If it wasn’t official before, it was now. Fireworks lit the air, confetti rained down on the team as if they were in Miami, and Alabama head coach Nick Saban once again hoisted the crystal trophy as the team and fans celebrated Alabama’s 15th national championship.

The day’s activities started with a replay of the national championship victory over Notre Dame on the steps of Bryant-Denny Stadium, followed by a team parade that ended up at the Walk of Champions.First came the 2012 permanent team captains, seniors Barrett Jones, Chance Warmack and Damion Square, followed by the rest of the football team. Eli Gold, who was already at the podium, heralded each position as they made their way to the front of the stadium.

A sentence that once seemed implausible has now become a reality: I just signed into Myspace with my Facebook account.

For most people, Myspace is a distant memory of a prototypical social network that was basically a glorified blog with an obnoxious amount of customizability.

Now, years after Facebook and Twitter forced Myspace into obscurity, musician and actor Justin Timberlake has released a new version of the site. Despite the name, the site is nearly unrecognizable. Gone are the glittery backgrounds and annoying automatic profile songs. Instead, the new Myspace is going for a simplistic profile style, which asks for very little besides name, age, sex and a brief description of yourself. In fact, you can sign into the website with the click of a button using your Facebook or Twitter account, something that would seem insane to someone living through the social network wars of the early 2000s.

Myspace isn’t trying to compete with other social networks anymore. It’s trying to be “one more thing” instead of “the next thing.” As Google+ proved a few years ago, it is extremely difficult to convince people to jump ship to another system when they are so deeply invested in something else already.

The new Myspace homepage is made up of large tiles, each one representing a news story, band, movie trailer or music video. The tiles change depending on the user’s interests. The goal is to help users “discover” new things that they may like instead of simply viewing the things they already enjoy.

Timberlake has not been focusing on his music as much as he used to, but it is very clear that the new Myspace is music-oriented and hopes to compete with streaming options such as Spotify and Pandora.

The site aims to make sharing and discovering new music a social activity. Users create their own mixes and playlists that can be shared with their friends, while also being shown new artists and songs that may interest them. This is an interesting middle ground between Spotify, which primarily streams music that the users choose themselves, and Pandora, which plays music randomly based on a theme that the user chooses.

However, the big question here is whether or not people want to add another tab to their online social activity. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Youtube, Pandora and more, it is likely that web users are already over-saturated with social options.

For now, it will be most useful to fans of the indie music scene, who can follow and discover lesser known bands easily and add and share new music to their “mix.” Indie bands may also have more success connecting with an audience if this format becomes a success.

We will have to wait and see if Myspace can really return from the grave as another website to check every day, or even take over for one we’ve already grown accustomed to. For now, it’s just another pretty time waster to click around while you’re supposed to be working.

Oregon football players got their first opportunity on Sunday to comment on the official hiring of Mark Helfrich.

Despite a busy start to the offseason, players remained upbeat and excited for the future of the program during the team’s official press conference and coach introduction at Autzen Stadium. The majority of the team found out about the promotion Saturday night during a team meeting.

“I feel like our team has a great vibe,” said sophomore De’Anthony Thomas, one of five student-athletes immediately available for comment. “We’re ready to go already.”

“Jack Reacher” might as well be called “Tom Cruise.” No audience in America will gasp when Cruise makes his appearance 10 minutes into the movie; few people will expect him to transform beyond recognition into a compelling role (à la Daniel Day-Lewis in everything or, well, Cruise in “Tropic Thunder”). This is a Tom Cruise action movie, which means you already know 90 percent of what you need to know.

This, for people who want to attend entertaining movies, is perfectly OK if Cruise carries out his end of the bargain. The bargain being that Cruise remains compelling to watch — an essential skill for any actor, but his lifeblood.

