Correction Appended
You are correct, Mr. Rogers. It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
And you better believe this is about basketball.
Without a doubt, we're going to spend Monday relishing yesterday's big victory over UA in men's basketball. And we're mustarding it. And we're ketchuping it. Really, anything we can do to it, we're game to do it, for this is a joyous occasion.
After all, for the first time since the '94-'95 season, the ASU men's basketball team swept the Wildcats in the sport that is supposedly theirs. Oh, and the women swept the Cats as well.
Now what are Arizona fans going to say, wait for football season? If so, we're fine with that. Honestly. Oh, it's good day to be a Devil, right?
Well, maybe not, so back up there, turbo. As it turns out, it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
We still are, according to UA's now apologetic footbal coach Mike Stoops, a "junior college" compared to their lovely university's "four-year college."
Well, perhaps that would explain why we are able to beat them in every sport. Perhaps they are too busy focusing on academics. Or not.
We'd like to prove how incorrect Mr. Stoops truly is and how we in fact happen to be quite a bit better than our superiority-claiming counterparts. And it won't be too difficult. So "bear down" on this:
While adhering to the same admission standards, we "Scum Devils" can stake claim to a higher average high school GPA of our incoming freshmen. We have more than doubled UA's number of National Merit Scholars. We have seven more Fulbright scholars. We have a higher freshman retention rate. We actually had students selected to USA Today's Academic First Team (in fact, ASU has had 11 since the rankings began in 1990 — the most from any public school in the nation). We have lost no athletic scholarships because of NCAA sanctions on low academic performance of athletes (UA … not so much). We could go on longer, but honestly, we don't have the time — we need to go study and/or party. Because, oh yeah, we do that thing better, too.
Well, well, well … that might explain a few things.
Such as why some folks in the Old Pueblo weren't smart enough to correctly spell their own mascot's name on Facebook, urging their fellow kitty-cat faithful to join a group named "1,000,000 Arizona Wilcat Fans."
But, we want to stay as classy as possible and maintain our well-established upper hand in this rivalry, so we'll stop the Cat-bashing here.
All we really needed to say is that coming into yesterday, we were feeling good about our spot as Arizona's finest university, but after completing a full sweep in football and basketball, we're feeling even better. Not bad for a junior college, eh?
Correction: The sentence about UA's football coach Mike Stoops should have read, "We still are, according to UA's now apologetic football coach Mike Stoops, a 'junior college' compared to their lovely university's 'four-year college.'"
