December 2007 - Posts
It's one thing to say you saw something coming, or to make one correct prediction. How can you do answering 10 questions about the shape of things to come in 2008?
Please answer any or all of the following challenges, and leave your name if you want credit should you turn out to be the second coming of Hlastradamus.
Your responses are automatically dated, so you won't get much credit for being a visionary if your predictions are made on Dec. 30. The sooner you make your forecasts, the more homage you'll be paid if you do well.
1. Name the participants in the Super Bowl, the winner, and the final score.
2. Who will win the Daytona 500?
3. What will Iowa's record be in Big Ten men's basketball (18 games) and Iowa State's in the Big 12 (16 games)?
4. Will Tiger Woods win the Masters? If you answer yes, by how many strokes? If you answer no, how many strokes will he be from the winner?
5. Name the matchup in the NBA Finals, and pick the winner and number of games the Finals last.
6. Which nation will claim the most medals at the Summer Olympics?
7. Forecast the regular-season won-lost football records for Iowa and Iowa State, knowing that both play 12 games.
8. How many points will Iowa score in its football season-opener against Maine?
9. Who will be the No. 1 team in the BCS standings on the first Sunday of December when the national-title game pairing is set?
10. Who will be elected President of the United States, and with how many electoral votes? It takes 270 to win.
The National Football League again displayed its infinite wisdom Wednesday when it announced it would simulcast the NFL Network's telecast of Saturday night's New England-New York Giants game on CBS and NBC.
There are reasons why the NFL is miles ahead of the other professional sports leagues in building and maintaining fans in the 21st Century. This is another. The league knew it had a public-relations nightmare on its hands were it to have New England going for a perfect 16-0 season only on the NFL Network, where at least two-thirds of its fans would miss the game.
So the league said let's turn chicken feathers into chicken salad. Give the game away to the networks, but showcase this meaningful game in prime-time to millions of people getting their first look at the NFL Network. Maybe they'll like it, crave it, storm the cable companies with pitchforks and torches to demand it, and get it. Or switch to satellite TV.
Major League Baseball would never have seen the potential err of its ways, as per usual. The Big Ten Network should have had a giveaway at some point this fall, maybe for its Wisconsin-Ohio State telecast. But the BTN waits and waits for public outrage to reach critical mass and force the cable operators to pay the network/charge consumers what the network wants for its product.
Instead, however, the league has kept a lot of Big Ten teams' fans in the dark. If you don't have a dish, you won't be able to see Saturday night's Southeastern Louisiana-Iowa men's basketball game on your tube.
Not that it matters. The Patriots are going for 16-0 Saturday night. That's what I'll be watching.
Wild, wild horses couldn't make me watch a Florida Atlantic-Memphis or Nevada-New Mexico football game in September, October or November. But slap those matchups in a bowl game, and let's watch some football!
Utah-Navy is an unwatchable game in Week 4 or Week 9 of the regular season. But when the two squads met in the Poinsettia Bowl Thursday night, it was appointment television. Could Utah win its seventh-straight bowl? I had to know.
OK, being in a few bowl pools online and at work increases the interest. Football without gambling is, after all, soccer.
But how could you not watch Friday night's New Orleans Bowl between Florida Atlantic and Memphis, if only because FAU Coach Howard Schnellenberger wore a fabulous suit. Football coaches should wear suits. Plus, I kept waiting and waiting for that one panoramic shot of the Superdome to show vast swaths of empty seats instead of the tight shots of the pockets of fans for the two teams. If it happened, I missed it.
Three bowls were to be played Saturday. Southern Mississippi played its last game for fired coach Jeff Bower. It lost. Sentiment gets squashed every so often.
Then came Nevada playing New Mexico in the New Mexico Bowl. Which seemed totally unfair. You get a bowl game on your home field? The winner of last year's inaugural New Mexico Bowl was, by the way, New Mexico.
Let's see if we have this right. There's a New Mexico Bowl. Has someone informed Steve Alford of this? It leads one to believe New Mexico is (gasp) a football state. By the way, don't expect Alford to eventually fail at New Mexico. He should know how to recruit by now, and recruit enough to win 20-plus games every year there. Then he gets the Indiana job after Kelvin Sampson is found guilty of bribing officials, buying players, and worst of all, calling Bob Knight overrated.
