The Things We Do For Ratings.

Via Idolator, I get another reason to despise sweeps periods: apparently even Los Angeles TV affiliates are trying to scare people about emo, about three years too late.



I guarantee this is how the idea meeting went for this: "My kid's acting really out of sorts lately. He's listening to some awful music, and spending all his time on the computer listening to bands I don't understand. Hey, let's make a three minute long story out of it."

I'm all about trying to get people to stop listening to My Chemical Romance, but this really isn't the way to go about it.

That's The Sound Of Another "Fire Millen" Sign Being Scrawled.

The FanHouse exists at AOL for a reason: to find the little things that some of the rest of us would completely gloss over in the muck of Peter King's usually mediocre column, and it only matters to me because it concerns my rooting interests. This is how much Mike Shanahan and the Broncos offered Millen for Calvin Johnson, about a month before the draft:

A month earlier Denver had offered two first-round picks, a second-rounder and two third-rounders, plus veteran linebacker Al Wilson, but when the Broncos wouldn't substitute another second-round pick for the injured Wilson, Millen turned them down. With that, the bar was set high.

Wow, that's a lot of stupid -- on both ends. Not only was the Rat Fink willing to mortgage the entire goddamn franchise on Calvin Johnson (never a guarantee, given the way WRs are dropping in value as far as the marquee player list goes), but he was willing to ape what the Saints did to draft Ricky Williams, and inherit the NFL's dunce cap from Millen as far as miserable personnel decisions go.

Yet Millen still said no. Is William Clay Ford, Jr. just a puppet, a marionette controlled by Millen? Detroit fans might just have reasons to consider that possibility.

The Gary Thornebot 3000 Opens Its Mouth Again.

I thought the GT3K only had two settings: OFF or HIGH. These usually work for hockey coverage, and are doubtful for use in other sports (Mom's Robot Factory used it as a prototype for the Gus Johnson model GJ-1 and added multi-sport flexibility.) Now, I find out that our GT3K also has another useful setting: PUT FOOT IN MOUTH.

Thorne is the play-by-play-bot for the Orioles, and during last night's telecast of the Red Sox-O's game, Curt Schilling's bloody sock from the 2004 World Series came up:

"The great story we were talking about the other night was that famous red stocking that he wore when they finally won, the blood on his stocking," Thorne said to broadcast partner Jim Palmer, the Hall of Fame pitcher, in a conversation that had begun with a discussion of Schilling's blog.

"Nah," Thorne said. "It was painted. Doug Mirabelli confessed up to it after. It was all for PR. Two-ball, two-strike count."

Palmer: "Yeah, that was the 2004 World Series [sic]." Thorne: "Yeah."

During a break two innings later, Thorne confirmed that's what he said, and that Mirabelli had told him so in a conversation "a couple of years ago."

"Go ask him [Mirabelli]," Thorne said.

Mirabelli was shocked, then angry, when relayed Thorne's comments.

"What? Are you kidding me? He's [expletive] lying. A straight lie," Mirabelli said. "I never said that. I know it was blood. Everybody knows it was blood."

Via Deadspin, I come to Baseball Musings, who reveals another instance of the GT3K's on-air bouts with stupid. Eventually, either ESPN or the MASN is going to have to do something about this sort of thing -- you can't have your announcers be consistently wrong about things like stats or even stuff like this. Harmless as the idea of Schilling painting the sock is in the scope of things, as far as sports go, to accuse someone of faking playing hurt for an ego boost is pretty damn ugly.

Miami Quarterback Follies.

Must be something in the water down in the Florida area that makes the front offices of their pro football teams insane regarding quarterbacks. We'll gloss over the whole mess of Tampa Bay, bringing in Jeff Garcia to compete with Chris Simms and Bruce Gradkowski (right, adding Bruce only to be a completist) and trading for Jake Plummer, who then retired -- Gruden must just think that if he has four going into camp, one of them just has to be starter-quality enough to hurl it to Calvin Johnson, whom the Bucs are clearly man-crushing over hard enough to consider trading up for (more on Mr. Johnson later.)

The situation in South Florida is getting messier -- after the Dolphins dealt for both Daunte Culpepper and Joey Harrington prior to the 2006 season, big things were expected, as numerous pubs had the Dolphins deep in the playoffs, and SI put them in the Super Bowl against Carolina (yeah, that prognostication turned out well.) Culpepper stayed hurt after rushing back from the first surgery, and Harrington was his usual inconsistent. The play of the two is probably another factor of what drove Nick Saban to Tuscaloosa. It ought to be stated that this continued morass at QB is his fault, but Cam Cameron and the front office haven't done a hell of a lot to solve the problem so far. Harrington is now backing up Michael Vick in the ATL, and it's assumed Culpepper will be on the way out, as the Dolphins try to grab Trent Green from the Chiefs, who feel they no longer require his services with Damon Huard and Brodie Croyle on the roster.

Most sane people who observe the NFL on a regular basis would want nothing to do with Green as far as a trade goes at this point in his career (if he were to be cut, someone would give him a contract offer); however, not a lot of GMs in sports are considered sane. GM Randy Mueller probably rubber-stamps the coach's decisions on personnel, and if that's the case, the Cam Cameron era will be a short one. Now, Trent Green is not a bad QB, but many of us happen to remember this little hit from last year against Cincy:



(Yeah, the video stinks, and I don't think it was a cheap shot. It's the only clip of the video I could find on YouTube.)

Green was out for the majority of the season due to that concussion, and I think it was a mistake for Herm Edwards to go back to him in the playoffs after missing that much time. Why the Dolphins want a 36-year old QB is another question entirely, especially after David Carr was on the market and available for less (Green's agent wants to re-negotiate his contract with the team that acquires him.) It is a slight mistake to consider Green "extremely durable," as he missed an entire season with the Rams due to a freak injury, and Kurt Warner then stepped in and took his job (quite well, if a Super Bowl is good by anyone's standard.) The Dolphins had enough problems with Culpepper, whose injury put a few more virtual years on his already-30 self. Acquiring Green would be a bonehead move when what the team needs is a new or slightly used younger QB for a semi-stable future (Brady Quinn at #9 in the draft would not be a bad way to go, if he falls that far.) The Culpepper experiment, if it is over, ought to be instructive in the sense that it is time to start fresh on the offense, especially when New England has re-stocked yet again and the Jets dealt for Thomas Jones from the Bears. The defense will still be tops in Miami; acquiring Joey Porter is actually a help, even though he's on the way down as an individual player, he's still useful to a team, and he, Zach Thomas, and Jason Taylor look like a hell of a combo on paper.

