Bleacher Report - Articles by Craig Meyer

Final Chapter to a Sorry Saga for Binghamton Basketball

Craig Meyer — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:27:57 -0400

By in large, the basketball teams that comprise the America East Conference aren’t the ones typically associated with the pageantry and lore that come with major college basketball programs.

I wouldn’t go as far as former Vermont head coach and current ESPN analyst Tom Brennan did when he referred to the conference as a sort of “mom-and-pop shop” operation, but I think we can all agree on the fact that no team in the America East will vie for blue chip recruits or make a run to the Final Four here anytime soon.

With this in mind, America East teams have certain expectations that, if met, can be barometers of success for a given program. Traditionally, these are things like graduation rates, well-rounded student-athletes, and maybe a conference championship here or there.

Since only a small percentage of America East players go on to play professionally, the emphasis on academics and character is valued very highly in the conference’s member schools.

Sure, every America East team wants that coveted spot in the NCAA Tournament, but for the longest time, it was understood among the conference’s athletic departments that the values of scholarship and integrity could not be compromised in order to achieve that kind of success. You want to win? Then do it the right way.

However, in a matter of a couple of years, many of these core values were abandoned by a single America East program: the Binghamton Bearcats.

Having just made the jump to Division-I athletics a few years ago, Binghamton was looking to build a flourishing athletic program at a school widely considered to be the “crown jewel of the SUNY system,” and the way they saw fit to accomplish this goal was through their basketball program.

In came a sparkling new arena and a renewed sense of optimism with the arrival of a new coach, Kevin Broadus. This was where the rise to prominence began, but also where any sense of reason or proper judgment got derailed.

Broadus began to stockpile problematic players with dubious backgrounds: transfers with serious academic issues, recruits with police records, and virtually anything in between. Rather predictably, the environment that Broadus fostered with his basketball program began to clash with the long-established culture at a school that prided itself on academics above all else.

Embarrassing scandals ranging from bar fights to condom theft and assault involving Bearcat basketball players began to make front-page news. Yet, despite all of this, the team was winning and the vision of Binghamton becoming an athletic force was fully realized with an America East basketball championship last season.

This past week, though, all of the shortcuts that Binghamton took to achieve this success came back to haunt them in the form of one of their star players, Tiki Mayben, who was arrested for distributing crack cocaine.

Mayben’s arrest has set off a media firestorm that compelled Broadus to release six players from the team for conduct detrimental to the school and the program. Among them are Mayben, D.J. Rivera (Binghamton’s star player), Malik Alvin (the condom thief), Corey Chandler, Paul Crosby and David Fine.

The release of these players seems to be an indication by Binghamton that it understands what it has done wrong and that it has now cut loose the damaging elements that tainted the program.

While these bothersome players certainly played a hand in this current mess, Binghamton (at this point at least) has failed to hold all those who oversaw and orchestrated these pitfalls accountable.

It has to begin at the very top with the athletic director, Joel Thirer. He is the one responsible for hiring Broadus, for allowing all of those troublesome players to enter the program and become representatives of the school. Anyone who keeps up with America East hoops knows that the Mayben drug bust has been far from the only incident that has plagued this program.

Once scandals like that become a widespread and reoccurring phenomenon, you begin to realize that there is an institutional lack of control within the athletic department and the finger can be pointed squarely at Joel Thirer. Merely from his missteps as an AD, Thirer has taken a proud university and turned it into a national laughingstock—he has to go.

The other individual who has to be put under the microscope is Broadus. After all, he was the one who essentially brought in this “win at all costs” mentality when he took in players like Mayben, Alvin and Rivera, the types of people who were cut loose by programs that had the sense to realize that their talent could not compensate for their moral shortcomings.

For the longest time, Broadus rationalized his decisions to bring in these players as a benevolent act of giving them a second chance. He came from Georgetown, a program known for bringing in malcontents and giving them a chance at redemption, a strategy implemented under the close watch of John Thompson a few decades ago.

Giving underprivileged and misunderstood kids another shot sounds great in principle and for Thompson it worked because he not only helped his players develop on the court, but he also cared tremendously for his players and instilled in them a sense of discipline that helped many of them graduate from one of the top universities in the nation.

But Broadus hasn’t proven himself to be a fraction of the man that Thompson was as a coach, evidenced by such a startling number of arrested players in such a short period of time.

The fact that these wrongdoings have continued to persist shows that Broadus has had no genuine intention of helping his players reform themselves, but has rather exploited them to win games and chosen to ignore their criminal behavior—he, too, has to be let go.

Some may think that right now is not the right time to clean house, what with it being the middle of the fall sports slate, but at some point precedence has to be given to tearing down a house that was built on a faulty foundation in order for a respectable Binghamton athletic department to begin the rebuilding process.

What is now left is a program in shambles, one that is probably not as bad as Binghamton was when they made the jump to Division I, but at least then they had their dignity intact.

It’s a sad situation in so many ways, whether it’s for the conference as a whole, for the school and even for the Binghamton fans who placed their trust in the hands of individuals with jaded intentions.

The question has to be asked whether all of this legal trouble, bad publicity and outright embarrassment was worth a blowout loss to Duke in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, but it will probably remain as nothing more than one of many unanswered questions in a sorry saga for Binghamton University and the America East Conference that has come to an abrupt end.

Why Duke-North Carolina Isn't Necessarily the Best College Hoops Rivalry

Craig Meyer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:50:43 -0400

As sports fans, we are presented with certain things that are inalienable and sacred truths, especially in the modern age of media where every facet of any sport is manifested into some sort of ranking or list.

A lot of us have been told since we can remember following baseball that the 1927 Yankees boasted the best lineup of all-time, appropriately dubbed "Murderer's Row."

Commemorative specials and documentaries have served as a sort of confirmation to the fact that the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Colts and Giants was the greatest game ever played in the history of football.

And as far as upsets are concerned, nothing can top the U.S Olympic Hockey Team's paramount win over the U.S.S.R in the 1980 Winter Olympics, the so-called "Miracle on Ice."

Whether through basic repetition or prolonged exposure to these widespread opinions that have subsequently been deemed as undeniable fact, these talking points become something that we resign ourselves to as being matters that are beyond debate.

One of these assertions is that the rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the best in all of college basketball, and that to believe otherwise is nothing more than unjustified babble.

Any sort of discussion that revolves around the best rivalries in college hoops are usually pretty brief ones, beginning and ending with Duke and Carolina. It's something that negates many other great adversaries, but for the sake of emphasis and brevity, who can really complain?

After all, no other contests in college sports receive the same level of coverage and media attention that Duke and UNC do, with talking heads rambling on and on about the merits and intensity of this rivalry, coming off with a teary-eyed sense of nostalgia that you would think would warrant the music of a Disney orchestra playing in the background.

