Lost in the Stephen Strasburg hub-bub: Jeff Ruland is back in town.

The onetime Bruise Brother was named head coach of the University of the District of Columbia. Ruland gets the UDC job after getting canned as an assistant by new '76ers coach Eddie Jordan.

Ruland played the moody lug to Rick Mahorn's gregarious lug when the two of them lugged up the lane for the Washington Bullets of the 1980s. He and Mahorn were famously dubbed "McFilthy & McNasty" by the greatest play-by-play announcer ever, the Celtics' Johnny Most.

At UDC, Ruland takes over a program that hasn't been good since his earliest days as a Bullet. Given the way college basketball and recruiting have changed in the years since, there's no way that Ruland can bring UDC back to the heights it reached back in the early 1980s. The Firebirds won an NCAA Division II national championship in 1981 with a squad that featured two high NBA draft picks: First-rounder Earl Jones, who went to the L.A. Lakers, and Michael Britt, a second-round pick of the Washington Bullets in 1983. D-II ballplayers don't get drafted anymore.

Mahorn's also a coach, and he's still getting in trouble for shoving people around on the court these days.

Only now, he shoves women.

He's head coach of the Detroit Shock, and last year, when he was an assistant under seminal NBA thug Bill Laimbeer, Mahorn got a little too involved in a bench-clearing brawl between his team and the L.A. Sparks.

Mahorn said he pushed Sparks star Lisa Leslie to the ground while acting as "peacemaker," but he got suspended anyway.

***

Duke basketballer Greg Paulus was just named the starting quarterback at Syracuse.

(AFTER THE JUMP: Adrian Dantley's son bumped for Paulus? How do you sell parking for Redskins games without ever saying "Redskins"? Is taping guys to goal posts still giggly? Does anybody really think Cora Masters Barry is a victim?)

Read More "Cheap Seats Daily: Is Jim Zorn Running ‘Camp Snoopy’?" »

Another day, another Red Line delay.  This time, it's due to a train striking a man as it pulled into Van Ness/UDC  station around 12:30 this afternoon.  According to Metro's press release,

"A six-car Red Line train headed toward Shady Grove was pulling into the station around 12:30 p.m. when witnesses report the man intentionally placed himself on the tracks.   Emergency crews responded to the scene and removed the man from underneath the first rail car of the train. The man was transported to a local hospital."

Single-tracking is in affect between Friendship Heights and Cleveland Park so expect to wait for trains.  Nothing like a delayed Metro to kick off the weekend rush-hour!

*PRETTY SOON THEY MIGHT START REPRODUCING: After victories in Iowa and Vermont, "[gay] momentum...could spill into other states," the New York Times speculates.  Closer to home, the D.C. Council voted resoundingly to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.  Jason Cherkis has some comments on that, as well as some intriguing internal polling, here.

Read More "Our Morning Roundup: Gay Momentum & Stagnetti’s Revenge" »

The University of the District of Columbia's board of trustees has voted to approve a controversial tuition hike, one that would nearly double tuition over the course of two years.

Of the board's 14 members, 10 voted in favor. Three members---Verizon exec Joseph Askew, alumni representative Eugene Dewitt Kinlow, and student representative Dale Lyons---voted against. One member was absent.

UDC President Allen Sessoms said afterward he is gratified by the vote and by the discussion and debate that accompanied it: "UDC has not had a truthful, in-depth discussion of where this university is going."

The next step, he says, is moving forward with measures to expand the university's autonomy from the District government, allowing it greater freedom to manage its own affairs. "We want to be accountable," he says. "We don't have accountability right now."

Board chair Jim Dyke says that lessons were learned from the uproar that accompanied the tuition-hike proposal. A task force on communications, he says, has been established to combat what he calls the "misinformation" that went out to students about the tuition hike.

Despite all that, he says, "I think the students conducted themselves very well."

Yesterday, students at the University of the District of Columbia marched and camped in at the school's Van Ness campus to protest steep hikes in the school's tuition. Today the Board of Trustees for the University of the District of Columbia is voting on that plan, which would raise tuition for students in four-year programs from about $3,800 to $7,000 yearly.

Sounds shocking, but a few things don't get mentioned, or get mentioned very briefly, in most press accounts.

Read More "UDC Tuition Hikes: Get Over It" »