Adventures in Basketball's Bush League

(From RealClearSports)

Once, on a road trip in 2004, beaten down from the CBA grind and (Coach) Dales’ ways, Trainer Brad told me, “I feel bad about waiting for the maid to go in and clean the room so I can grab soap from her cart and run. … [For CBA games, the home team is supposed to provide soap for both locker rooms, but apparently Dales didn’t like paying for that.] A few times I’ve just gone to Target and bought soap, just to appease Dales and let him think I’d stolen it from the hotel. I just took one for the team.” 

- Carson Cunningham, "Underbelly Hoops"


It doesn't get any more bush league than the ol' CBA. Ten-hour bus rides; staying at motels where the towels were so rough that you wouldn't even think of swiping them; and a diabolical coach who hid the fact your wife was hospitalized because he wanted you to finish practice.

Such is the life in the "underbelly."

The Continental Basketball Association, the irrepressible, irredeemable basketball league might be gone, but some of its memories are forever preserved for posterity in Carson Cunningham's irreverent and humor-laced "Underbelly Hoops: Adventures in the CBA."

You might remember Carson, a former All-Pac-10 freshman point guard at Oregon State who, after transferring to Purdue, nearly led the Boilermakers to their first ever Final Four under Gene Keady. He spent four years chasing the dream of reaching basketball's holy grail, the NBA, before finally hanging up his sneakers and settling into his new life as Dr. Cunningham, teaching history at DePaul University.

But the "Underbelly" is about more than just chasing a dream. It's also a love story.

"A lot of us do it for the pure love for hoops," Cunningham says during an interview with RealClearSports. "We keep grinding away because we want to play high-level hoops. It was good basketball (in the CBA). From top to bottom, the league was better than any major (college) conferences. The basketball was good, underrated. There were a lot of super-talented players and I didn't appreciate how good the players were until I was in the league.”

One of those was Keith "Boss" Closs, a 7-foot-3 center who was at one time a rising star with the Clippers but the big-hearted shot blocker with a big vice somehow ended up playing for Cunnigham's Rockford Lightning. During a late-December road trip to Flint, Mich., Closs apparently passed out at a nightclub after the game and was dumped at the local police station by players from the opposing team. The next morning, the gregarious Closs sat under the Christmas tree regaling a group of curious cops about his life and times in the NBA as if he were an oversized Santa Claus, before an assistant coach was sent to fetch him.

It took a thick skin, and a somewhat irrational personality to survive in the CBA. You didn't do it for the pay, that's for sure, since most guys earned hundreds of dollars per week, plus occasional McDonald’s coupons that passed for per diem. It wasn't for the glamour and the amenities - when you consider a Red Roof Inn was a treat and at some games the crowd count was short of triple digits.

While Cunningham might be a hoops junkie chasing every Hoosier’s boyhood dream, he was a man with a plan. During his stints in the CBA, he was also working on his Ph.D. in history at Purdue. As his teammates spent countless hours pounding away at video game consoles, he read, wrote and kept a diary of his existence in the underbelly.

“It’s living on the fly, you just basically learn to adapt to uncertainty, and roll with it,” Cunningham says. “When you’re in your early 20s, you have a lot of energy and you have a lot of down time to get some stuff done. I’ve always enjoyed the process of writing and I liked it that during my minor league days I was able to combine two passions.”

Cunningham adds that the CBA was able to get the hoops out of his system so that when the time came, he was ready to move on with his career, get married and have kids. His book isn’t so much a tell-all about his ex-teammates and coaches, but a memoir, and maybe even a cautionary tale about the nomadic minor-league existence.

Two recent stories neatly presented the juxtaposition of this phenomenon. Jeremy Lin, who spent a bulk of his professional career riding the bench in the NBA and playing in the D-League, broke out and became an instant star. Meanwhile, Antoine Walker, who made over $100 million in his NBA career, was plain broke and last seen playing for the D-League team in Boise.

“One thing I struggled with in the book is how to cope with riding the animal – so to speak,” Cunningham says. “Jeremy Lin epitomizes (the dream) for thousands of hoopers like us. I think in a way it's inspiring but at the same time you have to confront the reality that your NBA dream might never come to fruition.

“There’s a fine line on chasing a dream and how hard to chase it. … I was grateful to have a backup plan, but I’ve seen a lot of unfortunate situations. I never had a lot of money but you would come across guys who made a chunk and ended up with nothing.”

The D-League, a wholly owned subsidiary of the NBA, is essentially an offspring of the CBA, which managed a half-century of existence that, wrote Cunningham, “survived the Cold War, economic recession, relative obscurity, and Vietnam, among other things. Over 53 years, nothing seemed capable of toppling it. But then, Isiah Thomas showed up.”

Through Thomas' mismanagement, the CBA began its death spiral, but not before providing refuge for hundreds of more hoop dreamers before its demise in 2009. Cunningham might have eventually found a cure for what he called an “affliction,” but he stuck around long enough to serve up a nice slice of Americana.

And even now, in his new life, Cunningham occasionally finds himself missing the wilderness of the underbelly:

Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved the way things were rolling with my wife and our little one, and I liked teaching history. … But I still couldn’t completely shake it. I still wanted a run. 

I started to really feel it after we went to a dinner party and this couple with a bunch of advanced degrees started in on the movie “Crash.” The lady, kind of affected-like, said “More than race, [it’s] about class.” I felt like puking. … She went on and on about how profound the movie was, but did so in a way that made me want to put on Tarzan gear and run out to the wild and beat a drum or swing from a tree – or go play in the CBA.

The State of American Sports in 2012

(From RealClearSports)

Editor's note: In advance of President Obama's State of the Union address next week, RCP is rolling out daily "state of" reports to better frame the issues facing the nation. Today: The state of American sports.

On so many levels, most sports fans are happy to see 2011 in the rearview mirror. Both the NFL and NBA had prolonged work stoppages that threatened their seasons. Two major college programs - Ohio State and Miami - were exposed for rampant cheating involving criminal elements. And on top of all that, the alleged child rape scandal at Penn State not only obliterated its football coaching staff, but shook the entire university to its core.

So 2012 should be a stroll in the park then, with a restoration of the usual fun and games, right? While things can’t possibly be as bleak as they were last year, there are some dark clouds looming. Here’s a look ahead:

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS

The NFL resolved its labor crisis with no loss of regular season games, and its perch as king of American sports was not threatened by the lockout - in fact, it might have become more entrenched. The $9 billion industry now is guaranteed labor peace for the next decade, and has further stuffed its coffers with a nine-year TV contract extension, worth $3 billion per year. Interest in the league is at an all-time high, buoyed in recent weeks by Tebow-mania, which just adds an embarrassment of riches to a league that hardly needs more publicity.

So the rest of the sports leagues will have to fight for the NFL’s leftover scraps. Major League Baseball managed to secure its own long-term labor peace without any rancor, though performance-enhancing drugs continue to cast a shadow on the sport, both in terms of Hall of Fame enshrinement of alleged PED users and the recent revelation that NL MVP Ryan Braun had failed a drug test.

The NBA had its own labor dispute, with the season saved by a last-minute deal that still came with a cost: the loss of about 20 percent of the games. But the sport with trouble ahead is the NHL, which already had one entire season wiped out in 2004-05. Donald Fehr, who spearheaded several of baseball’s labor wars, is now the head of the NHL players’ union. He had fired a shot across the owners’ bow last week by rejecting a realignment proposal, setting the stage for turbulent times ahead as the current deal is scheduled to expire in September.

