Book tour details; Sad and murky situation at Syracuse, Ohio State doesn’t change and extra talk on Edsall and Maryland

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It has been a while since I’ve had a chance to write here in part because there has been a lot going on which has caused me to spend a good deal of time writing Washington Post columns but also because I’ve been pretty caught up in getting things lined up for my impending book tour.

I’m actually fired up about the book tour, which is unusual. Normally I dread them but I’m excited about this book and the early response it has gotten. Tomorrow I’m in New York where, among other things, I’ll spend an hour (4-5 o’clock) on Mike Francesa’s WFAN show. Francesa and I often disagree but I’ve always said his radio show is almost always a good listen and the fact that he read the book and wanted to book me for an hour is very encouraging. I will also be taping a ‘Fresh Air,’ interview which will air on Thursday. That’s a good combo—WFAN (and YES network) on Wednesday; a big-time NPR show on Thursday.

Next week I go to Indianapolis on Monday evening. I made the decision to be there on the official publication date of the book because ‘One-on-One,’ is, after all, keyed to the 25th anniversary of ‘Season on the Brink,’ so where else would I want to be on the day the book is officially released? I’m doing an appearance Monday night at The Big Hat bookstore, which is on Cornell Avenue in Indy.

The next morning I will be in-studio to do The Bob and Tom Show, which for me is a big deal. It’s a big deal because those guys are great at selling books. But beyond that, it’s a big deal because the very first interview I did for ‘Season on the Brink,’ was on Bob and Tom. Back then it was a local show in Indianapolis. I still remember it like it was yesterday: It was snowing and dark when I got to the station and I was on for a long time. They had read the book and were totally prepared for the interview—which I now know is how they always do business.

Since then I’ve been on the show countless times and have been on for every single book I’ve ever written. This makes 28. The same people who did the show then—on and off air—do the show now and I always look forward to talking to them and, in this case, seeing them.

After that I’ll do some local TV and radio in Indy, winding up by going on Dan Dakich’s radio show. It’s hard to believe that Dan, who I probably spent more time with than anybody during my ‘Season on the Brink,’ winter, is now a big media star. Except it isn’t that hard to believe because he’s very bright and is also very good on-air. He’s a rising star at ESPN, which makes me happy except for the part about working for ESPN. But Dan—unlike me—has the temperament to handle working for those guys, so good for him.

From there, I drive over to Chicago and from Chicago to Cleveland the next day. Then it’s home for a day of satellite TV and local TV and radio and then back on the road again the next week. It will be hectic but I made the schedule that way because, as I said, I honestly believe people will like reading this book.

Okay, maybe Bob Knight won’t like it. Tiger Woods may not hate it as much as you might expect. Then again, I’m not counting on either of them reading it. Knight will tell you he still hasn’t read, ‘Season on the Brink.’

Onto the news and the question is where to begin.

The latest out of Syracuse on Bernie Fine is devastating. We are not talking a Penn State scandal here because there’s no evidence that Jim Boeheim or any officials at Syracuse knew what is alleged to have gone on. The whole thing is so—you pick a word: slimy, sad, murky. I don’t know. But it is also confusing: the original accuser went to ESPN and The Syracuse Post-Standard eight years ago but they couldn’t find enough corroborating evidence to go with the story. Second accuser, the original accuser’s half-brother comes forward. Then, the original accuser releases a tape from years ago (why didn’t he release it years ago?) that is alleged to be Bernie Fine’s wife. The tape is sickening on many levels. Now a third accuser who has been accused of sexually abusing a child himself comes forward.

Boeheim, who was jumping up and down in Fine’s defense—understandable after working together for so many years—is now retreating rapidly and Fine has been fired. As with Penn State, this is far from over. There will no doubt be more allegations and, I’m guessing, more murkiness. Meanwhile, I’m so sick of all of this I want to hide under the couch.

Then again, there’s Ohio State. It is good to know that my pal the bow-tied E. Gordon Gee learned his lesson from the Jim Tressel mess. Clearly he learned that having a football coach who is bigger than the school is a bad idea. Clearly he learned that sending a message that football is more important than anything by guaranteeing a new coach $4 million a year is really good idea. Clearly he was unfazed by the number of Florida players arrested during Urban Meyer’s tenure there.