Now, to the CJ-related tangent: If the Dolphins release Culpepper, what's the temptation the Raiders have to sign him? It re-teams him with Randy Moss, and leaves the Cryptkeeper and Coach Lunch Money (TM The Hater Nation) with an opportunity to draft the aforementioned Calvin Johnson, and ship Jerry Porter out of town. You could say that JaMarcus Russell is a younger, healthier version of Culpepper, but Al Davis is probably sick of waiting around (he may not have many more years to be patient) for a QB to develop; he's been down that road before. Of course, Culpepper post-injury only has a few good years left, which would leave the Raiders in the same damn situation come three or four years later.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part IV.

Here are Parts I, II, and III of the prior deconstruction of Jason Whitlock's multi-column "solution" to fix men's college hoops and college football. And Part IV (hopefully final) is a doozy, because now he's dug himself so far into the hole that he won't be able to dig out: his final grand proposal is to scrap Title IX, calling it a welfare system. Not new, not particularly revolutionary, but incredibly reactionary and stupid, and is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's get started.

Today, I drop the other shoe. I point out the benefactors of the continued exploitation of these directionless athletes and how fixing football and basketball players will end the gravy train of other non-black athletes.

Great. So the goal is to completely scrap the athletic opportunities for students who (gasp) are actually at college or university to go to school and get a degree in order to see that black men get one, even if they may not necessarily be aiming for it? If this is your idea of improving the lot of black men (which I am in favor of in general), count me the fuck out.

You could argue, and I will here, that the NCAA is in the business of recruiting impoverished, poorly educated black athletes for the purpose of securing gigantic TV contracts so that its schools can fund sports primarily played by white kids. The NCAA, rather than take a portion of the revenue it generates off its football and basketball players and invest in those athletes' intellectual and academic development, chooses instead to divert those revenues to volleyball, softball, baseball, golf, tennis, women's basketball and track athletes and their coaches.

Because they have resources that already exist in order to invest in their athletes intellectual and academic development: THEY ARE CALLED CLASSES AND ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS. It's very simple. If you stop riding the men's hoops and football players so hard to be pseudo-pros, cut down on the travel schedule, and make sure they go to class and take the exams, then you have what you want in the first place. But no, that cuts down on the gravy train for the universities, and they want to hoard that money. They use Title IX as an excuse, and as far as excuses go, I'd say it's a damn good one.

While the athletes remain eligible, the NCAA cuts deals to get them more and more television appearances on every night of the week. It's a vicious cycle that has produced the mess we have today. The athletes know they are being used for money, and they express a hard-to-digest hostility and sense of entitlement because of it. The NCAA, NBA and NFL ignore the athlete (who did not choose his environment or dysfunctional upbringing) and allow him to rot until age 18, and then wonder why he is hard to bring under control at age 23 or 24 when he's been handed several million dollars.

It is not the responsibility or job of the NCAA or any of the professional leagues to educate and develop an athlete before the age of 18, regardless of what you might think. That is incumbent upon parents and teachers at the lowest levels, and at higher ones, local, state, and federal government. I shall repeat my notes from prior installments: EDUCATION IS NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN EMBRACE BY DEMAND. That love has to be developed and nurtured. It is not the responsibility of an athletic association to educate its athletes. If they truly are students, then it is incumbent upon their universities, and the NCAA accounts for this, however flawed the standards are (and they are highly flawed) for men's hoops and football.

The intervention process must happen much sooner. Major League Baseball builds academies in foreign countries hoping to develop future major leaguers. But we can't build outreach programs to help our young football and basketball players develop academically and socially? We know there is a need for this. We know it's the right thing to do.

Yes, it is. Then ask your local school district, get your city councilman's attention, get the state house or assembly, the state senate, the mayor, the governor -- make it your mission to be active and demand these programs that help academic development for all children who need it, especially those in impoverished areas. I cannot repeat this enough: Whitlock aligns himself indirectly with a generation of American society that got theirs and said "fuck you" when it came to standing up and advancing the causes for equalizing funds in public education or advocating alternatives such as adequate vouchers (I'm not a voucher fan, but at least it's something.)

I am not in favor of paying college athletes money. Has money solved TuPacman Jones' problems? He needed counseling at age 12 and 13. He needed a strong alternative from hanging with the boyz 'n the 'hood at age 14. The NCAA and professional sports leagues should have given him an alternative long ago.

Please see the above response again. My blood is boiling over this now. Just because you don't want to pay them doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to earn money on the side, take a job. If the sport is a full-time job, then they should be able to get a bit of a stipend for it. Didn't you just advocate such a stipend in part three, saying the NCAA should give a poor student-athlete a $2,000-$3,000 stipend based on academic effort? Either you want a stipend or you don't want to pay them. Pick one.

A portion of the money that these athletes generate should be invested in the athletes who generate the money. Many of the non-revenue sports should be club sports. What we have now is a comfortable welfare life for Olympic athletes. I'm not knocking those athletes. I'm suggesting there's a lot of fat in their budgets. Why should any of them ever compete in an event that requires them to get on a plane or stay in a hotel?

Fine. No more athletic championship tournaments for golf, tennis, gymnastics, fencing, etc. Then, watch as there are no more Olympians come every couple of years. Every golf phenom will go the Michele Wie route of turning pro at 16 rather than the Tiger Woods route of spending a few years learning how to win at Stanford. Kids who are good at their sports, but have lesser to no expectations of going pro will have no opportunity to test their skills against the best in the country, and figure out what it means to win at a higher level.

You think amateur sports are professionalized enough? Just wait. With this solution, we'll be digging into high schools more and more as the NCAA funds its version of the AAU camps, and athletes in other sports enter tournaments at younger ages because they know there's no quarter for them in college.

Here's another analogy for you: you run a university that produces scientific scholars and patents that bring in lab funding and research money, so you give all your money to that department, and pull it out of the humanities by de-funding history, English, or music (no new desks, new building, or re-tuning the pianos in the practice rooms in the hall). That's what this is akin to -- screwing over a bunch more students than you started with.

It's called welfare or Title IX or stupidity or exploitation of football and basketball players who just happen to be primarily black, poor and in desperate need of the resources being funneled to white kids and their even whiter coaches.