In “Jack Reacher,” Cruise’s physical stunts only diminish slightly from his previous work. At moments, his silhouette seems borrowed from the “Mission: Impossible” franchise (the prominent nose and tuft of hair), which makes it less striking, but his steadicam scenes of combat and movement occasionally seem fresh. Fresh may be an inappropriate word though, as “Reacher” seems to reach back toward the past for its action tropes. The fighting is direct and realistic without the crutch of shaky-cam; the car-chase scenes are loaded with skidding and minor bumps — creating chaotic, screeching tension. Perhaps most wonderfully, the gun fights ring with hundreds of missed bullets as combatants dash for strategic cover. It’s more “duck and cover” than “kill hundreds of bad guys.”

Beyond the physical is the more-intriguing mental state of Cruise. In his movies, there has always been a sense of detachment, with perhaps a glimmer of some erratic behavior. The “cool” in Cruise comes from the detachment, the “compelling” comes from his sudden, wry humor. In “Jack Reacher,” he nails detachment. Reacher is cold and calculating; even though he’s hit on by literally every woman in the film (one wonders who added that to the script), Reacher remains stoic and untouchable.

It’s in a similar vein to “The Expendables” series, in which bros help out the ladies not for sexual gain but for a sense of revenge or justice. This detachment, though, provides a feeling of something missing, of an opportunity wasted. While it makes sense within Reacher’s character (ex-military, extremely diligent, justice-seeking, etc.), there’s still a nagging sensation that Cruise could be doing a little more, that he could not just say funny lines (of which there are plenty in this film) but also deliver them in more humorous ways. In “Reacher,” one wishes Cruise would give a “Risky Business” smile, instead of just resting on a stern “M.I.” expression.

Beyond the leading actor, “Jack Reacher” also provides some surprising roles. Rosamund Pike (“Wrath of the Titans”) is excellent as a lawyer providing a flickering love interest for Reacher. There’s a dignity in Pike’s characterization, a determination and regality that is powerful and sexy — it’s refreshing to watch. Werner Herzog (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”) completely chills as a stubby crime lord. One particular Herzog scene imagines one of the more horrific choices someone pushed to the edge would have to make (think self-cannibalization). Lastly, Robert Duvall (“Get Low”) provides a much needed side-kick for the titular character, and proves old men can hang with the young guys.

Modern times contain a lot of self-depreciation, and movies are catching on to this fact, especially within the shoot-’em-up genre. “Jack Reacher” understands this, and it almost perfectly toes the line between serious and comedic. Cruise ends up as the barometer for the movie’s success, and while he wears the grim mask of a soldier driven toward justice quite well, one wishes it would occasionally slip off to reveal a grin underneath.

With Ryan Kelly on the shelf indefinitely each player knew he had to step up to keep the team afloat during a tough ACC schedule. Tonight, the freshmen shined in the victory.

“[The freshmen] had a good first half, and they gave us a huge lift [in the second half],” senior forward Mason Plumlee said.

Duke overcame a halftime deficit to knock off the Yellow Jackets by a score of 73-57. If it seemed as if a different team took the court to start the second half, that’s because there was a different lineup. After talking to his team in the locker room, head coach Mike Krzyzewski left juniors Tyler Thornton and Josh Hairston—who started the game—on the bench while Rasheed Sulaimon and Amile Jefferson ran with the first unit to provide a much needed spark.

“I thought we were hesitant to shoot, and no team of mine should be that way. Amile at the end of the half hitting that two helped a lot,” Krzyzewski said.

Sulaimon was coming off the bench for the first time in his career after starting the first 16 games of the season. Mired in a horrible shooting slump—he shot just 28.1 percent from the field in four games this month—Thornton was given the nod over the freshman.

Sulaimon responded by contributing his highest scoring output since Dec. 19 against Cornell.

“Rasheed had his best performance since Temple. For a lot of freshmen, it is tough to keep playing really well, but he had a month where he just wasn’t playing up to the level that he can play at, but tonight he did. He practiced that way for the last three days and it paid off,” Krzyzewski said.

Sulaimon’s benefit for this team is not solely his ability to score, but also his defensive intensity and rebounding. Sulaimon helped lead a Duke defense that forced 21 Yellow Jacket turnovers—more than twice the turnovers Georgia Tech committed in their overtime contest against Virginia Tech last week.

