A bunch of stuff about stuff

* Bad news for Kentucky, as star defensive end Jeremy Jarmon, who was honorable mention All-SEC last season and had 13.5 sacks over the past two years, has been informed that he failed an NCAA drug test and is ineligible for the season. As a senior, Jarmon's career is over. I have a confession: I did not know that the NCAA could suspend a player for an entire season for failing a drug test. Now that I know, I think the most surprising thing is that it doesn't happen more often. Jarmon said that he inadvertently took a banned substance included in a weight-loss product -- if true, that's a crappy way to end a nice career.

* Oregon QB Justin Roper, a redshirt sophomore, announced that he will transfer after getting beat out by Jeremiah Masoli in spring practice for the starting quarterback job. Roper wasn't terrible when he found the field, but given the Ducks' potency with Masoli at the helm during their ridiculous run late in the season (49.5 points per game over the final four), it seems doubtful that Roper was in Chip Kelly's long-term plans.

* Tomahawk Nation has a great post up related to fumbles and the general randomness related to their recovery. It's been the stated opinion of numerous sites -- including Mgoblog, Football Outsiders and RollBamaRoll.com -- that recovering fumbles isn't something that teams are "good" or "bad" at -- it just happens, with no consistency from year to year and no trends of certain teams being better than certain other teams. In other words, if a team gets all the lucky bounces in a given season, odds are good that those numbers will regress to the mean the following year (and vice versa). I'm intrigued so much by this idea that I can foresee a lengthier post in my future.

* According to Ohio State's student newspaper, there were 21 recruiting violations by Big Ten schools this year. The breakdown: 13 for Ohio State, eight for all the other teams combined. I try to stay objective, but that's just ridiculous. And here's the best part:

"I don't view it as a bad thing. If we suddenly had zero violations, I would have to ask myself what the coaches were hiding," said Doug Archie, OSU's associate athletics director for compliance and camps.

In other words, as long as the coaches admit that they did something wrong, they didn't really do anything wrong at all. Nice.

* Michigan's game on October 17 against Delaware State has caused some craziness, as DSU has announced that it will have to forfeit its conference game against North Carolina A&T originally scheduled for the same date. How can this happen? Well, Delaware State apparently didn't have an athletic director at the time -- it's unclear who in the administration actually agreed to the deal with Michigan -- and a "miscommunication" left school officials with the understanding that a couple of conference teams would rearrange their schedules if necessary. When that didn't happen, Delaware State was left with its pants down and with an 0-1 record to start the season. Gene Wojciechowski has it right: This game never should have been scheduled, even if you're willing to overlook the general blah-ness of games between FBS and FCS schools. Speaking of mistakes, I'd like to point out to ESPN's web people that "Delware" (in the headline above the URL directory) is not correct.