We mistakenly appended this to the end of the roundup this morning - early morning + lack of coffee = editing mistakes - but it’s front page level disgusting, so we’ll repost it without shame. While putzing around, we found this lovely mailbag by David James, the lead sports anchor for KUTV, Salt Lake’s CBS affiliate. Sure, it’s two months old, but it helpfully dispels some misconceptions about our friends from LDS country:

1) The evangelical South and the Mormon West find common earth on bad grammar, as evidenced by this fine writer, but moral celebratin’ is a whole other matter:

BYU new slogan (One & Done) As a Ute Alum I am tired of the BYU fans talking trash about the Utes basketball program just because they happen to be down at the moment and saying that the Utes just want to be them, not true, if anything it is the other way around. At least when the Utes go to the dance they do more than just have cookies and punch, they actually dance. The Utes do not want to be BYU they want to get back to where they were and they will.

Utes dance? Scandal! Next they’ll tell us the punch was spiked, and that there were finger sandwiches in addition to those cookies.

2) Proper church lurnin’ aside, the pure minds of these fine folks are challenged by the same sins as all sports fans: common wisdom, blind loyalty, uncontrolled expectations and a colloquial tongue:

People don’t give a rat’s ass about MWC championships. The only thing that matters are BCS wins and NCAA wins. Does anyone care that UTAH lost to UNLV in 98? No they remember going to the final four! Beating Wyoming is something you are supposed to do. Beat someone you are not supposed to beat.

Truer words have never been spoken. In fact, if all of you haven’t beaten Wyoming today, we must ask: why do you hate freedom?

3) Nightmare fuel knows no religion. That’s the only explanation for why Messr. James shared this photo in the mailbag, and why we pass it along to you now:

Just plausible enough to not be a PS job - just frightening enough to keep us up tonight.

WINNAR.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Dear Cancer: Die. Love, Coaches

We normally struggle to make light of potentially fatal diseases - even we have depths to which we won’t stoop, much to the surprise of our wife - but we do call the lede “the story everyone is talking about,” and the news late Friday that UConn coach Jim Calhoun once again had cancer qualifies for such title.

Calhoun had already beat cancer twice - prostate cancer in 2003 and skin cancer in 2007 - by catching it early (good for cancer and chicken pox; bad for gonorrhea). This time, he alerted his doctor to a growth on his neck that was determined to be squamous cell cancer. Growth removed, radiation administered, and four weeks later, scans show his lymph nodes and skin to be cancer-free.

Upon hearing the news, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski expressed relief - not only that his colleague was safe and would return to the sidelines, but also because Cancer’s third consecutive loss to Calhoun in a championship round gave it a slightly worse record than Coach K’s own 0-2 against Calhoun in games that count. (Not that we’re bitter.)

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