Kurt Warner Tweeted this photo today of his son Elijah’s sweet haircut:

So when does he drop Johnny Rotten for L-Fitz’s Marley?

By now, you know our delight with the advent of Twitter; while 95% of athlete correspondence is stuff like “hey what’s up!!!” and “workin out lol,” there’s a small fraction of it in which everything that a player’s coached not to say to the media actually comes out. That, of course, is where the fun lies.

(It’s always a good day when the Fail Whale comes to play.)

But while the NFL is cracking down on its players’ Twitter usage, just as we always feared, discord has found a way to circumvent the rules, because discord always finds a way. If order beat disorder, there wouldn’t have been any crime in the last 3,500 years. Here, our agent of mischief is the family of NFL players; specifically, Larry Fitzgerald’s brother Marcus, a football player himself at Marshall, has a few choice words for Kurt Warner after Sunday’s Arizona game. Isn’t that right, “old ass man”?

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Week One of his first full season as head coach of the 49ers has not slowed the growth of the legend of Mike Singletary. When he was handed the job on an interim basis to replace the embattled Mike Nolan, there was doubt in many corners as to whether he was ready for the job.

Sure he had great instincts as a player. But great players don’t always turn out to be great coaches — would Singletary have the instincts to coach at the highest level? On a weekend in which some big-time coaches proved that their instincts were suspect, Singletary came through looking pretty good against the Cardinals. Read more…

We continue to mourn the effective end of the Arena Football League today after their announcement that the league was folding and declaring bankruptcy. We fondly remember spending a few evenings in Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, watching Kurt Warner throw touchdowns to guys we’d never heard of as the Barnstormers proved you can have a terrible team name and still succeed in the world of professional sports.

(Nothing is over until Grand Rapids decides it is!)

But one Arena Football team isn’t taking the bad news lying down. The Grand Rapids Rampage, which sounds like a bad neurological livestock disease, are “committed to putting a team on the field.” Guys, that just sounds like practice but with the nice uniforms on.

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Being a backup quarterback for a small-market NFL team is somewhat of a thankless job, albeit a thankless job that pays millions of dollars. You practice just as hard as your more talented counterparts, but the only time you get in a game is when the outcome is already decided or someone better than you gets injured. Nobody really cares what brand of hot dogs you prefer, shoes you wear, or who you’re dating. There’s a reason they call it “buried” on the depth chart.

(Mark Sanchez, beware - this could be your future!)

For Arizona Cardinals backup QB Matt Leinart, who signed $5 million worth of endorsement deals back in the days when people thought he might be good at football, that presents a problem. The former Next Big Thing is stuck in Phoenix carrying 75-year-old Kurt Warner’s jock, and it seems he’s finally realized that the way to get back in the spotlight is to toughen up and stop being a “pretty boy”. His new training regimen? Getting his ass kicked by mixed martial arts fighters.

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O Glorious Day! The zenith of nascent spring has arrived! Today, you can call in sick to work (tell them you need to prep for your World Series-winning colonoscopy), crack open a beer before 9:30 am on the West Coast, and stare intently at teenagers in short pants for four straight days without so much as a cocked eyebrow from your loved ones.

(2008 Final Four coverage from SPORTSbyBROOKS)

(Hint: timing’s everything on this one. One weekend in the wrong direction and you’re stuck programming your GPS to stay 200 yards from schools for the next five years.)

Here’s what you need to thrive today:

Television schedule
Watch online
Watch on your iPhone
Nevada Council on Problem Gambling

(2007 teaser from SPORTSbyBROOKS coverage)

Here’s your morning NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament storylines:

• UNC guard Ty Lawson will not play against Radford in the first round.  Please adjust your money line bets accordingly.
• However, Michael Jordan’s son will likely play more for Illinois during the tourney due to injuries.  (Odd how MJ doesn’t even provide a drop quote for his son to the NEW YORK TIMES, leaving all the talking to Mom.)
• And Levance Fields feels much better, making him available for Pitt.
• Mike Krzyzewski got his back out of whack when he heard President Obama didn’t even pick Duke to go to the Final Four.  (Worse: he picked Lawson’s team to win it all.) Don’t get excited, Coach K… he did pick your team to be prepared for a little thing called “life”.
• Gus Johnson will call games in Memphis with as much gusto as he calls out bad service in a restaurant: loudly enough to get handcuffed.
• Finally, if you haven’t filled out your brackets yet, follow our advice: you can never go wrong shaking the Big Ten teams off your sheet like Mateen Cleaves works a towel.