And, just as clearly, Meyer is a believer in upholding the Tressel tradition of lying with a straight face. Here’s my question: WHY would he keep denying he had been offered the job last week when it was apparent to EVERYONE that he was going to be the new coach on Monday? Why not just say, ‘no comment,’ or, ‘It would be unfair to anyone at Ohio State for me to say anything when they’re getting ready to play Michigan.’ Sure, people will see through that but they also saw through the, ‘no one has offered me the job,’ line which may have been technically accurate in some way but was clearly not true.

I don’t get it some times with these power coaches. They really believe if they say the sun will rise in the west that it WILL rise in the west and if you doubt them, how dare you.

Speaking of football coaches, I wrote on Monday that Randy Edsall should be fired after one year as Maryland’s coach. The response to the column has been overwhelmingly positive but I am still amazed at some people’s ability to NOT read. A handful of posters said I was hypocritical to call for a coach to be fired after one season, regardless of record. A few others—and my friend Steve Czaban at WTEM—rattled on about how Maryland can’t afford to buy a coach out in light of its financial crisis.

Note to Czabe: You need to read past the headline sometimes. One of my points was that it will cost Maryland MORE long term to keep Edsall than it will to buy him out now because people can’t STAND the guy. And the reason they—and most importantly the players—can’t stand him is because he’s never wrong and doesn’t take responsibility for his own failings. Edsall rattled on about ‘accountability,’ all the time. How about HIS accountability?

I didn’t call for Edsall to be fired for going 2-10. I would never advocate firing a coach after one year based on a poor record. Many great coaches have had poor records early in their tenure—although most didn’t take over a team that had been 9-4 the previous season. I think it takes at least two years, more often three, to really get a handle on where a coach is going.

But Edsall shows NO sign of understanding any of his flaws or mistakes or that he even has any. He has consistently blamed everyone but himself all fall. What put me over the top wasn’t giving up 42 straight points to North Carolina State on Saturday but Edsall comparing himself last week to Bob Kraft and the New England Patriots because Kraft talked about, the “Patriots Way,” in an interview. Trust me the “Patriots Way,” wouldn’t be nearly as effective without Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, but that’s beside the point. The point is Edsall said that he was doing the same things Kraft did and therefore, “I must be right.”

Wrong Randy. You’ve been wrong every second since you didn’t bother to go meet with your Connecticut players in person to tell them you were leaving—accountability?—and you’re still wrong.

My rule has always been you don’t judge a coach after one year—good or bad. There are exceptions to every rule.

My newest book is now available for pre-order: One on One-- Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game 

Yesterday’s annual NCAA press conference with Greg Shaheen

I swear to God when I walked into the NCAA’s annual press conference yesterday I had no intention of asking any questions or, for that matter, staying very long. The only reason I even wandered in was that the NCAA sort of trapped us by putting an hour break into the schedule between the time the players and coaches from Butler were available to talk and the time the players and coaches from Duke showed up.

So, if anyone from the NCAA was unhappy with what took place, they should blame themselves. Schedule the teams one after another the way you should and you won’t have me hanging around while you publicly congratulate yourselves on all the great work you’re doing for ‘student-athletes.’

What happened was this: Greg Shaheen, who is the NCAA vice president in charge of—for all intents and purposes—this basketball tournament, began outlining how a 96 team field would work. We all know the tournament is going to 96 teams, the only question is if they’ll make the leap all at once next year—that’s my guess—or ease into it over a two or three year period.

Shaheen knows that cat is out of the bag. Back in January when I wrote that it was a done deal and said that ESPN was going to put so many Disney Dollars on the table that the NCAA wouldn’t be able to resist, he wrote me an angry e-mail, not denying the expansion, but that I had implied that CBS wasn’t being treated fairly in the negotiation process. Now that CBS has partnered with Turner, the NCAA is bound to be very nice to them since the worst they can do is get into a bidding war with ESPN and drive the price higher—regardless of who ends up with the rights.

As Shaheen was describing how a 96 team tournament would play out in terms of schedule he made one completely ridiculous statement: that ‘student-athletes,’ would not miss any more class time under the new format than they already do now. He carefully outlined how the first week would work, emphasizing the fact that while the 64 non-bye teams would arrive at sites at the same time as in the past, the 32 bye teams could arrive a day or two later.

Fine. Let’s not even get into the fact that the first week of the tournament is often spring break for a majority of schools. Let’s just give the NCAA that one.