Jefferson was coming off an impressive game in Raleigh against N.C. State, but left the Duke faithful wanting more after fouling out in just 12 minutes. Jefferson collected four personal fouls, but played a career high 28 minutes.

“He started the second half and looked like a kid who has started for a while. He really played well for us and gives us some energy,” Krzyzewski said.

Jefferson is not the physical sort of rebounder that Hairston or Mason Plumlee is, but uses all that energy to find ways to always get his hand on the ball and make plays happen.

“[Amile] is a crafty guy, he’s not going to bang you,” Seth Curry said. “He’s going to work around guys and get offensive rebounds and find lanes to get layups and things like that. He’s done a better job on the offensive rebounds than we did even with Ryan in there so that’s an added bonus.”

Despite the terrific play of the freshmen, and the fact that both started the second half in place of the juniors, Krzyzewski stopped short of saying they would be in the starting lineup when Duke next takes the court against Miami on January 23 in Coral Gables, Florida.

“I don’t know who the hell is going to start next week,” Krzyzewski said. “Should we have people mail in who we should start? If it generates tweets and followers for people, we’re all for that.”

Although Krzyzewski made light of the freshmen’s performance, the way Jefferson and Sulaimon have stepped up is no joking matter. Curry put it ever so simply.

“They’re here for a reason,” he said.

A tumultuous 48 hours of questions, rumors and speculation temporarily halted early Saturday morning when former Irish linebacker Manti Te’o ended his silence and denied any involvement in concocting the fake life of Lennay Kekua in an interview with ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap.

“No, never,” Te’o told Schaap when asked if he was involved in the hoax. “Never, not ever.”

In fact, Te’o told Schaap he was not fully convinced he had been hoaxed until Roniah Tuiasosopo, the man accused of perpetrating the scheme, contacted him to admit the hoax Wednesday, the same day a report from Deadspin.com originally broke the story.

Schaap said Te’o showed him Twitter messages from Tuiasosopo from two days ago in which he apologized.

While he maintained his full innocence in the interview, Te’o did admit he made mistakes along the way, including lying to his parents about meeting Kekua.

When the story of Kekua’s death unfolded in the midst of an undefeated Notre Dame season and Heisman Trophy campaign for Te’o, the linebacker said he “kind of tailored my stories to have people think that, yeah, he met her before she passed away.”

“That goes back to what I did with my dad,” Te’o said. “I knew that — I even knew that it was crazy that I was with somebody I didn’t meet.”

“When [Te’o] described her as the love of his life, he meant it 100 percent, although they had never met,” Schaap said. “He did mislead people by saying he met her. He did so because he knew how crazy it would sound that he felt this deeply about someone he had never met.”

Te’o told Schaap the relationship allegedly started on Facebook during Te’o’s sophomore year at Notre Dame, but that it was not until around the Oct. 1, 2011 Purdue game that it grew. He said the relationship started to become more intense in late April 2012, when Te’o was told Kekua was in a car accident.

Te’o told Schaap that he began to sleep with the phone on the line with who he believed to be Kekua once she was in the hospital recovering from the fake car accident and leukemia.

ESPN also reported Te’o supposedly had attempted to video-chat with Kekua multiple times before she purportedly passed, but each time had been unable to see her face in the chat.

Additionally, Te’o told Schaap about a four-way text message conversation before Kekua’s death involving Scripture messages between himself, his parents and the person he believed to have been Kekua. Schaap reported Te’o even showed him the messages during their interview.

Te’o said he never doubted Kekua’s existence or death until early December, nearly three months after he believed she had died.

Corroborating the statements made by Notre Dame Director of Athletics Jack Swarbrick on Wednesday, Te’o said he received communication from the woman whom he believed to be Kekua on Dec. 6, but was not initially convinced it was a hoax.

“After he gets this phone call on Dec. 6 … he’s utterly confused,” Schaap said. “He doesn’t know whether to believe this person or not. She tells some story about how she’s been hiding from drug dealers.”

