Sports

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 5/24-25

by

Read this post to get introduced to Sports Watcher. Basically, I run down what a sports fanatic would watch if he wanted to watch as many sports as possible over the weekend. That means only one sport in a given timeslot, as many sports as possible, and as important a contest as possible. All times PDT.

Saturday
9-11 AM: College lacrosse, Syracuse v. Virginia (ESPN2). In one of my previous stint of Sports Watcher posts, I noted that the Frozen Four seemed to be the biggest college sport that wasn’t football or basketball. If ESPN is any guide, baseball, softball and lacrosse may give it a run for its money. Of course, that may just be ESPN looking for any spring championships to fill time. The final, incidentially, isn’t until Monday. The second semifinal, Johns Hopkins v. Duke, is out because otherwise I get no baseball.

12:30-4 PM: MLB Baseball, regional action (FOX). Mets/Rockies, D-Backs/Braves, Angels/White Sox. The Rockies stink after making the World Series last year, and the Mets having a .512 record (as of Wednesday) would be more impressive if they weren’t second-to-last in their own division. The other two games are more interesting, especially Angels-White Sox which pits two division leaders (again as of Wednesday) against each other, but I doubt as many people will get D-Backs/Braves as should.

5-7:30 PM: NHL Hockey, Pittsburgh @ Detroit (CBC/VS.). The NHL’s dream Stanley Cup finals for American dominance starts.

7-10 PM: Ultimate Fighting Championship, UFC 84 (PPV). Yes, there’s an overlap. It’ll start with dull undercard matches anyway, it’s not much of an overlap. Besides, I bet you can’t afford it anyway.

Sunday
10-1:30 PM: IndyCar Racing, Indianapolis 500 (ABC). Or as ESPN is calling it, “The 92nd Indianapolis 500 telecast presented by GoDaddy.com”. First of all, it’s not the 92nd TELECAST, TV not being arouns 92 years ago and all, and secondly, this is what they’re calling it on their ticker even when referring strictly to the race itself! But who cares? It’s all about unification, baby! And Helio winning Dancing with the Stars! And Danica winning her first race! Wait, the latter already happened on a race on ESPN Classic that wasn’t Indy?

Honorable Mention: 12-3 PM: Champions Tour Golf, Senior PGA Championship, final round (NBC). Sheesh. I once created an imaginary system where all the championships could be scheduled on one imaginary network, because usually there’s no more than one at a time (this later evolved into Sports Watcher). Key word, usually, because in 2006 the MLS Cup interfered with the Chase for the then-Nextel Cup. Now I’m considering having two tracks of Sports Watcher. Get more high-profile sports onto the main Watcher, you know?

2:30-5 PM: College softball, super-regional action (ESPNU). If you’re not familiar with college baseball or softball, super-regionals appear to be pairs of regionals. 8 teams advance from the super-regionals to the College World Series and get placed into a bracket only once they get there. Regular ESPN actually airs softball during the Indy 500!

Honorable Mention: 4-6 PM: College lacrosse, women’s championship (CBS College Sports). It’s not because of the softball that I bumped this, violating my all-championships policy in the process. It’s so early in the softball tournament that I wouldn’t cry to lose it. It’s because it just barely interferes with…

5:30-8 PM: NBA Basketball, LA Lakers @ San Antonio (TNT). A Celtics-Lakers final would be heaven for NBA brass and ratings, as much of a godsend as Pens-Red Wings is for the NHL; a Spurs-Pistons final would be hell. Keep a very, VERY close eye on the officials in both series.

Well, certainly one involving Bill Simmons, at least.

by

Hold on, I’m about to go into super-nerdy mode for a moment here.

Popular ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons has had a total of one column since May 1st, and the reason why is not a secret within the sports blogosphere, as much as ESPN may not want it to come out. When popular sports blog Deadspin inquired about his lack of columnage May 14, Simmons cited “behind the scenes bullshit” and claimed “certain promises were not kept” “within a few months” of signing a recent extension. Shortly thereafter, Simmons started up an off-site blog, albeit only posting old columns for the time being, and introduced one such column as having been “written right as I was starting to find a groove and my column was starting to resemble what it’s like now, only if nobody was killing five of the best jokes or making me re-write them so they weren’t as funny.

