Catching Up

Sorry for the lack of content in recent weeks, but between work and my posts at SB Nation's Atlanta site, time has been tight.  For those of you who don't visit the Atlanta page on a daily basis, hang your heads in shame ... and then click on the tab that I added to the right that goes directly to my profile there.  That has a fill list of what I have been posting, both in shorter and longer form.  Some highlights from the last few weeks:

My predictable gloating over the Saints' little bounty issue:

The last parallel between the Ohio State and New Orleans scandals is that both relate to the most pressing issues facing their respective sports. College football has been plagued in recent months with significant scandals involving major programs and improper benefits, leading many to question the continued viability of a sport that is built on a fiction. For instance, the 2010 national title game was contested between a team whose star quarterback's father was trying to sell his son to the highest bidder and an opponent currently under investigation for paying a runner in Texas to direct players to Eugene.

The biggest issue facing the NFL is the long-term health impact of the sport, a dilemma that leads to a plausible scenario in which the NFL no longer exists. Through a combination of: (1) the school firing its head coach and suspending several of its best players; and (2) the NCAA tacking on a one-year bowl ban, Ohio State has essentially had to give up two football seasons. That's the message that the NCAA and its members have to send to deter money finding its way to the players who generate it.

I don't pretend to know what is in Roger Goodell's holster in terms of potential punishments, but it is clear that he is going to have to bring the hammer down because the participation of Saints' coaches in the team's bounty system and the acquiescence of the head coach and general manager in that system touches on the biggest problem facing the league. Goodell has to ensure that current and future authority figures in the league see what happened to the Saints and take the lesson that they have to stamp out incentives to injure opposing players.

This is one of those instances where I am quite happy that Roger Goodell has given himself untrammeled power to punish league figures who "damage the shield," to quote that preposterous phrase that was bandied about by authority worshipers when Goodell was disciplining Ben Roethlisberger for tawdry conduct that did not lead to criminal charges.  Let's see him use that power when the wrongdoers are management instead of labor.  That, after all, is the big issue with the Saints scandal.  It's not that the Saints had a bounty system, as that appears to be something that happens every now and again in the NFL.  It's that this appears to be the first instance in which a defensive coordinator, a head coach, and a general manager all either participated or at least knew about the scheme and did nothing.

My predictable counter to Forbes labeling Atlanta as the most miserable sports city in America:

Forbes would never permit this terrible reasoning when evaluating companies. Financial reporting is (at least theoretically) based on reviewing the entirety of a company's record to make the best evaluations possible. That same rigor apparently does not apply to sports analysis, where we define disappointment based on a "small sample size important; big sample size unimportant" framework.

The point of sports is to provide us with entertainment. We all want an escape from the ennui of the working world and games provide us with exactly that. A team like the Braves during their heyday provided great entertainment, as they consistently won more than they lost. Day after day, we could rely on the Braves to make us happy by beating down the rest of the NL East. Losing a playoff series was a sad experience, but was it enough to overwhelm six months of happiness? No.

Personally, this has been a pretty good period to be an Atlanta sports fan.  How many other times in city history can we say that two of our teams - the Hawks and Falcons - are playoff regulars and the third - the Braves - are at least on the cusp and have a roster full of promising young players.  Maybe my expectations were beaten down by two of the city's three teams being so bad in the 80s when I was growing up, but this seems fine to me.  It's unfortunate that the Hawks have reached their ceiling at the second round of the playoffs and the Falcons can't win a playoff game, but as between playoff disappointment and finishing in last place every year, I'll take the former.

I also finished a post that I've been meaning to write for weeks on the decline of the ACC as a basketball conference.  I offered four potential explanations: conference expansion, bad coaches, the Big Dance killing the regular season, and the possibility that we are just seeing a statistical blip.  The decline of the ACC stands out for me because of the juxtaposition with SEC football.  The latter is as strong as ever, as population trends have dovetailed with the ability of athletic departments to monetize fan passion - and thereby build facilities and hire coaches that create a recruiting advantage - to put the SEC on top of college football.  Those same shifts in population should be helping the ACC in basketball, but they aren't.  That leads to a chicken-egg question: is fan intensity down in the ACC because the product is weaker or is the product weaker because fan intensity is down?

 

An Attempt to Explain Paterno and Curley Imitiating Colonel Klink

In consuming the same news stories and opinion pieces about Penn State's remarkably limp response to the football program's former defensive coordinator's unique way of expressing his commitment to children, I've been trying to make sense of the reaction of Tim Curley and Joe Paterno, among other.  Short of murder, child molestation is about as bad a crime as there is.  Jerry Sandusky committed repeated acts of molestation, such that he was observed at Penn State's football facilities on at least two occasions performing sex acts with boys.  This is not a case where authorities would have to rely upon the testimony of a child to determine whether a crime has been committed.  Sandusky was so brazen in his conduct that he committed these crimes in a place where he could be observed by adults, first a janitor and then Mike McQueary, who was a graduate assistant at the time.  Confronted with eyewitness testimony from adults on at least two separate occasions, Penn State's authority figures did nothing. 

This sin is especially grave because it is fairly common knowledge that individuals who commit acts of pedophilia are highly likely to perform the same crimes again.  The offense has a very high rate of recidivism because of the psychological pathologies involved.  Sandusky's crimes cannot be written off as a crime of passion that is unlikely to repeat itself.  Thus, the failure on the part of Penn State authority figures to act appropriately made future crimes by Sandusky a likelihood.  Every child who was assaulted by Sandusky after the 2002 incident can legitimately point a finger at Curley, Paterno, McQueary, and others at Penn State.  Almost certainly, those individuals (or, more precisely, their parents) will be hiring highly-capable lawyers (the victims will have their pick of the best plaintiffs' lawyers in the country) to point those fingers for them and Penn State will ultimately have to respond by writing some very large checks.

So how does this happen?  I would posit that athletic departments at major universities are places where the default response to any wrongdoing is to try to handle it in-house and to avoid reporting it to the appropriate authorities.  Major college football and basketball, the games about which so many of us choose to obsess, live a lie in at least two major respects.  First, those sports involve massive amounts of revenue paired with antiquated British rules enshrining amateurism as a defining value. The natural place for the money to flow is to the players who generate it, but the NCAA seeks to prevent that water from flowing to its natural destination: the players who create the revenue.  Second, colleges and universities have to lower their academic standards in order to admit the players who can make the difference between winning and losing.  They have to operate under the fiction that an individual with a 2.3 GPA and an 850 SAT score from a below-average urban or rural high school can compete academically with students whose credentials far out-strip those of the athlete and come from an environment that makes them much better prepared to process what the professor is saying, understand the assigned reading materials, and create coherent answers to difficult questions based on what they have learned over the course of a semester. 

