The Sports Curmudgeon

What is the biggest news related to March Madness so far? Is it that the chalk absolutely dominated the first day? Is it that Duke went out in the first round? Is it that three of the opening day losers couldn’t score 50 points? I don’t think so. Those may be interesting side notes, but the biggest news so far is that if you go to Senator John McCain’s campaign website – I don’t do politics so you can go find that link for yourself – you’ll find that he has posted his brackets for the entire tournament. And why is that news, you may be asking yourself…

Well, it wasn’t but 5 years ago that Senator McCain and his then partner-in-crime Dr. Myles Brand went on an oratorical flight of fancy proposing Federal legislation that would make it illegal to gamble on any collegiate sports. Don’t write me and tell me that posting a bracket isn’t gambling; I know that. But bracket pools are everywhere and if it were a Federal crime to have a bracket pool with even a dollar riding on it, there wouldn’t be enough people out of jail to be the guards for the prisons that would house the people who should be in jail. And now, Senator McCain – or one of his advisors – thinks it might be a good idea to show that he is “one with that large number of people” out there who mess with brackets and maybe have a buck or two riding on the outcomes.

While I am thinking of the US government and March Madness, here’s something for an investigative journalist to poke around and find out for all of us:

Now that Chief Justice William Rehnquist is watching this year’s NCAA Tournament in the Celestial Casino, who took over his role as the master of the Supreme Court’s Bracket Pool?

It was merely hours ago when there was bleating and screeching about how unfair the tournament assignments were and how some schools were jobbed and how the tournament needs to expand in any number of ways. Well, if today’s games bear any resemblance to yesterday’s games, then I want to hear all of those same wailing voices calling for a contraction of the tournament all weekend long. Based on yesterday’s games, we don’t need more sacrificial lambs to be herded to slaughter; in fact, we might need fewer teams. Parity may have come to college basketball in the sense that there is no overwhelming favorite or super-elite grouping of clubs this year, but there is still a big gap in talent and ability across the spectrum of 65 teams.

Based on all of the assertions early this week, you would have had to make Syracuse and Drexel two of the favorites to make it to the NIT Final Four; after all, they should have been in the main tournament if the pundits were right. Syracuse may still do that; and if they do, good for them. But Drexel – one of my two alma maters – took the gas pipe in the opening round of the NIT losing to NC State. Before anyone rises to tell me that NC State is a big time program and there is no shame involved in losing to them, consider:

The game was in Philadelphia.

NC State was playing its fifth game in six days.

NC State finished tenth in the ACC regular season - - although it did make a run in the ACC Tournament.

Had Drexel made the NCAA Tournament, it would have had no home games; it would have to have drawn a more rested opponent and it would not have had the luxury of facing a team that finished tenth in its conference. Opening round upsets are fun and all that, but you have to remember that Cinderella is a fairy tale; there are no fairy godmothers; a guy going around trying to put a shoe on every woman in the land is more likely to wind up in jail than he is to find his true love.

I ran across an item on NJ.com yesterday saying that Ron Dayne was scheduled to meet with the Philadelphia Eagles’ brass yesterday. That’s just stunning. The note went on to say that the Eagles are also interested in Chris Brown and Corey Dillon; that probably means they are looking for a “big back” to complement Brian Westbrook. That sounds like a good idea until you look at these three “menu items”:

Notice how much of a fight the Patriots put up when Dillon asked to be released. There isn’t much gas left in the tank there; he used to be a fine running back – emphasis on “past tense” verb there.

Notice how much time Chris Brown spends in the trainer’s room and nursing injuries. He isn’t on the field all that much of the time.

Notice how Ron Dayne never gets hurt and is always available for duty – and how that’s his major liability. When he’s in uniform, coaches might be tempted to put him in the game.

Memo to Eagles’ Brass: These are the Manny, Moe and Jack of running backs; you have to be able to do better.

