4. NCAA puts bowls on notice: The NCAA sent out an interesting letter to all the bowls last week. The letter essentially said that while the NCAA has certified 34 bowls for next season, that certification does not guarantee that a team will be available for any bowl. It is a pre-emptive move by the NCAA to ward off litigation in case there aren’t enough teams with at least six wins to fill the bowls. Some of the bowl execs I talked to want to know: “If you were worried about having enough teams, why did you certify two more bowls?”
This could get nasty. Right now a bowl cannot take a team unless it has a 6-6 record or better. This December a bowl could be in a situation where it has to petition the NCAA for a waiver to take a 5-7 team. If that happens the NCAA will get hammered in the court of public opinion. And it should.
College coaches are thrilled. At the end of any season, even if it’s considered unsuccessful, if “bowl appearance” is attached then alumni are calmed. Even better, if you can win a bowl game, despite finishing 7-6, you end the season with a victory.
The cities love bowls because almost anything surrounding football turns to gold. No matter how small the bowl or poor the teams, fans will still come, eat your food, stay in your hotels, maybe even come back another time if they have a good experience.
But who to blame for the growing number of bowls? The cities aren’t concerned about watered-down postseasons, they just want visitors. The NCAA technically is certifying these bowls, but it isn’t inventing them.
“There’s a lot of concern in our association about adding even one more game,” said Scott Ramsey, executive director of the Music City Bowl and chairman of the Football Bowl Association. “One of the worst things that could happen down the road is for the organizers of a game to spend all year preparing for it and then not have enough teams to play. It would give the bowl system a collective black eye.”
We’re past the point when a bowl is an award for an excellent season. It’s not even an award for a pretty good season. If you have an average year, you’ll get a postseason, please your athletic director, please your bigger-money supporters, please your town and continue the downward spiral of December college football.
Just a few days ago, Paul Janish was talking about his quick start with the Louisville Courier-Journal. It was a stark contrast to last season with the Class AAA Louisville Bats:
Last year the 25-year-old struggled making the jump from Double-A to his 55 games with the Bats, hitting just .221 with eight doubles, one triple and three homers. Through 32 games this season, Janish was hitting .287 with four doubles, a triple and three homers.
“Last year kind of snowballed on me,” he said. “I just didn’t feel good and got off to a bad start. Somewhere about halfway through the year I got into a funk and just couldn’t get out.
“This year I just feel a lot better and more comfortable.”
Janish will make another jump to the Reds after shortstop Jeff Keppinger broke his kneecap last night on a foul tip. Some might be worried that Cincinnati is now down two shortstops after losing Alex Gonzalez during spring training and now Keppinger, one of the team’s most productive hitter.
But many feel Janish, the former Dayton Dragon, is prepared for his chance. In late April, it’s a chance he he and many others didn’t think was coming.
The 25-year-old entered this season projecting as more of a utilityman due to his inability to hit in the upper levels of the minors, as he batted just .235 with four homers between Double-A and Triple-A last season. He is looking far better now, but we do have to keep in mind that he has not even seen 100 at-bats yet. Still, he is highly unlikely to help this season with Jeff Keppinger and Alex Gonzalez present in the majors.
Ever wonder how a player finds out he’s moving to the bigs? It’s hectic. The player development director calls the minor-league manager on his cell phone during a game. The manager tells the player in the eighth inning. The player showers. The player pulls his mother out of the stands to tell her the news. He then tells his father, who planned a trip from Houston to Louisville on Friday, to change the itinerary.
“When he came up last year, he struggled at first offensively,” (Louisville manager Rick) Sweet said. “He’s matured into a very good player. He deserves this. He’s ready to go up there and play and help out.”
The AP’s Marc Duncan is thanking the photo gods for his seat at last night’s Cavs-Celtics playoff game. That’s how he got the greatest shot of LeBron James telling his mother to, um, cool it.
Gloria James nearly came out of the crowd after Paul Pierce wrapped up LeBron and they went out of bounds. Kevin Garnett tried to restrain her as well as she tried to get into the fray.
“I told her to sit down, in some language I shouldn’t have used,” James said. “Thank God today wasn’t Mother’s Day. All I could think about is her. … I know my mother. It’s fine, we’re good.”
Good column today from George Vecsey from the New York Times on former Bengal Reggie Williams, who is dealing with recent problems with one of his two artificial knees. The column’s first lines are attention-getting:
Lying in his hospital bed, Reggie Williams watched a flow of blood, four or five inches high, coming from his postsurgical knee.
“A fountain!” Williams called it.
That was May 2. Today, Williams, the one-time 14-year Bengal and a popular man throughout the league, is waiting for another procedure on the knee. He’s not sure what’s going to happen, but he insists that nothing will keep him from his College Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony this summer and that he doesn’t regret playing football for a living.
Williams knows that an alarming number of his peers are dying young, but he says he has no regrets about his violent occupation. He tells how his father fled Birmingham, Ala., for Michigan after fighting back against racial slurs. He notes that he was born in September 1954, only months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, outlawing school segregation, a timing Williams sees as mystical.