Thus, the mission of athletic departments, unofficially, has to be to ignore reality. They have to look the other way when a star player is driving a car that is well beyond his present means.  They have to ignore the extent to which tutors assigned to the players are doing the players' assigned course work.  Athletic departments have to put in place compliance regimes that look good and act to stop the most obvious violations of NCAA rules, but at the end of the day, they cannot be cultures based on reporting all rules violations.  To use an analogy from another black market economy, la cosa nostra has to be the default rule.

If you want two illustrations of that culture at work, look at Ohio State and Penn State. Jim Tressel - a man with a sterling reputation prior to last December - received information from a former Ohio State player about NCAA violations made by his players. He did not forward this information as he was required to do by NCAA rules.  Various media outlets then found story after story of potential additional violations, each time leading Ohio State's Athletic Director, Gene Smith, to cut and paste a version of "this is all news to us" into the school's response.  When confronted with media reports that Tressel had sat on evidence of violations, Smith and University President Gordon Gee believed that a two-game suspension would suffice for Tressel.  It was only after a media firestorm that became hotter as a result of Smith and Gee's comical response that Tressel was fired, a fact that Ohio State later touted to the NCAA as evidence that it took the scandal seriously. 

Penn State's scandal involves conduct that is worse by several orders of magnitude than that committed by the Tat Five, but it follows the same pattern.  University officials receive evidence of wrong-doing, they try to keep the evidence in-house, and then their efforts to keep everything quiet are foiled when the criminal justice system gets involved.  And just as Gee embarrassingly claimed "I only hope that he doesn't fire me" when asked if he would terminate Tressel (a move that Ohio State was ultimately forced to take), Penn State President Graham Spanier issued a press release defending his recently-indicted administrators, another colossal miscalculation of how the media would treat the scandal.  Again, the default response to violations of NCAA rules or, in Penn State's case, the criminal of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was not to report the violations to the proper authorities.  Instead, it was sit on the evidence in the hopes that the problem would just go away and then for the university president to defend those who did the sitting.  Given the environment in which athletic departments operate, we should be upset, but we should not be surprised.

Question Time

The right honorable gentleman from North-Decatur-upon-Lullwater wants to know two things:

1. If Chipper Jones would have been drafted by the Cardinals instead of the Braves, how would his career have been different?  In other words, how would things be different after the inevitable blow-up between Chipper and Tony LaRussa as to Chipper’s reliance on his father for hitting advice?  That advice surely violates one of LaRussa’s myriad unwritten rules for baseball, like “I get a virgin in heaven for every pitching change I make” and “a pitcher can hit a batter only in one of the following 17 situations…”

2. In light of the fact that Bret Bielema is apparently the best coach in the Big Ten now that Jim Tressel is no more, how many head coaches in the SEC are better than the best coach in the Big Ten?  Put another way, would Georgia fans trade on-a-seat-of-indeterminable-warmth Mark Richt for any coach in the Big Ten?  Would LSU fans take any coach in the Big Ten over Les Miles?  Am I being too partisan here or does Jim Tressel’s demise at Ohio State really bring into full view the sorry state of coaching in a conference that has the money to do so much better?

A Simple Question

How exactly does one sell the four-month college basketball regular season when the Final Four is comprised of: (1) the second-place team in the SEC East that went 2-6 on the road in KenPom’s sixth-placed conference; (2) the ninth-place team in the Big East that lost seven of its last 11 games (so much for that theory that you can watch games in February and figure out which teams are peaking); (3) a team that was at one point 6-5 in the Horizon League; and (4) the fourth-place team in the Colonial Athletic Association that finished on a four-game losing streak in that mighty conference?

Dan Wetzel, if this is what you want college football to become, then I think I speak on behalf of most enthusiasts of the sport when I say “no thanks.”

The Same Old Playoff Argument, Michigan and Udinese Edition

For those of you who don’t look forward to looking at the standings of Serie A every Sunday night, Udinese is the hottest team in the major European leagues right now.  Paolo Bandini explains:

A four-horse race? That depends who you ask. "Please, you know [the scudetto] is an impossible goal," said the Udinese manager Francesco Guidolin after his team's 2-0 win over Catania, but the director Gino Pozzo – son of team owner Giampaolo – took a different view. "Dreaming doesn't cost a thing," he mused.

No one could blame the Friuliani for doing that after their recent run. The only unbeaten side left in Serie A this calendar year, Udinese have collected 33 points from the past 13 games and gone seven games without even conceding a goal. Furthermore, they already hold the head-to-head tie-breaker over Inter, and have the chance to get the same over both their other rivals, having already beaten Napoli 3-1 at home and drawn 4-4 at Milan. Their return fixture against the Rossoneri comes on the last day of the season.

Guidolin may be saying that the scudetto (the Italian word for the Serie A championship) is out of reach just to tamp down expectations, but he is also being realistic.  With eight games to play, Udinese are not just six points off the top of the table; they are also looking up at three teams: AC Milan, Inter, and Napoli.  Even if they manage to win out without even a draw, they will still have to rely on three other sides slipping up.  This is interesting to me because if Serie A followed the American model, Udinese would be the favorite in the post-season playoff.

Now, contrast Udinese’s current place to that of my alma mater’s basketball program.  While not quite as hot as the Friulani, Michigan ended the season on a fairly torrid run.  After starting 1-6 in the Big Ten, Michigan’s only losses were a pair of setbacks away from Ann Arbor against #1 Ohio State, a two-point loss at Illinois in which Michigan missed a pair of potentially winning three-point attempts, and a one-point loss to Wisconsin after a Wisconsin player banked in a three at the buzzer.  The Wolverines were a classic young team that takes most of the season to figure out how to play together before gelling for a run through the second half of the schedule.  (Not that Michigan has any experience with that.)  As a reward for this stretch and then a 30-point trouncing of Tennessee, Michigan got a shot at top-seed Duke.  That shot ended with Darius Morris missing an open runner in the lane to force overtime.

As excited as I was about Michigan basketball returning to relevance, the whole spectacle on Sunday struck me as odd.  Michigan was not good for the first half of the Big Ten schedule, as evidenced by a 19-point loss at Indiana and a 14-point loss at Northwestern.  Duke was excellent for the entire season, despite the loss of their best pro prospect.  Duke’s reward for being much better was that they got to play Michigan on a neutral court with one day to prepare for John Beilein’s system.  OK, Duke got to play in Charlotte, but as it turned out, Michigan had a number of UNC fans cheering for them (or at least hectoring the refs for calls that went against Michigan).  How exactly does the NCAA reward teams for being demonstrably superior for a four-month, 30-something game regular season?  In Italy, Udinese doesn’t get to forget an average first half of the season.  In college basketball, Michigan’s past sins were washed away.   