Then, having made that point a couple times, Shaheen simply stopped. He said nothing about the second week, which is when the extra round of games will have to be played. Since the round of 64 will now be played on Saturday-Sunday, the round of 32 has to be played the first half of the next week to get to the Sweet 16. Shaheen acted as if that round didn’t exist.

I couldn’t resist. I asked for the microphone—at NCAA press conferences you have to ask for a mike and for reasons I’ve never understood, “identify,” yourself before asking a question. I once identified myself as Bob Woodward and no one batted an eye.

So, I asked Greg exactly when the round of 32 would be played. He said most likely on Tuesday-Wednesday. That would mean the winners would play regionals on Thursday-Friday, meaning that teams that played on the weekend and then played the round of 32 and then the 16s would miss an entire week of school.

When I made that point, Greg referred back to the first week. I told him I wasn’t asking about the first week. He AGAIN started talking about the first week. I finally said something like, “well you just aren’t going to answer the question about the second week are you?”

He then claimed something about not understanding the ‘nuance,’ of my question. I could have said, “Oh come on Greg, you’re a smart guy, you get the question you just don’t want to answer it in this forum; don’t want it on the record that OF COURSE everyone will miss a full week of class—in addition to whatever they miss the first week and the four days the two teams in the championship game miss this weekend (Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday).”

Afterwards, no longer at the podium, Shaheen admitted they’d miss the entire week although he claimed, “some teams,” could go home between their weekend game and their round of 32 game. Quick quiz: How many coaches do you think will play a game on Saturday night, fly home, maybe have the kids go to class Monday and then fly back to play Tuesday? How about none.

What bothered me about it, what caused me to jump in, were two factors: One, Shaheen was simply trying to bulldoze past the fact that there will be MORE missed class during a press conference in which the NCAA had been bragging about improved graduation rates. (A story for another day). Second, here’s an organization that runs screaming from the room whenever a football playoff is brought up because it doesn’t want to take on the BCS Presidents or the bowl lobby and then claims it is worried about MISSED CLASS TIME for football players (who would miss almost zero class time with a football playoff) and it is shrugging off MORE missed class time for basketball players as no big deal.

“Wouldn’t be that many teams affected,” Shaheen said later.

So apparently it is okay as long as the ‘student-athletes,’ from 16 schools are affected but not okay if ‘student-athletes,’ from eight schools are affected—though almost not at all—in football.

My point in asking the questions I asked wasn’t to embarrass Shaheen. I like him. He’s very bright but he is also one of those administrators who thinks if he says it then it must be so. Maybe that comes from hanging around the basketball committee for so long. When someone asked Dan Guerrero, the UCLA AD who is the committee chairman this year if he was concerned about how a 96 team field would affect attendance at the Pac-10 Tournament which already doesn’t draw very well, Guerrero said, “That’s not something we’ve addressed as a conference yet.”

Honestly, I think if you asked Guerrero where the sun’s going to rise tomorrow he would tell you that the committee had studied a lot of options: east, west, north and south and all were very worthy of hosting sunrise.

I have to admit I was a little surprised at the reaction to my exchange with Shaheen. I sometimes forget how fast information goes out on the internet and on TV these days. It’s a sign of age. But the reaction was swift and I guess what it shows is that a lot of people are pretty fed up with the NCAA’s constant filibustering on any real question.

This morning I presented Jim Boeheim with the US Basketball Writers Coach-of-the-Year Award at a breakfast. I noticed that a lot of the committee members were in the room when I got up to the podium. I was tempted to say that the USBWA had decided to expand breakfast to include lunch next year but we believed it wouldn’t cost those who came any extra money because, well, because we said so.

I decided to pass on the line and make fun of Boeheim instead, knowing he was going to nail me when it was his turn. (He did—he said the only thing that could ruin being named coach-of-the-year was having me present the award. Then he said he hadn’t worn a tie because he didn’t think he needed one with a bunch of writers. I took my tie off and gave it to him. Without missing a beat he pretended to look at the label and said, “JC Penney.” He was very funny).

One thing I like about coaches like Boeheim is that they don’t take themselves too seriously most of the time. Then again, he was the first guy to suggest expanding the tournament. All of which just proves that no one's perfect.

'Championship Week’ was one brilliant idea from ESPN - March Madness starts tonight; Wilbon talk

While the big-name college basketball teams are sorting themselves out over the next 12 days—the top teams trying to pin down high seeds; the mid-level teams in the power conferences trying to play their way from the dreaded bubble into the NCAA basketball tournament—this is also the time when the little guys get their moment in the sun.

