Ten Observations/ Predictions from the Sports World

Please read the following observations/ predictions from the world of sports. You’re welcome for the clarity.

The Indianapolis Colts are 0-3 in the NFL pre-season. This gives them four wins versus 21 losses dating back to 2005. This proves the pre-season records mean nothing because the Colts have averaged 13 wins over the same regular seasons. Oh, and they won a Super Bowl.

Nick Saban will eventually leave the University of Alabama for another coaching job.

The NFL is the king of sports, and college football rules the south, but high school football is the best value for the Everyfan.

No American male will advance to the semis-finals of the 2010 U. S Open.

Pitcher Andy Petite is the key to the New York Yankees post-season and Roger Clemens federal indictment for his role in the performance enhancing drug saga.

The World Basketball Championships are currently under way in Turkey. You may not have known this, or even cared. This lack of story proves that the “Lebron James Decision” was good for the NBA in the vein of “any publicity is good publicity.”

Major League Baseball is on a roll right now. Clemens’ issues with telling the truth and letting guys inject drugs into his backside, has a fantastic reality television feel that is attractive to mainstream viewers and readers. Also, there are great story lines emerging as the play-offs approach. Small market and small budget teams like San Diego and Tampa Bay are leading their divisions. And lastly, The Yankees are still relevant.

Golf’s Ryder Cup is the premier all-star contest in professional sports. Tiger Woods is the world’s best golfer. Still, he has been fighting to make the U. S. Ryder Cup team. (He will make it). Golfers are the only athletes care so much about these exhibitions. That’s why we should be interested.

The NFL will go to an eighteen team schedule next season. Rosters will expand. Teams will carry four quarterbacks. Some teams will take this opportunity to “carry” an unconventional or “Wildcat” quarterback.

Every guy driving a Smart Car has a beard? It’s true. This may not be related all that closely to sports, but it is true. Think about it.

Notes From a Delinquent Writer

Notes If you are a member of the few, the (hopefully) proud, followers of this site: I’m sorry. Hopefully, I can reward your loyalty with some … thing. Here are some observations from the summer of 2010, as defined by the Cobb County (GA) School Calendar.

The Lebron Thing

Lebron James did the right thing for his “brand” when he held his press conference announcing his exodus from Cleveland on ESPN. He went to a pre-packaged All-Star team in the Miami Heat and made his “decision” a prime time spectacle. Lebron will win championships in Miami. People will forget the ESPN special. We will remember the highlights and the ad campaigns to come. Accountants and salespeople at Nike and the NBA were ecstatic. The “LBJ Decision ’10” drew a bigger audience than the prime-time NBA and NFL drafts. The show received higher rating s than any NBA play-off game before the finals. That’s good pub and good business. Like it or not, the The King is selling more and more shoes for Nike across the globe.

Not since “Must-See-TV,” has Thursday night programming garnered so much attention. Yes, the mainstream media crapped on it. Why? Because it was staged. The media was virtually ignored and certainly devalued, ESPN decided to chase ratings, credibility be damned. By the way, Jim Gray was the perfect moderator/ table setter for the one hour special. With a guy of Gray’s stature, ESPN and Lebron’s handlers did not even need to buy heavy duty the puppet strings. Just like with the Tiger Woods mea culpa months ago, the mainstream media was unnecessary and practically uninvited. Talking heads and beat writers were virtually ignored. They got their feelings hurt and cried like a kid that just lost his play date. Lebron James (the person) may have taken a little hit incredibility, but the Lebron James brand did not. His sponsors, the NBA and ESPN quietly loved it. Do you think Nike execs would have said, “Lebron, you really shouldn’t have brought so much attention to basketball in the middle of summer?”

The Kid Baseball Thing

Some six year olds can play baseball all summer anywhere, anytime. Parents should not encourage every six year old to play baseball anywhere, anytime.

The Kid Baseball Thing and Just Plain Good Baseball

If your team makes three errors in an inning it will hurt the ballclub. It doesn’t matter if the boys are six going on seven or twenty-six going on twenty-seven.

The Ozzie Guillen Thing

Ozzie Guillen is a lot like Charles Barkley. Some of the stuff those two say is dead-on. Often, they say what needs to be said. Other times, their musings are misguided at best. Should Charles Barkley have really talked about running for governor before he was a registered voter? On Ozzie’s latest rant, yes, Latin baseball players are treated differently than the Asian players. What Guillen chooses to forget is that the Latin players will do anything (including fake their age) to become a part of the baseball fraternity and escape the economics of Central America.

Some of these kids do learn to play baseball with yesterday’s tree limbs as bats and make-shift baseballs. These Latin players are almost always teenagers are more than happy to be paid to train on immaculate fields, receive state of the art coaching, buffet meals and live in air conditioned dormitories for the opportunity to play minor league baseball in the U. S. These players are not ready to play at the Major league level without the training and tutoring provided by MLB clubs.

Then there are the Cuban ballplayers which Ozzie chooses to forget. The Cubans are also Latin ballplayers. They are treated very similarly to the Asians because they are generally not available and desirable to the Major League teams until they are in their twenties and polished ballplayers. (Why spend money on someone too young, too raw, or too scared to defect a communist country). I have advanced well past my twenties (chronologically) and still would have second thoughts about defecting out of any foreign country. So, once the Cubans escape the Castro thing, they are more equipped to have their Miami-based agents (sweeping generalization) get them their money.

Finally, this blog will continue with more frequent, but equally, sanguine posts. Thank you very much for reading and commenting. The updates this fall will most likely be more digestible (shorter) moving forward. In the next days or week, there will be news about my new assignments writing about the religion of the south, SEC football.