At the beginning of the 2006/07 college basketball season, there were 336 colleges and universities playing Division I basketball. Unless I misread the standings of conferences and indies, 335 of those schools have won a game so far this year. Iona College in New Rochelle, NY is the only one that has not won a game; they are 0-21 at the moment and play Siena tonight. They had a four game stretch in mid-January where they lost two OT games, then lost by a point and then lost another OT game. They have 8 games left until the MAAC Championship Tournament in early March; they’ll have to win that tournament to get the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament if they hope to play on beyond the first week of March.
Given the results at Iona and the less than rosy future there, you might forgive the local scribes for being a bit down on the team. Meanwhile, out in Colorado, the Buffaloes aren’t doing all that well either. They have won 5 games this year out of 18 starts and they’ve lost 7 conference games by an average of 20 points per game. Mark Kizla of the Denver Post was not pleased with the way things were going for the Buffaloes when he wrote:
“In more than a century of CU’s hoops, the Buffaloes have had more than their share of lost years. But watching this team lose night after endless night, with the arena as lonely and gray as a tomb, is morbid. The Ricardo Patton [coach at CU] era has a duty to die.”
I don’t even want to think about what Mark Kizla might have to say if he had to cover the Iona College basketball beat…
Once the pitty-pat part of the college basketball schedule is over and done with, the games become compelling. One thing I’ve noticed this year is that a couple of “traditional powerhouses” aren’t merely reloading this year; they’re rebuilding and things don’t look all that well in the reconstruction phase. I caught UConn about a week ago against Louisville and the Huskies looked overmatched. That hasn’t been the case with a UConn team for a long time now.
I’ve seen Illinois play twice (Ohio State and Wisconsin) and they too looked overmatched both times. I saw that Illinois has a decent record so I went to see just how creative a scheduling job the athletic department had done for the team in November and December. It was feather-pillow soft. That’s another team that’s not nearly as good as it has been in recent years.
I’ve only seen Oklahoma play about half of a game so maybe I just caught them at a bad time, but the Sooners didn’t look all that good to me. But there’s still a month to go in the season and then there are conference tournaments. Maybe these teams are setting themselves up to peak at the end of the season. Whatever.
Up at the NBA level of basketball, the league is doing what it always tries to do – focus attention on its stars and draw attention away from some of the fetid corners of the league. The Boston Celtics are particularly fetid at the moment; they are two full games worse than the Sixers and the Sixers are a team in the process of self-immolation. One personnel move – among more than a few – that just has not worked out for the Celtics is their acquisition of Sebastian Telfair. I think that it’s getting to be time to declare that this kid was dreadfully over-hyped and really isn’t going to amount to much at the NBA level. He’s not playing in Boston because he’s been beaten out for the starting guard spot by Delonté West – a decent player – and by Rajon Rondo – who may some day become a decent player. This bench-warming role in Boston follows a bench-warming role in Portland where he watched as Steve Blake got the minutes. Telfair has a shoe contract and a movie about him and all that stuff. I think he belongs in the Developmental League because I don’t think he could even start in most of the European leagues.
I have no idea what is going on with the Barry Bonds/SF Giants contractual machinations. Supposedly, there is a side-letter to the contract that says the Giants can void the contract if Bonds is indicted; Bonds’ agent says it is unenforceable because the Collective Bargaining Agreement would supersede it; so, why would the Giants work to negotiate the letter in the first place and why did it take time for the Bonds’ folks to agree to it? During the impeachment brouhaha for President Clinton, people made a lot about whether or not the Special Prosecutor might indict him and how a good prosecutor could “get a ham sandwich indicted”. Well, if that’s even remotely true, then using an indictment as the trigger for voiding a contract seems a bit strange. Stay tuned…
Sammy Sosa signed his deal with the Texas Rangers and it is a non-guaranteed minor league contract that he may turn into a $500K contract with incentive clauses if he makes the squad in the springtime. Sosa says he was mentally beaten down after the 2005 season in Baltimore and even though he did want to play in 2006, he now thinks it was a good thing for him to take the year off and get himself ready to play in 2007. He says his body is in shape and he’s ready to go. Before taking 2006 off, Sosa’s numbers declined for four straight years; it will be interesting to see what his one-year sabbatical did for him. That assumes of course that he can make the Rangers’ squad…
The Asian Games are underway in China. In an ice hockey game, Kazakhstan beat Thailand by a score of 52-1. That’s not a typo. Insert your own punch line here.
In Denver, they have a new soccer-only stadium for their MLS team and they sold naming rights for it. The stadium is Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. I wish that I could listen to Denver sports radio because you just know that they had a contest to come up with the “short name” by which the stadium will be known. And you know that they would have had each and every caller on a 10-second delay with not one but two guys at the engineering console poised to hit the “dump button”.
Finally, since I mentioned soccer and MLS, here’s a comment from Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“If you tell American sports fans that David Beckham ‘transcends soccer,’ you have to tell ‘em what soccer is.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…