Yesterday afternoon news officially broke that ESPN had signed Paul Finebaum to a five year contract. The deal calls for 100 TV appearances a year and a simulcast of Finebaum's radio show on the upcoming SEC Network, set to debut in August of 2014.

It's a smart decision that fills up several hours of programming year-around on the upcoming SEC Network. Putting radio shows on television works pretty well already and is a cost-effective duality. ESPN pioneered the strategy in sports with multiple shows now airing daily and NBC and CBS have followed up on the decision, placing Dan Patrick and Tim Brando front and center on the NBC Sports Network and the CBS Sports Network. It would be a pretty big shocker if Fox didn't also have a radio show on television when FoxSports1 and FoxSports2 debut this August.   

But the biggest aspect of this deal is the message that the SEC is sending to the college sports universe. 

Another year, another woeful performance on the Wonderlic test for bunches of college athletes who have somehow remained eligible at major universities despite testing borderline literate.

The latest player scores to leak are all wide receivers: West Virginia's Tavon Austin and Tennessee's Cordarrelle Patterson and Justin Hunter. The trio scored a 7, 11, and 12, respectively, according to a report in the Milwaukee newspaper. (The news wasn't all bad, USC's Robert Woods posted a 23).

A test score of ten on the Wonderlic is considered functional literacy. According to Wonderlic data the average engineer would score around a 30, the average security guard a 17.

So all three of these wide receivers tested borderline literate, and substantially less intelligent than an average security guard would test. 

Yet all three receivers have been eligible to play college football for years.

Isn't this prima facie evidence of academic fraud? I mean, if you can barely read the Wonderlic test, how in the world have you been eligible at a four year college without significant cheating?

Academic fraud -- that is, what goes on to keep players eligible in college -- is one of the great untold stories of major college athletics. Virtually every major program is cheating its ass off to keep players who have no business in college eligible to play football and basketball. 

[So much tragedy over the last few days. Along with everyone else, my heart goes out to all the people impacted in Boston, MA and now West, TX. It's been a rough week for sure, but I'm hoping I can write something that will give y'all a moment of relief from all the bad news, even if only for a couple minutes, and maybe even make you laugh a little.]

Harvey Updyke killed the oaks at Toomer's Corner, but he can never kill the Toomer's Corner tattoo that Auburn grad Giancarlo Guida recently got on his back.

You must read the story of this tattoo as written by Austin Phillips.

It took more than 12 hours for the tattoo to be finished.

I gotta be honest, this is pretty extraordinary work by Rubicon Tattoo in Atlanta.

How did he make the decision to do the tattoo?

“I thought that was a great way to capture the trees after that asshole killed them,” Guida said.

Guida is a married father of four and his wife is, wait for it, an Alabama grad.

“She’s just glad it’s on my back,” Guida said. “But the joke’s on her because it is the last thing she has to see when I walk away.”

Presumably this is because Guida never wears shirts.

We always wonder about the individuals who get these tattoos, but usually we don't get the story behind them.

At long last, we have the story.

And it's real and spectacular.

By Josh Lampley

When I first moved on to the campus of the large SEC school that I attend, I was excited for many reasons. I looked forward to new freedoms, new females, new friends, and SEC football. Those were my four "F's". But one aspect of the college life that I never took into account was the fact that the same star athletes I would watch on the field on Saturdays would be in my classes during the week.

You can't stop crazy.

It's an important lesson to remember in the wake of two explosive devices that went off at the Boston Marathon yesterday, killing three people and injuring over a hundred.

That's an awful act perpetrated by an individual or individuals, either foreign or domestic, who are terribly misguided and weak.

But it's also an incredibly aberrant and rare act.

In the long history of American sports, there have been two sports terror attacks -- the 1996 Olympic Park bombing that killed two people and wounded over 100, and yesterday's bombing at the Boston Marathon. Those two attacks are separated by nearly 17 years, flank the 9/11 terrorist attack, and have killed five people combined. (There have been sports terror attacks elsewhere -- most notably Munich in 1972 -- but these are rare also. Time Magazine compiled the ten worst sports terror attacks a few years ago.)

In fact, in the entire world, less than 100 people total have ever been killed by terror attacks at sporting events.

When you consider the size of the crowds and the difficulty of policing audiences of this size, that's simply unbelievable.