COLLEGE SPORTS

NCAA President Mark Emmert might just have the most thankless task in sports. He has to navigate a billion-dollar industry masked as amateur athletics. The scandals at Ohio State and Miami (among others) demonstrated that the difficulties of maintaining a flawed system whose entire labor force is undercompensated 18-to-22-year-olds who can easily fall prey to nebulous outside influences.

A new proposal is on the table to pay compensation to college athletes in the form of a $2,000-per-month stipend. But that’s akin to patching up a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid. Emmert is considering more sweeping reforms that may more adequately address systemic issues facing the NCAA, which still operates an antiquated model that is no longer compatible - economically or otherwise - with the times.
(From RealClearSports)

College football, the real cash cow in college athletics, has specific problems to address that fall outside of the purview of the NCAA. The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is universally derided, with criticism only intensifying after the most recent championship game that pitted two schools (Alabama and LSU) from the same conference. The BCS also has done its part to destroy century-long rivalries by ushering in a conference realignment frenzy. With its current TV deal scheduled to expire after the 2013 season, the BCS will be forced to contemplate a dramatic shakeup, likely as soon as this summer.

THE OLYMPICS

If it’s a leap year, it must be time for the Summer Olympics. The 2012 London Games are facing numerous challenges, not the least of which is measuring up to its predecessor. The 2008 Games were orchestrated nearly flawlessly by China’s communist government, which spared no expenses or manpower to make sure everything went smoothly in Beijing, including an event-best 51 gold medals for the Chinese.

The U.S. team finished a distant second with 36 golds, though it did garner a Games-high 110 total medals. The Americans are favored to top both standings this year in England, with high hopes for a number of athletes, particularly swimmer Michael Phelps, who is expected to add to his record 14 gold medals in his final Olympics.

SPORTS MEDIA

For the first time since 1988, the Olympics broadcast will not have Dick Ebersol at the helm, and that’s a good thing, as his insistence on tape-delaying live events had caused a steady decline of TV ratings on NBC, for both Summer and Winter Games.

NBC’s new owner Comcast will instead use the Olympics to increase viewership and visibility for its family of networks - especially the NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus) - and Web properties by making nearly every event available live, either on TV or via live-streaming.

NBC, as well as Fox and CBS, are trying to maintain their influence in a sports media landscape increasingly dominated by ESPN, which raked in $8.5 billion in revenue in 2010 for parent company Disney. ESPN has been able to dramatically increase its cash flow by extracting ever more subscriber fees from cable and satellite operators to supplement its advertising revenue.

As a result, bidding wars for sports programming have caused rights fees to skyrocket. In just the last year, NBC paid $4.3 billion to the International Olympic Committee (for four Olympics through 2020); Fox, CBS and NBC paid $28 billion to the NFL while ESPN paid $15.2 billion for its own separate “Monday Night Football” deal (through 2022); ESPN also paid $500 million to the NCAA for non-football and non-basketball championships (through 2024); and CBS and NBC paid an undisclosed amount to the PGA Tour (through 2021).

All that cost of doing business will eventually be passed on to the average sports fan, even if he or she decides to forego paying escalating ticket prices and instead watches everything from home.

But the good news is that - other than, potentially, the NHL - there will be plenty to watch in 2012. And if we’re lucky, we won’t have to deal with learning a new household name, as we did in 2011 with Jerry Sandusky.

UConn Women Not Rivaling UCLA's Streak

(From RealClearSports)

The UConn women’s basketball team isn’t going to top UCLA’s 88-game winning streak.

The Huskies can beat Ohio State on Sunday, Florida State on Tuesday and then win their next 100 games for all I care, but John Wooden’s Bruins will still own the longest winning streak in history.

The longest winning streak in men’s basketball history, that is.

UConn will have the longest winning streak in women’s basketball. And before you get your PC undergarment all twisted up in a knot, let’s just make one thing clear: There isn’t such a thing as a record for all of college basketball. It’s either a men’s record or a women’s, and never the twain shall meet.

Comparing men’s and women’s basketball isn’t like apples and oranges. It’s more like apples and meat loaf.

Would you say Brett Favre’s 297-game consecutive starts streak is an all-time record for all oblong balls sports, obliterating every record from rugby to Australian Rules Football? Of course not, that would be silly.

So why would you insist on merging records of two sports that use different sizes of balls, different timing rules and different measurements within the courts?

Besides that, men’s and women’s basketball have no common lineage or connection; it’s not as if the sports at some point intermingle with each other. Every NBA player at some point of his life played boys' high school basketball, and most of them played men’s college basketball. Exactly zero has ever played girls' basketball or women’s basketball. (And the reverse is true as well: no WNBA player has ever played men’s basketball.)

This is not to diminish what Geno Auriemma and his Huskies have done, far from it. In fact, they should be celebrated for their prolonged excellence. Achieving a winning streak of this length is hard to do in any sport. They deserve every bit of adulation and admiration that are bestowed upon them.

And let’s not marginalize their accomplishment by disparaging their competition. Yes, it’s true that there are very few elite teams in women’s basketball, since most schools field women’s teams out of compliance for Title IX more than anything else. But the Huskies can only beat what’s on their schedule. It’s not their fault if their opponents are not typically up to snuff and tend to get rolled.

UConn’s women already own the women’s college basketball streak when they won their 71st consecutive game last March, against Notre Dame. Now they’re adding onto that streak, which should easily reach triple digits.

The fact that the UCLA streak is even in conversation is a disservice to the UConn women. It only draws unfair comparisons between two squads that are not even on the same planet. Fine, if these two teams played each other 88 times, Bill Walton’s Bruins would beat Maya Moore’s Huskies 88 times by at least 30 points each. But that is totally senseless so why even go there?

Why can’t we see what UConn is doing for its own sake? The Huskies are going for their third straight NCAA championship, eighth in the program’s history. Geno will get a chance to finally tie his archrival Pat Summitt for most titles of all-time – in women’s basketball. Those are the records they're chasing after, nothing more and nothing less.

Please leave the four-letter word out of it.

Better Than AP and Coaches Polls? You Bet!

(From RealClearSports)

The AP Poll has been around forever, well, OK, since 1936. The USA Today/Coaches Poll is now attached to the BCS's crystal ball. But in all honesty, neither poll can measure up to the BlogPoll in terms of fairness and expertise.

The BlogPoll? What the heck is that, you ask.

It's conceived by Brian Cook, the uber-blogger proprietor of MGoBlog (a Michigan blog, if you must). It has, over the past few years, become part of the conversation in the college football landscape. The BlogPoll is voted on by some of the most respected and knowledgeable bloggers who cover the sport. After being part of CBS Sports the past few years, the BlogPoll is moving over to SB Nation this year.

The BlogPoll voters care more about their votes and bring more expertise to the ballot than your average AP and coaches poll voters, and here's why: Most AP voters - college football writers and broadcasters - usually spend their Saturdays covering one game while dozens others pass them by. The coaches, meanwhile, couldn't care less about any other game going on out there other than the ones they're coaching themselves.