We all hear about how these two schools have been battling since 1920, making it one of the oldest in the country. Everyone finds a way to bring up the fact that the schools are separated by a mere eight miles.

The images of Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Roy Williams, Christian Laettner, Grant Hill, and Tyler Hansbrough are molded into montages harkening back to past glory and triumph that seeps through the minds of every college basketball fan.

The rivalry even has none other than "The Worldwide Leader In Sports" in its proverbial corner, with the tremendous influence of ESPN taking this rivalry to even greater heights. You'll see ESPN crews and cameras at every matchup between the two schools, flocking to the campuses as if they'd just been told that there were new developments in the Brett Favre saga.

On live TV, you can see Dick Vitale, red-faced and screaming with prepubescent giddiness, pimping clashes between Duke and Carolina as the greatest thing since the invention of electricity, and flatly stating that it is the best rivalry in all of sport.

With all of this seemingly overwhelming evidence supporting the Duke-UNC rivalry as the best in college basketball, one would be led to believe that disagreeing with this notion could only come from someone who is mentally ill.

Well then check count me among those who don't think of the rivalry that way, and proudly so, because I respectfully disagree.

This opinion of mine doesn't mean that I regard the Duke-North Carolina rivalry as nothing more than an over-hyped, over-analyzed match between two schools that I could honestly care less about. But it also doesn't mean that my belief should be rendered useless and treated as some sort of cardinal sin because I don't happen to agree with a majority of the punditry.

The fact remains that amidst this love affair between college basketball fans and media with this rivalry, there are some striking realities that work against the thought of Duke and Carolina being the unquestionable best.

For starters, the two schools play in the same conference, something many people see as a strength of the rivalry, but I see as a weakness.

While being in the ACC means that the schools have a commonality with regards to opponents played and geographic proximity, it also means that the two schools have to play each other twice a year.

Gone with that additional matchup are the notions of "one game deciding it all", and in some years, the presence of bragging rights. After all, what happens if the two schools split the season series? Who gets to be deemed as the superior squad?

Some will point to the ACC Tournament Championship Game as a way to break the deadlock, but Duke and UNC have only met in that game once this decade, and only three times in the past 15 years, leaving a lot of people scratching their heads as to who has the upper hand, year after year.

Another reason that this rivalry is as vaunted as it is, is because of what people perceive as gaping fundamental and institutional differences between the two schools. In short, Duke is seen as the snooty private school with the overflowing endowment, while North Carolina is the state school, the champion of the common people.

These alleged vast contrasts between the two schools are a major reason why the rivalry is viewed as the epic showdown that it is today.

But in all honesty, looking past all these labels and preconceived notions, how different are Duke and North Carolina? From this question comes a resounding answer: not that much.

The public versus private debate brings up a wide variety of topics that deserve credence and consideration, many of which deal with the discrepancies between publicly and privately funded entities.

A crucial barometer with regards to this rivalry has to be the athletic budgets of these two athletic departments. According to the US Department of Education, Duke has an athletic budget of $67.8 million, while North Carolina (a state school, mind you) has a similar budget of $61.2 million.

Considering all of the chatter and focus given to the supposed differences between Duke and Carolina with the schools' funding, it is all rendered relatively moot after the examination of strikingly similar athletic budgets.

From a more petty standpoint, the idea of Duke being the stuck-up private school is a commonly presented one, with UNC being routinely presented as its foil, a perfect match for a premier rivalry.

We always hear of the insufferable arrogance of Blue Devil fans, pointing out the fact that their school is the more prestigious academic institution, and that regardless of how their basketball team may perform against the Tar Heels, they have the superior education and intellect.

However, North Carolina prides itself on the fact that it not only is a top-tier university, but it gives itself the title of a "Public Ivy", giving off the impression that it sees itself as much better than "run-of-the-mill" state schools, essentially doing the same thing to other public schools that Duke supposedly does to it.

It begs to ask the question of not who is the snobby private school and who is the disrespected, down-trodden state school, but which school and fan base has its nose hoisted higher in the air?

I don't bring up these things that I see as flaws of a storied rivalry merely for the sake of being a ruthless skeptic with no convictions of his own, but rather because I happen to believe that draped behind this lore of Duke and North Carolina is a rivalry that I view as the best in college basketball.

The rivalry that I'm speaking of is between Louisville and Kentucky.

Granted, I've lived a good majority of my life in Louisville, which is something some people may perceive as inherent bias, but it's given me a glimpse at the inner workings of this intense rivalry and what truly makes these two schools and basketball teams hate each other the way that they do.

For starters, like Duke and North Carolina, the rivalry pits two of college basketball's most storied programs. Between the two schools, there are a combined nine national championships, one more than Duke and UNC have between the two of them.

The Cardinals and Wildcats possess a similarly impressive cast of legendary characters as the Tar Heels and Blue Devils, featuring Adolph Rupp, Pat Riley, Louie Dampier, Dan Issel, Antoine Walker, Joe B. Hall, Rick Pitino and Tayshaun Prince for Kentucky, as well as Denny Crum, Darrell Griffith, Pervis Ellison, Wes Unseld, Derek Smith, Terrence Williams, and Pitino (more on that later) for Louisville.

The Battle for the Bluegrass does not have the tradition and long history of games that Duke and UNC do, with a big reason for that being that the rivalry was dormant before 1983 due to Rupp's refusal to play Louisville for reasons that have been widely speculated, but remain largely unknown.

Decades and decades of not playing one another do hurt the overall scope of the rivalry in a sense, but it does serve as some sort of anecdotal evidence to the depth of the hatred between these two schools.

Unlike Duke and North Carolina, Louisville and Kentucky only play each other once a year, something that not only makes the game that much more intense, but also gives undeniable bragging rights to the winning team for the whole year, even in a season like 1997 when the Wildcats won the National Championship, but lost to the Cardinals 79-76 in the regular season (if you want to take it that far).

Each fan base represents entirely different demographic groups, with Louisville fans chastising Kentucky fans for what they pride themselves for and stand by, with Kentucky fans doing likewise to Louisville fans.

These issues and debates extend far beyond the basketball court, with the two fan bases arguing on social and political matters revolving around the rivalry, with race being at the forefront.

Many Louisville fans point to the fact that not only was Rupp a well-documented racist, but that his prejudice fueled him in his recruiting efforts as well as his refusal to schedule games against Louisville. Kentucky fans and backers refute these claims, and are steadfast in their belief that Rupp was not a racist, just a college basketball coaching legend.

Both Louisville and Kentucky are public schools, but there exists a considerable gap in their athletic budgets, with Kentucky's at $71.2 million and Louisville's at $50.8 million, one difference of many between these two schools and programs.

The already heated rivalry spiked even greater when, in what many Wildcats fans see as a Benedict Arnold sort of act of betrayal, Rick Pitino, who had coached Kentucky for eight successful seasons, accepted the job at Louisville in 2001, after stepping down as the head coach of the Boston Celtics.

