ESPN

Ron Stowe might love college baseball more than anyone.

The 72-year-old attended his 254th consecutive North Carolina baseball game on Monday, and he has missed only three games -- one series -- out of the past 443.

Stowe jokes with UNC coach Mike Fox (they know each other pretty well; Stowe sometimes sits with Fox’s wife during games) that he probably has seen more Carolina baseball than Fox himself, when you take into account the various ejections and suspensions in Fox’s 15 seasons with the Tar Heels.

Stowe has always loved baseball. A second baseman in his day, he signed with the Detroit Tigers out of high school and played for nine years. After that, he was a manager for the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League’s Mercer Titans for about 10 years and led his team to the league championship in 1976.

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Cam brought our class doughnuts and orange juice! #WarCamEagle!! twitter.com/UnoOjo/status/…

— Brookelyne Harvel (@UnoOjo) February 21, 2013

You’re a college student. You’re stuck in some bogus class you don’t wanna be in, you’re embarrassed about all the drunk texts you sent out last night, and your mom forgot to mail you your “just because” money this month. Life is so frustrating. You can’t even ...

But then your unendurable hell world suddenly gets much better, because famous NFL quarterback Cam Newton just appeared in front of your desk, offering you a doughnut that he purchased just for you. And YOU. JUST. DIE. (With joy, I mean.)

Too bad such a thing could never happen in real life. Except that it did on Thursday to some lucky little study bugs at Auburn University.

Newton, who is finishing his degree at the school even though he’ll probably be wading in that Play 60 money 'til he’s dead, decided to surprise his classmates with doughnuts and orange juice, an act so generous that he is now the front-runner to be the next pope.

And they weren’t those garbage grocery store doughnuts or the “hurts doughnuts” that athletes are more prone to doling out, but high-quality SQUARE-SHAPED doughnuts from a popular local bakery.

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Editor's note: Welcome to the fourth installment of "Mascot Memoirs," in which NCAA mascots from around the country relive their fondest memories from behind the mask. Previously, we checked in with Michigan State’s Sparty, Notre Dame's leprechaun and Georgia Tech's Buzz.

When Zakk Otto discovered he shared a moniker with Syracuse’s mascot, he knew his fate was to don a giant orange head.

From 2007 through early 2011, Otto the Orange was played by the entrepreneurship and marketing major, who would also attend graduate school at Syracuse. Outside of class, Otto (as Otto) would perform the famous head spins and somersaults the playful mascot is known for.

As the Cuse gets ready to tip off against No. 1 Louisville on Saturday, here are some of Otto’s favorite Otto moments.

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Editor's note: Welcome to the third installment of "Mascot Memoirs," in which NCAA mascots from around the country relive their fondest memories from behind the mask. Previously, we checked in with Michigan State’s Sparty and Notre Dame's leprechaun.

Here’s a secret you may not know about Buzz, Georgia Tech’s yellow jacket mascot: He’s actually played by multiple students, one per quarter during a typical football game.

Here’s another secret: those students’ identities. So the only facts we can reveal about one Buzz we spoke to is that he’s a fifth-year biology major, premed, and this is his second year donning the wings and stinger.

Why is a full colony of yellow jackets necessary?

“He’s super-curious, super-hyper and crazy unpredictable,” Buzz says. "You have to do full sprints, jump up walls and run through people. It gets very tiring -- and it’s very, very hot in Atlanta.”

As the Buzzes prepare to invade El Paso, Texas, for the Sun Bowl versus USC on New Year's Eve, our Buzz correspondent relived some of his most memorable moments:

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OK, we had our big Uni Watch college basketball season preview, and then an update with some additional uni changes, and now we have one last round of uniform tweaks for this season:

• Boise State has added a gray alternate.

• Bowling Green has added a black alternate.

• Bucknell has changed its color scheme from navy with orange trim to the other way around.

• Canisius has changed its home color from gold to white.

• Central Michigan has changed its home jersey insignia from the school name to the team name. Lots of changes to the collar and side paneling, too.

• Drake has cut down on its side paneling to achieve a cleaner, less-cluttered look.

• James Madison has gone from super-clunky to, well, not so clunky. But that new purple jersey looks more like a high school uni, no?

• LaSalle will wear 1968-69 throwbacks on Dec. 5 against Penn State. (The "Gola 15" T-shirt is a fan giveaway for that game.)

• Loyola has new outlined lettering and much busier side panels. It's hard to see, but the side panels have a repeating "LU" pattern.

• Disappointing to see that Nevada has scrapped the gold trim and gone with a clunkier typeface.

• Northern Iowa has changed to a serif font, and has also added some piping to the collar and armhole regions and made some revisions to the side panels.

• Pacific has a new orange alternate uniform.

• Providence has changed its chest lettering from white to black, and has also made several other small adjustments.

• St. Joseph's has changed its color scheme from red with gray trim to the other way around.

