Notable Alum Name Game

I love random trivia. Back home I have some buddies that are fantastic at coming up with pointless games such as: One person thinks of a town in your state, gives the first letter, and other people have three guesses. Or attempting to list as many roster members from teams around 10 years ago. It's a great way to kill lulls in conversation, although it usually just leads to that being the entire discussion.

Over at Joe Posnanski's Blog he has some excellent useless conversation fodder. The rules:

For each college you have to pick the best (1) Basketball player; (2) Football player; (3) Baseball player and (4) Wildcard, which could be any sport, anything semi-involving sport or if it’s good enough a cool alumni who has nothing at all to do with sports.

I'll add an additional element for the FWG discussion: The Black Sheep. Basically the alumnus that you're less than keen on having graduated from your school.

Minnesota

Basketball: Kevin McHale
Football: Bronko Nagurski
Baseball: Paul Molitor
Wildcard I: Herb Brooks (US Olympic team hockey coach)
Wildcard II: Ric Flair (whoo!)
Wildcard III: Bob Dylan (wrote song for Hurricane Carter)
Wildcard IV: Patty Berg (co-founded LPGA)
Wildcard V: Tony Dungy
Wildcard VI: Bud Wilkinson

I would recommend Dave Winfield and Brock Lesnar as rather notable wildcards. Even though Lesnar did go to the dark side of fake wrestling for a bit. Although it is difficult to fault him for getting paid. Garrison Keillor would be one that has little to do with athletics.

Black Sheep: Yanni

And for Rob:

Connecticut

Basketball: Ray Allen
Basketball: Diana Taurasi
Football: Brian Kozlowski
Baseball: Charles Nagy … special mention for the remarkable Walt Dropo
Wildcard: Sam Rutigliano (coach of Kardiac Kids Browns) and Leigh Montville (sportswriting idol), two heroes at one school. Almost impossible to believe the awesomeness.

Suggested Black Sheep: Moby. You have anyone worse than that, Rob?

Go over, check it out and leave some comments to see what colleges readers support and how they fare. I'm thinking that the rankings are based entirely on what they did after they left school - if things were changed to only factor college performance, the lists could look vastly different. Although Bee may have things pretty well locked down either way with UNC.