Here is the newest weekly article on college football for The Washington Post ----
The college football regular season inched past the one-third mark on Saturday — five weeks down, nine to go before the Bogus Championship Series announces its matchups — and, while a number of questions have been answered, there are many more that no doubt will keep people glued to their seats or their TV sets between now and Dec. 4.
Here are some of the questions and answers, although many of the answers are still incomplete.
Question: Can Virginia Tech backdoor its way into the so-called national championship game courtesy of a soft nonconference schedule and being part of the ACC — which, if it were a baseball player, would have been nicknamed “Mr. August” by the late George M. Steinbrenner because that’s when ACC football traditionally has its best moments.
Answer: No. You don’t just replace a quarterback like Tyrod Taylor without some hiccups, and the Hokies’ offense was exposed by Clemson on Saturday. The special teams mistakes were surprising, but the biggest issue was the complete inability of the offense to get anything done. The Hokies might still end up in the ACC championship game but that’s a little bit like making the NBA or NHL playoffs for them. Yawn.
Question: Will North Carolina State Coach Tom O’Brien be at the very top of Wisconsin Coach Bret Bielema’s Christmas card list?
Answer: He should be. To be fair to O’Brien, he was in a tough position last spring when quarterback Russell Wilson told him he planned to skip spring practice to play baseball and was not sure he would return to football in the fall if he had a good summer playing in the Colorado Rockies’ farm system. O’Brien was caught in the middle because his other experienced quarterback, Mike Glennon, had told him he probably wouldn’t return to be Wilson’s backup.
O’Brien named Glennon his starter and Wilson left. He hit .228 in the low minors and landed at Wisconsin, where he was eligible right away because he had his undergraduate degree. Voila!—the Badgers are legitimate national contenders and Wilson is a Heisman Trophy candidate. Their toughest remaining game in the regular season should be at Ohio State, but the Buckeyes aren’t exactly the Buckeyes this year. They’ve already been tattooed with losses twice. (Sorry.)
I’m not going to write here in any detail about Monday’s Maryland-Navy game because I wrote about it in today’s Washington Post. The column was posted here a short while ago. I sum the game up this way: Maryland deserved to win. Navy deserved to lose. You will not see the name Ricky Dobbs in the same sentence with the words Heisman Trophy at any point in the future.
The most important game of the college football weekend was the last one played (and played and played and played; my God is it time to do something about the length of college football games). That was the one between Boise State and Virginia Tech. I believe many people who went to the game will be reading this shortly after they arrive home at about noon today. Nothing quite like the parking lots at FedEx Field—especially at midnight on a school/work night when you are an angry Virginia Tech fan I would imagine.
Virginia Tech is a very good football team. It is well coached and resilient as it proved when it rallied from an early 17-0 hole to lead on several occasions in the second half. My guess is the Hokies—if they don’t get too down about this loss—will win the ACC for the fourth time since they joined the league. I’m still not sold on the Miami comeback thing or on Jimbo Fisher although we’ll have to see.
The point is this: We now know that Boise State is the real deal—if there was any doubt before Monday night. The Broncos traveled across the country, went into a hostile stadium and bolted to an early lead. Then, when the home team, led by a talented senior quarterback rallied and took the lead, they didn’t get frazzled. When they had to drive the length of the field late in the game to win, they did exactly that.
You fans at Alabama and Texas and Ohio State and Florida who are screaming that your team would whip the Broncos, that’s fine. Like I said last week—play them. (Note to the poster who pointed out that LSU HAS scheduled some very good teams home-and-home in recent years and on future schedules: you’re right—but they’re all from BCS Conferences).
If Monday night’s game had been played in Seattle, Washington instead of suburban Washington, Boise State wins by at least 10. The setting played a critical role in Virginia Tech’s comeback. Would Boise State beat those top-ranked teams on a neutral site? I don’t know, but I’d love to see them get the chance.
And now, like it or not BCS apologists (that means you Kornheiser) there’s a possibility they might. If Boise State can beat Oregon State at home on September 25th, there’s a good chance it will run the table—just as it did last year when the BCS hypocrites stuck them and an equally undefeated (I know there’s no such thing) TCU team in the Fiesta Bowl to ensure that neither would get the chance to beat someone like Georgia Tech or Iowa or Cincinnati in one of the BCS games—which they surely would have.
