Hey, I'm as big a fan of "Le Tuna Grande" as anyone; Parcells knows what it takes to win and has done just that. Where he goes, teams get better; go look that up for yourself. However, all you need to do is to look at the way he does what he does and ask yourself if that way of doing business is compatible with the "photo-op mentality" of Danny Boy. No one in the Washington media would dare say it lest they be frozen out of covering the Skins, but everything related to the team is first and foremost available to Danny Boy as a way to get his picture in the papers or his face on TV. Imagine Bill Parcells holding training camp where thousands of fans and scouts from every other team in the league are always in the stands - at $10 a pop plus another ten-spot to park. Imagine Bill Parcells holding training camp and having to be sure that no activities are directed to one part of the field because Danny Boy and a few of his associates are sitting on the field in lawn chairs smoking seegars. Imagine Bill Parcells having Danny Boy and TV cameras in his drafting room and Danny Boy storming into his dressing room to chew him out after a loss on the road. Even Danny Boy ain't got that much money; probably Bill Gates ain't got that much money and Bill Gates makes or loses as much as Danny Boy is worth just about any day the NASDQ does one of its gyrations. I'd say that Parcells working for Danny Boy is about as probable as an outbreak of total candor from either Bush or Gore.

So Norv Turner is highly likely to be on the job market and his name is already being mentioned for the job at USC where Phil Hackett was fired yesterday but the AD that hired him in the first place, Mike Garrett, has thusfar escaped any real or implied blame in the situation. Don't feel too sorry for Hackett; one paper reported that he has another year at $800,000 coming to him from USC and he has lots of contacts in the NFL to get a job as an offensive coach. The problem for Garrett regarding Norv Turner is that Norv will not be officially fired until after the Skins season is over and that will probably be in early January. Garrett has probably figured that hiring a new coach needs to be done sooner than that because if there is a vacancy for too long, someone might begin to ask him what he has done to make the situation better and that is probably not a question he needs to try to answer. Especially not now when all the varsity spin-meisters and PR gurus are in Florida. If asked that question without having a prepared answer, he might sound like Ralph Kramden - "Hammina …hammina …hammina".

Supposedly, the Rams have already been quietly inquiring among teams who might want to trade for Trent Green at the end of the season to see what kind of price he might bring. The Rams would love two first round picks and a lower level pick or two and supposedly would "settle" for a first and a second and a third round pick. If any of that is true, then putting Warner back in on Sunday is an important move for the Rams because Green has happened to be the QB during the recent swoon by the Rams even though the fault is clearly the defense who has not stopped anyone. Nonetheless, it does not behoove the Rams to dangle their trade bait out there and then lose games. Interestingly, San Diego is one of the teams who has a supposed interest in Green and as I pointed out here before, the Chargers are the team that originally drafted him and then released him before even putting him on the field.

The NFL has an option to buy out a majority of the Arena League. How they got that option and why they took it are mysteries to me, but they have one. A talking head on TV said that they were considering exercising that option now and it makes me wonder if the emergence on the scene of the XFL has anything to do with that. I'll bet that the NFL would portray this as a way for them to have a developmental league and they'll cite the emergence of Kurt Warner from the Arena League as the motive force for all of this. But they already have a developmental league that is now called "NFL Europe" and used to be called the World League of American Football. So why do you need two developmental leagues? Oh, and by the way, isn't NCAA football a developmental league too?

In NBA news, the Sonics have fired Paul Westphal after he and Gary Payton have had a couple of public contretemps in the past week or so. The fact that the team is under .500 gives the Sonics some kind of cover/justification for this action, but the reason is that they don't dare fire their franchise player - Payton - and it became clear that Seattle was not a big enough town for both people. So they declared Westphal the loser and set the rules as "loser leaves town". Sonics' GM Wally Walker said with a straight face that there was no single incident or single thing that led to his decision, but he tried to convince us that there was something wrong in the gestalt that embraced the team. Yeah, right.

The new Sonics interim coach, Nate McMillan has already said that he wants to play players who want to win and not play players who have big contracts but show no effort on the court. He had the good taste not to project a picture of Vin Baker behind him as he said that. He also said that players had taken advantage of Westphal who gave them lots of second and third chances to do things but they never delivered. McMillan believes in hard practices and said that you can't practice at one speed and then expect to play at a different speed. Sounds like he is either going to be a finalist for Coach of the Year or looking for work at the end of the year.

