Thanks KIRO-710 AM for putting this montage together. Hard to think of anyone in the city whose death would touch such a wide range of people.
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Category Archives: Sports
A Story For Those of You Who Gutted Out Time at the End of the Bench
If you’ve had conversation with me lately, you’ve probably had to hear me tell the tale of Niki, the Senior JV player who got called up to varsity for the last game of her senior year for Senior Night, and got in a fun 15 minutes of play at the end.
Well, the story gets better. Here’s a story from the Seattle Times from last night’s Girls High School State Tournament:
Defending Champs Skyline Advances | Girls 4A State Soccer
SAMMAMISH — Fresh off its ascent to the No. 1 spot in the nation, top-ranked Skyline immediately went out and validated that status.
Emphatically.
Two quick first-half goals and stout defense propelled the Spartans one step closer to their third consecutive Class 4A state championship with a 5-0 win over Mount Rainier in Tuesday’s first round of the state playoffs at Skyline High School.
Junior forward Michelle Bretl scored her first high-school hat trick and has four goals in the postseason for Skyline (17-0). She leads the team with 15 goals this season.
The Spartans’ depth showed, as well. Reserve Niki Gerlach, a senior playing in her second varsity match after a last-minute roster switch when Nicole Candioglos came up ill, booted in a rebound shot in the 78th minute. Gerlach, listed on the roster as a team manager, had been playing on the junior varsity.
“With Niki, it’s kind of a fun story,” said Skyline coach Don Braman. “On Senior Night, she had an assist and nearly scored a goal and was kicking herself, so it was fun to see her stick one in the net. She has worked hard.”
….
If you’ve ever sat on the sidelines and wondered why you are putting in all that effort for no guaranteed payout, this should remind you.
My Annual Stupid Idea for College Football
So I’ve seen way more college football than I expected to this year. In addition to more Husky games than usual, accompanying a graduating senior on some college tours gave me the chance to catch games at WSU and Oregon. A few quick notes:
- Oregon fans – You have a cute little minor league stadium, in a cute little minor league town, with a team full of players who are a step away from prison, and a ga-billionaire benefactor who is willing to fund underwater treadmills and have his own little real-life fantasy football team. Feel free to show a modicum of class and act like you’ve been there before. You’ve had a good 15 year run, but no national championships. Unless you actually work at Nike or helped recruit a kid from Houston Junior College, show a little dignity. Oh, and to the guy in Sec 29, row 24, seat 14 – find a rule book.
- Oregon State Fans – How on earth have you guys not showed up at Adidas with a whiteboard and video projector to convince them to go pound for pound against the Nike money in Duck Country? For that matter, where are you UW? No one can convince Adidas that it would be a good thing to undercut Oregon?
- WSU fans – God I hope revenue sharing works in your favor. Otherwise, I just don’t see how you compete in the Pac-10 much longer.
- UW fans – I never realized how bad Husky Stadium was. Take away the view and it’s the worst spot in the Pac-10. Your renovation is well-deserved. And I hope it turns out nicer than Oregon’s little stadium with the huge pressbox.
Anyway, every year I throw out a stupid idea for the BCS, and this year I’m early. I’ve shifted my opinions some for a simple reason. College Presidents love the Bowl system. Think about it. If you are the President of Penn State, every year your team will make SOME bowl. And for 2 weeks in the middle of cold-ass December/January, instead of being bunked up in Happy Valley, you get an all expense paid vacation to someplace warm. For 2 weeks, you and your 100 closest friends get to live the high life in a place that isn’t under 12 feet of snow. Why on earth would you ever give that up for a playoff system?
So my focus this year is not on the BCS schools. It’s on the non-BCS conferences that always feel screwed. Here’s what I say to you.
You need to be flexible. And you need a “Champions” League.
If you want a National Championship shot, you need to make sure all your top teams have a harder schedule. But the big guys won’t play you. So you need to get creative.
All of you non BCS conferences need to split into 6 team mini-conferences for football. So you play 5 “conference games.” Then, all the top non-BCS conference teams roll into a 7 team “Champions League.” So your schedule looks like this:
- 1 game non conference – Try to get a BCS team on your schedule.
