Monday Morning Coffee: Down Goes Monarch Edition

Happy Monday.

I don't do the Collection of Whimsy nearly as well as the Admiral does, but I'll try to fake it:

• Neil Armstrong died this weekend. I remain of the opinion that The Onion had the best take on the moon landing of any news outlet, real or faux. (Probably NSFW.)
  
• Lemme repeat what I said last week about Lance Armstrong's decision to walk away from USADA's arbitration process: I'm not saying I think Lance Armstrong is innocent. (In fact, I think it's probably more likely that he doped, just to keep up with the Joneses.) But given how ridiculous USADA's been acting, I can understand how someone who was innocent could throw up his hands and say: "To hell with this."
• FOOTBAWWWWW starts Thursday, if you're into that kind of thing.
• Mallrats knew what it was talking about after all.
• I mean: it's only about three seasons too late. That's pretty good, all things considered.
• How does this cat not live in Wisconsin?

Marquette Basketball Links

We should've seen this coming, in hindsight, but after a week of calm and quiet -- the biggest news, I suppose, was that Marquette ranked 17th in ESPN's "it's the summer, and there's nothing to talk about, so let's make a list" 50 in 50 series -- the University dropped a bombshell on Friday night, when MU announced that assistant coach Scott Monarch had been canned for lying about recruiting violations, and Buzz Williams will sit out the team's Big East opener in recognition of his responsibility as captain of the ship.

The reaction to that news, 'round the webs:

Andrei at Paint Touches has a thoughtful look at the situation, and concludes that, given everything that's transpired in the last six months, we shouldn't be surprised if Marquette is in the market for a new head coach soon:

Buzz is not going job-hunting because he's suspended for one game. It is the big picture aspect of an administration seemingly trying to reel him in that would cause one Brent Williams' eyes to start wandering.

In the Credit Where Credit's Due (I Guess) Department, here's your obligatory link to Don Walker's self-congratulatory (read: fart-sniffing) piece about being the first to report the news that MU was investigating a recruiting violation.

At CBS Sportsline, Gary Parrish -- he of the not-so-cryptic "Buzz's suspension is the kind of action that causes a man to start updating his resume" tweets late Friday night -- wonders what possessed Monarch to lie about his relatively minor transgressions. Parrish writes about another (unnamed) assistant coach who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and quickly realized that honesty was the only option:

The assistant acknowledged the violation the first time he was formally asked about it and was subsequently suspended briefly, which wasn't ideal. But he kept his job. The point is that he kept his job and that he's still coaching today because he understand what he did was wrong but not wrong enough to lie about.

Why Scott Monarch didn't understand as much in this case is a mystery.

ESPN has the AP copy of the story, which carried the most interesting quotes from Larry Williams:

"Our intent here is to build a national championship-caliber program, and we don't want to put it at risk for something as controllable and as fundamental as integrity," Larry Williams told the AP. "We're confident that this is one of the building blocks toward that pursuit of a national championship-caliber team."

In that same story, Larry Williams also echoed Parrish's sentiments re: Monarch's puzzling decision to lie about a couple of secondary violations:

Had Monarch admitted the violations right away, it's possible that he would have faced less severe punishment.

"Which makes this all the more troubling," Larry Williams said. "This is not something that should rise to this level of untruthfulness."

Random Music Video

In honor of all the youngsters who thought that Billie Joe was the Armstrong who died this weekend, let's do some Green Day: