5:53 PMPeyton Manning becomes the first NFL QB to throw for 40,000 in a single decade, and his 125th career win ties him with Frank Tarkenton at 4th on the all-time QB victory list. Jim Caldwell also becomes the first NFL coach to start his career 8-0 since 1930.
4:44 PM Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner is reportedly interested in hiring Mike Holmgren to run his team, a la Bill Parcells with the Dolphins. Other names mentioned include ex-Giants GM Ernie Accorsi, ex-Packers GM Ron Wolf and current Falcons president Rick McKay.
Remember Tebucky Jones? Of course you do; everybody remembers their first Tebucky. For the youngins, though, Jones played in the NFL for several seasons at safety, even winning a Super Bowl with the Patriots back in 2001.
(He’s a wide receiver? I thought guys only played receiver if they didn’t like to hit.)
These days, Jones is an assistant football coach at New Britain High School in Connecticut, where he attended high school. One of the players on that team is one Tebucky Jones, Jr., and surprise of surprises, they’re related. Like his father, Jones is a terrific athlete and gaining considerable attention from some D-I colleges, like UConn. One tiny problem, however, would be the holy smoking assload of charges Jones faces for a fight at school from May.
Wrigley Field will now host the Captain Morgan Club (a restaurant) and the Smirnoff Patio and provide lovely mixed drinks to the fans that like to do a little drinking around 10 am at home and then ride the El to Addison and start downing car bombs around 11:30 am for a 1:20 pm start.
Also gratuitous: the entire 2008-2009 NCAA women’s basketball season. The University of Connecticut Huskies won their 39th straight game by double-digits to complete their undefeated season and claim the nation’s crown.
Stanford University of Louisville kept this game competitive for about as long as you’ve been reading this article thus far, which still might be the best effort of the year for a UConn opponent. This could be the point for a snide joke about going pro in a little something we call life, but these young women are already professional assassins. Yikes.
We know the short-lived hole in the media filter (and the filter on media members themselves) caused by Twitter will soon close and leave us with more canned responses and layers of personal marketing protection. As we speak, there are businesses springing up around the management of social spaces and new media integration and other phrases that dampen the soul.
For now, though, we live in truly awesome times. Example: Bill Stewart (West Virginia’s head football coach and the antithesis of R-Rod) has been carrying on like a blessed fool on Twitter, including how he threw all the kickers out of a meeting or how he gets so fired up by Chubby Checker that he sprints into practice at 4:15 am.
Go like this, Coach Stewart. Go like this all morning long.
Stan Kasten, president of the Washington Nationals, went on Philly radio and told Phillies fans just how much they were welcome to fill those increasingly empty seats at Nationals Park, having apparently forgotten that D.C. sports fans survive the surprisingly harsh winters by burning compressed carbon logs of their own hate for other teams. You’d think Stan Kasten had bigger fish to fry, frankly. For example, Dmitri Young just called Stan Kasten’s house because he heard Kasten’s hosting a fish fry.
Senator Ted Kennedy threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park on Opening Day. Senator Bill Frist saw this video and declared Kennedy alive and well, raising his batting average to .500.
The San Diego Padres have one chance at a title: Miss California Carrie Prejean (a former “Deal or No Deal” model) will be competing for the Miss USA title in Vegas on April 19th and she’s a former member of the Padres’ “Pad Squad”. It’s good that she’s no longer with the organization or Becky Moores might demand weekend visitation rights.
As always, sports governing bodies’ petty infighting makes for complicated reading. Therefore, please forgive us an analogy: baseball couldn’t hook up with softball to make a 2016 Olympics baby, so they’re slumming with women’s baseball to try to reproduce a “women’s component to its bid to get reinstated for the 2016 Olympics“. (The IOC is loathe to add a boys’ sport without adding a girls’ sport as well.) Of course, the idea might go over better if there were more than a thousand high school girls in America that played baseball, much less in other countries.
Then again, maybe this would all be helped if these sports governing bodies weren’t so monochrome in their leadership that one expert found that the “whiteness is distressing.“
Are you not ready to wish college basketball goodbye for the year? Do you wish you could see just one more unexciting blowout? Are you a fan of subpar hoops, like you saw last night? Well, you’re in luck, because tickets for tonight’s UConn-Louisville women’s national championship game are still available.
