Campus Corner: Hockey Ravens make a statement

Notes on our teams and athletes of interest from The 613, plus a housekeeping announcement.

Football

• It's easy enough to imagine this score appearing on The Score's ticker late Saturday night --

  TULS 77
  UTEP 35

  -- and more than a few a late-night channel-surfers going, "du-ah?"
  
  The unbeaten Tulsa Golden Hurricane, who have Ottawa's Tyler Holmes starting at left tackle, scored 70 points in the first three quarters on Saturday against Texas-El Paso. Has anyone ever heard of a football game where the score was 28-28 after the first quarter?
  
  It's pretty awesome that there is an Ottawa connection to one of the great stories of this college football season. Tulsa seems to be this year's Boise State or Hawai'i , the people's champion, the team from the non-BCS conference who's poking around the Top 25.
  
  Our ace commenter Dennis Prouse noted a while back that the Tulsa offence is the brainchild of Gus Malzahn, who has a book out about his no-huddle, hurry-up offence. That Wildcat formation that has zazzed up the Miami Dolphins' otherwise ordinary offence and taken the NFL by storm? That was his idea.
• Manotick's Scott Mitchell also savoured a W on Saturday, as his Rice Owls won a 45-40 shootout over Southern Mississippi (way to stick it to Brett Favre's alma mater). Rice is projected for the Dec. 28 Texas Bowl against Kansas State.
• Scout.com is projecting the Connecticut Huskies and Western Michigan Broncos (hey, alma mater of John Saunders and Glenn Healy!) to be in the International Bowl.
• U of T's graduating fifth-year receivers who each hail from Ottawa, Cory Kennedy and Jeff LaForge, each caught touchdown passes in their final game Saturday against the Gee-Gees. Good for them.

Hockey

• Ravens: Break up Carleton -- they had a pair of three-goal wins on home ice over the two traditional lodestars in the OUA Far East division, beating McGill 4-1 Saturday after Friday's 5-2 win over UQTR.
  
  Going by the summary, it looks like it was a pretty chippy contest between two teams that are starting to develop a pretty good rivalry ... Carleton fought through and Brandon MacLean sniped a shortie with a little more than nine minutes left that put the game in the icebox (thank you, Chick Hearn).
  
  Ravens goalie Alex Archibald clearly enjoyed the famed "Sager bump." He stopped 61-of-64 shots this weekend after he was profiled in Thursday's print edition of the Ottawa Sun.
  
  Those who have paid attention to OUA hockey know UQTR's M.O. well — get the opponent into penalty problems and just get going on power-play scoring spree. Carleton got four power-play goals Friday, two each from Ryan Berard and Francis Walker in Friday's 5-2 thumping of UQTR, basically beating the Patriotes at their own game.
  
  There's a post up on the competitiveness of CIS hockey on this at The CIS Blog.


• Gee-Gees: The U of O ended up splitting a home weekend, which teams can't do too often (basically, it's three points at least at home, split on the road) in the OUA. They were getting UQTR after a loss, though.
  
  Centre Yanick Charron has six points in three games after scoring two goals, including the eventual game-winner, in Friday's 4-2 win over Concordia.
• Golden Gaels: A three-point weekend from a road trip to the other side of Toronto looks good enough for Queen's, since the U of T split two road games that were played within the GTA.
  
  Queen's had less than 20 shots on goal in each game. Ex-67 and ex-Frontenac Brady Morrison making 17 of his 31 saves in the final 20 minutes during the 4-3 win over Guelph Friday.
  
  Pat Doyle of Smiths Falls scored twice for Queen's in that game.
  
  The women's hockey Gaels had a nice comeback win over Toronto on Saturday and also beat York Sunday to complete a four-point weekend, with each win coming by a 4-3 score. Becky Conroy, of Pembroke, had a natural hat trick for Queen's in the Sunday game. It was quite the feat, considering Queen's had only 15 skaters available. Andrew Bucholtz could probably fill you in more on that.
  
• Elsewhere, A Kingston boy, David Edgeworth, also had a two-goal night Friday for Waterloo in their 7-5 win over Lakehead. Ex-67's winger Arron Alphonso is now skating for Lakehead; he scored a goal for the Thunderwolves, who ended up getting a split. Ex-Frontenac Adam Nemeth had a two-point night to help Western beat Laurier 4-3 in overtime Saturday.

Hoops

• Ravens: Carleton went 3-0 at the House-Laughton tourney, with Stu Turnbull scoring 32 points in the final Sunday, a 73-64 win over a spirited Victoria team who made a big run in the second half.
• Gee-Gees: Dave DeAveiro's team will probably face some stiffer competition than they got this week out in Newfoundland the past couple nights next weekend when they hold their home tourney. They play UPEI (Oct. 24, 8 p.m.), Guelph (Oct. 25, 8 p.m.) and McGill (Oct. 26, 4:30 p.m.) at the refurbished Montpetit Hall.
  
  The opener is definitely the one to get out to — it would good to see how UPEI's 6-foot-6 forward Manock Lual, a Rideau High grad, is coming along in his second season. Lual is the younger brother of graduated Acadia big man Achuil Lual, whom Carleton Ravens fans should remember very well from the national semi-final last March.
  
  Manock Lual is a legit double-double player (cribbing from cishoops.ca's archive). The Gee-Gees have 6-foot-6 Warren Ward, who scored 22 points in Thursday's last-second 83-82 win over Ryerson — it will be something to watch those two play can-you-top-this.
  
  That first game of their home tournament also got the Gee-Gees started on a very good season last year — they played a rousing final three quarters against St. FX.
• Ottawa native Greg Carter, who led St. Patrick to an Ontario championship last winter (first AAA boys basketball title for an Ottawa school), is getting some major minutes as a freshman point guard at Lakehead. He played 31 minutes Friday in the Thunderwolves' loss to Simon Fraser and had three steals.
• Ottawa's Anneka Bakker, who's a rookie for the Alberta Pandas, poured in 14 points in 16 minutes in an exhibition win over Western. At the same tournament, another Ottawan, Bess Lennox, had an 18-point, 19-rebound game for the Mustangs.

An announcement — without guitars

• This CIS Corner feature might be due for some tweaking. Not to get too navel-gazey, but this site is evolving. The three universities in Eastern Ontario each have very good sports information directors who do a bang-up job. It was never the intention to supplant their hard work, and just regurgitating results and goal scorers is no longer necessary. The media in Ottawa has come a long way over the past 18-24 months when it comes to covering university sports, and of course, down in Kingston, the Whig-Standard under Claude Scilley and now Mike Koreen has always done well by Queen's sports. Besides, you can always get the latest on those teams by adding their RSS feed to your Google Reader.
  
  One idea is to take the same format and have an Around The 613 digest on weekends at The CIS Blog (which needs writers, seriously). It would be totally OUA-centric, but it might be a better fit over there.