January 2008 - Posts
The Wizard of Odds, which should always be your first stop for Internet national college football news, leads us today to an interesting item out of Oklahoma.
The Wiz shares the good work of the folks at the Oklahoman newspaper in Oklahoma City. They have reported that Oklahoma State won't be sell individual tickets to the Nov. 29 Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game in Stillwater beyond the normal 5,000 tickets allotted to the Sooner fans.
To gain admission to that game, you'll need to buy a season ticket to see the Cowboys. The plan copies the one introduced last year by Iowa State Athletics Director Jamie Pollard for its game against Iowa, which helped increased ISU season-ticket sales by almost 20 percent.
"When you saw what happened there, you think, 'Maybe that's something we should consider,' " Oklahoma State AD Mike Holder told the Oklahoman.
This should play about as well with Sooner fans as it did with Hawkeye supporters. The ultimate result will be the same, too. Oklahoma State will have a lot more tickets sold for its home games against Houston, Missouri State, Troy, and yes, Iowa State, than it normally would.
The Wizard of Odds, by the way, can be found at:
http://thewizardofodds.blogspot.com/
Drake has ascended to 16th in Associated Press' college basketball rankings for the first time in over three decades.
So I did a little digging to see who some of the No. 16 teams were in the last week of January.
In 1999, it was Iowa. In 1998, it was Iowa. In 1996, it was Iowa. In 1988, it was Iowa.
Iowa used to be ranked a lot. It was in the AP poll from the start of the season to the finish in 1986-87, 87-88, 88-89, 92-93 and 95-96, and in most of the 1997-98 and 98-99 seasons.
Those were the years, eh? The Hawkeyes were ranked from time to time during the Steve Alford era, and were as high as No. 9 the first week of 2002. Their highest ranking since was 14th in '05.
By my unofficial count, Iowa has been in the Top Ten in 104 different weeks. Maybe again, someday.
Until then, Drake has Creighton to beat Wednesday and then Indiana State at Terre Haute Saturday if it is to keep climbing. Drake-Creighton is on Mediacom Connections Wednesday night, so there's one reason I'm glad I didn't switch to a dish.
Had it been Kaeding's kicking leg, it would be a story for the ages.
Anyway, what follows is from AOL.com's Fanhouse. The text was written by that site's Michael David Smith.
http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/2008/01/25/chargers-kicker-nate-kaeding-toughed-it-out-his-team-paid-the-p/
Wrote Smith: In the days since the Patriots beat the Chargers in the AFC
Championship Game, there has been much debate about whether quarterback
Philip Rivers hurt his team by playing on a severely injured knee, and whether running back
LaDainian Tomlinson hurt his team by sitting out on a mildly injured knee.
But a third Charger played with an injury, kicker
Nate Kaeding.
And that injury, to his lower left leg, was apparently a much more
serious injury than he was letting on. Dan Pompei reported on ESPN this
morning that the injury to Kaeding's plant leg included a broken bone,
but that Kaeding played despite the pain.
But then Pompei added an odd postscript to his report. He finished his
discussion of Kaeding by saying, "Luckily, the Chargers were not hurt
by his inability to kick the long one."
Excuse me? What game
was Pompei watching? I was watching the game in which Kaeding kicked
off five times, and the average length of the kickoff was less than 55
yards. I was watching the game in which the Patriots had an average
starting field position of their own 34-yard line after Kaeding's five
kickoffs. The Chargers were certainly hurt by Kaeding's inability to
kick long kickoffs.
Yes, Kaeding made his four field goal
attempts. But a kicker has two jobs, and Kaeding was incapable of doing
the other one effectively. The Chargers erred by deactivating their
other kicker, Dave Rayner, and that contributed to their loss.
THE HLOG'S COMMENT: Had the Chargers punched in a couple of touchdowns instead of settling for chip-shot field goals, of which Kaeding had three, Smith wouldn't have felt a need to write what he wrote. But his point is well-taken. Raymer handled the kickoffs in San Diego's regular-season finale and its playoff wins over Tennessee and Indianapolis.
Kaeding's injury came on Dec. 24 as he tried to tackle a Denver kick-returner. He was on crutches for several days afterward, but kicked in three playoff games. At the time, the Chargers only said Kaeding had a "bruised left leg." Some bruise.
