The Red Sox announced a ticket price hike on the day after Thanksgiving. The best box seats will go from $40 - 45 per game to a straight $55 per game. Bleacher seat will now cost $20. The Red Sox will have the highest average seat price anywhere in MLB for 2001.

Staying in the Boston area, Will McDonough of the Boston Globe reported that Rick Pitino told the Celtics after their trouncing by the Sixers on 20 November that he was leaving at the end of the season. If true, that would imply several things:

1. Pitino will walk away from the final 5 years of his deal in Boston costing him about $25 - 30M. That is a lot of cheese to walk away from!

2. Pitino thinks he has had problems motivating players and getting them to do what he wants them to do before this exchange?

3. Pitino starts angling to be coach at Indiana and pressure will mount for him to get the job unless the Hoosiers get to the Final Four.

The Sixers lost their first game of the year to the Hornets and had to find out if they knew what to do to "snap back from a defeat". The answer is still unknown since the schedule gave them the Atlanta Hawks in the next game and Jim Jackson went out of the game with a sprained knee to make it even easier. The Sixers scored all of 76 points in Atlanta - with only 14 coming in the 4th quarter - and won the game comfortably. The Hawks are a miserable team.

Nonetheless, the Hawks did manage to beat the Knicks earlier this week. In that game the Hawks outrebounded the Knicks 42-30. Keep in mind that both Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain had games where their individual rebounding totals were 50 or more…

Last year, Doc Rivers was a genius in Orlando. He was certified as such by the press that covered the NBA. The team won with nobody on the roster and missed out on the playoffs on the final day of the year. This year, the team has signed Tracy McGready and Grant Hill and were expected to be in the top two or three teams in the East. Granted - no pun intended - that Hill is hurt, but the Magic is 4-9 and is not scaring anyone. How did Doc Rivers get so dumb so fast? Or wasn't he as smart as everyone made him out to be last year???

Tracy Murray groused his way out of Washington over the summer by complaining about just about everything. Now he is in Denver and is not playing there and is complaining even more. Murray is a streak shooter who plays no defense and that makes him a liability waiting to happen. He is getting less than 10 minutes a game in Denver and is averaging less than 2 points a game and is bugging the Nuggets to trade him. Problem is that not a lot of teams are lining up to take him off the Nuggets' hands.

There is a sports columnist in Philly named Paul Domowitch who is either in possession of the newest and latest hallucinogenic substance or is just playing the sports columnist game of "gush over the current hometown hero". Domowitch supposedly wrote a column that laid out a scenario whereby Donovan McNabb would be the NFL MVP. And there is no evidence that he was giggling when - or just after - he wrote it. There are two simple words that respond to that column: Not Happening!

Watch for a news article to become the basis for stuff reported in the sports sections of newspapers. Jihad Hassan Moukalled returned to his home in "Someplace" Michigan from a trip to Vegas. Evidently, he lost big - or as Dick Cheyney would say, "big time"! So he returned home and suffocated his three children (ages 3, 5, and 7), shot his pregnant wife, then wrote a note saying he was sorry about his gambling debts and sorry that he had to kill his wife and kids, and finally shot himself. Yes, that is a tragedy; I am not trying to imply it is not. But wait till you hear the people who want to ban gambling on college sports get hold of it and make it into something indicative of the worst thing to happen to humankind since the banishment from the Garden of Eden.

I came away from the Breeders' Cup races thinking that there were three young horses who could make for some exciting racing next year. Tiznow, Giant's Causeway and War Chant ran really big races that day and they were all three year olds at the time. Well, Giant's Causeway and War Chant are both retired to stud already. This was what the Breeders' Cup races were designed to avoid, but it is clearly not working this year. Sad… But the economics favor heading to the breeding shed. War Chant will have a stud fee of $75,000 next year and is expected to "service" 80 mares. Do the math; that is $6M in stud fees and it would be an outrageous year to have him win anywhere near that amount of money. Unless his offspring show up with only three legs and one eye, his fee will stay the same for the year after that. Then, the fee will be adjusted up or down based on what his first crop of progeny do when they hit the racetrack as 2 year olds. So he will put about $12M in the bank before anyone knows for sure if his genes are worth more than $29.95.

College football coaching opportunities happen even when the school does not fire the coach. Dick Tomey - head coach at Arizona - resigned after losing to Arizona State 30-17. ASU had already fired its coach - as did the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL and the Arizona D-backs in MLB. I wonder if the Phoenix Suns coaching staff is feeling a bit antsy?

There are too damned many Bowl Games!!! On 27 December they will play the "Galleryfurniture.com Bowl". It will pair East Carolina (6-4) against the SEVENTH place finisher in the Big 12. Right now it looks like that will be Texas Tech. Tell the truth, how many of you knew that Texas Tech was even in the Big 12? By definition, this is the bottom half of the conference for the Big 12. The question here has to be, "What's the point?"

Remember the suspension of Arizona center Loren Woods for 6 games because of an incident when he was in the eighth grade? Well it now seems that the infraction was that he "accepted benefits from a family friend". When I was in the eighth grade, I accepted meals from the families of my friends and a variety of gratuities from friends of my family. Would that make me ineligible for NCAA competition? If so, who can reasonably be eligible?

Now it seems that the NCAA is about to begin investigating the Alabama football program for irregularities. They have not told the school why they are going to be investigating, but they did say they will be showing up on campus in the near future. That news is second in joyousness to news that the IRS Audit Division has named you their "Taxpayer of the Year"!

Before the start of this weekend's game against the Redskins, the Eagles are allowing the fewest number of points per game of any team in the NFC. And other than the regular readers of these rants who reside in the Philadelphia area, I am not sure that most other NFL fans could name three starters for the Eagles' defense. Here are some clues: Reggie White is gone; so is Jerome Brown - except Jerome is not going to be making any comebacks any time soon.

I picked the Titans over the Jags for the mythical picks on Wednesday and learned that Steve McNair hurt his hand in practice on Wednesday and could not practice since then. He is questionable for Sunday's game. No matter; I still think Tennessee is three points better than Jacksonville.

After watching the Thanksgiving day games, no one would dare argue with the statement:

The Cowboys and the Patriots stink!

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