March Madness actually begins tonight. The Big South starts its postseason tournament. By the end of the weekend, if you count The Ivy League, five automatic bids will have been handed out.

For me, the one bid tournaments are about as much fun as anything that takes place during the basketball season. Very few of the kids playing are going to be one-and-done and you aren’t going to hear a lot of speculation about their pro futures. All they care about at that moment is the game they are playing because most are one loss away from the end of their season. A majority of the seniors are one loss away from the end of their careers.

That’s what makes these tournaments so much fun. When Mike Brey was coaching at Delaware he often said that winning The America East Tournament was the equivalent of getting to The Final Four for Duke—which was where he had coached prior to moving to Delaware. “And winning a game in the NCAA Tournament is like winning the national championship,” he added.

We all know that on rare occasions one of the little guys will slip through to the sweet sixteen. George Mason’s Final Four run in 2006 belongs in a different category but it is worth remembering that the Patriots didn’t come out of a pure one-bid league. In fact, they got into the tournament as an at-large team, much to the chagrin of Jim Nantz, Billy Packer and others.

The real one bid leagues are the one where no one even discusses an at-large bid, where the committee has already penciled the champion in as a No. 15 or No. 16 seed most years. Of course there can be exceptions going in either direction. In 2006, coming off a first round upset a year earlier over Kansas, Bucknell came out of The Patriot League as a No. 9 seed—and promptly lived up to it by beating Arkansas. This year, the opposite is true in the league. The only conference team likely to avoid being sent to the dreaded play-in game in Dayton is top-seeded Lehigh. Anyone else wins the PL Tournament—which begins tomorrow but doesn’t end until March 12th because of (you guessed it) television—and they’re probably headed for Dayton. At the moment that teams cuts the nets down though, it won’t be thinking about Dayton. It will be nothing but pure joy.

That’s why Brey’s description is so apt. When you watch these teams play for their championships you can see how much it means to them. None of them are thinking about the fact that they may face a first-round game against Syracuse, Kansas or Kentucky. Or that they might be going to Dayton. It doesn’t matter. They want to be champions and they want to see their name go up on the board on Selection Sunday and they want to be part of The Dance.

Sure, it is all cliché but it is real. I remember being in Lafayette’s locker room after the Leopards beat Navy 10 years ago to win The Patriot League title when I was researching, “The Last Amateurs,” and it was about as joyous a place as I’ve ever been. A week later, as a No. 15 seed, the Leopards were beaten badly by Temple but that didn’t change the memories or the feelings they had for one another after beating Navy.

The little guy that no one wants to play this year is Cornell. It will be interesting to see how the committee seeds The Big Red. They have one bad loss—at Penn—but their other three losses are to Seton Hall and at Kansas and Syracuse. They’ve won road games at Alabama, at Massachusetts and at St. John’s. They played a tougher non-conference schedule than most schools in the BCS conferences play.

Jim Boeheim has said Cornell should be a No. 4 to a No. 6 seed. That won’t happen. I think if they had run the table in the Ivy League they might have sneaked into a No. 9 seed ala Bucknell four years ago. Now, I think they’ll be more like a No. 11. One thing about the committee—they hold a bad loss against a little guy against it more than they do a big guy.

That’s all for a week from Sunday. For now, the next 10 days are about the little guys having that moment they will all remember forever. If you think the U.S. hockey team looked heartbroken, check the faces of some of the losers in these conference tournament finals—especially after a last-second game-decider. The Olympians all believe they’ll get another shot in Sochi in four years and many will. Most of the kids who lose one-big finals know they won’t get another shot. Most teams that rise in these conferences are led by seniors so this may be their last chance.

ESPN has done a lot of bad things through the years but ‘Championship Week,’—giving the one-bid kids their moment in the sun—was brilliant. It also wasn’t a coincidence. It was the brain-child of Tom Odjakian, who worked at ESPN then and works at The Big East now. Odjakian is a Lafayette graduate. He wanted his school and others like it to have a chance to play their championship game on national TV. This is what he came up with. Good for him. This will be fun.

The money teams will be everyone’s focus soon enough. For now, let’s get fired up for a potential Coastal Carolina-Radford final in The Big South. Or Stony Brook-Vermont in The America East.

Let the you-know-what begin.

