A Completely Logical College Sports Business Blog and Random Thoughts on Chicago, the Illini and the World
When J.J. Redick gets arrested for a DUI, an emergency post with his mugshot is not just warranted, but necessary.
(Photo from Deadspin)
(Update: In a classic case of being careful for what you wish for, there's speculation that Redick would drop down in the NBA Draft to where the Bulls might take him with their second pick at #16. Now I'm on the suicide watch.)
A post on a sport that I never write about is on tap for tomorrow. Hint: it's not about soccer, which Minneapolis Red Sox has already eloquently addressed. By the way, I'm in search of new country to root for in the World Cup as the U.S. and Poland were inept in their opening games and won't make it to the final 16 unless they can pull off upsets against some superpowers. Also, I believe Las Vegas oddsmakers have put the over/under for the number of days after the World Cup ends that it takes for that guy from Paraguay who headed the ball into his own net this past weekend to "disappear" at negative 3. Anyway, here are today's links:
1) Multiple Injuries, Few Injuries for Roethlisberger (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) – WTF, Big Ben?! As my buddy B-Diddy mentioned, Ben Roethlisberger wore a helmet everyday to work, so why would he not wear one riding a motorcycle going 60-plus miles per hour? I was in a catatonic state for days after Jay Williams wrapped his motorcycle around a pole on the North Side of Chicago (throwing the Bulls back into a hole that they were just starting to come out of at that time), so I can only imagine how Steeler Nation is feeling right now after seeing this happen to their star quarterback that's coming off winning a Super Bowl in only his second season in the NFL.
It isn't too strange that Pennsylvania doesn't have a helmet law for motorcycle riders. What is wacky to me, though, is that it used to have a helmet law until 2003, when it was then repealed. So, enough Pennsylvania politicians were actually convinced that the law was such a bad idea that they had to get rid of it. The biker lobby must have joined forces with Charlton Heston and the NRA to get that type of result.
Let's just hope Big Ben comes out of this okay.
2) For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume (New York Times) – Word to the wise: remove any references as to how you "smoke blunts" off of your MySpace personal profiles. As one fellow Illinois grad found out (thanks for making us look like schmucks, dude), that's probably a bad idea when you're looking for a job.
3) Worst-Case CTA Scenarios (Chicago Tribune) – No mention of what to do if you're trapped on the El with Ronnie Woo Woo, which has happened to me on multiple occasions.
And finally…
4) How To Brainwash Your Baby Early (Deadspin) – Do I think this is the latest sign of the apocalypse? Yes. However, do I also believe that there should be a statute enacted making it mandatory that every hospital in the State of Illinois provide an Illini version of this, whenever it is released, to go home with every baby? Absolutely.
Gregg Doyel has presented some interesting perspectives as to how the major conferences are actually the biggest proponents of expanding the NCAA Tournament from 65 teams to around 80 (the column also goes into separate conflicts over non-conference guarantee games). The rationale here is that the major conferences would be the most likely beneficiaries of additional at-large slots. Illini head coach Bruce Weber says, "[I]t's not a surprise that the big guys are clamoring." The high mid-majors that have been receiving multiple bids recently such as the Missouri Valley Conference and CAA are also for it (albeit with a little less enthusiasm), but the smallest conferences don't believe they would benefit from an expansion at all.
For the record, even with my admitted major conference bias as a Big Ten guy, I'm completely against expanding the tournament to this level. In my opinion, the tournament should only be expanded to a maximum of 68 teams, where there would be 4 play-in games involving the 8 lowest seeds playing for the right to a matchup against each of the number one seeds. Anything more than that would severely dilute the prestige of the event overall.
Plus, the largest knock against college basketball is that it has the least important regular season of the major sports. At least with the current tournament format, the last month of the regular season provides a ton of excitement in weeding out the teams that are on the bubble. Expanding the tournament to around 80 teams would pretty much allow every team that would have been on the bubble in present times into the dance. That might add a couple more days of tournament interest for those who don't start paying attention to college basketball until March, but it would come at the expense of eliminating what is now the most valuable and entertaining aspect of the regular season. As a monster college basketball fan, that's definitely not worth it to me.
I'm off to the White Sox-Tigers game tonight courtesy of TK (I will not mention the 'S' word after two Sox victories). At the same time, the NBA Finals are starting. Just for kicks, I'm predicting a classic series with the Mavs winning over the Heat in 7 games and Dirk Nowitzki cementing his place among the league's elite. Here are some links to tide you over until tonight:
1) In the Body of an Accounting Professor, a Little Bit of the Mongol Hordes (New York Times) – Khaaannn!!!