(Don’t expect many wide angle shots of tonight’s game.)
As of press time, I’m able to get seats as low as the plaza level, which are the best in the house besides the folding chairs on the floor. But to be fair, it’s tough to sell 72,000 seats to any event, like the men’s title game was able to do last night. What’s that? This game isn’t in a giant arena, but the 20,000-seat Scottrade Center in St. Louis? And what else, you say? It’s clear no one gives a damn about women’s basketball? Well, you said it, not me.
In a game played in front of about 70,000 rabidly partisan Spartan fans in Detroit (and roughly a couple dozen Husky fans), Michigan State outran, outmuscled, and outhustled UConn en route to an 82-73 victory. The leading scorer for the Spartans was Kalin Lucas with 21 points, but every time we looked up, Durrell Summers was making one big play after another, like a ferocious dunk in transition that capped a decisive 17-7 run.
(”F-CK YO FACE!”)
UConn hung tough, to say the least; the teams battled to a 49-49 draw midway through the second half. But shoddy play at the line and on the glass doomed the Huskies, who had looked like (arguably) the most impressive team in the tournament up to that point. We would go on, but you just want to watch Summers dunk in Stanley Robinson’s face, don’t you? Video, courtesy of THE HOOP DOCTORS, is after the break. Read more…
Is it time to talk about race in college athletics? No, not really. What purpose would it serve? What territory are we supposed to be driving towards by noticing that there’s only one white guy playing meaningful minutes in this Final Four game between Michigan State and UConn, and he’s not even from America? That’s a fact. So what?
(Destroying racial strawmen. Or strawpeople. Oh Jesus now we’re sexist.)
The simple truth is that discussing race makes people sufficiently uncomfortable that unless you’ve got something truly ground-breaking and worth saying, just leave it alone. It’s not going to change anything, it’s not going to be explored fully by the sensationalist media, and it’s just going to spark some truly stupid commentary from peanut galleries who have their own stupid pre-existing racial agendas. So let’s just keep our mouths shut until–oh damn it, for some reason, Geno Auriemmahas something to say (via THE QUAD):
“White kids are always looked upon as being soft. So Stanford’s got a tremendous amount of really good players who for whatever reason, because they don’t look like Tina Charles or Maya Moore, the perception out there is going to be, well, they must be soft.”
I hate April Fools’ Day. It’s to being funny what St. Patrick’s Day is to drinking: pure amateur hour. Every office cut-up who thinks that “Two and a Half Men” is God’s gift to comedy decides that this would be a great time to do something wacky - think Michael Scott from “The Office.” And every radio hack in America decides to start a rumor that a certain celebrity died of a drug overdose/car crash/lightning strike.
So as cranky as I am about the whole day, it’s rare when I can appreciate an April Fools’ Day stunt. But I have to doff my cap to Connecticut star Hasheem Thabeet, who managed to pull of a good prank using his (protected) Twitter account. THE ARENA reports that Thabeet Tweeted that he had failed a drug test, and would be not playing in the Final Four this weekend.
Any grousing about how the Big East didn’t deserve three 1 seeds in the tournament is pretty much dead and buried at this point, isn’t it? Aside from the fact that the original argument relied exclusively on “because it just shouldn’t be that way” rather than “because Memphis/Duke/Oklahoma earned it more than UConn,” it’s been proven true throughout the tournament, and especially today.
(FTW! No seriously, this was for the win.)
During the early game, UConn held off the same unusually frisky Missouri team that ran Memphis right out of the gym. The final was 82-75, with freshman (eep!) Kemba Walker scoring 23 points on just nine shots from the field (EEP!) for UConn.
That game didn’t hold a candle, though, to one of the best Elite 8 games of all time, as Pitt and Villanova (both Big East, mind you) went toe-to-toe, using every single bit of their 40 minutes before Villanova prevailed, 78-76. Read more…
The U.S. doesn’t run, from anything. At least that’s the story they tell you at jingoistic patriot rallies and Boy Scout camps. Yet it turns out that’s not the case, because U.S. baseball manager Davey Johnson is making noise that he’ll withdraw the team from the ongoing World Baseball Classic’s second round — or semifinals, should it advance that far — if further injuries strike the squad.
