Across Fort Collins signs read, “Defend the Fort,” and the No. 5 ranked TCU Horned Frogs did just that by defending the Fort Worth name in Fort Collins by defeating CSU 27-0 in the Frogs’ first conference game of the season.

The win was the first road shutout under head football coach Gary Patterson in his ten seasons as head coach. The last road shutout was a 24-0 win in 2000 against Navy when Patterson was the Frogs defensive coordinator.

Patterson said the players and the ones responsible for the shutout against the Rams. He said shutouts on the road are hard to do and when it happens it is good for the players.

“The ones you’ve gotta be proud of is them because they’re the ones that do all the hard work,” Patterson said.

The first half was slow for both teams and the only scoring action came from Horned Frog kicker Ross Evans. Evans scored a 29-yard field goal on the Frogs first possession of the game. The field goal by Evans is the third time in five games this season that the Frogs have scored on their first drive, two of the three were touchdowns.

TCU defense kept CSU from gaining any first downs during the first quarter and kept possession for the majority of the first quarter for a total of a little over nine minutes.

Evans scored another field goal for the Frogs at the opening of the second quarter. The second quarter remained slow with the Frogs controlling a majority of the possession time and the only points coming from Evans two field goals.

Dalton said the lack of points in the first half wasn’t over confidence, it was the team not executing to its full potential.

The Frogs came out strong after halftime and the defense pushed past the Rams to score its first touchdown of the game during the second half opening drive scored by sophomore Ed Wesley.

Dalton said the opening drive of the second half gave the players awareness of what they needed to do the rest of the game.

“Six points is unacceptable for this offense and with how explosive we feel we can be” Dalton said. “So we had to go out and execute (during the second half).

Last week, Wesley was out for the majority of the game against SMU after getting a concussion but returned against the Rams to score the Frogs eight-yard touchdown.

Wesley scored the Frogs second touchdown late in the third half with a three-yard rushing drive.

The Frogs strengthened their lead in the fourth quarter with a 39-yard pass by quarterback Andy Dalton to senior wide-receiver Jimmy Young.

Daltons touchdown pass to Young broke the TCU record for the amount of scoring passes in his career at 50. Max Knake held the previous record in 1995 with 49 scoring passes.

At the end of the fourth quarter senior safety Tejay Johnson forced a fumble out of the Rams that was recovered by Wayne Daniels on the TCU 25-yard line.

Patterson said the team accomplished what they needed to do in Saturday’s game by playing together.

“I was pretty proud of the guys that stepped up and played,” Patterson said. “Overall, I was happy with our protection.”

In the modern age of Facebook, where everyone from parents to corporate executives actively participate in the 500 million-member network, New-York based entrepreneur Josh Weinstein thinks he has found a way to bring back “the college-centricity of social networking that made Facebook so appealing during it’s early stages.”

His solution? CollegeOnly.com.

CollegeOnly, which came about after a year of working on two of his other website start-ups, GoodCrush and RandomDorm, was launched to seven colleges and universities, including Cornell, on September 1st. The site will launch at NYU and Columbia this coming Saturday.

Reminiscent of Facebook’s early days, users need a college or university e-mail address to gain access to the site. Other features, similar to Facebook, include the ability to post general updates and events in a centralized feed, and being able to keep tabs on friends across campus.

However, Weinstein says that CollegeOnly sets itself apart by its new features, which include the ability to update and post anonymously in preset chat rooms. The “Missed Connections” room on the site allows students to chat about cute classmates, while the “After Party” room is the place to gossip about a previous weekend’s popular parties.

“One of the key things we’ve seen is that people aren’t uploading as many photos as they used to on Facebook,” Weinstein said. “So we’ve made photo-sharing an important component as well.”

There is the fear that anonymous posting may leave users unrestrained to say whatever they want. However, with light moderation, CollegeOnly staff hopes to ensure the quality of their experience. By allowing users to flag inappropriate content and having campus representatives monitor these activities, Weinstein feels that the site’s anonymity is a useful tool.

“I am looking forward to offering this service to expand the scope of conversations that are otherwise constrained on Facebook, by forcing association between all of the content posted and your identity,” Weinstein said.

Weinstein’s previous website, GoodCrush, a collegiate matchmaking website, did not experience widespread success. However, features of the site, including the CrushFinder, have been incorporated into CollegeOnly to create a social networking experience rather than just a dating site.

“When we started GoodCrush, it was clear that the CrushFinder was ‘just’ a feature. It’s a very useful feature, but not something that you can use on a daily basis,” Weinstein said. “What people want to do is connect with their friends, classmates and others in their college community”

In spite of Weinstein’s enthusiasm, some students remain skeptical about the new site’s potential to draw students away from Facebook.

“I don’t think that it’ll ever be able to eclipse Facebook,” Tommy Gabay said. “I think these features are just gimmicks … there are other websites that do [what CollegeOnly does.]”

Weinstein said he was “not yet in a position to say [whether] the site will be more popular than Facebook.”