Pitino's decision to take the Cardinals job still looms large as a point of contention and has managed to find a way to increase the animosity between these two passionate fan bases and programs.

If the point that I'm trying to make with Louisville and Kentucky's rivalry doesn't come through clearly enough, what I want readers to understand is that the talk of top rivals in any sport shouldn't be so limited.

The conversation doesn't even end with Louisville and Kentucky when talking about other great rivalries that don't get the publicity of Duke and North Carolina; Xavier and Cincinnati share a heated in-city rivalry; Indiana and Purdue have been going at it for years, as well as the rivalries of Syracuse and Georgetown, Kansas and Missouri, and Philadelphia's famed Big Five.

This assertion of mine may stem from the fact that it is so hard to try to rank and place entities that are as abstract and unquantifiable as the passion and intensity that you find in rivalries.

If anything, I hope that this article can lead people to think and question. Sports may seem like a trivial matter to some, but the basic principles that revolve around the debate and conversation in sports are the same that you'll find anywhere.

No matter what aspect of life is being discussed, it is dangerous to just presume that an opinion should exist as a basic truth that is beyond any sort of questioning.

Dissension and critical questioning were key foundations of the founding of this nation, and are necessary elements to a successful government, society, group, or individual mind.

Is Duke-North Carolina rivalry one of the best in college basketball? Absolutely. But the best? Maybe for one person it is, but for the next person, it isn't. Just because figures like Vitale and Billy Packer think something to be so, it doesn't mean that it is.

When enough people believe in an opinion it gains merit, but in the case of something like the Duke-UNC rivalry, it should never be solidified as undeniable fact, especially in an age of college basketball when so many other great rivalries thrill and electrify fans, even for those who are miles and miles away from Tobacco Road.

The Curious Case of Sebastian Telfair: From NYC Phenom to NBA Bust

Craig Meyer — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:38:47 -0400

"Watch Me Now."

It was a headline that came off as something much more, along the lines of a statement or proclamation, boldly placed on the cover of the most well-known and widely-read sports magazine in the world.

On the cover was not an NBA superstar, an imposing NFL middle linebacker, or even a standout collegiate athlete. What it was was a high school senior, a legend in some circles who already had the basketball world buzzing about his playmaking ability, and his acumen and comfort with the game that was usually only exhibited by the NBA's best players.

That skill and the growing lore about his game molded him into a Sports Illustrated cover boy, tenderly grasping a ball while leaping over the Coney Island Pier and surrounding skyline, all at the tender age of 18.

His name was Sebastian Telfair and he was poised to become the next big thing in the NBA and in the game of basketball itself.

His story began as a familiar and oft-repeated one, growing up as an underprivileged youth in the rough-and-tumble Brooklyn housing projects. The unfortunate circumstances that Telfair and his family found themselves in fueled a desire for him to make something of himself, and his means of escaping poverty were found in a game he used as a circumvention from his daily life: basketball.

Telfair honed his game on New York City's famed playgrounds, and quickly developed into not only a schoolyard legend, but also a phenom whose reputation was beginning to expand far beyond the Big Apple.

He led his Lincoln High School team to multiple PSAL city titles, and ultimately became the all-time career points leader in New York high school basketball history (a record that was recently surpassed by another Lincoln product, Lance Stephenson).

To many, it seemed like Telfair was living a life similar to that of the fictional Jesus Shuttlesworth in the movie "He Got Game", only this was happening in real life before our very eyes.

Celebrity status soon followed, as stars like Derek Jeter and Jay-Z began showing up in high school gyms just to watch Telfair play. During his senior year of high school in 2003, Telfair was followed around by a film crew that was working on a documentary that was released a few years later, titled "Through the Fire".

The film documented the trials and tribulations of Telfair's rising star, and was centered on his looming decision as to whether to follow his college commitment and play for Rick Pitino at Louisville, or to test the waters and enter the NBA Draft.

For months, many people figured Telfair would stick to his commitment and spend maybe a year or two in college, but Telfair's tone soon began to change. A murder that happened down the hall from his family's residence in their housing complex began to make him think that for the health and welfare of his family, it may be for the best that he begin collecting NBA paychecks as soon as possible.

In the end, Sebastian accepted a lucrative shoe contract from Adidas and subsequently opted to skip college and enter the NBA Draft.

After all of the workouts and team visits, the Portland Trailblazers decided to take a chance on the high school wonder, selecting Telfair with the 13th overall pick of the 2004 NBA Draft.

Few would have considered at the time of the pick that Draft Night would have been the highlight of Telfair's career at this point five years later.

Given the gift of hindsight that we as sports fan possess, we have seen Telfair's professional career morph into what it has become, which has quite frankly been nothing more than a disappointment, especially given the umbrella of hype that he entered the league under.

Telfair ended up spending only two years with Portland, posting unimpressive numbers in points and assists, and shooting an embarrassingly-low percentage from the field. At the end of this two-year period, the Blazers effectively gave up on Telfair and shipped him to Boston in a trade.

His averages dropped in his lone season with the Celtics, as he was buried on the bench on a squad that at that time was one of the worst in the NBA.

In the following offseason, Telfair was one of many pieces in the blockbuster Kevin Garnett trade, bringing Telfair to a rebuilding Timberwolves franchise. He put forth two lackluster seasons in Minnesota, and about a month ago, was sent to the Los Angeles Clippers, which for those of you keeping score at home is his fourth team in his six-year career.

Telfair's troubles since leaving high school have extended beyond the basketball court. In April 2007, after being pulled over for driving 77 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, it was discovered that in addition to having a suspended Florida license, the police found a loaded .45 caliber handgun under the passenger's seat of Telfair's car. He pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon the following year and was suspended three games by the NBA for his actions.

Experts, pundits, and talking heads have gone in depth to examine what has caused this supposed downfall, and many have put forth different theories, each of which raises interesting and legitimate points.

Many of these opinions stem from Telfair's decision to forego a college career to make an attempt at some sort of instant gratification in the NBA.

Coming out of high school, Telfair possessed immense skill and put forth highlight reel quality play, but he was widely considered to be a mediocre outside shooter.

His size and physical stature were also points of concern before he entered the league. At 6' in height and weighing in at 170, Telfair was small even for a typical NBA point guard. Jumping to the NBA straight from high school only compounded this shortcoming. It was one thing for a bigger player like a Garnett or a Dwight Howard to make that sort of quantum leap, but it was something else entirely for an undersized point guard with a weak jump shot to attempt the same thing (uncharted waters, if you may).

With his decision to enter the NBA Draft, Telfair also stripped himself of the opportunity to play college basketball. In the years since David Stern's age limit for players entering the draft, many top prospects who become "one and done" college players have looked upon their time in the collegiate ranks as a crucial component to their development as players.