*******

Okay, I had a number of people contact me yesterday about comments Michael Wilbon made about me during an online Washington Post chat yesterday. Wilbon’s angry with me because we have a fundamental disagreement about Tiger Woods—and, I guess it is fair to say star athletes in general.

This though is about Woods. He defends him. I don’t. There’s really no need to go through the details: What we’ve both written and said is out there if you want to find it.

Wilbon got mad two weeks ago because I joked on Tony Kornheiser’s radio show that he had put aside his professionalism when it came to Tiger. As he proudly told The Post in his chat he called my cell phone and left a profanity-filled message. I responded by leaving him a message that was, I think he’d agree, considerably calmer but sticking to the essential point: we disagree on Woods. He isn’t going to back away from his position; I’m not backing away from mine.

I don’t know if the question during his online chat yesterday was a setup. I do know the person I’m really mad at is some guy I’ve probably never even met calling me, ‘Junior.’ Anyway, Wilbon responded by saying on the one hand he didn’t ‘give a damn,’ what I thought but on the other hand said he’d called and screamed profanities at me. If nothing else, the profanities let me know he cared. I was touched. He also said something about not being ‘subservient,’ to me. I don’t think I’ve ever asked Wilbon or anyone I’ve worked with to be subservient to me. In fact, I’ve never written these words: “As I was being driven from Bristol to New York on Sunday.” (Nor will I).

The only thing Mike said that’s just untrue is that I confuse my opinions with facts and legitimacy. Having been a columnist for a long time now I not only know the difference between opinion and fact I’m accustomed to people disagreeing with my opinions—sometimes angrily. It’s part of the job. As for legitimacy, that’s clearly up to the readers too.

Wilbon also says he’d put his journalistic credentials up against mine any day. That’s fine. Mike’s been very good at what he does for a long time. I feel pretty comfortable with my journalistic credentials though and here is where we differ (in my opinion): Guys like Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Shaq—the rich and famous guys Wilbon thinks of as friends—have public relations machines that tell the world how great they are. If they do something good, it should be reported. But when they screw up, they don’t need us taking a bullet for them. The people in sports who maybe need a boost every now and then (when they do something good) are the kids in The Patriot League; the football players at Army and Navy; the golfers who end up in Q-School.

Those are the stories I enjoy doing the most and the people I tend to gravitate towards. That doesn’t mean the big names don’t have stories to tell—I think I’ve told my share of those stories too. And gotten to know many of them along the way. WIlbon loves hanging with big names and telling people about it. I'm looking forward to dinner with Paul Goydos this week. Neither one of us is right or wrong. We're just different.

Let me close by saying this: When Abe Pollin fired Jordan several years ago Wilbon was one of many in Washington who ranted against him for doing it. Pollin’s decision was proven correct when Ernie Grunfeld came in, hired Eddie Jordan as coach and rebuilt the Wizards into a playoff team—four straight years—before Gilbert Arenas’s injuries and stupidity brought the team down again. When Pollin died, instead of simply writing the words, ‘I was wrong,’ about Pollin’s decision (hell, we all get it wrong sometimes; I thought Tiger would be playing golf this month) he went off on some tangent about how it was a shame Abe never forged a better relationship with Jordan.

Come on Mike, you’re better than that.

In conclusion? Wilbon and I have been friends for 30 years. We’re pissed at one another right now. I hope we’ll sit down and agree to disagree and move on at some point in the future. In the meantime though I guarantee this: I will NOT criticize his clothes. He dresses VERY well.

Final note of the morning to poster Case: Not sure if you were joking but I was never scheduled to work The Patriot League quarterfinals. I’m in Florida right now—it’s raining dammit—to do some golf this week and some baseball. The league’s known since August I was going to miss that game. I’ll be back for the semis on Sunday. But thanks for paying attention!

The 2nd worst idea in college sports; Stories on Cremins, Billy Packer

There’s an item in The Sports Business Journal this morning reporting that the NCAA has opened preliminary talks about a new TV contract. This isn’t news. Everyone knows ESPN is dying to swoop in with its Disney money and steal the tournament away from CBS, which has televised it since 1982. Anyone who thinks loyalty will play a role in this negotiation—CBS has literally spent billions helping to build the tournament into the mega-event that it now is—also thinks that there’s no football playoff because of concern about the ‘student-athletes.’

The important part of the story concerned the make-up of the tournament. Apparently the NCAA is looking into expansion—going from the current 65 teams to 96 in order to add a week of TV that would add more money to the new contract.