Since you now have a few hours to kill, here’s the hail of bullet points to distract you while considering why you’re getting sex advice from China’s last eunuch (and how they tested for this):

• The United States lost to Venezuela 10-6 in second-round WBC action with slightly more meaning than a rerun of “Maude” since both teams had already advanced to the semifinals.
• More pressing: why aren’t you all out there supporting the U.S. squad? Don’t you know Tommy Lasorda said you’d go to hell if you didn’t cheer loudly enough? (And does this make the U.S. team a Bizarro Tinkerbell?)
• If you want to see what poor support at home looks like, follow Cuba back to the island after they were eliminated by Japan in a repeat of the 2006 final.

• Continuing the international baseball thread, Manny Ramirez and his balky hamstring enjoyed the game of cricket yesterday in the desert. Four out of five doctors agree that many ailments can be cured or temporarily assuaged by applying an appearance fee to the affected area.
• As always, you can stop Mexican drug wars temporarily if the local soccer team does well.
• If you’re a referee, you’d probably rather not have a potential replay rule change named after you. Too bad, Ed Hochuli.
• Donté Stallworth is very sorry that someone died.
• Grandpa Warner has hip surgery. His helmet next season will come with a radio and a hearing aid.
• Things are getting interesting in New York City sports talk radio. And by “interesting”, we of course mean “catty”.
• The Cubs are retiring the number shared by Fergie Jenkins and Greg Maddux. Cubs fans would have settled for retiring Dallas Green before letting Maddux escape to Atlanta in his prime.
• Also, you don’t apparently have to live near the USOC to lay off 13 percent of your staff. And we doubted the USOC CEO!

If Kansas City Chiefs fans thought that new head coach Todd Haley and GM Scott Pioli would bring new stability to the organization, they should think again. The KANSAS CITY STAR is reporting that Pro Bowl guard Brian Waters is asking to be released or traded after being “shocked” by the arrogance of the two in their first meetings - confirming what he has heard about Haley from Arizona Cardinals players at the Pro Bowl.

There were three Cardinals at the Pro Bowl this year: Anquan Boldin, Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner, all of whom played under Haley’s direction as Arizona’s offensive coordinator, and all of whom have their reasons for bad-mouthing Haley to his new star lineman. But old grudges aside, Haley and Pioli did themselves no favors with Waters in terms of making good first impressions.

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It guess it’s not just to the victor that go the spoils: despite his team falling just short in the Super Bowl, Cardinals offensive coordinator Todd Haley was rewarded for the team’s miracle run, as the KANSAS CITY STAR reports that he has reached an agreement with the Kansas City Chiefs to become their new head coach. Now, with the absolutely mess that the Chiefs are right now, it’s debatable how much of a “reward” this job is. But hey: it’s not the Raiders.

Clearly, by resurrecting the career of Kurt Warner and turning the Cardinals into a fearsome offensive machine, Haley’s proven that he can coach an offense. But can he be the leader? After all, this is someone who never played college football (instead playing and later coaching college golf) and only got into football as a scout in 1995. Can he earn the respect of the players with such little experience?

I don’t want to raise any red flags here, but when you think of “head coach with no college playing experience,” who do you think of? Charlie Weis? And if Haley commands the type of respect and admiration from players and fans that Weis does - yikes. It might even have Chiefs fans longing for the halcyon days of Gunther Cunningham. (Note: this will never happen.)

But I had an inkling this was going to happen. A source (a teammate on my kickball team) mentioned earlier this week that his father spotted Chiefs GM Scott Pioli having a lengthy meal with Todd Haley’s representatives at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House in St. Louis, hurriedly shooing away waiters and looking out for spies (apparently not well enough).

Which brings up an interesting point: Ruth’s Chris Steak House? Really? There was no better place in St. Louis to conduct an important, secretive conversation about your next head coach than a chain steak house? Granted, it’s not Sizzler or Golden Corral, but St. Louis has to have dining options with red leather chairs and lots of dark corners - don’t they have Italian restaurants there? And why not have the meeting in Kansas City? Can someone point him to Yelp, please?

