Archive for the ‘Anthony Alford’ Category

While they’re not exactly the circumstances that you want your prized two-sport prospect to choose baseball under, it looks like a significant hurdle has been cleared in Anthony Alford’s march towards potential baseball stardom.

This, of course, is not necessarily good news.

The Hattiesburg American reported today that the Jays prospect, and freshman quarterback at Southern Miss, has been released from his scholarship by the school– doing so at the player’s request. Clearly it’s a decision reached in the wake of Alford’s recent arrest at the school, and the fact that he stands charged with hindering prosecution and conspiracy to possess weapon on campus, though there are also genuine athletic reasons, too.

The Golden Eagles just finished skulking through an 0-12 season. They’ve fired the head football coach who recruited Alford and have now hired of Oklahoma State offensive coordinator Todd Monken to replace him, as well as the previous offensive philosophy.

The American‘s Stan Caldwell writes, in as informative piece on Alford’s situation as you’ll find, bluntly titled Alford should focus on baseball, that “even before the incident that landed him in jail, there were serious rumors that Alford was shopping his services, that he’d had enough of USM and was looking to transfer.”

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In the wake of last week’s news that Jays prospect, and Golden Eagles QB, Anthony Alford had been arrested on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, there were a lot of serious shit heads around here (far from anything close to the majority, I’ll grant) moaning about “character” and what they saw as the Jays’ possible abandonment of it in the 2012 draft. They’d come to this rash conclusion because first-rounder Marcus Stroman was suspended at the end of the season after he most-likely-unintentionally took a supplement with a banned ingredient in it, and because Alford had been arrested in this incident– one that these pea brains knew absolutely nothing about.

Nor did anyone else, frankly. Nor do we know a whole lot more right now. And that’s kind of the whole thing: it’s usually a good idea to have a handle on the facts before jumping to conclusions.

Of course, that means I can’t entirely exonerate Alford, either, but at this point I can at least pass along word that things appear to be looking up a little bit, as the Hattiesburg American is now reporting that the charges against him, originally for aggravated assault, have been lowered to “conspiracy to possess a firearm on campus and hindering prosecution.”

Um… hooray?

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If you’ve been periodically checking in on the University of Southern Mississippi’s football team over the course of the NCAA season, you already know what a catastrophe it’s been for the Golden Eagles, and to a lesser extent, freshman quarterback Anthony Alford, who the Jays selected in the third round of this year’s draft.

Or… well… that is, it was a lesser extent catastrophe for Alford until last night.

Yes, on the day that the school fired head coach Ellis Johnson one year into his tenure– following up a 12-2 2011 with a winless season in which Alford (not to mention the four other quarterbacks used) was hopelessly ineffective (according to reports), and in which his mother was arrested at a game following a verbal altercation with a fan berating his play– Alford somehow managed to make things worse.

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