Many believe that Telfair would have undoubtedly benefited from a year of guidance and instruction under Pitino at Louisville, and would have gained further national exposure, playing on a talented team that (even without Telfair on board) reached the Final Four in 2005.

Even a single year in college may have been enough of a lesson in maturity for Telfair, as his multiple arrests are a model of sorts as to what can happen when you give millions upon millions of dollars to teenage boys, many of whom have not only been poor for most of their lives, but have also never lived on their own without the surveillance of parents and teachers.

Some of this judgment may seem premature to pass on Telfair—he is only 24 years old and still has some potentially career-changing years ahead of him. However, the fact remains that players typically have shown what they are capable of producing within their first four or five years in the league (regardless of their age), so barring some sort of unprecedented improvement, Telfair will continue to underachieve and do nothing to make the basketball community stop viewing him as a career backup at best.

What could very well happen for Telfair is this: he can henceforth serve as an anecdote to young, undersized, and mentally raw players who are in limbo as to whether they should make the jump to the pro ranks. These young talents can see his missteps, poor decisions, and lack of judgment as evidence as to why there is tangible proof to take advantage of time in college as a key period of player development, as well as a chance to acquire some much-needed emotional maturity.

The potential and promise of greatness that were embodied for Telfair in that Sports Illustrated cover have withered away and virtually disappeared in a matter of only a few years, undone by a series of poor choices and faulty handling.

Indeed, we have all watched Sebastian Telfair, but we have not borne witness to the next great NBA point guard, but rather a misguided youth who will be forever burdened as being labeled as an NBA bust and a cautionary tale.

College Basketball's Top 25 Programs of the Last Decade

Craig Meyer — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:04:15 -0400

With the completion of the 2008-2009 college basketball season, we have seen a champion of the sport crowned in every year this decade, a ten year span that has now come to a close. In each and every decade of the past, we have seen the grace and dominance from an array of players, coaches, teams, and elite programs, all of which serve as a sort of time capsule that works to define that period of time. The new millenium (or do we call it the 2000's?) has proven to be no exception, as college basketball fans have been treated to some spectacular play from some excellent players, seen some all-time great teams, and have witnessed fantastic coaches work to build their legend and elevate their place in the game's history. Keeping this in mind, what I have decided to do is do a Top 25 poll of sorts, and rank the college basketball programs based on their accomplishments this decade, beginning with the 1999-2000 season, and taking into account vital barometers of a program's success in order to determine who really has been the best these past ten years. Note: All of the stats that appear in each slide for every team are just from this decade (winning percentage, NCAA Tournament appearances, etc.)

Begin Slideshow

A Tale of Patience and Perseverance: The Rich Brooks Saga at Kentucky

Craig Meyer — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:26:08 -0400

Throughout time, big time athletics have been a young man's game. The people who compete in the highest levels of sport are young enough to be in the physical prime of their life, and have yet to be hampered with the wear and tear that plague athletes as they become victims of time.

While it may seem obvious that the people who play in the games that we watch aren't collecting social security money, there has been a widespread youth movement with regards to coaches and personnel in professional and college sports alike.

College football has been no exception to this emerging trend, as the average age of a Division I football coach has dropped considerably over the past few years.

Sure there are the coaching luminaries like Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden who have been at their schools for decades and have some advanced mileage, but it doesn't take a thorough investigation to see the direction that a lot of successful football programs want to head in.

Urban Meyer, the Florida head coach whose teams have accounted for two of the last three National Champions, is 45 years old, a pretty young age especially when you consider all of his accomplishments at this stage in his career.

Earlier this year, Tennessee turned to 34-year-old Lane Kiffin to take the reigns of its storied football program.

Even a man like Pete Carroll, who is 57 years old, would make you think he is twenty years younger than he really is with his unparalleled enthusiasm, irresistible charisma, and constant Twitter updates.

This "out with the old, in with the new" mindset has become prevalent in college football, virtually to the point where it could be considered the norm.

With all of this information in mind, it would probably come as a surprise to most people that there still manages to be a place in college football for a man like Rich Brooks.

Brooks is hardly cut from the same cloth as the aforementioned likes of Meyer and Kiffin, and he doesn't come close to fitting the profile of what most athletic directors and boosters look for when they're trying to find someone to head a struggling program.

This made the University of Kentucky's decision to hire Brooks back in 2003 all the more astonishing. For months and months, there had been widespread speculation that Kentucky would bring in a household name or a coach of that ilk to come in and try to make the Wildcats a viable competitor in the rough and tumble SEC.

The name of Doug Williams, the former Grambling State coach and Super Bowl XXII MVP (who at the time was a personnel executive for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers), had been floated about, as had many other high-profile football figures.

The gossip and persistent whispers reached a climax when it was reported that Kentucky was courting Bill Parcells, who at the time was retired and out of coaching.

The prospect of bringing in such prominent figures seemed so spell-binding and surreal for Kentucky fans at the time, that disappointment inevitably set in when AD Mitch Barnhart announced that the school had chosen to go with Brooks.

There was no argument that Brooks has an impressive resume. He was largely credited with having revived Oregon's football program, where his 17 year stay with the Ducks yielded four bowl appearances, the school's first conference title in 100 years, and a berth in the 1994 Rose Bowl. He even had NFL coaching experience, both as the head coach of the St. Louis Rams and as a defensive coordinator for the Atlanta Falcons.

Despite this admirable track record, Kentucky fans were very weary of Brooks' hiring, and controversy subsequently ensued. The disappointment that afflicted many Wildcat football fans with missing out on Parcells and Williams transformed into anger, and Brooks soon became the victim of considerable criticism before he had even coached a game.

Many griped that he had been away from the game for too long, having not had a coaching job of any capacity since his stint with the Falcons that ended in 2000.

Others pointed to his age, believing that a man who at the time was already 62 years old was not equipped to guide a program that was coming off of NCAA probation (for infractions committed under previous coach Hal Mumme).

Building off of the age concern, many other fans and pundits felt that Brooks was out of touch with the modern age of college football, and that his personality and emphasis on fundamentals would not mesh well with today's players.

In Brooks' first three years on the job at Kentucky, his teams didn't do much to prove his doubters wrong, going 9-25 and 4-20 in SEC play in this three year span.

Amidst this lack of success, Brooks became a victim of another reality of the contemporary college football landscape: a general lack of institutional patience from fans, media, alumni, and boosters.

The very same detractors who had been in opposition to Brooks' hiring in the first place were now the ones passionately calling for the university to oust him and head in a new, different direction. They felt that the decision to go with Brooks was inherently flawed, and fans, bloggers, columnists, and sports radio shows all felt that it was time to pull the plug on what seemed like a failed experiment.

Barnhart, however, did not give in to the demands for Brooks to be fired, and stood firmly by the man who he chose to rebuild Kentucky football.

Brooks entered his fourth year with his status as the Wildcats coach widely questioned and debated. The season got off to a slow start for Brooks and his team, but as the year went on, Brooks began to show the college football world what made him into such a successful coach.