So it’s interesting to note that the Sports Guy’s latest ESPN column is basically a roundup of very short, quick takes on various sports (and non-sports) stories from the past month-plus. What may be a lot more interesting is this:

…[a]nd can ESPN organize a Josh Howard roast so I can stand on a dais and make
these jokes as someone like Jerry Stackhouse keels over in hysterics and does
the slumped-over-and-pounding-the-table routine? (Whoops, I forgot — you’ll see
Danny Moder leave Julia Roberts alone for the night with George Clooney before
you see ESPN get involved with another roast. Scratch that thought.)

Of course, Simmons is referring to an infamous incident during ESPN’s roast of their “Mike and Mike” personalities earlier this year, when Dana Jacobsen made some rather offensive comments while drunk. Okay, it’s not taking a shot because of Simmons’ own battles with ESPN, and that incident wasn’t even really ESPN’s fault, but am I the only one surprised, given what we’ve learned so far, that ESPN didn’t censor what could be considered taking a shot at the Worldwide Leader in Sports?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Quick addendum

by

I left out one option on the new poll asking what features you want to see added to Da Blog. I have been thinking, off and on, about a “playoff watch” – keeping track of where teams are in their quest to get into the playoffs. It would essentially be a generalization of the Week 17 Playoff Positioning Watch on the SNF Flex Scheduling Watch. I didn’t put it on the poll and I’m not putting it on now because it was just enough work that I don’t want to do it week in and week out, day in and day out, all year long for all sorts of sports. But if you want it, feel free and comment.

It truly is a vast wasteland.

by

Look over my SiteMeter stats and it becomes glaringly obvious that since joining SiteMeter, my peak readership for Da Blog has been in November and December, when my college football rankings, SNF Flex Scheduling Watch, and (not next year) SuperPower ratings are in full swing.

The rest of the time, I barely break 100 readers for the whole month, or about 3-4 a day. By those standards, I shouldn’t be disappointed by the readership numbers for Sandsday!

Currently, the poll on the front page of the web site has the following most popular topics with 4 votes each: Sports (well covered), Movies (well, if I can get the Greatest Movies Project off the ground…), Video Games (evidently the Sandsday crowd), RPGs, Politics (forthcoming), and the current overall leader with 5 votes, Computing/Internet.

As for my original Da Blog Poll, asking what you’d like to see out of Da Blog, the three leaders in the clubhouse are: Short poems or stories I’ve written, TV Ratings Reports, and Sports Watcher. TV ratings reports are out of the question; they take too long and are too much work. I heartily recommend TV by the Numbers for much more in-depth coverage than I ever had in mind.

Sports Watcher is coming back on a provisional basis this weekend and possibly for good, aided by Blogger’s new Scheduled Posts feature, allowing me to work on the Watcher throughout the week instead of all at once on Friday. At this point, publishing short poems or stories I’ve written is a) probably going to be more a web site thing than a blog thing and b) will mostly be the ones I think are less publishable. My interests have shifted since writing them into more philosophic strains.

I’ve reposted the topic poll under the new mechanism, removing the three most popular items, and replacing them with four new ones: TV schedule reports (know exactly what’s going to be on direct from the source!), philosophical treatises, live election results based on my projection mechanisms (which are coming for November’s general election anyway), and random discoveries from the Internet. (I’m not a subscriber to StumbleUpon, but I was interested in the concept when I was semi-accidentially introduced to it.) Given the pace at which my polls get votes, this one will last until the end of July, although if I get enough votes suggestions from it will start filtering into Da Blog and the web site before then.

Now for another question. In a recent comment, someone suggested “send[ing my] posts to other bloggers”. (Ironically, this was in a post about my inability to get readers for Sandsday, not Da Blog.) Two problems with that: I’m not certain who to send it to, and I don’t want to feel like I’m spamming other bloggers. I am already on the blogroll of Sports Media Watch, but no place else to my knowledge; I haven’t had a response to any of my posts on a blog recognized by Technorati; and I’m a bit put off by the concept of blogrolls myself, partly because some of my interests are a little embarrasing for me to discuss, partly because it seems cliqueish, and partly because what I read is none of your business. Unless I decide it is. As a result, I have a bit of a beef with blogs like Awful Announcing that seemingly will only link to me if I link to them in a blogroll.

