The Gators won the yardage and time of possession battles Saturday against the Crimson Tide, but Florida still lost the game.

UF’s struggles inside the red zone were the biggest reason for that.

Of four opportunities inside the Alabama 20-yard line, two resulted in field goals and two resulted in turnovers.

An interception in Alabama’s end zone and a botched handoff on Alabama’s one-yard line ruined two chances to put points on the scoreboard.

“The red-zone scoring, that’s a whole different ball game,” coach Urban Meyer said. “If we don’t throw those picks and have red-zone efficiency, we are in that [game].”

No. 14 Florida used freshman wildcat quarterback Trey Burton near the goal line again Saturday. But instead of scoring six touchdowns like he did against Kentucky the week prior, Burton threw an interception in the end zone on a 4th-and-goal jump pass.

“I knew it was on the road, I knew points were going to be at a premium against that offense,” Meyer said of the play call. “We had significant momentum going there so we wanted to score touchdowns.”

The next red-zone turnover came in the third quarter when quarterback John Brantley tripped over offensive lineman Carl Johnson and fumbled the exchange with running back Emmanuel Moody.

Part of the problem was a lack of balance with the play-calling. The Gators ran the ball eight times and threw it just three times when they were inside the Tide’s 20-yard line.

Leaders need to emerge: Meyer is playing the waiting game.

After the loss against Alabama, some players were vocal in the locker room. But Meyer won’t know who the team’s leaders are until Saturday’s game against No. 12 LSU.

“Some leadership really stepped up in there,” he said. “But it’s easy to stand up and say something. Now you have to be a grown man and back everything up. So I’m anxious to watch them.”

Senior center Mike Pouncey was one of the players who made his voice heard after the loss, but he reiterated there isn’t a clear leader on the team just yet.

“A lot of people said a lot of things,” Pouncey said. “The main message was just believe in each other and we’ll get through this tough loss.”

Following UF’s loss to Auburn in 2006, Meyer said he remembers a lot of players screaming and yelling. After its loss to Ole Miss in 2008, he remembers a dejected group.

But this time, he is still waiting for leaders to step up.

“[The leaders are] to be determined,” he said. “There were some good things said, but we all can walk up and say good things.”

Injuries: After Saturday’s crushing loss, the Gators finally received some good news.

Running back Mike Gillislee, who stood on the sideline with crutches the entire second half, was diagnosed with a bone bruise after many thought he suffered a high ankle sprain. Meyer said he is probable for Saturday’s game against LSU.

I deleted my Facebook in July. I did so when I realized that I only spoke to about five percent of the people I had listed as friends, and that no one actually cares that I just made awesome guacamole or that I slept through calculus again (barring the creepy guy from work who probably doesn’t need to know more about me as it is).

Since I’ve closed my account, certain drawbacks to having one have become apparent to me. And of those, the most obvious is how awkward Facebook makes all your relationships — especially the more-than-friendly ones.

The complications start immediately, as you start becoming interested in someone. You know you’re navigating their page all the time, so you end up reading most of their status updates. Then you have to feign ignorance when they discuss those things with you in real life because you don’t want to seem like you’ve been stalking them (regardless of whether you actually have or haven’t). It’s a vicious cycle. Don’t pretend that you don’t do it.

Case in point, consider this sublimely awkward exchange, a conversation I had last semester:

Me: Oh, so this is your free haircut? It looks nice!

Jason: How did you know it was free?

Me: Didn’t you tell me it was?

Jason: What? No.

Me: Oh! Hahahaha, I must have a sixth sense or something because I definitely didn’t read it off of your status update.

Further adding to your grievances, under relationship status, one can list “married,” “engaged,” “in a relationship,” “in an open relationship,” “single” and the ever-debated “it’s complicated.” What does “it’s complicated” mean? (When is it not complicated is a better question.) “It’s complicated” could mean “I’m not over my ex” or “my ex just did time for attempted manslaughter, and I’m too fearful for my life to fully extract myself from my current relationship, which I am actually desperate to leave.”

So, yeah, I need to know, please.