In other news: it turns out that corporate sponsors don’t like it when the person they are using to sell breakfast to millions of kids is pictured taking a rip from a bong. Who knew? CNBC details how Kellogg’s has decided not to renew Michael Phelps’ endorsement contract, which is set to expire at the end of the month. Which was probably going to happen anyway - except very quietly versus with a public statement from the company admonishing Phelps for behavior that “is not consistent with the image of Kellogg.”

At least Phelps can always count on USA Swimming to have his back in their usual, clumsy way. The organization decided to crack the whip on their poster child by giving him a three-month ban, during a time when he wasn’t expected to compete in any meets of significance. (He will miss one meet, but let’s be serious here - if it’s not the Olympics or World Championships. does it really matter?) It’s the equivalent of a five-game baseball suspension for a pitcher, which just means that his next start is pushed back a game.

While all this was going on, there were actual games being played last night. And none were more important - or exciting - than the clash between the Lakers and the Celtics in Boston. The last time the Lakers were seen at the Garden, they were dodging green and white confetti as they exited the court to lick their wounds after having the Celtics pound them like a two dollar steak in their Finals-clinching 131-92 victory.

That didn’t happen this time. Despite Kobe Bryant having an off shooting game (10 of 29 from the field), the Lakers found a way to prevail 110-109 in a seesaw overtime thriller. The key for the Lakers was defense - a concept many thought they had abandoned about a month ago - even without injured center Andrew Bynum, and the scoring of Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom (a combined 44 points).

But if you want to talk about winning, you have to start with Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt. After missing at her first attempt earlier in the week against Oklahoma, she notched her 1,000th career win on Thursday, with her Lady Volunteers thumping Georgia, 73-43.

Say what you will about women’s basketball, but that’s an incredible feat. Consider this: in all team sports, only Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan has recorded more wins with one team. The difference, of course, is that Summitt actually knows how to win championships (although to be fair to Sloan, she never had to game plan for Michael Jordan.) In other news:

• Is Ray Lewis ready to walk away from the Ravens? It’s appearing more likely after PRO FOOTBALL reports that he has refused to give the team a “hometown discount” in contract negotiations. Could he make his way to the Bengals and rejoin Marvin Lewis? God, we hope so.



• It turns out the NFL did screw up the Santonio Holmes catch: USA TODAY says the league has admitted that the Steelers receiver should have been given a 15-yard penalty for excessive celebration after his Super Bowl-winning catch. As I type, Will Leitch is buying a black market gun and heading to the league offices in New York.
• BALL DON’T LIE wants to slap an asterisk on LeBron James’ triple-double the othe night against the Knicks on the basis of his questionable ninth rebound out of 10. Judge for yourself and see if it should have been credited to him or Ben Wallace:
• Alabama has never had a black head coach in a major sport. Jon Solomon of THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS thinks it’s about time that changes, with the Crimson Tide looking for a replacement for basketball coach Mark Gottfried. (h/t to THE MARCH TO MADNESS)
• Yeah, I guess it’s a “poor decision” for Bowling Green’s star women’s basketball player Nikki McCoy to be driving around with a BA level twice the legal limit and an open bottle of rum in the car. WTOL-TV has details of her inevitable arrest.
• PBA bowler Jason Belmonte bowls like your four-year old son does - except your son probably can’t bowl 300 games. The WALL STREET JOURNAL has the details of one of the weirdest bowling styles you’ll ever see from a pro:
• MLB.COM reports that the Los Angeles Dodgers will host the first-ever Mexican League baseball game in the US in May, as first-division teams Monterrey and the Mexico City Diablos Rojos will battle at Dodger Stadium. Grab yourself an ice cold Horchata and enjoy the game!
• THE BIG LEAD wonders if moving your family to Nevada so your seven-year-old son can play golf full-time is a bit excessive. I would agree, especially since no one is ever going to buy Brett Sodetz-flavored Gatorade.
• According to the ASSOCIATED PRESS, Michael Waltrip is vowing to retire from NASCAR if he isn’t competitive this season. So make sure you say goodbye to him if you go to a NASCAR race this season.
• We are so close to history: the NEW YORK TIMES reports that a 14-year-old set a world record at Guitar Hero with a score of 973,954 on a song by metal shredders DragonForce. Someone is going to break the million point barrier - just call that kid the Roger Bannister of Video Game Nerds.