I should know. For the better part of the 1990s, I covered Cal and the Pac-10. I spent every game day Saturday stuck in the pressbox either in Berkeley or some other Pac-10 outpost. If I was lucky, maybe I'd catch a glimpse of another game or two on the pressbox TV. The coaches saw even less. I've been asked by coaches at press conference about what happened at this-and-that games so they could scribble something down before handing it off to a gofer to fax in their votes.

But these days, I spend Saturdays in front of my 55-inch HDTV with my MacBook handy for streaming videos. I miss nothing. My wife and kid know this is my religion (I used to belong to the Church of the NFL, but have since converted) and my devotion is not to be messed with. Not to mention as the self-anointed BCS Guru, it's my business to know what's going on.

So when Brian offered me a vote in the BlogPoll last year, I happily accepted. And this year, I'll share my weekly ballots with RealClearSports readers here at RCS Sidelines:

BCS Guru Ballot - Week 1

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Ohio St. Buckeyes	--
2	Texas Longhorns	--
3	Boise St. Broncos	--
4	Alabama Crimson Tide	--
5	TCU Horned Frogs	--
6	Nebraska Cornhuskers	--
7	Florida Gators	--
8	Iowa Hawkeyes	--
9	Oregon Ducks	--
10	Oklahoma Sooners	--
11	Virginia Tech Hokies	--
12	Cincinnati Bearcats	--
13	USC Trojans	--
14	Utah Utes	--
15	Wisconsin Badgers	--
16	Notre Dame Fighting Irish	--
17	Pittsburgh Panthers	--
18	Houston Cougars	--
19	Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets	--
20	Penn St. Nittany Lions	--
21	Arkansas Razorbacks	--
22	North Carolina Tar Heels	--
23	Missouri Tigers	--
24	Stanford Cardinal	--
25	BYU Cougars	--

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings »

* For this season, I have developed a dynamic rankings system, which in many ways removes idiosyncratic human biases. But the secret sauce for the system will remain under wraps for the time being, as I work out any potential kinks.

* As per the spirit and guidelines of the BlogPoll, the voters reserve the right to radically change the ballots from week to week. Especially from the preseason, when we have not seen a pass thrown or a tackle blown. Don't get all suspicious when you see wild swings in my ballots from week to week. It's supposed to happen.

* USC, on a two-year NCAA bowl ban, is banished from the coaches poll but not the Associated Press poll. Since the BlogPoll does not sanction any team, the Trojans will be eligible to be on our ballots. They can even finish No. 1 at the end of the season, just as they can still claim the AP title, as Oklahoma did in 1974 while on NCAA probation.

* My system does take the BCS into consideration. With the exception of USC, my preseason ballot does convey a degree of probability in terms of a team reaching the BCS title game. So the top of the ballot tells you that I project Ohio State and Texas to meet in the BCS national championship game.

* Eleven other teams were also considered but didn't quite make it onto the ballot. In order: Navy, Oregon State, Miami (Fla.), LSU, Florida State, Connecticut, Auburn, Clemson, Ole Miss, Arizona and Washington.

USA-Algeria Live Blog

(From RealClearSports)

RealClearSports staff and selected experts will provide live commentary during the USA-Algeria and England-Slovenia World Cup matches Wednesday. Please join us as we will be breaking down the matchups, the second-round scenarios and maybe even geopolitics. The live blog will begin at 9:30 a.m. ET, and all commenters are welcome.

Tiger Should Just Get a Divorce, Now

(From RealClearSports)

Dear Tiger:

Some of your celeb friends are worried about you. They're wondering if you're getting sound advice.

Well, we know we can reach you even if you turned off all your phones - because you're gonna read this. So here's the best piece of advice for you:

Get a divorce, now.

(And come back play some killer golf.)

Your marriage is beyond saving. There have already been reports that Elin wants to end this thing. You should agree with her and let her go. She's really the only victim here (and maybe your kids) and she's suffered enough.

It's obvious your marriage at this point is in a shambles. Elin is furious at your betrayal, but we get the feeling that you haven't been a happy camper for some time, either. More than a few of your flings have mentioned that you're miserable, and we suspect they're not all lying.

Maybe you rushed into this marriage thing because your handlers wanted it to burnish your image or you felt it was the right thing to do. But you're at a point where you can't carry on like this. Remember, a sham marriage only works if there is equal utility for both sides (see Clinton: Bill and Hillary). That's not the case here.

So here's what you need to do:

We're pretty sure you have an iron-clad pre-nup, and since you live in Florida, you're probably in good shape. But you should be magnanimous: Give Elin 100 mil as a parting gift. For good measure, send her $1 million a month for child support.

If she wants the new digs in Jupiter Island, let her have it. The same goes for "Privacy" the boat, the Gulfstream, whatever. You can always get new ones.

Ending your marriage is the best thing you can do right now. Your sponsors are jumping off your wagon. Your approval rating is sinking faster than Obama's. But the one thing you can't allow to take a nosedive is your standing as the world's best golfer.

The biggest threat to your future well being isn't your crumbling marriage, but this accusation that you're associating with a doctor who is tainted by HGH and PED. People will eventually forgive you for running around on your wife (it's America, after all), but they, and what's left of your sponsors, will abandon you in a heartbeat if you turned out to be a cheat on the playing field.

Steiny's response to the New York Times on the question of Dr. Galea was beyond amateurish (did he really think the NYT would get off your back because he asked them to "give the kid a break?" Didn't he learn in PR school about the Pentagon Papers and how that worked out for Nixon?). You're gonna have to come out and do some damage control on your own. You'll have to stand in front of the press throngs and cameras, and deny any and all of this, unequivocally.

But you don't want to do that until your infidelity mess is squared away, which is understandable. That's why getting a divorce, like tomorrow, is a must.

Divorces don't end careers, in sports or otherwise. Lance Armstrong and Andre Agassi did OK after their first marriages broke up. Ronald Reagan became the leader of the free world even though things didn't work out with Jane Wyman. We could go on.

And after getting a divorce, you can feel free to play the field if that's what you want to do. Then whoever you're sleeping with is just gossip, not a scandal. It also doesn't mean you have to stop being a father. Given that you have complete control of your schedule, you can spend as much time with Sam and Charlie as you're willing.

Get this thing done. Stop groveling to Elin. That's just so not you and besides, she deserves so much better anyway. End it amicably (put in a mutual no-disparagement clause so nobody will get an idea about a book deal down the road). But most of all, quickly.

Come back to do the one thing you love to do more than any other: Play golf. The only way you're going to redeem yourself is on the golf course. At the end of the day, your legend will be about catching and passing Jack, not how many times you were married and how many skirts you chased.

You just need to be decisive. Act quickly and do it with no regrets. That's perfectly within your character.

To quote one of your former sponsors:

Go on, be a Tiger.



Sincerely,


Your Real Friends

Top 10 NFL Quarterback Busts

(From RealClearSports)

"Don't f***ing talk to me! Knock it off!"
- Ryan Leaf to San Diego Tribune's Jay Posner

It was the defining moment and the epithet on Ryan Leaf's unfulfilled NFL career. It was replayed on TV, over and over again, even a decade later, long after Leaf has departed the scene, having moved on to the coaching staff of West Texas A&M and perhaps, jail, in the near future.

By all accounts, Leaf is the gold standard of pro football busts. Drafted in 1998 by the San Diego Chargers with the No. 2 overall pick, he was supposed to compete with Peyton Manning on the highway to Canton. Instead, Leaf serves as the biggest cautionary tale in recent NFL history.