I bet very few of those football and basketball players or their families are that stupid. The NCAA created a system, the coaches and players are trying to make their futures in it with "advisers" and "consultants" -- just don't call them agents, but that's what they are. This is the "posse" you decry so much, that apparently takes advantage of them -- these kids are not as dumb as you think they are, Whitlock; teenagers never are.

Black football and basketball players are not alone in having their hands out. They just happen to have sufficient justification. We need to do whatever it takes to put education in those hands long before they ever hit a college campus.

Sure. But stop making it incumbent on the NCAA, NBA, and NFL -- these organizations are utterly amoral when it comes to education, and it's probably better that way -- they'd screw it up or run it like AAU without the middle man. Here's an idea, expressed often, but worth repeating one more time: if you care so much about the downtrodden black student-athlete, then why not help his local city, state, and country care about him as a student and a black man rather than an athlete? Because that would dare to venture into the bigger picture of politics and the precepts we blindingly accept as part of American society (so you're poor, you can't afford school supplies, and your history textbook is ancient history of its own? Bootstraps, people!), and Whitlock either can't or won't bring himself to tackle those sacred cows. Minority students in urban areas get shafted because good schooling costs money, whether you move into good schooling in the burbs or pay for it in private schools, but that doesn't seem to matter too much -- the prism is still so small for him; looking at the politics of education, anything that might force him to take his focus off of sports and onto the context in which sports exists is clearly over his head.

Proposing a fix for a broken system like the NCAA while refusing to look at the bigger picture of education and money in American society as a whole is akin to calling yourself an expert in Shakespeare or Joyce after reading the Cliffs Notes.

Somehow, We Let All The Morons On Radio And TV.

First, we have the widely chronicled case of ESPN's Colin Cowherd sending all his listeners to flood The Big Lead so they got knocked over their bandwith. TBL is still down. What makes this especially egregious in terms of professional conduct is that TBL, for all I know, never took a shot at Cowherd, and he did something of questionable legality for kicks. I only watched the guy when the Sunday morning edition of SportsCenter would have him, and mediocre would be kind, as far as a description goes. TBL has been nothing but kind to me as far as linking to my stuff every now and again, and what Cowherd has done is damn near the definition of douchebaggery. Flood his show with calls tomorrow and block his phone lines (that is, if you care to listen to the idiot); email the new ombudswoman at ESPN if you're so inclined.

Second, an illegal immigrant is being charged with the death of two girls in a drunk driving accident in Virginia. This is Bill O'Reilly debating the topic with Geraldo Rivera on his show:



I'm not sure whether it's worse that I'd like to see both of them go to blows or that I actually am taking a side with the otherwise noxious Geraldo.

Hat tips to Sports Media Watch and the News Blog.

Third and finally, we have the wonderful example of Don Imus, pontificating on college basketball by calling Rutgers' team "nappy-headed hos" after his EP called them "hard core hos" because they had tattoos.



Don Imus is considered a political player, pundit, and comedian extraordinare. Where the fuck does he get off with his faux-cowboy hick routine after decades in fucking New York City, and how does he continue to get respectable political figures and journalists (right, right; oxymorons, I know) to appear on his radio show/TV simulcast while he spouts the most blatant, racist diatribes? I've read a couple of his books -- it's basically a shock tour on paperback, and I don't understand why people find him so goddamn funny. Usually, I'd be more erudite and break down his unique brand of douchebaggery, but I've got too much of your basic rage going on. Fuck him and Sid Rosenberg (whom I am reminded suggested that you couldn't get interest in a nude pictorial of Serena and Venus Williams from National Geographic once) right in the goddamn ear.

Tips to Awful Announcing for video and Sports Media Watch for a transcript of the juicy bits.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part III.

Read the prior fisking of Jason Whitlock's first two installments of columns on fixing college basketball and football before this one; here's Part I, and here's Part II.

In Part III, Whitlock lays out his plan to improve the education of the big-time collegiate athlete for us. I feel like I should state that I think he means well (others may disagree), but the road to hell is re-paved on an hourly basis with good intentions. Let's get cracking. He has six parts of the basic position; to save space and your eyes, I will only re-post the ones in full with questionable assumptions.

1. True, especially considering the NCAA's mouthing of "academic integrity" and the integrity of amateur status. No major quibble there; if you're going to dump money into a TV sport and profess integrity, you're going to have to pay to ensure it, if you have any interest in doing so (and that's probably where we run into issues.)

2. I don't think anyone can argue with this one.

3. Football and basketball are dependant [sic] upon predominantly black, American-born athletes. A large percentage of these athletes are from impoverished, no-father-in-the-home backgrounds. Black youth culture has been corrupted by hip-hop/prison culture, which is hostile, self-destructive and anti-education.

First part, yes -- second, not so much. I made the same point in Part II: hip hop culture is not intertwined with prison culture, you cannot write or speak of them as if they were intertwined. Hip-hop culture, like most subcultures entwined and borne from a form of music, is about speaking an alternative truth. The truth of the war on drugs and the war on the poor is that black men, many non-violent offenders, are cycled through the prison/industrial complex to serve a machine of mindless prohibition. I don't think it's so much anti-education as a distrust of what's being taught, because history is written by the victors, and for centuries, black folk have been subjugated. We try to modify these faults as the years pass, but that doesn't mean they're still not there. Distrust of an education system didn't start with hip-hop culture.

Also, who's your copy editor?

4. That's probably safe to say -- if you were part of massive profits for your school, yet couldn't even take a stipend from an on-campus job, you'd be pissed too.

5. Poorly educated, hostile and resentful professional football and basketball players are creating a public-relations nightmare (potential loss of TV ratings) for the NBA and NFL by breaking the law off the field and projecting a hip-hop/prison image that makes their fans uncomfortable. These same athletes are contributing to an unhealthy image of American blacks at home and across the globe.

OK, so we take into account the Bengals, Pac-Man Jones, Ron Artest, and they're supposed to represent the majority of the image of players, including folks like Allen Iverson, who've been good citizens? Why are fans uncomfortable? Is it because media tends to overhype the bad actors (especially minority bad actors) in society to arouse fear, and since the media is controlled by the few, that image is the one that gets portrayed around the world?

6. The NFL and NBA are trying to crackdown on these athletes with dress codes and other get-tough policies. The new rules are necessary but will fail if not supported by an improved educational system for athletes.

Oy. Last column you wrote that these rules were as useful as the failed war on drugs and the war on the poor. Pick one. Either they're necessary or designed to fail.