2) Pitcher Spills Steroid, Speed Secrets (The Smoking Gun) – This has the potential to be a bigger bombshell than the leaked BALCO grand jury testimony. Look at all of the blacked out names starting on page 12 of this affidavit. That's a lot of players that are going to be outed by Jason Grimsley. By the way, remember "Batgate" from a few years ago involving an Indians player climbing through the viaducts in Comiskey Park to steal a confiscated Albert "Corky" Belle bat? Grimsley should have his own episode of America's Most Wanted.
3) 'Hell Awaits' Drivers at the Airport No More (Chicagoist) – Airport officials have finally figured out that driving around in circles was starting to annoy people.
4) Showcase Metra Station Suffering (Chicago Tribune) – Ugh, as a former frequent Illinois Central rider, I know exactly what everyone is talking about here. The Roosevelt Road station is essentially an outhouse coupled with a subpar toothpick bridge project from a high school physics class.
5) Nothing Beats 1st Title; Just Ask '91 Bulls (Chicago Tribune) – All in all, the '91 Bulls run was the best championship season that I ever have or will personally experience as a fan. I was a little too young to fully appreciate the magnitude of what the '85 Bears accomplished, while the all-encompassing-sports-are-everything attitude has dissipated as I've gotten older when experiencing the more recent White Sox and Illini successes. However, the '91 Bulls hit the personal sweet spot: at the point in my life when sports meant the most to me, my favorite team in my favorite sport led by my favorite athlete won its first championship. That's something that can never be replicated. This also happened 15 years ago, which makes me feel freakin' old.
And finally…
6) Managing Director of Cristal Not Impressed With Rap Patronage (AllHipHop.com) – Funny, I never heard the French complain about American rappers when our boys stormed the beaches at Normandy. Ungrateful bastards.
(Update: A nice picture of the U.S. Cellular Field scoreboard from last night – Oak Park Night, no less – is on TK's site. Other than the fact that the Sox sucked it up against The Gambler after the first inning, it was a fantastic evening.)
Groucho Marx once said, “I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member.” If sports leagues and conferences had any brains, they would apply Groucho's skeptical train of thought to cities that throw an overwhelming number of incentives to woo them. However, despite being a conference that generally makes solid and grounded decisions for its members (i.e. standing firm on not taking bastardized television time slots for conference football games), the Big Ten just made a huge mistake by choosing Indianapolis over Chicago as the permanent home of its annual conference basketball tournament (and this has nothing to do with my loyalty to the Illini, where I admit that I love our complete homecourt advantage at the United Center).
In this case, Indy was willing to throw a multitude of incentives that Chicago wasn't going to match. The Big Ten's move here smacks of the short-term decision by the NFL to put a team in Jacksonville as opposed having a club in the nation's second-largest television market of Los Angeles. From an immediate dollars and cents standpoint, I can understand the Big Ten's reasoning for choosing Indy, but this is not a positive long-term business move for the conference (in addition to this post, I went through a number of other reasons for this back in March).
The Big East used the locale of its tournament at Madison Square Garden to propel its entire conference to national prominence. That association with New York City provides extra intangible value to the perception of the league across the country. Using the Big Ten's recent logic, however, the Big East should move its tournament to Hartford, a town that's rabid for college basketball compared to New York and where the event would take over the entire city for the weekend. Something tells me that Mike Tranghese would seriously (and correctly) question the sanity of anyone who would suggest such a thing.
Yet, the Big Ten is essentially doing what pretty much any other conference would consider to be ludicrous. Now, is Indy proportionally a bigger college sports town than Chicago? Sure. Does Big Ten Tournament completely dominate Indy while it's treated as just another event on the full sports calendar in Chicago? Of course. However, we could say the same so-called advantages for Indianapolis about Hartford, Tucson, and Birmingham. The entire allure of holding an event in a large and sophisticated city is that people actually would want to visit that location even if there wasn't a tournament going on. It's the reason why the Big East chose NYC for its tournament, the Pac-10 planted itself in LA, and the SEC and ACC fight over turf in Atlanta as opposed to picking "intimate" cities where their respective events would be much bigger deals.
This isn't meant to slight Indianapolis, which is a fine town and by every account that I've heard and read has a fantastic basketball facility in Conseco Fieldhouse. However, just as the NFL was short-sighted in putting a team in Jacksonville as opposed to one in LA, the Big Ten not trying to do everything to tie itself to the nation's third largest media market (not to mention being a major base for alums from EVERY school in the conference as opposed to the Hoosier-Boilermaker oligopoly in Indy) is a failure in basic logic. I have previously argued that the Big Ten ought to try to become the beneficiaries of large market biases as opposed to being the victim of them. The Big East has New York, the Pac-10 has Los Angeles, and the Big Ten should have Chicago. Unfortunately, the Big Ten took a step backwards toward provincialism as opposed to solidifying the link the greatest conference in the nation to the greatest city in the world.