You're Just a Sweet Memory / And it Used to Mean so Much to me

I am a few years older than Brian Cook, so I remember the Fab Five very well.  I remember my first “holy shit!” moment for the Fabs: Webber’s 360 dunk in Columbus, a game in which Michigan played extremely well for a half and then got beaten up in the second stanza.  I went to the team’s first two NCAA Tournament games at the Omni against Temple and East Tennessee State.  (Ah, the good old days when Arizona blowing a first round game was a veritable rite of spring.  Mister Jennings had his way with them.)  The second round game was incidentally the first time that a rival fan told me to “Go Blow!”  So creative.  I remember the overtime of the regional final against Ohio State, which was Michigan’s best period of basketball between the 1989 run to the national title and the 1993 game against Kentucky.  I remember not noticing that the team had unveiled black socks for the opener their sophomore season against Rice at the Houston Summit, but instead being impressed by Juwan Howard’s passing from the high post.  I remember Alan Henderson blocking Webber’s potential game-winning shot in 1993 at Crisler in a game that effectively decided the Big Ten title and then remembering that play every time Henderson festered on the bench for the Hawks while Webber was putting up 24-12-7 games routinely for the Kings.  I remember Michigan almost blowing their sophomore season against UCLA in Tuscon before taking care of George Washington in the game in which the establishment finally turned on them.  (Wait, Jimmy King just dunked the ball and he’s in the face of an opponent?  The horror!) 

Finally, I remember the ‘93 Final Four very, very well.  I remember reading Curry Kirkpatrick’s story in USA Today on the way back from Spring Break, the story about how Michigan didn’t stand a chance against Kentucky.  I remember the Fabs playing their best game in college, showing once and for all that a team could win without relying on threes.  I remember Webber abusing Gimel Martinez after Jamal Mashburn fouled out of the game.  I remember the serious looks that the Fabs had for the final, the shooting performance from Donald Williams that won the Heels the game, the ridiculous performance that Webber put forward that was obscured after the timeout, and the ending.  I had received my rejection letters from Dartmouth and Princeton that day and had already made up my mind that Michigan was ahead of the University of Chicago in the pecking order, so when Webber screwed up and my brother taunted me, I threw a shoe (black, naturally) at him and proclaimed “I’ll see you in Charlotte next year!” before storming off to my room. 

There’s a point to the repetition of “I remember.”  The Fab Five are indelibly etched in my memory and, given the chatter about the 30 for 30 entry about the team, I’m not alone in this respect.  With college basketball teams trending towards the unmemorable as the cult of the coach has fully taken over, there aren’t teams that invade the public consciousness anymore and certainly not like this particular team did.  They had charisma, they fit together as a unit (a fact that the critics who dismissed them as playing streetball never quite grasped), and they inspired strong feelings on both sides of the love/hate divide.  Hell, Duke won the national title last year and I couldn’t even work myself up into a feeling of anger.  It was like the end of Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader becomes a sympathetic character.  When the villain is no longer vile, it’s time to end the series … or come up with an embarrassing prequel involving a platypus with a bad Jamaican accent.

In watching the documentary, I was struck by how much I was reminded of watching highlights of the Clockwork Orange Dutch sides of the 70s.  Think about the parallels.  The Fab Five and the Dutch both lost consecutive finals, but are remembered far more than the teams that vanquished them.  (That said, Jalen Rose was wrong about one thing: I can name the starting five for the Carolina team that vanquished them: Phelps, Williams, Reese, Lynch, Montross.  What’s my prize for wishing that they all die in a fiery blimp accident for all these years?  Also, there are at least two major parallels between ‘78 Argentina and ‘93 UNC: both teams wore light blue and were coached by liberals.  However, Cesar Luis Menotti is an avowed lover of playing attractive football, so he would have little time for the coach who almost ruined basketball with the Four Corners.  I digress.)  Both teams are noted for their style of play and cultural impact.  When I watch highlights of the two teams, I feel intensely bittersweet feelings: joy for my teams at their apex, pain for the ultimate failure to win the big one. 

Sports are full of teams that captured the imagination, but not silverware.  Soccer is especially replete with such examples because the difference between teams that play well and teams that play negatively can have such a big impact on the viewing experience.  Thus, there is a special place for ‘74 Holland, ‘54 Hungary, ‘82 Brazil, and ‘86 Denmark.  In college football, ‘83 Nebraska comes to mind because of Tom Osborne’s decision to go for two in the Orange Bowl.  In the NFL, the Bills teams of the 90s are a great example, although moreso in retrospect as the full extent of Buffalo’s sports trauma has played out.  The Fab Five are a little different in their own, larger-than-life way, but they are best remembered (there’s that word again) as one of the teams whose ultimate losses added to their fame rather than detracting from it.  

Since When Did Coaches Become Baghdad Bob?

Is it me, or have we reached a point where coaches say whatever the hell comes to their minds after losses?  Maybe I’m just having a “get off my lawn!” moment, but growing up, I don’t remember having to listen to coaches make unsupportable complaints every time things didn’t go their way on the field.  Here are three examples from the past week:

1. Sir Alex Ferguson ranted about the officiating at Chelsea on Tuesday because the ref had the temerity not to send off David Luiz and then awarded a soft penalty to Chelsea for the winning goal.  Of course, Sir Alex was not exactly taking into account the fact that United’s goal was scored by Wayne Rooney, a player who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the pitch after elbowing James McCarthy in the head.

2. After a 0-0 draw at Deportivo La Coruna that left his side seven points behind Barcelona in La Liga, Jose Mourinho complained that the league shows favoritism to Barca by giving them more rest after Champions League games.  It turns out that there is no factual basis for the complaint.  Mourinho’s act has grown so tiresome that, according to Phil Ball, even Marca is starting to turn on him.

3. Michigan State was swept by Michigan in basketball for the first time in 14 years.  So how does Tom Izzo respond after his team lost on Saturday and his star point guard tossed a ball at his opposite number?  

“I’ll straighten that (Lucas throwing the ball at Morris) out but at the same time, (Morris) going for a layup with 2 seconds left and talking a lot stuff all game, including at our place, maybe he (Morris) deserved it.”

Yes, Tom, I’m sure that you would have reacted the same way if a hapless Michigan player would have thrown a ball at Mateen Cleaves after you left him in to get an assist record in a 114-63 rout.  And I wasn’t aware that you have a rule against players yapping at opponents.