According to the ASSOCIATED PRESS, Johnson says he will forfeit if he runs out of players at any positions. And before you scoff that off as hyperbole, you should consider how close he already is to that point: The U.S. had to call in Brian Roberts, the reserve infielder, when he was out at dinner. Now he’s the only second baseman left on the roster.
How big a statement would the U.S. be making if the country that invented baseball pulled out of only the second World Baseball Classic? A big one, that’s for sure. Yet as more players criticize the practice methods and over-inflated early intensity of the WBC, the entire tournament is being thrown back into question, even as the Netherlands (recently and dearly departed), Japan, Korea, Venezuela and Puerto Rico author a pretty intriguing script.
It’s a strange emerging dichotomy that’s hard to bridge, both for the American public and, surely, the commissioner’s office as well.
If Davey Johnson doesn’t want the job of leading the U.S., we think we know a guy who does: One particular British cop, if he can learn anything about baseball. After all, right now he’s heading over to L.A. to be an assistant coach with the Galaxy, and that’s hardly at the level of a national team gig.
Think about what’s he’s already getting though! In one fell swoop, Community Support Officer Andy Bridgman is going from organizing a “Shopwatch” to coaching David Beckham and Landon Donovan.
That’s the MLS for you: They’ll spend $30 million+ on two players on a roster, but they’d rather bring over a cop from England on a psuedo loan than hire a half-decent trained coach.
A coaching scout for Major League Soccer called him late last year to offer him the job and he is taking a 12-month career break to accept it.”How many people get this kind of opportunity?” he said.
“Not only to play football full-time but also to work alongside the top teams in America? It’s fantastic. At first I thought, it’s not real.”
Well, we hardly thought it was real at first, either, but it checks out. Unfortunately, the MLS doesn’t check out itself.
If you’re like us, you waited all day yesterday for the real NCAA show: The Women’s Tournament Selection Show! What’s that? You didn’t watch it? Ahhh, well, we didn’t either. But we did read enough to learn that the four No. 1 seeds are U-Conn., Maryland, Duke and Oklahoma.
More interesting is the bracket breakdown, with Duke landing the top seed in the Western (Berkeley) Region. Who’s the No. 2 there? Why, Stanford, which happens to play less than an hour away from the site of the Sweet 16 and Elite 8. If that seems a bit unfair to you, it does to us, too. Not that it’s unprecedented, of course, but it sure does minimize the advantage of being the No. 1 seed. After all, if you can’t beat a 15, then you don’t deserve to go anywhere in the tournament. And if you can’t beat a 7, then you probably should have been a 1 or 2 seed anyway.
Once you get past that point, the site and fan presence at the event are as important as anything else, and that’s where Stanford will have a huge advantage. That’s not to say Duke won’t pull it off, it’s just a matter of the smart money being on Stanford.
You just thought Binghamton was having a great month because of the NCAA Tournament. It really isn’t. Why? Because of this Serbian lunatic.
Why can’t teams just keep wearing the uniforms, warm ups and shoes they’ve sported all year when they make the tournament? We’re so sick of this March marketing already. With that in mind, here’s Louisville’s new duds and kicks.
Rasheed Wallace, aspiring economist. Who would have thought? Maybe Dean Smith, actually.
THE BIG LEAD posted this yesterday, but it really is a must see if you’ve ever doubted the credibility of either Jay Bilas or Dicky-V. One of them is wrong in this scenario, no matter how you slice it.
Are you a degenerate gambler? Just curious about how the Vegas lines are moving heading into the NCAA tourney? Well, this fascinating post is for you.
Is Roy Jones. Jr’s heart really still in the fighting? Or are these bouts just huge publicity stunts? Read this interview and tell us, why don’t you.
Did idiotic Chelsea defender Ashley Cole — husband of the almost perfect Cheryl Cole — get set up for an arrest by an employee of a tabloid? Someone thinks he did.
Finally, are those shoes on Victoria Beckham’s feet, or did she step on a couple birds? We’re really not sure.
So where were you when one of the greatest college basketball games of all time was played? For those of you on the east coast, the answer is probably “asleep.” Unless you were at Madison Square Garden, where, at 1:22 a.m., the buzzer sounded for the final time as Syracuse beat UConn 127-117 in six overtimes in the quarterfinals of the Big East Tournament.
