Football

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which has supported the construction of a 72,000-seat football stadium in downtown Los Angeles, now has raised a series of criticisms about the project's potential impact on the environment. Many of its concerns are well founded; rather than fight them in court, the project's developer, Anschutz Entertainment Group, ought to take them into account and use them to improve the proposal. In a letter to the Los Angeles City Planning Department, the NRDC warned that although AEG's voluminous environmental impact report promises a number of measures to limit the negative effects of the stadium on the environment, it lacks details about how those measures will work and how they will be enforced.

Brian Price, once a wrecking ball on UCLA's defensive line, has beaten long odds to return to the NFL after two off-season surgeries aimed at keeping his hamstrings attached to his pelvis, rather than breaking loose and coiling down the backs of his thighs. For Price, who will start at defensive tackle Sunday for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his excruciating recovery was a 10-step process. Meaning just two months ago, he could run only 10 steps. "You have these doubts in your head at times," said Price, a second-round pick of the Buccaneers in 2010 who, because of his congenitally malformed pelvis, spent the last half of his rookie season on injured reserve.

A 23-year-old gang member who shot and killed a high school football star he mistook for a rival gangster in 2008 should be put to death, a Los Angeles jury decided Wednesday. Jurors reached the verdict after about a week of testimony in the penalty phase of the trial for Pedro Espinoza, a member of the 18th Street gang. The panel was asked to decide what punishment Espinoza should receive for the slaying of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw II. Prosecutors said Shaw was killed execution-style because he was a young black male carrying a red Spider-Man backpack, which led Espinoza to believe he was a Bloods gang member.

Bob Baffert and Wayne Lukas were sitting next to each other at a recent racing function when Baffert said to Lukas, "Everyone used to hate you. Now they hate me." It's as clear as a giant flowered hat, and just as ugly. At rowdy Churchill Downs today, the only thing more quietly despised than Bob Baffert will be a Breathalyzer. The 128th Kentucky Derby will feature 19 horses, 150,000 fans, and one villain. Baffert will saddle longshot War Emblem.

As warehouses go, there are few like Skechers USA Inc.'s new 1.82-million-square-foot distribution center. This warehouse is so big that it takes half a minute to drive from one end to the other at 60 miles per hour. The setup is so advanced that human hands will hardly touch the cargo as it is unpacked, categorized, stacked and prepared for delivery. The building is so green that it uses prevailing winds for ventilation instead of air conditioning. For its new North American operations warehouse, the nation's No. 2 footwear company chose the Inland Empire's Moreno Valley.

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

George Allen, the steely personification of the victory-obsessed football coach, who motivated underachieving Los Angeles Rams and over-the-hill Washington Redskins teams into perennial powerhouses and came back this year to post one last winning season as coach of the Cal State Long Beach 49ers, died Monday. Allen, a physical fitness buff who never fulfilled his elusive dream of building a national fitness academy, died of natural causes at his Palos Verdes Estates home. He was 72.

The Times is pleased to have Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver guest-blogging for us while he competes on "Dancing With the Stars. " Each week, Driver, a Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl player, will answer a few questions from Sports Now editor Houston Mitchell and give some insight into the competition. Here are Driver's thoughts about Week 3, which he offered via email. Q: You seemed to be having a lot of fun dancing the paso doble. Was that the easiest dance for you to connect to so far?

An environmental group that has supported a proposed downtown Los Angeles football stadium and helped the developer secure special treatment in the courts issued a sharply worded critique Tuesday of environmental documents prepared for the project. In a 16-page letter to city officials, the Natural Resources Defense Council called on Anschutz Entertainment Group to rewrite and recirculate a recently released environmental impact report on the proposed stadium, saying it failed to fully analyze health risks created by cars that would travel to and from the 72,000-seat facility.

USC's Sept. 8 against Syracuse at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., will kick off at 12:30 p.m. PDT and will be televised by ABC, USC announced Tuesday. The Trojans open the season against Hawaii on Sept. 1 at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The kickoff time for that game and others are to be determined. USC, led by quarterback Matt Barkley, is regarded as a front-runner for the Pac-12 Conference championship.

USC continued to build depth in its future running back corps Thursday when Justin Davis of Lincoln High in Stockton announced he would play for the Trojans in 2013. The 6-foot, 195-pound Davis is the second tailback in 48 hours to commit to the Trojans. Ty Isaac of Joliet Catholic in Joliet, Ill., announced Tuesday that he would attend USC. High school players cannot sign letters of intent until February.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND : A professional football team once leased a quarterback to another team. Strange trades have long been a part of professional sports history. Heck, just recently in Sports Legends Revealed I've featured a quarterback that the New York Giants acquired an entire franchise just to add to their team and a trade by the San Diego Padres where they dealt a player for a pair of treadmills . However, I don't believe I have ever encountered a trade like the one the Houston Oilers and the Denver Broncos made in 1964 where the Broncos traded a player to lease a quarterback from the Oilers!

His mother said a quiet prayer of thanks. His father dropped his head and rubbed his eyes. Four years after Los Angeles High School football star Jamiel Shaw II's death, the gang member accused of gunning him down because he was carrying a red Spider-Man backpack was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder. Jurors deliberated for barely half a day before returning the guilty verdict against Pedro Espinoza, now 23. The panel found to be true allegations that Espinoza committed the crime in association with a gang and that he personally discharged a firearm.

While the legislature in Minnesota continued to work on a solution to keep the Vikings, AEG on Tuesday unveiled its latest vision for an NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles. Two weeks remain in the public-comment period of AEG's environmental impact report on the concept, and the company hopes to have its approvals in place by late summer, with the goal of luring a football team back to L.A. next spring. AEG's is one of two competing stadium proposals, with the other in City of Industry.

A rule change approved by the NCAA Football Rules Committee will allow defensive players to advance fumbles no matter where they recover the ball.

Many college coaches are control freaks who operate on military time and like to assign stadium steps for anyone arriving five minutes late to a 10 o'clock meeting. Their game plans are meticulously penned in multiple colors and tiny letters on laminated sheets. Coaches have the omnipotent power to block player transfers and close practice to the media. So it was kind of funny hearing Pac-12 Conference coaches sounding so helpless Tuesday on the subject of a playoff. Pac-12 coaches huddled last week at their annual conference meetings in Phoenix to discuss how different the post-season is going to look when the BCS goes RIP in two years.

The 17-year-old football star's skin was black and his backpack red. Were it not for those colors, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday, Jamiel Shaw II might never have been murdered by an 18th Street gang member eager to earn his stripes. Deputy Dist. Atty. Allyson Ostrowski said Pedro Espinoza, now 23, shot Shaw execution-style in 2008 thinking he was a Bloods gang member because he was African American and was carrying a red Spider-Man backpack. Shaw, who played for Los Angeles High School, was killed in March of that year just a few houses away from his Arlington Heights home.