1. I'll take Seattle even up at Atlanta for $11. Chandler has been demoted to #3 QB; Falcons defense is bad; Seahawks aren't anything to write home about but should be able to stay with the Falcons. Holmgren says he will play younger players to see what they have to offer for next year, but I'll still take the Hawks here.

2. I'll take SF minus 2.5 versus San Diego for $11. Somehow I don't think the Chargers win last week is a sign they turned the corner.

3. I'll take Tampa Bay/Dallas UNDER 38 for $11. I figure Dallas scores less than 13 and I don't see Tampa scoring more than 20…

The Chicago Bulls doubled their win total for the year and are now 2-13 by beating the Atlanta Hawks last night. Attendance was reported to be 10,956. If you see the highlights of this game on SportsCenter, you will see so many empty seats that you might be tempted to extrapolate the capacity of the arena to about 50,000 based on that attendance figure. Even though these teams play each other 4 times, I doubt that the sum of their win totals this season will be 41 which is the number needed by just one of them to have a .500 season. But in the midst of all that incompetence is a stat that is very interesting. Elton Brand is leading the NBA in offensive rebounds with more than 4 of them a game. Brand is a legitimate player surrounded by far too little talent in Chicago.

The Washington Post has a puff piece today on the Wizards' new acquisition, Tyrone Nesby. They acquired him Tuesday but he could not be here until Friday afternoon. Is he driving here in a white Bronco at 40 mph?

The NFL and the Players Union have actually agreed to something without two years of wrangling and an armada of lawsuits. The agreed to raise the level of punishments that the commissioner can levy against teams that cheat on the salary cap. As of this agreement, he can fine a team $3.5M and deny the team up to two first round picks and suspend owners/GMs/whomever is involved for up to a year. Now there is an angle to this that I find interesting. When teams "circumvent the cap", the preponderance of cases will be those in which they spend more money than the cap allows and not be ones where a team does not meet the minimum salary floor. So "circumvention" translates into more money for players than is called for in the agreement. So the Players Union thinks that one of these two things is more important than getting more money into their members pockets:

1. The sanctity of those clauses of the Collective Bargaining Agreement that define the Salary Cap.

2. The ability to hit people in management with stiffer penalties that can really hurt them.

College football coaching vacancies are being filled but USC and Alabama are not making much headway. Ten years ago, the availability of these jobs would have had coaches lining up outside the AD's house at 0400 just to chat him up. Now there is a cloud over the Alabama program with regard to possible NCAA investigations and the demands of the alums that the program return to the "Bear Bryant Days of Glory" immediately. And USC has a game venue that is far less than desirable and there are more and more grumblings about the "interventionist tendencies" of AD Mike Garrett. The Sporting News said that Dennis Erickson has turned down even an invitation to talk about the job and that Barry Alvarez is not returning phone calls from USC. Interestingly, John Robinson is still coaching and just turned UNLV from an 0-11 team to one that won 4 or 5 games this year. Could they get him back there for a third regime?

Dick Bennett resigned as the basketball coach at Wisconsin saying he was exhausted and the tank was empty. He was a class act who made teams better when he ran the programs. I have to wonder if the "shoegate" scandal at Wisconsin this summer that involved a couple of his players - and a lot more football players - was a part of this "burn out".

The Athletic Director at North Dakota State was arrested on "suspicion of lewd conduct" in a park in Omaha Nebraska. Why do I suspect there is going to be more to this story in the next week or so? This weekend, North Dakota State plays at Delta State in Mississippi in the Division II football tournament. The AD must have been driving to the game???

The vice President of the Spanish Paralympics committee has resigned over the revelation that some of the players on the Spanish Paralympic basketball team were not actually "intellectually deficient". Can anyone think of a motivation for someone to put ringers on a Paralympics team? Were they expecting some big endorsement contract after the games? From whom? And what athlete would want to compete in these games against other teams using "people with disabilities"? It is like the old Monty Python sketch where one soccer team was made up of one legged Long John Silver impersonators. Not a lot of glory in a victory there.

The Washington Post reports that the Donald Brashear assault charge stems from his grabbing a security guard "by the throat" when the guard told Brashear's wife to leave the weight room in their town house complex because she had a one year old child in there with her. Brashear is quoted as saying that this was not such a big deal and that the papers made him look like a criminal. I hope the same judge that heard the McSorley case hears this one. In that case he ruled essentially that even though being hit with a stick was something that might happen in a hockey game, McSorley was guilty because his actions went beyond the norm. If he handles this case, we'll learn whether or not he thinks a security guard should normally expect to be grabbed by the throat as part of his job.

Supposedly the Dodgers are looking to "move" second baseman Mark Grudzielanek whom I described here as Edward Scissorhands. The Dodgers are also supposedly interested in Robbie Alomar and so Grudzielanek may be a throw-in on a trade with the Indians? If the Dodgers were to wind up with Alex Rodriguez and Robbie Alomar, their infield defense would be improved by about 250%

Ray Lewis has been sued for $6M by two women who claim that he hit them in a crowded bar last year. After the troubles Ray had with going out clubbing with his buddies after the Super Bowl and now this incident, you may think that he would find other ways to entertain himself in the future, no?

Jamall Anderson was asked about the promotion of Doug Johnson to starting QB and Danny Kannell as the #2 guy leaving Chris Chandler as the "emergency QB". Anderson said he had no comment on the quarterback situation and added, "For all I know, I'll be punting next week." Looks like Dan Reeves is losing his grip on this club.

Jim Fassell has ordered Giant players not to discuss with the media anything that relates to the Giants or to their opponents or to the upcoming game(s). Other topics seem to be OK. Forgetting for a moment whether he has the juice to enforce that rule if one of the major Giant players decided to do it anyway, let's ponder another point. If you were a reporter - either a microphone jockey or an ink stained wretch - why would you bother to talk to an Giants' player if you knew those topics were off limits. I don't think that I'd bother asking a random defensive back about the lack of consistency in the argumentation in Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic.

Whenever you think that your job is about as bad as it can be and you wish you were doing anything else, just think that you could be a ticket broker in Cincinnati this week holding an inventory of about 250 ducats to the Arizona/Cincinnati game and you need to get rid of them. There may not even be enough tailgaters at this game to let you offer to use all of the tickets to start the charcoal fires that will cook the burgers. Or maybe worse yet, you could be the announcing team assigned to this game. Ray Bentley and Ron Pitts will not even have a sideline reporter to "throw it to" meaning they will have no time to just kick back and wonder exactly where it was that their career took a U-turn…

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...