Tigers on top, Cajuns at bottom: LSU is on top of The Sporting News preseason college football poll, while the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is ranked last at No. 120. The magazine notes that the Tigers’ season hinges on quarterback Jordan Jefferson, who has been “historically shaky” and has delivered one memorable game during his three years with the team. LSU plays two of the teams in the Top 5: No. 3 Alabama and No. 5 Oregon. The Ragin’ Cajuns are considered to be the worst college football team going into the season, but the rest of the BCS teams in Louisiana don’t fare much better: Louisiana Tech ranks No. 94, Louisiana-Monroe No. 96 and Tulane No. 104. See the full poll here.
Move seen as making investors happy: America’s biggest corporations are spending more money on stock repurchases to keep investors happy. Standard & Poor’s says stock buybacks in the first quarter rose 63% to $89.8 billion. That’s up from $55.3 billion in the year-ago period. Despite the increase, S&P 500 companies are mainly using stock buybacks to protect the value of the company’s shares, says Howard Silverblatt, a senior analyst for S&P. Stock buyback programs indicate companies have enough cash to take their shares off the market. That in turn increases the value of the remaining shares and per-share earnings results. Stock repurchases increased 4% in the first quarter from the previous quarter, according to S&P. But stock prices over that time rose by an average of 8%, indicating that companies snapped up fewer shares even while spending more money on buybacks. That means companies are using buybacks primarily to control employee options and shares used for dividend reinvestment programs, Silverblatt says. The stockpile of cash companies are sitting on meanwhile continues to grow. S&P companies have set a new record for cash holdings in each of the past 10 quarters. In the first quarter of this year, companies had $963 billion in cash.