Kentucky finished the regular season at 7-5, and defeated Clemson in the Music City Bowl for the school's first bowl victory since 1984.

The following year, with the help of star quarterback Andre Woodson, Brooks led Kentucky to another 7-5 mark, highlighted by a win over the eventual National Champion, LSU, and a No. 8 ranking in the polls in the sixth week of the season. The Wildcats again went to the Music City Bowl, where they beat Florida State to win a bowl game for the second consecutive season.

Perhaps the most impressive season for Kentucky under Brooks came last year when a team starting new players at several key positions went 6-6 and knocked off East Carolina in the Liberty Bowl for the Wildcats' third consecutive bowl win.

Kentucky's swift change from a probation-plagued program in the perpetual shadow of Wildcat basketball to a respectable SEC program coming off of three straight bowl victories is truly nothing short of remarkable.

But the fashion in which Brooks has gone about all of this change and achieved all of this success has perhaps been even more astounding.

Brooks has proven his critics wrong by demonstrating that his coaching style is still relevant in the modern game. He has never had the most talented teams, especially compared to other star-studded SEC squads, but he makes the most of what he has, and puts forth fundamentally sound teams that do all of the little intricacies of the game right, day in and day out.

His successful implementation of his coaching philosophy has produced a series of talented, high character players like Woodson, Keenan Burton, Jacob Tamme, and Wesley Woodyard, who have not only gone on to the NFL, but were also critical components in helping elevate the stature of Kentucky football.

Through patience and diligence, great success can be achieved, even if the odds and rampant criticisms at times seem insurmountable, and nobody can testify to that more than Barnhart and the Kentucky administration who have seen the continual lean years of their football program mature into a successful product under the watch of the man that they believed in all along.

Brooks' tenure should serve as a model for any college football fan, media member, or athletic director that the importance of fundamentals, team-oriented football, and the ability to run a clean program should never be undermined no matter how the dynamics of college athletics may change.

The Perpetual Struggles of Five MLB Teams Wondering If Next Year Will Ever Come

Craig Meyer — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:58:04 -0400

In the midst of the All-Star Break and with the MLB trade deadline fast approaching, baseball fans are given time to look back at the first half of the season.

At this point, we can all begin to reasonably determine which teams are in contention for the playoffs and may have a shot at a World Series title.

But on the other hand, we can also weed out the teams that have stumbled their way through the season and will have better luck stockpiling and reloading for the years ahead.

While high-payroll teams like the Yankees and Red Sox tend to be in the playoff hunt year in and year out, a substantial number of teams fall into the latter category.

In some cases, certain teams have been in rebuilding mode for the greater part of the decade, having been unable to crack a winning record season after season. It may seem hard to believe, but there are currently five MLB franchises that have not finished with a winning record in the past five seasons.

What I will try to do is examine each of these teams and review what got them to where they are today. But I will also offer reasons to hope that these five franchises can not only do better in the win column, but maybe even make the playoffs someday as well.

Case No. 1: The Washington Nationals/Montreal Expos

Last Year at .500 or Better: 2003

At the moment, the Nationals are the laughingstock of MLB, with a league-worst 26-61 record entering the All-Star Break. Although this is a historic low for the franchise, things weren't really much better before this year, seeing as the last time that the Nationals finished above .500, the team was playing north of the border.

In hindsight, it's pretty surprising that the Expos even finished above .500 in 2003. At the time, the team was owned by the league and was effectively forced out of the wild card race because ownership could not afford to call up top minor league players for their expanded September roster.

Futility on the field and shamefully low attendance (crowds at Montreal's Olympic Stadium averaged around 10,000 a game in the Expos' final years) forced the franchise to move to Washington, where the on-field product has been no better, due in large part to inept front office management.

High-priced players like Vladimir Guerrero, Javier Vazquez, and Livan Hernandez were unloaded years ago in widespread salary dumps, and rebuilding efforts haven't yielded many results thus far.

Deposed GM Jim Bowden acquired a glut of outfielders, causing a logjam of unproven, inexperienced players. The organization has not produced a quality group of pitchers either.

Things may seem bleak for the Nationals right now, but there is reason to believe that they can turn things around (at some point).

They have found a young star in Ryan Zimmerman to try to build around, they play in a gorgeous (albeit fairly empty) new ballpark, and the new management has made some good moves, including the acquisition of Nyjer Morgan from the Pittsburgh Pirates (we'll get to that later).

All in all, though, don't expect to see much from the Nationals in the next few years, at the very least.

Projected Year When They Get Over the Hump: 2014

Case No. 2: The Kansas City Royals

Last Year at .500 or Better: 2003

It's pretty hard to believe that a little more than 20 years ago, the Royals won the World Series. The figure above may be a little misleading because the Royals' decline began long before 2003, a season in which the team drastically overachieved to reach an 83-79 mark.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Royals have been plagued by something that a lot of small-market teams have to deal with: not being able to sign and hold on to top players who would command high salaries in free agency.

Rather than paying All-Stars like Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Carlos Beltran, and David Cone, the Royals traded away these players for prospects before inevitably losing them to higher-payroll teams in free agency.

Some may point to the decline of the organization having been a byproduct of unsteady ownership since the death of Ewing Kauffman in 1993. Like many other teams highlighted in this article, consistency has been hard to achieve, as GMs and managers seem to stay no longer than a few years.

Despite being in fourth place in the AL Central at the All-Star Break, the Royals have given their fans some signs of hope for their future. They finished the 2008 season at 75-87, the Royals' best mark since 2003.

This year, they have seen their ace, Zack Greinke, mature into one of baseball's best pitchers. With a 10-5 record and a 2.12 ERA, he is one of the leading candidates for the AL Cy Young.

Joakim Soria has become one of the better closers in baseball, and even though his first stint in the major leagues wasn't very productive, third baseman Alex Gordon still has the potential to become a superstar.

Projected Year When They Get Over the Hump: 2011

Case No. 3: The Cincinnati Reds

Last Year at .500 or Better: 2000

The franchise known most fondly for their dominating run through the 1970s, with a superstar-laden cast and one of baseball's most famous monikers, the Big Red Machine, has fallen on hard times this decade.

The organization had a pretty good run through the 1990s, highlighted by the team's surprising run to the 1990 World Series title.

At the end of the decade, owner and self-professed Hitler apologist Marge Schott sold her stake of the team, and 1999 NL Manager of the Year Jack McKeon was fired after the Reds finished the 2000 season with an 85-77 record, the team's last season in which they finished over .500.

The Reds invested a lot of money at the beginning of the decade in high-priced players like Ken Griffey, Jr. and also gave lucrative extensions to Barry Larkin, Sean Casey, and Danny Graves. The team did this in large part to compensate for Schott's refusal to invest in the Reds' farm system, leaving the team very thin in talent.