And then, eventually, you’ve got to have that discussion about relationship statuses for yourself, because the first question anyone will ask you about your new “friend” is whether or not you’re “Facebook official.” Because, you know, hyperlinking your pages together makes you a real couple — it’s an act that truly attests to your ability to weather the turbulent storms of college love. If Facebook doesn’t say so, then I’m not buying it.

Assuming you manage to make it over those hurdles, Facebook only heaps more discomfort upon you once you’re actually in a relationship with said person. Who’s Rachel Skanksy? Why is she “liking” this photo of you? How come she’s commented on your wall three times in a row? There are far too many “lol”s going back and forth between you two lately. What’s up with all the emoticons, buddy?

This isn’t even to mention how incredibly awkward it is to have to “cancel a relationship” on Facebook once you’ve broken up. The hilarity of that wording aside, it does present a degree of conflict. Someone has to click that “cancel relationship” button, and unless you alert your now-exes immediately, they’re left with an “in a relationship” tag with no name after it. That makes it pretty obvious to the world that someone just got dumped. (And admit it, you’re suspicious when no page link is listed after “in a relationship.” I mean, if you don’t have a Facebook, you basically don’t exist, right? That’s what I’ve learned, at least.)

But the worst of it obviously comes after the breakup. After all, no one wants to see photos of their ex that are constantly cropping up randomly on their news feed. (By “cropping up randomly” I mean “checking their page obsessively.”) And Facebook just has to rub it in with that handy-dandy feature that reminds you of friends with whom you have not had any recent communication.

Months and months after the fact, Facebook repeatedly would continue to insist that I “reconnect with Jason!” or “leave a comment on Jason’s wall!” or “send Jason a message!”. No, thanks, there’s actually a reason I haven’t reconnected with him. It was like my life was The Truman Show, and Mark Zuckerberg was just trying to be an enormous, ironic jerk about it.

In the end, I realized that the problem was that my primary relationship was and would be with Facebook, so long as I had one. So I decided it was about time to cancel that relationship as well. And sure enough, Facebook wasn’t about to make it that easy for me to walk away — you have to Google how to delete your account, type in a Captcha to prove you’re not a robot (because no one in their right mind would delete their Facebook) and hold off on any activity for two weeks before your account is actually terminated.

Now that that mess is over, I can say it with conviction: Facebook, you were the creepiest relationship of all. I’m so glad we’re over. Signed, Catherine.

Sports journalism is full of hyperbole.

The world of Duke sports is no different—it seems a yearly ritual, for example, for a rumor about Mike Krzyzewski being offered another job to be blown out of proportion.

So it’s a rare occurrence indeed when the nation doesn’t seem to fully recognize the momentous significance of any story, let alone one dealing with Duke, a program that always is in the national spotlight.

But that’s what seems to be happening after Austin Rivers’s verbal commitment to the Blue Devils.

The importance of Rivers’s commitment cannot be over-hyped, overvalued or over-reported. Now it seems as if Duke is the hottest program in college basketball, only a year after many analysts proclaimed the Blue Devils were taking a backseat to rival North Carolina, in a prime example of hyperbole in action.

Think about it: Around this time last year people had moderate expectations for the Blue Devils’ upcoming season, and the program had just lost out on mega-recruit Harrison Barnes. It seemed as if Duke lived in the shadow of the defending national champions down Tobacco Road.

Now the Blue Devils are themselves the defending champions. And they’re the clear cut favorites to repeat this season, and they just wrapped up arguably the best high school player in the country.

That’s an incredible turnaround, no hyperbole intended.

What’s even more important for Duke fans still smarting over the Barnes defection is that the Blue Devils out-recruited the Tar Heels for Rivers. But this time, according to Dave Telep, Scout.com’s national recruiting director, Duke was able to hold off its rival without much difficulty.

“Once he publicly decommitted from Florida, it looked to me like Duke moved into a leadership position with him that they never relinquished,” Telep said. “This one, behind closed doors, was heading Duke’s way. It would’ve been an upset of pretty big proportions if he went anywhere else.”

All this would be enough to leave Duke fans, and the program itself, feeling pretty chipper. And that’s without even mentioning Telep’s most intriguing comment regarding Rivers.

