End of season notes…

Did the best team win the Super Bowl? Considering there were ten different ways the Giants might have missed the playoffs entirely, it’s hard to say the best team won. I will say the team that played the best game and made the most plays and did what a good team needs to do to win the Super Bowl did in fact win the game.

Did Brady really get called for grounding? In his own end zone? I’ve never seen that (burying the pass 50 yards downfield between the hashmarks) but to be fair isn’t

every single pass

an attempt to avoid a sack? Why not just allow a QB to throw the ball into the ground? How is spiking the ball to stop the clock legal but throwing it into the ground to avoid a sack an infraction?

Peyton Manning? If it was me I’d be tempted to just quit but he seems to want to play. He ain’t going to the Jets and Tennessee just drafted Jake Locker. The Cardinals just signed Kevin Kolb but if they can trade him to Cleveland for 60 cents on the dollar maybe they will sign Manning when the Colts cut him. And yes, I said when. The Colts are drafting Luck so they ain’t keeping Peyton on the roster to the tune of a 25 million bonus plus the salary he’d be due. And you still don’t know if he’s going to play this year. Put is this way – would you hire a guy off the street if you didn’t know that she or he could do the job? And make them your highest-paid employee? Neither will the Colts.

College football’s Powers that Be are still incapable of a plus 1 or playoff, postponing a decision they could vote on in 48 hours for 12 months. Clowns they are, clowns, all of them. Their current system is broke. The Hokies don’t have a quality win, lose to Clemson twice and they still get the Sugar Bowl over Boise, the same Boise team that plays quality opponents on the road with frequency and has the nevre to ask for fair treatment. Keep all your SEC supremacy talk down – I fully believe that Boise would compete with success in the SEC. They are better than Vandy, Ole Miss, Miss St, The Vols, I’d take them against the perennially overrated Gamecocks, Kentucky, (this year) Auburn. How many years in a row do the Broncos have to shine before they get their due? This system is corrupt.

NBA news? I still don’t care about the NBA. Never have, likely never will. Have another lockout and stay locked.

In a desperate move to remain relevant the MWC and Conference USA will likely merge, creating a league of 14 teams that ESPN will ignore.

MLB
Drop the DH, expend the rosters by 1 spot for all teams to make up the difference.
Contract two non-attendance teams (I’m looking at you Florida – neither older than 20 years old and neither with a fan base).
Let Mark Cuban buy the Dodgers (he complains about the officiating but at least he thinks we should pay to have the best officiating)
Inter-league play doesn’t bother me – people say it’s an unbalance schedule, but to be fair does Baltimore’s schedule full of games against NYY, BOS and Tampa sound the same as the schedule for Central division teams? Either do it and do it a lot and fairly or don’t do it at all.
Stop giving home field in the World Series to the winner of an Exhibition game, Bud. Stupid, stupid idea, but an easy fix – put in your starters and leave them in the whole game. Just leave 10 guys on the bench – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMk5sMHj58I

NHL
Move more teams to Canada = Phoenix is a great choice to become a second Toronto team. (Toronto Molsons? East Toronto Historians),
Change the Florida Panthers to the Montreal Seniors.
Eliminate the head shots. The league says they are doing it – believe it when I see it.
Control salaries – you have NO TV DEAL. Save money, get a cap.

NBA
Just stop. I can’t stand the NBA. The cancellation of the upcoming season due to a labor dispute is a gift from Mt. Olympus.
Talk about a league that absolutely doesn’t care about 2/3 of the teams. This is a league that couldn’t sell the Nuggets with Carmelo.
This is a league that gets annoyed when San Antonio wins the title because they simply do their jobs and aren’t arrogant SOBs.
Retract a lot of teams – DC cares only about the Washington NFLers so nuke the Wizards, Kings, Raptors, Bobcats, Pacers & Memphis.
This is a league that would really benefit from only have 24 teams.

NFL
Stop ideas of expanding to LA – move teams or don’t – 32 is a perfect number. Who wants a league with 33 teams? Only Communists.
Jacksonville is a great choice – put them in the AFC West and swap with Kansas City. KC used to be the Houston Texans and Tennessee used to be the Houston Oilers and the Colts used to be in Baltimore so this is an all-relocated division change.
Keep the schedule at 16 games. I don’t care if you want more money. Cut pre-season to 2 games.
Stop playing the Super Bowl in February and only wait one week between the Semi-finals and the Super Bowl.
Share money with the players, but force them to put it into concussions treatment centers and into the former player’s medical bills.
Abolish the conferences. 8 division winners make the playoffs, next best four records, regardless of conference. Re-seed those 12 teams so the top four get a bye no matter how many wins, next four host the final four. No team should ever get to host a playoff game against a team with a winning record.

