I'm back from a weekend in Las Vegas and I have at least partially recovered from the sensory overload that comes from spending about 24 hours in the Race and Sports Book at The Mirage. Between the NFL and the NCAA football games, I guesstimate that about 35 games were on TV for my watching and wagering pleasure. Then there were the baseball games and the horse races from more than a dozen tracks and all the time there were wagering lines and opportunities which needed consideration. I know; it's tough work, but somebody has to do it…
One game on which I focused a lot of attention was the Purdue/Wisconsin tussle. Let me say this as clearly as I can. There are 117 schools playing Division 1-A football; and if there are 70 players per team, that means there are 8,190 major college football players in the country. If Kyle Orton wins the Heisman Trophy as the “best college football player of 2004”, then football as we have come to know it may be finished. I'm not convinced that Orton is the best quarterback in the country let alone the best player.
Out there in Las Vegas, you can see lots of people who continue to hold out hope in situations that are clearly hopeless. There were people who were actually cheering for the Raiders on individual plays in the fourth quarter of their debacle against the Broncos on Sunday. If the referees had allowed the Raiders to play twelve-against-eleven for the entire fourth quarter, the Raiders would still not have covered the spread, but “the faithful” still held out hope for a miraculous comeback. Well, I think that the sports books themselves have also succumbed to that behavior. I am sitting here looking at a sheet that list the odds for futures bets on the winner of the 2005 Stanley Cup. Like there's going to be a hockey season in 2004/5…
A wager on the Stanley Cup winner in 2005 is like giving the sports book an interest-free loan because the terms of the bet include the proviso that all bets are action so long as there is a Stanley Cup awarded any time in 2005 no matter when the season starts, how long the season is or what the playoff format might be. So, they can hold your money for quite a while before they have to refund it to you – without interest. I asked one of the assistant managers if there were actually people who were wagering on the 2005 Stanley Cup winner and he said that there were not nearly as many as in other years but that they had taken “hundreds of bets” up to last weekend. Then I asked him if he would be willing to guess the odds that his sports book might put up for the option “No NHL Season In 2004/5”. He said that would be a “less than even money bet - - far less than even money.”
For readers in the Washington DC area, the oddsmakers in Las Vegas are pointing to a bleak winter for you. Currently the Redskins are 80-1 to win the Super Bowl; those are the same odds as the Bucs and the Chargers; those are longer odds than the Browns, Raiders, and Lions. But things don't get better because the Wizards are 150-1 to win the NBA title next summer and the Capitals are 150-1 to win that Stanley Cup that isn't going to happen in 2005. But DC is exuberant to get the Expos.
Now all they have to do is find a place for the Expos to play. They'll start out in RFK Stadium. In terms of modern amenities and comfort, RFK Stadium has to rank below where The Vet used to be and where Shea Stadium is now. The ambience here would probably be considered “low rent” even in Darfur. Then there is the matter of building the new stadium, which is currently sited in a dreary part of the town – to be absolutely as polite as I can be. The only reason this part of town is not an open-air drug market at the moment is that the drug dealers don't want to have to spend time there. Stay tuned.
The single most important question about the Expos next year is what they will do with their stupid mascot – that orange colored fur-ball called Youpi. I'm sure that other mascots have been thrown out of games, but I'm pretty sure that Youpi was the first in MLB to earn that honor. It seems that Youpi and Tom LaSorda got into an argument and Youpi was shown the door by the umpiring crew. Just a guess, but Youpi probably tried to sell LaSorda on the wisdom of the Atkins Diet – meaning no pasta – and that probably enraged LaSorda. Whatever. But in DC, there isn't really any reason to have an orange fur-ball running around. So, Youpi will probably go to “the mascot graveyard”. We can only hope that he will not be replaced.
Yet another woman has sold her story to a British tabloid, The Sunday Mirror, recounting her sexual encounters with David Beckham. The woman is a “22-year old beautician” who has been described by one of her acquaintances as a woman with a “long history of fleecing men”. I'll bet that's not all she does with men…
Conventional wisdom used to hold that the NFL home field advantage was 3 points. Either that advantage has disappeared or only the good teams have been traveling so far this year. Through the first six weeks of the NFL season, assuming that I have counted correctly, the home team is only 46 – 42 straight up. I wonder if visiting teams in the NFL have ever finished over .500. I doubt it, but I am not going to go back and do the calculations to find out.
We've endured the Olympic drug testing “stuff” and we've been inundated with the steroid “stuff” in baseball. However, this item goes over the top even for athletes/drugs stories. Sergio Perez is a visually impaired judo competitor in the Paralympics. He won a gold medal in that sport in the latest set of competitions – which I have to admit I did not follow even a little bit. Now he has been stripped of that medal because he tested positive for something called prednisolone. According to the International Paralympic Committee, this is not – repeat NOT – a performance-enhancing drug. Nonetheless, it is sufficient that he had it in his system for them to strip him of his medal. If it isn't performance enhancing and assuming it is not an illegal substance, why does the International Paralympic Committee even test for it – let alone take action when they find it? Suppose he had tested positive for a Snickers bar? Would that disqualify him?
Finally, I was just wondering what would happen if they ever ran a marathon in Nairobi, Kenya. Do you think some guy from Nantucket might win?
But don't get me wrong, I love sports...
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