Briefs | College football: Bobby Bowden says NCAA penalties are too harsh

College football

Florida State coach discusses sanctions: Florida State coach Bobby Bowden says NCAA sanctions calling for giving up victories in 10 different sports are too harsh.

Bowden, 79, also said he supports the decision of T.K. Wetherell, university president, to challenge the NCAA's bid to have the school vacate victories, reportedly including as many as 14 in football.

Bowden's 382 career victories are one fewer than all-time major-college leader Joe Paterno of Penn State has achieved. Bowden made his first comments Wednesday night about the NCAA penalties for an academic-cheating scandal at Florida State, involving 61 scholarship athletes.

"It just seems like they're killing a flea with a hammer," Bowden said.

Meanwhile, Wetherell apologized for a profane remark made Tuesday about Bowden's former school, Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. Wetherell used a term that means stupid or incompetent.

Skiing

Vonn sliced her thumb on broken champagne bottle: Lindsey Vonn's stitched-up and swollen right thumb, sliced open on a broken champagne bottle during a photo op gone awry last month, is protected by a brace that wraps around her wrist.

Late in the recently concluded World Cup season, that freak injury forced the Vail, Colo., skier to tape her pole to her glove for races but she managed to secure her second consecutive World Cup overall title.

Vonn said she worries she might need a second operation on the thumb, which she can't bend fully and might never be able to straighten.

"There's always a possibility that there could be too much scar tissue, and I don't get the range of motion back, and that would mean that I would have to have surgery again," Vonn said. "But I'm hoping that that's not the case. I'm hoping that it's healing well, which the doctors say it is."

NHL