The Chicago Cubs have a rookie pitcher on their spring training roster who may just make the squad as a reliever. With the Cubbies’ starting rotation, this guy could also become the #3 starter by May 15th; who knows? His name is Rocky Cherry. So, the question is this; when he comes into the game from the bullpen or comes to bat in a game, should his music be:

The theme from Rocky

The theme from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

Neil Diamond’s Cherry, Cherry

Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music

You make the call…

Finally, here’s something to ponder from Mike Bianchi in the Orlando Sentinel:

“And if you really want to stop recruiting excesses, just take the advice of late college basketball coach Abe Lemons, who once said: ‘Just give every coach the same amount of money and tell him to keep what’s left over.’ “

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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An AP story appears on cbs.sportsline.com today saying that Pete Rose bet on the Cincinnati Reds “every night” while he was managing that team. I guess there is an ort of news therein considering the phrase “every night”, but that is not the important part of the story. The story also says Rose thinks he should be reinstated into baseball because he is a good ambassador of the game and that statement is probably more true than false. But then, Rose takes his foot and jams it ankle-deep into his mouth one more time. He says that after he’s reinstated, he’d like to manage again in the major leagues.

I am on record for years and years now that Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame; I’ve said that there are 4,256 reasons why he should have been there long ago. I am also on record saying that so long as he bet on his own team to win, I have less of a problem with that than if he bet against his team even one time. I think it would be perfectly brilliant of Bud Selig to declare Pete Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame – thereby leaving his fate up to his peers on the Veterans’ Committee – but maintaining that he cannot hold any position in the game of baseball other than something like “roving ambassador” or “minor league instructor”. Pete Rose cannot manage a major league team ever again. Seamheads already parse every move made by a manager through eleven dimensions of reality and semi-reality; with Rose’s admissions on the books, he couldn’t scratch his butt without someone trying to decode if that was a signal to a bet-runner in the stands to “get down” on some prop bet. That simply will never work.

Gary Matthews, Jr. spoke out yesterday and said he has never taken HGH and that he is not the target of any law enforcement inquiry that would allege that he had. He said that the reason for his delay in making that assertion is that he and his representatives wanted to be sure he was not the target of any investigative processes prior to making such a statement and it took two weeks for them to find that out. OK, that’s good; we’ll never know if that was the reason or if it was Arte Moreno’s threat/demands that forced some statement out of Matthews and his representatives. I guess it really doesn’t matter all that much.

However, I have this nagging feeling about the scenario here. Let’s suppose that I were a person of some “celebrity” and that a story broke that I might be involved in some way with having sex with dead household pets. [I’m purposely trying to make this as bizarre as I can; go with it for a moment.] If I know that I’ve never been involved in that activity – and there’s good reason to believe that I’d know if I had ever engaged in such an activity – then what is the advantage to me to wait before I deny any involvement? Logic tells me that I’d only wait to see what the intentions of the investigators might be if I had some doubt about what they might find.

I am not saying that I believe Gary Matthews, Jr. ever took HGH. I am saying that his explanation for his delay in speaking out sounds good on the surface but still has a ring of dissonance in it.

While I’m on subjects related to baseball, Jerry Greene had an item in the Orlando Sentinel recently about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays signing some kind of partnership deal with a “dot.com company”. That sounds positive for the Devil Rays because you have to think that any new revenue stream that team can create will be good for the franchise. However, according to Jerry Greene, this partnership will allow fans to send text messages during the games for display on the scoreboard at Tropicana Field. Greene sums all this up in two words: Bad … Idea. Boy, is he right.

First of all, there better be a very savvy person editing and clearing those messages before they go up on the scoreboard. There will be a serious attempt by some fans to try to slip some “offensive material” through whatever filters exist to get it up on the scoreboard. You know people will try that; if they succeed, this initiative could blow up in the face of the ownership there. But there’s an even larger problem here.

Sporting events are becoming less and less about what is happening on the field/court/ice. The game – and watching the game – is becoming ancillary to a larger taxonomy of sensory stimuli and activities associated with the games. Fans spend more and more time distracted by flashing lights, product promotions, music and stupid mascots at the game venues.

New arenas are becoming WiFi hotspots so people are encouraged to bring computers with them to “check out” whatever else might strike their fancy at any moment of the game. No one – and I do mean no one – is so important and/or so busy that they must bring their computer to a ballpark and pay their bills online during a game. If they even think they are that busy or that important, they need psych counseling badly. And don’t even get me started with the annoying folks using their cell phones to call people to ask if they can be seen on TV or those other fans who just have to respond to one more e-mail on their “Blackberry”.

Teams are encouraging fans to come to the games and do a huge variety of things other than watch the damned game. A new level of silliness will happen sometime in June this year when the Phillies will have “Stitch and Pitch Night”. They want quilters and knitters to bring their projects to the game and work on them while the Phillies play whomever happens to be town that night. Maybe they’ll get a bunch of folks to the park who wouldn’t normally come to the park on that night. Maybe not.