May sweeps might be over, but that didn't stop me from some hardcore vegetating on the couch last night:
1) Samir Goes Down – I doomed Samir Patel with my “MJ in 1991” comment yesterday. He wilted like a flower suffering from eremacausis and didn't even make it to the prime time final of the National Spelling Bee. Patel is already looking toward a recrudesce next year after he takes some time off to play in the White Sox farm system. The winner Katharine Close, however, was a machine last night. While every other contestant had to stoop to the standard stalling techniques of repeating the same questions about the definition and country of origin over and over again at one point or another, she just proceeded to pound out every word without a hint of hesitation. It was like those days in the late-1980s when you would pay fifty bucks to watch a Mike Tyson fight on pay-per-view and then he would pummel his opponent in 45 seconds. She knocked those words back to Bolivia.
2) WTF Sox Bullpen?! – I'm extremely disappointed in the White Sox on this 3-game losing streak since they (a) couldn't take advantage of the Tigers finally having to play someone other than the Royals (much less the Yankees) and (b) completely let the Indians back into the AL Central race as opposed to killing them off. What's even more worrisome is the status of our bullpen, which is a glaring weakness that has been covered up so far this season by the hot Sox offense. I'd seriously rather have the Cubs bullpen out there over what we have on the South Side for the stretch run. I'm hoping Kenny Williams is burning up the phone lines to address this situation ASAP.
3) Dirk Rolls Over the Suns – How spectacular has Dirk Nowitzki been for the Mavs during the playoffs? Not only is he a 7-footer that can drop 50 points in a game both inside and outside of the arc, but his Governor of Cal-i-for-ni-a postgame interviews have been classic. You know he's stepped up to another level when every tall white European draft prospect with a halfway decent jumpshot from now until the end of time will be described as possibly becoming the “next Dirk Nowitzki”. Shaq vs. Dirk in the NBA Finals is exactly the matchup that I long to see.
4) They Wouldn't Do This to Catherine Zeta-Jones – Why does the T-Mobile commercial centering around an arena full of fans (presumably all Pistons backers) cheering and waiting for Ben Wallace to come out during his pregame introduction show the Miami Heat home floor at the beginning? And why does Vince Carter have a bulimic dog? These are the things in life that really bother me.
Happy Friday and enjoy your weekend!
Damn Pistons. After Ben Wallace packed Shaq in last night's game, I now have a really awful feeling that we're going to be denied a Dwyane Wade and Shaq NBA Finals for the second year in a row even though the Heat only need one more win. Anyway, here are today's links:
1) Who Will Win? We Handicap the Spellers – Samir Patel is going to finally bring it home tonight. He's on the cusp of cementing his greatness like MJ in 1991.
2) Suburban School Board Rejects Book Ban – Freakonomics, Slaughterhouse-Five, Beloved… all books that a District 214 board member attempted to ban. Of course, she never actually read any of these books in their entirety (a common theme among book burners). Thankfully, northwest suburban Chicago isn't located in Kansas and cooler heads prevailed.
3) Not Heard 'Round The World – Instant karma's gonna get you.
4) Pimp My Grill – My eyes are popping out of my head like a Looney Tunes character right now.
And finally…
5) He Believed He Could Build – R. Kelly to Olympia Fields: I want to piss on you.
Let's see if you can match up the following actual quotes from this past Sunday with the appropriate Chicago baseball manager:
1) Manager A: "We have to get better as a team… It's not about individuals. We have to get better with the little things."
2) Manager B: "I'm proud of how the team battled back, especially the way things have been going… We don't quit."
Interestingly, Manager A's remarks came after his team won 7-5 and continues to roll on with the second-best record in all of baseball. In contrast, Manager B's quotes were in the wake of his team losing its sixth game in a row by giving up a franchise record 8 home runs in a single game and their third baseman letting a routine pop-up bounce off of his head that allowed a Braves player onto base (who would subsequently score Atlanta's winning run). Is there any wonder why Ozzie Guillen (Manager A) is the most beloved coach in Chicago history this side of Mike Ditka while Dusty Baker (Manager B) is questioning whether he's going to still have a job by the All-Star break?
