No News Would Be Good News

It should be slim pickin's at this time of year as far as the world of college football is concerned.  The members of the Class of 2010 have signed their letters of intent and that should be it until spring practice begins.  Alas, there is news, and it surely ain't good.

• The saddest news item came Thursday from Georgia, where an 18 year old kid named Rajaan Bennett was shot to death, apparently by his mother's ex-boyfriend, who then killed himself.  Rajaan Bennett had signed a letter of intent to attend Vanderbilt.  There's absolutely nothing good associated with this story, simply another dream destroyed.
• At Ole Miss, a 20 year old kid who had transferred to Mississippi from a juco collapsed early during the his new team's first workout and died at a local hospital.
• The Oregon Ducks now have about a half dozen players who have been arrested or accused or implicated in criminal acitivities of varying severity since last season's on-field activities concluded.  There's clearly some connection with the choices that coaches/recruiters make when considering the sum of physical ability and individual character.  You can't recruit criminal potential and expect it to disappear when the cheering stops.
• Floriday booted a redshirt freshman D-tackle from the team after he was arrested for smacking a couple of women at a party.  Keep an eye out and see if he resurfaces somewhere.

Here's hoping that no more news events happen...but they will.

Off topic: I fell off the wagon yesterday evening. I watched some Olympics on TV.  I watched some of NHLUSA beat NHLCanada, then I went where I promised I absolutely would not : ice dancing.  It brought me to a new conclusion,  that my intense distaste for this particular event is largely a by-product of the cloying and annoying expert commentary of the skating announcers.  I am not about to adjust the audio and become a big supporter (though I was prompted to learn that Moldavia ceased to exist 150 years ago, though the music lived on for two American ice dancers in their odd little costumes, but that's another story), but the athleticism of the participants surely merits respect.   The contributions of the skating expert announcer, on the other hand, deserve a big "blechhh".
That is all.

Lane Changes

We're halfway through February and desperately looking forward.
Cabin fever is the all the rage in the month of February.  Once the Super Bowl is in our rear view mirrors, there's nothing much to look forward to, entertainment and holiday-wise, to help fend off the ravages of seasonal affective disorder (click) and the debillitating effects of winter.  There are, however,  a few tasty deviations from the doldrums, e.g.:

• Lane Kiffin, the new USC football boss and the new most unfavorite guy in sports, offered a 13 year old kid a scholarship.  Everyone associated with this farce maintains that it's a legitimate offer.  Kiffin supposedly reviewed films of the kid, who is in eighth grade and six feet tall.  We can only hope that this turns out badly for everyone involved, which it can and likely will for a multitude of reasons, at which point we can get together for a group chortle and a collective "I told you so".  If you're keeping score at home, mark this one down in the "Reasons to Hate Lane Kiffin" column.  Rest assured that there will be many, many more.
• The quadrennial farce that is the Winter Olympics began this past weekend.  The winter Olympic is ten days made-up and mostly weird sports that only a tiny nanno-percentage of the inhabitants of our planet has ever even tried and at which an even smaller subgroup has decided to become competitive.  A notorious example of the bizarre nature of these contests is the luge.  The luge competition is the activity that cost a 21 year old competitor from Georgia his life when he misjudged the navigation of the final turn.  In the luge, the competitor plops himself on a highly engineered but relatively primitive ice sled and hurls himself onto a chute that will accomodate him at up to 90 miles per hour.  I watched some of this nonsense on Sunday afternoon, a charade made all the more ridiculous by the clucking of the TV announcers who chronicled the competition.  The closest thing to luge-ing in the lives of everybody but the dozen guys who do this in the Olympics would be falling on your arse and sliding down your ice covered driveway on the way to retrieving the Sunday morning paper, an event that could be just like the Olympics if there were to be a couple of breathless announcers hidden behind your mailbox giving the world a slide-by-skitter account of your trip to the curb.  Millions of dollars of TV money fuels this machine, the Olympics, that is, not your trip to get the Sunday paper, and the media bleats the results with a nationalist spin to all the sheep of the world.  The TV coverage does make winter in Vancouver look like fun, though it's a lot more fun sitting in my living room than it must be shivering on some Canadian hillside with the lugers.  
• By the way, there is no way I will spend ANY time watching the figure skating "competition", which is Disney on Ice without the costumes.

• This past week was Speedweek.  Speedweek, for those who have not been appropriately market targeted, is the start of the NASCAR season  in Daytona, Florida.  Since NASCAR makes up answers to questions as it goes along, it should be no surprise that Speedweek is nine days long.  It culminates with the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500. This past weekend, the 52nd running of the Great American Race, provided an example of why NASCAR is suffering from aggressive apathy from its fans.  This race brings together on the premises in Daytona approximately 200,000 people.  This is a real number, and I have been among them five times, so I can offer personal testament to the grandeur of the event.  Millions of fans watching on TV join the celebration of the new season.   Problem this year: nobody checked to see if the race track was ready.  Since you need a race track to have an auto race,this is in the classification of "mission critical".  The pavement in one of the turns started disintegrating after about 300 miles of racing.  Since the cars are ripping along at 190+ MPH, the appearance of a pothole is a serious issue.  For the entertainment product that is NASCAR, there was a bigger problem, that being that it took over an hour and a half to fix the hole. The race was stopped and everybody watched two guys patch a hole, and then take about an hour and a half to figure out that they might heat the patch to hurry-up the setting process.  All this while 200,000 on-site sat on their hands (it was cold there!) and the rest of us switched channels.  They raced another hundred miles before another hole opened, and another delay occurred, by which time everybody at home was watching something - anything - else.
• The pothole delay is why I was subjected to so much luge-ing, and I will not forgive NASCAR for that.