If the lockout alters the NBA collective bargaining agreement as Telep thinks it might, Blue Devil fans might get to see an NBA-caliber talent in Cameron for more than the customary year.

“Things are going to change with the collective bargaining agreement,” Telep said. “It is entirely possible that we see either a 20-year age limit instituted or we see two years in college required. People who use the term one-and-done from this point forward are putting themselves in a position to get a little egg on their faces, because one-and-done could be a term that is one-and-done after this year.”

The lockout might not just affect Rivers but his possible teammates in 2011, as well. Even if the 20-year age limit is not implemented, the possible absence of NBA basketball in 2011 could keep Kyrie Irving and Mason Plumlee in Durham for an additional year. While it’s foolish at best to try to prognosticate so far in advance, next year Duke could trot out a backcourt of Irving, Rivers, Seth Curry and Andre Dawkins, with the Plumlee brothers (all three of them) anchoring a deep front-court.

If you take into account Rivers’ potential on an actual basketball court, then this story reaches the next level.

Forget the comparisons with Barnes—Rivers could be better. He’s an extremely polished scorer, who will instantly make the Blue Devils better when he steps foot in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

“Austin’s game is extremely mature for a high school basketball player. He’s got a scoring array,” Telep said. “The easiest way to picture Austin Rivers is as a guy that’s just more advanced. It sounds very simple, but the fact of the matter is he has NBA style about him in terms of what he can do as a perimeter player.”

So there seems to be no downside to this story—Rivers’s commitment has helped reengineer Duke’s recruiting pitch, it has given fans still sore over Barnes some measure of revenge and it could lead to one of the more talented Blue Devil teams in history.

And for once, the hyperbole that will invariably be thrown around by fans, and the media, is actually merited.

Even if Rivers is still a high school senior.

Students paying hundreds of dollars for academic papers online may be surprised by how little they get for their money.

A recent study by Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business, and Aline Grüneisen, associate in research at Fuqua, investigated the quality of online essay mills, which sell papers to high school and college students. Although many of the sites claim they are supposed to help students write their own papers, Ariely wrote on his blog that “with names such as echeat.com, it’s pretty clear what their real purpose is.”

Ariely and Grüneisen bought four essays for between $150 and $216 each, but they contained significant errors and passages that made little to no sense.

“The essays were completely incoherent,” Grüneisen said. The essays cited sources from Wikipedia, and one source was in Russian, she added. There were also awkward word substitutions, like the replacement of “cheating” with “deceiting.”

When the researchers asked for a refund due to the poor quality of the papers they received, one of the essay mills threatened to turn the researchers in to a University dean for using its service, Grüneisen said.

The essays the researchers bought related to how and why people cheat. One paper read, “Cheating by healers. Healing is different…. But these days fewer people believe in wizards,” to answer the assigned cheating prompt.

“If a paper [like that] was turned in, I would fail the student and take it to the honor code council,” Ariely wrote in an e-mail.

The experiment originated from a conversation Ariely had with undergraduates about honesty and challenges they face. The students mentioned Adderall, lying on resumes, plagiarism and essay mills.

Grüneisen added that the poor quality of essays produced by essay mills should be enough to keep students away from them. Grüneisen does not think essay mills are widely used, however. She said she thinks purchasing cheaper essays from friends is more common.

The Office of Student Conduct has not seen cases of essay purchasing in a couple of years, but there have been cases in the past, said Stephen Bryan, associate dean of students and director for the OSC.

Even though essay mills are not widely used at Duke, Ariely said the mere existence of the mills is a problem.

“The existence of these sites and their popularity can create what we call ‘social proof’ where people think it is okay to do this, particularly when they hear that other people are doing this,” Ariely said.

Although alcohol remains many students’ drug of choice, some undergraduates have recently experimented with a new, “legal weed.”

K2—also known as spice, genie and zohal—is a leafy green, synthetic drug said to have effects similar to marijuana. Often marketed as incense, the drug began appearing in U.S. tobacco shops and convenience stores in late 2009.

Serious concerns about the drug have emerged in the last year after more than 500 reports were made to poison control centers across the country, according to The (Raleigh) News & Observer. Side effects have allegedly included hallucinations, elevated heart rates, vomiting and seizures.

