- You want the circus that is O.J. Mayo are your college or university, this is part of what you get. Southern California freshman standout Mayo might have violated an NCAA rule by accepting free tickets to Monday night's NBA game between Denver and the Los Angeles Lakers from Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony. Mayo revealed Tuesday that he had received the tickets, which were located behind courtside seats near mid-court at Staples Center and had a face value of $230 each. Hmm, and you didn’t think that might violate some sort of rule, champ? Or maybe the rules don’t apply to you….”We don't know the specifics of the situation and won't be able to comment,” NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said Wednesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press. Decoding that….Mayo screwed up and will probably receive a slap on the wrist, something along the lines of a one or two-game suspension. NCAA bylaw 16.11.2.2.3 states that student-athletes may not receive “free or reduced-cost admission to professional athletics contests from professional sports organizations, unless such services also are available to the student body in general.” Admittedly I don’t have a degree in advanced mathematics from Harvard, but getting $230 tickets to an NBA game seems to violate both the letter and the spirit of that rule. Mayo’s only hope is that the NCAA could consider Anthony a friend who gave Mayo the tickets rather than a representative of the Nuggets, perhaps making the matter legal by NCAA standards. Mayo, USC’s leading scorer, said Anthony made the offer of tickets at a party he hosted Sunday night. "I was talking to him like, `Man, you're out pretty late. You've got a game tomorrow night against Kobe [Bryant],"' Mayo said. "He said, `Nah, it will be all right.' And then he asked, `You want to come to the game?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’” Oh, and your lame attempt to fall on the grenade for your player doesn’t count as a viable option, USC coach Tim Floyd. You saying you gave Mayo the OK to accept the tickets is as lame and transparent a lie as I can ever remember hearing. First, how convenient that you told him it was OK once he let news of the transaction slip. Second, bad news for you, T. Floyd, but you giving him your blessing doesn’t make it ok for him to take the tickets, nor does it absolve Mayo of blame. But take heart, because after this year he can move on to the NBA and next year you won’t have to deal with these sorts of headaches.
- The longer the TV writers are on strike, the worse things get. The ideas the networks are coming up with to fill air time because they’re out of new episodes of their usual shows are becoming increasingly moronic. The latest example of a network having a collective brain fart is Baby Borrowers on NBC, a show that is nothing more than a glorified home ec project caught on film. The premise of this atrocious show is giving teenagers a baby to act as a parent for, then watch their travails. I don’t know if the message is to discourage kids from having sex and thus from becoming teen parents, if it’s to have a laugh as you watch the kids try to be parents, but regardless of the aim, whoever green-lighted this show is a moron. I mean, are you freaking kidding me? This sounds like some lame high school home ec project we all had to do in high school, not the premise for a good TV show. What’s next, are you going to make a show about kids getting paired up as imaginary married couples with made-up identities and having to create an imaginary budget for their theoretical family? I know it’s tough to do, but the networks keep coming up with ideas for strike replacement shows that are worse than the ideas preceding them. Good Lord, let this strike end soon because I don’t think anyone wants to see how low the quality of these shows can go.
- The best game of the college basketball season, when all is said and done, may have been played last night in College Station, Texas. Baylor, a program on the verge of absolute collapse five years ago, outlasted Texas A&M (No. 16 ESPN/USA Today, No. 18 AP) in a 116-110 five-overtime win over. The Bears (No. 25 AP) escaped with the W in the longest game in Big 12 conference history. Three free throws by Baylor stat Curtis Jerrells gave Baylor a 106-103 lead in the fifth overtime. Dominique Kirk got A&M (15-4, 1-3) within a point with a layup on the next possession. Jerrells pushed the lead back to 3 with his steal and layup with about a minute left. Aaron Bruce added a pair of free throws before a layup by Bryan Davis made it 110-107 with less than 30 seconds remaining. Jerrells added four more free throws and LaceDarius Dunn chipped in a pair to ensure the win. Davis, who led A&M with a career-high 30 points, made a layup with 9 seconds left in the fourth overtime to knot it at 99 and send it to the fifth OT. Three Aggies fouled out, compared to five for the Bears. Dunn scored five points in the first half of quadruple overtime to give Baylor a 97-94 lead with about three minutes to go. Davis made two free throws to get A&M within one before a layup by Tweety Carter made it 99-96 with about a minute left. Just as he had late in triple OT, Donald Sloan made just one of two free throws, this time making it 99-97. Jerrells scored six points in the last 1:01 of triple overtime, including the tying layup with 10 seconds left to leave it at 90-all and force the fourth overtime. "