With Griffey's numerous and extended stays on the disabled list, Larkin's retirement, and Casey's departure, the Reds chose to focus on building the team around a young nucleus of Adam Dunn, Ryan Freel, and Aaron Harang.

While the three of them (especially Dunn) have had relatively successful careers thus far, none of them was the kind of player that a championship club is built around.

Dunn has since been traded away, as were Griffey and Freel, with the once promising prospect of success for the Reds having dwindled in the wake of an eight-year string of losing seasons.

Under manager Dusty Baker, the Reds have now become a significantly younger team, with the help of a deep farm system that is widely regarded as being one of the best in baseball.

The building efforts are now predicated upon young arms Edinson Volquez and Johnny Cueto, as well as a slew of talented young position players, like first baseman Joey Votto, second baseman Brandon Phillips, and outfielders Jay Bruce and Chris Dickerson.

Right now, the Reds are a shade below .500 at 42-45, but they are in an NL Central without a dominant team, and their young nucleus will only continue to develop. Of the teams in this article, it looks like Cincinnati is the closest to achieving a winning record.

Projected Year When They Get Over the Hump: 2010

Case No. 4: The Baltimore Orioles

Last Year at .500 or Better: 1997

I guess you could say the recent misfortunes of this franchise can be attributed to Jeffrey Maier and that fateful night in October of 1996 when his now-famous fan interference incident very well could have cost the Orioles a trip to the World Series.

Since the playoff seasons of 1996 and 1997, the Orioles have been undergoing a slow and steady downturn that they have yet to rebound from.

A lot of the blame could understandably be placed on owner Peter Angelos, who has caused a lot of the turnover that the franchise has experienced, having gone through a long series of GMs and managers over the past 10 to 15 years.

For the longest time, the Orioles were the only professional baseball franchise in the Baltimore-Washington, DC area, but the addition of the Nationals in 2005 has cut into not only the franchise's fanbase, but the team's revenue as well.

The Orioles' longtime franchise player, Cal Ripken Jr., retired in 2001, and in the years following his retirement, Baltimore has been unable to fill the tremendous void that Ripken left.

The organization brought in several high-profile additions in this time, including Albert Belle, Sammy Sosa, and Miguel Tejada, but none of them was able to help build the Orioles into a championship contender in the brutal AL East.

All of those players have been unloaded, and Baltimore has spent the last few years attempting to rebuild around a group of talented young players.

Brian Roberts has been one of the more productive second basemen in the AL over the past four or five seasons, and outfielder Adam Jones has had a breakout year, emerging as one of the premier center fielders in the game. A little over a month ago, the Orioles called up catcher Matt Wieters, who some scouts have likened to Joe Mauer.

The pieces seem to be in place for the Orioles to compete, but it's hard to ascend in the standings in the AL East, so this team should be given a little more time.

Projected Year When They Get Over the Hump: 2011

Case No. 5: The Pittsburgh Pirates

Last Year at .500 or Better: 1992

By virtually all accounts, the Pittsburgh Pirates are the longest-suffering franchise in baseball, at least for this generation of fans. An organization with a storied history of World Series championships and Hall of Fame players (Honus Wagner, Bill Mazeroski, Roberto Clemente, and many others) has become nothing more than a punch line over the past 17 seasons.

Many people believe that it all began with Pittsburgh's heartbreaking loss in the 1992 NLCS to the Atlanta Braves, with a Pirates team loaded with star-studded talent, including players like Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Andy Van Slyke.

But following the 1992 season, Pirates management and then-manager Jim Leyland set out to rebuild the team for future success. Bonds left to sign a lucrative deal with the San Francisco Giants, and many of the team's other high-priced players were either shipped off or allowed to go elsewhere through free agency.

Many talented, young players have come through the Pirates' organization in this period of time, like Jason Kendall, Brian Giles, Aramis Ramirez, Oliver Perez, and Jason Bay, but ownership has appeared to be stingy.

The Pirates have become notorious for their large-scale salary dumps, shipping off emerging talent and on-the-cusp stars in exchange for packages of prospects, in a perpetual retooling mode that is designed to save the franchise money at the expense of success on the field.

This seemingly endless cycle of trades has disillusioned many Pirates fans, and understandably so, as they see the team's ownership as not being committed to fostering a successful product.

The trades have only intensified in the past couple of seasons. Last year at the trade deadline, the Pirates shipped outfielder Xavier Nady to the Yankees and sent Bay to Boston as a part of the blockbuster deal that sent Manny Ramirez to the Dodgers.

This season, Pittsburgh unloaded the team's star, Nate McLouth, to Atlanta in exchange for minor league players. In the past few weeks, outfielder Eric Hinske was traded to the Yankees, and Nyjer Morgan, an emerging star in the Pirates organization, was traded to Washington.

These trades can only help but make Pirates fans fantasize about an array of outfield combinations that would feature Nady, Bay, McLouth, and Morgan teamed up with rookie sensation Andrew McCutchen had the team remained intact these past few years.

The rebuilding continues in Pittsburgh, and it seems like in this case, the efforts are focused on building around the speedy McCutchen, who is a leading candidate for NL Rookie of the Year.

The Pirates have the fortune of a loyal fanbase and one of the best ballparks in the majors in PNC Park, but until ownership gives some tangible evidence that this next crop of talented Pirates players won't be traded away, fans may have to wait a while longer to see a winner.

Projected Year When They Get Over the Hump (assuming they don't trade away McCutchen and any other potential stars in the coming years): 2012

X's, O's, and Rick Pitino: Sizing Up the Big East Basketball Coaches

Craig Meyer — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:40:12 -0400

From its inception as a seven team league in 1979, the Big East has transformed into an entity that is widely regarded as the best college basketball conference in the country year in and year out. Throughout the league's existence, it has produced a staggering number of NBA stars, and has been home to teams that have been coached by some of the most legendary figures in college hoops lore. During what some consider to be the league's heyday back in the 1980's, squads led by such coaching luminaries as John Thompson, Lou Carnesseca, and Rollie Massimino would square off in grueling matches that feature the physical style of play that has come to define the league. The Big East is still packed with a group of coaching legends, and also features coaches who have already accomplished great feats in a relatively short amount of time, and of course there are the coaches who are far, far away from being considered legendary (or even mediocre in some cases). With all of this in mind, I took it upon myself to weight the merits and accomplishments of the Big East's sixteen coaches, and ranked them accordingly.

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Make-or-Break Year Approaching for Louisville's Steve Kragthorpe

Craig Meyer — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:50:03 -0400

When Louisville Athletic Director Tom Jurich turned to good friend Steve Kragthorpe to take over as the head coach of the Cardinals' football program back in January of 2007, the basketball-minded school had been experiencing a renaissance of sorts on the gridiron.