Here’s a certainty; I will purposefully avoid going to the park that night. In addition to all the other chazerei going on that night, I’d have watch out for balls of yarn rolling down the steps. Going to a baseball game is about watching competition on the field and trying to figure out what might happen when the count is “one-and-two”; it is not about “knit-one-purl-two”.

Finally, here’s an observation from Bernie Lincicome in the Rocky Mountain News:

“A federal arbitrator has been assigned to settle a copyright infringement case over who is entitled to use the label “Fantasy League Baseball,” the stat geeks who make up their own teams and pretend to be owners or the major league owners who each spring proclaim their team can win it all. The Rockies’ Charlie Monfort has been designated to represent the owners.”

But don’t get me wrong. I love sports…

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The first thing you need to do this morning is to look at today’s date. Good. Now, go calculate the area of a circle… Or go bake a lemon chiffon pie…

The NFL free agent season has been surprising in terms of the lavish contracts bestowed on free agents in this year of a steep increase of the salary cap. However, just as surprising is the running back merry-go-round that seems to have finally come to a halt. Running backs are switching teams almost at random; I’m not sure what to make out of all of it. But I have figured out that Corey Dillon made a mistake “demanding” his release from the Patriots. Despite all the moves that follow here, Dillon hasn’t had more than a sniff from other teams.

The Denver Broncos sent Tatum Bell to the Lions as part of a trade and then signed Travis Henry. The Lions also signed TJ Duckett so their “intentions” for next year are still not clear – as if “clarity of purpose” has been a hallmark of the Matt Millen Era in Detroit.

Tiki Barber retired and so the Giants needed a replacement; they signed Rueben Droughns. Look, I’m not saying anything negative about Droughns here but that signing was very strange to me; Rueben Droughns looks like a slightly older version of Brandon Jacobs and I really wonder why the Giants want to have two backs that do the same thing.

The Ravens let Jamal Lewis go into free agency and the Browns scooped him up. I guess that is what made Rueben Droughns “available” to the Giants, or not? When the Ravens sought to replace Jamal Lewis, they acquired Willis McGahee from Buffalo. McGahee is a different style running back than Lewis so it remains to be seen how he will fit in Baltimore; the fit had better be pretty good because McGahee cost the Ravens three draft picks. One thing seems certain; after McGahee’s negative comments about Buffalo as a city worthy of an NFL franchise, he will have to be happier in Baltimore. Unless he’s going to demonstrate that he’s really a serial malcontent…

Ahman Green went to Houston and the Packers didn’t seem to put up all that much fuss when he did even though the Packers have not been active in this running back grab-bag game. More interesting in Houston is a more subtle change at running back. Domanick Davis was supposed to be their stud running back last year but he got hurt. Domanick Davis will not be back this year either because Domanick Davis has changed his name to Domanick Williams – assuming his mother’s maiden name. According to one report, he also wants to change his number. So in Houston they have a new running back acquired from the “meat-market” and a running back coming back from injury with a new nom de guerre; so, will any of this make the Houston offense into anything bordering on competent? Now, there’s the real change that’s needed.

Dominic Rhodes left the Super Bowl champion Colts to sign up with the bottom-feeding Oakland Raiders. He and LaMont Jordan look to be sharing the load at RB next year. The Colts’ let Edgerrin James leave Indy and shrugged it off; so I can’t be surprised that they’d take a similar stance when Rhodes left town. You might – I said might – think that Rhodes would have “gone to school” on James’ experience. Both of them have left the Colts with their good OL to go and play for really bad teams with bad OLs. Didn’t work out all that well for James…

And of course, the Jets acquired Thomas Jones from the Bears for a second round pick. I didn’t understand that move when it happened and I still don’t understand why the Bears did it.

The Patriots seem to have done very well in the free-agency season signing a herd of wide receivers – which they needed – and a very good OLB in Adalius Thomas. The Broncos’ acquisition of Dré Bly gives them the best pair of starting cornerbacks in the league and signing Daniel Graham shouldn’t hurt them either. The Niners went on a spending spree and helped themselves with several signings the most prominent of which was CB, Nate Clements. But I think the Niners may be doing an experiment in algebra here.

They added by subtracting when they ditched chronic annoyance, Antonio Bryant.