The best-case scenario for the BCSA (BCS apologists) now is that two of their schools go undefeated. Then they can use the, “tougher schedule,” excuse to leave Boise State out of the championship game. If, however, there’s only one unbeaten or even worse if no one goes undefeated, the BCS has a problem. Because if Boise State is left out of the championship game in favor of a one-loss BCS school, there are going to be a lot of voices a lot louder and more influential than mine screaming fraud. Because that’s exactly what it will be.
Don’t get me wrong, the problems with this system go well beyond Boise State. Unbeaten teams from Utah and Hawaii and TCU have also been denied the chance to play for the national championship. In 1998 Tulane went unbeaten and didn’t even get to play in a BCS Bowl. That was before Congress began throwing the term, “cartel,” around and all of a sudden a formula was found to “allow,” non-BCS schools access to the BCS Bowls (read money) though not—as yet—to the title game.
If you go unbeaten in any sport, you should get to compete for a championship. Period. That’s why some form of playoff should have been in place years ago. That’s why Boise State’s win Monday night was important because even though it isn’t going to bring down the BCS, it is another brick in the wall. This is sort of like the plagues of Moses. It took ten to get to Pharaoh but he eventually had to capitulate. Don’t get me wrong: I am NOT advocating the death of the first born of All BCS, just extreme discomfort for all who defend it. I think watching ‘Around the Horn,’ on a non-stop loop forever might be appropriate.
Or maybe listening to Colin Cowherd too. (This is a new one for me. I’ve always thought the guy was just kind of a clown, another ESPN guy made a star by ESPN promoting him non-stop, but Monday when I heard him blaming the people who went bankrupt and lost their homes for the fall of the economy, that was it for me.)
My favorite BCS team for the rest of the season will be Virginia Tech. Because the more the Hokies win, the better it is for Boise State. And if you believe at all in what is right and good for America, you are a Boise State fan. And a TCU fan. Throw in Utah while you’re at it if you want. But the Broncos are the horse we’re riding right now.
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Completely different subject: Patrick McEnroe stepped down as Davis Cup captain yesterday. He’s got three kids and a lot on his plate and figured that ten years was enough.
The leading candidates to replace him are Jim Courier and Todd Martin. This is a no-brainer. Martin is a good guy who was a solid player but Courier is a four-time major champion who was a Davis Cup stalwart. He’s also very bright and wants the job for all the right reasons. The USTA should put Martin on hold, keep him involved with the work McEnroe is doing with young players and name Courier as the captain. It’s an easy call.
One other easy call: Bob Beretta should be the next Athletic Director at Army, replacing Kevin Anderson who left for Maryland. Beretta has been at Army for 20 years and gets the place. He’s smart, he’s been Anderson’s right hand for six years and can hit the ground running. What’s more, he won’t see the job as a stepping stone to a bigger job the way Anderson did and the way Rick Greenspan did—even though Indiana’s decision to hire Greenspan was right up there with New Coke when it comes to disasters. In fact, Army STILL hasn’t completely recovered from Greenspan’s Reign of Error. (See Berry, Todd for details).
Beretta is an easy choice and the right choice. My concern is that Army will conduct a ‘nationwide search,’ hired one of those God-Awful headhunting firms and screws it up—as it did with Greenspan.
There is something special about the calendar hitting September. Kids complain about going back to school—although I know there are now lots of places where they start in August—but most are excited about seeing their friends again and talking about their summers.
For someone like me, September is right up there with March as a month I always look forward to on the calendar. It isn’t just that football starts, it is that pre-season football ENDS. Honestly, the number of meaningless games and stories that take place during the summer in the NFL could fill The National Archives. Yesterday on Washington Post Live I swear to God we spent five minutes—which in TV-world is the equivalent of five hours in the real world—talking about Malcolm Kelly.
Malcolm Kelly? Seriously? A guy who has about 12 catches in two NFL seasons and is always hurt? He’s finally been put on injured reserve after grabbing his hamstring AGAIN on Monday after returning to practice for the first time in a month. This morning, in The Washington Post there’s a story on the Redskins lost draft of 2008—the one that was run without adult supervision by Dan Snyder and Vinny Cerrato. There’s even a quote from Cerrato—put out through Snyder’s new flak—claiming Snyder had nothing to do with the decision to draft Kelly. Of course Snyder flew to Oklahoma to watch Kelly work out. That, Cerrato said was, “just for support.”
