The Sporting Life category archive

Opening Day.

But an alloyed hope: As the NCAA basketball circus draws to an end and big league baseball starts up, my local rag yesterday chose to remind everyone of football uber alles by covering the top half of the front page of the sports section, extending all the way to the fold, with a picture of a local college football player.

Bob Molinaro is underwhelmed by the prospect of yet more college football bowl games. A snippet:

In any case, bowl invitations shrink in significance – don’t you think? – when they’re handed out to two-thirds of the FBS schools, opening the door to even more 6-6 teams. Then they become like youth participation trophies.

Oh, goody-good, more big-time football games I can choose not to watch.

NCAA’s trading sex for sign-ups.

Perhaps the most insidious use of female enticement is the use of “hostesses” to show prospects around campus. Often these women’s duties go far beyond answering questions about the dining halls. Several former hostesses have said it was understood they were to do whatever it took to convince the recruit the school was right for him. Several have later said they were raped.

The role of sex in recruiting isn’t a secret. In 2013, former Oklahoma State defensive back Chris Wright told Sports Illustrated that an assistant coach told him, “You didn’t do your job” after learning that a recruit Wright was hosting hadn’t had sex the night before.

Twits who prove that men are pigs.

Sports twits.

Kudos to Curt Schilling for ensuring that these snivelling twits got a comeuppance.

It’s about time.

Major League Baseball on Friday announced significant rules changes intended to speed up the pace of the game, moves that will revamp the instant-replay process and address the steady increase in average game time.

The changes, announced jointly by MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association, will require hitters to keep one foot in the batter’s box, create a time limit for breaks between innings and streamline the process of challenging a call on the field. MLB, the MLBPA and the World Umpires Association have agreed on the changes, which will begin in spring training, and they will evaluate the results after the season.

My brother has long thought that the “one foot in the box” rule would be the easiest way to speed up the game in the Bigs; he tells me the rule is common in the Minors. He will be surprised, though, to see that a limit is being placed on commercial breaks time between innings.

Pitchers and catchers report.

This has to be one of the more bizarre brouhahas in baseball:

A federal judge on Thursday denied a request from rooftop clubs overlooking Wrigley Field to temporarily halt installation of signs they say will block their view and violate a contract they have with the Chicago Cubs.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall ruled that the “vague possibility” that installing the signs could affect rooftop businesses wasn’t enough to grant a temporary restraining order. The ruling means the Cubs will avoid a setback as they renovate the historic ballpark.

Bob Molinaro, sportswriter extraordinaire, sums up the Little League kerfuffle:

Now the whistleblower who tipped off authorities that the Jackie Robinson West Little League team used ineligible players is receiving nasty voicemails, emails and even death threats, requiring a police car to be parked in front of his home. This is totally unsurprising and the product of adults poisoning children’s games with their warped, infantile perspective of what’s important. Maybe, too, it’s a result of Little League International using kids as pawns in an overly commercial venture.

Paul Elbert offers ten reasons to “hate-watch” the Big Game. Here’s one; follow the link for the rest.

8. The owners

Remember in 2011, when an emotional Robert Kraft and Jeff Saturday shared a hug that symbolized the ending of the lockout? That hug came after Myra Kraft, Robert’s wife, passed away at the age 68. Not long after that, however, Kraft began dating dancer and actress Ricki Noel Lander, who’s young enough to be his granddaughter. That’s just creepy. Opposing Kraft is Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of too many nice things already. Anyone partly responsible for Windows 8 is unworthy of being called a two-time world champion.

Pitchers and catcher report in three weeks.

Duane Thomas, via Bob Molinaro, Sportswriter Extraordinaire:

If the Super Bowl is the ultimate game, how come they’re playing it again next year?

Adam Kilgore thinks the NFL may be using the kerfuffle over Bill Belichick’s under-inflated balls to its own advantage. A snippet:

During its most important week of the year, the NFL has willingly enabled a phony “controversy” to fill the space that may otherwise be dedicated to actual controversies that engulf the league. Rather than concussion settlements, or the league’s response to domestic violence, or the viability of Roger Goodell’s commissionership, discussions have focused on the amount of air inside the Patriots’ footballs.

If the Patriots cheated, they of course should be punished. But the NFL has complicated the process beyond reason, and in doing so it allowed a farcical over-reaction to stand in for discussion pertaining to the game’s alarming sins. The league has allowed the Patriots to play the role of the villain, a convenient distraction from its own scandalous year.

You can read the whole thing and decide whether you agree. I don’t; over the past year, the NFL has demonstrated a public-relations ineptness indicating an inability to come up with so sophisticated a misdirection play.

A South Carolina man is facing narcotics charges after police last night found him in possession of a bag of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, specifically a “New England Patriots drug pipe.”

No word on whether the pipe was properly inflated.

Don Giordano has qualms about returning a statue of Joe Paterno (who was a football coach, not a statesman or general or a scholar) to a place of honor on the Penn State University campus. In case you have forgotten, Paterno was revered as an all-around nice guy until it was learned that, upon being informed that one of his friends and long-time associates had been seen molesting a little boy, did as little as he could possibly have done about it.

Old friends and we’re all members of the club and all that, eh, what?

Nevertheless, the Penn State alumni continue to revere JoePa because he embodied their highest value, their most revered goal, the reflection on the Platonic wall of all that is sacred, the highest ideal of honor and integrity: NCAA bowl games.

Here’s a bit from Giordano:

It’s amazing to me the spins and defenses that callers have offered to me to defend Paterno. The first wave argued that JoePa was of a generation that couldn’t comprehend what he was being told when he was informed by Mike McQueary, the assistant football coach, that he had witnessed Sandusky assaulting a young boy in the athletic-building shower.

I wonder what Paterno’s reaction would have been if McQueary had told him that he saw Paterno’s grandson in that shower. Would Paterno have merely done the minimum and reported it only to his supervisors?

The second wave of defenders loves to tell me that Joe did all that he could to stop Sandusky. He reported Sandusky to his “superiors.” Who was JoePa’s superior at Penn State?

The third wave of defenders has started the argument that we beat the NCAA and now we’ll put Joe’s statue back because we are a huge alumni group with a lot of power. I wonder what an alum would do if it was his child or grandchild who had been victimized by Sandusky. Would he truly be OK with JoePa’s minimum effort?

This is just strange.

The NASCAR driver known as “The Outlaw” testified Tuesday he believes his ex-girlfriend is a trained assassin dispatched on covert missions around the world who once returned to him in a blood-splattered gown.

The headline in the print edition of my local rag differs from the online version.

The print headline says,

The Goal: Curb rising college fees.
The Risk: Big cuts for some sports.

Get real. The purpose of college is to entertain beer-guzzling couch potatoes and give ESPN a vehicle for ads.