Driving 16 hours today to Spokane, Washington to see the little brother graduate. Not sounding like a  fun 16 hours at 4 in the morning. I should have plenty of time to finish the spring ball reviews and work on the Buff opponent spring reports, though.

If some one can explain this NCAA Academic Progress Rate system or APR to me that would be great. Ringo does as good a job as possible explaining this but it sounds like a big cluster. Here is the most important part:

The Camera has confirmed former Buffs Kendrick Celestine, Nate Vaiomounga, and Lamont Smith all left the school ineligible. Former defensive lineman Jason Brace also left the program and did not remain enrolled on a full-time basis, producing the same effect on the APR score as his ineligible former teammates.

If the program's score falls below 925 this year, it would lose a scholarship for every player who left ineligible during the year. The number could be five depending on Katoa. All of those players were recruited by Hawkins and his staff.

Right now the Buffs sit at 929 points, only four above that dreaded 925 mark. What does that four points mean? I don't know, I have no clue but the article makes it sound like losing five scholarships, maybe more, is a very real possibility. This is very disappointing news if such sanctions were to come down on the team. Hopefully they can right the ship and while it seemed that LB Lynn Katoa may have been written off a couple months ago, he may be even more important to the Buffs' coaching staff now in trying to get him eligible. I could be totally wrong about all of that but it sounds good right?

CUBUFFS.com has more on this APR thing with a chart at the bottom which shows the scores for the last four years. Trying to write commentary on those numbers is a bad idea. The big news is this article centers around the Buffs' basketball team losing one scholarship:

The University of Colorado Academic Progress Rate (APR) report based on information for the four year period between 2004-05 and 2007-08 supplied to the NCAA shows that nine of its programs improved upon their scores from the previous year but, as school officials expected, also resulted in the men's basketball program being penalized one scholarship.

The NCAA issued its annual report Wednesday afternoon.

The men's basketball penalty was a contemporaneous one that resulted in a one-year reduction in scholarships from 13 to 12, but was already taken earlier this athletic year; it was for a team member who left the university ineligible at the end of the 2007-08 school year.  Last year, the program received an "Occasion 1" historical penalty (a public reprimand and required  development of an APR improvement plan), but there is no additional "Occasion 2" historical penalty this year, as the team has shown tremendous improvement over last year's scores.

The multi-year score for the men's basketball program was 900, up from 873 last year, but still below the 925 bench mark established by the NCAA. 

The guys over at Roll Bama Roll, the Alabama blog on SBNation, have noticed that the Ralphie Report now has 1,912 followers on twitter. Yes, that is good for first place among all the blogs on SBNation, NFL teams included. Basically, we are dominating, some 200 followers ahead of the competition. It sounds like they want to rally the troops to continue their so called dominance over the Buffs:

I'm too young to remember the '69 Liberty Bowl, but you better believe I have some fond remembrances of the '91 Blockbuster Bowl and the '07 Independence Bowl (at least as fond as memories of an Independence Bowl appearance can get). So when it comes to Alabama vs Colorado, all I know is the sweet taste of victory.

With that in mind, lookee here who's in the lead for the SBN "First to 5000" Twitter 5K, our old pals Colorado (by which I mean SBN CU blog The Ralphie Report). We're doing pretty well in this thing, moving up to the #10 position from yesterday's #20, but we're still a good 1100 followers behind the Buffs (and about 20 behind Mississippi State?! The &*%$?) 

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And beyond all that, you'll get the satisfying feeling of sticking it to those damn hippies Buffs one more time. 

So if you needed anymore motivation to jump on the twitter bandwagon and help us beat the Huskers, Red Wings and the Crimson Tide, there it was.

The newest rivals100 list is out with Colorado prep QB Austin Hinder checking in at no. 84, the second highest rated quarterback in the nation. Buff commit, Ath/QB Danny Spond, also cracked the top 250 at 244.