The following is this week's column from The Washington Post on the Jets saving the playoff weekend followed by an article on UVA basketball and its coach, Tony Bennett ---------------
If these past two weekends were the best the NFL has to offer, maybe there's a chance for the USFL to make a comeback.
Six of the eight games were enough to make one think about switching to Dick Vitale calling a women's basketball game. Or Dick Vitale talking about calling a women's basketball game.
Wild-card weekend gave us Packers-Cardinals and three games that even fans of the winners would be hard-pressed to watch to the end. The Ravens-Patriots game was over before Bill Belichick had a chance to get his hoodie into position.
Surely the divisional playoff weekend would be better. Except it wasn't: It was worse. The winning teams were ahead by a combined 35 points at halftime Saturday and never looked back, and the only real suspense in the over-hyped Cowboys-Vikings matchup was when the "Can Wade Phillips survive?" talk would begin.
Click here for the rest of the column: Rex Ryan's Jets save NFL playoffs from tedium
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This really wasn't the way Tony Bennett had it planned. It isn't that he didn't love basketball. The game has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember, which tends to happen when you're a coach's son. The gym is as much a part of your boyhood as your mom's kitchen table. Growing up while his dad, Dick, was coaching high school ball, then National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics ball and then Division I ball, he was the classic gym rat, the kid who makes himself a great shooter by spending hours and hours alone with a ball and a backboard.
Bennett would have been something straight out of "Hoosiers," if he had been in Indiana instead of Wisconsin. But coaching wasn't in his blood. Playing was what he was about.
"When I was a kid, the last thing in the world I thought I'd ever do was coach," he said, relaxing in the Virginia coaches' lounge at John Paul Jones Arena on Wednesday after the Cavaliers had upset 20th-ranked Georgia Tech. "I loved being a player. I guess in my mind I was going to play forever -- go from college to the NBA and just stay. I saw close-up what a roller-coaster ride coaching was for my dad and for my sister Kathi [who won a Division III national title at Wisconsin-Oshkosh and later coached at Indiana] and I said, 'That's not for me.' Then I got hurt and things changed."
Click here for the rest of the column: Finding direction on an unexpected path
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1 comment:
Thanks for the heads up on Mr. Bennett's journey at UVA. Here on the West Coast I was wondering why WSU had fallen so hard, I guess that is a good reason.
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