Yes, I know I’ve picked three particular coaches and teams that I dislike and there are probably examples of coaches whom I do like who have made similar complaints, but does anyone else get the sense that there sorts of unjustifiable excuses are more common now?  One possibility is that coaches have always made these “we either win or we got screwed” defenses and we only know about them now because they are immediately the subject of blogosphere and message board chatter.  In the old days, Izzo’s remarks would have slipped into the ether.  Now, they can be dissected by interested fans of rivals within minutes after being made.  A second possibility is that in a media-saturated environment, coaches have thinner skin because they are criticized with a volume that did not exist before.  A third possibility is that increased attention creates greater possibility for a coach to create an us-versus-them dynamic.  This is a Mourinho specialty: say a series of ludicrous things to rile up just about everyone in the league, then feast off the resulting siege mentality.

To use a legal term, I think I’m an egg-shell plaintiff when it comes to patently stupid arguments.  Because I take the process of making good arguments very seriously (“not seriously enough,” you’re probably snickering right now), it offends me to see coaches at the tops of their professions throwing out whatever claim comes into their minds.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to start complaining about how ballpark hot dogs don’t taste the same as they did when I was a child.

OK, Smarty Pants, Explain That Other Sport

In the process of bagging on the Big Ten for being populated with cheap athletic directors who don’t exploit the league’s revenue advantages by hiring coaches with credentials, it occurs to me that I ought to take a crack at explaining why the league is doing much better in basketball.  KenPom has the league atop his ratings this year, while Sagarin puts the Big Ten a hair behind the Big East in second place.  Sagarin had the Big Ten as the best conference in basketball in 2008-09, so the league’s success isn’t necessarily a one-year blip.  (Caveat: this is the first year that KenPom has had the Big Ten in the top two and only the second year in which it has had the league in the top three, so by that measure, 2010-11 is indeed a outlier.  If you go by those numbers, then this year is simply the product of the Big Ten having a number of very experienced teams.)  So how do I explain the Big Ten’s success in basketball as compared to its wasted potential in football?  I’m glad you asked:

1. College basketball doesn't penalize lack of proximity to talent.  Take the best programs in college basketball: Duke, UNC, Kansas, and Kentucky.  (Historically speaking, we can include Indiana.)  While these states are basketball hotbeds, they aren’t exactly population centers brimming with talent.  Those programs all recruit nationally and they are able to do that because they only need three players per year.  College football is more of a numbers game, so when a top program is putting together a recruiting class, it is harder to assemble 25 players from all over than it is to assemble three or four.  That would explain why college football powers are found in Florida, Texas, and California, but the same is not true in college basketball (with the exception of UCLA).  Also, the top college basketball players are used to traveling with their AAU teams, so going far away for college doesn't strike them as unusual.  It’s not as hard for Roy Williams to convince Marvin Williams to cross the country to play in Chapel Hill when Marvin had already been a jet-setter in high school.

1a. All that said, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Illinois all recruit locally and they all have good local talent bases.  The explanation might be as simple as the fact that the Midwest is more into basketball, culturally speaking, and the South is more into football.  I'd bet that the Midwest does a lot better in the Rivals 100 in basketball as opposed to football.  Michigan, for example, produces far more basketball talent than football talent.  Illinois and Indiana are the same.  The only major football talent-producing states in the Midwest are Ohio and Pennsylvania and the latter isn’t quite what it used to be.

2. College basketball has evolved in such a way that teams can compensate for lack of talent, especially on defense.  There are two major examples: (1) mugging players away from the ball (a.k.a. Big Ten defense); and (2) flopping under the basket to prevent opponents from scoring on drives to the basket (a.k.a. Duke defense, although the Devils don’t do this as much as they did in the Battier era).  Think about a football equivalent.  If officials started allowing defensive backs to grab receivers with impunity, don’t you think that the Big Ten would do better in match-ups with the SEC?  Ditto for offensive tackles tackling defensive ends.  The SEC has better athletes than the Big Ten does, but that advantage would be negated in an anything-goes environment.  (Caveat: this explanation reflects my status as a fallen college basketball fan, so take it with a grain of salt.  I don’t watch enough college basketball to make the claim with confidence.)   

3. We can predict with greater certainty whether a college football coach will do well because the nature of the game gives us a better read on a college football coach’s merit.  Because football coaches call plays on every play (or at least hire and supervise the coordinators who do so), they have more control over events than their basketball equivalents do.  Thus, a college football coach’s record will be a better reflection of his coaching ability, whereas a college basketball coach’s record will be more dependent on talent.  Thus, hiring the best available (and most expensive) college football coach is more of a sure thing than hiring a blue chip college basketball coach.  (Caveat: if basketball success is more dependent on talent, then hiring a college hoops coach who can attract talent is a sure way to win.  See: Calipari, John and Pitino, Rick.)  The Big Ten has done well with in-house promotions and hires from the local lower tiers: Matt Painter, Bo Ryan, Bruce Weber, and Thad Matta.  In fact, the Big Ten coaches who came in with the best credentials – Tom Crean and Tubby Smith – have produced underwhelming results (although both are relatively new in their jobs and Crean inherited an absolute disaster).  The Big Ten would not and does not do as well with local promotions in football. 

Fool on the Hill

Mocking unhinged rants from John Feinstein is like shooting fish in a barrel, but Blutarsky has unearthed another gem. To pile on, I'm amused by Feinstein's claim that the NCAA has the leverage to force a college football playoff over the wishes of its most powerful members, specifically to carry on a tournament with Butler and Cornell, but not Kentucky or Duke.

Let's imagine you are a lawyer for CBS negotiating and drafting the agreement with NCAA to pay billions for the right to show the NCAA Tournament. CBS is paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to draft an agreement that will protect its interests. The agreement has to cover contingencies so CBS isn't paying billions for a significantly devalued tournament. Do you think that maybe, possibly you'd include language setting forth that CBS doesn't have to pay for the Tournament if all of the teams with significant cache and TV followings (you know, the ones who might interest advertisers?) have seceded and formed their own, competing tournament? Put another way, do you prefer not to commit malpractice?

John, I'm going to make this very simple for you: people watch games because of teams and players, not organizations. The NFL couldn't put semipro players in uniforms and still get ratings. Thus, the BCS conferences hold the valuable chips. The NCAA works for them, not the other way around. There is a name for the NCAA without its most powerful members: the League of Nations.

A Paean to Bob Huggins

Kudos to Jason Zengerle for that rarest of pieces: a defense of Bob Huggins. OK, I'll admit to being drawn to the piece because Zengerle (a UNC grad) attacks Coach K's pretentious claims to being a great leader with pearls of wisdom for all walks of life, rather than just a good basketball coach:

And yet, despite all of this—or, rather, because of it—Huggins is a surprisingly refreshing figure* in the world of big-time college basketball, which is currently filled with coaches who are constantly pretending to be so much more than just coaches. Krzyzewski, of course, is the most egregious example of this—with his whole “leader of men” schtick that, in addition to his lucrative endorsement career, has led to the creation of an actual Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke’s business school. But pretty much every successful college coach these days now considers himself a guru who has valuable lessons to impart about not just how to beat a 2-3 zone but how to have a successful business and successful life. To pull a couple titles from the ever growing bookshelf of coach lit, consider Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun’s A Passion to Lead: Seven Leadership Secrets for Success in Business, Sports, and Life, which, presumably, offers a slightly quicker path to success than Louisville coach Rick Pitino’s Lead to Succeed: Ten Traits of Great Leadership in Business and Life. Even a rogue like Kentucky’s John Calipari—the only coach in college basketball history to have Final Fours vacated at two different schools due to rules violations—has recast himself as a philanthropist , starting his own charitable foundation for children and organizing a “Hoops for Haiti” telethon that earned him a congratulatory call from President Obama.