Lots of people are understandly shaken by yesterday's event, but over the past hundred years worldwide you've been infinitely more likely to fall to death inside a stadium than you have been to be the victim of terrorism. Alcohol poisoning has killed infinitely more fans. Scores more people have died driving to and from sporting events. Indeed, around 110 people a day die in car accidents in this country, the equivalent of the entire VIetnam War death toll every two years. Amazingly, despite the frequent and massive gatherings of sports fans around the world, attending a sporting event is one of the safest things a large group of people can do in America.  

Adam Scott, the man your wife or girlfriend actually wishes she was with instead of you, won the Masters yesterday.

Which is nice.

Because prior to this win all Adam Scott had going for him was that he was a single, multi-millionaire professional golfer from Australia who was ridiculously good looking. Now he's a single, multi-millionaire professional golfer from Australia who's ridiculously good looking with a green jacket.

I think I speak for everyone when I ask this question -- how in the world could he live with himself without that green jacket?

Scott's victory did, however, launch him into the celebrity stratosphere as millions of women around the world suddenly realized that he exists. And they all simultaneously wished they were with him instead of their current husband or boyfriend. If you doubt me, check out this google trend line for "Adam Scott girlfriend" searches on Twitter. Google hasn't updated the searches for "Adam Scott girlfriend" to reflect yesterday's results -- and some of these were probably gay guys -- but last year's British Open, when Scott nearly won the tournament, sent Google search traffic soaring for his girlfriend. Chances are your wife, girlfriend, and all their friends were surreptiously Googling his marital status just in case.

Scott's single, but he's previously dated Ana Ivanovic.

It's mailbag time and by the time you read this I'll be teeing off in a charity golf tournament at Legends Golf Course here in Nashville.

But I suspect there will also be some good SEC news that is bouncing around all over the Internets. OKTC will be there to cover it live next week. Check Twitter if you want to know what I'm talking about.  

In the meantime, the mailbag is off and rolling on Friday as always. Even if I'm in the process of posting a solid 100 on the golf course.  

Our beaver pelt trader of the week is 3HL listener and OKTC reader Brandt Snedeker, who I took at 30-1 odds to win the Masters; he had a good first day so I'm going to presumptively crown him beaver pelt trader of the week in hopes it will carry him on to victory and help to make me some serious money.

Good luck Brandt.  

On to the mailbag: 

A couple of weeks ago we dove into the porn habits of each SEC state.

The results were wildly popular. You were dirty, dirty birds Kentucky.

Thanks to massive data analysis, the top ten most searched porn terms by state have been compiled here.

Of course we immediately thought about every state in football terms and wondered, which conference is the dirtiest?

So after analyzing the SEC's porn state favorites, what conference makes sense to do next?

The Big Ten, of course.

By Brett Ungashick

In the last week we have seen quite different approaches to connecting with collegiate athletes. On one end of the spectrum was Mike Rice who attempted to inspire players by throwing basketballs at their heads and calling them "f***ing f***ots." There's not a whole lot to add to the Rutgers situation that hasn't already been said. Yes, the school administrators predictably protected the profits over the people who were producing them. Yes, Mike Rice is certainly not the only coach in the country who has abused his free laborers. Additionally, the most embarrassing part of the situation is that had Rutgers done better than 15-16, and been a perennial tournament team, Rice would still have a future in coaching. Winning takes care of everything. Don't believe me and Tiger? Bob Knight, the original Mike Rice, is a public face of ESPN and even amidst the Rutgers outrage, Knight was able to appear in a commercial during the championship game. 

As the official announcement of the billion dollar SEC Network in partnership with ESPN inches closer and closer, one aspect of the SEC's expansion to add Texas A&M and Missouri -- a decision that was worth over $100 million a year -- has gone unexplored. That's this, does Texas A&M have SEC exclusivity in the state of Texas? This is an important question because the SEC Network's spigot of money will be eye-opening and astounding. The SEC and ESPN are about to make money rain on college athletics in a way that money's never rained on college athletics before.

When you make it rain on college athletics, other schools take notice and want to experience the shower themselves. (Yes, this means colleges are just like strippers.) 

Those of you who read OKTC have been nearly two years ahead of the SEC Network narrative. While most fans and media focused on the value of the SEC renegotiating its existing TV deal, we told you that A&M and Missouri represented a new paradigm for the SEC, a network era for the nation's most popular college conference. Expansion to 14 wasn't about extracting more money from ESPN or CBS, it was about getting filthy rich off a brand new network.