Review of the weekend – bowl games, outdoor hockey, college basketball and a 4am firing

Let’s start today with the big news of the weekend: The Islanders, after blowing a three goal lead on Saturday night, won a shootout against the Atlanta Thrashers to pick up two critical points.

Okay, just kidding. But I love having the NHL center ice package even though watching the Islanders some nights is about as much fun as listening to Mark Jones say that one of Navy’s football players will be reporting to “Quan-TEE-co,” this spring. Several people pointed out to me on Friday that I forgot to mention that one. I’m also told that Jones and his partner Bob Davie showed up in the TV booth not long before kickoff and didn’t have time to go through the usual ritual of having the SID’s (at least the Navy SID) make sure they knew how to pronounce all the players names.

Thus Davie managed to mispronounce the name of (his words) “the greatest captain in Navy football history,” Ross Posposil. Or, as Davie called him, “Poposil.”

Oh, one more thing: a friend who is a Missouri fan tells me they botched a number of Missouri players’ names too so let’s give them points for consistency. Then, during The Alamo Bowl, Davie kept going on about the “passion,” of the Texas Tech fans because they’re all so angry about Mike Leach being fired. What I heard directed at Adam James didn’t exactly sound like passion.

Okay, let’s move on to a review of the first three days of the New Year.

And, for a moment, let’s stay with hockey.

When the NHL started the “Winter Classic,” in 2008 I thought it was terrific. The whole spectacle worked. I also thought that by the third year or the fourth year the uniqueness would wear off and it would become an over-hyped regular season hockey game.

At least for me, it hasn’t happened yet.

Friday afternoon I kept wanting to hit the remote and switch back to Penn State-LSU or Florida State-West Virginia because both those games certainly had intriguing story lines and, in the case of Penn State-LSU a dramatic ending. But the setting—hockey in Fenway Park!—was just irresistible. The NHL and NBC have gotten lucky with the weather each year: cold enough to make it really feel like a game on a rink somewhere in Canada but not so much snow that you couldn’t play.

That said, the whole concept just works. Even though I can’t help but curse the day Mike Milbury decided to draft Rick DiPietro with the No. 1 pick, seeing him skate over to Bob Costas and talk about playing outdoors as a kid was cool. There was also the added bonus of a very good game between the Flyers and Bruins. Word is next year’s game will be between The Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins, probably in Pittsburgh because the risk of warm weather in DC is too great (not this year that’s for sure). If it is at all possible, I’m going.

Switching to the football games, the highlight of Penn State-LSU was hearing Joe Paterno screaming at Erin Andrews, “come on, let’s go, let’s go,” when Brad Nessler was a tad slow throwing it down to her for the mandatory (dull) halftime interview. That’s one thing about Joe, he is almost ALWAYS in curmudgeon mode.

A friend of mine tells a story about being at a dinner with Joe one night a couple of years ago. The appetizer was some kind of bruschetta and when the teen-age waitress—thinking Joe was finished—started to clear his plate he screamed at her, “What do you think you’re doing! I’m not finished here yet!” Poor kid apparently almost fainted.

Flashing forward to the end of the game: I am really tired of officials not using common sense and then falling back on the letter of the law (or the rules) as an excuse. Down 19-17, LSU had moved the ball to midfield with about 20 seconds remaining—maybe it was 25, I don’t remember exactly—and one of the Penn State players was doing exactly what he should do in that situation: lying on top of the ball for as long as he could to keep the clock running. One of the LSU linemen tried to move him off the ball and got nailed with a 15-yard penalty that, for all intents and purposes, ended the game.

Basically, the officials made LSU pay for their not taking control at that moment. As soon as they saw the Penn State kid clearly not getting off the ball, they should have stopped the clock, gotten him up and then re-started the clock right away. No penalty either way, let the kids decide who wins. It would still have been a long shot for LSU to get into position for a field goal, get their field goal unit on the field (with no time outs left) and get a kick off in the mud to win. But there was a CHANCE and the officials, basically being lazy, took it away from them.

That said, I was glad to see both old coaches—Paterno and Bobby Bowden—win.

Bowden, as you might expect, was all class all day. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for the people running Florida State who kicked him out the door and couldn’t bring themselves to give him one more season as if he hasn’t done enough for the school to merit that. The spear toss was magical and Bowden’s wife Ann coming into his press conference to say, “it’s time to go honey,” was almost a perfect metaphor: Bobby Bowden always had time for everybody.

Back to field goal kickers for a moment. I really felt for the Northwestern kid who missed the three field goals in The Outback Bowl (is it over yet?) but much worse for Ben Hartman, the kicker from East Carolina. He had two chances from 39 yards to win The Liberty Bowl for his team in the final 67 seconds of regulation and then missed a 35-yarder in overtime opening the door for Arkansas to win the game, 20-17.

