sports
- Illinois
- Notre Dame
- Iowa
- Wisconsin
- Purdue
- Minnesota
- Michigan
- Michigan State
- Ohio State
- Northwestern
- Penn State
- Indiana
- Oregon
- Oregon State
- Washington State
- Washington
- Boise State
- Utah
- USC
- California
- Arizona
- Arizona State
- Stanford
- UCLA
Desperation
How desperate am I for live sports?
I’m watching NASCAR. And hard pressed to turn it off when they went into a rain delay.
As Groucho Marx toasted the stuffy society lady in Animal Crackers:
“A toast: to your charm, your beauty, and your brains. Which should give you a general idea of how hard up I am for a drink.”
Note: I’m like 99% sure that toast came from Animal Crackers_, but the internet isn’t helpful in finding it. So here’s another classic clip from that movie._
Really happy for Scott Frost
Really happy for Scott Frost and impressed to see him take UCF to an undefeated season.
Will be even happier to see him on the sideline in Lincoln wearing the Big Red N next year.
The best sports weekend of the year
It’s the best sports weekend of the year: the first weekend of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. So many games, so many great stories, something always happening.
Then you get highlights like this one. The 14-seed Georgia State down 2 against Baylor with time running out.
Craziness.
A College Football Playoff Proposal
OK, so can we just agree that the BCS really stinks, and there must be a better way to do college football playoffs? Every year there’s whining because some team deserves a shot and doesn’t get it, and some other team may not be as deserving, but the computers seem to like them… it’s just never good. So here’s my proposal for moving Division 1-A NCAA football to a playoff system.
1. Expand the Big 10 and Pac 10 to 12 teams each. There’s already a weird schedule imbalance between the Big and Pac 10’s and the SEC and Big 12. Namely: the conference playoff. The SEC and Big 12 are having big games this coming weekend, but the Big 10 has already been done with its season for two weeks now. It just ain’t right.
So get Notre Dame to join the Big 10, which would make twelve teams (Penn State joined as the 11th team almost 20 years ago). Get Utah and Boise State to join the Pac 10, giving it 12 teams. That allows each of the big 4 conferences to form two divisions and hold a conference championship game.
2. Split them into divisions this way:
Big 10 Midwest:
Big 10 East:
Pac 10 North:
Pac 10 South:
There’s another added benefit: Notre Dame, Boise State, and Utah have all fairly regularly been “non-BCS” teams that got to go to BCS bowls, which always throws a wrench in the works. This would get those teams up playing with the big boys and incorporated into the system.
3. Make an 8-team playoff.
Eight teams means only three rounds. (The conference title games are effectively another round of playoffs in and of themselves, but who’s counting?) Three rounds is doable. You can use the four existing BCS bowls as hosts of the first round of the playoffs. It does mean you have to move them so that they all play the same day again, but hey, the bowls were better that way, anyway. Since we already have that silly extra National Title game, that means we’d only have to add two games to the schedule to do a full three-round playoff.
4. Give the champions of the big four conferences the top four seeds in the tournament.
Because hey, they deserve them.
5. Let an NCAA committee seed the top four teams and then select and seed four more teams to fill out the tournament.
If they want to keep the BCS rankings and use them as a guide, fine, but let’s not have computers picking and seeding teams. The NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament teams and seeds are chosen by a committee, and it’s the best tournament out there.
6. Play the title game the week before the Super Bowl.
There’s almost always a dead week in between the NFL Conference Finals and the Super Bowl. Seems like the perfect week to play the title game.
So there you go. A simple way to pull in a few more teams, give us a couple more big conference championship games, and settle things once and for all with a real college football championship. What do you think?
OLN Hockey Blackout
Yesterday night I sat down in front of the TV, looking forward to watching a hockey game. The Dallas Stars were playing the Phoenix Coyotes, and according to the TV schedule, it was slated to be broadcast on OLN (cable channel 69 in our area) at 7:30 PM central time. I was bewildered to find that rather than the NHL, OLN was showing some cheesy show about the “25 scariest animals” or the “10 worst jobs” or something like that. Where was my hockey?
A quick check of the OLN website confirmed that they were showing the NHL. They even have a cool graphic that says “NHL on OLN: We believe in hockey.” I double-checked the TV listings at Excite. Yep, it was supposed to be on. I checked nhl.com. Yep, they agreed that the game was supposed to be on OLN, and even gave an in-progress score. So what the heck was going on?
Next I did a Google search, and I found this article from Newsday. It ends up that OLN is in a wrestling match with several major cable companies, apparently including my local provider, Mediacom. They want OLN to be a first-tier channel, i.e. have it included in the “standard” cable package that the company offers, rather than have it as part of a second-tier, pay-extra package. And so they are using blackouts of NHL games to try to blackmail the cable companies into switching around their cable packages.
The end result of all this: a whole bunch of really mad fans. Check out the OLN forum, for one. The funny part (OK, it’s not so funny, maybe ironic?) is that the people that paid extra to get that second-tier so they could watch hockey are the exact ones that are getting screwed. No hockey for you! If I were Gary Bettman, I’d be getting pretty upset with OLN - why, after already almost killing your league with a cancelled season, would you want to further alienate your fan base by blacking out TV coverage and not explaining why?
I will be contacting all three parties to express my frustration. I doubt it’ll accomplish anything, though. I should check… does some other network have TV rights for the Stanley Cup playoffs? If not, I may miss another whole season. Arrrrgh.