I think it's fair to say that if a coach "writes" a book about leadership skills designed for a middle manager to consume on an airplane, then that creates a rebuttable presumption that I am not going to like that coach. Put another way, I can ask myself this question about coaches and their commercial ventures: would Woody Hayes or Bear Bryant do this? Can anyone see the Bear writing a piece of treacly nonsense like "Lead to Succeed?" F*** you and buy a Ford!



My only complaint about Zengerle's argument is that his reference to John Calipari at the end seems forced. There is a big distinction to be made between coaches who put out vapid tomes on business skills in order to make a buck and/or massage their egos and coaches who spend time on philanthropic ventures. The description of Calipari fits into the latter category. (This is not to say that Coach K, Calhoun, and Pitino don't do charitable activities.)

Fundamenally, most of us want to find something genuine in the world of sports. So much of what we are supposed to consume as sports fans is sanitized, pre-packaged, and massaged to remove any interesting content. Tiger Woods is the best example of this phenomenon, but there are countless examples. I liked Bob Knight from a young age because he seemed like that rarest of college basketball coaches without a filter. I liked Steve Spurrier during his Florida years for the same reason. I never liked Huggins because of the zero percent graduation rate at Cincinnati (and I probably never will), but Zengerle's article makes me think of him in a slightly different light.

Even with my Statler & Waldorf Attitude Towards the Tournament...

This Kansas State-Xavier game is the bee's knees. Gus Johnson is going to look like one of the Duke brothers by the time this is over. I'm just not sure if he'll be screaming "turn these machines back on!!!" or he'll be on a stretcher. On Jordan Crawford's three at the end of regulation, he call was this: "Crawford's gotta hurry! Aaah!?! AAAAHHH!!! He tied it!!!!" I don't agree with Bill Simmons on everything, but he's spot on on his Gus Crush.

If Xavier plays Butler, then I won't know what to do because I'm always confusing those two programs as the two feisty mid-majors from the Midwest who wear navy blue.

If Bruno Ganz is unavailable for Downfall: The Prequel, Frank Martin can stand in for him. He's, uh, passionate. I was seriously wondering whether he was going to pull a reverse Sprewell at the end of regulation when his team fouled a shooter taking a three.

This is like a game that I would have played my myself in our driveway when I was a kid.

And somewhere, Mitch Richmond is smiling.

I'm Going to Start Swearing

I don't like Michael Rosenberg. Although we attended the University of Michigan at the same time, I can't say that I've ever met him, so this isn't based on any personal interaction. I can't say that he smells bad, he has a weak handshake, or he kicks homeless people when they're sleeping. What I can say is that I don't like his written product at all. For evidence, I give you this piece on John Calipari.

Before reading the piece, keep in mind that Rosenberg authored a ludicrously unfair attack on Rich Rodriguez's Michigan program in August, a piece that willfully obscured the distinction between countable and non-countable hours. A piece that preyed on unsuspecting freshmen in a manner that would make Urban Meyer purple. A piece that a proper Michigan grad/journalist referred to as "journalistic malpractice."

If Rosenberg wants to cast himself as a defender of purity in college athletics, then that's one thing. He can rant and rave about cheating coaches until the cows come home. I can disagree with him and chastise him for writing unfair articles, but at least Rosenberg would have a consistent worldview for his readers to accept or reject. However, it's quite another thing to write pieces as if Rodriguez is the devil and then write the following about John Calipari:

REFUSE TO LOSE. It sounds like such a simple, inspirational phrase for a team -- and it can be. But it also describes the man. He's a scrapper, and will weigh all of his options besides losing.

Calipari has done the most remarkable coaching job of this season, and nobody is close. Think about it: He convinced John Wall, Xavier Henry and DeMarcus Cousins to come to Memphis, inserted clauses into their letters of intent so they could go somewhere else if Calipari left, convinced Memphis to keep its Notice of Allegations from the NCAA quiet for three months, took the Kentucky job before anybody knew about that notice, then convinced Wall and Cousins to join him in Lexington. That is refusing to lose.

(Rosenberg is factually wrong in a number of respects in this paragraph, starting with the fact that Wall never verballed to Memphis, let alone signed a letter of intent, but what else did we expect from Rosenberg? To paraphrase Francisco Scaramanga, facts never were his strong suit.)

Or this:

Calipari just keeps rolling. Since he first arrived on the national stage, Calipari has changed offenses, stars and schools. He has gone from the hot new coach that everybody loved too much to the crafty veteran that people hate too much.

When people attack him, he fights back. Refuse to lose. But he'll open his home to fans and his program to anybody who can help him win.

There are plenty of people in college basketball who think it will all come crashing down around Calipari -- that we will witness the professional death of a salesman. I don't know. We won't know for years. All I know is that I filled out my bracket the other day. I'm picking Kentucky.

Sorry, Mom, but I'm about to swear. Are you fucking kidding me? Rich Rodriguez is a dirty bastard because your investigation uncovered the fact that Michigan was practicing five hours on certain days instead of four and quality control assistants were watching some summer skeleton drills. John Calipari is an inspiring fighter even though he has left both UMass and Memphis on probation and came within a whisker of winning a national title with multiple players who apparently cheated on their SATs. If you're going to be a moralist, then be a moralist. Don't pick on one guy for running a stop sign and laud an arsonist because the arsonist is a smooth salesman and and the bad driver isn't. Your credibility as a writer sorta depends on whether readers think that your opinions are based on something other than completely subjective judgments about people.

An unrelated note: Rosenberg unintentionally does a great job of illustrating why the NCAA Tournament has killed college basketball with this paragraph in his paean to the Big Dance:

The NCAA tournament is never overhyped because from November to March, most of the country doesn't pay attention to college basketball. You might watch your team. You might watch your conference. But the college basketball season starts during the baseball playoffs, stays underwater for the NFL playoffs and finally comes up for air at the end of the regular season. I mean, Baylor, West Virginia and Kansas State are all top-three seeds in this tournament, and I have yet to hear anybody say they have been inundated with Baylor, Kansas State and West Virginia basketball talk for four months and they're sick of it.