And Tiger still loves Elin.
I know I digress but why do guys like Snyder insist on hanging on to complete untruths? (Also known as lies). Why not just say, ‘yeah, Vinny and I really blew it in the draft that year. If we end up with two guys panning out we’ll be lucky. That’s why Mike Shanahan’s here now.’
In every NFL city there is talk about irrelevancies like Malcolm Kelly and who will be the third string quarterback or the No. 5 receiver. Once the season begins, that goes away and the games have meaning. College football is different because there are no exhibition games although there are some really BAD games played early in the season—power schools lining up against lower Division 1-A (sorry NCAA, that’s still the term I use) teams or 1-AA schools.
The most intriguing game of this first weekend won’t be played until 8 o’clock Monday night in the stadium formerly named for Jack Kent Cooke. That means the 90,000 or so who go to see Boise State and Virginia Tech can expect to get home well after midnight because a national TV game will take close to three-and-a-half hours to play and then it will take about that long to get out of those god-forsaken parking lots.
Still, it is a game well worth watching. Boise State has been begging for games like this in recent years and, of course, very few power schools will play them. That’s why I get annoyed when I hear people like my pal Tony Kornheiser say things like, “well Boise State couldn’t go undefeated if it played in the Big Ten.”
Really Tony? How do you KNOW that? There certainly isn’t anyone in The Big Ten willing to actually PLAY Boise State. Except for a couple of Pac-10 schools NO ONE will play them home-and-home or even coast-and-coast. You think Virginia Tech is going back out west for a rematch? The only reason Virginia Tech is willing to play the game—besides money—is that it has less to lose than Boise. Why? Because the ACC has become a laughingstock nationally in recent years and a win would help restore some luster. A loss merely confirms what everyone already thinks anyway.
If Boise wins and beats Oregon State and runs the table it should play for the national championship. If the power schools whine about their schedule, like I said, PLAY them. Last year the BCS conspired to make Boise and TCU play one another in the Fiesta Bowl because they were so frightened that both would walk in and beat power schools.
Okay, I’m not going to go on one of my BCS rants today—plenty of time for that later.
What I really want to say is that I’m psyched it is September. I’m looking forward to Monday afternoon (Thank God it isn’t a night game too) when Navy and Maryland play in Baltimore. I’d prefer Saturday—ALL college football games should be played on Saturday; sadly we know that ship has sailed—but that game should be a lot of fun. It is very important for both teams: Maryland is coming off a horrific 2-10 season and needs to rebound to save Ralph Friedgen’s job and Navy has extremely high hopes after going 10-4 and crushing Missouri 35-13 in The Texas Bowl.
I’ll be starting my 14th season doing color on Navy radio, which is hard to believe. As I’ve said before there are few things I enjoy more than my association with Navy. I like calling games involving good kids—and they ARE good kids in spite of occasional transgressions and that one angry Navy professor who has made a cottage industry for himself by ripping his employer in any publication that will accept his work—and I enjoy greatly working with (new dad) Bob Socci, Omar Nelson, Frank Diventi and Pete Van Poppel in the booth.
All that said, this Maryland game makes me very nervous. There’s too much hype around this Navy team: Ricky Dobbs Heisman talk (I love the attention the kid is getting, but please let him play a few downs this season first okay?); talk about an un-defeated season (won’t happen—too many tough road games: Air Force, Wake Forest, East Carolina, not to mention this Maryland game and Notre Dame in the Meadowlands with a real coach in charge. Heck, even Duke has a reasonable team) and people acting like the Maryland game is a semi-walk over.
Please. Maryland has two very good running backs, BCS caliber and BCS-size lineman and defenders and a mobile quarterback. I’ve always though Friedgen could coach and the reasons for the team’s recent failures are based on recruiting not actual coaching. Plus, there is nothing more dangerous than a team that has something to prove and Maryland has a LOT to prove and knows it will be 3-0 (it has two cupcakes after Navy) if it can beat the Mids.