The lesson? Don't waste your high draft picks on quarterbacks. Most of the time, it's just not worth it.

It's a lesson, however, mostly ignored by NFL teams. And they do so at their own peril.

From the first common draft in 1967 through 1997, only eight quarterbacks were taken first overall in those 31 years. Since 1998, however, a quarterback has been taken first overall nine times in just 12 years, including five in a row from 2001-2005.

1967-1997
1970 Terry Bradshaw
1971 Jim Plunkett
1975 Steve Bartkowski
1983 John Elway
1987 Vinny Testaverde
1989 Troy Aikman
1990 Jeff George
1993 Drew Bledsoe

As you can see, teams didn't blow their top pick on a quarterback unless they felt they had a sure thing. More than half of these quarterbacks are either enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame or led their teams to Super Bowl glory, and the rest had long and productive careers.

Now look at this list:

1998-2009
1998 Peyton Manning
1999 Tim Couch
2001 Michael Vick
2002 David Carr
2003 Carson Palmer
2004 Eli Manning
2005 Alex Smith
2007 JaMarcus Russell
2009 Matthew Stafford

Among this bunch, only the Mannings own Super Bowl rings and Peyton may be the only one headed to Canton. Two are already bona fide busts. Another one is just coming back to the league after spending two seasons in prison.

And those are just the No. 1 overall picks. Between 1998 and 2009, teams invested 33 first-round selections on quarterbacks, a higher percentage than any 10-year period in NFL history. Despite a mountain of evidence suggesting the contrary, teams continue to spend their most valuable draft pick on a highly risky proposition.

In 2009, of the 32 quarterbacks who started the majority of their teams' games, fewer than half (15) are first-round draft picks. The other 17 came in the second round (3), third round (2), fourth round (2), fifth round (1), sixth round (4), seventh round (1) and undrafted free agents (4).

That's right, nine starters came from the sixth round or later, or altogether undrafted. And put this list up against the one you just saw:

Tom Brady (sixth round, 2000)
Kurt Warner (undrafted, 1994)
Tony Romo (undrafted, 2003)
Marc Bulger (sixth round, 2000)
Matt Hasselbeck (sixth round, 1998)
Jake Delhomme (undrafted, 1997)
Matt Cassel (seventh round, 2005)
Derek Anderson (sixth round, 2005)
Shaun Hill (undrafted, 2002)

Among them, they've been to nine Super Bowls with four rings. Six of them were selected to the Pro Bowl. And you still want to waste that first-round pick, let alone No. 1 overall, on a quarterback?

Since what's done is done, we decided to conduct a thorough examination of these first-rounders during what we shall dub "The Quarterback Decade," that began in 1998 when Manning and Leaf went 1-2 in the draft. We want to find out, at least statistically, if Leaf was indeed the biggest flop.

Our research would cover a 10-year period between 1998-2007, ensuring that we have the goods for at least 2½ seasons before calling someone a bust. Out of those 28 quarterbacks, we exempted those who have started at least 75 percent of their teams' games while maintaining a passer rating better than 75.0.

The following statistical information was then taken into consideration for the remaining 14 quarterbacks:

1. Winning percentage as a starter
2. Percentage of games started for original team
3. Career passer rating (through Week 8 for active players)
4. Draft position

We discovered that Leaf had some fine company, and that, if you remove all the off-the-field stuff, he wasn't even the worst of the lot. Of the 10 biggest quarterback busts in the past decade, only one had a career winning record as a starter; one started more than half of his team's games; one completed more than 56 percent of his passes, and none threw more touchdowns than interceptions.

Half of them are already out of the league. Of the other half, three have their butts firmly planted on the pine, one just got off, and only one started more than half of his team's games this season.

And this is how we ranked team, from the pretty awful to the absolute worst:

Continue to Top 10 NFL Quarterback Busts

Q&A with Mike Bianchi

(From RealClearSports)

RCS: Well, Mike, you predicted an Oklahoma victory. What happened?

Mike Bianchi: I thought Florida's defense was good, but I didn't think it was that good. I thought the final score would end up like 40-34 but the Gator defense really rose up there. It was surprising to me. Now you have to wonder why [Florida defensive coordinator] Charlie Strong isn't a head coach somewhere.

RCS: And yet there's just one African-American BCS conference head coach out of 67 schools.

Mike Bianchi: Right, what needs to happen is a Tony Dungy of college football, a black coach who gets a good job and does well at it. Ty Willingham had a chance at Notre Dame, now Randy Shannon's got the chance at Miami. He needs to get it done.

There are so few black coaches who get good opportunities at good schools. A successful one can open a lot of doors. Look at Dungy and the coaching tree that came from him: Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, Herm Edwards, they all worked for Dungy.

RCS: But we have a black man who soon will be our president. And you think sports had something to do with that. In fact, the day after the election, you wrote a column about it titled "Athletes of Color Paved Way for Obama."

Mike Bianchi: I think a lot went in that helped Barack Obama become president, and sports had an impact. Sports is the first forum that was truly color-blind. Jack Johnson was boxing against white guys in the '20s.

You look at an NBA game today, 70% of the players are black and 90% of the fans are white. But if you can root for a black man on the playing surface, over time, you become more accepting in other facets of life, including the voting booth.

Look around sports today, you see guys like Jordan, Tiger, they made it big in corporate America. These guys cracked barriers, too.

RCS: Speaking of Tiger, perhaps Orlando's most famous resident, when is he coming back?

Mike Bianchi: Tiger's nobody's local resident. He lets nobody into his cocoon. I have no idea what his plans are, until he releases it on his web site.

But I do think there's a chance that he plays Bay Hill before the Masters. He loves to play there. He loves to play in Arnie's tournament. That'd be a good warmup for him.

RCS: So in the meantime, what will keep you busy in Orlando?

Mike Bianchi: Orlando really is a one-team town, when it comes to pro sports. But at least now there's a team that can compete for the championship.

The Magic have been in the league for 20 years and this is their best team since the Shaq days. They have the third-best record in the league, and people are starting to get excited. I think they're for real. I don't know if they're going to win it all, but they're capable. Dwight Howard is a legitimate superstar, the best pure center in the league. They have a monster in the middle surrounded by gunners.

The thing I love about the Magic is that they're maybe the most entertaining team in the NBA. They're fun to watch.

RCS: Is Orlando a good sports town?

Mike Bianchi: It's a tourist town and the population here is more divergent. Orlando is an NBA city, but really a college football town, sort of like Jacksonville, it's an NFL city, but really also a college football town. The natives here grew up as college football fans. We really didn't have any pro teams.

For the longest time, the Dolphins were the only ones in Florida, so we grew up following the Gators, Seminoles, Hurricanes. That was our pro sports. And I'm certainly one of them.

RCS: You're a native Floridian. You grew up in Florida. You went to school in Florida. What was your path to the Orlando Sentinel?

Mike Bianchi: I went to Florida in the early '80s. Back in those days, you didn't have to have a high SAT score to get into Florida. I was a student journalist at UF. While most people were rooting for the team from their school, I was investigating it. Let's just say [Flordia head coach] Charley Pell had a unique interpretation of the NCAA rules.

I started at the Gainesville Sun part-time, and got a job at Florida Today (Melbourne), back to the Sun as a columnist, went to the Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville) and then here in Orlando, where I've been for seven years.