The key to correcting what is wrong with football and basketball is education and tying the financial interest of the athlete to education. It is a mistake to give young people what they want. A wise parent and/or society gives young people what they need.

Ah, here's the thesis; interesting, but flawed, because actual athletic skill has fuck-all to do with education. I'll elaborate in a bit. The second sentence here seems innocuous enough, except you realize that we are talking about and dealing with 18-year olds. You can't force them any more.

The NFL and NBA need to go into partnership with the NCAA on its two television sports. The NFL, NBA and NCAA would all financially benefit from developing well-educated athletes...I'm against an age limit for entering the draft. I'm in favor of gigantic financial incentives for athletes entering the league after completing their college degrees and/or five years of college. A 22-year-old college graduate has far more to offer the NBA than a 19-year-old who spent one semester pretending to be a college student. The American college graduate also has far more to offer the NBA than a 19-year-old foreigner who American fans are unfamiliar with.

Not a terrible idea at first sight, but the problem is that the NCAA is so much more than Division I-A -- there are thousands of member schools to be concerned with, so many of them that will never send a player to a professional sports leagues, and they will be left out of this subsidy and crying foul. I've never liked the age limit either, but do you have any proof of the back half of that statement? Ultimately, no pro league or scout will be judging based on how long that athlete has spent in college. The question is always, "Are they ready to play at the next level?" Thinking it could be anything else is delusion, regardless of how smart it is overall. I'm pretty damn sure a 22-year old who's played all four years in college probably has more to offer, but I can't assert that.

As for the 19-year old foreigner: wouldn't these be the same 19-year old foreigners that Whitlock believes play at a higher level than our own ballers?

So my step one would be for the NBA and NFL to institute a salary structure that paid college graduates and/or five-year college players significantly more than early entrants. Isn't this the way it works in most professions? The more educated you are the more money you earn as an entry-level employee...You could stagger the money non-graduates are paid based on the number of years they spent in college. The rule might entice foreign basketball players to enroll in American universities.

Professional sports are not most professions. Again, the problem is that the level of formal education is not important in the overall scheme of professional sports. The reason many white-collar jobs (including mine) rely on measures of formal education is because our jobs require a certain amount of it. Playing basketball or football for a living requires smarts and intelligence that aren't necessary directly linked to your skill with say, history. Formal education might improve your skill as an athlete (it will most likely help you get around a playbook more easily), but it won't ensure you have the talent to survive a physically demanding lifestyle.

With regard to foreign players: again, these are players whom Whitlock has said are already better skilled, so why put in a rule that's unfair to them? Also note that folks like Andrea Bargnani are the exception -- many foreign players these days come into the leagues in their early 20s, Manu Ginobili was in his mid 20s in his rookie year; Jorge Garbajosa is in his late 20s. Dirk Nowitzki was 20; that'll probably be less common. So why force them to go to American universities to earn what they're worth?

Step No. 2 would be for the NBA and NFL to recognize that college football and basketball are developmental leagues and that the NBA and NFL need to financially subsidize college football and basketball.

OK...don't mind that too much....

This subsidy is necessary because my other central belief is that the NCAA needs to get involved academically with its potential football and basketball players as they enter ninth grade, and the NCAA is going to have to offer modest financial rewards for its poor athletes who achieve academically and stay in college.

Oh, HELL NO. I have enough of a problem with high school sports being professionalized enough as is, and the NCAA should be getting involved with 14-year old kids? You can say academically all you want -- knowing the NCAA, it's not going to happen that way.

The NCAA needs to measure and reward academic effort. A formula needs to be devised that takes into account academic effort and achievement in high school and economic background and provides a freshman college athlete a stipend ($2,000 to $3,500 per semester). This stipend would only be available to the poor. And the stipend would increase each year based on the student's effort (attendance) and achievement (grade point average).

OK, so this stipend would only be available to the poor, and the well-off athletes who are barred from taking a part-time job or earning most forms of money while on scholarship are going to have to lean on Mommy and Daddy? There are middle-class athletes on scholarship whose parents are feeling the pinch, too; they might be able to squeeze sending in some money, but don't pretend that they couldn't use it either.

To replace AAU basketball, NCAA schools need to host their own four-to-five-week summer football and basketball camps that would be a mix of athletics and academics for potential recruits who are incoming high school freshmen to seniors. This would be expensive. It's also very necessary...You bring the recruits up during the time frame that the coaches are hosting their money-generating camps for rich kids with little real talent. The money from those camps is split up among the coaching staff and (in basketball) payoffs/speaking engagements to AAU coaches. I'd take all the profits from those camps (along with money from the shoe companies, which will have less interest in lining the pockets of AAU coaches) and spend it on academically, socially and physically nurturing 25 basketball and 50 football recruits for a month each summer.

It's a fascinating concept. I shudder to think what the NCAA would do if left in charge of it; they'd likely run it just like AAU is run right now. Basically, you're just consolidating, removing the middleman. Putting the NCAA in charge of anything involving an athletic camp and hoping that they will mix academics in is a mistake. There's no incentive to do that.

To ensure the integrity of a college athlete's academic progress, universities need to hire academic-athletic directors who report directly and only to the school president or chancellor. Their only concern would be the academic success of athletes. If academic fraud was uncovered, the academic-athletic director and the school's president would take the hit -- not a coach or athletic director.

Another needless level of bureaucracy. Keep the athletic director responsible for this. The problem is that the NCAA is made up of the presidents and ADs -- they aren't going to police themselves very well; the problems with the system are a feature, not a bug. We don't blame ADs enough as is for bad performance on and off the field or court, and now they should be let off the hook?

Money is driving football and basketball. We need to financially reward high-profile athletes for embracing education, and we need to financially penalize high-profile athletes who reject education. We should not deny the uneducated an opportunity to be professional athletes. Denial creates hostility.

Ever known anyone who just wasn't suited for university, just wasn't one of those people? I have, and this is a system that creates de facto denial. This essentially creates a new age limit by tying salaries to a concept that doesn't have as much to do with the primary function of a professional athlete.

I realize that Title IX and other factors (cries of racism by shakedown artists such as Jesse Jackson) stand in the way of implementing the solutions I suggest. I'll address all of that.

Nice to see the slam of someone who has actually gone out of his way to try and see that some of the gains made in the civil rights area were actually preserved instead of stripped by those in charge of the government. Can't wait for the next one.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part II.