This story comes straight from the “There’s no way this is going to last” file, but there’s a particular Olympian who is scheduled to appear at a handful of motivational speaking gigs in California later this month. And, as you might guess (since you’re reading it here, after all), that particular Olympian has earned himself a bit of criticism for toking away on some old school marijuana.

Yup, by now you guessed it: Bongtastic Michael Phelps is going to give speeches to burgeoning capitalists in Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland in late February — his first Sacramento date is Feb. 24 — and March. A company called Get Motivated! is responsible for the business seminar where Phelps and a host of others will speak, which begs the question: What does Phelps know about business except that money flocks to him when he wins? That’s all he’s got to go on, right?

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If you thought Super Bowl XLIII was exciting on its own, you should have seen it in Tucson.

(Hey! That’s not Larry Fitzgerald!)

According to the ARIZONA DAILY STAR, viewers in Tucson, right in the heart of Cardinals country, had the climactic moments of Sunday’s Super Bowl extravaganza co-opted by a cable porn network called CLUB JENNA, the pay-per-view TV station started by porn star Jenna Jameson. But wait, there’s more: The 30-second clip that ran over Pittsburgh’s fourth-quarter heroics showcased a woman unzipping a man’s pants and then, you know, some very athletic moves of a different sort.

“I just figured it was another commercial until I looked up,” said Cora King of Marana. “Then he did his little dance with everything hanging out.”

“I was in a state of shock,” said Jeanene Piek, who was watching the game with her granddaughter. “I am totally disgusted.”

Before you think this was a freak cable-crossing that only hit a few homes, check out the Comcast data. The overlay affected all viewers in the cable provider’s reach that were watching the game on its regular definition feed (the HD version wasn’t effected, perhaps as another incentive to go buy a better set). Comcast provides cable to at least 80,000 homes in the Tuscon area, so it’s safe to say that some 40,000 Super Bowl parties got an pretty unhappy ending, both on the screen and then on the field.

(Yup. Still Jenna Jameson. Not Fitzgerald. Thought we’d check.)

Not surprisingly, Comcast has already dispatched customer service reps to handle a huge influx of calls. And what’s the company line right now?

The company had “no idea” at the time it happened how the porn may have gotten into its feed, said Kelle Maslyn, a Comcast spokeswoman.

Might want to get on that, Kelle. The word is out, and Comcast is about to have some explaining — and probably some firing — to do.

For the rest of the country, there was no porny ending to overshadow a terrific game. And for the second-straight year, the Super Bowl was an instant classic, handing the lucky American public a game will be remembered for an unbelievable, final-minute catch by a wide receiver.

A year after Plaxico Burress easily pulled down a game-winning grab moments after David Tyree pulled in the catch heard ’round the world, Santonio Holmes did his best Tyree impression, grabbing a fading ball in the corner of the end zone for the game-winner, capping Pittsburgh’s NFL record sixth title.

It was an amazing catch, yet even if he’d dropped it, a catch still would have defined Super Bowl XLIII. As Adam pointed out last night, Larry Fitzgerald Jr.’s heroics will likely be overlooked 50 years from now, thanks in part to a questionable call on the game’s final play. That doesn’t mean his fourth quarter was anything short of transcendent. That he and schmoopy-with-Jesus quarterback Kurt Warner stuck to their crossing pattern guns all game and eventually got the result they wanted and expected is a testament to them and their game plan (Editor’s note: Where were all the trick plays? What happened to that story line?).

Put it all together, and there’s a fascinating trend developing. Maybe, rather than hyping quarterbacks forever in the playoffs, we should really be focusing on wide receivers. Sure, qb’s have to get them the ball, but it’s no coincidence that the Giants, the league’s best team throughout most of ‘08, collapsed after their star pass catcher shot himself in the leg. It’s no surprise that the Cardinals really emerged when Fitzgerald became a world beater after an embarrassing loss in New England. It’s no surprise that the biggest factor in the Steelers’ Super Bowl win — for the second straight Pittsburgh Super Bowl, at that — was an overlooked wide receiver.