RCS: You've become very multi-media, doing a radio show five days a week. In addition to your column, why do you feel compelled to host a radio show as well?

Mike Bianchi: I've been doing radio on and off since I was in Jacksonville. I started this new show about 4-5 months ago with Marc Daniels, a longtime radio guy here. I like it. It's sort of a relief, and a fun thing. You don't have to put too much thought into it, you just talk about what comes to your mind. I follow sports anyway, so I give my opinion. And the thing about radio is that people can call in and talk to you. You get more interaction with people than with newspapers and it's more immediate.

RCS: You also write a blog for the Sentinel.

Mike Bianchi: Blogging is just like writing a mini-column. You're basically writing what you're thinking and how you feel at that moment. It's more spontaneous and there's more interaction. People can comment and carry on a dialogue. People like having dialogues with writers and more media access.

Overall, I think it's good. I don't think blogging causes the downfall of journalism.

RCS: Are you concerned about the future of journalism -- specifically, newspaper journalism?

Mike Bianchi: Right now, things are not looking good. Then again, a lot of businesses are suffering, so we're not unique in that sense. I think there's always gonna be a place for people to get local news.

I see newspapers become more localized. For example, we're concentrating on covering the Magic, Central Florida, the Gators and local high school sports. There's national coverage elsewhere, but there's only one place you can go to find all the local stuff.

I think there will always be a place for a newspaper. It may become more and more of an internet product than an actual print product. But I'm one of those guys who like to get to the driveway to pick up my newspaper. It's like getting a little Christmas present on your driveway. That's the way I look at newspapers. I guess I'm old-fashioned.

RCS: We can't let you get away without talking about Tim Tebow. He's coming back to college. Smart move?

Mike Bianchi: No question. I would rarely say a college player should come back if he's ready for the NFL, but he's different. He's probably as big a superstar as he's ever gonna be. He's the face Florida football and a national celebrity. Why not come back for one more year? And he has a chance to become the greatest player in college football history if he wins another national championship, another Heisman.

RCS: When he does go though, is he going to play quarterback in the NFL?

Mike Bianchi: I heard Mel Kiper the other day talking about how Tebow would be an H-back, a Frank Wycheck-type. Maybe that's where he'll end up. But if guys like Tavaris Jackson can start on a playoff team, don't you think Tim Tebow should at least get a chance? Bruce Gradkowski started the last game of the season for Cleveland. I'm sorry, but Tebow is better than him. If Bruce Gradkowski is an NFL quarterback, then there's got to be a place for Tim Tebow.

Black Coaches - Distinct, Nearly Extinct

(From RealClearSports)

When DeWayne Walker was named to head the New Mexico State football program on New Year's Eve, he became a member of a very distinct group - so distinct that it's almost extinct.

Walker became just the seventh African-American to head a Division I-A (or Bowl Subdivision) football program, out of 120. And of the seven, only one - Miami's Randy Shannon - coaches in one of the so-called BCS conferences. Do the math - six percent of DI-A coaches are black, and barely one percent (1 out of 67) in the BCS conferences plus Notre Dame.

In a sport where more than 50 percent of the athletes are minorities, this is downright atrocious.

Yet beyond the usual indignation of the hand-wringing variety, it barely raised eyebrows. Rivals.com published its top 10 college football stories of 2008 – this didn't make the list.

While the NFL has made a concerted effort to hire more minority coaches through the "Rooney Rule" - to good effect, college football has all but yawned about this glaring inequity. After the 2008 season, there have been 20 coaching changes, and just four of these head jobs went to black candidates.

It's ironic that universities, perhaps the most liberal and progressive institutions in America, are so behind the times when it comes to hiring for their most glamorous jobs. The head football coach often is the most well-known member of the university community, the de facto face of the university. While colleges aren't afraid to raid each other - or even the business world - for some of the best and brightest minority faculty members, they are reticent to take chances with the head ball coach.

This speaks volumes to just who controls the purse strings at big-time college football programs. The powers-that-be inside the ivory towers ultimately defers to the well-heeled boosters with millions to dispense with. College presidents talk a good game, but at the end, money speaks loudest.

So if you think the BCS gives college football a bad name, you should check with the BCA first.

Most 'Valuable' Athlete in Beijing? Not Phelps

(From RealClearSports)

Who’s the most valuable athlete at the just-completed Beijing Olympics?

It’s not Michael Phelps. Not Usain Bolt. Not Kobe Bryant, LeBron James or any other member of the Redeem Team. Not Yang Wei, not Yao Ming, not anybody from Team China.

It’s female swimmer Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe – pound-for-pound (or dollar-for-dollar, euro-for-euro, if you will). And it’s not even close.

An NCAA champion who’s been swimming at Auburn University, Coventry nevertheless represents her home country, a poverty-stricken mess in the midst of hyperinflation. As recently as July, it cost $250 billion Zimbabwean dollars to buy a loaf of bread – until the government redenominated its worthless currency.

But Coventry brought at least some honor to her troubled nation. Her four medals, one gold and three silver, accounted for all of Zimbabwe’s medal haul in Beijing. In fact, of Zimbabwe’s eight Olympic medals, all-time, Coventry won seven of them.

Her medal production means that in Beijing, Zimbabwe would’ve produced nearly 181 medals per $10 million US in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of course, Zimbabwe’s nearly nonexistent national economy helped make this happen. But it takes nothing away from Coventry’s achievement, even if she does train and live in the United States.

Coming in as a distant second is Jamaica, a poor Caribbean nation that has enthralled the world by becoming a sprinting powerhouse in recent Games. Besides Bolt’s three gold medals, Jamaica claimed three more gold, three silver and two bronze medals in Beijing. All of the island nation’s 11 medals came in sprint events between 100 and 400 meters.

Of the nations ranked with the best medals production vis-à-vis GDP, they generally fall into three groups: African nations (Zimbabwe, Kenya, Togo and Ethiopia), Caribbean nations (Jamaica, Cuba and Bahamas) and former Soviet Republics (Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova). Of these 16 nations, 11 currently or formerly practiced communism, including North Korea and Mongolia.

Two of these nations also are among the leading medal-winning nations in Beijing. And not so coincidentally, both are run by communist governments – Cuba and Belarus. And both are by far the poorest among nations that won at least 16 medals.

Cuba has always been an Olympic heavyweight, its 24 total medals placed it 12th among the 202 teams that took part in the Olympics. The Beijing Games, still, must be considered a failure by the Castro regime as Cuban athletes won just two gold medals – none in boxing, which Cuba historically dominated. And not even baseball as South Korea defeated Cuba in the gold medal game.

Half of the 16 top medal-producing nations are G-8 members. And most of the rest are western-(style) democracies - plus China, the host nation and the world’s third-largest economy.

Economic prowess obvious has a positive correlation with a country’s ability to produce Olympic medals. Most of these countries performed at similar rates in Beijing, at about 1-3 medals per $10 million US in GDP.

Among western nations, Australia stands out with its production of over 6 medals per $10 million US in GDP. Ever since hosting the Sydney Games in 2000, Australia has been among the top five medal winning nations, despite a small population base of 21 million (slightly less than the state of Texas).

The one country conspicuous by its absence among the winning nations is India, an emerging economy, that, with over $1 trillion US in GDP, ranks 12th in the world. Yet, until the Beijing Games, India has never won a single Olympics gold medal aside from men’s field hockey. And despite having participated in every Olympics since 1920, India has never won more than two medals at a single Games. Between 1980 and 1996, India did not win a single medal in three successive Summer Olympics.

