Lock of the Week

Making a brief cameo here during basketball season, it is my obligation to alert the great readers of YCS of a sure way to make a few greenbacks. Currently, Marquette would be 2.5 point UNDERDOGS to 14-11 DePaul. The same DePaul team who Marquette has beaten 8 out of the last ten times. The same DePaul team that would be coached by Principal Vernon, whose coaching strategy resembles that of Fat Pat Kennedy. When the talent is relatively equal, a Tom Crean coached team will beat Jerry Wainwright 9 out of 10 times. Other than Wilson Chandler, the talent is not equal. DePaul cannot match the Three Amigos and Ousmane Barro should be a handful down low. A double digit Marquette victory is much more likely than the good guys not covering. While you blow a wad of money on your significant other tonight, you can recoup your money by taking Marquette and 2.5 points straight to the bank.

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Holy crap. I believe Sammy Sosa now.

I believe him when he said he injured his back sneezing that one time. A couple seconds ago I sneezed really hard, and now my back really hurts. Then again, I'm a 135-pound, horrendously out-of-shape desk jockey and not a big hulking pro athlete.

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I love this kind of game account

because it reads like a discarded script to a cliched sports movie.

Buffalo 98, Bowling Green 90 (OT)

Here, the good team is dejected, the bad team is jubilant in their smiting of our heroes, and celebrates prematurely (probably not in a classy way, nor in any sort of fashion that implies that any team regardless of talent can win if they just "play together.")

They leave the floor, the ref says, "Well....now that I look closer....it appears that there IS more time left," with a little wink towards the coach. Stressful free throws attempted to tie the game, (probably by either the foreign exchange student-athlete or the kid who always got picked last at recess.) and the team triumphantly carries him off on their shoulders after the victory. Grown men cry. David Anspaugh runs away with sacks of money. End Scene.

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Dumbass of the Day

While many feel the spirit of love on this Hallmark Holiday, I have plenty of pent up hate ready to be unleashed towards DuhPaul at the Bradley Center South later tonight. In that spirit, I would like to identify this moron's take on the Marquette basketball season. Seriously, the snow that I just shoveled has more substance than this moron. Since he seems to be so concerned with relating to past pop culture, I would compare his intelligence to Barney the dinosaur.

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This is Ricky, Calling on Behalf of Ricky about Ricky

In a move reminiscient of the glory days of Ricky Henderson and the third person, Carlos Zambrano has taken to referring to himself as "Carlos Zambrano." Also, he calls himself "Big Z." Awesome. Additionally, dude wants to get paid.

"I'm ready to sign, and I would do my job anyway with the Cubs this year," Zambrano said. "Whatever happens, I don't want to know [anything] about a contract during the season. I want to sign with the Cubs before the season starts. If they don't sign me, sorry, but I must go. That's what Carlos Zambrano thinks."

"When you're a great pitcher and have talent, you deserve the money no matter who gives it to you," he said. "Zito is a great pitcher. Good for him he has that contract, and I think that will help me. Jim [Hendry] spent a lot of money. I hope he has more for 'Big Z.'"

For the record, everyone on the YCS staff (even Cubs haters Nate and I) think the Cubs need to resign 'Big Z.' He's the best pitcher they have, and dude needs his paper.

However, resorting to the third person is hilarious.

*HT Deadspin for the story.

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Spin Zone

From the usually good Todd Rosiak of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Wednesday's Marquette-DePaul game.

"The Blue Demons are coming off an exciting 67-66 victory over Notre Dame in
which sophomore forward Wilson Chandler went off for 25 points and 14 rebounds. The Golden Eagles are 1-2 in their last three games against DePaul
at Allstate Arena, with an 82-79 victory coming last season."

Alright. Fine. We're trying to create drama. Marquette going on the road, and it's true, tomorrow night will be a challenge, but no more so than any other road game (Of which Marquette is 5-2 this season, 7-2 away from the Bradley Center.....see how I spun the stats right there to say something the complete opposite of what Rosiak is trying to say?)

And yes, Marquette is 1-2 in their last three trips to the Allstate. However, this ignores the fact that Marquette has gone 32-4 in their last 36 meetings with DePaul, and since the 2000-01 season, MU has gone 4-2 at the Allstate. Funny what omission does to statistics.

OK, maybe you can't use long-term stats for college sports because players graduate and teams turn over (I think you can on some level because it speaks to the recruiting capabilities and infrastructure of the coaching staff and athletic department, which in college sports seems to be half the battle.)

But taking Rosiak's assumption that you can only go back a few years (hence the inclusion of the 2004 loss, but not the Marquette victories that preceded it), and only those recent results are relevant, then he would have noticed that no players on the 2003-04 team (whose loss he cites) are still on the Marquette roster. Likewise only two current DePaul players (Sammy Mejia and Marcus Heard) played in that game for DePaul.

Likewise, Ousmane Barro is the only Marquette holdover from the 2005 loss, where he played 9 minutes. 5 DePaul players remain from the 2005 game.

I guess I expected more from Rosiak. Either all the recent results are valid, or only the ones with some semblance of the current roster are valid.

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Housekeeping!

