Barry Tompkins

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... I have a soft spot for college football. Let me put that another way. I HAD a soft spot for college football. I grew up with Cal and Stanford football. I took the Key System train across the Bay Bridge and walked to Strawberry Canyon to watch the sturdy Golden Bears play when I was a teenager. I once had my car bogged down in the mud of the parking lot at Stanford for three days after watching Stanford play Army in a deluge.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The Turk is coming. Not really. Not anymore. But there was a time in the NFL when the most hated person in the locker room was a non-existent character who roamed the halls on cut-down day selecting a gaggle of non-suspecting wannabes to take a walk with him to the gallows. It was a day when Hall of Fame dreams turned into merely hopes of being employee-of-the-month.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... I’ve been noticing that ever since David Letterman went off the air, lists like his nightly Top 10, seem to have found a home on ESPN (Top 10 Quarterbacks; Top 10 Hockey Goalies, Top 10 2027 Draft picks; Top 10 Top 10 lists, etc). And, while my mind isn’t capable of scrounging up 10 of anything (even fingers and toes), I thought I’d pass along some top five lists I’ve been mentally composing over these last several months.