The Sports Curmudgeon

I saw just enough of the Miami Heat on Christmas Day to conclude that this must be the final season for Shaq as an NBA player. Unless he has such a major injury that might be fully corrected by off-season surgery, I just cannot see him continuing to be worthy of a starting position much longer. At the moment, he is starting for a monumentally bad team whose true rottenness will not be fully appreciated this season because of the presence of the Minnesota Timberwolves in the same league.

Shaquille O’Neal has had a career that assures his Hall of Fame induction. But as with all things - - including bad cases of constipation - - its time has come and it is gone.

Speaking of the NBA, will someone explain to me how firing Scott Skiles will make the Chicago Bulls a better team - - or how keeping him on the job will make them a better team. The problem with the Bulls seems to scream out from the stats. Three of their young “stars” – Deng, Heinrich and Gordon – are not shooting well this season and their “older star” – Ben Wallace – has never been able to shoot well. The Bulls don’t score a lot; and when that happens in the NBA, teams tend to lose more than they win. And that’s a coach’s fault?

Since I have no idea whether or not I’ll write one of these essays next Monday, I do want to comment on three of the bowl games scheduled for New Years Eve:

1. Clemson/Auburn: Are you tired of seeing bowl games where neither team can play any defense at all (think Purdue/Central Michigan or Texas/ASU)? Well, if you want to see some defense, tune in here because Clemson was ranked #6 in defense in the country and Auburn allowed fewer points than anyone in the SEC. You might just see a defender cover a receiver closely enough to knock down a pass attempt.

2. Indiana/Oklahoma State: This game is the Insight Bowl. So what is the insight provided? Neither of these teams is all that special would have to start any list of insights provided.

3. Florida State/Kentucky: Obviously, this game is meaningless. It features a Florida State program that continues to draw attention only because of past glories and a Kentucky team that drew attention because it was above average this year - - and that is a dramatic improvement of Kentucky football teams of the past decade or so. The game is the Music City Bowl; if might be just as attractive if it were the Mucous City Bowl.

Oh, and Florida State will be sure to bring its integrity to the game. About two dozen of the players will be ineligible for the game because they got caught cheating in an online “course” in Music History. We had a course like that where I went to school; we called it “Tunes For Goons” and if you were smart enough to find your ass with either hand, you didn’t need to cheat to get an “A” in that puppy. But it gets worse…

Florida State says it cannot identify the cheaters because Federal privacy laws prohibit that. So when anyone compares the rosters of the FSU team from four weeks ago with the roster for the bowl game, they’ll see a bunch of guys that are missing from the later one. But the list of “missing players” will include players who are legitimately injured and no one will know into which category any individual player might fall. So, to protect the identity of the cheating weasels, the injured players on the squad have to endure the suspicion that they too are cheaters. Can anyone explain how that can possibly be the proper outcome here?

FSU coach, Bobby Bowden, has had a long and honorific career as a football coach but it may be time for him to hang up the jockstrap. When the scandal broke, you’d expect the head coach to take a position. If he is a man of honor and integrity, the position is that this kind of behavior is unacceptable and you’ll see to it that nothing like this happens again. If he is basically a lying weasel walking upright, the position is that some rat on the faculty is just out to get the noble scholar-athletes on your team because that faculty member is only 8-to-5 to be able to place on foot in front of the other sequentially without falling down. Here’s what this paragon of leadership and teamwork, Bobby Bowden, had to say on the occasion of this scandal making it to the newspapers:

“It’s not like I had anything to do with this.”

It’s not as if the “major bowl games” in early January are all that much better than many of these useless match-ups in the “minor bowl games”. So, let’s root for some more embarrassment for the BCS mavens. This year, they had to put a two-loss team in their BCS Championship Game for the first time and had no undefeated team with any national championship credibility available as an opponent. (Sorry, Hawaii fans.) The game will decide nothing except the winner of the game. So, let’s root for a horrendously sloppy game with a dozen turnovers and a final score of 3-0. I really don’t give a rat’s ass which team wins here; I just want both teams to look awful and have the game be an affront to the eyeballs of every viewer.

Then maybe the wisdom of using all these meaningless bowl games as the stepping-stone to set up a small Championship Tournament for Division 1-A football will start to make sense…

The Oakland Raiders are a bad football team. Just as the Miami Heat will not be recognized for their badness this year because of the Timberpuppies, the Raiders will not be demeaned as severely as they might because the Dolphins can’t be relegated out of the NFL. There are probably dozens of reasons why the Raiders stink this year, but here is one of the big ones. Teams have been able to run the ball down their throat all year long. Consider:

Opponents average 4.9 yards per carry against the Raiders defense.

Opponents have scored more rushing TDs against the Raiders than any other team (24).

Ten opposing running backs in the first fifteen games this year have run for 100 yards or more.

Finally, here’s an item from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald:

“The U.S. lost the World Cup of Golf in China. Gee, what a shock. We sent Boo Weekley and Heath Slocum to represent us. Evidently, the multitudes better than them were all busy.”

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