Under then head coach Bobby Petrino, the Cardinals were perennial contenders in a much improved Big East, and were fresh off of a season in which they won the conference championship and beat Wake Forest to capture the Orange Bowl, the school's first and only BCS bowl win.

All of this success was the culmination of an unprecedeted run in which Louisville made nine straight bowl appearances and moved from Conference USA to the Big East.

Louisville football was by no means an upper-echelon program like the USCs and Michigans of the world, but its sustained success under John L. Smith and Petrino (all under the careful guidance of Jurich) seemed to give Cardinal football fans some sense of hope that their beloved program could reach those lofty heights in the not-too-distant future.

After Petrino left to become the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, Kragthorpe was handed an emerging college football power, with a team that was returning several key players from its Orange Bowl squad, most notably quarterback Brian Brohm.

At the time, it seemed like the transition would prove to be relatively seamless and that people could expect Louisville football to maintain the prosperity it had experienced for the greater part of the last decade.

However, fast forward two and a half years later, and the current situation in "The Ville" would make one think that the Orange Bowl win was centuries ago.

By virtually all accounts, Kragthorpe's first two seasons as the Louisville coach were very disappointing.

The 2007 team that opened the season ranked sixth in the country and returned such stars as Brohm and wide receiver Harry Douglas stumbled to a 6-6 mark and failed to make a bowl appearance, the first time Louisville had missed out on the postseason since 1997.

The following year went no better, as the Cardinals went 5-7, bookended with an humiliating 63-14 loss to Rutgers in the season finale.

Louisville's lack of success under Kragthorpe has left an understandably bitter taste in the mouths of Cardinal football fans, and many have become disillusioned with the direction of the program, questioning where all the progress of years' past went, seemingly in the blink of an eye.

In the search for answers and explanations for Louisville's perplexing struggles, the proverbial finger of sports radio, blogs, and message boards have essentially held one man responsible for the decline—Steve Kragthorpe.

While it may seem slightly unfair to blame a single person for the shortcomings of an entire program, the calls for Kragthorpe's ousting certainly have some degree of merit.

His record while at Louisville has been an unimpressive 11-13, especially when considering the 41-9 mark that Petrino posted in his four seasons at the helm.

There has been an astounding amount of turnover with the Cardinals' coaching staff in the past couple seasons.

Louisville is set to start the season with its third defensive coordinator in Kragthorpe's time there, and Kragthorpe himself has elected to take the reins as the team's offensive coordinator, a move that could very well signal Kragthorpe's willingness to be more accountable for his team's fortunes (whether good or bad).

In each of Smith's and Petrino's seasons at Louisville, their teams made bowl games. Neither one of Kragthorpe's two squads has reached a postseason game of any kind.

His offenses have lacked the precise execution and innovative playcalling that were commonplace under Petrino, and his defenses have perhaps been the primary point of concern, letting up staggering numbers of points, even to mediocre offenses (Louisville's 58-42 win over Middle Tennessee State in the '07 season comes to mind).

From a more sympathetic standpoint, many Cardinals fans will point to Brohm as being an unfair victim of Kragthorpe's perceived inability, losing out on millions of dollars and a chance to be an NFL star.

A good majority of pundits and experts had Brohm slated as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2007 NFL Draft, but in the matter of a year (due in large part to Louisville's disappointing season), Brohm fell down the draft boards and was eventually taken in the second round by the Green Bay Packers, where he is now the team's third string quarterback.

Kragthorpe was hired to coach the Cardinals because of the work that he did at Tulsa, taking over a program that had won only two games in the previous two seasons and rebuilding them to the tune of three bowl appearances and a 29-22 record in his four seasons as coach.

Since Kragthorpe left Tulsa, however, the Golden Hurricanes have posted an 18-5 record in two seasons.

While Kragthorpe's work at Tulsa cannot be negated or compromised by his initial lack of success at Louisville, many wonder whether he was the right kind of coach to inherit a thriving, on-the-cusp program, considering his that all of his accomplishments as a head coach came in helping build a program, not maintaining a successful one.

Despite this underwhelming body of work, there are reasons to believe that Kragthorpe's tenure should be treated with patience and understanding from the Louisville administration and fan base.

The transition from Petrino to Kragthorpe represented not only a change in coaches, but also a change in culture with regards to the leadership styles, personalities, and philosophies of the two men.

Where Petrino was viewed as the dictatorial, overbearing, no-nonsense type, Kragthorpe is a more lenient, passive individual. To say the least, it can be an awkward and difficult adjustment for players, coaches, and anyone involved in a program, being given a relative amount of free reign after years and years of extremely strict oversight.

For all of his disciplinary zeal on the football field, it has come to light in the past couple years that Petrino had little care for his players' actions and personal character away from the game. He strictly saw himself as a football coach, and his job was to train them as athletes, not to mold them into decent men.

Petrino's Cardinal football teams won their fair share of games, but a slew of arrested players and run-ins with the law in the months following his departure served as an indicator that a lot of problems within the program may have been masked by on-field triumphs during Petrino's tenure.

From the time that he arrived at Louisville, Kragthorpe has made a concentrated effort to try to head a premier program comprised of quality young men who are not only productive on the gridiron, but also in the community. It's an admirable effort, but is certainly something that has come under fire given the failures of his teams on the field.

Kragthorpe's years at Tulsa remain as a slight glimmer of hope for Louisville fans, and stands as a reason why he still should be given more time to prove himself as a leader.

He has clearly not forgotten how to coach, and molding a program under a certain image and philosophy takes time, usually at least a four year span in which a coach can stay long enough to oversee the duration of his first recruiting class' time in college.

So where does that leave Kragthorpe and his Louisville football program at this point?

The Cardinals will enter Kragthorpe's third season with very low expectations, almost unanimously picked to finish seventh out of the Big East's eight teams.

Virtually every player from the Orange Bowl team is no longer there, and the remaining crop of players are largely unproven, or have yet to demonstrate that they can be impact players on a top-tier college football team.

Jurich, the man whose opinion in this whole situation matters the most, has preached patience to the Louisville fans and boosters, and at this point seems to be Kragthorpe's biggest ally.

He has been on record as saying that the 2009-2010 season will not be a "make-or-break season" for Kragthorpe, but has explicitly stated that he wants to see progress being made.

Despite Jurich's assurances, it's pretty hard to envision an already irate fan base tolerating a season in which Louisville fails to make a bowl game for the third straight season.

The ideals and beliefs of giving a program time to grow and develop sounds great, but with conference championships and major bowl appearances under Petrino still fresh in every fan's mind, it becomes so utterly confusing how a program that once had so much promise and potential has turned into an also-ran in a weak football conference in a span of only two years.

From confusion, in this particular case, stems anger, disappointment, and bitter rage. And for the sake of Steve Kragthorpe, Tom Jurich, and Louisville administration and fans, Kragthorpe's third season better show some sort of measurable progress.