Previously: Part I. Now, here's where Mr. Whitlock and I probably run off the rails, because Part II for him is about athletes showing off "the wrong image" for pro basketball and football.

Change is coming in professional football and basketball whether hip-hop athletes and their groupies like it or not. We've already seen it in the NBA with the age requirement, dress code, rules limiting hostility toward the referees, importation of foreign-born players and harsh penalties for any negative interaction with fans. Now the NFL and its new commissioner, Roger Goodell, plan to join the fight by enacting a get-tough policy on law-breaking players. The NFL Players Association set the tone for this by suggesting a three-strikes policy shortly after TuPacman Jones allegedly made it rain one-dollar bills and bullets at a Vegas strip club.

"TuPacman" is absolutely unnecessary; a rhetorical blast of irrelevance designed to link any criminal actions of Pac-Man Jones with hip-hop, part of Whitlock's thesis and arsenal; he does not understand the relationship between correlation and causation, he would rather condemn the members of a youth culture he doesn't understand while refusing to acknowledge where such youth culture stems from. And what part of "allegedly" isn't understood (although it doesn't protect you legally)? The accusations are that one of Jones' associates shot up the club, which is an important distinction to make. Is Jones a troubled person? Most likely. Would a suspension based on prior record and legal problems he's still dealing with appropriate? Yes. Will a three-strikes policy possibly be as misguided and problematic in execution as it is as a sentencing guideline now? Most definitely.

Music is rebellious and sometimes divisive for no good reason. Sports are patriotic and unifying. There is too much pointless, unjustified rebellion in football and basketball right now. Muhammad Ali made sports fans uncomfortable for a good reason. That's why he eventually became beloved. Today's hip-hop athlete makes fans uncomfortable just because he can and for the approval of his fawning posse.

If this were the Sixties, Whitlock would be writing a column about how Ali should never have joined the NOI, never have sat out the Vietnam War, and should have shut his mouth. Frankly, we don't know if today's basketball or football star will go down in history as being bigger than just sport -- we can't be that forward looking, but they don't have fewer opportunities to do that because they're uneducated; a lot of it has to do with corporate handlers who prefer non-confrontational, non-political athletes. Don't stop the money train.

More and more fans sense they have nothing in common with the athletes they're watching. And, even more troubling, more and more fans are reaching the conclusion that they don't want their children emulating the style of dress or behavior of the athletes. Again, whether we like it or not, sports are supposed to be "All-American," played by the boys next door. We sing the National Anthem. The games are supposed to bring us together, make us see our common humanity. There is economic value in the perception that the players love their teams, love their schools, want to be educated and act and dress like middle America.

Black people are still trying to be part of middle America. It's only been 40 years since the struggle Whitlock prides (and rightly so) that ensured that we even got to vote. Back then, "all-American" and "the boys next door" meant all-white, non-bohemian, non-threatening to the archaic notions of the culture, and to some extent, despite the rise of black music as the driving force in pop music, it still is. The fear still exists, no matter what brown folks of any color do to stand out. Why would athletes whose parents didn't get a chance to be part of Middle America want to emulate all the factors of it? Most of your professional athletes want to be part of America, and they'd like to leave their violent pasts behind, I bet. But they want a measure of control over how they become part of the upper class.

There's a cultural clash going on inside the arenas/stadiums between the predominantly white fans and the predominantly black players. There's a mutual distrust and disrespect. From a business standpoint, the athletes are wrong. This is America, with its capitalistic economic system. The customer is always right.

It's nice to know that the right to be an ignorant consumer trumps the right of men playing on the field or on the floor; these gladiators are performing for your entertainment, and damn them if they happen to have body art or listen to music you find untenable. It doesn't reflect badly on you, because you paid your money, and the men on the floor are there to serve at your pleasure.

From a social standpoint, the black athletes are wrong again. They are contributing to a negative, stereotypical view of black Americans. No one believes that wealthy young men shouldn't enjoy all the excesses that America has to offer. You can enjoy those excesses without breaking the law, without mocking the educational system and without smothering yourself in prison/hip-hop culture.

If the black athletes are wrong, then so are the white handlers that sign them to contracts to sell sweatshop labor-made shoes to teenagers of all colors. And how many times do we have to state that hip-hop culture and "prison" culture are not one and the same? Many of the athletes signed to multi-million dollar contracts do exactly what Whitlock writes in that last paragraph: LeBron, Tracy McGrady, D-Wade, you can make a longer list of multi-millionaire players who have been nothing but clean. Still taking the examples of a few and tarring the many.

Whitlock is right in saying that black athletes are our ambassadors to the world, but mostly because entertainment is the only way black men and women with any semblance of power are exported to the rest of the world -- business leaders, any other arena of society, that's white men being displayed as our oligarchy, our collection of the creme de la creme of American society.

They're failing us. And we are failing them. We have let them down by falling in love with their money, rationalizing their every misstep and not demanding that they embrace education.

You can't demand people embrace education. This is a fundamental and crucial misunderstanding of how learning works. If you are a parent, you have to give your children a reason to learn, and if you want to foster an embrace of education, you have to give those same kids a reason to be curious, a reason to love learning. You can tell a child to study for his own good, but when that child reaches the teenage years, that child wants more of a reason why. I've never heard of, met, or read about a parent that didn't want their kids to be educated, but the 24/7 nature of the American work force makes it difficult for families where both parents work two jobs to show kids why it's important. In that case, you need societal structures to help: after school programs, etc. -- but you cannot demand that anyone embrace education; otherwise, it's a crock, and the savvier segment of athlete, prospect, and ordinary teenager will smell a rat.

The letter he re-prints from someone teaching in China, with all the questions about stereotypes, is exactly what happens when you have a semi-monolithic media source feeding negative images and stories on many people who don't fit into the cultural majority. It's not what athletes put out; it's what the media chooses to focus on.

Now, I'm sorry, as a black man, and a proud one, I'm not going to sit quiet while a group of idiots define us all as idiots. No way. I know a little bit about history and how Martin Luther King Jr. and others won us the freedoms we take for granted today. We had the moral and intellectual high ground internationally. We had the bigots outflanked. These guys who serve as our ambassadors don't know that because we've failed to inform them. They can't see that the picture they're painting of us justifies the prison building (new slavery) at home and limits our ability to combat it.