I can’t call this the worst idea I’ve ever heard because the BCS still exists. But it is a solid No. 2.

The perfect number for the NCAA Tournament is 64. The only reason a 65th team was added was (surprise) a money grab by the BCS commissioners who didn’t want to give up an at-large spot when The Mountain West Conference became eligible for an automatic bid, upping the number of automatic bids from 30 to 31.

Unfair as the play-in game is, it is a minor kink in an otherwise smooth-running machine. With a 65-team field, making it into the bracket is an accomplishment. Sure, there are always a handful of coaches screaming that a horrible injustice was done when they get left out but that’s kind of the beauty of Selection Sunday: who will get in and who won’t. The committee doesn’t always get it right and occasionally a team is left out unfairly. But more often than not, the deserving teams get in and when they do they feel as if they’ve actually done something.

Compare that—for example—to the bowl system where 68 of the 120 teams playing Division 1-A football make postseason. All you have to do—literally—is be mediocre and you can play in a bowl someplace. In basketball, the only time a team that hasn’t played well all season gets in is when someone comes from the depths of a conference to win a conference tournament and get an automatic bid. Even when that happens, the team in question has to be playing well when it matters most to pull off that sort of an upset.

(The football-basketball talk reminds me of a story. If I’ve told it on the blog before, forgive me but I think it bears repeating. Years ago, during an ACC coaches meeting Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Cremins was complaining to Commissioner Gene Corrigan about the extra pressure on basketball coaches to make the tournament.

“But Bobby,” Corrigan argued. “There are 64 bids out there. That’s a lot.”

“Sixty-four bids out of how many teams?” Cremins asked.

Corrigan shrugged. “About 300,” he answered.

Cremins turned to Dean Smith and said, “Dean, you’re the math major, what’s 64 into 300?”

“A little more than 21 percent,” Smith answered.

“Okay,” Cremins said turning back to Corrigan, “how many football teams make bowls?”

“Well, there are 26 bowls right now,” Corrigan said. “So that’s 52 teams.”

“Out of how many?” Cremins said.

“About 100,” Corrigan said.

Cremins turned back to Smith. “Okay Dean, 52 into 100, what percentage is that?”)

Back to our story for today.

So now the NCAA, which went to the 64 team bracket in 1985 is talking about expanding to 96 teams. If it happens they will claim this is being done in the name of fairness which is, of course, a lot of hooey. It will be done to up the TV money and to appease all the whining coaches who think expanding the field will help them keep their jobs.

You see, Cremins wasn’t wrong. There IS tremendous pressure on coaches, especially those at the big-time schools, to make the tournament every year. Jim Boeheim went two straight years without a bid and heard sniping all around him. Gary Williams missed three years out of four and if his team hadn’t rallied last season to make the tournament you can bet his AD would have been trying really hard to find a way to force him out at Maryland.

But the theory that more bids means more job security doesn’t really work. You see right now an NCAA Tournament bid MEANS something. If you expand to 96 teams and the ACC gets nine bids every year instead of six or The Big East gets 12 instead of eight then you’ve got the bowl system—except that a real champion does eventually get crowned.

Making a bowl does not guarantee these days that a coach keeps his job because AD’s know that it is often meaningless. In the BCS leagues, you can schedule three home games against weak opposition and go 3-5 in league play and presto! You are on your way to the Insight Bowl or the Independence Bowl or the fabulous St. Petersburg Bowl where you get to go to Florida—to play indoors.

If there is one thing the NCAA gets right every year (except for the play-in game) it is the basketball tournament. It hit on 64 as the right number 25 years ago and—with good reason—has kept it (almost) right there.

That reminds me. Apparently my good friend Bill Hancock, who is now executive director of the BCS (it is sad when a good man goes to work for the forces of evil) is trying to defend the BCS by talking about ‘bracket-creep,’ in the basketball tournament. Bracket creep? The tournament has expanded by ONE team in 25 years and he calls it bracket creep? Bill also claimed that if there was an eight team playoff this year there would be terrible controversy because two of the four two-loss teams in the major conferences would have been left out of the field. Think about what he’s saying: It is okay to leave three UNBEATEN teams out of the national title picture but really awful to leave out a couple of two-loss teams.

For his next trick, Bill will tell us that if unemployment went down it would be unfair to those still unemployed so maybe it would be better for unemployment to go UP.