Either way, it will be a fun afternoon. Either way, September is always fun. The weather cools, the football gets better and I actually enjoy September baseball. I’m one of those guys who likes going to late-season games even if they don’t involve contenders. I like seeing who is playing as part of the expanded 40 man rosters and I enjoy the relative calm of a September game with nothing except pride and perhaps the long-term future of teams at stake. The pennant race games—and postseason—are fun for entirely different reasons. Of course most of postseason is played so late that I struggle to stay up and rarely go anymore. If there is an early round afternoon or early evening game near me, I might go.
There’s also some interesting golf the next few weeks, the U.S. Open tennis where there’s bound to be an upset (I think) at some point and another month of being able to swim outdoors. So, if we can just keep the damn hurricanes away, this should be a lot of fun.
It was just too hot to be outside yesterday, even on Shelter Island where the temperature is usually about 10 degrees cooler than in New York. The thought of playing golf, or even just hitting golf balls, made me feel slightly ill. No one in my family disagreed.
So we holed up inside—Thank God the air conditioning was working—and everyone did something different. I worked for a while but, having worked out in the morning and having been out in the heat for some time doing errands, I ran out of gas around 4 o’clock.
I plopped down on the couch and turned on our newly installed TV—its an old TV but the first time I’ve ever had one outside my office in this house for a number of reasons—and began flipping around. Nothing. If I heard one more report about where LeBron James or Dwyane Wade might or might be going I was going to throw a rock through my beloved new TV.
I flipped over, finally, to ESPNU. To be honest, I’ve appeared on ESPNU (Patriot League basketball) more often than I’ve watched it. I won’t pay the extra money it costs back home and I didn’t even know it is part of my basic service out here until recently.
The U (that’s what they call it, right?) was showing the entire NIT over the course of the day. Hey, it’s July. There isn’t even spring football to ruminate about. I’ve said this before and it remains true: There is almost no basketball I won’t watch. Years ago, I had some time to kill in New York one afternoon and wandered down to the park where I grew up. I found myself sitting on a bench next to the old basketball courts I had played on as a kid.
There was only one full court in the playground and that was always the game you wanted to be in because that’s where the best kids played. The court was nowhere near regulation size—maybe 70-feet—but the thrill of going up-and-down, trying to beat the defense back or make a steal and going the other way, was about as good as it got when I was about 12-years-old.
Nothing had changed. The best kids were playing on the full-court. As I watched, I noticed one kid who reminded me of a kid I’d grown up with. All I remember is his name was Moey. He wasn’t necessarily the best player we had, but he was the toughest. He always won, in part because he’d cheat if he had to. He’d grab you and deny it; call a foul when there was none; call his when the ball had clearly gone off his hand. No one challenged him.
This kid must have been Moey’s son. As I watched—and I sat there for a solid hour and watched—I got ANGRY. I came thisclose to telling Little Moey to knock it off before I remembered how old I was and how stupid I’d look.
Back to yesterday. When I flipped to the U, they were showing the Virginia Tech-Rhode Island game, a quarterfinal in Blacksburg that I knew Rhode Island had won late to advance to Madison Square Garden. I sat there transfixed, watching a game that had taken place more than three months ago, one where I knew the outcome. Didn’t matter. It was basketball—pretty good basketball at that—so I watched.
As the game wound down, two things ran through my mind. Tim Welsh was doing the color on the game. I like Tim Welsh but we had a bad falling out a few years back. He was coaching at Providence and had a very good team, led by Ryan Gomes. He committed to come play in the next year’s BB+T Classic, then backed out—in late March when finding a team was going to be, to put it mildly, extremely difficult.
Maybe I take the charity work I’m involved with too personally—but I’m really not going to apologize for that. Welsh handled the whole thing badly: first his scheduler began ducking calls from our tournament director (the deal had been completely agreed to on both sides and we’d sent out the contract) and then when I tried to call Tim to find out what the hell was going on he ducked my calls. When I finally got him on the phone he tried to claim some assistant AD was forcing him to blow off the event, which I didn’t believe for a minute. He was better-dealing us for a bigger payday, taking advantage of Gomes’ decision to return for his senior year.
I began referring to Welsh every chance I got as, “the aptly named Tim Welsh.” He wrote me a note asking what he could do to make up for the, “awkward position,” he had left me in. I told him not to bother. Welsh was fired a few years later and, like most fired coaches, ended up doing games on ESPN.