Te’o told Schaap he asked the person purporting to be Te’o to provide a photo with a date stamp, but even after receiving that, continued to be suspicious of the conversation. In addition, Te’o said people associated with Tuiasosopo showed up at Notre Dame’s team hotel during preparations for the Jan. 7 BCS National Championship Game. Notre Dame did not arrive in South Florida until Jan. 2.

Schaap said Te’o “wanted to get his story out there because he did know what people say to some extent” after a 48-hour period during which he was criticized for his silence.

“He disputed the theory out there that he was completely naive about romantic relationships,” Schaap said. “He said he got sucked into this because he thought he was talking to someone who he shared a lot with. Background, Samoan background, she understood the culture, she understood the language, spoke it better than he did. … It was an intense relationship over a couple months.”

ESPN publicist Mike Humes said on his Twitter account that ESPN “had no parameters on questions. While no tv cameras were permitted and use of audio was limited, we can use anything from the interview across our outlets.” Schaap said he thought the no-camera setting made Te’o more comfortable, and the arrangement was at the linebacker’s request.

On Friday, ESPN’s Shelley Smith published a report in which an unidentified woman close to Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the alleged mastermind of the operation, claimed Tuiasosopo told her that Te’o is a victim of the hoax.

In the report, Smith talked to two California residents who claim their cousin was duped by Tuiasosopo in 2008. The two claim Tuiasosopo supposedly used the same name and photos in that hoax.

Late Friday, USA Today reported that three elements of Kekua’s story parallel that of the Tuiasosopo family: a case of leukemia, a car accident and a quote from Tuiasosopo’s father’s Facebook page that Te’o told the team Kekua said prior to the faked death.

The two-and-a-half-hour off-camera interview with Schaap took place in Bradenton, Fla., where Te’o is currently training in anticipation for the NFL Draft.

The police chief (Nick Nolte) in Gangster Squad warns Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) that there are two things a person can’t take back: “bullets outta your gun and words outta your mouth.” Well, I’d like to amend that list because I very sincerely wish to take back seeing this movie.

Imagine the most stereotypic gangster movie: the clothes, the violence, the way of speaking. Imagine Scarface, but without the credit of any level of originality, and you might have conjured up an accurate picture of Gangster Squad. The film follows the reign of Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), a Capone-style kingpin who’s taking over Los Angeles, and a group of unofficially/officially commissioned misfit cops who join together to stop his evil plot: the Gangster Squad. The problem is that nothing in this movie lives up to its potential.

Advertisements had suggested that the romance between Ryan Gosling’s character and Emma Stone’s would be a major subplot—even a driving force—but the scenes that progress the relationship are chaste and can be counted on one hand. The violence, chock-full of Tommy Guns, isn’t dastardly enough to be worthy of the R rating. Nor are the love scenes, seeing as there are none. Also, Mickey Cohen’s schemes are greed-driven, and while the character is violent in nature, his success would not mean the imminent destruction of lives and civility, just the loss of money. So while he is definitely an evil villain, he’s not very interesting and it’s hard to be invested in his downfall. There’s a talented cast in place, a few of whom were responsible for my wanting to see the movie. But they all play characters the average audience has seen many times before. Either they’re one-note and shallow or have an unoriginal complexity like the bad-boy with a heart of gold.

The blame lies largely with the uninventive screenplay written by Will Beall, whose sparse IMDb credits indicate his limited film-writing experience. There is never enough at stake and far too much awkward dialogue, such as “Who’s the tomato?,” uttered by Sgt. Jerry Wooter (Gosling) when inquiring about Stone’s redheaded character. Sure, people die and families are ruined, but nothing about those supposedly dramatic scenes are emotionally moving; maybe the blame is equally shared with the director Ruben Fleischer. Unfortunately, it’s not even the type of bad you find yourself giggling over—I laughed more in Twilight. Flat all around, Gangster Squad is simply a lackluster story wrapped up in predictable and cliché direction.