Did you notice it?

Larry Foote, the former Michigan Wolverine, gave his prep alma mater some serious holla' when the Pittsburgh Steelers' defense introduced themselves in the first quarter of their 27-23 triumph over Arizona in Super Bowl XLIII. The overwhelming majority of players who introduce themselves -- 44 offensive and defensive starters in all -- make mention of the college or university they played football for.

Not Foote. When the heavy hitter's face emerged, his quote was simple: "Larry Foote....Detroit Pershing...Doughboy."

Of course, most of us in metropolitan Detroit know the Public School League (PSL) players from Detroit who populate the rosters in the NBA and NFL are fiercely loyal to their Detroit upbringing. Many of these players mention the PSL like it's a badge of honor on their athletic resume. It's one of the reasons I cringe when I hear suburbanites say things like, "They should just bulldoze Detroit and start over."

Try saying that to the community at Seven Mile and Ryan in Detroit. To anyone who thinks high schools in the city don't have a spirit or energy comparable with the schools in the 'burbs, I point to schools in the city like Pershing. In New York City, the word Pershing is commonly associated with Park and 42nd Street -- Grand Central Station and that intersection's name -- Pershing Square.

In Detroit, Pershing is synonymous with a football and basketball tradition swathed in royal blue and gold.

CHARLIE'S NOT SORRY: That's two championship rings for former Detroit Lion and standout Eastern Michigan University quarterback Charlie Batch. Of course, Batch is a local legend in the Pittsburgh area, where he grew up, but Batch was also one of the outstanding football players to ever toss the pigskin in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

MAC DADDY: Did anyone else take notice that three of Pittsburgh's four quarterbacks are Mid-American Conference products?Ben Roethlisberger played at Miami University andByron Leftwich was a member of Marshall's MAC championship teams. Batch makes the Mid-American hat trick possible.

There are, in fact, 22 players on the Steeler roster (active, injured/reserve or practice) from colleges in the Great Lakes, including two from the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (GLIAC).

DETROIT -- No one familiar with the University of Detroit-Mercy's lackluster basketball fortunes this season would attribute the Titans' struggles to anything other to the usual growing pains of rebuilding a once-proud program from the ground up. Titan coach Ray McCallum faced an opponent Saturday afternoon in Calihan Hall led by a coach well-versed in turning the task of rebuilding into an art.

Gary Waters and the Cleveland State Vikings ventured into the Motor City and earned a 53-44 decision over UDM, one of Waters' 607 wins as either an assistant, associate or head coach in the venerable coach's path through college basketball that dates back to Ferris State University in 1974. Waters left Ferris in 1989 and joined Ben Braun at Eastern Michigan. In his second season with the Hurons, Waters was followed Ferris State to Ypsilanti by former Troy High standout Marcus Kennedy, who transformed a Mid-American Conference contender into an undisputed league champion in 1990-91.

Three years alter Waters helped recruit Royal Oak Dondero center Theron Wilson to EMU. Wilson, who had previously been at Detroit King, lived with John Bancroft's family at the corner of Catalpa and Maplegrove in Royal Oak and turned the Oaks into Oakland County's best team. With Ben Bancroft, who later played at Albion, and Jason Beverlin, who went on to pitch for the Detroit Tigers, Dondero found itself in the state's Associated Press Top Ten poll. Later Wilson would lead EMU to a 1996 MAC title. Eastern became the first school in 55 years to top Duke in the first round of the NCAA tournament when the Eagles defeated the Blue Devils 75-60 in the RCA Dome in Indianapolis. John Bancroft, now retired, is best remembered for the many years he coached track & field in the Troy school district. Ironically, Troy High basketball coach Gary Fralick is a former Oak.

But I digress. Before Braun left EMU for California in '96, Waters accepted the head post for five seasons at league rival Kent State, followed by another five-year stint at Rutgers. For the past two seasons, Waters has led the Vikings, who defeated Syracuse in the Carrier Dome earlier this season on a 60-foot three-point heave released before the game's final buzzer to break a tie score. Last season Waters flipped a team that had earned a 10-21 mark the year prior into a 21-win squad that earned an NIT appearance. Now McCallum is being asked to do the same thing at UDM.