When Abhinav Bindra won the gold in men’s 10-meter air rifle, India exploded in joy. With Sushil Kumar and Vijender Kumar (no relation) winning bronze medals in wrestling and boxing, respectively, India was positively glowing in its unprecedented Olympic achievement.

Just don’t tell the jubilant Indians that in terms of medals per GDP, India placed dead last among the 87 nations that won at least one medal in Beijing. At least India can take solace in not getting shut out, however.

Saudi Arabia, with $376 billion US in GDP, is the nation with the highest GDP (25th) not to win a single medal in Beijing. In the kingdom’s “storied” Olympic history, which covered nine Games, it has won just a silver and a bronze medal, both in Sydney 2000.

Of course, when you don’t even allow half of your population to compete in any sport, you’re not helping your chances. But that’s a story for another day.

London Has No Chance, But That's Just Fine

(From RealClearSports)

The London Games of 2012 will never live up to the Beijing Olympics.

For that we should all be thankful.

London might not have what Beijing had to offer – money, “volunteers” and a state-run machinery that left no details uncovered. And unless they open up Buckingham Palace for the dressage, London’s venues will seem like a pauper’s sandlots compared to the architecturally stunning Beijing creations.

But London has something in spades that Beijing offered little, if any at all.

Freedom.

You won’t need to get a permit to unfurl a protest banner. If you want to shout “Free Falklands” at the top your lungs around Trafalgar Square - go ahead. The bobbies won’t descend on you and drag your malcontent butt to the Channel Islands for “re-education.”

If you want tickets, you may buy them. If you care to surf the web and read about Amnesty International, have at it. If you decide to stroll through some of London’s rougher neighborhoods, nobody is going to stop you by putting up giant boards to hide them from view.

But if you expect everything to run smoothly, choreographed to perfection, then you won’t get it. There might be heavy traffic and lousy weather. A shuttle bus might be running late because of a flat tire. A not-so-cute little girl might even be seen during the opening ceremonies.

The thing about free people is that they’re allowed to screw up.

I’ll take the slightly disheveled Boris Johnson any day over any perfectly coiffed Chinese bureaucrat. During the closing ceremonies, the mayor of London stuck his hands in his pockets in a perfect moment of clarity – nobody told him what to do so he had to look around and figure it out on his own.

That a royal bastard child, the great grandson of a Turk and a bombastic former newspaperman could assume the leadership of one of the world’s greatest cities speaks well of Londoners. They voted him into office and then they railed against him when he banned alcohol consumption on the Underground. And if he ticks them off too much, he’ll be ex-mayor at the London Games.

Free people are like that. They can change their minds and get rid of their leaders.

Whatever happens in London, at least you can believe it to be real. It could be a carefree Olympics like the ones in Barcelona and Sydney, or it could be an Atlanta-esque semi-disaster. There will be plenty of planning, but it won’t cover every conceivable contingency.

But that’s OK. It’s more fun to be at a party where the lawn chair ends up in the pool than the one that you’re only allowed to look at, but not touch anything.

Goodbye, Beijing. Hello, London.

Let freedom reign.

Preseason BCS: Buckeyes No. 1, Again

(From BCS Guru)

Without a doubt we have been here before: Ohio State is No. 1 in the BCS standings.

Just like at the end of the 2007 regular season, and the 2006 regular season, the Buckeyes are once again on top of the BCS standings. Despite Georgia's lofty status as the top team in both the AP and coaches preseason polls, Ohio State is ranked No. 1 in the preseason BCS standings after the computers have spoken.

Georgia is not even No. 2, in fact -- that spot goes to USC. The Bulldogs, eyeing their first national championship since 1980, are at No. 3, followed by Oklahoma, Florida and Missouri. Defending BCS champion LSU is No. 7, with West Virginia, Clemson and Texas rounding up the Top 10.

See the complete preseason BCS standings, all the way down to No. 57s Hawaii and Washington. Every team that received at least a single vote in the AP or coaches poll is placed in the BCS standings

So what is the methodology of our preseason standings, you ask? Well, it's the same formula that produces the official BCS standings, with two exceptions: 1) Since the Harris Interactive Poll that accounts for 1/3 of the standings won't be available until late September, the AP poll is used in its place; 2) None of the six BCS computers has published preseason ratings, so ratings from 20 computers that do are used. The highest and lowest ratings for each team are discarded, and the remaining 18 averaged to produce the computer score.

How important is it to be No. 1 in the preseason? Well, it's far from meaningless. Or let's put it this way: you don't want to be way down in the standings to begin the season if you have any aspirations of getting into the BCS championship game. Just ask Auburn of 2004, which began the year No. 17 in the polls and never made it all the way to the top despite not losing a game.

For Ohio State, being No. 1 is nothing special, but finishing No. 1 has proved elusive. The Buckeyes have been to the last two BCS title games -- and got blown out in each. Their legitimacy will be severely questioned every step of way because of that history, and it doesn't help that the Big Ten will be even weaker than last season, particularly with Michigan seemingly on a rebuilding trail.

Luckily for Ohio State, it has an opportunity to quiet most of its critics early in the season. The Buckeyes have a date at the L.A. Coliseum on Sept. 13 against No. 2 USC. With an inexperienced offense and the availability of QB Mark Sanchez in question after dislocating his knee last week, the Trojans may be vulnerable. But USC, which hasn't lost a non-conference regular season game since 2002, has a stout defense of its own led by All-American linebackers Ray Maualuga and Brian Cushing.

The winner of the game that night should be on top of the unofficial BCS standings while Georgia, without a strong early-season test until the Sept. 20 game at No. 17 Arizona State, might hang on as No. 1 in both polls.

Olympics' Home Gold Advantage

(From RealClearSports)

For the first time in 12 years, the United States will not be on top of the Summer Games medals table. With one week left in the Beijing Olympics, China is poised to replace the U.S. as the country with the most gold medals. (Counting gold, by the way, is a worldwide standard.)

While China's emergence as a global sports power should be a surprise to no one, it's clear that the Chinese benefitted from hosting this year's Games. Through Sunday, China has hauled in more golds (35) than it did in the entire Olympics in Athens (32). Playing at glittering new venues and cheered on by a helpful home crowd, Chinese athletes are projected to win as many as 45 gold medals and 85 overall.

But China hardly would be the first Summer Olympic host to take advantage of home cookin'. Since 1988, every host nation has seen an increase in gold medal count, and all but one - the United States, ironically - has reeled in more medals as host than in the previous Games. (See Chart)

We use the 1988 Seoul Games as demarcation for this study for two reasons. The first is fairly obvious: The previous two Olympics - Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 - were boycotted by large blocs of influential countries and therefore the medal counts were grossly skewed.

The second reason is that the 1984 Games marked the Olympics' departure from only the purely traditional and classic sports to the inclusion of the truly unconventional and downright bizarre ones. And the number of available medals naturally skyrocketed. In L.A., synchronized swimming gained a place as a medal sport. Since then, beach volleyball, trampoline, rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized diving all found their way up the podium.