None of this would matter if it was still football season.

2010 Future Props

The good people who set the betting lines are tuned in to our needs.  Proof?  The lines are out for the 2010 BCS series! Here's some highlights.

Reigning champion Alabama is the favorite to win a repeat title at 3-1. 

Ohio State is 25-4 (that's 6 1/4: 1 if you're unable to do arithmetic because of having too much fun at the Super Bowl party last night).

Lane Kiffin and USC are 12:1.  Sanctions could make this infinity : 1.  BTW, I am officially off the USC bandwagon, no fan of the Pete Carroll for Lane Kiffin trade.

My Northwestern Wildcats are 125:1.   If you think that is insulting, allow me to point out that the vast majority of teams are in "the field".  For years, NU resided in "the field".  No more.

Baylor, BC, K-State and South Carolina share the 125:1 price.

NU's Outback Bowl opponent, Auburn, is 30:1.

Texas, sans Colt McCoy, is 14:1, same as Boise State. Tebow's gone, Gators are 16:1.

Oregon, new home of the football scandal, is 12:1.

Carpetbagger Kelly and the University of South Bend are 70:1.   Jilted Cincinnatti is 80:1.

So, if you have a few bucks rattling around in your pocket and you're feeling prognosticational, take your best shot.  Season starts in 7 months.
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Off topic: The Super Bowl

Maybe I'm feeling a bit cranky...It's early, and I've read a couple of reviews of yesterday's Super Bowl Big Show.  Lewis Lazare has his horns out and is ripping the commercials.  Jim DeRogatis has ascended to his haughty place and is skewering the oldies show from the Who.

Blah-blah-blah.

Let's call it what it is:  we gather annually to watch five hours of great entertainment, and it's free.  Some good ads, some not so good ads, with ten or twelve minutes of a big name act in the middle.  We had a house full of friends, good food, good times, broke even on the wagering. Nice...

Ain't that America!

Not This Weekend

It's very difficult to stay on point this weekend.  The focus of this space is college football.  The focus of the world this weekend is Miami, and the Super Bowl.  That said, here are a few brief points before I go to work on a half dozen or so prop bets to make Sunday's game more enjoyable.

Last week's Senior Bowl was far more entertaining than last week's Pro Bowl.  To be honest, I watched the entire Senior Bowl, albeit via the DVR, and I only watched a few minutes of the Pro Bowl.  A few minutes was more than enough.

The Senior Bowl story was "how will Tim Tebow perform"?  TT's performance wasn't very thrilling.  He started with some poorly thrown short passes.  That was followed by some not so great medium length throws. Overall, TT looked overmatched.  Tebow exited to make room for the other South team QB's, making a short appearance toward the end of the game.

Tebow's performance looked worse because his opposite from the North Squad was Cincinatti's Tony Pike, who is definetly a thrower, tall and lanky.  TT looked dumpy in comparison.  QB du Jour honors go Central Michigan's Chuck LeFevour.  He was composed, threw well, ran for a couple of nice gains, looked like the whole package.  I predict that by the end of their play for pay days, LeFevour accomplishes more than Tebow. 

Time to sign off and start timing the National Anthem.  That's the opening bet; we won with an under play last year (and yes, I'm serious). 

Next week, we'll look at some of the recruiting classes  that were assembled this past Wednesday.  Today's parting gift to you is this link to Dr. Saturday's compilation  (click) of unusually named up and coming student/athletes.  Ciao.

Economy? Healthcare? BCS!

The Assistant Attorney General of the United States of America is a man named Ronald Weich.  Mr. Weich has written a letter to Senator Orrin Hatch that says that the Justice Department is reviewing Senator Hatch's request to determine whether the BCS violates provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

Let that sink in for a moment.

Senator Orrin Hatch is a Republican from the state of Utah.  The University of Utah felt slighted by the BCS last year and may have deserved consideration to play for the BCS championship.  Neighboring Boise State had the same complaint this year.

Pause to ponder.

Barack Obama the candidate said he favored the creation of a championship playoff system for college football and might "throw his weight around" if elected.

I heard that at the time it was said and laughed it off. 

Back to Mr. Weich's letter to Senator Hatch, it says,   "The administration shares your belief that the current lack of a college football national championship playoff with respect to the highest division of college football ... raises important questions affecting millions of fans, colleges and universities, players and other interested parties."

Ooooo...we have heard stuff like this before, my friends, and it makes me very, very uncomfortable.

This little look-see is not about football, nor is about fairness, nor is it even about the source of almost every decision and disagreement, money.   There will be much rhetoric bandied about in order to make the facts fit the needs of the inquisition.  While I am not a legal expert, I've done a little research and from my perspective there will not be a lot of tailoring needed to make this suit fit the anti-trust model, so that's not much of an issue. 

The marquee issue here is that our little pastime has become the latest plaything of politicians run amok. Class, identify which of the following statements doesn't belong:

• Our unemployment rate is a daily depressing headline. 
•  There is no workable response to the challenges of healthcare. 
• Our national debt is so big as to be incomprehensible. 
• Our Department of Justice is concerned that there are inequities in college football. 

Friday I'll share some thoughts about the Senior Bowl.  Today, I have to go sit in a corner and be sad.

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Off topic:  for those of you who like to vacation in Vegas,  I have plum to share.  I found this tremendously useful website Vegas Casino Info (click) the other day.  It's independent,up to date,  articulate, and highly entertaining.  Check it out, you'll want to add it to your favorites.