"Ray's already got some things in place," Waters said after the contest. "I think he'll be good next year, frankly. There's three things you have to do when you take a job. You have to change the culture, which means making sure kids know they have to work. You have to bring in some talent, which he's started to do, and third, sometimes you have to get rid of some people, clean house a little bit."

Waters has witnessed 405 losses to accompany his 607 wins mark in his various roles as a bench leader in college basketball. Waters worked his 1,000th game in Cleveland State's fourth game of the season, a 72-62 win over Saint Leo on November 24 in Miami, Florida.

REPLAY'S SAVING GRACE: Saturday's contest saw CSU with a 34-20 halftime lead, but only after a UDM basket at the buzzer, initially flushed down as good by official Tim Fogarty, was waved off. UDM guard Thomas Kennedy drove the left side of the lane and floated a soft running lay-in attempt that fell short of the basket. Titan forward Michael Harrington clutched the errant attempt and tossed in a bunny.

The interesting aspect wasn't that the shot counted in the face of a apparent red light prior to the shot leaving Harrington's hands, but rather the reasoned, even calm response from the Cleveland State bench. In the era prior to replay, the reaction would have predictably been one of near-unanimous rancor to the decision, but because the CSU coaches knew the officials would use the replay resources available to them thanks to SportsTime Ohio, the coaches actually walked off the floor without knowing the shot would be waived off.

FOUL BY NUMBERS: As an official, writer and overall fan of the game of basketball, I've never subscribed to the theory that team fouls must be even or near-even to represent a fairly-called game from the crew of officials assigned to working the game.

Saturday UDM was on the short end in the first half of the fouls, first by a 7-4 count and later by a 9-6 tally. The UDM faithful behind the team bench belabored the point against the silence of the arena, filled with a few hundred fans for the contest. What floors me is how the foul count has become the harbinger of fair officiating standards. To me, this illustrates the level of paranoia that accompanies basketball. Nine-and-six is just one scant call away from eight-and-seven, as close as the count can be to being considered even.

In the second stanza it was the Titans that benefited from a 10-6 foul count in the first 15 minutes of the half. Not surprisingly, it was the UDM following that offered little critique of the officiating while the CSU contingent assumed the role of the vocal victims. For the game, Cleveland State was whistled for 21 fouls to UDM's 18.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due August of 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

Editor's Note: Content updated at 5:00pm on December 28 to correct references to Butch Jones, mistakenly identified as Butch Davis.

DETROIT -- The catcalls, snickers and jokes remain, but if accepting a bid to the Motor City Bowl means Central Michigan University is playing football every year after Christmas, CMU coach Butch Jones welcomes all barbs.

Jones guided the Chippewas on Friday night in a hard-fought 24-21 loss to Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in front of 41,399 at Ford Field. The Owl win was the 12th edition of the annual game, which has more than earned its' keep in 12 years of successful pairings. The Rose Bowl it's not, but the Motor City Bowl (MCB) is no Cherry Bowl, the ill-fated game that managed just two turns in the mid 1980s in the Pontiac Silverdome. In 1984 Michigan State helped bring around 70,000 into the 'Dome for the inagural game but the Spartans dropped a 10-6 decision. The next year the game was broke before kickoff and Cherry Bowl unceremoniously fell from the vine of college football bowl games.

MCB immediately struck an alliance between two neighboring conferences, the Mid-American Conference and the Big Ten. Aside from revenue giant sports football and basketball, the two conferences are competitive in many sports, the rare upset on the gridiron or hardwood notwithstanding. But Motor City Bowl has helped the MAC -- a bowl-starved conference -- attain a footing among major college football's elite, and perhaps no school or coach has been a better beneficiary than CMU and Jones.