From the first postwar Games (London 1948) to L.A., the number of sports held steady between 19 and 22. After L.A., it has mushroomed to 31 until the IOC finally put a cap after the 2004 Games in Athens. Total available medals has gone from 411 in London to 688 in L.A. (plus-277 in 36 years) to 922 in Beijing. (plus-234 in 16 years).

The proliferation of (marginal) sports in the Olympics had a direct impact in helping the home team. It allowed the host nations to target their resources in more sports to mine medals. China instituted Project 119 in 2001, shortly after winning the bid to host the Games, expressly focusing on areas where the United States might be weaker - and that strategy appears to be paying off.

Of the five post-L.A. hosts prior to Beijing, Spain enjoyed the biggest sporting renaissance in a four-year period. The Spaniards hauled in 13 golds and 22 overall in Barcelona, good for sixth place, after winning just one gold and four total in Seoul 1988. Australia also catapulted from a second-tier sports power to a global juggernaut, adding seven golds and 17 total medals as host in Sydney 2000.

On average, the host nations improved their presence in the standings by 5.3 places with an additional 6.8 gold medals and 9 overall. By percentage, that's a whopping 60 percent improvement in golds and 24 percent overall. 

Economic assistance is the primary reason for medal improvement. The host nation, already committing millions (later, billions) into building Olympic infrastructure, spent some of that investment on its athletes. Sometimes lavishly. Improved facilities often led to better training and coaching and therefore better performance on the field.

Another factor is that home teams always benefitted from questionable officiating in events where judges decided the outcomes. The most infamous example would be Roy Jones' "loss" in the 1988 Games to South Korean Park Si-Hun in the light middleweight gold medal bout. Of course there are others, including this year's women's gymnastics controversy, in which China's blatant use of underage performers were generously overlooked - an unlikely event had the Games been held outside of China.

Finally, the development of sporting culture in host countries proved to be vital - and also lasting - in helping these nations to win medals now and later. The initial investment in Olympic athletes often resulted in sprouting interest in sports in the general population. It's revealing that, except Greece, each of the recent host nations has maintained its global sports standings even after the Games have long departed its turf.

Including China, four of the six leading nations in Beijing are recent hosts (1. China, 2. USA, 5. Australia, 6. South Korea). Spain is ranked 13th, but arguably it's having a better sporting year than anyone else on the planet, with victories in the soccer European Championship and Tour de France, and Rafael Nadal's double triumph at the French Open and Wimbledon and ascendency to world. No. 1.

It's a certainty, with this backdrop, that China will remain a sporting power long after Beijing. Great Britain, currently ranking No. 3 and having its best Olympics since 1920, is next in line as the host of the 2012 Games in London. The top of the medals table is getting crowded with lots of newly minted Olympic powers, all emerging after serving as the host in the last 20 years.

Threatened by all these new competitors, the United States has but one thing to do to reclaim the five-ring global supremacy:

Get the 2016 Games to Chicago.

Only As Good As Gold

(From RealClearSports)

Do you know that the Buffalo Bills were the most successful NFL franchise in the 1990s? Or that Jan Ullrich tied Lance Armstrong as the greatest riders in the history of the Tour de France?

Senseless? Hey, it's the same logic that U.S. media outlets follow when it comes to the Olympics medal tables - including this one.

The world over, the medal tables are arranged according to the most number of gold medals accumulated - check out BBC, l'Equipe, Der Spiegel, The Australian, Globe and Mail, Japan Times, South China Morning Post ... I could go on and on.

Not to mention the IOC, the governing body of the Olympic Games.

But here in the USA, without exception, medal tables are ranked according to total number of medals won by each country. A few publications let you sort it however you want, but the default mode is always total number of medals.

In a country imbued with much sports culture and heritage, we should know better than that. When it comes to sporting events, it's victory uber alles. Silver medals are for losers. Just ask Jim Kelly how he feels about finishing second four times.

This disparity of how medal tables are arranged will become a big topic as the Beijing Olympics move into the second week. It's likely that for only the fourth time - and the first since the Tokyo Games in 1964 - that the country with the most medals won't be the one with the most golds.

While U.S. publications continue to tout America's "lead" in the standings, the rest of the world sees China as the front-runner. The Chinese have a commanding advantage in gold medals - 35 to the U.S.'s 19 as of Sunday - even though the U.S. is clinging onto a slim overall medals lead. Without a particularly strong track and field contingent, it's unlikely that the U.S. would catch China for the most golds.

With that, America's 12-year-run as the Olympic hegemon will be over. China may not end up with the most medals, but it will have the most of what matters.

And it won't even be all that close.


Olympics with Different Leaders in Gold and Overall Medals

1896 - 1. USA (11 gold, 20 total), 2. Greece (10, 46)
1912 - 1. USA (25, 63), 2. Sweden (24, 65)
1964 - 1. USA (36, 90), 2. Soviet Union (30, 96)
2008* - 1. China (35, 61), 2. USA (19, 65)

* Through Sunday, Aug. 17

Phelps Wins by a Jiffy

(From RealClearSports)

To the naked eye, it's hard to tell whether Michael Phelps really beat Milorad (Mike) Cavic to the wall.

Well, that depends on how naked you want to get.

Sports Illustrated has come up with this series of photos that seems to dispel any notions of conspiracy and device malfunction. It really does look like Phelps beat Cavic by the closest of margins.



By 1/100th of a second.

That's one centisecond, a bit longer than a flash. Technically, it's called a jiffy.

Yes, Michael Phelps won by a jiffy.

Land of the Delay, Home of the Tape

(From RealClearSports)

It's a staggering fact that of the nearly 200 nations participating in the Beijing Olympics, the United States might be the only one where live coverage of the Opening Ceremony is unavailable.

Why? Thanks to NBC, which continues its criminal practice of "saving" the best of the Games for prime time -- a tactic that began in 1992 when the network first secured Olympics TV rights and continued to near-perfection to this day.

Basically, Dick Ebersol and his minions don't want you to think of the Olympics as a sporting event. They want you to view it as though it's theater. We all know what happens at the end of Hamlet but we'd still see it, right?

The problem is, sporting events can't be scripted (with apologies to the NBA). Neither can news events. And the Olympics are both.

Let's say a bomb goes off in the middle of the Opening Ceremonies. It would instantly reverberate around the globe. Footage of the carnage will be immediately beamed all over the world -- except in the United States.

Because NBC holds the exclusive U.S. broadcast rights, nothing from the Games' venues may be viewed anywhere in America except for on its broadcast partners and its own web site. So while you might get a peek of a still photo here and a news story there, you'd have to tune in, 12 hours later, to see what actually had taken place.

"A Bomb Blows Up the Entire Stage in Beijing's Olympic Stadium! Watch it on NBC Tonight at 8!"

The tape-delay practice, done away with from mainstream American sports in the early 1980s, came back with a vengeance during the 1996 Games in Atlanta, where Ebersol foisted the absurd "Plausibly Live" concept upon the unsuspecting public. Main events were shown on a delayed basis but masqueraded as live.

They became blatantly taped in the subsequent five Olympics, four staged away from U.S. soil. But with the advent of internet age, when free flow of information became readily available, NBC's ratings took a nosedive as potential viewers shunned television coverage when they already knew the results.

Even Ebersol acknowledged this fact and pledged to show more events live from Beijing this year. One way to accomplish that is to strong-arm the IOC to allow certain marquee events to be staged at 8 in the morning in China (prime time in America). Always aiming to please, of course the IOC obliged.

