The Sporting Life category archive

Old Dominion University is a local university which started as the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary.

A few years ago, they started a football team, which has done reasonably well, if you care about such stuff. It plays at Foreman Field, a small stadium that seats about 20,000, though they are starting to have arena dreams.

Now they are going big time.

But Saturday, when ODU hosts Howard in its home opener, that policy is changing. Bags will be searched and banned items such as Frisbees, alcoholic drinks and cowbells must be pitched into nearby trash cans.

Are they doing this because there is any demonstrated threat to college football games, other than fistfights between drunken tailgaters?

No.

They are doing this because searching people is the Next Big Thing, enabled by two crackpots leaving backpacks on city streets.

All the cool teams are doing it.

Mike Fryling, assistant general manager for Global Spectrum, the company that handles game-day operations for ODU football, said bags were inspected in 2009, the school’s first season. ODU had a more relaxed attitude the past three years.

He said that’s changing in large part because other colleges have beefed up security at athletic events.

“It’s a national trend,” he said.

And you thought that The Naked City was just a movie.

Such is life in the home of the brave.

The NFL head-butts the taxpayers, aka the “fans.”

David Cay Johnston analyzes the concussion settlement.

The average left after those costs above is just $150,000. [Update: To arrive at these illustrative calculations I divided the settlement figure by the approximately 4,500 plaintiffs. Dividing by the full list of retirees and surviving spouses—several times larger—would reduce the average per-player allotment.] Since some players, or their families in the case of dead players, may collect as much as $5 million, even that average figure is inflated. That figure, a typical payout of less than $150,000 per player, should have set reporters to asking if it was in fact enough to cover the players’ medical costs. NFL players only have health insurance while workingfor the length of their careers plus five years, a highly relevant detail for any industry that knows many workers will be unemployable due to on-the-job injuries.

(snip)

Still, Rishe missed the big story by not asking an obvious question: If the settlement does not cover all the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who will bear that burden?

Answer: Taxpayers.

Makes sense in a way, I guess. After all, the Emperor helped pay for the circuses in the Roman Coliseum.

More Xes and $s at the link.

Bob Molinaro, in my local rag:

No one’s done more to skewer the NCAA’s hypocritical, outmoded rules this summer than ESPN’s Jay Bilas. In one of his latest tweets, he said, “Amateurism is dead, smothered by NCAA commercialization. Yet, NCAA drags it around like it’s in a bizarre remake of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s.’ ” Nice.

Do read the rest.

Oh! and speaking of the Entirely Sports Programming Network . . . .

Afterthought:

Big-time football is starting to make boxing look clean.

Addendum, on Posting Day:

Bob Molinaro follows up in today’s local rag:

As much as ESPN might want us to think that it is a news-gathering operation that covers all aspects of sports, it’s in business with the NFL, paying it more than $1 billion a year to broadcast MNF.

The NFL and ESPN are, first and foremost, corporate partners.

Read it.

If you wonder why I’ve given up on the Olympics (and most other endeavors of the Athletic Industrial Complex except baseball), look no further than this item in Bob Molinaro’s always excellent column in my local rag.

While wrestling and baseball are trying to fight their way back into the Summer Games, pole dancing is making a bid to join the Olympic movement. Speaking of movement, what’s now being called “pole sports” includes a rule that prohibits women competitors from dancing “in an overly erotic manner.” And I suppose fans will be prohibited from bringing $1 bills to the competition.

Afterthought:

Who defines “overly erotic,” Miss Grundy or Miss October?

I always look forward to Bob Molinaro’s Saturday column in my local rag. It’s a parade of short takes on sporting silliness.

Technology can be a wonderful thing. The San Francisco 49ers’ new stadium, set to open in time for the 2014 NFL season, will feature an app that keeps fans updated on the length of bathroom and beer lines. There’s a clear symmetry to an app like that.

Read the rest.

Daniel Ruth is not amused by the NFL’s recent purse prohibition. A nugget:

The NFL — think Iran, only without the joie de vivre — imposed the purse/bag ban after the Boston Marathon bombings, although it’s highly unlikely, given the security patdown precautions that have been in effect for years, that anyone would have been able to smuggle a pressure cooker bomb through the turnstiles.

Follow the link. Later on, he waxes sarcastic. (No word on whether sarcastic waxes h–oh, never mind.)

It’s telling that a college basketball game is no longer a game, but a “product.” From an article in my local rag about the ACC’s plans to have its own cable channel (emphasis added):

The appetite for ACC content seems high. Although league networks are football driven – and the ACC’s on-field product has come under fire in recent years – the basketball product, with the addition of Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Notre Dame and, eventually, Louisville, figures to be better than ever. It would also create an easier-to-find platform for the league’s non-revenue sports.