Jones has succeeded former CMU coach Brian Kelly's success without missing a beat, in part because the Chippewas have made the Motor City Bowl a three-year tradition that means more than simply playing a football game on Boxing Day. In short, it allows the Chippewas to be a major player within recruiting circles that encompass metro Detroit's talent-rich, three-county footprint. "Without a doubt, the access created by playing a bowl game in our backyard, so to speak, is priceless," Jones said. "Our staff made a commitment to recruiting Michigan, and our success is predicated on how well we recruit Michigan. Playing in the Motor City Bowl has made such a huge difference in our program's success in recent years."

To wit, the Chippewas boast 16 players from the tri-county area, including seven from Oakland County. Three players hail from Lake Orion, a runner-up in this year's MHSAA Division 1 football finals. There's four players from Detroit's proper and three from Warren's De LaSalle High, making CMU's roster one stocked from all corners of Michigan and fortified with a large bounty from metro Detroit. Playing in the Motor City Bowl three straight years has contributed to Central's success on signing day.

Like Florida Atlantic, a school with hardly an ounce of name recognition in major college football just a handful of years ago, the Chippewas are a rare story that few schools could even hope to emulate today. In the early 1970s, Central Michigan and fellow in-state rival Eastern Michigan University were powerhouse NAIA schools who made the leap from small-time Christian athletics to Division-I status. While Eastern struggled in the late 70s and early 80s, Central Michigan flourished and thrived under a former Oakland County coach, Herb Deromedi. When Roy Kramer left CMU in the late 1970s, the former Royal Oak High grad and Kimball High coach began a 20-year reign in Mt.Pleasant that landed him in the college football hall-of-fame.

However, a not-so-rare story followed Deromedi's departure. The Chippewas struggled to regain that winning form. After Kelly quickly made CMU successful again, he was poached just as quickly by Cincinnati. Enter Jones, with an already strong acumen for recruiting and chalkboard strategy. Add CMU's trifecta of bowl appearances in Detroit and the Chippewas have re-chartered their path for annual success.

"We're very proud to represent our conference and our state in Detroit," Jones said."If being successful means coming to the Motor City Bowl three straight years, I'll take that success every day of the week as opposed to staying home for the holidays."

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due August of 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

When does an NBA Hall-Of-Famer designated as one of the 50 greatest players in professional basketball history not qualify was a lock as his college's greatest player?

When your name is George Gervin and your alma mater is Eastern Michigan University, that's when. Gervin was honored at EMU yesterday with an honorary degree at halftime of Eastern's game with St. Bonaventure. Before you get upset with my question, be careful not to misconstrue the premise behind the question. I'm not saying Gervin isn't EMU's greatest player. Gervin's basketball resume is the most accomplished of any player to ever wear EMU's verdant green and white. I'm saying there's a handful of other players who could arguably lay claim to the honor based on their total body of work at EMU.

It also means Eastern Michigan has been able to land some of the most overlooked talent in a region already nationally-recognized as a hoops hotbed. Eastern's basketball record book could easily make one scratch their head and wonder aloud, 'How did these players end up at EMU?' Reality reveals different players end up at a school like EMU for different reasons. Sometimes it's grades, a player's size or abilityjudged to be a bit below a bigger school's standards, which is the case the majority of the time. Other times, however, it's a dynamic coach who can recruit, like a Jim Dutcher or Ben Braun, or a player and a teammate, like the Thomas twins from Lansing and Detroit Northern's Lorenzo Neely. Sometimes it's simply a player's desire to stay close to home.

Gervin grew homesick for his native Detroit at Long Beach State University and transferred back to EMU to play for Jim Dutcher along with fellow King grad Gary Tyson. While Gervin's story is unique, there's literally no end to the stories that brought so much talent to EMU.

