Jake Plummer has a reputation - undeserved to my mind - as some kind of great miracle man because he has engineered 12 come from behind wins in the 4th quarter of games. Four of them - one-third of the total - have been against the Eagles and we know that the Eagles have not been a good team or an well coached team for a long time. The jury is still out on Andy Reid but I still have that nagging feeling that his main qualification for the job in his interview a year and a half ago was that he was willing to work cheap. Before him was Ray Rhodes who spent more time working on scowls for his face than on an offensive game plan. Before him was Richie Kotite, the penultimate coaching dolt, and Buddy "do we have to have the ball on offense, can't we just give it back to them?" Ryan and Marion "Swamp Fox" Campbell. Bang all their heads together for an hour and I doubt you would get the spark of a genuinely new idea.

A year from now when the collective bargaining agreement for MLB expires, you will hear from the Players Association that they are doing whatever they are doing for the benefit and protection of their members. It is purely the well-being of the membership that will guide these paragons of altruism. So I'm going to tell you this now so you can remember it and then square it with the grand emoting that will be upcoming then. Gene Orza who is the deputy-something-or-other for the MLBPA said recently that it is "unclear" that steroids enhance sports performances of athletes. And therefore, there was no compelling reason for players to use them and so there should be no kind of testing program for the drugs. One of the news services reported recently that more than 10% of AAA-level players tested showed positive tests for steroids.

Remember too the health risks associated with steroid use for many people; remember Lyle Alzedo in his final days. Then ask yourself why an organization dedicated to the well-being of its membership would oppose testing for a substance that could hurt the members. If none use it, then of course the MLB managers will simply be wasting their time and money and that would be another quiet victory for the players. Unless of course, some of the players might use them even though it is "unclear" that they help in any way…

The President's Cup is about to begin. This is another manufactured event with a rich and glorious history that goes all the way back to - - -1994. It is a Ryder's Cup knock off - the organizers prefer to call it a spinoff. It started here in the Washington area and so "spin" is something that is very well understood here. In this event there will be referees who are appointed by the Pooh-Bahs that run this event to decide questions of fact and apply "The Rules". (These folks like to use caps here to give an aura of importance to rules for a game.) The referee will be accompanied by an observer who is appointed by the same Pooh-Bahs to assist the referee in making decisions on matters of fact and application of the rules and to report to him any infractions he may have missed. The observer will have at his/her side an honorary observer who is appointed by the same Pooh-Bahs and who does the same thing the observer does. Conclusion: The referees must be about as competent as the ones in professional wrestling if they need all this assistance to apply "The Rules" to a game where in about 4 hours of elapsed time the ball is actually moving or being addressed prior to moving for maybe 20 minutes.

These folks are assisted by myriad crowd control people who constantly tell people to be quiet because these guys are about to hit a ball. This is not brain surgery where one inadvertent twitch can change the course of a person's life from full recovery to a person who will be lucky to be taught how to drool his food onto his chin. But we have to have silence here and God forbid someone would take a picture - you know how noisy camera shutters can be. What these people need is a TIMEKEEPER who carries a cattle prod. Set up a 30 second clock and if they don't hit the ball by the time it goes off, the cattle prod makes a surprise visit to their posterior. Now that I would watch.

Golf is a game that encourages men to appear in public wearing clothes that they would not otherwise be caught dead in.

Well, the Jaguars took gas last night against the Titans as I suspected they would. Tennessee just dominated the game and that is all there is to it. Jax is a team in disarray at the moment with an injured OL and DL. They need to right this ship quickly if they are going to make it to the playoffs and try to win something now. And "now" is a key word for Jax. Supposedly they are projected to be as much as $20M over next year's salary cap after allowing for about a $4-5M rise in the cap number for 2001. Mark Brunell's salary cap number for next year based on his current contract is supposedly over $13M and that is about 15% of the total salary allowable for the roster. This is a team that may need to be disassembled in the off season - much like the 49ers and Packers and Cowboys have either had to do or will need to do as soon as egos allow it to be done.

A Slovenian mountain climber went to the summit of Mt. Everest and then skied down the slope. He had tried this in 1996 but did not make it and lost two fingers to frostbite. Some other goof will try this soon and then it will become an Olympic sport by 2020. If so there should never be bonus points for losing digits to frostbite. Imagine if there were and the only way for someone to win a medal was to lose eleven digits and so they skied down in the nude. But the TV ratings would go up…

In the NBA, the Golden State Warriors came to their senses and cut Yinka Dare. His name is pronounced "Dah - ray" and you can easily remember that because it rhymes with "can't play".

Who the hell is Timo Perez and where did the Mets find him and why wasn't he the MVP of the NLCS? Maybe the braintrust that runs the Dodgers thought they were signing Timo Perez when they spent all their money on Carlos Perez? There was a graphic on TV that said that Timo Perez came from Japan; without trying to be politically incorrect, Perez does not sound much like a Japanese name.

University of Maryland just named someone to be the assistant director of media relations. As the new guy in the office, he probably gets to explain why the football program continues to have all the luster and polish of a turd despite having what the Athletic Director has called the best football coach for the program that is possible.

Memo to the New Guy: A big part of the problem is that the Athletic Director is not necessarily the brightest star in the constellation.

In all the furor over Dennis Miller on MNF, it seems that Jimmy Kimmel has gotten a pass on the FOX pre-game show. Maybe it is because the expectations for a pre-game show are that many of the segments will be lame at best. Well if so, then Jimmy is hitting his mark just about all the time. That is an experiment that needs to end quickly.

Bob Verdi of the Chicago Tribune has suggested that the Olympic motto be re-written. In 2000 and going forward it needs to be "Citius. Altius. Fortius. Urinalysis." Not a bad idea at all! And just as that becomes the new Olympic motto, our national Drug Czar has decided to resign after giving us these drug free Olympic games in Sydney and a whole host of zero tolerance policies that have obviously eliminated the drug problem in the country once and for all.

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