Weekly Sporties

-You may remember a couple weeks back when I told you that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had asked the previous Commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, to take over the appeals process for the seemingly-endless scandal involving several New Orleans Saints in an alleged extra-pay-for-big-hits program. At the time the players were skeptical whether or not Tagliabue would be able to stay impartial, especially since he was Goodell's former boss. Well, it turns out they shouldn't have worried, because this week Tagliabue threw out all the Bounty-Gate suspensions. Basically, he said that there was evidence the players had participated in the program, but that it was all the fault of the coaches. To me, this was Tagliabue trying to cover for his friend Goodell, who clearly over-stepped his authority, while also desperately trying to get this story over with once and for all. I've said it before, but the players insistence that nothing like this ever happened is laughable, especially when you consider the Saints' coaches and GM admitted as much. Also, this idea that it was all management pushing this along is just as crazy, because these are not college kids we are talking about - these are grown men and NFL vets who should know better. Still, at the end of the day I'm just glad this is over with. Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma says he plans to continue with his defamation suit against Roger Goodell, but considering I'm not sure you will be able to find 12 people who actually think he was defamed tells me that should be thrown out as well. Hopefully the Saints will now be able to focus on what really matters - fixing that defense, because that secondary wasn't getting them to the playoffs this year, I don't care which players were on the field.

-Now, if you think Roger Goodell was just going to allow this potential embarrassment to linger in the news, you clearly don't know the master of distraction. Less than two days after the suspensions were tossed out, Goodell announced he is thinking about expanding the NFL playoffs. Currently, only 12 out of the league's 32 teams make the playoffs every year. Goodell would like to see that number rise to 14 or maybe 16 within a couple of years. Usually I would wait until the full proposal has been unleashed to render my judgement on it, but even without seeing exactly what the Commissioner has in mind, I feel confident in saying this is a bad idea. One of the great things about the NFL is that there are only so many regular season games and even fewer playoff spots to be won - it makes every game feel more important. Expanding to the point where half the league is going to make the playoffs pretty much defeats the purpose of the regular season. You don't have to look any further than the NBA and NHL, which have similar teams-to-playoff team ratios and their regular seasons feature large chunks of the games which barely matter. On top of that, Goodell has to ask himself if there are really that many teams worthy of playoff spots every year. Take this season's AFC races - will anyone really be excited if an 8-8 Jets team everyone knew was losing in the first round was included? A couple years ago a 7-9 Seattle team got into the playoffs for winning the worst division in league history and everyone was mad about it. If this measure is passed you can bet you will see a lot more teams with sub-.500 records playing into January just to fill out the line-up. Sure, it would be great the one time a random low-seed caught fire and made a run, but most of the time they would be dismissed quickly and it would almost be like they were never there. So, I say make it be that they were actually never there and just leave the playoffs alone. Still I have to admit, as distraction techniques go, this one was pretty good.

-Going into the baseball offseason, Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton was seen as the big prize. However, given his off-field past is filled with drug and alcohol addiction, there were fewer teams interested in signing him than expected, so the buzz about where he would end up was rather quiet. Seattle was said to be very interested, but given their ballpark and current players it would have taken an overwhelming offer to get Hamilton to become a Mariner. All signs were that he would find his way back to Texas eventually. Personally, I expected him to have to wait until after the New Year, when the teams looking to make a big splash get desperate and tend to loosen their wallets, to get a contract offer he liked. But, shockingly, on Thursday afternoon Hamilton signed with the Los Angeles Angels for 5 years and $125 million. Given the way they spent money last year and got nothing to show for it, baseball experts were not expecting the Angels to be buyers two years in a row. The thing you have to remember is that sports teams' rivals are actually the other teams in their own city far more than the teams in their divisions, so I can only surmise all the moves the Dodgers made had the Angels nervous. Now, you can question if Hamilton's history of addiction and the fact that he has only played in smaller markets or ones where baseball is not that important make his move to Los Angeles a bad idea. But he will be in the same clubhouse as Albert Pujols and Mike Trout, so you could argue that there will actually be less pressure on Hamilton here than there would be in almost any other city. Even if he has a down year, it won't be as obvious when the team is scoring 7 runs a game. At least, they had better hope they score that many because they certainly didn't improve their rotation this year, which means a lot of 8-6 games are coming. I guess the Angels plan to fall back on that newest of baseball beliefs: if you can't out-pitch them, you had better hope you can out-hit them.