The NFL is for tough guys only.
It would have been absurd had the NCAA found anything to be wrong about this, but the NCAA and absurdity have never been strangers:
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Butler seniors Pete
Campbell and Mike Green spent Thursday morning worrying whether they
would even play against Loyola of Chicago.
Then they demonstrated how much they mean to the Bulldogs' success.
Campbell
scored 15 points and Green added 13, leading No. 15 Butler to a 63-50
victory over the Ramblers on a chaotic game day that included pregame
phone calls from school officials to the Horizon League with questions
about possible rules violations.
``I
didn't think it would be any type of problem,'' Campbell said. ``We
probably could have used better judgment, but it ended up being
harmless.''
Fortunately for the Bulldogs (18-2, 7-2), the NCAA agreed.
But
that wasn't quite good enough for first-year Butler coach Brad Stevens,
who declined to comment on the situation precipitated by the appearance
of three seniors - Campbell, Green and Julian Betko - behind the Iowa
bench Wednesday night at No. 7 Indiana. Stevens did acknowledge he was
concerned.
All three players
received tickets from the Iowa coaching staff. But Campbell, Green and
Betko made the one-hour trip to Bloomington to see some old friends,
namely new Hawkeyes coach Todd Lickliter and assistants Joel Cornette
and LaVall Jordan, who all coached at Butler last season.
Eventually, the NCAA gave the three clearance to play, and Campbell and Green made the most of it.
Iowa State couldn't give Kansas a game at Kansas Wednesday night. No surprise.
Iowa couldn't give Indiana a game at Indiana Wednesday night. No surprise.
Drake will probably climb into the Top 20 if it beats Northern Iowa Saturday night in Des Moines. In the words of the deep thinker Gomer Pyle, surprise, surprise, surprise.
UNI won Wednesday, by the way. It not only won, it won at Wichita State for the fourth straight year. That's a surprise.
And if someone had told me Baylor would beat Texas A&M Wednesday in
five overtimes by the score of 116-110, my reaction would have been ...
surprised.
That's how you text-message and IM, you know. You use "2" instead of "too." I know this stuff.
Anyhoo ... I had planned to go to Des Moines Saturday night to write a short column off the Illinois State-Drake men's basketball game, seeing how both are 6-0 in the Missouri Valley Conference, Drake is headed into the Top 25 with a victory, good stuff like that.
But with wind chills the way they are around here this weekend, I lack the intestinal fortitude to be driving home 'round midnight tomorrow. Assuming the company car would even start after sitting outside at Drake for five hours or so. Thus, another time. Not that this moment in time will come around for the Bulldogs again even if they beat Illinois State, since they turn around and go to Creighton Tuesday. Creighton is not a place to take a new national-ranking. Or an old one.
Do any job that requires driving in the Midwest, and you have January horror stories. In 1985, I got the Iowa basketball beat at the Gazette. Oh, by the way, you'll have to drive to Indiana and Ohio State on one trip, and to Michigan State and Michigan on another. Hey, you're young, you want to make your mark, you'd drive to Nova Scotia if that's what was asked.
That Michigan trip was a doozy. The morning after the Michigan State game, I drove from Lansing to Ann Arbor. The weather was horrific. Icy. I spun on the freeway, did a 360 that would have made Tonya Harding jealous enough to have someone take out my kneecap, and somehow wound up back in the direction I was headed without going into a ditch. Alas, the guy driving the bread truck behind me had to do some skating of his own to avoid making a sandwich of me, so he ended up in that very ditch. I paid for his tow. Not a good day.
Two days later wasn't any better. I went to bed in Ann Arbor the night before and could barely sleep a wink because of the gruesome sound the wind was making. Then I began the drive all the way home to Cedar Rapids. Somewhere in southwest Michigan or northeast Indiana, I got a flat tire on what a Chicago Tribune headline proclaimed (I believe) "Coldest Day of the Century." Miraculously, it seemed, I recognized the flat shortly before nearing an Interstate exit, one which had a service station open on a Sunday and someone capable of doing what I couldn't, which was change a flat.
I drove the rest of the way back to C.R., then wrote the follow-up story from the Michigan-Iowa game the night before. The Hawkeyes lost in triple-overtime. That game, I can barely remember. The other stuff, if only I could forget.
