Weekly Sporties

-On Thursday afternoon an audio tape surfaced, reportedly of former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, in which Williams is heard encouraging his players to go after the heads of various San Francisco 49er players during this year's playoff game and offering bounties for big hits. If nothing else, this tape explains why Williams was the only person who was suspended by the NFL not to appeal. Williams is suspended indefinitely and this audio has a lot of people saying that once Commissioner Roger Goodell hears it he will never let Williams coach in the NFL ever again, especially when you consider the Saints had been repeatedly warned to knock off the practice of offering bounties. Personally, I go the other way. The footage was captured by a documentary film maker who was granted access to the Saints while working on another project. What that tells me is that Williams was so comfortable with what he was saying that he never thought it would come back to haunt him. So I think all this audio really does is just confirm how wide-spread and common the practice of putting bounties on other players really is. It doesn't sound good for Williams at the moment and I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up being out of the NFL for two or three years, but I still expect to see him on an NFL sideline at some point in the future.

-Still, the main result of this leaked audio is that many football coaches, already known for being tight-lipped, are going to close their ranks even tighter. This is going to make finding a team willing to be part of the "Hard Knocks" show an almost impossible task. The guys who film "Hard Knocks" get unprecedented access to teams during training camp and a leak like this will not help ease concerns about people getting a little too inside the organization. So, it was not surprising to learn that they went back to the Jets to inquire about their interest on being the focus of the show for a second time in three years. For the time being the Jets haven't said yes, but they haven't said no either. Of course, they would be a TV show's dream. Not only are the coached by the bombastic Rex Ryan, but they also added media lighting rod Tim Tebow and have a legitimate quarterback controversy angle producers could exploit. Still, I'm not sure if the Jets want to sign up. "Hard Knocks" adds a certain media circus quality to the mix and the team already has that in spades. While that would be fine for a team that doesn't plan on doing anything this season, the Jets seem to think of themselves as legitimate contenders. Let me just say this: inviting a reality show camera crew to follow you around for weeks on end is not exactly the best way to convince people to take you seriously.

-However, this week also served up a reminder that no matter how tight-lipped people think their staff  may be, there is always at least one person willing to leak information. A few days ago an unflattering Wonderlic score was leaked to the national media. For those of you who may not be familiar, the Wonderlic test is given to all NFL recruits at the combine. It is composed of 50 questions which have to be answered in 15 minutes and you get one point for each correct response. Supposedly it measures your ability to think under pressure and every year there is one score which gets leaked to the media that people seem to latch onto. The player in the crosshairs this year is LSU cornerback Morris Claibourne, who allegedly got a 4. Now, some in the media are looking at this as a personal attack on one kid, but the main thing I feel about this story is indifference. Honestly, who cares what you get on the Wonderlic anymore? I'll give you two examples: Dan Marino supposedly got a 15 while Ryan Leaf got a 27. The first is in the Hall of Fame and the second was arrested twice in 48 hours last week for breaking into houses to steal pain medication. Moral of the story: the Wonderlic test doesn't mean anything.

-Late Saturday afternoon former Detroit Pistons stars Isiah Thomas was fired as head coach at Florida International University. Now, it is Thomas was 26-65 in his three years at the school, so you can't really claim this was a shocking firing. To me the shocking part of this story happened three years ago when he first took the job. FIU is mostly a commuter school, which means this was like Magic Johnson coaching at UMass-Boston. At the time Thomas was coming off a failed stint as GM of the New York Knicks and things had not ended well at two NBA stops before that either, so I get that he was trying to rehabilitate his image, but this still seemed like a bad job for him to take. FIU is a low-level D-1 school and will always have little to no luck recruiting against the dozen or so bigger colleges in the area. I don't care is Isiah Thomas is the coach, you're not going to FIU if schools like Central Florida or Miami also come calling. I'm sure Thomas thought this was going to be a stepping stone to a bigger job, but all he has succeeding in doing is hurt his reputation even more. I'll be very surprised if he gets another college coaching gig out of this. But at least he didn't kill the program completely, like his did when be bought the CBA. I guess in that regards it could be considered progress.

-On the total other end of the college coaching scale is John Calipari. After his Kentucky Wildcats won the National Championship on Monday a lot of basketball minds figured that now his college resume was complete and Calipari would follow the lead of most of his talented freshman and go pro. Calipari has come out and said he doesn't plan to leave and (for the moment) I tend to believe him. I do think he'll eventually go back to the pros because, much like Pete Carroll in the NFL, he has a desire to prove that his first attempt at coaching on the pro level wasn't a true indication of his skills. However, I just don't see him leaving right now. And why would he be in a hurry to go? Kentucky is a great job and next season is going to be one long victory lap. On top of that the majority of the jobs which will be open in the pros next season are going to be pretty bad. Why rush back to take a job where no one could win? That was what he did the first time around in New Jersey and it blew up in his face. If he stays at Kentucky for a couple more years and keeps winning (and there is no reason to think he won't), he'll start getting offers from better teams. He can afford to be a little picky at the moment and there is no reason to do anything rash. The NBA will be there for him when he feels like giving it another try.

-Of course, if a job like Orlando opens up that could change Cal's mind and it certainly looks like current Magic coach Stan Van Gundy is on his way out the door. In an extremely awkward press conferences the other day, Van Gundy was talking to a group of reporters when he said that someone high in the organization had told him star player Dwight Howard had told the team's owner he wanted Stan fired. Howard happened to be walking by at the moment and, unaware what Van Gundy was saying, walked over and threw his arm around the coach. The two made small talk for a minute before Van Gundy walked away and left Howard to deal with a group of reporters asking if it was true that he wanted Van Gundy gone. Howard was clearly unprepared for the questions. Now, I don't know if Howard asked for Van Gundy to be fired before that day, but I'm pretty sure he has now. The stranger part is that I don't think Van Gundy even cares if he gets fired at this point, which is why he did this. Just goes to show you that even a few million dollars aren't worth dealing with Dwight Howard's should-I-stay-or-should-I-go melodrama for another year.

-Up until Wednesday, Mohammed El Akkari was carving out a quiet career playing professional basketball in Lebanon for Moutahed, a Division A team. He was chugging along, averaging 7 point a game while playing 19 minutes. But on Wednesday El Akkari went off for 113 points in a game against Bejjeh. Now, I'm obviously impressed with his point total, but all the stories I have seen have attempted to place this in the Wilt Chamberlain category and I just can't make that leap because not all high-scoring marks are the same. It doesn't even have anything to do with the quality of his league, but everything to do with how he scored his points. El Akkari was 40-69 from the floor, including 32 three pointers (and I thought Nate Robinson had no impulse control), something Chamberlain didn't have the option of shooting. Also, he made only one free throw, which tells me the guy never goes to the basket (there was no mention of his rebounding total, which leads me to assume it is because he didn't have any). Lastly, the game ended 173-141, which tells me they don't seem to value defense in Division A. People always wonder if there will ever be another 100-point game in the NBA. To me, this confirms it will never happen. Not because NBA players care more about defense, but because if any player ever took 69 shots I think his own teammates would start blocking them.