-Even though it feels like the NBA season just started, the All-Star game is rapidly approaching. The first group of ballots have been turned in and as you would expect guys like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant lead the voting. In fact if the game started tomorrow the starting line-ups for both conferences, which are decided by the fans, would be exclusively made up of players from the biggest markets and marquee teams - it's all Lakers, Celtics, Knicks, Clippers and members of the Heat. What is interesting is that Jeremy Lin of the Houston Rockets is not that far from cracking the line-up, despite not being able to duplicate the statistics he generated last season during 'Linsanity.' A lot of people are saying it is because he is the most visible Asian player in a league that is increasingly marketed in places like China. If that were the case it would hardly be a new phenomemon. When Yao Ming was still playing he would get voted into the starting line-up of the All-Star game every single year, regardless of stats or whether he had even played a game that year. (I do think the argument that "Asian fans vote for Asian players" is a bit of a lazy assumption, but I can't deny there may be something to it.) If Lin does eventually overtake the leading vote-getters, he would hardly be the first player voted into an All-Star game based on popularity instead of merit and that is a much larger problem than wondering who is stuffing the ballot boxes. I know I complain about this every year, but I wouldn't care so much if it weren't for the fact that all the basketball people say it is nothing more than an exhibition, but then use All-Star appearances when discussing a players Hall of Fame credentials. You simply can't have it both ways. Either it is meaningless, in which case who cares who is on the team, or it is a true measure of a players career, in which case we can't leave it in the hands of drunk homers. This continued straddling of the line between the two is infuriating.

-Lost in all the football-driven college conference realignment is the fact that there are far more schools that play basketball than play football. I always wondered what the non-football playing members of conferences thought when they heard they would be forced to increase their travel costs to fly across the country to play all their new conference 'rivals.' Well, it appears this week I got my answer and it is that they are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore. Seven of the Big East basketball-only schools (Georgetown, Providence, DePaul, Marquette, St. John's, Seton Hall and Villanova) have decided to leave and are talking about joining with the basketball-only schools in the Atlantic 10 to form a mega-conference. Personally, I think this is a great idea. Honestly, what does a school like Seton Hall get out of being in the same conference as Temple? Now, immediately people began to wonder how this was going to work, because a basketball-only conference would get a much smaller TV deal than the football-driven one these schools are ditching in the Big East (and, lest we forget, TV deals are where all the money is and college athletics is all about the money). However, while it is true that the pie they would be cutting into would be much smaller, you have to remember that it is also much cheaper to have a basketball team than a football team. You don't need nearly as many facilities, you aren't giving out as many scholarships or travelling as many players. Plus, the football schools were not even giving them equal shares. So, it boils down to simple economics: making less is easier to swallow when you are spending less. The only question now is whether the 7 schools will take the Big East name with them. Considering Georgetown is one of the few remaining founding member of the league I think they have a legitimate claim to it. Besides, the football schools may as well let them have it, because I don't think they will need it for much longer anyway.

-As I have said before, I think the college football coaching hiring system is broken. If coaches want to have any shot at recruiting players to their new school, they must leave their current job while their players are preparing for a bowl game and the kids they have been wooing all year who were getting close to making a decision must now reconsider everything. It is truly unfair to the players, but can you really fault anyone for wanting a better job, regardless of their profession? The reality is that while it is a bad way of doing things, it is a product of how the calendar sets up and I can't think of a better way to configure it. That being said, coaches can still handle it a hell of a lot better than Tommy Tuberville did. Tuberville, the head coach at Texas Tech until last week, was having dinner with several Tech recruits. Reports from one of those recruits say that Tuberville got up in the middle of dinner and never returned. The next day he was named head coach at the University of Cincinnati. [Sidebar: Remember last week I questioned if Bret Bielema leaving Wisconsin for Arkansas was the most questionable coaching move of the year? Well, Tuberville has to be the new leader in the clubhouse. It's not that I think Tech is a better job but, as we just talked about, the Big East is disintegrating. What good is coaching the best team in a league that has four teams and is spread all over the country?] Now, Tuberville obviously couldn't tell these kids about his chances at the job because what if he didn't get it and the kids were scared into playing elsewhere? What he should have done was accepted the job, but asked if Cincinnati could wait a couple days to announce it. Or at the very least until everyone had finished whatever that brought home in the doggy bag. Either way, Cincinnati should not expect any loyalty from him going forward.

-I've always said that if I won hundreds of millions of dollars in a lottery, I would like to buy my own golf course. Nothing too extravagant - just a nice course where I could keep the price low and help grow the game. I wouldn't even want to buy a course with designs of eventually holding a PGA Tour event. However, to a lot of golf course owners, hosting a PGA event is worth its weight in gold. If you can promote your course as a place where the pros have played you can jack up prices as high as you want and there will be people willing to pay it. That is what makes the story about a course in Australia all the more puzzling. The Palmer Coolum course has held the Australia PGA Championship for over a decade, but the course was recently bought by an eccentric millionaire who made a few changes. The most notable of these changes was that he put a 26-foot high, motion-activated, mechanical T-Rex in between the 9th and 10th holes. The players say they wouldn't mind it, but in addition to moving, the T-Rex lets out a very loud roar every now and again, occasionally during their backswings. This is just the first of many changes, as the owner says he wants to add more dinosaurs and eventually build a replica of the Titanic on the grounds. The PGA of Australia countered this by saying they will look for a new place to hold the Championship going forward. Now, I get that it is this man's course and if he wants to turn it into a dinosaur-theme resort that is his right, but if you want dinosaurs on every hole of your golf course why not buy a mini-golf course and save some money? It's like buying an expensive painting and then putting sticker on it. Obviously Australian golf fans are not happy with his actions but considering I was never going to play there anyway, I'm far more offended at the fact he has decided to reenact scenes from "CaddyShack 2". That movie sucked.