However, he believes that he could provide “real value” in the “wake of Facebook’s departure from the college demo.”

Consider what could have happened.  Had the Detroit bomber succeeded, several hundred people would have died.  If Mr. Faisal Shahzad’s Times Square plot was effective, a few hundred more might have perished.  These claims are not meant to scare, and usually when stated by elected officials are nothing more than attempts to end debate by stating the obvious.  Yet these events beg the question, what motivates young men living in the West to train in Pakistan with the aim of murdering as many innocent lives as possible?  The answer to this question is complex and beyond this article’s scope.  The fact that this question is an obvious one though, seems to imply that there is some force at work larger than fundamentalism; a force which extends beyond the basements and caves of Islamic terrorists.

The United States confronts a rather widespread sentiment, which holds that terrorist attacks against the United States and her allies are acceptable.  This view seems to be based in the notion that the West somehow holds back the Arab world through some form of oppression, be it political, economic, or military.  As former UK Prime Minister Blair said, “The problem is not simply the extremism.  The problem is actually a narrative that is shared by a far broader spectrum than we think.”  This is not to say that most people in the Arab world wish to fight in a war against the West or even hope for further attacks.  In fact, the West must make it a priority to support reputable Islamic and Arab leaders who believe that Islam is compatible with a Westernized lifestyle.  However, it does seem that there is a sizeable contingent that at least implicitly accept attacks on the West through support for those groups that carry out these attacks.

Consider the Iranian-funded Lebanese Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah.  It is responsible for numerous attacks on the U.S., including the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.  It operates a militia group that is at times at odds with the Lebanese army.  Yet, Hezbollah provides social services, enjoys veto power, and holds 13 parliamentary seats.  To be sure, Hezbollah is not universally loved, even within Lebanon.  Support for the terrorist group is largely based in its opposition to Israel.  Nonetheless, it is simultaneously the darling of Shiite radicals and a viable political organization that has murdered innocents.

The dynamic in Pakistan is quite different, but still demonstrates an uncomfortably widespread animosity towards the West.  A poll over the summer indicated that almost 6 in 10 Pakistanis consider the U.S. an enemy, and only 1 in 10 a partner.  54 percent of polled Pakistanis consider the Taliban a threat.  This is despite billions of dollars in both military and civilian aid from America.  The Pakistani army has fought the Pakistan Taliban who pose a threat to the government, yet it is reluctant to fight the Taliban networks that are killing Western soldiers.  AfPak Taliban groups such as the Haqqani network both support locals and kill U.S. soldiers.  Yet, they are relatively safe in Pakistan.  Again, this is not open hatred towards the U.S., but rather something like a latent anger.

Those who believe the U.S. confronts a small, marginalized, and unsophisticated group do not recognize the more widespread and still dangerous anti-West sentiment that manifests itself in support for groups that actually do have the desire and means to kill.  There must be recognition and admission by the Obama administration that the difficulties in the struggle between liberal, Western ideals and reactionary, radical Islamic ones, are broader than killing a few men.  The “with us or against us” mantra of the Bush administration dangerously divided the world between those who fought with us and everybody else.  Yet the current message of a world split between people who either kill or are willingly tolerant to Western ideals is also misguided.  It would be comforting and intellectually honest for those crafting U.S. foreign policy to acknowledge and address the existence of a prevalent, dormant enmity towards the West.

How many credit hours are you taking this semester? Twelve? Fifteen? Eighteen?

How would you feel if U. Central Florida decided to charge a flat tuition rate for full-time students no matter how many credit hours they were enrolled in?

Well, this is a plan that is currently being debated by the board of governors. If adopted as early as November, the plan could be enforced at some schools for fall 2011.

I have a problem with this plan for a couple reasons.

A Sept. 19 article in the Orlando Sentinel said, “The system’s board of governors is considering a plan that backers hope would push students to graduate on time or even early.”

Since when is the system striving to get students to graduate early? Is it not enough just to get them to graduate on time?

Not only that, but putting a flat rate on tuition isn’t going to speed up the process. It’s not going to make students think they have to take on a couple more classes every semester to hurry up and graduate.

Therefore, I don’t see trying to push students to graduate early being a tangible reason for having this plan.

I realize the state has high hopes for its students, but trying to persuade us to graduate in less than four years and by these means is not going to influence as many people as they expect.

Another line from the Sentinel article read, “At Florida schools, full-time students need to average 15 credit hours per semester to graduate in four years – the equivalent of five classes. But some full-time students take 12 credit hours and others take 18.”

Yes, this is true. However, they are failing to mention the summer semester during which many students complete classes, which would make up for not taking 15 credit hours in the fall or spring semesters.

They are also not taking into consideration the fact that all courses are not created equal when it comes to how many credit hours they are worth.

For example, two different students could be enrolled in four classes each, but one could only be receiving 12 credit hours and the other 16, depending on the courses they are taking.

