I try to keep politics out of these rants as much as possible, but sometimes the world of sports intersects the political arena even if only tangentially and temporarily. Such is the case this morning because of the reports out there which say that presidential-hopeful, RFK, Jr. might be considering either Aaron Rodgers or Jesse “The Body” Ventura has his running mate for Vice President of the US. Please take nothing here as an evaluation of this ticket and most certainly understand that I am not trying to influence your voting behavior in any way.
I only want to ask a couple of questions about the potential candidacy of Aaron Rodgers:
- If he is on the ticket, would he be a part-timer on the campaign trail and an NFL QB at the same time or would he ditch the NFL gig?
- If he ditched the NFL gig, where on a scale of 1 to 10 would the freak-out level of Jets’ fans be?
- If he stays with the Jets as their QB while on the ticket as well, how long until someone pins the nickname “Secret Service” on the Jets’ OL who would be charged with protecting Rodgers from those defenders seeking to do him harm?
Regarding the candidacy of Jesse Ventura, please try to imagine the Vice-Presidential debate among whoever the Republican nominee is, VP, Harris and Jesse Ventura. Perhaps the perfect moderator for that event would be one of the aliens from the Xygork Nebula who are in residence at Area 51.
Moving on … That political situation is a potential fiasco; out in California there is an actual fiasco. Crypto.com Arena is the home venue for the LA Lakers, Clippers and Kings. Outside that arena they have placed a bronze statue of Kobe Bryant in a pose that recalls Bryant’s 81-point game back in 2006. The bronze casting is 19 feet tall and must weigh several tons. What is the fiasco:
- There are about a half-dozen misspellings in the casting.
Arena officials declare that they will be corrected but correcting a bronze casting is not quite the same thing as correcting misspellings in a Microsoft Word document. Moreover, there are two more Bryant statues to be cast and dedicated in the future.
- Memo to Arena Officials: Retain the services of a proofreader for the other statues of Kobe Bryant scheduled to be erected there. He/she will be a lot cheaper than “editing” the finished product.
Keeping the focus on LA and the Lakers for a moment, a friend sent me the following information related to LeBron James’ accomplishment of scoring 40,000 points in his career. LeBron James came to the NBA in the 2003-2004 season as a 19-year-old straight out of high school; he is now 39 years old and is in the middle of his 21st season in the NBA. Here is the amazing consistency he has shown in his scoring according to the data sent to me by my friend:
- It took 368 games for James to score his first 10,000 points.
- It took 358 games for James to score his second 10,000 points.
- It took 381 games for James to score his third 10,000 points.
- It took 368 games for James to score his fourth 10,000 points.
Staying with basketball but at a level down from the NBA, there is the possibility of a new fall tournament for college basketball. Plans call for staging an 8-team tournament in the Fall of 2024 at the MGM Arena in Las Vegas and if successful, to expand that tournament to 16 teams down the road. There are loads of early season college basketball tournaments and showcase events; so, why is the addition of yet another one of them worth contemplating? Here is the difference:
- This tournament will offer $1M in NIL money to each team in the tournament to be split among the players.
- The tournament winning team will get an additional $1M to divvy up.
I have no problem with this as a business model, but I once again ask rhetorically if this is the sort of outcome people envisioned and approved of when they began the quest for college athletes’ NIL rights. The objective here is for the NIL money – – the $1M appearance fee plus the $1M prize money that goes to the winner – – will be divided by the coaches and the players “as they see fit”. The only restriction is that the money must go to current players and not be used as recruiting enhancements for future players.
The tournament organizers will also provide for transit, room and board to and from Las Vegas for the event. With those expenses taken care of, I don’t think too many teams would turn down such an invitation. And once again, the rich will only get richer.
The organizers can only make money here by selling off the television or streaming rights to this event. Those “TV folks” will pay up to have recognizable teams with large followings in the field such as Duke, UNC, Notre Dame, Kansas, Kentucky – – you get the idea. The coaches and athletic directors at schools like UAB, Marist and/or Wyoming need not sit by their phones 24/7 to take any calls here.
Finally, since I mentioned proofreading above, let me close with a paraphrase of my eleventh-grade English teacher as she instructed us on the important steps in the preparation of our “Junior Theme”:
“Do not treat your final paper the way policemen have to treat people they arrest. Those people are innocent until proven guilty. Proofread your final paper with the attitude that it is guilty until you prove it innocent so that there are no misspellings, no grammatical errors, and no punctuation errors.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………