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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Inspirational thought of the week:
There’s a house honey, way across town
People coming from miles around
Put on your pretty red dress
Let’s go see about this mess
That’s it, baby let’s git
And go way far upon the hill
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun
We gonna greet the risin’ sun
All night long we gonna ball
Until we hear yo mama call
That’s it, baby let’s git
And go way far upon the hill
There’s a thrill upon the hill
Let’s go, let’s a-go, let’s go
— “Let’s Go” Hank Ballard and The Midnighters
Here at Bottom 10 Headquarters, currently stowed away in a storage container on the freighter ship carrying Desmond Howard’s pocket squares to Ireland for “College GameDay,” we are ready to be resurrected from our winter/spring/summer football hibernation. Now let’s hope the teams on the list you are about to receive are ready to do the same.
Same. That’s a word that we won’t use much during the 2024-25 (like, way into ’25) college football season. Realignment has bankrupted Rand-McNally. The transfer portal has been like a merry-go-round hooked up to Max Verstappen’s RB20, the spring model. And when December arrives, it will bring with it a 12-team College Football Playoff that is designed to finally make everyone happy and will likely make no one happy.
That’s why the arrival of the Bottom 10 feels like a warm hug from your grandma. It’s still the same it’s always been. It’s familiar. It’s soft. It smells a little like eggs. But in a world that feels as unsettled as Tim Legler in an L.A. earthquake, it is also the anchor we need … even if the teams who brought it to us always forget to pull that anchor off the bottom of the ocean before attempting to sail. Y’all better get going. Dez needs his squares.
With apologies to Napoleon McCallum, John Paul Jones and Steve Harvey, here are the preseason Bottom 10 rankings for 2024.
Ty Pennington’s alma mater joins the ranks of FBS and thusly adds its name to the prestigious Annowls, er, Annals of Bottom 10 Owls, taking their head-turning perch on a dry-rotted tree branch alongside Temple, Rice and FA(not I)U.
The Warhawks bring in new head coach Bryant Vincent, who immediately felt a draft in his office. When he traced the air leak into the locker room, he discovered a transfer portal exit tunnel hidden behind a Louisiana-Monroe schedule poster, almost like he was the warden in “The Shawshank Redemption.”
The Golden Flashes, winners of one game in 2023, will spend three of their first four weekends traveling to Pitt, Tennessee and Penn State. The good news is the school will receive large checks for those trips. The bad news is it will end up spending most of that money on BenGay and Band-Aids.
Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but Akron travels to Kent State on Nov. 19 for what could be the Bottom 10 Pillow Fight of the Century of the Year. So, go on and circle it. In crayon.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough for the Wolverines to win the national title or even to dominate the box office alongside “Deadpool.” Instead, Go Blue has decided to go all-in on a public thumbing of their collective Big House noses at the NCAA, whether it be departed head coach Jim Harbaugh at the news conference podium in Los Angeles or the decision to defiantly invite him back for the season opener after he’d been handed a show-cause by the folks in Indianapolis. I’m no expert on thumbing one’s nose, but I am a bit of an expert on the Wolverine, and no one should ever thumb their nose using adamantium claws.
The Minutemen will play their last season as an independent before moving to #MACtion in 2025. But wait just a, well, minute here. If you’re a Minuteman, isn’t fighting for independence like your whole thing?
The second flock of Owls in our rankings will play former Bottom 10 stalwart-turned-bowl regular R.O.C.K. in the UTSA during Week 13. Why is that significant? Because UTSA hosts Kennesaw State in Week 1 … visits Rice in Week 7 … and welcomes FAU in Week 8 … which means in 2024 the Roadrunners will go beak-to-beak with all four FBS Owls. So, do they have to play all those games at night?
New Minors head coach Scotty Walden led a winning program in FCS at Austin Peay, where the for-real school cheer is “Let’s go Peay!” Now he’s going to be walking around the Sun Bowl shouting, “Let’s go U-T-E-Peay!” which sounds like a condition one might need to take to their urologist.
This spot came down between a pair of #MACtionites in Baller State and the Buffalo Bulls Not Bills. The Cards have been in the Bottom 10 deck ever since 2015, the last of Pete Lembo’s five seasons in Muncie. Now he’s head coach at Buffalo. The teams play Nov. 12. Until then, the Bottom 10 status of both will likely be in, yes, Lembo.
The prodigal Panthers return. Back in 2014, this team was the first champ of a Ryan McGee-chosen Bottom 10. However, they eventually turned the Atlanta street corner and became semi-annual bowl visitors under head coach Shawn Elliott, including last season’s 7-6 squad that won the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. But Elliott shockingly left the team two days into spring practice and his Georgia State roster jumped into the portal like it was a Six Flags Over Georgia waterslide. So, who did State Not Southern hire to take over? Dell McGee. Are we related? No. Are we family? Now we are, yes.
Waiting list: Charlotte 3-and-9ers, EC-Yew, Buffalo Bulls Not Bills, Sam Houston we have a problem, Fa-La-La-La-La Tech, State of New Mexico and New Mexico State, UCan’t, maps … all of them.
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Chicago White Sox left fielder Andrew Benintendi will miss four to six weeks with a broken hand after being hit by a pitch in a spring training game on Thursday.