Yes, the Tournament is great because we no longer know anything about the teams playing! We have destroyed the village to save it!

Duel of the Jews, Basketball Edition

Before you read Stewart Mandel's claim that the term "mid-major" should be retired, here are four statistics for you:

1. No team from outside of a BCS conference has won the national championship in college basketball since UNLV twenty years ago. (The Tarkanian-coached UNLV teams had, uh, certain attributes that make them distinct from any current program. It appears that the mid-major who came closest to ending the drought - 2008 Memphis - also shared some of those attributes.)

2. Here are the seeds of the last 20 NCAA champions:

2009 North Carolina - 1
2008 Kansas - 1
2007 Florida - 1
2006 Florida - 3
2005 North Carolina - 1
2004 UConn - 2
2003 Syracuse - 3
2002 Maryland - 1
2001 Duke - 1
2000 Michigan State - 1
1999 UConn - 1
1998 Kentucky - 2
1997 Arizona - 4
1996 Kentucky - 1
1995 UCLA - 1
1994 Arkansas - 1
1993 North Carolina - 1
1992 Duke - 1
1991 Duke - 2
1990 UNLV - 1

14 #1 seeds, three #2 seeds, two #3 seeds, and one #4 seed. '88 Kansas, '85 Villanova, and '83 N.C. State are in the distant past and even those three noted Cinderellas come from the Big Eight, the Big East, and the ACC. If you want a good piece of evidence for my notion that the NCAA Tournament should be 16 teams instead of 64, this is it.

3. We are one year removed from an NCAA Tournament in which all of the 1, 2, and 3 seeds made the Sweet Sixteen.

4. We are two years removed from a Final Four that featured four 1 seeds.

So yes, Stewart, in light of that evidence, the distinction between schools that belong to the six BCS conferences and those that don't is "mystical." Mandel shows this bizarre ability to acknowledge reality:

As we move into Stage 2 of this championship, the favorites will remain those schools with the number 1 in front of them -- Syracuse, Kentucky and Duke. None were remotely threatened in their first two contests, and surely, we must assume, the clock will run out at some point for our friends at Saint Mary's, Cornell and Northern Iowa. It always does.

and then forget it a few paragraphs later:

But when the "best teams" aren't all that different than "the next-best teams," upsets happen. Here's guessing we've hardly seen the last of them in this, the nation's most egalitarian sporting event.

Mandel's line of thinking annoys me in two separate ways. First, it is a really good illustration of the recency fallacy. He takes one weekend of results and makes broad conclusions, completely ignoring a bevy of relevant facts that demolish his hypothesis. The clear trend in recent years has been for chalk to prevail in the NCAA Tournament. Northern Iowa beating Kansas and St. Mary's beating Villanova doesn't change that. Second, Mandel is feeding the media narrative that the NCAA Tournament is exciting and unpredictable. It may be exciting for people who want to reduce a season to three weeks, but the unpredictability factor is seriously overrated. Yes, there are upsets every year in the first two rounds (some years more than others), but at the end of the road, there is a team from a major school standing in the falling confetti in a dome somewhere. We like to imagine that the NCAA Tournament embodies the American Dream and that the little guy can go from nothing to glory, but just about all of the time, the little guy ends up face down in a pool with "The World Is Mine" rotating above his head.

In a B&B First...

I am going to express a modicum of sympathy for the Duke University basketball program. Duke just won the ACC regular season and tournament titles. They are 29-5 and, according to Ken Pomeroy's ratings, the best team in the country. They drew a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. So what is their reward for a season of excellence? A bracket in which they could end up playing Texas A&M and then Baylor in Houston.

Pitt faces a similar issue. The Panthers are 24-8 and, according to the NCAA, one of the 12 best teams in the country. What is their reward? A potential Sweet Sixteen matchup with BYU in Salt Lake City. (One caveat: since I mentioned KenPom's ratings earlier, I should mention that Pomeroy has BYU as the seventh-best team in the country, so this is not an injustice according to my preferred methodology. That said, the NCAA doesn't use KenPom's ratings, so by their standards, they screwed Pitt.)

The NBA, NHL, and MLB all have interminably long regular seasons followed by short, overvalued playoffs, but at least those three leagues have the decency to give incentives to teams in the form of homefield/court/ice advantage. If the Lakers have a great season, then they are rewarded by getting to play extra home games in the playoffs. College basketball doesn't even have that reward. Teams play all year for a chance at being slightly closer to home for the couple games that will decide whether their seasons are successes or failures, but even if a team does everything right and gets a #1 seed, there is still a reasonable chance that it will end up in someone else's backyard.

Moreover, the same commercial pressure that is pushing the NCAA to further expand an already gaudy tournament also causes the NCAA to put teams like Duke and Pitt is difficult situations. It cannot be a coincidence that Baylor and Texas A&M are both in the South bracket when the NCAA needs to sell thousands of tickets for a regional at Reliant Stadium. Duke ends up being penalized by the NCAA's need to maximize revenue. Couldn't the NCAA have adopted a more neutral way to draw Texans to the regional, like say burning Thomas Jefferson in effigy?

I will now return to my normal Vicious Little Ferret jokes.

Unintentional Irony, Mike Lupica-style

So I was watching the Sports Reporters on the elliptical this morning and the opening segment was about the plans to expand the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams. Bob Ryan and Mike Lupica lit into the idea, complaining that it would ruin the "perfect sporting event" and that it would devalue the regular season. Ironically, these are the same two people who cannot discuss college football at any point in the season without moaning about the fact that there is no playoff. I found a few things about their wildly inconsistent worldviews to be amusing:

1. They complained that expansion of the Big Dance is driven by coaches (because of the pressure to get bids) and the combination of the NCAA and the networks (which want more product to sell). Unwittingly, they illustrated the best case against a college football playoff. (For the record, I'm in favor of a 4-8 team playoff, but I'd like a constitutional amendment capping the field at eight. I'd rather have the current system than a 16-team playoff.)

2. Which arguments that Ryan and Lupica made against expanding the tournament from 65 to 96 could not be made to contract the tournament to 32? Or to 16? (I would be a much bigger college basketball fan if the tournament were 16 teams.)

3. It was not an accident that the panel spent the whole first segment discussing the potential expansion of the Tournament, but there was no discussion of actual college basketball teams and games in 2010. That wouldn't be because the "perfect sporting event" has killed the regular season, would it? Lupica's contribution was to mispronounce "Louisville" (the "s" is silent, Mike) and to refer to a non-existent school named "Missouri Valley State" as the typical Cinderella. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the NCAA Tournament is loved by people like Lupica and Ryan who spend the most of their time catering to the pro-sports obsessions of their readers because it allows them to distill an entire season down to three weeks. It's a sports writer's path of least resistance.