- 5 game Conference schedule.
- 6 game Champions league (or non-Champions League) schedule.
Why do this? Well here would be the 7 team gauntlet for the non-BCS Champions League if we implemented that today:
- TCU (10-0)
- Boise ST (10-0)
- Utah (8-1)
- UCF (7-2)
- Houston (5-4)
- Temple (8-2)
- Northern Ill (7-2)
Now tell me that if Boise St or TCU runs the table with all the best teams from all the best non-BCS conferences, that they don’t deserve a spot in the Big Show?
Anyway, that’s this year’s dumb idea.
Pics of Nick Foles Injury
I happened to be shooting pics at the UA/WSU game this weekend, on the exact play Nick Foles had his knee rolled over. When you zoom in on them, you see it unfold frame by frame.
Watch the left side of the defensive line. One of the lineman loses balance, and then seems to dive and roll directly into the knee. You can see Arizona’s #6 start on top and cut across the field making the pass reception. He’s already turning to run upfield by the time Foles gets hit.
Poor Liverpoool
Let the mocking begin. The Boston Red Sox have purchased the proud English franchise. And to commemorate the occasion, a T-Shirt company has already suggested a new uniform look and feel – “The Fenway Edition.”
2010 Sounders – The Power of Scarcity and Supply & Demand
Remember back to just before the 2009 MLS season started. There was a buzz around the Sounders. At first we weren’t sure what to expect. A sold out Thursday night opening match was electric. More games sold out. Tickets were impossible to come by. More seats opened up. More sell outs. Barcelona, Chelsea and the MLS Cup brought record crowds. It seemed that the team could do no wrong.
It was the perfect storm. A soccer enthusiastic public desired something positive to come from their city’s roster of not just losing, but atrocious, sports teams. That pent up demand, combined with a short supply of tickets, drove incredible buzz and success.
But perfect storms don’t last forever, and now the Sounders have to accept the bad that comes with the good of success. 2010 has been an interesting years for the guys in rave green. It’s a pretty interesting litany of environmental demand issues:
- Key injuries got the team off to a slow start.
- Spring optimism (which turned out to be very misguided) made the Mariners relevant for a brief period of time.
- The Barcelona and Chelsea games were replaced with Celtic and River Plate.
- The team’s European superstar was either whining, moping, in trouble with the front office, or hurt. We never really knew what it was – except he wasn’t drawing fans
So naturally demand fell. And that may have been fixable. But then at the same time, the Sounders faced a problem that no other American sports league has to face.
Supply rose.
The Sounders qualified for what’s called the Concacaf Champions League. Now this as marketed as the marquee invitation for North American and Central American teams. It’s a chance to compete in real matches against top talent from Mexico, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, etc….But in reality, it’s a kind of weir tournament for anyone to get too attached to. You see, you qualify in 2009 to play preliminary games in 2010 to make a championship round in 2011. You could have literally turned over your entire roster between qualifying and playing in the finals.
But the other thing it did was add 4 new mid-week home games to the tail end of the season. And these games weren’t part of your season ticket package.
Now, factor in that the Sounders qualified for the U.S. Open Cup Final, and are hosting it. That adds another game, and a very exciting one at that. That’s extra game #5.
Now, just for fun, throw in that the Sounders promised a 3rd free “Friendly” to season ticket packages. Here comes Chivas from Mexico, to play a friendly at the most unfriendly time of the year – right before playoffs. Imagine the Huskies scheduling a practice game with Nebraska the week before the Apple Cup. Yeah – not much sense to it.
There are 15 games in the season, starting in Mid-March. Most of those are on weekends, so by the time August comes around, some fans are feeling a touch of soccer fatigue. A playoff race can reinvigorate the base and get them out to the games they bought a good 10 months ago.
But adding another 6 home games to the season – that’s 40% for you math majors – when kids are in school and youth leagues are firing up, is just an unfortunate turn of events. And that is why you saw 11,000 people last night. Even your most ardent supporters and look at the home calendar:
- 9/29: Meaningless CCL game
- 10/2: Important MLS game
- 10/5: Important US Open Final
- 10/12: Meaningless Friendly
- 10/15: Possibly important last MLS home game
- 10/19: Meaningless CCL game
So what’s the 2011 solution? Because if they win the U.S. Open Cup, they’ll qualify again for next year. And that schedule won’t change, so you’ll be in a similar bind. Here’s what I’d do:
- End the pre-season with a match vs Portland as a free ticket to season ticket holders.
