The streak meets: Diehard Tigers fans, clear your calendars. The 17th annual Tiger Gridiron Club Bayou Bash daylong football recruiting party will return to the Baton Rouge River Center on Wednesday, with doors opening at 8:30 a.m. LSU coach Les Miles will talk about this year’s recruiting class at 5:30 p.m. A silent auction, panel of former Tiger players and personalities, and meet-and-greet with Miles are all planned. Tickets are $30 in advance, $45 at the door. A limited number of VIP tables for 10 are also available. You can get regular tickets via Ticketmaster here or at the River Center box office. Ed Fisher can give you details on VIP tables, and he can be reached at 767-7999.
Ahead of the pack: New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, Green Bay Packers’ Aaron Rodgers and New England Patriot’s Tom Brady top the Bloomberg Businessweek/Horrow Sports Ventures 2012 Power 100 ranking of the most powerful professional athletes in the United States. The list ranks the 100 most powerful athletes based on performance, endorsements, name awareness, appeal, influence, trustworthiness and overall popularity, among other things. The Power 100 rankings are based 50% on these “off-field” measurements, and 50% on “on-field” performance using a variety of industry statistics. Former LSU and NBA star Shaquille O’Neal also appears on the list, at No. 7. Check out the full story from The Times-Picayune here.
St. Louis Toodle-Oo: The New Orleans Saints’ new defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo will begin work Monday, The Times-Picayune reports, but says he hasn’t mined the Saints’ defensive schemes and players deeply enough to render a sound judgment on them just yet. Spagnuolo, former head coach of the St. Louis Rams, has stressed two points in his initial meetings with the New Orleans media: One, he intends to keep an open mind toward each Saints defender; and two, he doesn’t plan a vast scrubbing. “I really want an opportunity to talk more with the coaches, the defensive coaches and kind of share ideas. And then aside from that, you’ll learn this about me: If I stand here today and I tell you that ‘We need to have this, this and that,’ that’s going to assume we really don’t have it, and yet, I don’t know. I’m not deep enough into the evaluation of the personnel to say that,” he says. Read the full story here.