• And we conclude with Southern Illinois, which has changed from an old Under Armour template to a new Under Armour template.

Competing in a Division I sport is tough. Doing so with just 3,100 undergrads is even tougher.

Once in a while, a small school makes a good run and is injected into the conversation, but Iona College's cross country team isn't just an occasional champion.

For the past decade, only two programs have finished in the top 10 in XC every year: Iona and the University of Wisconsin, a school with 14 times more potential runners than the Gaels of New Rochelle, N.Y., just outside New York City.

Last week, for the 22nd straight year, Iona's men's team won the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship.

Why are the Gaels so dominant?

The answer is in knowing the competition and finding out where they aren't recruiting. The large Division I schools pull runners from across the States.

Iona casts a larger net: the world.

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Editor's note: Welcome to the first installment of "Mascot Memoirs," in which NCAA mascots from around the country relive their fondest memories from behind the mask.

With college football in full bore and NCAA hoops about to tip off, it can mean only one thing: Mascot season is upon us.

Of course, one of the top rules of being a mascot is to stay silent, so we haven’t had the pleasure of hearing their tales from the front line -- until now.

For ESPN Playbook's first Mascot Memoirs, meet Ben Hatala. From 2007 to 2010, he proudly rooted on the Michigan State Spartans, playing the role of Sparty. Here are some of his most memorable moments.

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We know about the big boys. But what about the little guys? Throughout the 2012 college football season, Playbook Fandom will take a look at some of the less recognizable schools you might see on scoreboards and TV screens.

No. 3 LSU just offed -- albeit barely -- a group of Tigers from Auburn, Ala.

Next up: More Tigers, but this time Tigers who stay in the shadows most weeks, choosing to prowl the Football Championship Subdivision's Colonial Athletic Association.

Those would be the Towson Tigers. So what's the deal with these cats whose school is named for the Baltimore-area city in which it lives? Playbook examines:

• Towson originally wasn't Towson. Or even in Towson. It started in 1866 as a teachers college in downtown Baltimore, but moved in 1915 and changed names in 1935. It later became a full university, called Towson State, then dropped the "state" in 1997 after joining the University of Maryland system (of which, at 20,000 students, it's the second-largest school behind that place in College Park).

• Towson sports weren't always Division I. Or even Division II. The offshoot: When the Tigers reached the 2011 postseason, they became the first program to make the football playoffs in all three NCAA divisions (they moved up to I-AA in 1987, after spending the previous 18 years in either of the other two divisions).

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Pretty much anything goes in Hawaii. Whether you wanna walk barefoot in Walmart or give birth to a president, no one’s really gonna raise a stink.

So it doesn’t seem too outrageous that the athletic director at the state’s biggest university would put down $200,000 in department funds for a Stevie Wonder concert that was booked without actually telling Stevie Wonder. Right?

Not so fast. The University of Hawaii put its athletic director, Jim Donovan, on indefinite administrative leave for doing just that, an offense that crosses the line from chill to scandalous.

The “concert” has now been cancelled, and the school is in touch with the FBI to investigate what exactly happened. The FBI, of course, will fiddle around for a week before giving up and calling in Dog the Bounty Hunter, who will proceed to wrap things up faster than you can say, “Don’t bear mace me, bro!”

With so many specifics of the case still up in the air, it wouldn’t be reasonable to paint Donovan as a bad guy quite yet. Ergo, the school’s still paying his salary, and unless he’s found guilty of wrongdoing, he can continue listening to Jack Johnson, consuming liquids out of hollowed-out pineapples and all the other things Hawaiians do for leisure.

It's trendy to refer to today's athletes as celebrities, but the more appropriate comparison is that modern athletes are superheroes. They have superhuman physiques and make superhuman plays on the field.

So it makes sense that Marvel Comics is teaming up with Russell Athletic to produce a line of college sports apparel that'll be hitting stores in August. Why have Bucky Badger or the Georgia bulldog on your T-shirt or hoodie when you can have Iron Man, Thor, or the Avengers?

The apparel program will include 200 schools, including prominent programs such as UCLA, Michigan State, Ohio State, Iowa and Baylor, and will feature a broad range of Marvel characters, including Spider-Man, Captain America, Hulk and Wolverine, all rendered in appropriate school colors.

But here's the thing: If you're going to have a superhero on your T-shirt, why not have him prowling the sideline too? Forget about putting some undergraduate kid in an owl costume or a gopher costume. Let's see Iron Man out there! The fans will love it, plus it should strike some fear into the hearts of the opposing players -- unless they have Wolverine on their sideline.

A few days ago, Dr. Denisha L. Hendricks, athletic director at Kentucky State University, got some phone calls from friends.

"And they said, 'You didn't tell me you [made the College World Series]!" Hendricks told ESPN Playbook. "And I said, 'What are you talking about?'"

They were talking about this:

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