And you stood by while your cities, states, and country failed to fund the elementary, middle, and high schools or either cut funding to the schools in a rush of standardized testing mania, and now you blame them for not learning from your example that they couldn't get in school? You got yours and didn't follow through. You let society pull the ladder up in the "greed is good" 80s ethos and now blame the kids that got put through that system for not knowing better? Blame the victim, indeed. At least the men who make millions toting the ball or shooting it had a way out. This is the ultimate problem I have with many prominent boomer black folk: it is never part of their responsibility to make sure the gains Dr. King, Malcolm X, and many others made were preserved by speaking out in the social or political arenas, and many of them decided to slam those who tried, like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, for being hucksters. I addressed a similar hypocrisy by jokingly asking why Oprah hated America when she built a school for girls in South Africa and took a jab at American kids.

It is rare when the right thing to do is also the right thing to do business-wise. Fortunately, when it comes to football and basketball, we are at that crossroad. My solution for fixing football and basketball is the right thing to do socially and the right thing to do financially for the leagues. The get-tough policies that are being adopted/suggested by the NFL and NBA won't cure what ails the sports or the athletes. They're public-relations ploys designed primarily to satisfy angry fans. They'll be as effective as America's "war on drugs/poor people."

So, why are you implicitly supporting those PR ploys here if they're going to be completely ineffective? The war on drugs/war on the poor is the elephant in the room, why the rest of America sees fit to build more prisons to house non-violent offenders, a prime contributor and developer of the "prison culture" you decry in modern American athletes. How ironic that the black market created by the war on drugs sends poor people with very few options to prison, and puts them into a culture that the writer deplores for being put to vinyl, cassette, and CD, there to supposedly influence others who grew up in the same realities.

Part III tomorrow, and Part IV will come after Whitlock writes his wrap-up column. I understand this stuff can be tedious to read, but I can't let this stuff go, even when I probably should.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part I.

Jason Whitlock is doing something right post All-Star column madness despite frequent amounts of stupidity and belonging to the old-school generation of Buppies who like to hate to black youth culture, because for some reason, I'm still reading. At least he picks a worthy topic this time: how college football and basketball ought to be fixed, which deserves a serious look, but so far, his look isn't serious, as evidenced by Part I. (Part II and III are up; I'll get to those later.)

Men's basketball and football are rotting on the inside. March Madness, no matter how much the media fawn, doesn't cover the stench. The players are mercenaries who rarely get properly educated. At the professional level, the lawlessness of the players is an embarrassing turnoff to fans. In the NBA, it's widely accepted that the players don't play hard until the postseason and the pro game has been exposed as inferior by international competition. The professional leagues are overrun by immature players who are completely unprepared for the money and spotlight the NFL and NBA provide.

Not a completely unfair assessment, as far as theses go, except for the last sentence, prepared to target all players as bad actors from the get go.

NBA executives, people presumably intelligent enough to know that [Kevin] Durant and [Greg] Oden will stunt their intellectual and basketball evolution by entering the NBA at 19, have been breathlessly jockeying for Durant and Oden to leave college.

I still think Oden won't. I think he has a good enough coach in Thad Matta to keep him from going and teammates that might stay (Mike Conley, Jr. for example); Oden knows he has holes in his game and is more likely to stick around, because in the NBA, purely defensive-minded big men are a dime a dozen. Whitlock asserts that it would stunt Durant athletically and mentally to leave Texas, but how much of a benefit will it be to stay at Texas when a coach like Rick Barnes isn't sure how to engineer an offense around him? When considering why an athlete leaves college early, part of the decision has to be on whether the style imposed on the team by the coach (since he is coach, GM, and father figure in one) works for the player. We put a lot of the decision to leave early on the player and his maturity, forgetting he plays in a system he did not create.

If he leaves Texas now, it's almost a certainty he will never reach his full potential as a basketball player. Kevin Durant doesn't know the first thing about winning. His Texas team, although young, underachieved this year, losing 10 games and bowing out of the NCAA Tournament in the second round after an embarrassing performance against USC.

Does Rick Barnes know the first thing about winning? That's a valid question to ask in the wake of a poor coaching job against USC. Yes, Texas consisted of four freshmen, but that's even more reason to look at Barnes' coaching job.

Kobe Bryant is the only straight-from-high school NBA superstar to win multiple championships. Of course, Shaquille O'Neal was the true star of those Lakers teams, and Kobe's snotty, child-star-spoiled attitude tore apart that Lakers dynasty.

Shaq is just as juvenile, pithy, and ego-ridden as Kobe, because he is a pro athlete, and a top one at that. O'Neal just has better tact and a better way with the media, which is a good skill to have, it allows you to feign humility. And it's nice to see Whitlock let Shaq off the hook later in the column for taking half the regular season off and not calling that a spoiled attitude (saying he won't be the last is not condemning the behavior, and it doesn't excuse calling Kobe "spoiled".)

Whitlock identifies an important part of the college/university experience, the new peer group.

It used to be that 95 percent of NBA players spent at least three years in college. What happens to most people when they're in college? They develop a totally new social group. The friends you thought you couldn't live without in high school get replaced by the friends you make in college...Big-time athletes rarely say or do anything important now because a Dr. Harry Edwards never gets a chance to get inside their head. The athletes visit college campuses for a year or two, but never experience what's really happening on those campuses because their entourages won't allow it. They're also less likely to develop friendships with people who don't have a financial interest in them. They don't develop peers -- young people their age who are headed for professional careers.

It may have something to do with the fact that there's not a lot of time to do that. From all the time spent in practice, travel, games, etc., there's not a bunch left over to socialize with people from outside the team. It's not on the entourages -- I really wonder if he has any evidence for that assertion; blame it on the revenue sport itself, the coaches, who have to produce that star player to keep their own job. I wonder how much time you have to develop off-the-court peers when all your time is spent on the court or in the few chances you have to go to class during that season.

The current setup is failing the game. We play an inferior brand of basketball. The NBA is virtually unwatchable in the regular season.

Expansion probably has more of a hand in this. There are plenty of roster spots that need to be filled, and there will be mediocre players used to fill those spots. Unless Whitlock is prepared to tell some NBA teams to close up shop, that's not going to change a whole lot.

Kevin Durant just finished 25-10 without elevating the performance of one of his college teammates, and he'll be seduced with a shoe contract from Nike or Reebok that will dwarf the 25-year, $25-million "lifetime" contract the Lakers once offered Magic after he'd made the Lakers and the NBA the rival of the Cowboys and the NFL.