I got bold and smart, or so I thought, the following year. I'm not driving to Michigan again, I said. OK, fly, the boss man said. So my flight to Lansing got delayed and delayed and cancelled in Chicago, and I ended up on something that made stops in two other Michigan cities before landing in Lansing. I listened to the tail-end of the game in a taxi to my East Lansing hotel from the Lansing airport. Mark Neuzil, then of the Quad City Times, handed me a box score a little later that night, and I called in the box to our office. So the Gazette got something out of that night.
The next day, Neuzil drove me to Ann Arbor for the Iowa-Michigan game the night after that. For some reason, I kept looking for bread trucks.
There is no such thing as a jinx. Any person of science will tell you that.
Of course, people of science will tell you a lot of things you don't want to hear or believe.
Every living human has some superstition, none of which has a basis in reality. But hey, we're an imperfect species. We think we're superior to other animals, but can we fly? Can we run as fast as a cheetah, swim as well as a fish, moo with the authority of a cow?
So we have our superstitions. We knock on wood. We avoid black cats and walking under ladders. We don't step on cracks, lest we break our mothers' backs.
But jinxes may exist. In fact, I may be one.
I have not seen the Iowa men's basketball team win once in the five games I've seen it play. When it beat Michigan State Saturday night, I was 400 miles away.
I saw Northern Iowa's football team play once in 2007. It lost, to Delaware in the NCAA playoffs. With me not in attendance, the Panthers were 12-0.
I've seen Iowa's wrestling team compete once. It lost, to Oklahoma State. The Hawkeyes have won everything else they've tried to win this season, including the Midlands and the National Duals.
The last time I saw Iowa's football team play, it lost, to Western Michigan. Of course, 70,000 other people were there for that. So they are jinxes, too.
But I'm a man of science, of reason. I don't believe in ghosts, hexes, or superstitions. I will be in Carver-Hawkeye Arena Wednesday night for the Purdue-Iowa men's basketball game. If the Hawkeyes lose, that's on them, not me.
However, if you're superstitious and feel strongly enough about this to pay me to stay away from Carver ...
OK, I was in the RCA Dome Sunday for the Indianapolis Colts' AFC playoff loss to the San Diego Chargers, and it was quite the scene. Amazingly loud, an interesting game with all sorts of unlikely twists and turns, and a surprise result in the Chargers winning.
What struck me, and what always strikes me at NFL and major-college football games, is how tribal it all seems for the fans. From my press box perch, the field was ringed by blue and white. It isn't an exaggeration to estimate three-fourths of all the fans in the stadium were wearing Colts home or road jerseys with the name and number of a favorite player on the back.
This is the way it is at all NFL stadiums. Apparently, you can't be a real fan unless you wear a team jersey. Nothing else cuts it.
A new stadium with a retractable roof is going up next door to the RCA Dome. It was build it, Indianapolis, or the Colts would bolt. So they're building it. And the RCA Dome will be demolished once it's built. The RCA Dome just didn't have the luxury suites that are so lucrative to sports teams. So, less than a quarter-century old, it has to go.
We just may be a disposable culture.
So I'm in Indianapolis Saturday night, on the eve of the Colts' AFC playoff game against San Diego tomorrow, and I hear that Iowa has a 43-36 lead on Michigan State in men's basketball.
Then I find out that score was a final, not a partial. This tells us No. 6 Michigan State isn't exactly in the same league as North Carolina or Memphis or UCLA.
But if you're the Hawkeyes tonight, you couldn't care less.
Meanwhile, Drake merely set a school record for consecutive victories Saturday night with its triumph over Missouri State. That's 13 in a row, the last five in Missouri Valley Conference play.
Drake won without its best player, guard Josh Young, who has a bad ankle. When Iowa's best player, guard Tony Freeman, was sidelined with injury in December, the Hawkeyes lost to Louisiana-Monroe.
That's ancient history. Iowa isn't going winless in the Big Ten this season. Purdue comes to Carver-Hawkeye Wednesday night.
A word of warning to the Boilermakers: Score 45 points or else.
Iowa takes an 0-3 Big Ten record into Saturday night's game against Michigan State, with 0-4 appearing to be the likely mark after the game.