Despite a warning label noting the product is not meant for human consumption, college students have reportedly been smoking K2 in dorm rooms across the country.

“Something you’re not supposed to smoke”

Students say that though some of their peers have experimented with the drug, few have become regular users—its reputation as an alternative to marijuana may not be deserved.

“I think a lot more people were doing it last year,” said Duke U. sophomore Will Chappell. “They were trying to give it a chance because they didn’t really know what it was.”

Smoking K2 as a substitute for marijuana has left some students disappointed. Chappell said K2 is “nowhere near as good as weed” and that he experienced an “angry high” from the drug that put him in a bad mood. Sophomore Scott Spencer said K2 had “a bad psychological effect” on him and made him feel paranoid.

Despite their unpleasant experiences, Chappell and Spencer agreed that K2 does bear some resemblance to its illicit counterpart. Spencer said the cost of K2 is comparable to that of certain kinds of marijuana, noting that the new product sells for about $15 to $20 per gram.

However, both students said they are wary of the substance’s synthetic origins.

“It’s synthesized, and it’s made from something you’re not supposed to smoke,” Chappell said, adding that he prefers not to smoke K2 because he believes it is worse than marijuana for his health.

Spencer also said K2 is not a drug he would choose to smoke often, particularly on Duke’s campus.

“If marijuana was legal, I don’t think you’d ever find someone who would prefer K2 to marijuana,” he said. “And there’s a low enough risk of getting in trouble with marijuana that it’s essentially legal on campus.”

Students seeking to try K2 normally find it readily accessible. In addition to its availability online, Chappell said last spring some students purchased the drug from Expressions, an adult and tobacco store located in Chapel Hill.

The store no longer sells the product, an employee told The Chronicle, but students say that Hazmat, a tobacco shop in Chapel Hill, sells K2. The store’s employees declined to comment on the product, noting that they were told not to talk to the media about K2 after the store’s recent appearance in a newspaper about the drug.

Unknown among administrators

Because K2 is still a legal substance in North Carolina, it is difficult for administrators to monitor.

Typically, administrators learn about drug use through situations in which students are being reprimanded, said Tom Szigethy, associate dean for students and director of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention Center . K2 is therefore more difficult to monitor.

“We’ve not seen a spike of students telling us about [K2],” Szigethy said. “The most common drug of choice, of course, is alcohol, and I would say that [marijuana] is second on the list.”

Jean Hanson, assistant director for Student Health, said there have been no known cases of Duke students being hospitalized due to the drug’s adverse side effects.

“I am not familiar with K2 and have seen no references to it in reports from the [emergency department],” she wrote in an e-mail. “I do not even know if there is a specific test for it.”

Szigethy said that in many cases, bad experiences with drugs offer an educational moment to students, allowing them to consider the reasons they felt it necessary to use the substance in the first place.

“There can [still] be implications if they kind of skirt the law—there can be negative implications on their life choices,” he said. “They’re using [drugs like K2], and… they have no idea about the long-term implications of using this substance.”

In light of its reported adverse effects, researchers at Saint Louis U., Harvard U. and U. Massachusetts have teamed up with the federal Centers for Disease Control and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to study how K2 affects the human body, the Associated Press reported in March.

Although K2 is still legal in many parts of the country, some states—such as Kansas and Kentucky—have banned the drug. Several other states are in the process of outlawing the product.

“Mancession” is the new nickname being thrown around for the recession that began in 2007. The nickname stems from the victims of job loss in the recession: mostly men.

Men account for 75 percent of the labor market that have lost jobs since 2007, according to a 2009 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of those jobs lost had been in fields such as manufacturing and construction.

This year, for the first time in American history, women make up a majority of the workforce in highly paid managerial and professional positions, holding down the fields at 51.4 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Over a five-month time period in 2008, nearly 700,000 American men lost their jobs while women gained close to 300,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While only 3 percent of the Fortune 500 CEO list were women, last year female CEOs out-earned their male counterparts by 43 percent and on average, received bigger pay raises.