It was the longest game in Big East history, and came up just one overtime short of tying the longest game in the history of college basketball. And it was nearly over an hour and a half earlier. Eric Devendorf buried what appeared to be the winning three-pointer at the regulation buzzer, sending the Orange into a frenzied celebration. But then came the review, and a long review it was. And after talking it over the refs decided this shot didn’t count:
So on we went to a second overtime. And a third. And a fourth. And so on. UConn led in each of the first five OTs but couldn’t close it out. Syracuse finally took the lead in OT number six and pulled away.
To put the whole thing in perspective, the game lasted three hours and 46 minutes. There were 70 minutes of basketball, and Syracuse point guard Jonny Flynn played 67 of them. Flynn had 34 points, 11 assists, and six steals. UConn had five players in double figures…in rebounds. Four guys on each team fouled out, so guys who don’t even normally play were in the game for the final OT. Astonishingly, Jim Calhoun didn’t keel over at the three hour mark.
The previous longest game in the Big East Tournament was the 1981 final, which went to three OTs. Syracuse beat Villanova 83-80, and the game featured Leo Rautins, whose son Andy was the key to Orange’s win last night. Andy Rautins hit a three with 10 seconds left in the third OT to tie it up yet again, then hit another early in the sixth OT to put Syracuse up for good. Somehow, the Orange have to recover and play tonight against West Virginia.
The busiest day in conference tourney action saw some other big names fall, and some bubbles burst.
The best finish of the day prior to the SU-UConn battle was earlier in the day at MSG, when Villanova blew a huge second-half lead to Marquette but rallied to get a buzzer-beating layup by Dwayne Anderson to crush the Golden Eagles 76-75:
• Your daily economic downturn update: Posh Spice Beckham has, shockingly, been spotted by GABBY BABBLE wearing the same outfit in public … TWICE. This follows news that hubby Dave has had to come up with $3 million of his own cash to pay the Galaxy part of the loan fee owed by AC Slater…err, Milan. Are the good times over?
• Buried in this story about Johan Santana throwing a couple of good innings for the Mets today is the revelation that Tim Redding, who the Mets have guaranteed $2.25 million to this year, can’t get anyone out. He gave up nine runs and three home runs in two innings against the Marlins yesterday, after failing to complete a full inning in an outing against the University of Michigan on Sunday. (He gave up five runs in that game, including back-to-back jacks. To college players.)
• Jason Richardson had a bad 20 seconds in the Suns’ loss to Cleveland last night. First, he attempted a 360 dunk that was blocked by LeBron James. Second, the refs didn’t call a foul even though Bron Bron clearly hacked him. Third, he got a T for complaining. LeBron had a triple double, with 34 points, 13 rebounds, and 10 calls nobody else in the league would get. Video of the play:
• It’s Friday the 13th for the second consecutive month. To commemorate the occasion, HOME RUN DERBY picked the all-time team of guys who wore (wear) #13. The only excuse to put Blue Moon Odom and Nate McLouth on the same team
• UNPROFESSIONAL FOUL has the story of Danny Mountain, an up-and-coming soccer star whose career was cut short by a tragic injury. But he picked himself up off the deck and got it together … in porn. Now he’s “acting” six days a week and is married to porn starlet Eva Angelina. And yes, Danny Mountain is actually his real name. Here’s one of the few pictures of Ms. Angelina we could actually run on this site:
• WALKOFF WALK implores you, adult fans of the (Devil) Rays, to not wear this replica AL Champion ring in public. Apparently, every fan at the April 14th game will get one. And, since it’s still April baseball in Tampa, they’ll only be handing out 47 of them:
Southern Mississippi gave Larry Eustachy a second chance after the former Iowa State coach’s career had gone belly up in 2003 after photos of him partying with students at Missouri came to light. At this point, I think it’s fair to say that his comeback has been a bust (and not a beer bust, either). After leading Cyclones to two NCAA tournament appearance in five seasons, he has yet to get the Golden Eagles to the post-season in his first four seasons, and at 14-14 it isn’t happening this year either.
So THE NEW YORK TIMES says that Eustachy did the right thing: he gave back a $25,000 bonus he had earned through ticket sales and various incentives. Granted, he kept his $380,000 base salary, and this might be seen as a cheap way to generate some goodwill and avoid being fired, but still: that’s about 3,000 12-packs of Natural Light we’re talking about (plus enough left over to keep the Omega Chi fire pit going all semester).