It doesn’t help that both of the blogs I referred to in the previous paragraph are sports blogs and I don’t want Da Blog to just be a sports blog. So I welcome any advice in the comments on how to branch out and how to get more inbound links. And I’m starting a second poll question – the first multi-question Da Blog Poll – asking whether I should spam other blogs. Because it’s simple, this one’s only lasting through the end of the month.

This post has something to do with the Derby, but it isn’t about it. Well, maybe a little.

by

Recently read:

NBC analyst Bob Neumeier correctly predicted favorite Big Brown would win. That
prompted NBC handicapper Mike Battaglia, citing confident Big Brown trainer
Richard Dutrow Jr., to say Neumeier “drank the Rick Dutrow Kool-Aid” — with
Neumeier adding “on the rocks.” Has everybody forgotten the origin of that
relatively young cliché?

Wait, I’m hardly an alcohol drinker (wouldn’t do it even if I was old enough), but aren’t “the rocks” just ice? It may be a bit of an off-color, mixed metaphor, and this probably wasn’t his intention, but it does seem to work…

(All I have to say about the death of Eight Belles is that, regardless of whether or not horse racing objectively needs to change anything, they need to do something or they could risk becoming absolutely dead, as people will see it as an insensitive sport where deaths of competitors are simply brushed off, even induced in some circumstances. At this point, Big Brown winning the Triple Crown, far from revitalizing horse racing’s popularity, could actually crush it, because a big reason for watching the Triple Crown – seeing a horse win it for the first time in 30 years – will be gone.)

The 2008 Mid-Major Conference

by

Refer to this post if you don’t know what this is about or to catch up on the rules.

This year, four conferences produced multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament: the MWC, WCC, A-10, and Sun Belt. These conferences are guaranteed one spot each in the Mid-Major Conference.

Four teams reached the Sweet 16, all from different conferences. Of these, Davidson and Memphis did not come from a multi-bid conference, while Western Kentucky and Xavier did. From the Mountain West Conference, one team won its first round game while the other did not; from the West Coast Conference, one team won its first round game while the other two did not.

This leaves two spots in the MMC to be determined by my discretion, with no conference restrictions.

Without further ado, the eight members of the 2008 Mid-Major Conference:

Xavier (Atlantic 10)
Western Kentucky (Sun Belt Conference)
Davidson (Southern Conference)
Memphis (Conference USA)
UNLV (Mountain West Conference)
San Diego (West Coast Conference)
Butler (Horizon League)
Drake (Missouri Valley Conference)
Honorable Mentions: Illinois State, Kent State, Akron

The NIT didn’t really produce much in the way of MMC contenders – the only teams to make the second round from conferences without automatic qualifying procedures were Illinois State, Southern Illinois, Creighton, and Akron. All lost. That’s barely further than any remaining team in the NCAA tournament, all but guaranteeing Butler a spot – but Drake bowed out in the first round of the NCAAs to Western Kentucky. Those NIT teams lost in a round one-fourth the size of the round Drake lost in. After such a strong performance all season, Drake very easily could have been passed over within its own conference. But the only other mid-major team to win in the first round was Siena, which falls under the Northwestern State rule (one lucky win doesn’t get you an MMC ticket). George Mason or Virginia Commonwealth would have made the honorable mention list if VCU wasn’t beaten by another mid-major (UAB) in the NIT first round or if Mason was as strong an at-large contender as Drake.

Kent State came the closest to knocking off Drake. Love it or hate it, teams that make long NIT runs can only compete for MMC bids with teams that were better in the conference tournament if they were robbed of an NCAA bid. Unlike Appalachian “upset-Michigan” State last year, Akron was nowhere near NCAA territory and Illinois was a bubble team when Drake was a lock. And since Drake and Kent State had the same level of tournament success, and Drake was a 5 seed to Kent State’s 9 seed, Drake pretty much has to get the nod (even though you could penalize it for losing to a 12 seed to KSU’s 8 seed, but even then Drake lost close while UNLV blew out Kent State).

