So, the second political debate went down last night. Hofstra University, the location of the town-hall style showdown, apparently cut their losses and swapped debate for football three years ago with tangible successes. (NBC, NYTimes)

Columbia’s football team may have an upcoming battle, but when it comes to endowment investment return, Columbia already fares well compared to the rest of the Ivy League for fiscal 2012. Roar, lion, roar, indeed. (Business Week)

Maybe Earth and an exoplanet around Alpha Centauri went to summer camp together once and switched places. In the longtime search for an “Earth Twin,” astronomers have concluded that our next-door neighbor joins the list of many stars which share qualities with our own dear home. (BBC)

Also out-of-this-world, Beyonce has confirmed that she will perform at Super Bowl XLVII. Expect the halftime show to seriously rival the fierceness of the February game. (USA Today)

Beyonce’s future venue via Wikimedia Commons

Update, 3:15 pm: Columbia just beat Marist 10-9. Roar, lion, roar.

Your CU Lions have their opening game today against Marist at 12:30 PM!  Make the trek out to Baker Field (map) with free shuttles from 116th and Broadway starting at 11 am.  Once you get there, enjoy free t-shirts for the first 500 students, free beverages in the pre-game picnic area, and free admissions to the game itself with your CUID.  So come out, support your team, make some noise, and keep laundry at bay for one day more.  Here’s to hoping the team beats last year’s record!

 

Real sports fans via Wikimedia Commons

UPDATE: Athletics has confirmed that Pete Mangurian will coach Columbia football next year. He has an impressive track record at Cornell, Stanford, LSU and with the NFL.

Notoriously un well-versed in sports, we were intrigued by the financial details of Columbia’s football team, detailed yesterday in the Times:

• The head coach of the football team is paid somewhere around $250,000 a year. This is comparable to senior administrators and faculty. The average salary for Columbia’s 14 men’s coaches is $94,000.
• Last year, PrezBo’s salary was $1.5 million, 6.9 times the median professor salary of $222,000, including benefits. This was a 13% decrease from his previous year’s pay.
• For comparison, John Sexton of NYU earned roughly the same, while Harvard’s Drew Faust, received $875,000 (a 6.4 % increase), and Princeton awarded its president, Shirley Tilghman, $911,000,(a 3.4 % increase).
• For further comparison, tOSU just hired a new coach on the terms of $4 million annually, and the use of a private jet.
• The annual expenses of the football team come in around $2.6 million.
• Two of Columbia’s major donors have made big gifts to Athletics in recent years. Willaim V. Campbell, chairman of the Board of Trustees, pledged $10 million, and Robert K. Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, pledged $5 million. Both played football at Columbia.
• Columbia’s football team has only played five winning seasons since 1956.

Bwoggers are a nostalgic bunch. As much as we’ve adopted an Empire state of mind, we’re fiercely loyal to our hometowns. New York may be the greatest city in the world, but the snow here gets grimy way too quickly. So, until break comes crashing to a close, we’ll be taking trips down memory lane with a series of back-to-your-roots blurbs—some essays resurrected from the Blue and White and a few more current creations. Warm and fuzzies abound! In this first installment from the B&W feature that inspired all this hometown nostalgia, Lauren Glover defends Pittsburgh, PA. And of course, feel free to send in your own anecdotes and photos to tips@bwog.com

In October, TIME magazine published an article saying that my hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was “in better position to withstand [an economic] downturn than many other places.” However, it was no brilliant bit of economic planning that was saving Pittsburgh from the recession. Pittsburgh’s economy has been floundering for the 20-odd years since the collapse of the local steel industry, so when the national economy began to plummet, Pittsburgh just had a relatively small distance to fall.

We Pittsburghers loved this, and not just because it meant we were doing OK in comparison to the rest of the country. The idea that the city’s middling status was ultimately beneficial sums up how we always have felt about our hometown. Our city is not a booming metropolis, but by God, we are fiercely proud of it.

“Why?” you East Coast metropolitans may ask. “Isn’t Pittsburgh another one of those generic middle-of-the-country cities, like Cleveland?” First of all, no, and never compare us to Cleveland again. Pittsburgh is the overcast urban oasis of the Ohio River Valley. It’s the kind of place where you can run into 11 friends in three blocks. We eat French fry sandwiches, and speak in a local dialect that foreigners find totally indecipherable. If you and your friends want to go to a football game, yinz need to go dahntahn t’see dem Stillers play at Heinz Fill’d. Get it?

The Steelers, unlike French fry sandwiches, are an incontrovertible point of pride. In a city that is eager to celebrate its insular idiosyncrasies, imagine the effect of resounding, national victories. In the run-up to the Steelers’ conference championship game against the Baltimore ravens, our mayor legally changed his last name from Ravenstahl to Steelerstahl. After the Super Bowl, as if to one-up the mayor, the City Council temporarily renamed the entire city Sixburgh—a reference to the Steelers’ six Super Bowl wins. How could I not go home?

That Sunday night, I ran through my slushy hometown, screaming and whipping a piece of yellow terry cloth above my head, and I was not alone. Thousands of my fellow Terr’ble Tahl-wielding citizens took to the streets, beaming with the knowledge that the rest of the country would understand how great we always knew our strung-out Steel town was—if only for one night.