Saturday's bowl finale was a matchup of Brigham Young and UCLA in the Las Vegas Bowl. It marked BYU's third-straight year in the Las Vegas Bowl. Most BYU supporters, I'm told, are Mormons. I don't know how much fun Mormons are allowed to have in Las Vegas, and I'm not making a wisecrack about a religion. But I'm guessing the sin merchants of Vegas didn't do cartwheels down the Strip when they heard BYU was coming back to town yet again. That's assuming anyone connected to the casino/malls of the Strip had even heard of the Las Vegas Bowl.
UCLA's coach, Karl Dorrell, got fired recently, too. You know there are too many bowls when teams not good enough to save their coaches' jobs can get into them.
This is my first year of not making a bowl trip since 1999. I've done Phoenix, San Antonio (twice), Miami, Tampa (twice) and Orlando in that time. This year I sit at home waiting for another ice storm, watching Nevada play New Mexico. I'll be all right.
I'm wondering if it's an accident that the best football and basketball games I've attended this season have involved teams from high schools, not colleges.
Folks, I covered all 12 Iowa football games this year and 15 college football games in all. I've seen five major-college basketball games this season. I've also seen just one high school football game and one prep basketball contest. They were superior.
On Oct. 31, I was among thousands at Kingston Stadium to witness Cedar Rapids Washington's crazy 34-28 win over Cedar Rapids Kennedy. The Warriors scored the winning points with 7.7 seconds left, on Derek Geisking's fifth touchdown pass of the game. Geisking didn't even start the game for Wash, but passed foir 487 yards. The game had about 1,100 yards of offense.
Tuesday night, I was among the sellout crowd of 2,100 at Linn-Mar for Iowa City High's 77-70 double-overtime boys' basketball victory over the Lions. Grant Gibbs of Linn-Mar was checked by City High's Matt Gatens and vice versa throughout the game. Gibbs is headed to Gonzaga on a basketball scholarship, Gatens to Iowa. Both got good ones.
And several other players on the floor will play college ball, though many won't right away. That's because Zach Bohannon and Nate Hutcheson are just juniors at Linn-Mar. City High's Malcom Moore is also a junior. City's A.J. Derby is a sophomore who will play Division I ball somewhere, but most likely football. Nonetheless, he and brother Zach Derby, a senior, are fine basketball players. Zach is likely to play college football, as well.
It wasn't just the quality of players that made these two games memorable, though, it was the atmospheres. Everyone cared. The noise level at Linn-Mar was something else. They put on a better show there than the one found at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, with their music and enthusiasm.
Oh by the way, Gatens can play a little. If you're a Hawkeye fan feeling blue about the current condition of your basketball team, go see City High play this winter. Help from a hometown kid is on the way.
I keep losing things more and more as the years go by -- my balance, my patience, my mind -- but I haven't lost my sense of wonder. For instance, I wonder where my mind went.
I definitely have a sense of wonder about the World Wide Web. It seems like black magic, with its pictures and sounds and stuff coming out of a tube. It's as if it was, well, television. You just click somewhere it tells you to click, and you're immediately taken somewhere else. Tell me that's not some test from a higher civilization form to see just how much humans will believe.
Anyway, Thursday night I stumbled upon the Denver Broncos-Houston Texans game at the NFL's Web site. They didn't show the whole game, just cut-ins from the NFL Network telecast, but enough of them to keep a decent flow of the game. I don't have satellite television, thus I don't have the NFL Network. So this was a nice surprise. Best of all, it was free. I don't expect to ever see that again.
Sage Rosenfels, who played the whole game for Houston at quarterback, was very good. He completed 16 of 27 passes for 200 yards and a touchdown, ran for a TD, and had a 28-yard pass to Andre Johnson off a terrific fake handoff on a stretch play. Rosenfels bootlegged left and threw a perfect spiral to Johnson at the Denver 1 to set up the Texans' final score.
Rosenfels is the best quarterback to ever come from Maquoketa, Iowa, and certainly one of the best quarterbacks to ever emerge from Iowa State. He may not have been Tom Brady-like, but he sure played like a veteran NFL quarterback. Which he is. He's been in the league since 2001. He's also been mired in the depth of depth charts nearly his entire career with Washington, Miami, and now Houston.