I don't know about that. I don't think Texas makes the tourney without Durant. He saved the team in several games when D.J. Augustin, Damion James, and A.J. Abrams just couldn't get it together. He had to play a Kobe role because the rest of the team had frequent off-days. Durant is a major reason the Longhorns got as far as they did this year, and many of us thought they could have gone further. As for Magic's contract, t hat's just because the money wasn't there in the league yet -- if Magic came out from MSU today, he'd command as much as today's pro prospects.

The setup is also failing the athletes. Their educational opportunities are compromised the moment they enter high school and are identified as a prospect. By the time they enter college, almost no one in authority over them has a genuine interest in their education. The interest is in their eligibility and their ability to meet the demands of TV networks.

No argument there, but I suspect there will be more in the next installment.

Nothing From Nothing Means Nothing.

And that's what the Texans will get for David Carr, as NFL Live's analysts are saying Carr just got his outright release from Houston (link will come later, when it actually pops up on the WWL's web site -- ahhh, here we go). I thought he was going on the trading block -- you could have gotten at least a second or third-rounder for him, but far be it for me to give the Texan front office any credit for intelligence.

Vikings, Dolphins, Chiefs -- GET ON YOUR PHONES NOW (especially the Vikes; you fuck this one up at your own peril.)

Again, how disastrous is the Houston Texans' management? They draft Carr, don't develop an O-line to help him, fail to draft either Reggie Bush to help him or go another direction with Vince Young, and now admit they maybe made a mistake, but compound that mistake by essentially giving up two second-round picks in consecutive years and paying $7 mil guaranteed to a QB who's never started only started twice?*

(*Thank you, randjamal. Don't know how I passed those two starts over, since everyone on ESPN was reminding us Schaub had gone 0-2 in those games.)

Oh right. They inked Schaub to that guaranteed money, proclaimed him the starter, and tipped their fucking hand right there.

Matt Millen is laughing at you, Houston.

Due Process.

Based on every published report and track record, Titans CB Adam "Pac-Man" Jones is likely a jackass and probably has some issues to deal with (when your drug dealer is concerned about your focus on your career, that's a bad sign). But this is less about Pac-Man and more about the NFL.

Do you think Roger Goodell has the right to make an example out of someone whom the judicial system has decided is a free man, who has not been arrested nor convicted of anything related to the incident that happened in a strip club at the NBA All-Star Weekend, without even waiting to see if he is charged by a county DA in Nevada or given a trial by jury?

I think not. And if Goodell actually follows through on his "consideration" of suspending Jones for an entire season, then the players ought to realize that Gene Upshaw is an absolutely useless piece of shit and replace him immediately. At some point, "go along to get along" has to go out the window -- and that's when it's used to convict someone based on public opinion regardless of what the legal process produces. I understand Jones was supposed to report arrests in his contract, and he didn't with a couple in Georgia, but if Jones is suspended for all of the 2007 season, that's an overreach. Quarter to a half season -- maybe.

(Hat tip: FanHouse.)

Danny Ainge: Certified Moron.

In the dubious competition of NBA's Stupidest Executive, Danny Ainge is up there, filling Boston fans with consternation over idiot trades (how's that dealing the draft rights to Brandon Roy in exchange for Sebastian Telfair looking now, especially since the Celtics passed on Randy Foye too?) and wasting the best years of Paul Pierce.

Now, his team's been slapped for 30 large for him being caught at the Big 12 championship talking with Texas stud Kevin Durant's family. What good does this do you, Danny? It's not like you're guaranteed the #1 spot in the draft if the Celtics continue to tank -- the draft only assures you the best chance at it, and as of late, that hasn't helped a lot of the worst teams from season to season (Celtics fans remember having the worst season and missing out on Tim Duncan.) Basically, he's trying to convince the mother of a one-and-done to get her son to leave college (most likely) so he can have half a shot at drafting him, and gets caught on national television (yes, the ESPN announcing team caught him).

Even Isiah Thomas wouldn't be caught pulling that crap.

blunt object, meet forehead.

Let me get this straight:

We (the U.S.) had an Agreed Framework with North Korea regarding the development of nuclear weapons via plutonium.

For five years, the current administration has believed that the nutcase on lifts over in Pyongyang was violating the agreement by enriching uranium. We got pissy, and who wouldn't, when you're pretty damn sure they're violating the agreement?

Now, well, maybe those uranium efforts weren't as far along as we thought, per the NYT:

The disclosure underscores broader questions about the ability of intelligence agencies to discern the precise status of foreign weapons programs. The original assessment about North Korea came during the same period that the administration was building its case about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, which turned out to be based on flawed intelligence. And the new North Korea assessment comes amid debate over intelligence about Iran’s weapons.

The public revelation of the intelligence agencies’ doubts, which have been brewing for some time, came almost by happenstance. In a little-noticed exchange on Tuesday at a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Joseph DeTrani, a longtime intelligence official, told Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island that “we still have confidence that the program is in existence — at the mid-confidence level.” Under the intelligence agencies’ own definitions, that level “means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views” or it is not fully corroborated.

As Robert Farley at Tapped puts it: "Morons. We have morons on our team."

shout at the devil.

I stumbled across this particular list of bands from Love God's Way (which also has a handy "God Hates Fags" reminder in the title) from a friend, for pure humor value.

All I can say is that it's clear that I'd really rather prefer to go to hell, if this list is any indication. Inclusions range from the obvious (Scissor Sisters, Rufus Wainwright, Elton John gets an "extra gay") to the odd (Ted Nugent gets a "loincloth" addition for his addition to the list, but I don't think it makes him gay, per se.)

The best parts? Marilyn Manson is described as "dark gay" and Morrissey has a "?(questionable)?"

own your words.

Despite the fact that I'm late to the party, I clearly need to opine on Tim Hardaway's nice little radio interview reaction to John Amaechi's coming out, since he decided to lay it all on the line with his homophobia. I don't usually get in a huff about these things; I know there are ignorant assholes in the world, and I expect it. Hell, I cover them every single day.

But what gets me is that, when confronted with his Cro-Magnon line of thinking, he decided that it would work if he apologized.

Hardaway, later saying he regretted the remarks, apologized for the remarks during a telephone interview with Fox affiliate WSVN in Miami.

"Yes, I regret it. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said I hate gay people or anything like that," he said. "That was my mistake."