I'll be the first to admit that the Cubs' problems run a whole lot deeper than Dusty Baker. There are the injury problems, the naive belief over the offseason by Jim Hendry that there wouldn't be injury problems, and the lack of financial commitment by the Tribune Company to spend the money that is commiserate with a franchise that draws over 40,000 fans a game. However, Dusty's attitude that he and his team are merely the victims of bad luck doesn't address why he doesn't bench a veteran such as Neifi Perez when he drops a cut-off throw and airmails a ball over the catcher's head… on the same fucking play! I wouldn't expect Dusty to yell and scream when it's not in his nature to do so, but I do expect him to hold his players accountable rather than constantly giving them free passes.
In contrast again, when the White Sox looked complacent for a moment and lost only two games in a row, Ozzie was right there to wake them up with a profanity-laced tirade. Guess what happened afterwards: the Sox have come back and bashed in runs for two straight wins. Even after that success, Ozzie still believes that the team needs to have more practices regarding fundamentals when they get back home.
Ozzie has instilled the attitude that nothing is taken for granted on the South Side. His team knows that they need to go balls-out everyday or else they're going to be sitting on the bench. Dusty, however, still thinks this is just an unfortunate stretch for the Cubs. The problem is that this unfortunate stretch has lasted over 98 years, so Cubs fans have the right to be losing their collective patience.
Soul Patrol! Taylor Hicks is taking it home tonight. Until then, here are the links for the day:
1) Report Says High Gas Prices Not Caused by Gouging – Really? Gas prices fluctuate according to the normal rules of supply and demand as opposed to being controlled by the Pentaverate consisting of the oil companies, Karl Rove, the Queen, the Vatican, and Col. Sanders? I still don't believe it.
2) Three 6 Mafia to Peform During WWE's 'Smackdown' – Let's take a look at that Oscar scoreboard again: Three 6 Mafia 1, Martin Scorsese 0.
3) Thomas, Aldridge – or Maybe a Trade? – Isiah Thomas is the gift that keeps on giving. With the Bulls securing the #2 pick in this year's NBA Draft, we're guaranteed either Tyrus Thomas or LaMarcus Aldridge to fill our need for size or there's still the possibility of parlaying this pick into a trade for Kevin Garnett. Now, if we can only get Isiah to taking over the coaching reigns in New York, we can send Greg Oden a non-refundable plane ticket from Columbus to Chicago for June 2007.
And finally…
4) Another Win Bites the Dust – How many more blown saves will it take for Ryan Dempster to achieve LaTroy Hawkins status? I say another 2 and he's there.
A few thoughts on the world of sports from the past few days:
1) Punchless Cubs – I'll spare everyone an excessively long diatribe on Michael Barrett's cheap shot on A.J. Pierzynski. However, I will point out that I enjoy the North Side spin that this will somehow fire up the Cubs, as if having their starting catcher and best hitter since Derrek Lee's injury getting slammed with a suspension that could run a week or more is going to do a lot to "fire up" an already putrid offense. Just what the Cubs needed – Henry Blanco and his .051 batting average while the Cubs play Atlanta this weekend and then 16 straight NL Central games after that! Plus, regardless of team allegiances, the sight of Neifi Perez as a cleanup hitter should be mortifying to any baseball fan. Look, I know A.J. is an asshole, but Cubs fans need to take a step back and look at how Barrett's groundless punch has the potential to sink that lineup into an even greater abyss at the worst possible time.
2) Sox and Hound – The thing I love about this White Sox team is that I expect them to make a comeback every time that they fall behind. Regardless of how large of a deficit, they always keep applying pressure to the opposition. Even after Frank Thomas returned to the Cell with revenge on his mind with two homers (for a guy hitting under .200) that would have sucked the life out of a lesser team, the Sox pressed back and won on a suicide squeeze play executed perfectly by Pablo Ozuna in the 10th inning. Great teams make those types of great plays.
3) Great NBA Playoffs, But No More Bron-Bron – I haven't enjoyed watching the NBA Playoffs this much since the Jordan Era. The Mavericks pulling it out in overtime over the Spurs in game 7 last night was a fitting end to a classic series. This sets up a Mavs/Suns Western Conference Finals matchup, where the over/under on total points per game is going to be 300. However, I was disappointed in LeBron James and the Cavs failing to get a defensive rebound for the last minute of Game 6 against the Pistons on Friday night. That guaranteed that Cleveland's Curse of MJ Making Craig Ehlo His Bitch would continue for another year – everyone who watched that meltdown on Friday instantly foresaw the Pistons' throttling of the Cavs in Sunday's Game 7. I have no personal love for the Cavaliers, but as a basketball fan I relished the prospect of LeBron facing up Dwyane Wade and Shaq in a best-of-7 series. I'll just have to take comfort in the fact that we're not going to see a snore-inducing repeat of a Pistons/Spurs NBA Finals. Regardless, this postseason proves that the NBA is back this year.
FRANK THE TANK'S SLANT 