No more lightweight New Year’s resolutions here. While special orders still won’t upset us, we’ve got bigger burgers to flip. We’re going to back up our whining with logical, get-on-board solutions.
As Dak Prescott shouts, “Here we go.”
The now common stomping and humiliation of mismatched college and high school basketball teams — the Grambling women’s team this week defeated the College of Biblical Studies by an unholy 159-18. They never had a prayer. (The wisecracks are as easy as Grambling’s opponent.)
Unless it was a “look-ahead game” for the Biblical Studies women because they next play rival Discomfort & Bloating, a culinary arts college, it’s time all schools recognize, prepare and enact the Coach Feldman Method in service to sports restoration.
Mel Feldman was the upstate New York girls high school basketball coach whose kids were being mercilessly mauled in a full-court press, run-and-gun, starters-still-in slaughter.
So at halftime, Coach Feldman suggested to his girls that if winning by as many points as possible is so important to the opposing coach, his kids might help him out by scoring into their own basket.
Heck, if the other coach wanted to turn the game into a farce, Feldman would provide the kind of farce that would leave his opposing coach the “he-started-it” victim.
Feldman’s girls loved the idea and were eager to provide aid and comfort to their misguided conquerors by further running up the score by scoring into their own basket, creating the ultimate final score asterisk, not to mention a traumatized scorebook keeper.
The message was delivered, then locally discussed and debated for days, but this bottom line was achieved: That opposing coach got it. He never again instructed his kids, annually blessed with superior talent, to humiliate an opponent.
In the age of Geno Auriemma, Kim Mulkey and other school-employed adults who instruct their young men and women to stomp “guests” raw, this coach’s teams could now still win by more than enough yet keep it civil and respectful. A win-win.
Along similar lines, I also resolve, this year, to rid colleges that “include Mercy” in their names from playing basketball. Rarely have I seen the result of a game, men’s or women’s, that have bestowed mercy on a Mercy.
In one day, this week, Penn’s women defeated Gwynedd Mercy University (Philadelphia), 89-34. Although Penn’s coach, in defiance of the Auriemma standard, cleared the bench, why the Quakers needed (or wanted) to take 30 3’s, block nine shots and make nine steals seems less than merciful.
In Connecticut, Sacred Heart’s women defeated visiting Mercy University (Dobbs Ferry), 73-41, a game that was over, 38-16, by halftime.
So in 2024, let us resolve to never again weigh the quality of Mercy on its strength of schedule, portal transfers and record against the spread, but instead revert to the quality of mercy.
College football fraught with farce
The best way to enjoy bowl games is to play stupid to what big-ticket “college” football has become.
Or as Washington’s Indiana-transfer star QB Michael Penix Jr. said after Monday night’s/Tuesday morning’s win over Texas, “I ain’t no quitter.”
Reader Bill Maroney: “No kidding — you’ve been in college for six years.”
ESPN has apologized for being ambushed by a woman flashing her bare breast (singular) during Sugar Bowl coverage. It has also offered her a gig as a sideline reporter.
Hey, it’s not as if many folks witnessed that scene. Three days later and I’ve yet to find one football fan who was awake for the end of Monday night’s Texas-Washington Sugar Bowl, which ended at 12:50 Tuesday morning. We read and heard that it was a good game lost to a foresight-bereft start on the blurry night after New Year’s and a next-day return to work or school.
Still can’t understand how games are scheduled to maximize TV audiences thus maximize TV ad revenue and financial terms of TV contracts but end too late for more than half the country to watch.
But TV is loaded with such wonder.
At the top of ESPN’s Michigan-Alabama Rose Bowl, play-by-play man Chris Fowler declared that UM coach Jim Harbaugh was sentenced to “a three-game suspension for minor recruiting violations.”
Gee, if Fowler knew they were minor what, exactly, were they for and how did he know?
Short of sharing a stick of gum, there are no such things as “minor” recruiting violations, and Harbaugh, has been a suspicious character since he was hired in December 2014 to eventually become the de facto ruler of the University of Michigan.
Though Fowler would have us think that Harbaugh was suspended for minutiae, he was sanctioned for violating rules in order to recruit players to help him and UM win ballgames. Gee, Chris, he was only caught cheating. No biggie.
As for the game, it was good enough to overcome Kirk Herbstreit’s repeated observation that Alabama was not playing with great “eye discipline.” Yep, another slick-sounding substitute for doing the smart thing by saying nothing.
Not sure what he meant by “eye discipline” but is Herbstreit aware that football often includes the kind of well-concealed deceptions that cause opponents to lose sight of the ball? Or do players’ eyes not follow orders, thus lack discipline?
Ravens saluting Ray Rice the NFL’s latest affront to decency
In 2023, it remains impossible to shame the shameless. Thus Sunday, the Ravens’ blindly devoted were invited to salute former Rutgers and Baltimore RB Ray Rice as a “Legend of the Game.”
Rice’s most legendary act was cold-cocking his fiancée unconscious (the charges later dismissed) in an Atlantic City hotel-casino.
To enter Sunday’s game, Ravens fans had to pass the blood-dancing statue of legendary LB Ray Lewis, who copped a plea to obstruction of justice in a double homicide before paying off the families of the two murdered victims.
Ex-Jet Pro Bowler and college man — Temple — Muhammad Wilkerson, who had two DWI arrests in 2019 and 2020, this week was arrested for DWI and carrying a handgun that contained hollow point bullets.
Also, this week, Colts’ TE Drew Ogletree, 25, a former student-athlete at Youngstown St., was charged with domestic battery of a woman in the presence of a minor.
Still strikes me that Commissioner Roger Goodell, as per his end-zone, sideline and back-of-helmets social messaging for NFL audiences to consider, chooses to ignore what’s most needed to change within his own $70 million per house.
Saturday’s out-of-conference, pad-the-record play-to-slay between Rutgers and 2-13 Stonehill (Mass.) was the Backfire of the Week. Though RU won it 59-58 — Yikes! — it was the kind of win that flashes neon red in the faces of the NCAA Tournament selection committee.
As if TV execs can’t sink any lower, NBC has selected professional lowlife Snoop Dogg to appear within its Paris Olympics team. Reader Michael Temple: “They’ve replaced Bob Costas with Snoop Dogg.” Such TV execs should show the courage of this conviction by chanting Dogg’s vulgar, women-degrading, N-word-larded lyrics in public and see how that works out for them.
My pal Billy P. ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon to see which came first.
Credit: Source link