Note how he said he shouldn't have said it; it doesn't occur to him that it was a questionable line of thought. It was an amazing display of stupidity, ignorance, and top-shelf bigotry; it is the epitome of the word "gaffe." That said, own your words. You had no intention of apologizing for your remarks; otherwise, you wouldn't have said it in the first place. Tim Hardaway doesn't regret saying he hated gay people; he regrets that anyone was paying attention and called him on it. That's all his attempts at apology mean. I have more respect for the person who gets caught saying something idiotic, admits it, and owns up to it than a weasel like Hardaway, who, when confronted with his stupidity, regrets not the thought pattern, but that someone heard it.

Amaechi took the high road:

"Finally, someone who is honest. It is ridiculous, absurb, petty, bigoted and shows a lack of empathy that is gargantuan and unfathomable. But it is honest. And it illustrates the problem better than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far."

Stop faking for your image, Tim; you are the one who covered the bridge in gasoline and lit the match, and you get to live with the consequences. Just when I thought Amaechi's coming out meant less than what ESPN was hyping, too. I think I was proven wrong.

Other takes: Leave the Man Alone, One More Dying Quail, The Hater Nation, and Just Call Me Juice.

Stephen A. is sane.

Clearly, compared to the world of sports punditry on ESPN, political pundits have a stranglehold on crazy if Smith sounds like the only one on this CNN segment on "atheists on the attack" with a functioning brain.

Smith may be part of what I call the Olbermann Rule: when you see journalists and pundits with a sports base move to news, generally, they're more incisive, because in sports, you have yardsticks to go by for evaluation (stats, won-loss records, actual skills on display on tape or TiVo), they actively seek out the similar measurements in politics. Political pundits have eschewed this approach to talk about the theoretical and anecdotal -- so much the better to spin, since the majority of the pundit class now consists of former campaign types and politicians (George Will, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough) and their acolytes brought up through talk radio. That said, he still had to profess his faith in the Lord and buy the spin point of the U.S. being a "Christian nation" -- please find that in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence where it specifically says that, or I will push this button for electroshock.

I don't advocate violence against women. I advocate violence against people who apparently haven't read the Constitution at all, also against constant idiocy. The woman on the left saying atheists need Hallmark cards and holidays...oof. And Debbie Schlussel, always up there with Dennis Prager as particularly repellent self-hating members of the tribe (just go sign up for Jews for Jesus already), has a new nickname thanks to the Deadspinners -- Fat Rachel Dratch. Absolutely no recognition at all that prayer in public schools is by nature coercive.

I'd get seriously reprimanded or fired if I had booked a segment like this when I did a morning show. How do you have a "debate" about whether atheists are on the attack without someone to represent them?

the wrong type of zero tolerance policy.

Run Up the Score would probably have better insight on this than I would, but I remember hearing about Rene Portland, Penn State's women's b-ball coach, and her problems with alternative lifestyles about a year or so ago, and it's too good to pass up.

Today, former Lady Lion Jennifer Harris and the school settled a discrimination lawsuit against Portland after the coach claimed she had a "no lesbian" policy on the team; of course, the terms of the settlement are undisclosed. The settlement absolves the school and Portland of guilt, and she was fined $10K last year after an internal investigation and threatened with immediate dismissal if another instance came up again.

Having lived through the Gary Barnett era, I don't have a lot of tolerance for this crap from coaches (even if it's been known for a while). I wonder how much more Penn State can let go if she happens to go off the cuff again on something like this -- but given that her team is currently sitting at .500 overall and is worse than that in Big 10 play, her record may get her in more trouble than her mouth.

a needle will turn you into a slut.

The very conservative governor of Texas has issued an executive order requiring sixth grade girls in the state to get vaccinated for the human papillomavirus, with its obvious and scientifically proven links to cervical cancer.

Of course, Gov. Rick Perry's religious conservative base is not having any of it, claiming the order doesn't allow enough room for parents to object or have a say in their children's medical treatment, adopting not only the "sexual license" arguments but taking the anti-corporate one when it suits them -- Merck's funding of such orders and bills in state legislatures is well known; Perry's former chief of staff is now a Merck lobbyist.

The cognitive dissonance required to wrap heads around this is stunning -- while I don't like the idea of Merck forcing the vaccine down people's throats, the fact that this vaccine could prevent cervical cancer likely outweighs concerns about Merck's profits or ramrodding through state houses and legislatures. Eventually, you have to wonder whether the people opposing this are more comfortable with the potential of dying due to a preventable disease rather than the thought of premarital sex.

there are no winners here.

The hawker of Paris Hilton's sex tape has apparently contacted both Hilton and porn star Jenna Jameson about starring in a new reality series that takes the concept of Beauty and the Geek to new (low) extremes: according to TMZ, he's trying to sell a show called "Virgin Territory," where men in the age ranges of 18-34 compete for an obvious prize where the show's tagline is, "When you win it, you lose it."

Given the various rumors surrounding Hilton and Jameson, I'd advise the winner go with abstinence -- of course, if said show comes to fruition, the contestants probably wouldn't get laid if they didn't win.

Odds on Fox buying it: even.

the NBA's Matt Millen.

Why haven't Timberwolves fans started a "Fire McHale" movement similar to the agony put forth by Lions fans every year for the past few seasons? Given that McHale has fired yet another head coach, it's worth asking. This man is the Matt Millen of the NBA -- questionable trades, bad drafting, routine firing of head coaches that don't solve the problem, the Joe Smith shenanigans, etc., but to pervert Mencken, you can count on a GM not understanding the problem if his job depends on him not understanding it.

The only reason McHale isn't viewed with more scrutiny on a regular basis is because Isiah Thomas exists in this league (and for those of you who would say Isiah is Millen, Isiah is a category unto himself), and to a lesser extent, so does Sixers GM Billy King, who also ought to be out of work and finally caught some national heat during the AI trade hullaballoo. There is also the "local legend" status that McHale holds, but wasting the career of one of the league's most talented players in the mire of numerous promises to compete and failing to field a team around him ought to be grounds for firing. Like the Ford family ought to do, this is a situation where the Wolves ownership needs to take a hard line stand. Like it or not, Jon Dolan did it when he said Isiah had to coach the Knicks to save his job. Maybe the Wolves owners should have done that last year when McHale had to do interim duties.

There aren't a lot of Wolves games on ESPN or TNT these days, but if I catch one, I want to see Twin Cities denizens hoisting some "Fire McHale" signs some time soon. They deserve better.

Update, 1/24 - Clearly Minnesota fans agree, in the most unscientific manner, that Dwane Casey got hosed.