And, like most fired coaches, Welsh wanted to coach again. He got that chance this past spring when he was hired at Hofstra—a good job in a good league for good money. Then he made a bad mistake: getting stopped for DUI within a week of his hiring. Within 72 hours he had resigned.
None of us condone DUI. There are also very few of us who haven’t made the mistake of getting behind the wheel at some point when we shouldn’t have and been fortunate enough not to be stopped. Welsh was both dumb and unlucky. Now, he’s out of coaching—and probably untouchable—and who knows if ESPN will take him back. God knows the four-letter folks have brought back people who have done worse, but Welsh isn’t a big star. So, with his first child due next month, Welsh is out of work.
As I watched the game, feeling badly for Welsh, I saw something on ESPN’s crawl—which may be the most annoying thing every created since 90 percent of the time it gives you information you absolutely don’t need while you wait around for the 10 percent you do need. The crawl note was about Bobby Gonzales, the recently fired coach at Seton Hall.
Gonzales has apparently been charged with shoplifting some kind of expensive satchel from a high-end clothing store. I have no idea if there’s any truth to it—his lawyer, as you might expect says it was all a misunderstanding—but, again, I feel badly.
I know there are LOTS of people who can’t stand Gonzales. I was, to be honest, stunned when The New York Times ran a piece on him in March quoting people at Manhattan College talking about how they couldn’t stand Gonzales when he was there. He’d been gone FOUR years and, by the way, completely rebuilt the program, going to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments in 2003 and 2004; beating Florida in the first round in ’04.
Gonzales came very close to turning Seton Hall around. His team was on the NCAA Tournament bubble all season and had some heartbreaking losses in The Big East. But close doesn’t count in coaching and Gonzales was fired with people at Seton Hall saying, ‘good riddance, he was nuts.’
I’m not prepared to argue with that but I always liked Gonzales. I’m affected, no doubt, by the fact that he always treated me well dating back to his days as a Virginia assistant coach. Early in his Manhattan tenure I was at a Manhattan-Army game while researching, “The Last Amateurs.” Bobby knew I was there to see Army and write about their kids but he sought me out after the game. “I just want you to know how much guys like me appreciate the fact that you try to stand up for the little guys in this game,” he said.
Naturally, I was flattered by the comment and I was pleased for his success and the fact that he got a shot at The Big East. It didn’t work out. Now, whether these charges have merit or not, he’s been publicly disgraced.
It’s remarkable how quickly you can go from hero to bum in coaching—or, I guess any job where you’re in the public eye. Chances are it will be very difficult for either Welsh or Gonzales to coach again—or even get TV work. There’s no doubt they both made mistakes. There’s also no doubt in my mind they deserve another chance somewhere, someplace, sometime.
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"You guys couldn't make a shot," Virginia Tech Coach Seth Greenberg told his big brother. "Tough to win -- even if you play good defense -- if you can't shoot."
The two brothers talked for a while about their mom and their families, and then -- inevitably -- more basketball.
"The difference between Brad and me is when he loses I wait a couple hours and call and he's fine," Seth Greenberg said. "When I lose he just texts me. Then he calls me the next day."
Brad and Seth Greenberg have been bonded as brothers and as basketball lifers since they were kids growing up on Long Island. Brad, who is 55, was a star at John F. Kennedy High School in Plainview, N.Y. Seth, two years younger, was his back-court mate when he was a sophomore and Brad was a senior.
"I was his inbounder," Seth said. "He did the rest."
"I would give him the ball back to dribble for a while if I got tired," Brad said. "Of course, I never got tired of shooting."
Almost 40 years later, they coach 15 miles down the road from each other: Seth in the Big Time -- the ACC -- Brad in the Big South. Brad has climbed the basketball mountain -- he was the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers and drafted Allen Iverson in 1996 -- and is now happy and comfortable coaching in a one-bid conference far from the bright lights of the NBA or, for that matter, the ACC.
Last night was one to put the remote to heavy use. There was all sorts of college basketball going on, not to mention the Islanders absolutely smoking the once-vaunted Detroit Red Wings. I can’t wait to talk to Matt Rennie (aka Mr. Detroit who is my editor at The Post) this morning. Rennie is apt to duck my call after that performance.
