11 New Year's Wishes for Sports

The universe owes us one. We will have thrust upon us at the beginning of this year by a comatose American electorate a sociopathic, clinically narcissistic, utterly unqualified, willfully ignorant, despicable, lecherous, shallow, juvenile, jackass-in-chief.*

I hope that wasn't payback for the Cubs and Indians in a thrilling seven-game World Series. Assuming the former was the common people knowing what they want and getting it good and hard, and the latter just good luck, it's only fair that one of the following occur this year to improve the sports universe.

1. Put the N-Scam-A-A out of our misery -- its member institutions admit that they are, in

collusion with various television networks, in the for-profit sports entertainment business. They agree to treat revenue generating sports -- big time football and men's basketball -- as the business franchises they are, bidding for players with actual cash and offering everyone who wants one a scholarship to matriculate and graduate like regular students. They maintain the limits on practice time and provide time for all athletes to attend classes, but in every other way continue to treat them like the employees they are. This is the only formula that allows the member institutions to move forward without lying through their teeth every day about their athletic programs.

2. Slash the NHL and NBA playoffs in half -- so that the regular season actually matters. With only the eight best teams qualifying, most every game will count.

3. Enforce MLB's rules designed to move the game along and limit the number of pitching changes. Committee meetings are stultifying, even when they take place on the mound.

4. Have a foreign network provide the telecast of the next Olympics to the U.S. -- It's not all about us.

5. Limit the NCAA hoops tournament to a league's best teams -- No team that loses more games in its conference than it wins should be allowed in the tournament, period. We'd all much rather see a 25-4 squad that lost in the Southern Conference semi-finals make the tournament than a 16-12 powerhouse that finished 10th in the ACC. The latter did not have a successful season and the former did, and they should be likewise rewarded.

6. Begin every televised NFL game with a warning to fans: Though the officiating will not be perfect, it doesn't matter. Luck is 30% of the game. Don't sweat every call; don't worry about three inches that can't be discerned without super slow motion, stop action and three camera angles. Enjoy today's action by freakish athletes who are maiming and killing themselves for your entertainment.

7. Sometimes, tell replay to shut the @#$%&! up -- Baseball players who dive safely into a base but bounce over it while still being tagged shall be deemed safe. That's not what replay was for.

8. Eliminate crappy bowl games -- Division 1A college football post-season contests played in

Detroit, Birmingham or Charlotte, or featuring contestants with losing records in their conference, may not be called "bowls." Instead, each of these contests shall be called the "NIT," as in, the "Pinstripe NIT" and the "Armed Forces NIT" to distinguish it from a real bowl game. There shall be 12 bowl games, -- the Rose, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Cotton, Peach, Outback, Citrus, Sun, Alamo, Music City and Liberty -- pitting only ranked teams or league champions.

9. Remove the remaining dolts from baseball coverage -- Require everyone requesting a press credential to a Major League Baseball game to pass a test demonstrating that they understand why the old measurements no longer pass muster.

10. Screw the plane. Get into the end zone for a touchdown.

11. Admit it already: sports gambling is legal. They scroll stats under football games for fantasy league players and list point spreads in newspapers. Every office and bar advertises an NCAA tourney bracket. Forty-nine states participate in lottery operations. Your bookie is just a click away. So let's ditch the self-righteous hypocrisy and end the remaining prohibitions. Good idea? You bet.

* This blog remains non-partisan. This is not an endorsement of the other major party's nominee, who, though qualified and generally adult, was also a miserable candidate. Contrary to what the news media told you during its 25/8/366 coverage of the election, there were actually more than two candidates for president, one of them an actual Republican, all of whom more qualified, mature and dignified than the ultimate victor.

So What Was the Regular Season For?

Some brief dead-horse beating . . . 

The complaint here about professional basketball and hockey in North America has always been that they play 80 games each for no apparent reason, allow mediocrity into the badly-devalued playoffs, drag through weeks of post-season revenue generation (the "post" season -- practically an admission in itself that the "season" is irrelevant) before finally getting, anti-climatically, to the point.

The conference finals are now starting in the NBA and NHL and they provide a stark case in point. 

In the NBA, all the silliness has been dispatched after voluminous faux drama and over-wrought analysis and the result is exactly what you could have predicted on the first day of the season. The finals comprise not only the top two seeds in each conference but also the best teams entering the season, lo those many months ago. Indeed, they are the very same teams that squared off in last year's conference finals.

Maybe even more to the point, the favorites in each series -- the teams that met in last year's championship series -- are the two most notable for their disdain of the regular season. San Antonio's coach has been fined for resting his stars during meaningless January contests. Miami, clearly the most talented outfit, coasted though the long gauntlet with the singular goal of getting its number two star healthy come crunch time.

