USA SPORTS--Ben Sieber

     USA Sports is going to be a column that comes to the newspaper every two months. It will talk about college and professional sports, such as baseball, football, soccer, basketball, etc. The column will update you on news going on in sports, single player news (which includes injuries, interviews, etc.), and coach news. This weeks column will be about football.

     BYU chose to be an independent team for the beginning of this football season. Which means they aren’t in a specific conference, so they can play any team. For example they were in the Mountain West Conference last year and mostly played other teams in the same conference. Now that they are independent they will play teams in no specific conference. They decided to do that because they were not getting paid very much. They now get paid as much money per game, as they did the whole season last year ($2,000,000)

     Peyton Manning (Indianapolis Colts) had a third neck surgery in the past two years. This will bring Manning out for at least 2-3 months, which is half to three quarters of the season. This change will put the second string quarterback Kerry Collins in. He was only signed up to be Manning’s backup for a week before he got his surgery, so this is a big thing for Collins. “He’s going to play a lot,” Colt’s coach Jim Caldwell said. Collins played for Penn State in college and had a total of 5,304 passing yards. Collins has played for the Carolina Panthers, the New York Giants, the Oakland Raiders, and the Tennessee Titans as a starter, so being a backup is different for him. But it wont be so different for at least the first half of the season. 

     Tueni Lupeamanu, from the Herriman Mustangs football team, is already being scouted  by the BYU coaching staff. Last year he was playing quarterback, but he is also a great linebacker. But since he was quarterback last year they didn’t want to risk him getting hurt playing linebacker. BYU’s offensive and defensive coaches are going to have to decide what side of the ball he will play on, because he is great at both positions, that is if he accepts the offer to play for them.