Kevin Rogers' layup with 1:31 remaining in triple OT cut A&M's lead to 87-84 and he fouled out less than 30 seconds later, the fourth Bear to foul out. Both teams managed just four points apiece in the second overtime, with Davis scoring all the Aggies' points. A&M's Sloan had a chance for the win at the buzzer, but his layup was blocked by Rogers to take it to triple overtime. Kirk forced the second overtime when his tip-in at the buzzer made it 76-all. He missed a 3 on the play and a tip by Davis bounced off the rim before Kirk swooped in for the rebound and shot. Sloan, who had 18 points, got the inbound pass and streaked past Rogers and the rest of the Baylor defenders for the one-handed dunk to tie it a 64 and force overtime. All told, it was a game that left several participants so weary that they weren’t sure what had just happened. "I don't even know how many overtimes it was," Jerrells said, looking confused. Told it was five, he shook his head. "That just shows the ability, the dedication and the will of this team," he said. "If we put our minds to it, no matter what happens we're going to get it done." The game lasted so long that even one of the referees got confused. In the break before the start of the fourth overtime, a referee approached a member of the media and asked if triple overtime was about to begin. When told it was four, he shook his head and walked off. The win moves Baylor to 16-2, 4-0 in Big 12 play. Not bad for a program that five years ago had one player murder another player and then during the investigation, the now-former coach Dave Bliss lied about the player who did the killing, trying to paint him as a drug dealer, among other things. New coach Scott Drew has Baylor on a roll and ranked in the Top 25, which is great to see for all of those kids who still gave Baylor a chance when it would have been easier to go play somehwerhe else. They all deserve a lot of recognition and applause for their efforts, and this game was the type of win that makes college basketball the best sport around.
- Finally, the new season of 24 can get underway….or it could if not for the f’ing writers’ strike. The other big obstacle holding up production had been the fact that leading man, the diminutive Kiefer Sutherland, was serving a 48-day sentence in a Glendale, Ariz. jail for drunken driving. Sutherland was released earlier this week, slipping out a back door to avoid the cameras waiting on him. After spending his entire sentence on laundry duty, the man most of us know as Jack Bauer simply waited for his time to be up and was released. I was hoping he would pull a patented Jack Bauer escape, but alas none was forthcoming. Prison authorities cited Sutherland as a model prisoners and said he never once asked for preferential treatment. Best wishes foe a sober return to society, Kiefer, learn how to call a cab or hire a driver and you’ll be just fine. Well, you’ll be a lot better if the f’ing writers and networks can reach an f’ing agreement, but that goes for all of us…..
- You all may need to do without me for the next few days, as I think I’m heading down to South Florida to kick some Miami Dolphin ass. I already had a healthy amount of hatred and loathing for the ‘Fins because they pissed away my dream of an 0-16 NFL season by winning one and only one game, and doing so in Week 15 when the dream was within reach. But now these guys are forgetting that they are members of the worst team in the NFL and starting to act like they’re better than what they are. First, Miami defensive end Jason Taylor withdraws from the Pro Bowl because of an “injury.” I put the quotation marks around the word injury because every year, a dozen players from both conferences pull out of the Pro Bowl due to phony injuries and other lame excuses. They do it because the game is in February, a week after the Super Bowl, and for these guys, they don’t want to spend any of their beloved off-season playing football, especially not in a meaningless exhibition game where they could get hurt. I don’t especially object to that….except for Jason Taylor. You’re a member of the 1-15 Miami Dolphins, a team so bad it failed at failing, amigo. Other guys from real NFL teams can pull out of the Pro Bowl with injury concerns, but you can not. You don’t have that right. You should be thankful you were even considered for the game after the choke job your team pulled. So what you need to do is tell the league you made a mistake and that not only will you be happy to play in the Pro Bowl, you’ll pay your own travel expenses to get there and pay the travel expenses of all the other players in the game as well. Not to be outdone, Taylor’s teammate, linebacker Channing Crowder decided to follow the less-than-stellar example set by Chicago Bears linebacker Lance Briggs and many years ago, by boxer and psychopath mike Tyson, crashing his car on the highway and then walking away. Tyson crashed a Lamborghini and left it because, well, he was the baddest man on the planet at the time and probably had 25 more Lamborghini’s in the garage at home. Briggs was drunk, er, panicked when he crashed his $250,000 whip a few months ago and left the scene only to phone police, report his car as stolen and then finally fess up to crashing it. Now Crowder has done the same thing, running his souped-up Dodge pickup truck, painted candy-apple red with a gray sport stripe down the center, into a palm tree on a South Florida highway and leaving the scene in the car of a friend who was following him. Police found the wreck, checked the registration and tracked down Crowder. Bonus points for leaving your gun in the truck as well, C. Yes, I’m going to need a plane ticket to Miami so I can go down and remind these guys that they’re the FREAKING MIAMI DOLPHINS. Get your act together, guys, and stop acting like you’re not a total embarrassment to yourselves, your city and to me.
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