Houston is 7-7, but is 3-0 when Rosenfels has started in place of the injured Matt Schaub. The Texans thought they got their quarterback of the present and future when they traded with Atlanta to get Schaub last offseason. Maybe they did. Or maybe they got him the year before when they signed Rosenfels as a free agent, thinking he was just quarterback insurance for David Carr at the time.
"I don't know how you take him out,'' analyst Cris Collinsworth said late in Thursday's telecast. "He's 3-0 as a starter. The NFL is all about production, not who gets paid the most.''
Rosenfels' salary this year is $1.1 million. Schaub's is $8 million. Schaub got hurt in a game Oct. 20, and Houston rallied from a 28-3 deficit in the fourth quarter to take a short-lived 29-28 lead behind four Rosenfels TD passes - an NFL record for most touchdown tosses in the final quarter.
Flash back to March: "This is another exciting moment in the history of the
Texans," team owner Bob McNair said when he introduced Schaub at a team news conference. "Winning is all
about getting better every day, and that's what we're trying to
do."
They are getting better. That was a good-looking Houston team Thursday night. Real nice defense. A terrific receiver in Johnson. And a quarterback from Maquoketa and Iowa State.
Bobby Petrino leaves Louisville to sign a 5-year contract to coach the NFL's Atlanta Falcons, then resigns before his first season there is done to become Arkansas' new coach?
So the Southeastern Conference, if this report turns out to be true, is getting yet another carpetbagger of a coach. Nick Saban abandoned the Miami Dolphins in mid-contract last year for Alabama. LSU's Les Miles ... well Les Miles justs seems to say whatever suits his needs at the given moment. He's staying at LSU, but only because it kicked his pay up a whole bunch.
Petrino thought he'd have a top-flight quarterback in Atlanta. But that guy did bad things to dogs and doesn't play for the Falcons anymore. He's doing time. These college guys, like Saban and Steve Spurrier and Petrino, quickly find out that coaching in the NFL means far less true control than what they knew in college, where they're emperors. They weary of that in a hurry and yearn to be back in charge of a college program, where the competiton is easier and the criticism less.
College coaches who leap to the NFL find ut they're against top coaches and top talent week after week, and can't pad their schedules with nonconference fluff to prop up their records. So the SEC, which has mastered staying close to home to play nonconference cream puffs, has Saban and Spurrier, Miles and Tommy Tuberville, Mark Richt and apparently now Petrino. Fine coaches, all. But if they played SEC games and only SEC games, some would have losing records.
Wait a second, I almost forgot Louisiana-Monroe beat Saban's Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa a few weeks ago.
That was great.
That, as all of you surely know, is the title of a cut from Bob Dylan's mid-1970s masterpiece, "Blood on the Tracks." A finer, more heartbreaking album about love and broken-up love doesn't exist.
But shelter from the storm is apparently what's required this Monday night and throughout Tuesday in Iowa and around the Midwest. A good book, great conversation, a fire in the fireplace - these are warm counters to a wintry blast. Some of us, however, prefer the great god television.
The sports offerings Monday night:
Monday Night Football: New Orleans (5-7) at Atlanta (3-9) on ESPN. Brutal, especially with Reggie Bush unavailable for the Saints. On a scale of one to five logs for the fire, this gets just one.
Pool: Trick Shot Magic in Las Vegas on ESPN2. This would be great if we were in Vegas to experience it. Actually, we'd walk out on it and experience some of the city's other fine things, like wagering on the lousy Monday night game at a casino sports book. One log.
Larry King Live on CNN. Victoria Beckham is interviewed. She's married to that soccer boy. Who cares? One log.
That's it. Enjoy the storm.
Never, ever, ever would I try to convince actual working people who make the world go round that the sportswriter's life is difficult.
1. Most people do work hard in this life.
2. Sportswriters' lives are not difficult. You go to games, you write stories about sports - it's every bit the Peter Pan sham outsiders are sure it must be.