Hartman was a very good kicker at ECU but there’s no doubt it is going to be hard for him to forget the last game of his college career. I really feel for kickers at moments like that. I still vividly remember Ryan Bucchianeri, who as a Navy freshman in 1993 missed an 18-yarder at the buzzer that would have won the Army-Navy game. Even though Bucchianeri talked to the media afterwards and took full responsibility for the miss—it was a very wet field and a tough angle—but his response was simply, “I have to make that kick,” the miss haunted him during his entire time as a Midshipman.

I noticed in the Sunday paper that Hartman had not spoken to the media afterwards. I was curious who made the call: did the kid simply not want to do it? Did Skip Holtz, his coach make the decision? I dropped a note to Tom McLellan, the associate AD in charge of PR at East Carolina and asked him the question.

Tom not only got right back to me, he took the hit for the decision. He said he had made a judgment on the spot that Hartman was in no condition—emotionally—to speak to the media at that moment. I don’t disagree with Tom at all. His first job is to protect the players UNLESS they’ve done something really wrong like cheating on a test or getting arrested. This wasn’t close to that: he missed three kicks. No crime was committed.

Having said that, as I said to Tom later, I actually think Hartman might have benefited if he’d talked. Even if he broke down and cried, people would have respected him for giving it a shot. I’m also frequently amazed by athletes’ ability to handle themselves with grace under that kind of pressure. More often it is college athletes who do well in those moments because they haven’t been nearly as spoiled or over-protected as the pros (See James, Lebron).

Bottom line in it all is this: I had no vested interest in who won the game but my heart goes out to Ben Hartman.

One basketball note for the day: Did anyone see the 70-foot shot that Chandler Parsons hit at the buzzer to give Florida a 62-61 overtime win over North Carolina State? I happened to be watching, in part because State Coach Sidney Lowe was doing exactly what I would have done in that situation: fouling with a three point lead in the final 10 seconds and not letting Florida get off a tying three point shot. (Two hours later Xavier would allow Wake Forest to take a three in the last 12 seconds of overtime and would get burned by the decision).

Unfortunately, because Parsons threw in a miracle shot—which was RIGHT on line all the way and was, naturally, his only field goal of the game—coaches will now cite that as a reason not to foul. They’ll be wrong. Lowe got it right. He—and his players—just got amazingly unlucky.

There is so much more to talk about: the Redskins firing (at 4 o’clock in the morning) of Jim Zorn and their hiring (no doubt) of Mike Shanahan; the team formerly known as the Bullets and gun play; Kansas’ remarkable performance on Saturday at Temple and—did I mention the Islanders won in a shootout out?

More on that—okay, not the Islanders—tomorrow.

Bobby Bowden deserved a better ending than this; Friedgen gets another year

Bobby Bowden announced his retirement yesterday—sort of. He showed up on some kind of video with reporters not allowed to ask questions. No doubt Florida State wanted it that way because the school was afraid that, under questioning, Bowden might break the golden rule of big-time college athletics and tell the truth.

As in this truth: the man who made Florida State football matter got shoved out the door by an impatient president, board of trustees and fan base when all he wanted was to coach one more year. He said just that on Saturday, that he’d like to coach in 2010 and then turn the job over to Jimbo Fisher, who FSU put right up against Bowden’s back a couple of years ago hoping he might take the hint and allow himself to be shoved out the door.

Great coaches are great competitors. They don’t just say ‘thanks for the memories,’ the first time things go wrong and ask someone to shut the lights out in their office for them. Five years ago when the president of Penn State and the chairman of the board of trustees went to Joe Paterno’s house to talk to him about stepping down after going 26-33 over a five year stretch he threw them out of his house. He’s 50-13—that’s not a typo—since then.

The great ones should orchestrate their own exit. Bowden certainly earned that right.

There’s no need to recite his record here; the national titles, 10 win seasons, bowl trips. Or the fact that Florida State was absolutely nowhere in college football before he arrived and grew to be one of the four or five truly elite programs under Bowden. Was his reign perfect? Of course not. Even now, FSU is appealing an NCAA ruling that would take away 14 of Bowden’s 388 victories because of an academic scandal that football players were involved in. He’s had players in trouble—so has Paterno and every other college coach who has coached in the big time for longer than 15 minutes.

That’s the reality of the big time game: the pressure to win and win and win sometimes causes even the best coaches to take great athletes who may not be great people. The ugliest incident I ever saw at a Final Four involved a player recruited by Dean Smith, who coached with more class and dignity for 36 years than anyone I’ve ever met in the college game. Even the best make mistakes.