They subtracted by adding when they replaced Bryant with annoying underachiever, Ashlie Lelie.

More interesting here in Curmudgeon Central are the teams that seem to have gone backwards during free agency – or at the very best took the Great Leap Sideways.

In Oakland, maybe Dominc Rhodes is the answer to the problems – or maybe he isn’t. Maybe the Raiders OL will take a huge step up the competency ladder next year – maybe they won’t. Maybe the Raiders will find a real QB to play there next year – maybe they won’t. Here’s the only “certainty” at the moment; Jerry Porter said he wants to change his number from “84” to “81”. Why is that interesting? Well, now Randy Moss can have his old “84” back and maybe that’s what was keeping him from being the Randy Moss of old. Or maybe not…

The Giants released LaVar Arrington, Carlos Emmons and Luke Pettigout after losing Tiki Barber to NBC. Arrington and Pettigout are rehabbing injuries and Emmons is now only a back-up player, but all they seem to have done is sign Rueben Droughns. I don’t know how that made them better.

The Titans lost Travis Henry and a pair of wide receivers. They still have Pacman Jones on the roster, which has to provide the team with a steady source of those dreaded “distractions”, and the Titans actually took the time and effort to make a formal announcement that they had signed Kerry Collins. Only a dedicated fantasy geek would know that Collins was still in the football profession; think of it this way, he was found to expendable at the QB position in Oakland. Got that?

The Bills traded Willis McGahee, lost Nate Clements and London Fletcher-Baker to free agency and they signed some young – but not necessarily outstanding – offensive linemen to top dollar deals. Marv Levy is not stupid by any means, but I have to admit that I don’t see the elements of his plan coming together in Buffalo just yet.

The jury is still out on whether the Ravens got better or worse. They lost a bunch of solid players including two on the OL and much of the Ravens’ success last year came from an upright Steve McNair on the field.

If Buffalo and Baltimore are confusing, then the moves by the Tampa Bay Bucs are downright enigmatic. When you are a kid collecting trading cards, it’s neat to collect all the starting QBs in the league. I’m not sure why an actual franchise would head down that path though…

Finally, Greg Cote had an interesting slant on the entirety of the free-agency processes in a recent column in the Miami Herald:

“The Dolphins signed Joey Porter and released Joey Harrington in the same week, setting an NFL record in the category, Greatest Joey Upgrade.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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The following Topical Rant was originally written on 3/11/04. It is in the archives here and I’ve reposted it today because the NCAA Tournament begins in about 48 hours.

This missive is intended for fans of NCAA basketball. If you are a sports fan in general and kinda like college hoops, this is for you too. If you just hate basketball because of the noise of squeaking shoes on hardwood courts, you can stop reading now because none of this will interest you – not even a little bit.

You’ve probably heard about people who make “life lists” comprised of things they want to be sure to do in their lifetime. Often, these lists contain adventurous items such as “climb Mt. Everest” or “be the first paleontologist on Mars”. [That second one actually was once a goal for #1 son.] Sometimes there are noble entries on a life list list such as “curing hunger in the Third World”. I’m sure that some of these life lists contain fantasy items such as “break Wilt Chamberlain’s putative record for sexual partners”. I have one for all NCAA basketball fans to add to their “life lists” – if you don’t have such a life list at the moment, start one – that falls into the purely hedonistic realm:

Go to Las Vegas; park your carcass in one of the top tier sports books, and watch the first two rounds of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. That’s a four-day commitment to enjoyment.

Trust me on this; if you love NCAA basketball, this is something you have to do at least once while you take up space on this planet.

Picture this. You are in a room with enough big screen TVs to make you think you are in Circuit City. There are at least several hundred people there with you. Everyone there is a basketball fan and everyone there has not only a “fan interest” in the games but also a “financial interest” in some of the games. Every game is telecast in its entirety.

On each of the first two days of the tournament, there are sixteen games you can watch in an environment where every action in a game draws a reaction in the room. Several years ago, I had ceased to pay attention to one game because the outcome was no longer in doubt and I had no wager riding on the game. I don’t even remember what game it was now. All of a sudden, the noise level in the room went berserk; there were people cheering and people booing; there were cheers of joy and woe all at the same time. It involved the game I had chosen to ignore.

