Miami tight end McCormick returning for ninth year
Miami tight end Cam McCormick said Thursday that he is coming back for a ninth season of college football.
He is believed to be the first with a ninth season granted by the NCAA. McCormick's career was derailed multiple times by season-ending injuries, some of which earned him a medical redshirt from the NCAA, and all players who participated in college athletics in 2020 got another year of eligibility because of the pandemic.
McCormick spent the first seven of his college seasons at Oregon, transferred to Miami for the 2023 season and will keep playing in 2024.
McCormick missed most of his senior season of high school in 2015 because of an injury, then redshirted after enrolling at Oregon in 2016 and appeared in all 13 of Oregon's games in 2017. Over the next four years, he played in three games.
• Ohio State will hire former NFL head coach Bill O'Brien as the school's new offensive coordinator, according to ESPN, which reported that Buckeyes head coach Ryan Day has been exploring bringing in an experienced coordinator who would allow him to give up playcalling duties, according to sources. O'Brien served as the New England Patriots' offensive coordinator in 2023 and has extensive experience as an offensive coordinator, playcaller and developer of quarterbacks at the college and NFL level.
• South Alabama has promoted offensive coordinator Major Applewhite to head coach. Athletic director Joel Erdmann announced the former Houston coach as Kane Wommack's replacement, two days after Wommack left to become Kalen DeBoer's defensive coordinator at Alabama.
Applewhite, a former Texas quarterback, spent the last three seasons running the Jaguars offense. Before that he went 15-11 in two seasons at Houston, leading the team to a pair of bowl games.
• Beth Goetz has become Iowa's athletic director after serving in an interim role since August, the school announced. Goetz joined the Iowa athletics staff in September 2022 as deputy director of athletics and chief operating officer. She succeeds Gary Barta, who retired on Aug. 1.
• Harvard coach Tim Murphy has decided to retire, ending three decades on the Crimson sideline in which he became the winningest coach in Ivy League history. Since Harvard hired him in 1994, Murphy went 200-89 with the Crimson, including a record 141 wins in Ivy League play. His teams were unbeaten in 2001, 2004 and 2014, and he went 19-10 against archrival Yale. making a multimillion dollar donation to Yale to endow the baseball coach's position there in the name of his father. Francis T. Vincent Jr. was baseball commissioner from 1989-92 and is a 1963 graduate of Yale Law School. His father, Francis T. Vincent, was a 1931 graduate of Yale who captained the football and baseball teams. his eighth career goal in Europe's top club competition.
Kevin Paredes, a 20-yearold left back from South Riding, Virginia, who plays for Wolfsburg, was voted Young Male Player of the Year. He had eight appearances for the under-20 team in the 2022-23 U-20 cycle, made his national team debut in September against Oman and became a frequent substitute and occasional starter in the Bundesliga.
• Egypt lost Mohamed Salah to injury before coming from behind twice to draw 2-2 with Ghana in their potentially decisive Africa Cup of Nations match. Egypt's hopes of a record-extending eighth Africa Cup title suffered a blow before halftime when Salah limped off holding the back of his left thigh.
• The lucrative Saudi soccer league lost one of its high-profile players when England midfielder Jordan Henderson quit Al-Ettifaq to sign for struggling Dutch powerhouse Ajax. Henderson, a former Liverpool captain, lasted just six months in Saudi Arabia after joining the influx of top players, led by Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar, moving to the kingdom on bigmoney deals.