Bowl Season

New year, same problems:

It is very difficult to enjoy college sports, as the NCAA has decided that some of the games worth watching should come on at the same time. New year's day featured two games I really wanted to watch, West Virginia vs. Georgia Tech, and Arkansas vs Wisconsin. The games were running at the very same time, making it impossible to enjoy both. Having a television with Picture in Picture is nice, and helped greatly, but when push comes to shove, I end up missing the big plays from both games.

The irony is that the teams who no one really cares about all run solo. So the GMAC bowl and the Poppajohns.com bowl will be the only bowl game on when they air, but when two games both with ranked teams play, they are on at the exact same time. Who schedules this stuff?

What is even worse is how New Jerseyans got screwed royally. The best season Rutgers has had in decades, and we can't see the game, because it is on the NFL Network. This is ridiculous. The NFL Network is trying to get carried by basic cable services, but the price they are asking for is too high. Their solution is to steadily piss off football fans so that we call our local cable operators and demand the network. It is a rather ugly method, and will only lead to later bad relations, but that's not the issue. NCAA, why couldn't you the GMAC Bowl on the NFL Network? Sure, Rutgers should be good again next year, but let's not waste a 10+ win team's bowl game on a network that is run by the league that takes away the NCAA's top talent a year or more too early. (An issue that needs to be address in another entry)

But it could be worse, much worse. March Madness, the time of year where the words pool, bracket, sleeper, and underdog are used most frequently, features by far the worst television package ever. One channel - and in my area the one with by far the worst picture - is selected to carry all the games for the 65 team tournament. Luckily, the NCAA realized that it was a waste to not have some way for all the games to be watched, and now I can watch them streaming online. So I have two choices: watch the feature game in my area on fuzzy CBS, or watch any other game in choppy online video.

NCAA - Amateur athletes, amateur programming scheduling.

Ballin for Pride

(Note: I tried using a Yahoo Widget to submit this post, and when it failed to post, it also deleted what I typed. Lesson learned. So I'll try to summarize what I wrote)

This time of year has me feeling good for the recent successes of two players: Steve McNair and Allen Iverson. The players have similar backgrounds, as they both raised the play of teams that were jokes beforehand and led them to the Super Bowl/NBA Finals. Now, about five years later, both players were treated in a sour fashion.

Iverson led the Sixers to the NBA Finals, despite having no player that anyone will probably remember 5 years from now. The Sixers did nothing to try to improve the team, if anything, the roster only got worse. After the only major attempt to improve the team flopped, it was clear Iverson would not have a chance to win in Philly. The 76ers shopped Iverson around all summer to other teams like as if he was a used car with 120,000 miles on it. Unsuccessful, they finally traded him about a third of the way through the season, despite the team being within 6 games of first place in their division. (They play in what some are calling the worst division in sports history.) Now Iverson is on the Nuggets, a team that can compete and maybe even win the Western Conference, and will be even better next year when Kenyon Martin returns. The Sixers, on the other hand, have the ill fate of considering throwing games so that they have a better shot of the #1 draft pick, as that is the only way they will improve.

Steve McNair led the Titans to the Super Bowl, and were literally one yard short of being the champions. After an injury ridden past few years, McNair was banished from Titan facilities while on the comeback from a recent injury. Basically told he was no longer wanted, and being disrespected publicly by the team, McNair is now on the Ravens. The Ravens are 12-3 and can earn a first round bye in the playoffs. The Titans are now dangling to hopes for a playoff spot after finally finding traction with Vince Young. But this isn't about them.

The similarity of these two athletes, both in their thirties, is rather striking. They both show that players can overcome the unnecessary adversity placed upon them by their former teams, and can lead a new squad to success. I'll root for the Nuggets all the way, and the Ravens too...

... Until they meet the Chargers.
-CB