What happened? One team was leading by 12 with 4 seconds to play; the team that was behind substituted all of its players so that the bench scrubeenies could all say that they had played in an NCAA tournament game; the ball went inbounds and one of these scrubeenies launched a 30 foot shot that went swish; they lost the game by 9 points. That was the loudest cheer of the day to that point because the betting line for the game was 9.5 points. People who had the favorite just lost what looked to be a sure winner and people with the underdog just got the Las Vegas version of “found money”. I had to ask someone what had happened and then watch the replay to get the flavor of what happened. The atmosphere in the room is electric and you have to pay attention all the time.

The next two days will seem tame because there will only be 8 games per day. After trying to track 16 games on Thursday and Friday, Saturday will seem like a walk in the park - - at first. But I promise that the adrenaline will kick in on Saturday and Sunday as it did on the opening days.

There is also a lot of opportunity to make some easy money there. No, beating the books is not easy on that weekend; they are in no danger of going bankrupt because of my profits. The easy money comes from other visitors who come to Vegas to party and carouse and watch their favorite school in the tournament. It is the basketball equivalent of a trip to a “bowl game”. Lots of these folks are willing to make wagers with you on the side that are guided by their hearts and their glands and not their brains. I was sitting near a guy from a school that was a 12-seed in the tournament and he was just positive they would clobber the 5-seed in the first round. Vegas had it wrong; they were giving the 12-seed 8 points but Harry Huckleberry was convinced the 12-seed would win the game outright. I asked him if he had played the money line on the game but he said there was no money line on that game but he would be willing to bet me $20 at even money that “12-seed Tech” would beat “5-seed A&M” straight up. I really wished his name had been Paine Webber because I really wanted to say, “Thank you, Paine Webber.” when he made the bet and then paid up after his team lost by 15 points.

I will be venturing to Las Vegas next week – with the usual suspects of course – to check out the first four days of the tournament once again. After forty-eight games in four days in that kind of environment and I will come home in a state of sensory overload. [Did I mention that you can bet horse races at the same time and in the same venues? And of course the NBA and NHL are still playing at that time of year too…] If I did something like that once a month, I’d be carried out of there one of those days by the men with the canvass sports jackets. You know the ones I mean. They have really long sleeves and the sleeves tie in the back.

But everyone who is a basketball fan needs to do it once – and if you are really a junkie, you need to do it once in a while.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Bob Molinaro writes an entertaining sports column in The Virginian-Pilot; last week, while covering the ACC Tournament in Tampa, he wrote that the ACC Tournament belongs in North Carolina. He’s right. There are certain sporting events that one properly associates with venues. The Triple Crown races don’t meander around the country; the FA Cup Finals in Britain stay put; the major college bowl games have been in place for a long time now. It took WWII and a fear of a bombing attack on a stadium full of people to move the Rose Bowl just one time. The ACC Tournament came out of the Tobacco Road area and it should stay there; it certainly does not belong in Tampa where there is no “ACC presence”.

Having said that, they could play the ACC Tournament in Crow Lake, South Dakota and it wouldn’t be any more out of place there than the A-10 Tournament was in Atlantic City. There are no basketball teams of any renown in Atlantic City; there are no schools of higher education of any renown in Atlantic City; once you get 500 yards inland from the resort hotels, the city is more appealing than Baghdad and Darfur to be sure but then again so is a moonscape. The NCAA threw a fit once when teams were scheduled to play a game in a gym associated with a casino in Connecticut because of the proximity of casino games to the athletes and the fans. In Atlantic City, the players had to be housed in one of the hotels featuring casinos and the fans that went there watched games or gambled or engaged in whatever flavor of drunken debauchery was on tap for that day. For the early round events, the attendance averaged about 5000 fannies in the seats. Put the ACC Tournament in Greensboro or Winston Salem and they’ll draw 5000 fans if the games started at 2:00 AM. This is a bad venue for a college basketball tournament.

While thinking about college basketball, I want to warn you about something you will hear later this week. The NCAA Tournament begins on Thursday and there will surely be an upset somewhere along the way during Thursday’s sixteen games. When that happens, some commentator will think he’s being oh-so-clever when he tells you that the loser did not “Beware, the Ides of March.” It isn’t clever here; it won’t be clever when you hear it on Thursday.