At the corner of Update Street and Web Site Avenue

by

In case you haven’t noticed, the strip is back to normal now. Today, however, I want to add something else to the web site.

The Internet is an amazing place. When I discovered that there were sites dedicated to nothing but obsessing over America’s roads and highways, I became convinced that there was a website for anything on the Internet. So when I couldn’t find a site cataloguing street signs in the same way as roads – something that can show a lot of variety – I decided to make one.

(Can someone tell Freehostia that I’d really love a way to select several files at once for upload rather than have to go through Browse box after Browse box? I’m sure FTP would be one way that’s already in place but I fear complications…)

Also, I made a new addition to the Around the Horn Drinking Game.

The future of open-wheel racing

by

In the end, we all learned the number 1 rule of open-wheel racing: Don’t bleep with the Indy 500.

Now that open-wheel racing in the United States is unified once again, the unified racing body can turn its attention to repairing the damage done by the Champ Car-Indy Car war. On that front, I have a few suggestions for what to do going forward:

  • Recognize that the war only helped NASCAR’s rise, but was not solely responsible for it. NASCAR was arguably bigger than open-wheel racing even before the split, or at least before it really started punishing then-CART.
  • Decide right away whether or not you can take on NASCAR. If you think you can (and last year suggested NASCAR may be plateauing), be aware you may need a 10-year plan for it, and hope for NASCAR mistakes. Push what makes your sport distinct, run races in places NASCAR doesn’t, and leverage the passion of the fans you have. If you don’t think you can, focus on carving out a solid niche and consider running some races overseas. Either way, immediate financial solvency should be the immediate goal if you don’t want to get absorbed into NASCAR.
  • Reclaim the North and West for yourselves. CART was more popular than NASCAR entering the 90s because NASCAR was a southern sport and IndyCar racing was popular in the north. The Kasey Kahnes and Jeff Gordons of the world should not be running off to NASCAR. Rebuild the infrastructure that was there before.
  • Marketability! You can attract eyeballs if you can market your drivers. You can keep drivers if you can create marketing opportunities for them. Plugging the hell out of the likes of Danica Patrick is your friend. But whoever your best drivers are, they should be appearing in advertisements and making other appearances if you want to even have a chance to keep them from jumping ship to NASCAR.
  • Either fix the problems that caused the split in the first place, or recognize that they are unfixable. The IndyCar series has fallen victim to many of the same problems that caused it to split from CART in the first place. The barriers to success for Americans are especially vexing because of how far open-wheel racing has fallen due to the war. Make it more affordable and try and find more American oval tracks. If you recognize they are unfixable, take steps to appropriate them for your own benefits, and work to overcome them.
  • Everything revolves around the Indy 500. I actually doubt Tony George wanted to “win” the war, only create a series to compete with CART. “Winning” and becoming the de facto open-wheel leader since about 2002 if not before only led to IndyCar inheriting CART’s problems. But the Indy 500 is the only race that matters and, despite declining ratings as a result of the war, it is more than twice, if not three times, if not four times as popular than any other open-wheel race. Any effort to rebuild the sport must revolve around putting your mark on the Indy 500, and rebuilding its prestige. Daytona is one of the biggest races on Earth, but that it is more than twice as big as Indy is unacceptable.
  • ESPN is your friend – or at least it used to be. ESPN must be an equal partner in rebuilding open-wheel racing, since they, along with ABC, are showing your races. But they were probably more inclined to do so before they also started showing NASCAR races. Still, they need to plug their IndyCar broadcasts during NASCAR and generally plug that IndyCars are still here, they exist outside the Indy 500, and they’re coming back.
  • Don’t completely destroy what Champ Car left behind. Only a smattering of Champ Car events are on the 2008 schedule. That doesn’t include some Champ Car events that were serving as the series’ lifeline in its later days. Completely junking almost everything about Champ Car will only alienate its fans. And it may have had only a few fans, but you need all the open-wheel fans you can get to serve as a base to grow on!