- Reduce down to 1 mid-season friendly, but make it a good one.
- Let season ticket holders buy all 4 CCL matches for the cost of one game.
Now, there’s an economic issue with the CCL thing, in which the Sounders probably have to pay the CCL on every fan that enters the stadium. So, a 4 for 1 deal is going to cost them money. So they’d have to renegotiate some part of the concessions deal to make the money back. It’s not a perfect plan.
But the overall lesson is one of supply and demand. And once you lose scarcity, it’s hard to get it back. And the same people who wanted to go to the game they couldn’t go to, don’t want to go to the game that no one wants to go to. It’s a delicate balance. Interesting to see how they solve everything, now that a few land mines got thrown in their path.
14
Arizona is coming off one of its biggest wins in recent seasons, 34-27 against No. 9 Iowa.
The Wildcats were ranked for a few weeks last season, but before that it had been since 2000 that they last made the Top 25.
The last time they were ranked this highly in the regular season was 1998. Arizona finished that season No. 4 in the nation and was in the top 10 for the final six weeks of the season.
“Those are character-building drives,” UA coach Mike Stoops said late Saturday night. “Those are perception drives. Those are program drives.”
Bug Wright caught a 4-yard touchdown pass from Nick Foles with 3 minutes 57 seconds remaining to give No. 24 UA a wild victory.
The Foles-to-Wright connection capped a 9-play, 72-yard drive and put an exclamation point on a game that included a blocked punt, a blocked extra-point attempt, a 100-yard kickoff return and two interceptions returned for touchdowns.
Why Baseball Gloves are More Reliable than Boyfriends
“Honey, you’ll protect me if there’s a fly ball, right?”
“Absolutely dear.”
“OW!” You said you’d protect me!!!”
“Well not if it’s hit THAT hard…”
Why the U.S. May Not Qualify for the 2012 Olympics in Basketball
What? That’s a stupid headline. How could the U.S.A. possibly not qualify for a sport in which we have the premier talent in the world and won a gold medal in 2008? Ludicrous.
Or is it?
1) The 1st way for the U.S. to qualify for the 2012 Olympics is by winning the FIBA World Championship in August/September, aka the World Cup of Basketball. Seems doable, right? Well, they haven’t won this event since 1994, though they have earned 2 bronze medals since then. But the Redeem Team is live and well right? It’s a new era of commitment, yes? Well according to reports, that commitment does not extend all the way to Turkey, host country of this year’s tournament. Be it distance or safety concerns, the top USA players look to be choosing to sit this one out.
Ok, so we don’t win in Turkey. What’s next?
2) Well the next event is the FIBA America’s Tournament in 2011. This is a decidedly easier tourney, as the only real relevant power is Argentina, who the U.S. beat by 37 in the 2007 Finals. In fact, take away LeBron’s game high 31 points, and the U.S. still wins. HOWEVER, here comes the NBA lockout in 2011. USA Basketball is run by the NBA now. Lockout the players from club teams, they become ineligible for USA basketball as well. So, now the U.S. goes to the tourney with the best college team they can field.
Uh, oh. What’s next?
3) Well, there’s a last resort, as 3 teams can qualify in the 2012 FIBA World Olympic Qualifier, designed as a last chance for the best of the worst to sneak in. This is how Greece, Croatia and Germany got into the 2008 Games. It runs July 2 – July 8, 2012, just before the Olympics. So, we would have to hope that the 2011-2012 lockout gets done before June 2012. Or that common sense prevails and USA Basketball lets the guys play either way.
Now, there’s another doomsday scenario. Say the USA does win next month and qualifies, but the lockout extends from fall 2011 all the way through summer 2012. Who plays then?
The LeBron Contest – YouTube Version
Who’s the big winner in the LeBron sweepstakes? No, I don’t mean what city – what YouTube video is getting the most views for it’s enterprising young artists? Any favorites?