I love Bill, I really do. He’s coming to dinner with us Friday night in Philadelphia before Army-Navy. Maybe I can perform an exorcism and save him.

Meantime, the NCAA needs to NOT expand the basketball field. If money is the issue do this: Tell the BCS schools that beginning in 2010 there will be an NCAA Football Bowl Sub-Division Tournament. If an invited team declines to play, none of its other teams can participate in any other NCAA postseason tournament. The NCAA would make more than enough money by having a football tournament to make the dumb idea of expanding the basketball tournament go away. The BCS would go the way of The Edsel, New Coke and pet rocks. And Bill Hancock’s soul would be saved.

-----------------------

One clarification on yesterday’s blog: I was NOT implying that the replay official got it wrong when he put one second back on the clock in the Texas-Nebraska game. Some hysterical Texas fan claimed that by saying he put one second back on the clock I was implying he got it wrong. I was simply saying he put the second back and almost certainly got it right but wondered if he would have gotten it right if the second had belonged to Nebraska. I stand by that statement. The same fan also went into a long diatribe about why Texas deserves to play in the national title game. I’m not saying Texas does NOT deserve to play in the game. I’m saying under this ridiculous system NONE of us knows who deserves to play in the game. That’s why the question should be resolved through actual competition rather than hysterically bleating that MY TEAM is the best. If your team is the best, it should get the chance to prove it on the field. Period…

One more note: Several people asked last week how I feel about Billy Packer. I like him both personally and professionally. We agreed on almost nothing but arguing with him has always been great fun and I always believed he broke down a basketball game better than anyone. I missed him during last year’s tournament especially during the Friday practices at The Final Four. We had an unofficial tradition of sitting together and arguing about everything while the practices were going on. My favorite year doing that was 2006 when I waved Jim Larranaga over during George Mason’s practice and said, “Billy wanted to be sure he had a chance to congratulate you.” Billy never missed a beat. “Great playing,” he said. Then he turned to me as Larranaga walked away and said, “It still doesn’t mean I was wrong you know.”

Actually it did. But that’s okay.

Remarkable Night at the Theater Sparks Memories; Brief Boeheim Talk

I went to theater last night, something I always pledge to do more often and don’t follow through on. Thanks to my friend Tony Kornheiser and a very generous man named Bill Isaacson I was in the fifth row at The Eisenhower Theater to see Cate Blanchett in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

This isn’t a theater review but it was a remarkable night. Tennessee Williams was clearly a genius and Blanchett was simply amazing as Blanche DuBois. As I said to Tony walking out, “I don’t know how she does that every night. I’m drained WATCHING.”

This blog is for the most part about sports and sports has been the great passion in my life for as long as I can remember. But because both my parents were involved in the performing arts—my mom taught music history at Columbia and at George Washington; my dad was the first executive director of The Kennedy Center and later director of both The National Symphony Orchestra and The Washington Opera—I was exposed to the arts a lot as a kid.

Like most jock kids, I often whined about being dragged to a concert or the ballet or the opera. As I got older I realized how incredibly fortunate I was to grow up the way I did. I saw Marion Anderson’s farewell concert because my mother said, “this is history and you are NOT staying home to watch a ballgame.”

I not only saw Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev dance ‘Swan Lake,’ for the final time in New York I sat next to Nureyev at the post-performance dinner and listened to him telling stories about growing up as a dance prodigy in The Soviet Union. I once raced Leonard Bernstein down the aisle at Carnegie Hall (I think he let me win) and I remember hiding under the seat during the opening scene of “Sleeping Beauty,” because Carrobas (the evil witch) scared me to death.

I enjoyed the ballet, grew to like some opera (especially Russian opera which blows me away; you can keep most Wagner) and now enjoy concerts. But theater has always been something I truly love.

My first vivid memory of a night in the theater goes back to when I was 13. My father, to whom I will always be grateful not only for seeing to it that I was always in great seats but for MAKING me see certain things, insisted I had to go to the production of Hamlet that was at the old City Center in New York. I believe it was the Old Vic Company, which was managed by Sol Hurok, for whom my father worked at the time. I was too embarrassed to ask any of my friends to go with me, so I went alone on a Saturday night.

Richard Pascoe was Hamlet, I’ll never forget that. Vivian-Leigh Thompson, his wife, was Ophelia. The whole thing took my breath away. I still remember the tears running down my face the moment Horatio said, “Good night sweet prince,” and standing and screaming with the rest of the audience when it was over.

