What can I do to ease the pain of this poor unfortunate loyal reader? Not much. Unless of course he might consider advice along the lines of putting the house up for sale and moving to another venue…

I did respond privately to him in as compassionate and sensitive a way as any good curmudgeon might. I told him that it was a shame that the Chargers and Bengals did not play this year because that would qualify as the first true "Smashed Windshield Game" of the new decade. For those who don't know, Pete Axthelm once described a game like this as one where if you left two tickets on your dashboard and went into a mall, you would come out and find the windshield smashed and there would be four tickets on the dashboard.

I was glancing through the NFL schedules to see which teams had soft spots in the scheduling. Being a Philly kid, I was happy to see that the NFL gurus had the Eagles finish the season with Cleveland and Cincy back to back. But then I noticed a trend. New England has these two back to back and both Pittsburgh and Denver are in the middle of a back to back pairing with the Browns and Bengals as I write this. Even Tennessee - who does not need a soft spot in the schedule - gets these teams back to back in early December. This must reflect some kind of New Age sensitivity on the part of the NFL. Teams that may need to relax and have a breather are rewarded with Cleveland - the St. John's Wort of the league - to reduce their stress and anxiety levels and then they can luxuriate with Cincy - the Echinacea of the league and the cure for all football problems.

But the NFL schedulers may have been prescient beyond belief. While all of the experts - me included - saw the Jaguars as a playoff team and a threat to beat just about anybody, the schedulers saw them as vulnerable and in need of the scheduling equivalent of a hug. From 3 December through 17 December, the Jaguars have Cleveland and Arizona at home and then they journey to Cincy. That is not a soft spot in the schedule; that is a scheduling spa.

At this moment, the New Orleans Saints have the #1 defense in the league; they only give up 221 yards per game. However, they have not yet played a team with a potent offense. The best offensive team - statistically speaking - that they have faced is Philly. The Eagles are not nearly as bad offensively as they were last year, but no one should confuse them with a great offense. Nonetheless, the Saints have a shot at leading the league in defense up to Thanksgiving because they only have SF as a team that moves the ball well on their schedule between now and then. Unfortunately, New Orleans is in the NFC West and that means they get the Rams twice between Thanksgiving and Christmas - and they get SF for the second time in that time span too. The schedulers decided to make up one for the Saints that could be called the "Unhappy Holiday Season Schedule".

The Monday Night Talking Heads were voicing their "concern" that Eddie George was carrying the ball at a pace that would give him 425 carries for the year and they were musing about whether or not he could keep that up. If you check the stats carefully, Stephen Davis has carried the ball one time more than George has. And most of the same talking heads are saying that the Redskins have to keep running the ball and they need to be sure they don't abandon the run too quickly in games where they fall behind. Am I missing something here?

Don't peek, but who has the worst defense in the AFC statistically? The Seattle Seahawks. And their offense is 14th out of the 16 teams in the AFC. Believe it or not, the Seahawks are behind the Chargers in both offense and defense at this point in the season.

As the NBA season approaches, we have the "promise" of Michael Jordan to the Washington media that the Wizards will make the playoffs this year. And that may not be so terribly impossible. In the East, who got significantly better in this off-season? Orlando did. But Miami is not better with Mourning gone and the Knicks are not obviously better with Ewing gone and the Hornets are not obviously better after all their moves and the Sixers season could implode at any minute as the "love" ebbs and flows between Allen Iverson and Larry Brown and Atlanta may have to do without Mutumbo for a while since he has contracted malaria and the Nets' Keith Van Horne broke his leg in an exhibition game. Granted the Wizards are not a lock for the playoffs, but it is not nearly as long a shot as it was last year.

On November 17, Larry Holmes will fight Mike Weaver. Holmes is 51; he and Weaver fought for the heavyweight title in 1979. Larry Holmes says that a fight like this keeps him going and maybe one day one of these "young punks" will give him another title shot. He thinks all the "young punks" are afraid of him. I think Larry caught one too many left hooks…

Colonial Downs has ended its 2000 racing season. Things got so bad that they did not report attendance or handle figures to the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun papers. Under attendance, it just said "n/a". Well the Daily Racing Form had the figures and on a few weekdays when I would glance at them I noticed that weekday attendance was always below 2000 and was sometimes below 800. The good thing about Colonial Downs is that while it is running for 6 weeks or so, there is no Maryland racing which means that there is the opportunity for some folks to actually go into Laurel Race Course and clean the place up. By the end of a meet at Laurel, the place makes the Black Hole of Calcutta look like the palace at Versailles. I don't mind if the paint is not fresh, but when the seats and the railings are sticky to the touch…

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