“There was a dearth of opportunity for my father and his father,” Williams said. “I had the chance to do a little good. There is no way I would have been a member of the city council. A few months after our vote, I was at a private house party and Bishop Desmond Tutu was there, saying that ‘the city of Zinzinnati’ helped free Nelson Mandela. If this was the only cost I had to pay, I can swallow the pain today.”
There are plenty who want to see Williams as healthy as possible. He was a humanitarian both during and after his playing days, and he was even a dark horse candidate to become the NFL’s next commissioner after Paul Tagliabue.
Bottom line, one of the NFL’s good guys is dealing with some hard times because of the toll his body took on the field. But, he’s not blaming the game he played.
“That’s the first time I’ve had it and this is my 23d year,” home plate ump and crew chief Dale Scott said of the Reds batting out of order today in the ninth inning against the Mets New York Mets , a little snafu that was resolved in what seemed like a matter of hours. “It’s one of the more confusing rules. That was why it seemed to take an eternity because we wanted to make sure we got it correct.”
That’s right, the Reds somehow managed to go to the plate in the wrong order while trying desperately to get to baseball’s bottom. Although not the worst major-league team record-wise, the Reds will still face plenty of laughter on this one, kind of like the kid who gets a wedgie in the middle of the lunch room.
The confusion began when David Ross, who had been inserted in the sixth inning as the replacement catcher batting ninth, led off the inning in the spot that should have been the eighth batter, Corey Patterson, who had been inserted as the center fielder in bottom of the previous inning.
Randolph appealed after Ross had flown out to right field, but before the first pitch was thrown to Patterson.
“Obviously there was a little confusion there,” Randolph said. “I was right on it, we were right on it, but we could have gotten two outs if Patterson had actually seen a pitch.”
Now, with the Marlins coming into Cincinnati, you wonder what the Reds will do for an encore. Misplace their gloves? Send two third basemen out for the first inning? Forget there’s a game at all?
At least the Reds aren’t the only ones scared to death of playing games in Cincinnati.
“We tell our guys to stay with their approaches because it can go out anywhere,” (Marlins) manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “Anybody who comes to the plate can hit it out there. I get ulcers managing there. No lead is safe.”
While it might go against our national spirit, many around sports continue to search for ways to keep high-profiles athletes from turning professional, especially in basketball.
In today’s Chicago Tribune, two professors from George Mason University, Thomas W. Hazlett and Joshua D. Wright, have a theory: Make the colleges pay to insure those star players for future wages potentially lost by staying in school.
So the answer, given that universities cannot pay athletes market wages, is to at least insure them. Were underclassmen to be appraised, via draft rankings, and then offered compensation in the event—post-graduation—they slipped by some increment, they could hedge this very considerable exposure.
This publicly became known as a practice in a famous instance with Willis McGahee, the University of Miami running back who suffered a significant knee injury in the 2002 national championship game against Ohio State. Had he not been able to go pro, he had money coming because he secured insurance.
The two George Mason professors feel that athletes wouldn’t be so anxious to leave school if they knew the money was waiting for them one way or another. Get hurt? No problem, the check’s coming. Not drafted as high as you thought? We can pay the difference.
The NCAA allows players to insure, but the player pays even though it is largely the university (and its fans) that benefits. Moreover, policies can only insure against career-ending injuries, leaving the more common outcomes—less serious injuries and performance-related changes in draft status—terrifying prospects.
It’s an interesting thought, asking the school to pay for this coverage, although it’s just one instance of the ongoing argument about what colleges owe the athletes who help make millions upon millions of dollars for the athletic departments (and the NCAA).
This could be both an olive branch to help share some of the wealth and, perhaps, make a player or two think twice. If you know the money’s going to be there regardless, you might not be so quick to sign the agent papers.
The above basketball prodigy is Zach Feinstein, and here’s a little bit about him:
I am a Junior at Washington University in St. Louis double majoring in Systems Engineering and Applied Mathematics. I work with Intramural Sports at Wash U as their webmaster, I have also run the annual Intramural Sports Trivia Bowl for the past 2 years. I currently work in 2 different research labs on campus and will be spending the summer doing research in China, so sadly I will not be present at the draft at Madison Square Garden on June 26.
Furthermore, I do not play basketball.
He might not exactly fit the mold, but our friend Zach has declared himself eligible for the NBA draft. After studying the procedures and sending in the proper paperwork, he is now a 5-foot-8, 130-pound entry for professional basketball.
So, Zach Feinstein is eligible. It’s a funny story about studying rules and making it into an entertaining story.
Since I had waited and heard nothing back from the NBA in terms of confirmation, on the morning of April 14th I decided to call up the NBA. This conversation went quite well as Erika Ruiz quickly confirmed that all my papers were in order and no further steps needed to be made by me. And behold as of May 1 I am able to find myself on the Early Entry List at draftexpress.com and nbadraft.net under “unknown players”.
Upon Further Review | Sports in the Dayton, Ohio, area - youth, recreational, high school, prep and professional - Reds, Bengals, Buckeyes, Flyers, Raiders
Upon Further Review provides discussion, analysis and observations of the local sports world, from pee wees to professionals.
Kyle Nagel is the enterprise reporter for the Dayton Daily News sports department. He was raised in Centerville, received a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri in May 2003 and joined the Dayton Daily News in December 2003.
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