According to the James Chung of Reach Advisers, who spent over five years analyzing data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, in 147 of the 150 biggest U.S. cities, the median full-time salaries of young women are eight percent higher than those of men in their age group. In Atlanta and Memphis, young women are making about 20 percent more. In New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego, they are earning roughly 15 percent more than young males. However, this only holds true for childless, unmarried women under 30.

The study found that the cities where young women were out-earning men were in places that either had primary local industries that were knowledge-based or were manufacturing towns where industries

had shrunk. Cities where men out-earned young women were places that tended to be built around industries that were heavily male-dominated, such as military technology or software development.

Of the 15 jobs that are projected to grow over the next decade, men are the majority in two of them: janitors and computer engineers. Women dominate the remaining 13 in jobs such as nursing or childcare.

“We need to look at how we are raising our sons and daughters,” said Chicagoan Veronica Arreola who runs the blog, Viva La Feminista. With most of the fastest growing jobs in nurturing professions, Arreola said, “If we are we telling them that only women are caretakers, then only women will go into nursing. We need to get to the point where male nurses are respected as much as male doctors.”

While not all of these jobs are essentially high paying, they can lead towards a steady accumulation of working women. But not all believe this is good economically.

“Who said that being a home health assistant is a good job? It is a very low paying job,” said Dr. Claudia Goldin, the director of the American Economy program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Just because a sector is growing does not mean that it has lucrative jobs.”

While women have surpassed men in the workforce as a whole, in some fields their numbers are declining. In finance, 2.6 percent of women have disappeared from the industry while men have grown by 9.6 percent, finds the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the same time that blue-collar jobs historically done by men are becoming hard to find, higher education is being dominated by women. This is giving way to a new dynamic in the white-collar workforce.

Thirty years have passed since women started to receive more bachelor’s degrees then men. Since then, the gender gap in college enrollment has continued to grow. At DePaul University, only 41 percent of last year’s entering freshman class were male.

“We were just held back for so long, it was a pressure building up,” said Arreola. “On some level, women know that they need this college degree to even survive in this economy,” said Arreola.

As the proportion of male and female college enrollment continues to grow, instances of an affirmative action-type method have quietly begun to spring up. Several schools such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have asked if it is time to institute affirmative action for men.

Being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points in selective liberal-arts schools, found economists Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein in a 2003 study.

In December, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said it would investigate whether some colleges were discriminating against women in admissions by admitting males at a higher rate or by offering them more generous aid packages.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bars gender discrimination in all education programs at institutions receiving federal funds. But this does not apply to private institutions.

In a 2006 Op-Ed piece to The New York Times, Jennifer Delajunty Britz, who was on the board of the admission committee at Kenyon College, confessed that qualified female applicants were given hesitation in the admittance process based on their gender alone. When recalling a women applicant that was over-qualified in every realm except her middle-of-the-pool test scores, Britz wrote, “We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write “admit” next to her name. Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit.”

“Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions,” wrote Britz.

The growing gender gap in college enrollment has led many to speculate what is to come next in the workforce.

“Women will go into jobs that require a college education and fewer men will be able to,” said Goldin. “But there is a lot of retooling and retraining that goes on. Males mature later and many will realize at age 40 that they need better tools.”

American women are now the breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American households. In a survey conducted by The New York Times, when jobs are scarce, 85 percent of people polled in the U.S. believe that men should not get priority for jobs.

“Part of my Christian upbringing in a predominantly Christian nation is that God is the head of man and man is the head of the household,” said Mustafaa El-Scari, a program specialist for the Administration for Children and Families. “There are very few men in the nation that can ask their wives to stay at home because they don’t have the financial resources to do so.”

“The lines have been blurred over jobs that are supposed to be for men and supposed to be for women,” said El-Scari who heads support groups for men that are late or delinquent on child support payments. Since 2008, El-Scari said his support groups for men have seen a dramatic increase in enrollment.

The recession has made stay-at-home dads a reality, said Arreola. “Hopefully in the future, men will know they have the choice to stay at home or work. With the increase of women in the workforce, they will also know that they have that option.”

With a country composed of a growing male population who do not hold college degrees, and a recession that has diminished many blue-collar jobs, people are beginning to speculate what is to come for the American workforce.