I went home and went to bed. My parents were out. At about 2 o’clock in the morning my dad came in and woke me up.

“Well, what did you think?” he asked.

“Dad, it was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. “The guy who played Hamlet was incredible.”

“Dick Pascoe,” my dad said. “Would you like to meet him? He’s in the living room.”

At that moment I can honestly say I wouldn’t have been any more excited if he had said Tom Seaver or Willis Reed were in the living room. I jumped out of my bed in my pajamas and padded into the living room. My parents had gone out to a post-performance dinner with the Pascoe’s.

When dad introduced me, I was blathering. “Greatest thing ever, amazing, brilliant. How did you make it look like your arm was bleeding in the last scene?”

“Red toothpaste I’ve got in my hand,” Pascoe said, showing me the move he made to slap it across his arm when he’s stabbed.

I still had not even LOOKED at Vivian Leigh-Thompson. My mother finally said, “John, you know Mrs. Pascoe was Ophelia tonight.”

“Yes,” I said finally turning to her. “You were fine.” Then I went back to telling Pascoe how incredible he had been. My dad always loved re-telling that story.

He also enjoyed the story about my first exposure to Russian opera. It was in Montreal when I was 11 and Hurok sent him up there to scout The Bolshoi Opera which was supposed to come to New York the next year. (It didn’t actually come to the U.S. until eight years later when my dad brought it to The Kennedy Center). We went to see, ‘Pique Dame,’—The Queen of Spades. In the second act, after the protagonist (who is no hero) has killed the Queen of Spades, he is being stalked by her ghost. He sings, she stalks. The stage is very dark. Finally, as the ghost came up behind him I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Watch out!” I screamed, jumping from my seat as dad pulled me back down.

“It’s not real John,” he said. It FELT real.

I’ve had a lot of memorable theater experiences. I got to see Richard Burton’s last performance in ‘Equus,’ in New York when he came on stage after the curtain and talked to the audience about how the theater had saved his life. “Nicholas Nickleby,” remains one of the most amazing days of my life (another performance my dad told me I HAD to see) an eight-and-a-half hour marathon that felt too SHORT. I swear to God.

Last night was right up there. ‘Streetcar,’ is, of course, brilliantly written. It is stunning how many of the lines Tennessee Williams wrote in 1951 still resonate today. I’ve read about what a tortured soul he was. He certainly knew how to create other tortured souls. When Blanchett walked aimlessly across the stage in the final scene seconds after saying, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” the place was so silent you were almost afraid to breathe. The instant the stage went dark, the entire audience was on its feet. I still remember how much my dad loved standing ovations—especially what he called the ‘no doubters,’ when there was no doubt the audience was going to stand and scream as soon as the performance was over.

So, thanks to Tony and thanks to Bill for last night. And thanks to my dad and my mom too.

On an entirely different subject: a poster asked on Tuesday how I felt about Jim Boeheim on the occasion of his 800th college coaching victory at Syracuse. I’ll give the short answer for now and write about him in more detail later in the season: I like Jim Boehim. We have had numerous battles through the years—I once wrote that if a hemorrhoid could talk it would sound like Jim Boeheim. It wasn’t actually my line but the guy who said it worked in TV and begged me NOT to give him credit for it. Actually, Jim dealt with that with a good deal of humor. “My friends are pissed off at you,” he said. “But it’s probably not a bad description.”

That tells you why I like him. He’s got a good sense of humor and he can laugh at himself. He wasn’t amused a few years later when I thought he was going to agree to bring Syracuse to play in the BB+T Classic (to play Maryland) and then told me there was no way he would play the game. “Coaches who play games like that become ex-coaches,” he said.

I went off on him, screaming about charity and that he wasn’t going to get fired if he lost one damn game to Maryland. That was in a message I left for him. When he called back the first thing he said was, “I’m angrier at you right now than I’ve ever been at anyone in my life.”

Then we really screamed at one another. After it was over, we made up. Jim has since played in the charity golf tournament I put on in Bruce Edwards’ name for ALS Research on a number of occasions. He’s a good guy and he’s won 800 games as a coach so I don’t think he needs any defending in that area.

I’m sure there will be reasons during the season to write more about Boeheim. There are some classic lines of his I remember but I will save them for another time. He’s no Tennessee Williams, but he’s quick and clever and, as someone who has always depended on the kindness of coaches, I have to both respect and like him a lot.