The college hoops I saw had a myriad of story lines. Purdue lost for a second straight game—at home no less—blowing a late 13-point lead to Ohio State. What does this prove? Nothing we don’t already know: once you get in to conference play no one is going to win every night. Texas is going to lose at some point and so is Kentucky although it is impossible not to be impressed with the Wildcats. I made my first trip ever to Florida’s O’Connell Center last year and it is a VERY tough place to play. Kentucky made it look easy, taking the lead midway in the first half and looking to be in control from that point on.
The other game that caught my eye was North Carolina State winning at Florida State. It’s the road wins you notice this time of year. Wake Forest escaping Maryland in overtime only means the Deacons held serve and Maryland missed a chance for a bonus victory. Baylor losing at Colorado is the same thing. Teams lose on the road. When you win on the road, especially against a ranked team or even a good unranked team, that’s something to hang your hat on.
There may not have been a team or a coach more in need of a win than N.C. State and Sidney Lowe. Two Sundays ago, the Wolfpack had Florida beaten until a 70-foot shot at the buzzer went in and the Gators won by one. Because I always connect Billy Donovan in my mind to Rick Pitino (since he played for him at Providence and coached under him at Kentucky) I remembered a game years ago in Hawaii when a Kentucky player grabbed a rebound in the final seconds, went the length of the court and scored to beat Arizona at the buzzer.
“We call that play explosion,” Pitino said after the game. Back then Rick always had to take a bow. Now I think he would just say, “the kid made a hell of a play.” Donovan simply said his kid hit an amazing shot and left it at that.
After that brutal loss, State beat Holy Cross (yawn) but then blew a nine point lead last Saturday AT HOME to Virginia, which is still learning how to play Tony Bennett slow-ball. So to go TO Florida State and win was a very big deal.
Lowe will always be a hero at N.C. State for his role in the 1983 national championship. He was a superb point guard on that team. One of my favorite (among many) Jim Valvano stories is about Lowe dribbling the clock down late in a game (there was no shot clock). He came over near the bench and said, “Coach, I need a blow.”
Valvano nodded and said, “You’ll get one Sidney—just as soon as your eligibility is used up.”
This is Lowe’s fourth year at State and he hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament yet. He had an unlikely run to the ACC Tournament final his first season but that’s been about it for excitement. State fans more or less ran Herb Sendek out of town even though he had gotten State into the tournament five years in a row and reached the sweet sixteen. Sendek didn’t beat Duke or North Carolina enough and his dry personality wasn’t enough to overcome that defect. Lowe has plenty of personality and that State pedigree but he hasn’t beaten State or Carolina very much and hasn’t won nearly as much as Sendek did. It seems unlikely he’d get run off after four years but we live in an era where Ivy League coaches are getting jettisoned (two of them now—Glenn Miller at Penn, Terry Dunn at Dartmouth) in midseason. So nothing is a certain in coaching.
Ask the Tennessee fans who spent the last year learning to love Lane Kiffin.
Kentucky’s continuing success is going to continue to raise the issue of John Calipari’s move to UK from Memphis; the players he ran off and his history at Memphis and Massachusetts. Everyone knows the Kentucky people could care less about Calipari’s past, they care only about his present and future. They may already be erecting a statue to him by now.
In a very real sense they are no different than other fans—only there are more of them and they do tend to go a little bit nuts in both directions. I still remember being in a car during Tubby Smith’s first season at the school (which ended in a national title) and hearing a fan call into his show. “Coach,” he said, “I just want you to know I haven’t given up on this team yet.”
Kentucky was 25-4 at that moment.
One coach I know who knows Calipari well and has recruited against him for years said this about him: “He’s the most dangerous guy in the game right now. Why? Because he’s a good coach and a good guy and people like him. But he’s going to do whatever it takes to win—whatever it takes. You think it’s a coincidence he’s had two Final Fours vacated? Sure and Mark McGwire took steroids because of injuries.”
That sums up the way a lot of coaches feel about Calipari. Some of that is jealousy but some of that IS his past. I fall into the category of people who like John. I first met him in 1984 when he was a 25-year-old assistant coach at Kansas and was working at The Five Star camp. We were close in age and hit it off right away. John liked to talk. My job is to listen.