Sometimes there is a sports story that is silly enough to make it onto my list of things to talk about. However, sometimes the story takes more setting up than it is worth; and so without all the details, here are two comments from Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle that will give you all you really need to know:

“Pistons guard Lindsey Hunter is suspended 10 games after testing positive for phentermine, and explains that he grabbed his wife’s diet pills by mistake. ‘We do that at out house.’ Hunter explains. ‘If I’ve got a head cold, I might grab one of her pills.’ That can be dangerous, but on the plus side, Lindsey has never tested positive for pregnancy.”

“The suspension will cost Hunter $205,000, plus whatever it costs him to replace his wife’s pills. Man, for about $50,000 a year you could hire a live-in medicine-cabinet label-reader.”

In the political world, people like to vent about left-leaning newspapers or conservative networks. Those diatribes often call for balance and appeal to the lofty ideals of journalistic neutrality. And all of that is fine and dandy in terms of debate even if it doesn’t actually exist in most places. But let’s not kid ourselves that ESPN is a journalistic organization in any way. I know they put on hours and hours of SportsCenter every day and that they have programs like Outside the Lines. But ESPN is not there to inform about sports; its main purpose is to tell you enough about the sports you care about that you will stay tuned in order for them to tell you “really exciting stuff” about the sports that they will be carrying on ESPN channels. A two-hour SportsCenter usually has about 45 minutes of pure promotional material. As an example, consider the Arena Football League…

The Arena League has been around for 20 years; most recently, it had a TV presence on NBC. As far as ESPN and the SportsCenter folks were concerned, it had all of the importance of curling and/or synchronized swimming. They might tell you about the championship game the day before it was to be played; they would certainly give you the results of that game with maybe 15 seconds of highlights; but that was about it. This year the games are on ESPN because ESPN is also a part owner of the league and all of a sudden, they have studio shows to give you analysis of upcoming games and news from around the league. They have even allowed Ron Jaworski to telecast some of the games. I’m not saying that “Jaws” is bad in the booth because he’s actually pretty good there; the “issue” is that Ron Jaworski is a part owner of one of the Arena League franchises. How does that argument about the ideal of journalistic neutrality go again?

Here’s how you know ESPN has gone in the tank over Arena Football. Go to the ESPN.com website and you will find a way to play fantasy football for the Arena League there. Soon you might expect to see coverage of the Arena League draft? Who will emerge as the Mel Kiper, Jr. of indoor football?

During the halftime of the Super Bowl, people were watching Prince. Even the people who might have wanted to go to the pay-per-view Lingerie Bowl had to stay with the NFL halftime “entertainment” because there was no Lingerie Bowl this year. But organizers say it will be back in 2008; they hope to stage the game in Arizona proximal to the Super Bowl game in the Cardinals’ new stadium. According to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the Lingerie Bowl promoters sent a gift pack containing a football and some lingerie to Mary Manross who happens to be the mayor of Scottsdale Arizona. Evidently, Her Honor was not all that happy with the gift and somehow I don’t think the explanation from the Lingerie Bowl officials is going to make her any the more happy. According to the originator of the Lingerie Bowl, Her Honor will understand the value of having the game in her town “once she sits down and understands the brand and tries on the uniform.” Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think she will.

Finally, Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times is obviously keyed into the whole business of the NCAA Tournament:

“The American Medical Association, getting into March Madness, is expected to declare that the mouth will temporarily be reclassified as a Vitale organ.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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OK folks, the time has come and gone. We’ve endured Championship Week and we went through the pseudo-drama of the “Bracketology” shows on TV where we found out what teams were going where to play whom in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Now let all of us take a deep breath and try to get all of our adrenaline secretions under control and let’s try to look at all of this marginally dispassionately.

First of all, we really do need to acknowledge that the “Brackets Shows” on CBS and ESPN are nothing more than “made-for-TV” over-hyped events. These are nothing substantively more than a TV show to announce who will be invited to participate in an event. Imagine if the Heisman Trophy folks held a TV show to “decide” who they would invite to NYC for the presentation of their award. Would you give a damn? I hope not. Well, that’s what these “Brackets Shows” are and not much more.

Quick Quiz:

In terms of an over-hyped made-for-TV event, which is the most unimportant in the context of its sport?