For you regulars (and for the rest of you on the staff whom I haven't bothered telling yet), the URL
yellow-chair-sports.com now redirects to this blog. That's right--no more typing "blogspot"!

So really, this will only affect you the next time you sit at a foreign computer where YCS is not your homepage and the only site in your "favorites."

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"How the heck do you a fire a guy who went 14-2 last year?!"

You say, "Hey Marty--Good season and all, but yeah, we still don't like you. So get out; you're fired." Or something like that.
In a way, it's refreshing to see an NFL team making a coaching change independent of team record. It may not seem fair to fire a guy whose team had the best record in the league. But that's exactly the point--his team had the 14-2 record. How much positive influence Schottenheimer had toward that end is not necessarily a reflection of the record itself.

And so his bosses realized this. And they fired him for personality conflicts, a reason far more valid than the one that fells 90% of NFL coaches, that being "We had a bad record and needed a scapegoat." It's also far more reasonable than the explanation many will no doubt suspect or will use to justify the firing--the "couldn't win the big game" criticism. But I appreciate that Chargers' president Dean Spanos didn't stoop to this excuse because he very well could have.

Instead, team management owned up to its dysfunction, an honesty rarely seen in sports or in any business for that matter. There was no cut-and-dry, "let's make Marty look like the bad guy" brush-off but rather an admission that, hey, we just couldn't get along.

I'm sure a lot of analysts will jump on this decision and call it crazy, but I think that would be shortsighted. This isn't the first time Schottenheimer has been fired, and--if recent hiring trends hold true--it won't be his last. Hey, maybe someday he'll supplant his old coordinator Wade Phillips in Dallas and then be replaced by Norv Turner. Either way, being 14-2 this year didn't magically correct whatever personality flaws hurt Marty in the past.

Sometimes coaching changes seem unfair, but when so many people of roughly equal ability are gunning so hard for a very small number of positions, high turnover is inevitable. People get fired. And get fired often. And the decision is never 100% the right one. Except when it's the Cardinals, and they fire Dennis Green. I don't see how anyone could quibble with that.

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In other words, "This is the first time that even ESPN couldn't rank Duke."

I know it's commonly known as "The Coaches Poll", But I had to laugh when I read this sentence. "This marks the first time in the history of the ESPN/USA Today poll that Duke has not been ranked."

So either A) Duke has always been ranked, perhaps even when they didn't deserve to be so, but people gave them the benefit of the doubt. ESPN's presentation of this poll combined with their mega-boner for Duke (18 of their first 25 games this season were televised on one of the ABC/ESPN/Disney networks) makes this historical first omission all the more glaring.

or B) ESPN is charting the first time something has happened since they took over the coaches poll in 2002 as "The history." 4 1/2 seasons. Some history. That's almost like saying "This is the first time in Lovie Smith's head coaching tenure that the Bears have gone to the Super Bowl."

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For the love of God, I just wanna watch Joe Johnson for once! Is that too much to ask?

While ESPN/ABCDisney was all up its own ass the last two days about its star-studded Sunday afternoon of NBA action, most of us--I think--were rather unimpressed.

ESPN hyped the doubleheader as--holy crap!--four of the biggest stars playing on the same network in one day. Wow. Nothing like that has ever happened. And if not for the grace of God (read: made-for-TV scheduling), we'd have never been so privileged. We'd have never gotten to see the four most overexposed stars in the league play on national TV. Uh-gain.

As far as I'm concerned, the redundancy of teams and matchups in marquee games is as crappy for the league as it is for the fan. I realize that superstars tend to boost the appeal of a professional sports league tremendously, but I don't think that fans need to hear the St. Dwyane routine every week to realize D-Wade is a good player. Nor should we be robbed of appearances by players of equal merit that don't play for the defending champ.

It's the same thing that's gone on forever with national broadcasts. The NBA's current star power unfortunately has brought us back to the '90s when it was "Sunday on NBC--Michael and Bulls take on Ewing and the Knicks, followed by Hakeem and the Rockets versus O'Neal and the Magic! And next week--O'Neal and the Magic face Michael and the Bulls followed by Hakeem and the Rockets versus Ewing and the Knicks! Here on NBC! [John Tesh music.]"

We get the same thing, of course, in other sports, be it the Red Sox-Yankees and Giants-Dodgers five times a year on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball or Duke versus whomever every Wednesday night.

If athletes--particularly NBA players--are so motivated by the limelight, as the common perception holds, wouldn't the league prosper from sharing this limelight among more stars? Today two of the league's most intriguing stars, Gilbert Arenas and Zach Randolph, were playing head-to-head in a game with an excellent side plot (Arenas's misguided bitterness about his Team USA snub). Granted, it was a horrible game in hindsight, but the TV exec with foresight would have seen that pot of gold (Wizard's jerseys) a mile away. But no dice. Just more Duncan, Kobe, and LeBron.

I don't just have a problem with the repetition. I also dislike the distortion of public perception it creates. Is Wade really that much better than Joe Johnson? Or Duncan compared to Pau Gasol? Were Michael and Magic really that much better than Bernard King and Alex English?

Remember--Phil Rizzuto is in the Hall of Fame, and Bert Blyleven is not. And that's really what this post is all about.

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