Ten years later, when John had taken U-Mass from nowhere to a No. 1 ranking, Peter Teeley—who had been Bush 1’s speechwriter when he was vice president—came to me and asked if I could help him put together a charity basketball tournament in Washington. Gary Williams said yes right away on behalf of Maryland; John Thompson said no right away on behalf of Georgetown. We needed a glamour team to come in and play Maryland the first year. I called John. “Let me see if I can move some things on my schedule,” he said. He did and the U-Mass-Maryland game gave the event credibility that has helped carry it through 15 successful years.
(Note to Georgetown fans who keep asking me why we have “kept Georgetown out,” of the event. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve negotiated with Craig Esherick, with John Thompson III and with Bernie Muir and Adam Brick when they were AD’s and gotten nowhere. I still believe Big John Thompson is pulling that string).
So it is hard for me to not like Calipari for a number of reasons. But there’s no doubt the more his team, built in large part around two kids he brought with him when he left Memphis who are likely to be one-and-outs, will continue to be a source of controversy as it continues to win.
Tonight, I’ll be I Charlottesville for my first in-person look at both Georgia Tech and Virginia, with new coach Tony Bennett. UVA had a good win on Saturday when it won at N.C. State but tonight will be a much bigger test against a Tech team with one of the better young frontcourts in the country.
Remarkably, this will be my first game at The John Paul Jones Arena. I’ve seen it because Craig Littlepage gave me a tour a couple years ago when I went down to speak to some UVA students, but haven’t been there for a game. I know it is a marked upgrade for Virginia over creaky old University Hall, but I for one will miss the old place. Not only did it have excellent press seating it had the best media parking—like 10 yards from the back door to the building—in the country. If you think that’s not a big deal to someone like me you’re wrong. Parking, especially in winter, is always key for me. My guess is I’ll spend a lot of time moaning tonight about the good old days. But getting to have dinner at The Aberdeen Barn with a bunch of my old friends in the UVA media will make it worth the trip. Oh, and the game should be good too.
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I have to admit I was surprised yesterday that some posters and e-mailers seemed to think I let Mark McGwire off the hook. I admitted up front that I liked him. Then I went on to say he clearly hadn’t told the entire truth when he claimed he only used steroids to deal with injuries and to stay on the field. I also said he did not belong in the Hall of Fame and that I wouldn’t vote for him if I had a vote. I don’t think that’s letting him off the hook. I would have said the exact same thing about Barry Bonds—who I can’t stand.
Although there probably won’t be all that many people watching with The World Series going on (today’s soap opera questions: how does Pedro Martinez pitch while facing the Yankees in postseason for the first time since 2004; does A.J. Burnett implode if Joe Girardi makes him pitch to Jorge Posada?) there’s a college football game on TV tonight: North Carolina at Virginia Tech.
I bring this up not because it is a big game for anyone other than, well, North Carolina and Virginia Tech, but because of a story in this morning’s Washington Post about the fact that some faculty at Virginia Tech are very upset about a few evening classes being cancelled because the campus is basically overrun by football traffic.
Look, I can’t stand these midweek football games. College football is supposed to be played on Saturdays, really in the afternoon most of the time, although it is understandable why some places in the south prefer night games, especially early in the season.
But in the continuing sell-out by the alleged college presidents of college athletics to corporate America and TV, we now have college football games almost every night of the week. The ACC almost always has a Thursday night game and some of the smaller D-1 conferences line their teams up on Tuesday and Wednesday all the time. Once, Friday night was untouchable because the colleges gave way to high school football one night a week. Not anymore.
In fact, last Friday night ESPN had Rutgers-Army. There may be no place in the country where not playing on Saturday afternoon is a bigger crime than West Point. Anyone who has ever been to a game in Michie Stadium will know what I’m talking about. In 1999 in listing the 20 greatest sports venues of the 20th century, Sports Illustrated ranked Michie Stadium third—THIRD—behind only Yankee Stadium and Augusta National Golf Club.
Michie Stadium—and the entire military academy—are about as scenic as anyplace you can go on a fall afternoon. Even though Army’s been lousy the last 12 years (finally improving now with the right coach in place) there is nothing quite like a game at West Point. People arrive in the morning to tailgate, to go down to the plain to watch the cadet parade, then file into the pretty little stadium overlooking the reservoir, the mountains and the Hudson River.