Put another way, a season that has slogged through six months is now finally beginning in earnest in month seven.

Hockey has the same issue -- except in reverse. After eliminating only a handful of awful teams following a full season of play, the NHL playoffs have given us two five seeds, a four seed and a six seed in the conference finals. How a team performs in the regular season is utterly, completely, inexcusably meaningless as long as it makes the cut, a bar so low as to be laughable.

Once in the tournament, winning in hockey seems to be more about a hot goaltender, a healthy team and some fortunate bounces of the puck than anything else.

Put another way, a winter sport has slogged through six months to determine absolutely nothing. The winner of the Cup will not be able to claim it is the best hockey club, or the second best or anything except the survivor of a tournament that will finally conclude in the opposite hemisphere's winter.

There are great story lines, and should be inspiring competition, in these four series. I'll be watching. 

For the first time since last May.

This, That and the Other

Ken "Hawk" Harrelson's nine-year vagabond MLB career included a third-place MVP finish in 1968 and a fair amount of part-time, above-average offense. Hawk was an amusing blowhard when he played and he's maintained that record as the Chicago White Sox color analyst.

Harrelson is a card-carrying member of the Tantrum Club whose members stick their fingers in their ears and moan through rolled tongues whenever new analysis explodes their deeply-held mythology. In fact, Harrelson might even be president of this club.

Brian Kenny is a saber-wise host on the MLB network who has educated nearly as many people about baseball as Harrelson has stupefied. Kenny brought Harrelson on his show last week and allowed him an opportunity to explain his ideas, which is another way of saying he provided Hawk enough rope to hang himself. 

Harrelson eschews illuminating statistics based on actual research in favor of his own unquantifiable measure -- the will to win. During his rant, he made a long series of provably false claims and if you need to have the evidence provided, you've probably stumbled on the wrong site. Thanks anyway for visiting.

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The truncated NHL season has come to a merciful end and now half the teams start all over with three more months of playoffs. Last season, the L.A. Kings, the last team into the playoffs with more losses than wins, swept through their higher-seeded opponents en route to the Stanley Cup.

When it comes to winning the championship, the regular season is so utterly irrelevant that every contender ought to be installed in Las Vegas as a 15-1 shot. 

There are three teams in this year's tournament that have lost as many games as they've won -- Detroit, Ottawa and the Islanders, but you'd never know it from the standings. In an effort to obfuscate how weak the lower-tier playoff contenders are, the NHL calls overtime losses "ties" but overtime victories "wins." As a result, the standings suggest that the Red Wings are 24-16-8 when in fact they won 24 (probably some of them in overtime) and lost 24.

When you have to resort to trickery to validate your product, perhaps you need a new product. Hockey is a spectacular product; the NHL is a disaster.

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Now that the Lakers have proved to be pretenders not just in the regular season but in the playoffs as well, sports talk radio has swiveled its collective head to the other coast. "Next," (after more ads than the Super Bowl) "can the Knicks beat the Heat?"

No.

Now what do we talk about?

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The extraordinarily entertaining and intriguing NFL draft features a handful of encyclopedic minds offering instant critiques like old testament pronouncements about each pick. They never mention the one item that would be particularly illuminating: their own track record.

You heard a lot of analysis of Geno Smith, E.J. Manuel and the other QBs, including definitive statements about how they were taken too high or low. Some of the comparisons invoked the names Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick. 

How many of these football sachems were calling for teams to draft Wilson and Kaepernick? How many of them even thought Wilson and Kaepernick would start a game in their first two years, much less lead their teams into the playoffs?

Yeah, I thought so.

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Here's another NFL draft head scratcher: teams have been criticized for choosing a player in the right round, but not with the right pick. For example, the team with the ninth pick selects the best player at a position they need who is rated the 20th best player. "He's not a #9 pick," they say.

But the team isn't picking 20th; they're picking ninth. And presumably no one with the next 10 selections will trade with them. So they take the guy they want with the pick they have. If selecting that player will make the team better, isn't that the right choice? It seems like a silly criticism to me.

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The first 25 games of a season are too small a sample to draw conclusions from scratch. For example, the Rockies are 15-9, but we don't know whether they're that good, they're just on a hot streak or some gust of luck has blown their way. (Actually we do know that good scheduling has been at least partly responsible for Colorado's success. They're 1-5 against the Braves and Giants and 6-0 against the sad-sack Padres. Plus, they swept a three-game set against the Mets -- at home in the snow.)

On the other hand, we can learn a lot about things we already thought we knew. Here are four last place teams, with a combined record of 29-65: Houston, Miami, the Cubs and San Diego. It's not too early to draw conclusions about these collections. We thought they would stink and they have delivered in spades.