It seems that Vince Carter has injured the tendon that connects the quadriceps muscle to the knee. He is out for at least two games and maybe longer. Given how long it takes to repair and heal a torn tendon, the Raptors and the league would be nuts to rush him back into action. The cost of making this injury more serious is awfully high.

Yesterday, I said that the NBA was in trouble and here is a vignette that will illustrate that assertion. Tonight the Washington Wizards host the Atlanta Hawks in a game that looks to define for all time the word "dreadful". The combined record of those two teams is 6-22. To fill the house, the Wizards would need to round up all the homeless people in DC and prop them up in the seats - no, make that tie them down in those seats. Last night on the local sports radio station, several of the personalities were saying that someone had just tried to give them some tickets to tonight's game and they turned them down. One of them said that they should have taken them and given them away to listeners and the other said that he would not want to do that. This station carries many of the Wizards games on the radio so it is not a station that is "on the outs" with the team. When you can't give away tickets, you have a problem.

And for the NBA it is not a localized problem. For years, the Phoenix Suns played to full capacity; they did not even sell out the home opener this year. The Celtics are not drawing enough people to fill the old Boston Garden let alone the new and larger "Faux Boston Garden". Orlando - the team that supposedly had "the buzz" going for it this year - routinely plays to 4000 empty chairs.

Why are people turning away from the NBA? Why is it no longer worth the steep price of admission? First of all, there are too many players who come into the league without sufficient basic skills to play the game consistently at a pro level that is acceptable to the people who are paying the steep prices. Darius Miles - the high school kid who was taken 3rd in last year's draft by the Clippers - is an example. He can dunk and he can jump and he can make two wonderfully athletic moves a night. But he can't shoot because he never needed to learn that skill playing against other high school kids. Thus, he becomes a liability on the floor and has already been subjected to the NBA players' "inconsequential category" - DNP-CD. That stands for Did Not Play - Coach's Decision. He is not hurt; he did not play because the coach did not put him in the game. And the reason is that he does not have the all the skills necessary to play. And he is not alone… If the NBA continues to market players as opposed to teams, then it has to have players to market. The players have to be outstanding on the court and less than atrocious off the court. There are just not enough of them in that category any more.

Several months ago, the Paralympics had to deal with a "drug scandal" after all the grief caused by that kind of stuff in the Sydney Olympics. That seemed to die down quickly partly because the Paralympics was not a story that grabbed the headlines in the papers every day. Now it seems that there may have been some athletes who competed in the games who are not disabled. One member of the winning "intellectually-handicapped basketball team" claims he and his teammates are not disabled and never took any tests to test their intellectual capacity. (I will refrain from any and all lines here about intellectually handicapped NBA teams; they are just too easy.) These accusations bring back the haunting memories of the Bulgarian women shotputters of the sixties and seventies. I'll believe that those were all actual female members of the species homo sapiens about ten minutes after I witness an outbreak of total candor from either Bush or Gore. (Did I mention that I don't think either of them could deflect the needle by a nanometer on the world's most sensitive "truth detector"?)

A University of Missouri football player was arrested when police found 50 lbs of marijuana in his home. Among the charges were possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute same. I think the police have jumped to a conclusion here. Mizzou was a sorry team this year and their coach got axed after a 3-8 season. That stash could have been just the makings of a team party to make them forget that they aren't going to any bowl games this holiday season. It would take a lot of marijuana for these guys to forget that season.

Blackie Sherrod often writes in his column that he is a "geezer" who was around when some momentous sporting event of long ago was in the process of happening. This week, he said that an oldtimer is someone who thinks "The Long Count" refers to the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney fight. Blackie still has his fastball!

If you have the time, point your browser to "www.bostonglobe.com" and find Dan Shaughnessey's column for today. It is definitely worth reading - unless your are an unredeemable Red Sox fan. If you are, you might be a bit irritated.

Remember when Bob Arum admitted to bribing boxing officials to sanction a George Foreman/Axel Schultz fight as a championship thing? Well another promoter just admitted to the Nevada boxing commissioners he bribed officials too and part of his bribery had to do with the same fight. Cedrick Kushner was fined and got the same 6 month suspension (no locker room, no weigh-ins, no ringside role) that Arum got. Either that fight was a much bigger deal than any of us can recall or the sanctioning of that fight had to be absolutely outrageous for so much bribery to be concentrated in a single event. It isn't like there aren't lots of opportunities for mischief and improper money to change hands in the sport of boxing!

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