Sports Saturday—Welcome to the Dance

We missed theatre Thursday and film review Friday, but maybe we can have make-up columns for those early next week. Don’t hold your breaths, though. The next few weeks are going to be incredibly hectic for your humble (a lie) narrator. I am still committed to getting a Chumscrubber review up soon, though, so look for that. And it looks like we’re headed to a House vote on Health Care perhaps as soon as Sunday, so of course I’ll have something to say about that.

But today is Sports Saturday. Huzzah!

Gosh, am I the only person who picked Ohio to beat Georgetown? Day 1 was chock full of thrillers that I sadly didn’t get to watch. I was too busy trying to make money and, you know, not starve. Day 2 was not nearly as exciting, but all told, this year's early round upsets have been numerous and epic. Awesome. That’s what the tournament is all about — too bad I didn’t get to fill out a bracket.

Quick article from the onion. Is anybody going to win their office pool? http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/entire_nation_picks_same

And I saw this on Paul Daugherty's blog (another HHB favorite) and couldn't agree more.

http://tourney.si.com/?eref=sihp
To the powers-that-be at the NCAA who are considering a 96-team bracket: Consider this day a powerful message that the current format must be preserved. You don’t want to be responsible for preventing something like this from happening again, do you? Tacking on an extra round would make matchups like Georgetown-Ohio and Vandy-Murray State less likely to happen. Please, please don’t ruin this.

I have to say that this year, I’ve felt very little attachment to college ball – no real star presence in the likes of J.J. Redick or Tyler Hansbrough. This one-and-out rule, or “the Lebron Rule” is really ruining the sport. If someone is talented enough to play in the pros right out of high school, he should be able to just go, instead of risking injury playing as a man amongst boys in college for a single year. Plus, college sports is all about getting to know the stars and watching them contribute over a few years’ period of time. Tyler Hansbrough may never amount to anything in pro ball, but he was legendary during his four years at UNC. Guys like Greg Oden (Or Greg Wotan if you like the Norse pronunciation – he looks Nordic, right?), who are around for a single year and then take off for the pros, are completely forgettable to fans and don’t help in the building of a team.



The thrill of college sports is getting to see kids mature and the team finally start clicking as they grow over time. This one and out thing is ridiculous—it doesn’t help the colleges (who need time to have the team grow around a star player), it doesn’t help the pros (who want the best players available as soon as possible, even if it’s right out of school), and it doesn’t help the players (who risk career-ending injury while playing for none of the millions of dollars that they should rightfully be earning).

But, that said, college basketball in March is still very cool. The tournament is definitely the best postseason of any sport. The thrill of the upset; the Cinderella sleepers; the complexity of the seeding system; and it all happens within about three weeks. If the whole basketball season meant as much as all the games in February and March, college basketball might be my favorite sport. But, sadly, most of the season feels like it matters very little, and it’s still hard to justify tuning into a basketball game before the second half.

Still, college basketball absolutely crushes pro basketball in terms of the quality of the game itself. I don’t even count pro ball as a sport anymore. They’ve officially allowed you to take two-and-a-half steps between dribbles. Really?! We all knew that refs were looking the other way on the two-step rule before (so as to allow those big-hops stars to get more chances to do a ridiculous jam), but to officially sanction it seems like quite a step. Soon we won’t have to dribble at all — games will be decided by a dunk-off, similar to the shootouts of hockey. Kobe and Lebron take turns doing their most creative slam and the game is decided by the loudness of audience applause.

By the by, my Dad and I have always bonded over watching the Dream Teams of the 90’s play against the Latvians or some other country consisting of small, pasty Europeans. It’s hilarious. Hakeem Olajuwon would intercept a pass and then run down the court and do a monster slam home, screaming in ecstasy as the ball punched through the rim while the Latvians would just stare in wonder. They looked like Foghorn Leghorn in Space Jam after getting trounced by the Monstars, “Would you like original recipe or extra crispy?”

Oh, and here’s one more thing that annoys me. Have you ever seen a college basketball team fail to get the ball across half court in the ten allotted seconds? I’ve seen them stupidly give away the ball, I’ve seen them call a timeout when they get into trouble (one of the twenty timeouts that they are given), but I think I might have seen an actual violation only once or twice in my life. Why don’t they just give you 8 seconds to get across half court instead of 10? At the very least it would make teams use more timeouts so that they can’t save all of them for the final two minutes of the game (which currently take 40 minutes to play out).

Ok, that’s about all I have to say about basketball.

Two and a half weeks until Opening Day! It should be a national holiday. I’m so busy right now, I’m not sure if I’ll have time to continue my yearly tradition of watching Ken Burns’s “Baseball” documentary to get in the mood for the season – although I guess that will save me having to hear any more about Merkel’s Boner...

As a Cincinnati boy whose conscious awareness of sports doesn’t go back further than the year 1991, I’ve gotten used to disappointment and have learned not to get my hopes up. But I have to say, I’m pretty excited for this season. Pitching looks like it could be sweet. We have hard-throwing Cueto, who continues to grow, hard-throwing Bailey who finally seemed to turn a corner after learning a sinker (in a small ballpark like GABP, why don’t all the Reds pitchers know a sinker?), and the harder-throwing Chapman who has been astounding this Spring. Chapman has to make the team, if for no other reason than to let us have a lefty in the rotation. The problem is, all of the starting pitching have big questions surrounding them – none moreso than Harang, but last week’s column was about him so…

And I have to say, I’ve been up and down and up and down on Bronson Arroyo (mostly because he’s been just as inconsistent as well), but he’s always been able to give the Reds the innings they need from him and the amount of wins they need from him. He may not be the Ace that he looked like during the all-star first year when he came to the team, but at least he’s always proven steady over the course of the season. Those 10-run first innings don’t look good, but maybe it’s better to know you’re out of a game early than to have a pitcher melt down in the sixth.

The bullpen looks solid. Let’s hope Coco can stay strong, and Rhodes, who's already over the hill, doesn't start tumbling down it.

By the way, it’s just come to my attention that David Weathers is still a free agent. What gives? Couldn’t we pick him up dirt cheap right now for a one-year contract? The guy has been consistently good for this team for most of the last decade. Again, there are occasional meltdowns, but his ERA has hovered around 3.0-3.5 for a long, long time. And didn’t he break some awesome record or something last year, like most games pitched in relief, or something like that?

Ok, ok. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to sign him again, but, damn it, I’ve come to like David Weathers. I like those guys who quietly perform. Here’s to you Stormy