1. The NFL Draft

2. The NCAA Brackets Shows

3. The post position draws for the Triple Crown/Breeders’ Cup races.

4. Each and every NBA game prior to March 1st.

Discuss in 500 words or less…

Let’s also agree to ignore the furor that Syracuse and/or Drexel was snubbed by the Selection Committee. Understand, I am an alumnus of Drexel; I received a PhD from that school in 1970. Truth be told, it would be nice if they could have been in the NCAA tournament; but they have no less chance today of winning it all being on the outside looking in than they would have had with a twelfth seed in one of the brackets. Far too much angst is taken on by folks who think the Selection Committee needs to “get it right”. In just about every circumstance in the past 25 years, the Committee has actually “gotten it right” in terms of where it seeded the champion and how that team was put in the field in the first place.

In addition to the sage commentary of the talking heads on these programs and their staged outrage at how few “mid-majors” got invited to participate, we will all get to hear in the next 24 hours about some management consultant trolls who have “calculated” that businesses nationwide will “lose” about a billion dollars of “productive work time” in the next three weeks as folks fiddle with their brackets and discuss the progress of the tournament.

Memo to Consultant Gurus: We heard you last year and the year before that. We don’t care. Please just shut up and go away.

ESPN took their pre-tournament coverage even further over the top than usual this year. We had animated promotions for “ESPN 360” in which a young male in a men’s room was trying to figure out why he didn’t get his recent promotion. From a toilet stall, an animated “Kenny Mayne” appears to tell him he is suffering from “sports video deficiency” and that “ESPN 360” will take care of that. Forget that there is a guy in the background taking a leak at a urinal during the first 90% of this promo; forget that there is a woman in the men’s room to cheer this doofus on at the end of the promo; focus on the message.

This jackass didn’t get a promotion and so the way he should change his behavior such that he might do better in the next round of promotions is to have ESPN sports piped to his desktop at work. Yeah, that’ll get his productivity up and get him noticed by his superiors as a critical cog in the future of his company. If he does what the promo suggests he should do, this is a guy destined for unemployment benefits in the near future.

I’m not going to do full brackets for the tournament because you can find those things in about 5000 other places. Nevertheless, here are a few thoughts for those of you who might be filling out brackets.

Here are a couple of “low seeds” who could provide upset potential. Davidson is seeded 13th in the Midwest Bracket. Davidson was 29-4 over the season and was the big dog in the Southern Conference. Winthrop is seeded 11th in the same bracket. They were 28-4 in the Big South Conference. Davidson and Winthrop can’t be more than 60 miles apart along an Interstate highway. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Selection Committee found a way to make it such that these teams would meet if both make it to the Elite Eight? I don’t.

Texas A&M is a 3-seed and this is a team that has to scare any opponent because they play really tough defense and because they have a bonafide star who can get on a roll and score at will in Acie Law IV.

You could talk me into the position that Duke and Pitt are seeded too high. You could also talk me into the position that Marquette, Michigan State and Tennessee are seeded too low. Whatever! Let the games begin…

The Kentucky Derby bills itself as the most exciting two minutes in sports. Frankly, I’d take any two minute stretch in the Hearns/Hagler fight over any of the Ky Derbies over the past 20 years, but that’s a detail. Here’s what the NCAA Tournament is; its first two rounds are the best and the most exciting and the most attention-grabbing 84 hours of sports events anywhere. Forty-eight games cut the tournament field from 64 to 16; it’s all great fun; it sets up even greater fun for the next two weekends.

During the 60+ games in the NCAA tournament, you are going to get more than ample opportunities to see collegiate basketball coaches strutting and performing on the sidelines. Here’s an idea for the NCAA mavens to think about. Why not emulate the Duke model at Cameron Indoor Stadium? Why not have the TV cameras behind the team benches so that the coaches don’t feel any need to “play to the cameras” whilst they are doing whatever they do in the midst of the games? Forget who the coach is and whether or not you love him or hate him; wouldn’t you really want to be able to focus on the game and the players without having one of these thespians over there trying to get some face time on network TV?

Finally, here’s an observation from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“The American Medical Association, getting into March Madness, is expected to declare that the mouth will temporarily be reclassified as a Vitale organ.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Back when I was in college – but after Sir Isaac Newton had stopped teaching physics – there was a popular Bob Dylan song where each of his marginally intelligible refrains ended with the line:

“For the times, they are a-changin’.”

Well, times certainly did change from the early 1960s through the late 1960s and the times have certainly changed from then until now. But maybe there is a microcosmic wave of change beginning to gather itself in the sporting world today and maybe it too will gather momentum. I’m speaking of a small movement towards the concept of athletes being accountable for their actions. Wow! There’s a gestalt we can only ponder from where we are today. Let me tell you why the sports world might be edging on a vector heading that could lead us there.