Benintendi was hit on the right hand with an 87 mph fastball by Cleveland right-hander Logan Allen in the first inning and left the game. The White Sox announced the diagnosis as a non-displaced fracture, with no surgery required.
The recovery timetable means Benintendi likely will start the season on the injured list. The White Sox open at home on March 27 against the Los Angeles Angels.
Benintendi signed a $75 million, five-year contract with the White Sox prior to the 2023 season. After debuting with Boston in 2016 and helping the Red Sox with the World Series in 2018, he was traded to Kansas City in 2021. He won a Gold Glove that year and was selected for his first All-Star team in 2022, before being traded to the New York Yankees for the stretch run.
Benintendi matched his career high in 2024 with 20 homers but batted just .229, his worst average for a full season, excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 schedule. He has played in 286 games in two seasons with Chicago.
Derek Bender, the former Minnesota Twins minor league catcher who is under MLB investigation for telling opposing hitters what pitches were coming, denied the allegations in an interview with The Athletic as he remains out of professional baseball.
“No,” Bender told The Athletic, in an interview published Thursday, when asked if he gave away pitches to opposing batters. “And I’ll live with this until the day I die. I never gave pitches away. I never tried to give the opposing team an advantage against my own team.”
Bender, a sixth-round draft pick out of Coastal Carolina in July, was playing for the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels, the Twins’ Single-A affiliate. In the second game of a Sept. 6 doubleheader, Bender told multiple hitters for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Detroit farm team, the specific pitches being thrown by starter Ross Dunn, sources told ESPN at the time.
Lakeland scored four runs in the second inning and won the game 6-0 to clinch the Florida State League West division and eliminate the Mighty Mussels from playoff contention. Fort Myers coaches were notified by Lakeland coaches about Bender’s pitch tipping after the game, sources told ESPN at the time.
Sources told ESPN that Bender had told teammates he wanted the season to be over. In his interview with The Athletic, Bender said he joked to teammates about letting a ground ball go under their glove, but said he wasn’t serious.
Major League Baseball’s investigation of the incident continues, according to The Athletic, and Bender could face a permanent ban from the league.
“I had to go dark for at least three days,” Bender told The Athletic of the reaction to the initial story. “I had to private all my social media accounts. I was getting death threats and awful, obscene things said to me.”
Bender, 22, said he is trying to get back into professional baseball. He said he’ll play for the Brockton Rox of the independent Frontier League this summer.
Meanwhile, Bender said he hasn’t heard from any of his former teammates, including Ross.
“There are a lot of times where you’re talking with people that you thought you were friends with, they just don’t look at you the same,” Bender told The Athletic. “I’ve heard my friends get questioned about me, why they’re still friends with me. That’s hard to hear.
“It’s not like I’m getting accused of committing a crime.”
Bender told The Athletic that the Twins were willing to keep him in the organization if he admitted to the accusations and apologize. He said he apologized, but he wouldn’t say what he was apologizing for.
“The only thing I had left was my character at that point,” Bender told The Athletic. “Literally, the way they put it was, ‘If you want to die by the sword, we’ll release you.’ I knew there was no bluffing involved.”
His agents at Octagon told The Athletic that they had dropped Bender as a client because they had told him not to do any interviews until the MLB investigation was closed.
“It’s about gaining control over my life,” Bender told The Athletic of why he did the interview. “And this whole situation. I’m not doing this as a last-ditch effort to get back into affiliate ball. It’s more of this is the start of me taking control of my life again. Because I’ve let this completely control me for months now.”
A catcher and first baseman selected with the 188th pick in 2024, Bender signed for $297,500, slightly below the $320,800 slot for that selection. He will keep the entirety of his bonus after playing 19 games for Fort Myers, hitting .200/.273/.333 with two home runs and eight RBIs.
In three seasons at Coastal Carolina, he hit .326/.408/.571 with 32 home runs and 153 RBIs in 144 games.
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Jesse Rogers
Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner won’t be going to Japan where the team opens the regular season next month, manager Craig Counsell announced on Thursday.
Hoerner, 27, is still recovering from offseason arm surgery and will miss the two games against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Tokyo.
“Its good news because we were very much tracking towards opening day — domestic opening day,” Counsell said. “So it stinks in terms of not getting to be part of the trip, but his rehab in the last couple of weeks I think really took a step forward and he’s starting to progress quicker.”
Hoerner had surgery on his right flexor tendon back in October. He’s on track for an April return — but not for the mid-March beginning of the regular season. The Cubs and Dodgers play games on March 18-19, but the teams will be in Japan for about a week, eating up precious training/rehab days for Hoerner.
“He can’t play in games there and he needs at-bats,” Counsell explained. “He needs to be a baseball player, and the trip just does not allow for him to that in the proper way.”
Hoerner will stay in Arizona, playing in minor league games while the Cubs are in Japan. Counsell indicated back-ups Vidal Brujan or Jon Berti will likely start in Hoerner’s place.
The team also needs to make a decision on third baseman Matt Shaw, who has been slowed by an oblique issue throughout the first month of spring training. Shaw is scheduled to see his first game action this weekend. If he can’t play in Japan, Berti or Bruján — along with Rule 5 pick Gage Workman — will be candidates at third base.
“Nothing is off the table for Matt,” Counsell said. “No decisions have been made there.”
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