Princeton fires football coach
Roger Hughes has been fired as the football coach at Princeton after 10 seasons, athletic director Gary Walters announced yesterday.
Hughes went 47-52 as Princeton's head coach, winning the 2006 Ivy League title and posting three winning seasons overall. His dismissal came 1 day after the Tigers beat Dartmouth, 23-11, to conclude their season with a 4-6 record. Hughes had served as Dartmouth's offensive coordinator before taking the top job at Princeton in 2000.
Walters said he would soon meet with Hughes to determine what role the coach would have within the department during the remainder of his contract.
In other college football news:
* Mississippi (No. 20), California (No. 21) and North Carolina (no. 23), teams that started the season with lofty expectations before stumbling, have surged back into the Associated Press Top 25 poll. There was little change at the top of the rankings after a weekend when most of the highly ranked teams had easy victories or time off. No. 1 Florida was followed by fellow unbeatens Alabama, Texas, TCU, Cincinnati and Boise State. Also holding their places were No. 7 Georgia Tech, No. 8 Pittsburgh and No. 9 Ohio State. The only change in the top 10 came at No. 10. Oregon moved up a spot after LSU slipped seven places to No. 17 after losing at Ole Miss, 25-23. Penn State is No. 12.
Winter Sports
* Reigning four-man bobsled world champion Steven Holcomb won the four-man World Cup event at Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, N.Y., leading the U.S. to a 1-2 finish for the second straight day. Holcomb finished the two-run race in 1 minute, 49.60 seconds to beat teammate John Napier.
* Joannie Rochette, of the host nation, won her third women's singles title at Skate Canada in Kitchener, Onatario. Alissa Czisny, the U.S. women's champion, was second.
* Dutchman Sven Kramer broke a track record in the 10,000 meters by 23.19 seconds at a World Cup speedskating meet in Hamar, Norway. Kramer, the defending world champion at 10,000 meters, set the world record of 12:41.69 in March 2007 at Salt Lake City, Utah.
* USA Luge veteran Tony Benshoof, 34, who was fourth in the 2006 Turin Olympics, will receive an epidural cortisone injection today in Calgary, Alberta, to treat a recurrence of a herniated disk in his back - the same problem he had surgery on 11 months ago.
Auto Racing
* Former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher met with Mercedes bosses amid speculation the driver may come out of retirement to join the new F1 team.
* Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone announced a Dec. 9 deadline to decide whether there will be a British Grand Prix next year. The race that has run every year since 1948 at various circuits looked set to return to Silverstone after Donington Park failed to find the money to stage the event. But talks appear to have stalled.
Sport Stops
* Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and 400-meter runner Sanya Richards of the United States won their second IAAF World Athlete of the Year awards.
* Andy Murray beat Juan Martin Del Potro, 6-3, 3-6, 6-2, in the opening group match of the season-ending ATP World Tour Finals in London.