About 10 days ago, the Feds busted a drug/steroids lab in New Jersey and the “customer list” for that place had some recognizable names on it. One was Gary Matthews Jr.; I wrote earlier that whether or not he actually used the HGH produced by that place, he was currently going to be judged by the company he’s keeping in the person of the lawyer who represented OJ Simpson when OJ had his “image crisis”. Fully lawyered up, Matthews met with reporters and gave the typical “non-denial denial” and used the investigation itself as the reason he could not talk about matters related to the investigation. That falls into the category of the “move along, there’s nothing to see here pretense”.

Remember, Matthews isn’t accused of doing anything criminal at the moment let alone convicted of anything more anti-social than parking tickets. But he did have a career year last year and he did sign a $50M contract in the off-season and so “enquiring minds want to know.” And he’s not answering… But Arte Moreno, the owner who signed Matthews to the $50M deal is not happy and Moreno says that this matter “is going to be resolved by Opening Day, one way or the other, I promise that.”

What Moreno means is not that the Federal investigation and legal proceedings that might some day follow from it will be resolved; he means that he wants an explanation from Matthews about how his name got on the customer list at that laboratory. I don’t know what Moreno has in mind as a lever on his side of this, but here is an owner demonstrating a backbone. He’s on the hook for $50M; he wants some answers and he’s not satisfied with the “non-denial denial”. Stay tuned; that could get interesting.

At the same time, Ron Artest had another run in with the authorities over an alleged domestic violence situation. I already told you that the Maloof brothers (owners of the Kings) simply told Artest to stay away from all team activities and facilities until the matter is settled. Stay tuned; that could get interesting.

And on the other coast of the US, the new head football coach at the University of Miami, Randy Shannon, announced a new team rule. He made it public and he didn’t leave a lot of ambiguity in that new rule. Any player caught with a gun in his possession is off the team – not suspended, off the team. Stay tuned; that could get interesting.

But “important” is a large step beyond “interesting” and we don’t know yet if these actions are or will lead to anything “important”. If they begin to increase athletes’ accountability for their actions, then they will be important events and ones that should achieve the status where one recalls when they happened. Future historians, take note please.

Just an aside here, but imagine what could happen if this accountability trend really caught on and a major participant in moving it further along was the Cincinnati Bengals franchise…

There is one other piece of news today that deserves comment. Yesterday, there was news that one of the mushers – and her sled – was missing in what was described as a “particularly treacherous part of the journey”. I sort of think that the whole trail is dangerous and treacherous so I won’t comment on where this happened. Fortunately, all she did was to take a wrong turn and go about 50 miles out her way on the wrong trail and she’s been spotted by a search plane driving her sled toward a checkpoint. When she was still missing, I got an e-mail from one of the participants in an Iditarod Fantasy Pool we organized about 10 years ago; his note was brief; he hoped I didn’t have her in the Iditarod pool this year.

The interesting thing about this situation – and now that she’s been found it isn’t a tragedy – is that this is a rookie musher in the Iditarod and she’s 61 years old. I don’t mean this to be ageist or sexist in any way, but what would make anyone think that the Iditarod is something you just “pick up and do” at any point in one’s life? I’m glad she’s alive as opposed to carrion, but I must say that I don’t understand her mindset.

About 15 years ago, the Iditarod was immersed in a controversy and the courts had to get involved to settle a dispute between a musher and the race officials over the interpretation of what was called “The Dead Dog Rule”. I was always amazed that there could be controversy about a dead dog; it seemed to me that after about a year of argument and litigation the status of the beast as an exchanger of oxygen in the biosphere should have been clear. Finally, the court made a ruling; and I don’t remember how it ruled because it really wasn’t nearly as interesting as the debate over the alive/dead status of a dog. Given that precedent, can you imagine what would have happened if there were a dead musher in the race? Imagine the team of dogs pulling through the finish line with the musher on board in some kind of Weekend at Bernie’s situation. That would have been good for at least a year’s worth of controversy.

Finally, the Iditarod reminded me of dogs and so I’ll close with this line from David Letterman about why he did not attend the Westminster Dog Show:

“If I want to see something roll over and play dead at the Garden, I’ll go see the Knicks.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…