red country you cheered for Nebraska or got kicked out of the state. I got to know the coaches, athletic directors and some of the players and when the NU football stadium filled every Saturday it became the third largest city in the state. The Big Eight thanks to NU and Oklahoma became my favorite and when Texas and other southern schools joined them and it became the Big 12 it was killer conference.

Fact is ever since I moved to Nebraska the stadium has been sold out and the team finished in the top ten in the final polls about 22 of the last 25 years or something like that winning five national championships and playing for a whole lot more. Now that was football. Both of my kids graduated from Nebraska so they continued the tradition long after I left.

Then I moved to New Jersey in the 1980's and had two choices for a local football team, Rutgers or Princeton but we all know the Ivy League really doesn't play football so I cast my hopes on Rutgers because I found out it was really the University of New Jersey with a classy name. Lo and behold by the time I moved to Kentucky Rutgers had developed a respectable program for a school of eggheads.

When I lived in Lexington, Kentucky of course I suddenly became a fan of the SEC where there are too many teams to count but one could always count on Florida, Alabama and LSU pushing for a national championship with supporting help from Tennessee or a Mississippi school.

About 8 years ago I moved to the Washington, DC metro area so I could be free of college football bias and conference addiction and could write an independent and unbiased outlook on our favorite fall past time. We all know the only football in our nation's capitol is the dropped passes and fumbles by our politicians.

So here is my objective look at the upcoming season and my first poll of the top 25 college football teams. As always, viewer comments are expected, especially those who think I overlooked your teams. Time will tell but I would like to hear from different conferences.

The CPT Top 20

1. Iowa

2. Nebraska

3. Arizona

4. Alabama

5. Ohio State

6. Texas

7. Florida

8. Virginia Tech

9. TCU

10. Wisconsin

11. Miami

12. Oklahoma

13. LSU

14. Oregon

15. Penn State

16. Georgia Tech

17. Boise State

18. Arkansas

19. Rutgers

20. Kentucky

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

That's it folks, the pre-season top 25 in College Football from the most objective source in America. Of course we all know the polls will change every week but for the moment this is how we see things through rose colored glasses.  As for the final 5 teams in the polls, rather than act like I know it all as most pedictors do I admit I don't so you write in your favorite teams in the last five spots as it is the only time anyone can be in the Top 25, and it may be the first time for some you pick.

Every college football team deserves to be ranked because it takes a lot of guts and hard work to even make a college team.  In honor of the unsung heroes who don't attend Alabama, Ohio State, Nebraska, Iowa or the rest of the giants, tell me about your local teams that deserve this one time to appear in a Top 25 poll.  We have the rest of the fall to tell you who earns the rankings on the field.

Cheers...   
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