This Is Why You Fail

Imagine an SEC football coach saying the equivalent of the following from John Calipari:

John Calipari is one win away from clinching a Southeastern Conference championship in his first season at Kentucky -- just what he was brought in to do.

That's why his answer was swift and decisive when Calipari was asked Friday what winning the school's 44th conference title would mean: "Nothing."

The No. 2 Wildcats (27-1, 12-1), college basketball's winningest program, would assure themselves of at least a share of the championship by beating Tennessee on Saturday. They would get the championship outright if Vanderbilt also loses at Arkansas.

"I've always taken the approach that it's about the seed in the NCAA tournament," Calipari said. "If you want me to be honest about how I think and what we're doing to prepare, that's what it is. The SEC tournament is about our seed in the NCAA tournament."

Calipari is an unethical twit. He's made Kentucky hateable again, which is a public service, in a way. That said, he just did a wonderful job of distilling why college basketball has killed itself: it has rendered a three-and-a-half month regular season completely meaningless by making everything about a three-week tournament in March. It has produced a legion of casual fans who tune into the sport in March so they can stumble their way through the banal exercise of picking a bracket, but it has killed any incentive for people without a rooting interest in one of the contenders from being anything other than extremely casual about the sport. So thanks, John. You make me feel better about no longer caring for a sport that excited me as a kid.

Team of the Decade?

The poll question on ESPN.com this morning is an interesting one: which college team has been the most dominating in its sport this decade: UConn women's basketball, USC football, Florida football, or UNC basketball? Being a sucker for polls, I gave it some thought. I first ruled out UConn because I don't care about women's basketball. I know that the Huskies have been dominant, but it is easy to be dominant in a sport with lower interest and a more limited talent pool, just like it's easier for Rangers and Celtic to dominate in Scotland as compared to the bigger leagues. Plus, I'm sure that there are some minor sports where one school has been more dominant than UConn has been in women's hoops. (Colorado in skiing, perhaps?)

I ruled out Florida football because they were coached by Ron Zook for three years this decade. While their current peak may be a little higher than USC's peak in the middle of the aughts, they took about four years off: the three Zook years and Urban's first season when they were re-tooling. For the same reason, I ruled out UNC because of Matt Doherty. That left me with USC football, which has been consistently excellent since 2002.

The poll question does raise an interesting dynamic for this season in that Florida and USC could be playing for the title of team of the decade. It's too bad that Mark Sanchez didn't come back to school, because a season in which Florida and USC were #1 and #2 in August and then went on a collision course all year could be very interesting, not unlike 2005 when USC and Texas hurtled towards one another for four months before putting on an epic title game. LSU should also be in the discussion, since a national title and SEC title for the Tigers in 2009 would give them three national titles, four SEC titles, and five BCS bowl wins in the decade. (One caveat to that last number: all four of LSU's BCS wins have come in virtual home games in the Superdome.)

Here are the rankings for winning percentage as we enter the last year of the decade:

1. Boise State - 0.85217
2. Texas - 0.84348
3. Oklahoma - 0.84298
4. Southern Cal - 0.80870
5. Ohio State - 0.79825
6. Georgia - 0.77586
7. Louisiana State - 0.76923
8. Virginia Tech - 0.75424
9. Florida - 0.75000
10. Texas Christian - 0.74775

It looks like team of the decade isn't going to be an especially clear-cut question. Going into the 1999 season, the choice was fairly clear:

1. Florida State - 0.87838
2. Nebraska - 0.86161
3. Florida - 0.83482
4. Tennessee - 0.81982
5. Penn State - 0.79091
6. Texas A&M - 0.78571
7. Miami-Florida - 0.78302
8. Ohio State - 0.77928
9. Michigan - 0.76818
10. Notre Dame - 0.73394

Florida State had a national title and had finished in the top four every season. Nebraska had won three national titles and had put together one of the most dominating five-year stretches in modern college football history. The team that had the better season would likely end up winning the decade. I suppose that Florida was also in the discussion, as a conference and national title in 1999 would have given the Gators two national titles and six SEC titles (seven if you include 1990). In the end, Florida State went unbeaten and won the national title to claim the team of the decade title. As much as the sight of watching a young Michael Vick duel Florida State was epic, it would have been cool to see Florida State play Nebraska with history on the line.

Although USC and Florida were the two contenders at first glance for team of the aughts, that might have been a little bit of recency coloring my judgment (or maybe I shouldn't rely on ESPN to decide who is NOW!!!). LSU certainly deserves consideration. If Texas, Oklahoma, or Ohio State were to win the title this year, then those programs would have a pair of national titles to match LSU, Florida, and USC and they would also likely have an advantage in winning percentage. That said, Texas has only won one conference title in the decade and Oklahoma and Ohio State have had well-publicized struggles in BCS games, so these three appear to be pretenders to the crown. I'd also bet that they would be dragged down a little if we looked at computer rankings because their strength of schedule would not be on par with the SEC teams.

It's also interesting to me that LSU and Florida are on my short list for team of the decade because of their multiple national titles, but Georgia ranks ahead of both of them in terms of winning percentage. How different would our discussion be if Georgia had found its way into the national title game in 2002 and then won it? Moreover, if we accept the maxim that winning a national title requires a significant amount of luck, isn't Georgia just unlucky? After all, Georgia went 12-1 in 2002 and didn't get to play for the national title because two major conference teams went unbeaten, but LSU and Florida got to play for the title in 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008 with one loss (and in one case, two losses). And that's before we get to the point that Georgia could have been a one-loss team in 2005 absent the D.J. Shockley injury, but they still would have been frozen out of the title game because they would have again had the misfortune of being a one-loss SEC champion in a year in which two major programs went unbeaten.

Finally, it bears noting that only two of the top ten from 1990-98 are also on the 2000-2008 list: Florida and Ohio State. If you expand the analysis to the top twenty from the two decades, then the holdover list expands to six: Florida, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Tennessee, and Michigan. The latter three hold spots 18-20 this decade and all three stand a decent chance of not finishing in the top 20 for 2000-09, as none of them are projected to be especially strong in 2009.

The point is that college football is a little more fluid than I give it credit for being. While a program can be excellent from season to season, it's hard to be strong from decade to decade. While it's possible in spring 2009 to look at the recruiting bases for Florida, USC, and LSU and assume that they will always be good, these are the same programs that employed Ron Zook, Paul Hackett, and Curley Hallman. Nothing is certain.