But it does require travel, and in Iowa, that means occasional hazardous adventures in winter. Saturday, on the way to the Iowa-Iowa State men's basketball in Ames, the car sportswriter Jim Ecker piloted to get yours truly to Hilton had a tire blow out 15 miles east of Ames on Highway 30. So we pulled over, in the snow. And 30 seconds later, a man pulled up behind us to ask if we needed help. I didn't even have time to turn on my cell phone to call someone for assistance, who probably would have shown up an hour later.
This gentleman agreed to drive us to the front door of Hilton Coliseum. On the way, he started a little conversation, asking us why we were going to the game and so forth. We told him we were from Cedar Rapids, and he said he was originally from Los Angeles, but had lived in Cedar Rapids for a couple years. "Well, I was incarcerated there," he said.
"Do they still have the fireworks show (on the Fourth of July)? That was nice. Everybody getting together downtown for that ... I watched it from my cell window." The Linn County Jail is on an island in the Cedar River in downtown Cedar Rapids.
He had a Bible on his dashboard. He provided a great kindness for two strangers. And he balked at taking payment for his help. I don't know what the guy did once upon a time to land in the lockup, but he must have experienced some sort of personal rehabilitation. Good for him.
Ecker arranged for the car to get towed to Ames while we were at Hilton, and we went to a service station to pick it up and head home Saturday night. Because of his doughnut of a spare tire and the poor driving conditions on Highway 30 from snow, we couldn't go over 40 mph during the 100-mile trip home. But it didn't seem so bad, knowing it would have been a much worse day if that guy hadn't chosen to help us late that morning.
Of course, I wasn't the one who had to do the driving.
By the way, it's not like the game was so good that it was all worth the aggravation. Iowa State's 56-47 win over Iowa wasn't good at all, artistically. But this is a night to be grateful, not gnarly. Tomorrow, however, is another day.
You know the world has turned sideways when the football coach at Rutgers politely tells Michigan no thanks.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves here, Friday brought the news that Rutgers Coach Greg Schiano met with Michigan, and then said he was staying put in New Jersey. Maybe that was an easy out for Schiano after he got told Michigan was going to hire someone else. If that someone else is announced by the end of the weekend, that scenario makes sense.
But maybe Schiano found Michigan isn't willing to pay the kind of money the market is bearing for these coaching geniuses. Or maybe he simply felt Michigan doesn't know what the heck it's doing.
At any rate, can you imagine what the reaction would have been just a couple years ago had you told a Michigan Man (or Woman) that their school would be one day discuss their head coaching vacancy with the coach at Rutgers?
Schiano's talking about winning a national-title at Rutgers. Maybe he believes it. If West Virginia and Missouri can get within one win of the national-championship game, maybe you can do it anywhere. You know, Iowa opens next season with nonconference games against Maine, Florida International, Iowa State and Pittsburgh. That's almost from the Kansas School of Scheduling, which says you play four teams you can beat out-of-conference, then see what happens in league play. Now the Jayhawks are in the Orange Bowl.
Ah, the Orange Bowl. It was five years ago for Iowa. South Florida sunshine. The Atlantic Ocean. Art deco. I write this looking out my window at home, seeing grayness in the sky and white on the ground. Blecch.
Drake is 17th in the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) formula through Wednesday night's games.
That's the Drake in Des Moines, that hasn't had an NCAA tournament berth since Jim Morrison's final months on Earth.
How? Because the 6-1 Bulldogs have defeated UC San Diego, UW Milwaukee, and Duquesne, I guess. Their loss was at St. Mary's, which is unbeaten and second in the RPI rankings of the 341 Division I teams.
St. Mary's has a bunch of Australian players. See, I know this stuff.
Northern Iowa is 110th, Iowa State 115th and Iowa 229th on the RPI, though Iowa won at UNI Wednesday night. Those victories over Northern Arizona, Florida Gulf Coast, Idaho State, Maryland Eastern Shore and Eastern Illinois don't really help move the needle upward.
Miami (Fla.) is No. 1 in the RPI, Sam Houston State (which beat Texas Tech) is fifth, and North Texas is 13th. This tells us it's still really early in the season.
Eastern Illinois, still smarting from its 57-45 loss at Iowa last Saturday, is No. 341.
My favorite college basketball team, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is No. 337. My Highlanders (0-9) play Army in about a half-hour from when this was written.
If you're anywhere near the New Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Turnpike, get thee to Prudential Center to cheer on NJIT.