College Football
Merge the MWC with the Sun Belt and make a new conference. Divide into an upper and lower division just like the UK soccer leagues.
Top teams move up, worst teams sent down. And give the SMU death penalty to teams that cheat. Teams will cheat as long as you refuse to punish them. You think Auburn would pay money to a recruit if they knew doing so would mean losing their team for 3 years?

Now that our national crisis has concluded and the NBA Finals are over and ‘the Association’ has released its short-hair grip on our world, we have the unique opportunity to sit back, exhale and survey our surroundings.

What have we seen? Miami didn’t win the title and that made many people very happy. LeBron James acted like a spoiled brat in post-series interviews so that made many people very happy too. And now the season is over and a pending labor dispute may prevent another season from muddling the tv waters in 3 months so that’s a happy thought as well.

What have we learned? Don’t declare you’ll win 7 championships if you haven’t won 1 yet. Don’t act like you feel sorry for leaving the city you clearly were happy to leave. Don’t forget to show up and play in the fourth quarter. (LBJ – I know the Stanley Cup Finals were going on, but THEY play 3 periods and you play 4, try to remember)

Dallas had never won before, so good on them.

Finally, the NBA playoffs enter their fifth month and the Finals are here. Oh…joy. The LeBron Travelling Travel Show hits Prime Time. Museum tours have less walking than James. Good riddance on the NBA season – someone please sweep and let us be done with this.

Happy to see the Lakers lose. I don’t know which would make me happier more – seeing the Lakers lose or seeing Miami lose. To be honest, I wonder why it took this long for NBA players to figure out how to just all go to the same team. You need 12 guys to agree to earn $3 mil each and all sign with Milwaukee to form a dream team, go 73-9 and blow the doors off everyone. Imagine what the Heat would be with a more legit rebounder than Bosh. Bosh is nice, but he ain’t gonna pull a 20-20. Most boards all year was 17 against the lowly Kings. Imagine that team with Rodman on it – a Rodman willing to score 3 points per game and box out the universe.

The NBA would hate for an Atlanta-Memphis title matchup so naturally I am rooting for it. The tv ratings would sink near NHL levels. The NHL is having a fantastic playoffs and still no ratings.

I’m glad the Knicks and Lakers are out – and the Bulls and Celtics are soon to join them.

Also, props to the NBA for not re-seeding in the playoffs. Nothing invalidates your excessive regular season more than having bad teams face each other in the playoffs while good teams are force to eliminate each other. High quality from the Angel of Stern.

I hope either Butler or VCU wins it all. I love the big conferences getting slapped in the face.

Seeing which teams were picked for March Madness is my favorite part of the pre-tourney. My second favorite part of March Madness is hearing the gripes about who was left out.

See, there are few great basketball teams, quite a few good ones and then a whole mess of better than average teams. If you want it to be fair, instead of arguing which 10 to select from the 13 ‘we all kinda suck and went 18-11′ teams, you could just not include rotten teams at all. I guess nobody wants the loss in revenue of only having 48 teams and giving the top 16 a bye. I’m sure the argument would then shift to ‘why is that team #16 and not us?’ Either way, everyone should just shut up. If you didn’t get in, you weren’t going to win anything anyway.

Truth is teams like VaTech and Michigan State and UAB all stink right now, but Nova and Clemson and others that got in stink too. Just accept and move on.

Charlie Sheen spends thousands of dollars every day to have lots of fun with ‘massage therapists’ and ‘nurses’ and ‘librarians’ yet BYU was willing to boot off the team a player who had sex with his girlfriend.

If your code says you can’t do it I respect that they are sticking to the code, but here’s what they are losing: BYU won’t be the #1 seed going into the March tourney, which is what we expected 48 hours ago. They’ll go in as a 5 seed and be primed for a 5-12 upset if their first game is a team with any sense of rebounding or an inside game. They would have been the 4th or 5th highest pick to win the national title – now they will be 4th or 5th most likely to go one-and-done.

Your rules matter most when tested in the most dire or strongest circumstances. BYU is showing their strength by giving up any chance they had to win the national championship.