7:32 PM I'm sure Michigan football fans will be more than happy to spend an additional $83,000 to maintain their seat location at Michigan Stadium. With RichRod piloting the ship and the state of the economy, all is well.
UPDATE (6:47 am PT): MIAMI HERALD has a confusing account of the Taylor arrest. Did he hit another car and try to drive off in a car missing one wheel? Not clear. Jump in the comments if you can figure it out.
Lawrence Taylor arrested? And here I thought that the first contestant on “Dancing With The Stars” to be hauled to jail this year was surely going to be Donnie Osmond. At least the booking went smoothly; LT surely knows the procedure.
There aren’t a lot of details, but TMZ was the first to report that Taylor was arrested at 9:57 p.m. on Sunday in Dade County, Florida, for leaving the scene of an accident, in which there was also property damage. I’ll leave you to examine his mug shot and ponder what was going on.
But more potentially damaging than any of that is the following graph from the TMZ report: Read more…
Normally, you don’t see a broadcast booth spend a plurality of a football game raving about the “time of possession” statistic. Then again, normally, you don’t see a team win said battle by a full 30 minutes of game time, which is precisely what Miami did to Indianapolis last night. And then again, you don’t normally see a team control the ball for fewer than 15 minutes of the game… and win anyway.
(”Okay, so you just scored the go-ahead touchdown. Allow me to retort: BOOOO THUMBS DOWN TO YOU BOOOOOOO!”)
But lo and behold, thanks to the quickest of quick-strike offenses, the Colts did exactly that; thanks to touchdown drives of 1, 6, and 4 plays, Indianapolis prevailed in Miami, 27-23. Indeed, the Colts’ longest drive of the night was a 9-play drive that led to a 2nd quarter field goal; on the other side of the field, the Fins had exactly one shorter drive: an 8-play, 25-yard drive that ended in a punt. After that, literally every drive of theirs was 9 plays or longer. That’s the longest shortest drive since [ERROR WE ARE NOT ELIAS SPORTS BUREAU CLIENTS ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?].
Ah, but without turnovers, time of possession is effectively meaningless. Read more…
The Los Angeles Clippers won the most favored martyr award last night in the NBA Draft Lottery and, with it, the top pick in the 2009 NBA Draft next month (likely to be Blake Griffin). The Memphis Grizzlies and Oklahoma City Thunder now follow, leaving the Grizzlies to pretend Mike Conley, Jr. is the answer to anything but “Name one theoretically famous Junior” and draft Hasheem Thabeet.
Oklahoma City, your Ricky Rubio awaits. (Ricky will love the fried bologna sammich at Toby Keith’s I Love This Restaurant a block away from the arena.) A staff containing Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Jeff Green, Rubio, and your dear departed grandmother should be capable of 50 wins in two years. If you find it less ghoulish, we’ll refer to your passed loved one as Nenad Krstic. Same mobility, anyway.
(By the way, please send your love to Sacramento tonight as they had the league’s worst record and washed out with the fourth pick. And you thought living in Sacramento was punishment enough.)
Your intrepid correspondent pulled into a local sports bar in the Phoenix area just thirty minutes before the NBA Draft Lottery truly started (which was, of course, thirty minutes after it officially kicked off). That will be the best way to take the pulse of the community regarding the first lottery draft pick for the Phoenix Suns likely to play for the team since Amare Stoudemire, your correspondent said to himself rather self-consciously.
It can be officially reported that the patient is dead; there was no pulse in the greater Phoenix community regarding the draft lottery. The normally-popular bar was half-empty and the televisions kept being turned from the NBA lottery to practically any other sport. In fact, the only person to keep half an eye on the proceedings was Dan Majerle’s brother.
Surely, much of the passivity came from having such a slim chance at a top-three pick, but the collected crowd seemed much more interested in the Western Conference Finals for the NBA and NHL. They chose wisely as the Denver Nuggets couldn’t hold their late lead against the Los Angeles Lakers and therefore provided another thrilling finish, a 105-103 Lakers victory to kick off the NBA edition of the Western Conference Finals.
Also, game 2 of the NHL edition ended in the first overtime with a 3-2 Detroit Red Wings victory over the Chicago Blackhawks to extend the series lead to 2-0. The ‘Hawks could not stop giving up the puck in the most exposed fashion possible, leading to two breakaway goals, including the three-on-one clincher. You’d think a battle between a dinosaur and a human would turn out differently.
(The bar didn’t care for that result; Arizonans are either transplanted Colorado residents or former Illinoisans. No love lost for Detroit from either quarter.)
On the other hand, the true locals were left to stew yesterday over news that a federal bankruptcy judge couldn’t bring the NHL or the former and future owners of the Phoenix Coyotes together on a deal regarding the sale of the team and a possible move back to Canada. Instead, he sent both sides into mediation and told them to hash it out themselves.
The relocation hearing in late June won’t answer the question, either; multiple rounds of appeals will surely follow if all sides can’t talk it out. It all adds up to at least a month of indecision, misdirection, and public proclamations. It’s not unlike the buildup to the NBA Draft, really.
When Arizonans aren’t paying attention to hockey mirages or 14th picks or UFOs in 2009, they might be taking in this hail of bullet points:
College athletics are tax-exempt (even basketball and football) and the NCAA may have muddled the waters enough to make it incredibly difficult to change that.
Seriously, Lane Kiffin has multiple personal assistants and we can’t find a way to tax that program?
Melissa Rycroft is one busy gal. The former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader was chosen but then dumped on “The Bachelor” season finale, and is currently shaking her money maker on “Dancing With The Stars”.