Duke : College Basketball :: __________ : College Football

Let's review Duke's NCAA Tournament performances since making the Final Four in 2004:

2009 - #2 seed, lost in Sweet Sixteen by 23 to #3 seed Villanova

2008 - #2 seed, lost in second round by six to #7 seed West Virginia

2007 - #6 seed, lost in first round by two to #11 seed Virginia Commonwealth

2006 - #1 seed, lost in Sweet Sixteen by six to #4 seed LSU

2005 - #1 seed, lost in Sweet Sixteen by ten to #5 seed Michigan State

Here are some stats for your consideration:

• Duke has won one tournament game played outside of the State of North Carolina since winning the 2004 Atlanta Regional as a #1 seed against #5 seed Illinois and #7 seed Xavier. [Thank you to an anonymous commenter for pointing out a mistake in my original stat here. I had overlooked a one-point win over Belmont in Washington, D.C.]


• Duke has not won a tournament game against a team seeded #4 or higher since winning the 2001 national title game against Arizona.


• Based on their seeds over the past five years, Duke would be expected to have won 15 tournament games. (This assumes that they would lose their opening game at the Final Four.) Instead, Duke has won seven.

Leave aside the fact that Coach K was once a great tournament coach and this resume ought to cause Duke to be branded as world class chokers. My understanding is that Duke still hauls in McDonald's All-Americans. Has Coach K turned into a talent waster? Is he Guy Lewis? Bill Frieder? Is Duke's status as the emperor with no clothes common knowledge in college basketball circles and I just think this is an underreported story because I follow the sport very casually? As someone who just gets his content from major national sources - ESPN, Sports Illustrated, etc. - I still hear Duke discussed as a college basketball royalty even though they haven't played like it for years. Is the ACC currently sitting on declining coaching legends in both football and basketball?

Come to think of it, I wonder what changed in the ACC after the 2004 season that might cause Duke to go downhill...

Speaking of football parallels, there are two obvious comparisons: Ohio State and Oklahoma. The Buckeyes and Sooners regularly lose big postseason games, although they are not in the same position as Duke for two reasons. First, the college football regular season is a much bigger deal than the college basketball regular season, so Ohio State's and Oklahoma's success before January matters more. Second, there's no shame for the Bucks or Sooners in losing national title games to Florida, LSU, and USC. If Duke were getting to the Final Four and losing to UConn, UNC, and Kansas, then that would be one thing. It's quite another that they are losing to VCU and West Virginia. Duke could counter by saying that talent is more evenly distributed in college basketball and the post-season is longer, so it's more likely that a college hoops program would get upset in March.

The Ohio State-Duke comparison works better for a few reasons:

1. They both get criticized for lacking athleticism (read: too white).


2. They both get criticized for being media darlings with high-profile backers on ESPN. Thankfully for Ohio State fans, Kirk Herbstreit is better looking and far less annoying than Dick Vitale. Herbstreit also makes a pretense of not openly rooting for Ohio State.


3. They both play in overrated conferences. I know the ACC is supposed to be the bees' knees in hoops, but are there any major programs in the league other than Duke and UNC? The middle class of the conference - Georgia Tech, Virginia, N.C. State, Wake Forest, and Maryland - have all been down since 2005.


4. I hate them both and prefer that they end up in the same flaming ship.

Ten Things I'm Excited About

With the economy in the crapper for the foreseeable future, this seems like as good a time as any to think positive thoughts. So, without further introduction, here are ten things I'm eagerly anticipating in the world of sports:

1. Don Sutton calling Braves games again. The past six years have been death by a thousand paper cuts as everything that made the Braves unique have gone out the window. Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz, Andruw, Schuerholz, Skip, Pete, the Bravo Club, winning divisions, etc. Don's return will be a little slice of nostalgia for the decade when everything was great from April to September.

2. Duke's inevitable exit to a lower seeded, more athletic team. The NCAA Tournament doesn't officially start until a Duke player is crying his eyes out on a Thursday or Friday night in the second week of the Tournament. Greg Paulus, come on down!

3. The NFL Draft. It's such an odd feeling to have confidence in the Falcons' decision-maker. That confidence is buoyed, of course, by the team's decision to play hardball with Keith Brooking.

4. Josh Smith's first dunk in a home playoff game. I nominate Udonis Haslem as the dunkee.

5. The Copa del Rey Final. As I was mocking a Manchester United friend for the fact that United inevitably play boring finals, I realized that Barcelona have played exactly one final this decade. (I'm excluding meaningless games like the World Club Championship, the Spanish Supercup, and the European Supercup.) Thus, Barca's date with Athletic Bilbao (which ought to be re-named the "Who hates Fascist Real the most?" Cup) will be something exciting.

6. Terrell Owens' first interview after being cut. I'm sure that Stephen A. Smith is working the phones with T.O. as we speak. I'm also sure that Owens will be circumspect in his comments and wouldn't dream of throwing his teammates under the proverbial bus.

7. Liverpool losing at Old Trafford. 1990 was a long, long time ago.

8. Spring practice reports. There's nothing so exciting as the inevitable "Player X who has never seen the field before is tearing it up!" noise that comes out of every spring practice. We all manage to banish the thought that Player X is tearing it up against his own teammates. G-d help my sanity the first time I hear "Tate Forcier can [insert quarterback skill] much better than Steven Threet ever could!"

9. My friend Ben predicting an undefeated season for Georgia. It's a rite of summer. He's already thinking that the Dawgs are going to win 11 games. By May, that number will creep to 12 and by July, he'll reach 14-0. It's good to be friends with Pangloss.

10. Another Nadal-Federer final at Wimbledon. I'm not a tennis fan like I was when I was a kid, but the Wimbledon final last year completely sucked me in. I'd be very disappointed if there isn't a sequel.

How about a Fourth Reason

The audience for USA-Mexico on Univision dwarfed the audience for Duke-Carolina on ESPN.

You have to appreciate the passion of Mexican futbol fans. El Tri are playing miserably right now. They're coached by Sven Goran Eriksson, who is most noted for an inability to beat Big Phil Scolari. Eriksson has one foot out the door already. Mexico's captain starts for Barcelona and was last seen getting red-carded in Santander, a feat that he repeated on Wednesday night. Despite all of their struggles, Mexicans turned on their TVs in droves to watch the match against El Tri's arch-rival. You have to admire that loyalty.

I'd be very interested to know what ESPN's upper management thinks of those numbers. Duke-UNC is supposed to be the pinnacle of the college basketball regular season, but it just drew a little more than half the audience of a World Cup qualifying match. Duke-UNC's 3.3 million viewers was also a little more than half of the audience for the Cavs-Lakers game on Sunday, despite the fact that the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels were both in the top five coming into the game. I understand that college basketball is a valuable property to fill up airtime, but how much value is bound up in a high-volume product that doesn't get ratings? I don't know what the alternative is. It isn't as if ESPN can put hockey games on and get bigger numbers. My overall point is that college basketball's regular season doesn't move the needle and it probably gets more attention from ESPN than the ratings can justify.