There’s no doubt Florida State has slipped in recent years. It certainly hasn’t slipped to 3-9 the way Notre Dame did under Charlie Weis or below .500 the way in-state rival Miami—the once vaunted U—did a few years back. Bowden will coach in his 27th straight bowl late this month. But 6-6 is a long way from all those consecutive 10 win, top-five seasons. FSU lost about three games in the ACC in the 90s after it joined the league. I used to say the ACC consisted of Florida State, the seven dwarfs and Duke—which aspired to be a dwarf. Now it’s pretty much 12 dwarfs. THAT Florida State is long gone.

What made Bowden special went beyond winning. He was—is—a good man, a very good man. He was always accessible to the media. Nowadays, getting time alone with a big-time college coach in-season is all but impossible. If you jump through 18 hurdles and promise to be nice or if you bring a cameraman with you there’s a chance you can get 10 minutes.

When Bowden began to build FSU into a power, you could pick up a phone and call him almost any time. I remember years ago when he took his team to play Pittsburgh, which was ranked No. 1 with Dan Marino at quarterback at the time. (Bowden played more tough road games in those days than anyone. Heck, even this year he played—and won—at Brigham Young. How many BCS schools will schedule THAT game?). I was covering the game and arrived in Pittsburgh on Friday afternoon for FSU’s walk-through hoping to grab a few minutes with Bowden. It had been a last minute decision to send me up to the game so I just showed up. No one stopped me. I just walked in.

When I told Bowden what I needed he said, “look, unless you’re in a big rush, why don’t you come back to our hotel and we can talk in my room. It’ll be more relaxed back there.”

Which it was. Bowden wrote my whole story for me. I still remember George Solomon, the Post sports editor back then (a Florida grad) saying after reading the story, “God Bless Bobby Bowden, he makes us all into good reporters.”

Bowden deserved a better ending than this. He deserved the ending HE wanted, not the ending some suit with a title wanted because it will take some pressure from the alumni off him. Serious question: Does anyone think that Jimbo Fisher is going to make THAT big a difference next season? As for the long term—recruiting—Fisher can tell every recruit that he’ll be in charge beginning in 2011, that Coach Bowden has already announced that 2010 will be his last season.

Back in 1980 I was sent to Alabama to do a story on Bear Bryant. Believe it or not, Bryant wasn’t that old—66 at the time I think—but he had lived a hard life and looked more like 100 when I sat in his conference room with him. It was pretty clear to me that he didn’t know the names of too many players and wasn’t terribly involved in planning for that week’s game against Notre Dame.

“My coaches do the coaching,” he said. “I’m pretty much the CEO around here.”

It’s harder to do that when your bosses have told your number one assistant that the minute you are out the door, he’s in charge. I’m not implying that Fisher is disloyal to Bowden, I’m just saying that the term used is ‘coach-in-waiting.’ Is there anyone out there who ENJOYS waiting?

Bobby Bowden deserved a lot better than he got from Florida State. He certainly gave them a lot better than the people in charge deserve.

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Different school, different situation: Maryland announced yesterday that Ralph Friedgen would remain as coach even after going 2-10 this season. The reason for Friedgen surviving is simple: Maryland hasn’t got $4 million on hand to buy him out. Governor Martin O’Malley made it clear last week he didn’t want state funds spent on a buyout and there’s no big-time booster who is going to step up to spend that kind of money on football, which just doesn’t matter all that much at Maryland as long as the basketball team is playing well.

Maryland AD Debbie Yow named James Franklin as coach-in-waiting last year—which was a mistake for the same reason it is always a mistake to name a coach-in-waiting. Yow gets all bent out of shape when anyone says she made a mistake (on anything) but she did. She’s tried to paint the picture of Friedgen practically begging her to name Franklin because he is (according to Yow) the greatest recruiter of, oh, the last 100 years. One local columnist here in DC today said Friedgen was Yow’s first big hire, that she went out on a limb to hire him nine years ago. Wrong on two counts: Yow’s first big hire was Ron Vanderlinden who she was pretty much forced to fire after five years. And she hired Friedgen because a group of Maryland football alumni, led by Boomer Esiason, pretty much threatened to withdraw support from the program if she didn’t. She loved taking bows when Friedgen was winning but was more than ready to throw him overboard when things began to slide.

Yow probably would have liked to have pushed Friedgen out the door but couldn’t—not because he’s a big guy but because he has a big contract. Personally, I’m glad. I think Friedgen (and the great James Franklin) have made some recruiting mistakes that have brought about four losing seasons in the last six but he’s a good guy and a good coach and I’m glad he gets another chance with a more experience team next year.

Yow did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Florida State did the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.