Carl and Charles Thomas, who grew up in Lansing in the shadow of Michigan State University, joined Neely at Eastern after Ben Braun's relentless recruitment. Derrick Dial was the unfortunate recipient of the NCAA's ill-fated Prop 48 statues in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dial, who graduated from the scholar-acclaimed Detroit Cass Tech, became Eastern's No. 3 all-time scorer in school history with 1,891 points, earned a top 10 spot in blocked shots and become school's all-time career, season and single-game leader in made three-point field goals with 214.

There was Brian Tolbert, brother of Michigan recruit and University of Detroit star Tony Tolbert. Michigan State kept Tolbert in the fold for a possible scholarship until Southgate Aquinas product Jon Garavaglia won the state's Mr. Basketball award. The Spartans awarded the scholarship Tolbert coveted and Tolbert enrolled at EMU, where he scored 1,726 points, including 36 versus top-ranked Connecticut in the 2nd round game of the 1996 NCAA Tournament, the most points scored by any player in that season's tourney. Tolbert is 2nd all-time in made three-point attempts with 204 treys. Mr. Basketball winner Garavaglia? He's conspicuously absent from the MSU record book in nearly all categories for game, season or career.

And then there was Boykins, the 5'5 magician who Sports Illustrated named the county's best player under 6'0 in the periodical's 1997-98 college basketball preview issue. The recruitment of Boykins had an entire school's fan base scratching their collective heads. It had come down to the national signing day in 1994 at Boykins' high school in Cleveland, where Braun and Kent State's Dave Grube awaited the diminutive guard's answer to a scholarship offer from each school. Legend has it that Grube looked at Braun and said, "Well, either one of us will be brilliant or one of us will be fired." One year later, Grube was cannedfrom his contract at KSU and after Bruan's team had reached the MAC championship and accepted a bid to the NIT.

Boykins missed catching Kennedy McIntosh for the school's scoring record by a scant eight points, earning 2,211 points to McIntosh's 2,219 career total. Boykins would have started every game in his four-year career had it not been for EMU coach Milton Barnes, who took over EMU's reins after Braun accepted an offer from the University of California-Berkeley. Barnes, in a desperate attempt to prove himself a willful leader, benched the guard for the first five minutes of a non-league game his junior year. Barnes' tenure is a bad memory at EMU while Boykins is oft-remembered for his outstanding play-making and scoring ability.

So while EMU has struggled to regain it's former hardwood prowess over the past 10 years, much like the University of Detroit-Mercy, the school has a history and alumni list that brings with it as much cache as any mid-major school in the country.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due August 2009 fro Arcadia Publishing. Cameron's first book, Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, features pictures from the archives of The Oakland Press.

I kid you not when I say there will be baseball in Michigan today!

Of course, the preceding 10 games I had been scheduled for from March 19th to today have all been snowed out. For the second-consecutive March, winter's icy grip has grabbed our collegiate programs and throttled the season to a sudden halt. This is the latest start to any season I've been blessed to work since 2000.

Today's game was to be played in Olivet, Michigan between the Comets of Olivet College and Tri-State University. Then old man winter dumped four inches of snow on us Thursday night. Friday I got an e-mail notification through the Arbiter that this MIAA doubleheader would go down to Angola, Indiana. Friday night those plans were halted -- Tri-State is unplayable, too.

Back to Olivet we go for a 2 p.m. first pitch, which ought to be about 40 degrees but dry. Perfect!

This is what college baseball entails in the Great Lakes for any hopeful players, coaches and officials. My first Division-I game was a 33-degree snowflaker at Eastern Michigan University about seven years ago that was so miserable, I stopped trying to write the changes on the lineup card because I didn't have any feeling in my hands. I've heard more than my share of players and parents at the prep level tell me that they should be going to this college or this program, that their coach isn't promoting them enough, so on and so forth.

You have to be a pretty good ballplayer in high school to be able to play Division III baseball. In Division II, each team has four or five kids that would be on a Division-I roster if there had been a spot for them. It's was already that competitive when the NCAA mandated baseball scholarships be equalized, meaning coaches can't pare up their scholarships differently to each, individual player. If a coach signs you, he's got to be certain you're the real deal.