Michael Phelps, perhaps the headline athlete of these Games with his quest for an unprecedented eight gold medals, will have all of his finals broadcast live. NBC made sure of that.

Here's hoping Michael likes the morning swim.

The March of the Spanish

(From RealClearSports)

Carlos Sastre rode up the world's most famous boulevard triumphantly Sunday, the winner of the 2008 Tour de France. As Marcha Real played with l'Arc de Triomphe the backdrop, it marked another Spanish conquest on the world stage.



Yes, it's been quite a sporting year for Spain.

First, the much-maligned Spanish national soccer team breezed through Euro 2008 for its first championship since 1964. Then, wunderkind Rafael Nadal completed the first French-Wimbledon double since 1980 by outlasting Roger Federer in an epic final at the All-England Club. And now Sastre won the Tour -- the second consecutive for Spain.

Throw in Sergio Garcia's victory at the almost-major Players Championship and Alberto Contador's Giro d'Italia win, it's been an unprecedented international success story -- even if us provincial American fans aren't paying attention.

All these victories are bringing the Spanish closer together. After the end of Generalissimo Francisco Franco's iron-fisted reign, Spain has been quite a fractuous nation with the Castillian majority not getting along with the Catalonian and Basque minorities. Separatist aspirations ususally trumped national unity.

But that's changing. La Seleccion was cheered on by more than 70 percent of the Barcelonans, an unheard-of level of support because the Spanish national team typically was viewed as Madrid's team. Nadal, a Majorcan whose native tongue is Catalan, greeted the Spanish royals after his Wimbledon win and draped himself with a Spanish flag.

The famous Marcha Real, perhaps the oldest national anthem in the world, has no words. The joke is that had there been lyrics to the melody, gun fights just might break out depending on the singing individual's preferred regional language. After 2008, maybe the Spanish will work on something they all can sing along with.

There is just one near-miss in this magical year for the Spaniards: Only if Pau Gasol had helped the Lakers win the NBA championship.

Missing Tiger ...

(From RealClearSports)

Let me just say that I'm a golf junkie. I watch. I play. I play it on my video game. I talk about it incessantly. And I used to be a golf columnist, too.

I was always annoyed by the Johnny-Come-Lately golf fans who only care about golf when Tiger Woods plays. C'mon, people, I say, golf's been around for a long, long time before Tiger came around, and it will do just fine with or without him.

It never occurred to me what Tiger meant to golf until he's not playing. Last weekend, he missed a major tournament for the first time since he turned pro in late 1996. And his absence was palpable. I still followed the British Open with interest, but it just wasn't the same.

You don't realize what you're missing until he's gone. You don't appreciate his importance and magnificence until he's conspicuous by his absence. And then I ran across this song ... well, it just about said it all.

Get well soon, Tiger ...

March Madness Will Be Fun Again

(From RealClearSports)

I can’t wait to watch the 2009 NCAA Tournament.

I won't have to listen to the humorless and joyless Billy Packer ranting endlessly. I won’t have to put up with Packer's pompous declarations. I won't have to frantically search for the mute button when Packer begins to scold the refs, the players and the crowd – but rarely the coaches – for anything that goes wrong on the court.

College basketball is going to be fun again.

Packer sucked the life out of one of the most exciting sporting events just by being his curmudgeonly self. March Madness should be a time of celebration, a time of boundless joy over impossible possibilities. Instead, with Packer behind the mike, it often felt like the Batan Death March.

It would inevitably start on Selection Sunday. It had become an annual ritual for Packer to berate the committee chairman, the poor soul who just spent 48 sleepless hours to pick 65 teams for the tournament. It predictably began with the diatribe over why so many mid-major teams, teams from conferences that Packer deigned to be beneath contempt, were picked over the bottom feeders of his beloved ACC.

There was that worthless George Mason team in 2006, or Saint Joseph’s in 2004. Or any team from the Missouri Valley Conference, in any year. If Packer were the committee chairman, he’d just make it the ACC Tournament with a few invitations to the big-name teams from other power conferences.

Packer hates Cinderellas. Most college basketball fans want to see the little guys compete, and perhaps steal a game or two. Packer wants to see them squashed like cockroaches on a buffet table. UCLA 70, Mississippi Valley State 29 – now, that’s a basketball game that would make Billy Packer almost smile.

It’d be one thing if Packer’s dour demeanor and sour words were only for the benefit of the camera, a charade to counterbalance the insufferable boosterism of, say, Dick Vitale. But that was no act. The man is really that mean and graceless.

He once called Allen Iverson a “tough little monkey” as a compliment. Whether he was a racist or not, at least he was on his best behavior when it came to commentary on black athletes in the latter part of his career. Not so with women.

Packer’s a world-class misogynist. He once mused about Jennifer Gillom, the center for the U.S. Women’s Pan-Am team: “Doesn't Gillom remind you of a lady who someday is going to have a nice large family and is going to be a great cook? Doesn't she look like that?”

Packer thinks women’s basketball is so utterly rubbish that he belittled Richmond’s Ginny Doyle, who had set an NCAA record by making 66 consecutive free throws. Doyle invited Packer to a free-throw shooting contest, with a men’s ball, not the smaller women’s ball that Packer had denigrated. Packer showed up and promptly made 12 of 20 shots. Doyle sank all 20.

Then there was the 2000 incident at Cameron Indoor Stadium, when he was stopped and asked to show his credential by a female Duke student. Beyond the usual narcissist drivel such as “do you know who I am” dripping from his pursed lips, Packer couldn’t help but add this gem: “Since when do we let women control who gets into a men's basketball game? Why don't you go find a women's game to let people into?"

OK, we get it. He hates the underdog. He thinks women should stay in the kitchen. He is not moved by all the hoopla and pageantry that is March Madness. He must know basketball, right?

Well, he knows basketball, in so far as it’s played in the conventional form, like when he starred for Wake Forest in the 1950s. He has no real grasp of the many innovations of the sport over time, which might explain his absolute abhorrence for the NBA. When a new concept emerges in the college game -- take the Dribble Drive Motion Offense most notably deployed by Memphis in recent years -- it seemed to befuddle him.

So just exactly why CBS kept this man as the voice of the Final Four for the past 27 years, when he was nearly universally despised and derided? Simple. It’s a true test for the audience. If you’re a college basketball fan and you’ve tolerated Packer through gritted teeth over all these years, you must truly love the game.

You have now passed the test. Congratulations!

Bring on Clark Kellogg. And turn up the volume.

A RealClear Choice

Dear Reader:

The Berlinzoo is undergoing an expansion!

With pleasure, I'm announcing that I have joined the RealClearPolitics team. RCP is a well-trafficked and highly-regarded compilation and analysis site, on all matters politics. I will mainly work on a beta site (which I'm not at liberty to reveal yet) due to launch within a month, as well as RealClearSports, as an editor and contributor.

This is my first piece for RealClearSports, heralding the impending Wimbledon men's final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, which, of course, did not disappoint. I am expected to write on a weekly basis, perhaps more frequently once the football season gets under way.

Like its sister site, RealClearSports is a compilation site that provides links to the day's top sports opinion and feature pieces from various publications, web sites and blogs. The site is updated twice daily, at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. It's as if we're publishing a morning and an afternoon newspaper -- just like the good ol' days.

I will make another announcement when the beta site is formally launched. Please visit us, early and often!