And now the rah-rah girl-turned-reality TV star is being approached to also make her mark in the print media. Specifically, magazines. More specifically, nudie magazines. Yes, Melissa is being pursued to pose for Playboy.
After the Beijing Olympics, 17-year-old Shawn Johnson suddenly has one of the world’s most recognizable faces. She’s young, she’s an Olympic gold medalist (she would have won more than one of those, if not for Alicia Sacramone), and she’s had her own official fan club since before her 15th birthday. In fact, that’s part of her problem, as one of those fans, a 34-year-old man named Robert O’Ryan, has taken things way, way, way too far, trying to break onto the set of a CBS studio where Johnson is filming the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars.
The story comes from TMZ, via FANHOUSE — and was mentioned in this morning’s Speed Read, below — and it’s about as scary a fan issue as we can remember. Not only did O’Ryan claim he was “meant to be with,” Johnson, he also was packing a .45 caliber handgun, a shotgun, and a plethora of material that could be used to kidnap someone; duct tape, zip tiles, maps to different Johnson locations (the CBS studio, her house, etc.), love letters and “other clippings and information.”
• What’s more hilarious than showing up at practice and noticing that Brett Favre has put a dead animal in your locker? Reportedly it was a wild turkey, but usually when dead things end up stuffed in lockers in New Jersey, it’s not something to laugh about.
• Ozzie Guillen is in love with a certain team on the south side…of the country.
• Vladimir Putin released a DVD to teach you about Judo. Next in the series of world leader instructional DVDs: Robert Mugabe’s ground-breaking series of curling lessons.
Who had a better night on Monday? While Reggie Bush might have returned two punts for touchdowns for the Saints, his team still did lose. Meanwhile, his main squeeze Kim Kardashian might be back on Dancing with the Stars, as E! ONLINE reports that she is in line for a repeat visit after Olympic gold medalist Misty May-Treanorruptured her Achilles’ tendon prepping for her latest dance.
Replacing May-Treanor with the already-eliminated Kardashian might strike some people as a weak attempt to replace one sex object with another, but really it a…OK, who are we kidding - that’s exactly what’s going on here. Would you rather see Cloris Leachman shake her Granny wares at you? I didn’t think so.
In all the commotion surrounding the end of days of Lane Kiffin in Oakland, it seems we’ve heard opinions from everyone and anyone who’s ever played or coached professional pigskin. However, we foolishly forgot to get the slant from one ex-Raider who loves to talk ‘n’ talk ‘n’ talk - the ever-egregious Warren Sapp.
Well, Warren took some time out from Dancing With The Stars, and weighed in on the brouhaha at the Black Hole. During this week’s installment of “Inside The NFL”, Sapp said Kiffin was treated unfairly, just because the ex-USC coordinator he tried to do something different:
The only man to ever win both a reality ballroom dancing competition and the Indianapolis 500 is in a bit of hot water with the folks at the IRS. Indy Car/Tango star Helio Castroneves has neglected to pay more than $5 million of taxes that he’s owed the U.S. Government over the past four years, according to U.S. authorities.
Castroneves has been indicted along with his sister and his attorney in what is being described as a “tax-evasion scheme,” according to the MIAMI HERALD. They’re expected to make court appearances tomorrow in Miami. I’m sure this will all be cleared up very soon. I mean, who doesn’t forget to pay $5 million every once in a while?
Tuesday ESPN’s “E:60″ will examine the lengths some people will go to have more athletic kids.
ESPN: “E:60 correspondent Tom Farrey exclusively reports the story about the ultimate effort to buy athletic advantage – the purchase of sperm from anonymous donors who are college athletes. He visits the world’s largest sperm bank, California Cryobank in Los Angeles, where the seed of Division I football, basketball and baseball players sells fast. Farrey also speaks with families who purchased the sperm of a former tight end, and he addresses the question: How do expectations change when parents know their child is born with the DNA of an elite athlete?”
So what type of down-and-outer person, athlete or no, is selling their sperm?
John Ireland to Farrey: “How many people are breeding kids specifically to be athletes?”
Farrey: “I’m not sure they’re breeding to create elite athletes. They’re folks who are lesbians or same sex couples or mothers who never found mister right or it’s a heterosexual couple who can’t have kids on their own. So, they go to the sperm bank and they go through the catalog. And inevitably, when you’re like, ‘OK, what are we going to pick?’ … you end up picking the stuff you prioritize and you value and there are a lot of people out there who want their kids to have athletic traits.”
The main ethical question when it comes to this game of offspring roulette is if prospective parents should be allowed to know the identity of the sperm donator. So long as they don’t, I don’t see anything wrong with knowing the occupation and/or athletic history of the contributor. Problem is, if someone is donating sperm for money, what’s the odds that individual has a current occupation? (See Todd Marinovich.)
Yes, we’ve all heard over the years about Warren Sapp being a social cripple. Not to mention a man of questionable personal hygiene. So with that, I was delighted today at his selection to the latest lineup of “Dancing With The Stars”. Though I would love to see him plague survive the entire competition, that might be a little too much to ask, considering he’ll be dragging around a hazmat-suited partner.
In all seriousness, one media source close to the Raiders told me today that Sapp has always been known for raging, 100-yard halitosis. In particular, one veteran defensive lineman for the Raiders used to bark out “Breath!” whenever Sapp walked into a room or on the team plane.
That eventually lead to the team’s primary rallying cry last season: “BREATH! BREATH! BREATH!”
Sapp thought it was funny, but didn’t know the joke was on him and would bark it out too.
Coincidentally, when Marinovich was quarterbacking the club, the team’s rallying cry was, “METH! METH! METH!”