Bob Molinaro, in my local rag:

It might surprise you to discover that I know exactly what stage it is at the Tour de France. It’s the stage where I stop caring altogether.

More on-targetness at the link.

Athtwits. A nugget:

Curry, the high-scoring Warriors guard, was disillusioned by Twitter at first. Sidelined by injuries for most of the 2011-12 season, Curry was kicked while he was down by angry fans.

“I’d go out with an ankle injury and all of a sudden I’d get a hundred tweets saying, ‘My fantasy team is done. You screwed my whole draft!’ ” Curry recalled with a laugh.

I don’t get to see the Phillies much on local television.

The media seem to think that everyone in these parts roots for the Nats or the Birds (as I understand it, a nat is a small flying insect that is often consumed by birds and dragonflies).

But I got to see them beat the Nats tonight. It was most enjoyable.

Bob Molinaro yearns for a half-time.

Bob Molinaro:

You’ll be glad to know the NCAA is on the beat again, this time sanctioning a member of the women’s golf team from an unnamed West Coast Conference school for washing her car on campus. By using the school’s water, you see, she violated the rule against “extra benefits.” The player was asked to pay her school $20 – the estimated value of the water and use of the hose. You can’t make this stuff up.

This would not have happened if she had been a football quarterbacks.

The valet service washes their cars.

It’s only a game.

And guess who’s getting gamed (emphasis added).

Washington is one of 26 states whose highest paid public employee is a football coach, in this case University of Washington football coach Steve Sarkisian who was paid $2.7 million last year.

Coaches occupy the No. 2 and No. 3 rankings in the Evergreen State, with UW basketball coach Lorenzo Roman earning $1.35 million and Washington State University basketball coach Ken Bone being paid $855,000. They are followed by Washington State University president Elson Floyd at $625,023 and UW President Michael Young at $563,456.

And lots of persons think that the poor schmucks who fill the potholes are overpaid.

There is one God, and his name is JoePa. All others must bow before him.

Disgusting.

Aside:

Yes, it’s late when I write this.

Yes, I’ve had some Old Smuggler, one of the better cheap Scotches (any Scotch is better than every anything else).

No, I won’t regret it in the morning.

As a sporting event, the NFL draft is, as my mother would have said, “The biggest nothing.”

Bob Molinaro comments:

As everyone knows by now, the NFL draft is the world’s most popular sporting event in which no athletic ability is on display… with the possible exception of major golf tournaments.

Follow the link. It’s a delightful read.

Ken Purdy attempts to explain the kerfuffle over Tiger Woods’s two-stroke penalty at the Masters.

If you enjoy reading income tax instructions, you’ll enjoy reading this attempt to clarify the rules of golf.

____________________

*With apologies to Mark Twain (or someone else).

Bob Molinaro, sports writer extraordinaire at my local rag, introduces his column on the prospects of a local kid who has been demoted to third-string quarterback at Virginia’s always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride football factory with this bit:

“Over the years,” he said Saturday, “I think I lost my enjoyment of the game. I have to go back to the way it was and start having fun again.”

Following the Blue-Orange spring game, Sims said that sometimes he has to shake free from the feeling that football is “more of a job than anything,” though it really is for a college player.

“You’re so focused on studying film and doing everything on the practice field so perfectly,” he said, “you forget that this should be fun.”

He uses the quotation to lead into a nicely-done human interest story about the player.

He could just as easily have led into a story on the overall state of college sports and entertainment factories.

For a few of the fans, it’s obsession. For others, it’s a source of income (a bracket bucket shop). For most, it’s still a game.

For the college sports and entertainment cartel and its members, though, it’s all business.

Some Cubs fans aren’t happy.

They fear the loss of their cottage industry cottages.

As the Chicago Cubs and Mayor Rahm Emanuel near a deal on rehabbing Wrigley Field, the owners of the lucrative rooftop clubs overlooking the venerable ballpark yesterday displayed fear of the results.

Rattling a legal saber they’ve unsheathed before, the rooftop owners reiterated their belief that an agreement allowing signs that block their bird’s-eye views would violate not only their contract with the Cubs but also the city’s landmark rules for the 99-year-old stadium.

As many times as I’ve been to Chicago, I never got to Wrigley, though I did once take in a game at the old Comiskey Park, the one with the picnic tables behind screens in the outfield.

Must be fun cleaning those when it snows.

Just read this.

I can’t summarize or excerpt in a way that will do it justice, but it gets to the main reason I’m fed up with big-time college sports.

So, please, just read it.