So, while there will be plenty of attention lavished on Holmes in the aftermath of Super Bowl XLIII, it’s important to reflect back on the ante-game, a time when people hardly talked about Santonio Holmes being a key receiver full stop. Maybe next year we can all look a little harder at the wide out depth charts when diagnosing what’s really going down.

Of course, the game is always only half the story with the Super Bowl. In fact, sometimes it’s the lesser half. If the game gone the way it looked like halftime, with Pittsburgh rolling to a rout, we might be spending a lot more time right now bemoaning the lack of decent commercials. Because as good as the game was, that’s how bad the record-setting expensive — $3 million for a 30-second spot — ads actually were. There was one pretty clever ad, the punching koala bit for CAREERBUILDER.com, but that would have been a mid-tier commercial in a funnier year. At best.

So what’s happened with advertisers? That’s a good question. It’s always possible that many have cut back on their creative budget, opting to save the money for one or two Super Bowl commercials rather than cleverly crafting their campaigns. Other firms, like Gatorade, launched their new ad campaigns earlier, targeting the BCS as a start date rather than the Super Bowl.

Nonetheless, something needs to be done to make the ads a heck of a lot more watchable. Where are the clever creators of cat wrangling when you need them? Where’s this year’s “Wassssuuuuuuuuup!” The answer, dear friends, is nowhere to be found.

In fact, this year’s ads were nowhere near as interesting or cool as the halftime show. For once, a performance lived up to the hype, with Bruce Springsteen attacking a miniature four-jam set with much of the gusto and zest that he’s been known for throughout his career. You could feel it coming from the moment our fearless leader leaked the Boss’s set list earlier in the day and there was no “Born in the U.S.A” to be found on it. Clearly, this was the act Springsteen wanted to do. He was going to rock the Super Bowl, but he was going to rock it on his terms.

The lesson, as always, is to trust in Bruce. Not only was Springsteen so captivating that you couldn’t take your eyes off him, he transmitted the energy from his live shows over to TV. That’s quite a trick. And nothing can top his half-stage power slide right into a cameraman, a move which decked an unsuspecting film crew member without slowing Bruce for a second.

Now for the bad news: That’s probably the last we’ll see of Bruce in a Super Bowl. The NFL had begged him to steal the league’s biggest halftime stage for years, and he took a solid decade to accept the pulpit, and only grabbed it then (in all likelihood) to pimp his new album. You know what? With Bruce, we’ll take it. Still, with the E Street Band rapidly reaching their golden Metamucil era, it’s unlikely Springsteen and co. will be willing to take such public jaunts in the spotlight in the future, which just means everyone should try to commit as much about yesterday’s halftime to memory as humanly possible. Hey, we know that we will.

• The game hadn’t even started before the first free agent rumors and rumblings got going, and not surprisingly one of the hot names was Kurt Warner. So what will the near two-time Super Bowl champ be asking for? Try a two-year deal with a cellar of $18 million. Ouch.
• The Georgia job has been open less than a week, and Bobby Knight is not denying his interest. Oh God.



• There’s suddenly evidence that UFC champion Georges St. Pierre, coming off a truly dominant win over Brian Penn, may have gotten an edge from his trainer to win the bout. What did the cut man do? Slather him with vaseline. That’s gross, unsanitary and illegal. Ewwwww.
• Does anyone understand this Jack In The Box ad? We didn’t, and neither did FANHOUSE.

• The campaigns have already begun: Please Cardinal fans, don’t be the new Seahawks. It’s not worth it.
• Remember the magician who almost drowned at an Oklahoma City Thunder game? Here’s the video of the near disaster.
• The results you were all really waiting for: Choose your own Puppy Bowl V winner!



• The mainstream American media delay on the Michael Phelps bong hit? Yeah, it was only a single day. Oh, and according to THE WASHINGTON POST, the swimmer won’t face any sanctions, despite basically admitting he smoked. Seems like a double standard, doesn’t it?
• If there was any question that the Barcelona-backed Miami entry is your clubhouse leader for MLS expansion, here’s your proof: the team already has a logo.
• Speaking of soccer, today is the official finale to the transfer window in England. Think of the trade deadline, except 10 times more random and expensive. Good times. You can follow all the craziness here.