Most English courses are only three credit hours, whereas most science courses are four credit hours. It’s not fair to, in a way, punish those students whose majors are composed of courses that are worth fewer credit hours than others.

I feel it best to stay away from this block tuition plan and continue to charge per unit like has been successfully working for years.

There’s no need to bring this new plan into action when the reasoning isn’t really practical and the outcome wouldn’t be fair to all students.

Disney World is a cornerstone of Central Florida, but few people know how it came to be so – and how it almost never was.

Author Chad Emerson wants to fix that.

On Sept. 29, Emerson gave a presentation at the U. Central Florida Library on his book, Project Future: The Inside Story Behind the Creation of Disney World.

The presentation was open to the community as well as students and faculty, and despite the poor weather, there was a good turnout.

“The story needed to be told about how and why Disney ended up here,” Emerson said. “It is an interesting story, indeed, full of secret meetings, broken deals, dummy corporations, and the dream of one man that others worked to fulfill even after his death.”

According to Amazon.com, “Project Future” – the code name for the Disney resort in the ’60s – covers how and why Walt Disney selected Central Florida.

Emerson is a professor of law at Faulkner U., where he specializes in land planning law, intellectual property law and amusement park and leisure law. He began writing an article for a law journal in 2008 about the land acquisition in Central Florida that Disney was involved in and soon found that there was greater potential for this relatively unknown piece of Disney history.

“My wife read the paper and said, ‘You can build on this story – just get rid of the legal jargon,’ ” he said.

After another year of work and research – interviews, archives and, most importantly, documents from legal depositions – Emerson had his book.

Emerson said the biggest obstacle with putting together the book was finding the documents that were the most reliable.

“I purposefully did not use the Disney archives or sources,” he said. “I realized this story would be more credibly told if I found research independent of Disney. They didn’t oppose it; people informally helped me; big Disney executives wrote testimonials [for the book].

“But to get the official approval from Disney is a very Byzantine process that I didn’t want or need to go through.”

Instead of using Disney archives, Emerson used official depositions to source his book.

“The biggest challenge of writing the book was deciding what really happened. I double-sourced everything,” he said.

Emerson thanked the librarians who assisted him with the project and helped him find two boxes worth of depositions.

“That’s why I decided to write the book,” he said. “I didn’t want to write based on speculation; what’s more reliable than sworn testimony?”

Other Florida libraries have also had a hand in supporting the book. Apart from his presentation at the UCF,

Emerson also had a discussion of the book at the Orlando Public Library in June.

His lecture at the UCF Library had been publicized with posters, e-mails, and announcements on myUCF, where senior civil engineering student Alex Navarro heard about the event.

“I like all of the history of Walt Disney; also, I’m a cast member,” Navarro said.

Although he is a Disney employee, Navarro said that he never heard of a lot of the history revealed by Emerson at the lecture.

“I didn’t realize how close Disney World ended up to being in Palm Beach,” Navarro said. “That surprised me.”

Professors are showing interest in the book as well.

Karl Sooder, a professor of marketing and business, will be using the book in a new class that focuses on tourism and marketing in the Central Florida area.

“This is the first class of its kind at the university,” Sooder said.

He will be using the book as required text for his class.

Emerson said the one thing he is still most surprised by is how close Disney World was to being built somewhere else.

“It could have been in another state,” he said. “A lot of people see it as a foregone conclusion that it would be be built in Orlando, but that just isn’t the case.”

Emerson’s interest in Disney will continue to show in future projects. He is currently working on editing a series of essays written in honor of Disney World’s  40th anniversary in October 2011.

The hype for Boise State is at an all time high and seems to be getting bigger and bigger each week. ESPN’s trademark College Gameday show just made its first visit to Boise last week. Erin Andrews described it as “obviously the best stop this season.” Former Heisman trophy winner and analyst Desmond Howard was “amazed by the turnout,” going on to say that “this is about as good as it gets.”

This is about as good as it gets. Boise State just made their first national cover of Sports Illustrated, with the cover donning the whole team running out of the tunnel prior to the Oregon State game. The cover is a departure from what the magazine usually does and is a symbol of the madness that is the Boise State debate right now.

Never, at any point in the Oregon State game, did losing enter my mind. Not even when the Beavers pulled to within a touchdown in the second half. That’s the mindset now for most people familiar with the Broncos, and that is typically the mindset for fans of national championship teams.

We are ready to make the jump and Bronco Nation knows it. So does the rest of the nation too, and it’s becoming harder to deny each week. The only obstacle we haven’t tackled in our program’s history is a BCS national championship. Everyone knows Ohio State would get spanked in a BCS bowl against Alabama (see: the last 9 bowl games OSU has played against current SEC teams, dating back to 1977).

Why not give us the shot, a team where the game is not a foregone conclusion? It’s about time that Boise State is given that shot to prove all the supporters right and all the doubters wrong. If they’re not given that shot, who knows how long it will be before another team like this comes along. The BCS hierarchy will remain in college football and so will the “what-if” scenarios that can never be played out without a playoff.