On a Friday night though, it’s completely different. Traffic coming up from New York, where many fans come from, is an absolute nightmare. It is going to be cold for kickoff in late October and you can’t SEE any of the surrounding beauty. Playing on Friday always costs Army about 10,000 fans (at least) at the start of the game and, when the game’s not close and it’s raining, the stands are virtually empty during the second half.
The good news is that Army has signed a new TV contract with CBS College Sports that will mean all home games will kick off at noon on Saturday. The bad news is, Army is the exception—weeknight football across the country isn’t going away. Schools won’t turn down the money or the exposure they’re being offered in return for giving up Saturday football.
For most schools, a weeknight football game is a once a year on campus experience so there really is no reason not to try to enjoy it. Here though is a quote from today’s Post story from Jan Helge Bohn, a member of The Virginia Tech faculty: “I’m highly annoyed by the misplaced emphasis on athletics at the university. It infuriates me. The fact I have to move my car and go home and terminate work is outrageous in an academic community.”
If this was a once a week activity or even once a month the (self) esteemed professor might have a point. But we’re talking once a YEAR. Are athletics over-emphasized in many different ways at many, if not most, Division 1 schools? You bet. If this is so annoying and outrageous, get a job at a D-3 school. But please save the outrage for something important. Someone teaching at Virginia Tech should be especially conscious of the fact that being inconvenienced one day a year is hardly an issue of monumental importance. One wonders, when the entire school came together in the wake of the shootings to mourn and bond at the first football game that fall, if the professor was upset about THAT.
Speaking of annoying people, it has become pretty much impossible to not write or talk about the train wreck called The Washington Redskins. The club reached new lows on Monday night, not by dropping to 2-5 in a one-sided loss to the Philadelphia Eagles but with the neo-fascist tactics brought to bear (on Dan Snyder’s orders obviously) on fans who had the nerve to bring signs to the stadium.
Security people were ordered to not only confiscate all signs—clearly as an excuse to confiscate the negative ones—but also tossed people for wearing SHIRTS that said things like, “Sell the team,” or one that had a photo of Snyder and henchman Vinny Cerrato with a caption that said, “dumb and dumber.”
It got so bad that Dan Steinberg, who writes the very smart DC Sports Bog in The Post, was accosted by a security guard because he was looking through the garbage to see some of the signs that had been confiscated. The team put out a statement saying the new policy was put in because signs could block people's view (as opposed to those whose views are already blocked sitting in obstructed-view seats) and because those on sticks could be dangerous. Yeah, right, really dangerous. Oh one other thing: the TEAM handed out signs to people at several gates with the name of one of its corporate sponsors on it. Apparently THOSE did not block views and were not dangerous. Jeesh. Do these people EVER get caught in a truth?
Along with that came a radio appearance by the Redskins CFO—whose name I can’t remember and isn’t worth the time for me to look it up—in which he attacked The Post, accusing it of, “yellow journalism,” for the stories which revealed the team selling tickets to brokers last year (and bypassing those on the season ticket waiting list) and suing people who could no longer afford to pay for their incredibly over-priced club seats.
Yellow journalism? The stories were written by a Pulitzer Prize business reporter who did a LOT of digging to come up with facts. At one point CFO-guy said, “we don’t sue our fans.” Then later he said they had “only,” sued 125 fans in five years, which is considerably different than not suing your fans. He kept saying “125 fans out of 24,000 club seat and suite holders.” Let’s not even get into the question of whether 24,000 is a legitimate number given the waves of empty seats every week in the club section. That’s not the relevant number. The relevant number is how many people defaulted on their contracts among the 24,000. My guess is the number is about 125.
He also claimed the Redskins had dropped their lawsuit against, “Miss Hill or Miss Hall,” not even remembering her name. Miss Hill is the 72-year-old grandmother who became the centerpiece of The Post’s series. “Once we had the information we dropped the suit,” CFO guy said.
Where, exactly, did you get the information by the way? Oh wait, it was from that yellow journalism in The Post.
Honestly, I feel bad for these people who are forced—because they work for him—to defend Dan Snyder. It’s a little bit like it had to be working in The White House in 1974.
One last note: My Islanders beat the Rangers last night! Hallelujah. That’s two wins and the season isn’t yet a month old. Does anyone out there know where Bob Bourne is these days? Maybe the nicest athlete I’ve ever met in my life. I’d really like to do a hockey book someday, I already have a title: 'Season on the Rink.'