This is something new and not fun at Iowa. The Hawkeyes haven't been Final Four material for a long time, but they have seldom been as bad as they were in their 79-48 loss at Ohio State Wednesday night.
But it's not just Iowa that has introduced a new coach to a less-than-spectacular roster with predictably mediocre results.
Kentucky, under Billy Gillespie, was 6-7 going into Saturday. That's Kentucky.
Saint Louis, under Rick Majerus, lost at George Washington Thursday night by the ungodly score of 49-20. That's a record-low for points in the NCAA's shot clock era.
Michigan, under John Beilein, was 0-3 in the Big Ten and 4-11 overall as of Saturday morning.
Like Iowa's Todd Lickliter, Gillespie, Majerus and Beilein have all done significant things in major-college coaching. None of the four walked into a situation with the kind of talent to do significant things in their first years at their new schools. All are bound to do better in Year 2 and beyond.
First-year New Mexico Coach Steve Alford, meanwhile, has a team that woke up Saturday with a 14-2 record.
There's some sort of irony there, but I'll leave it to someone else to determine.
Iowa football Kirk Ferentz probably won't be voting for a Democrat in the 2008 presidential election because, well, because he isn't a Democrat. But more importantly, he probably doesn't care for all their talk about the 'C' word.
That's "Change," by the way.
Will there be changes to his coaching staff? It''s a possibility, Ferentz said, but only if they should happen to pursue other opportunities. He said Tuesday that he has a lot of confidence in his coaches, or words to that effect. I'm going to take an uninformed guess and say at least one current coach moves along. If so, and I have nothing tangible to offer that guess, would it matter in the big picture? Who knows?
Will Ferentz shift offensive philosophies, go to a spread offense that is the flavor of the moment in college football? Nope. There are lots of ways to coordinate an offense, he basically said. The New England Patriots do little but pass, the Jacksonville Jaguars do little but run, and it all boils down to how well you execute. We just have to execute better, he said.
Will Ferentz change quarterbacks? It's possible, but a long way from probable. He mentioned former Hawkeye QB Matt Rodgers when discussing the whipping boy of Iowa fans, Jake Christensen. Rodgers was thought by many in Iowa to be a washout when he was a young starter, then evolved to become an All-Big Ten player as the signal-caller for Iowa's last Rose Bowl team, the 1990 squad. The experience of his first, difficult year of play helped mold Rodgers, and so - you can guess the rest.
Me, I'd love to see Christensen turn into an all-conference honoree just to silence everyone who wanted to write off a sophomore playing in an offense with nothing but freshmen receivers, and an offensive line that reminded no one of the one that powered over people for the Hawkeyes in 2002.
Christensen wasn't too wonderful last season. He has areas that obviously need improvement. You can say the same about many of his teammates, for one thing. For another, is it so hard to believe that he can improve on some physical things and put the experience he gained in 2007 to good use the next two years?
It's one thing for people to cast doubts on coaches with long-term contracts that set them up to be better off financially than dozens of small nations. To mercilessly criticize a player who is doing something more difficult thatn what the vast majority of the rest of us do for a living, and who gets paid the grand total of zero? That's just warped.
I was in Iowa City Saturday night for the Oklahoma State-Iowa wrestling meet. They are the two programs that have won the most national titles in the sport.
Oklahoma State won, 19-14. It was a mild upset, maybe not one at all when you looked at the matchups before the meet. Based on individual rankings, the teams looked equal.
What doesn't change is wrestlers and wrestling coaches are about the most enjoyable interview subjects in all of sports. They say what they think, without filters. They all seem to feel the truth will set them free. There's no politics or political correctness. You'll find few athletes in other sports who place as much blame and criticism on themselves as wrestlers. They're in a pseudo-team sport, but they're rugged individuals who know no one else can bail them out during a match.
Iowa Coach Tom Brands would neither make excuses or listen to possible excuses from others after Saturday's meet. Excuses have about the same shelf life as passivity in his wrestling room. Ditto Oklahoma State's, Iowa State's, and so many others.
You show up, you keep pushing and attacking, and you get it done, or else you get beaten and broken. It's not for the faint of heart, and it's certainly not for everyone. But it's 100 percent honest, and I look forward to seeing more before this season is done.