If not, Louisville may find themselves in the same situation they were two and a half years ago—looking for a coach, only this time it will not occur in the wake of a BCS bowl win, but rather after a run of mediocrity that may have just set this program back to where it was decades ago.

Re-evaluating the 2005 NBA Draft

Craig Meyer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:32:14 -0400

It's usually best to look at NBA Draft classes a few years after the picks are made, say three or four years after the fact. It's interesting to view how players enter the league and are chosen as unproven commodities, and how they develop, blossom, and sometimes pan out as NBA players. With the 2009 Draft having taken place about a week ago, we can all take this chance and look back on the NBA Draft Class of 2005, taking into account all we have seen from these players in their first four years in the league. Based on how each player has fared so far in their respective NBA careers, I've re-ranked the top half of the first round as if the draft were being re-done today.

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Sports TV In Excess

Craig Meyer — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:14:58 -0400

We as sports fans are a demanding type, and that is no slight to any one of us. Our passion and enthusiasm for the games and teams that we follow inadvertently translates to a constant need for the most up-to-date news and scores. With the way that the modern media is structured, our needs are more than facilitated, and who are we to complain about it?

Gone are the days of having to wait for the morning newspaper to get the latest developing stories. The information age that we live in expands far beyond the world of sports, but perhaps no facet of our daily lives has been more directly impacted than our desire for sports news.

The biggest benefactor of this trend has undoubtedly been ESPN, the 24 hour sports network that is become a fixture of any sports fan's daily routine.

Despite ESPN's numerous and laudable contributions to the sporting community, the question (at some point) has to be asked—has all of this around the clock analysis and constant bantering gone a little too far?

Sure, news and analysis are essential to our understanding of the sports landscape and the teams that we follow, but there needs to come a time when some of us take a step back and try to gain a little perspective.

Now don't get me wrong here: I watch ESPN on a daily basis and rely on it heavily for my sports knowledge. But, I began to ask myself these aforementioned questions and began to wonder about the legitimacy of my sports obsession and how far I needed to take it.

For example, is it really necessary to have NFL Live and College Football Live air every day, even during the long days of summer when football season won't be starting here for at least another couple of months?

When the top stories of the day include Terrell Owens' stint on ABC's The Superstars and Lane Kiffin's tweets, it should pretty well resonate that there isn't much going on in those respective sports at this moment.

And how about the debate-style shows that "The Worldwide Leader in Sports" airs in the late afternoon?

Pardon the Interruption is that standard of this genre and Tony Kornhesier and Michael Wilbon do a wonderful job on this must-watch program, but ESPN brass has to realize that just because PTI has had so much success, that doesn't mean that there have to be five other shows just like it that air before it.

Around the Horn is entertaining and usually mildly humorous and is probably the only other show of its kind worth giving any credence.

But shows like Jim Rome Is Burning and First and Ten are nothing more than forums for presenting the same recycled stories, only they're done by abrasive talk radio hosts or less accomplished and insightful journalists.

The time has come for this nation of sports fans to take a collective look in the mirror and assess our current states as fans.

If the current ESPN afternoon lineup is any indication of where the sanity and intelligence of sports fans has gone, the future of the sports media and those who follow it sure doesn't look all too promising.

John Calipari: The Incredible Teflon Coach

Craig Meyer — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:10:16 -0400

We live in a different world of college athletics today than our parents and grandparents did decades and generations ago. At least for NCAA basketball and football, the college game is complete with glamour, fat TV deals, and big money marketing—a far cry from the state of the game decades ago.

College basketball and football have evolved into feeder systems for the NBA and NFL, respectively, and quite honestly, who are we to complain about it? We as fans get to see a higher brand of play out on the courts and fields as we are dazzled by athletes who are not only blessed with immense talent, but are often times destined for lucrative pay days in the professional ranks.

However, this heightened competition and increased publicity can often produce unintended results, and nobody has to look any further than today's sports section to find examples.

Yesterday, allegations from the NCAA came out that accuse the men's basketball program at the University of Memphis of several major infractions. The most notable of these claims is that a member of the Tigers' 2007-2008 Final Four squad had someone else take the SAT for him using his name. It is being widely speculated that the athlete in question was point guard Derrick Rose, the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft and Rookie of the Year for the Chicago Bulls.

There is no doubt that these accusation against the Memphis program are extremely serious and the repercussions have been widespread, to say the least. If it is discovered that these allegations are true, then Memphis will be facing major penalties from the NCAA and could very well have to forfeit their 2008 Final Four appearance.

The proverbial finger could be pointed at many people for this whole situation transpiring, but the individual who presided over all of this is nowhere to be found in southwest Tennessee. That man would be the new University of Kentucky coach John Calipari.

Granted, none of the reports that have surfaced regarding the allegations have directly mentioned Calipari as being a direct accomplice in these violations, but it cannot be ignored that all of these things happened under his watch. Some people out there may believe that Calipari is merely a victim of unfortunate circumstance—that he had no way of knowing that any of these infractions were occurring.

There is some validity to that argument, but this is hardly the first time a Calipari program has had a run in with the NCAA. His 1995-1996 team at the University of Massachusetts had to vacate their 1996 Final Four appearance because of an incident where UMass star Marcus Camby accepted money from an agent while still playing in college.

Calipari would be the only coach in NCAA history to have to forfeit two Final Four appearances, and from two different programs no less. While he may have had no direct involvement, the violations that exist at Calipari-led programs seem to have become something of a reoccurring theme.

However, if these allegations come to fruition, absolutely nothing will happen to Calipari. There won't be any action against him on the part of the NCAA. He will not be losing any scholarships or be reprimanded whatsoever.

Any sort of NCAA litigation will be placed on the Memphis program—on new Tigers coach John Pastner and his group of players that had absolutely nothing to do with this situation, all while Calipari receives the biggest paycheck of any college basketball coach at Kentucky and Rose enjoys the riches of the NBA.

And this is hardly an isolated situation. Who suffered from Kelvin Sampson's hundreds of illegal three-way phone calls with recruits? Indiana University did, as the Hoosiers struggled through one of the worst seasons in the history of their proud program in the wake of a very limited number of scholarships and resources necessary to succeed.

How about Clem Haskins, a man who presided over one of the largest cases of academic fraud in college athletics to date? Sure, he lost his job with the Minnesota Golden Gophers, but he still collected his paycheck and left behind a program that was forced to abandon its 1997 Final Four banner and had yet to recover from the scandal until Tubby Smith took over the program a few years ago.

What about any school coached by the likes of Jim Harrick and Jerry Tarkanian? It certainly wasn't the coaches who suffered the brunt of the damage.

None of these rampant bevvies of NCAA violations accrue without at least some neglect of institutional control, but oftentimes not every guilty party ends up getting held accountable.

In a sports climate littered with coaching carousels and the prototype "one-and-done" players, the NCAA needs to police itself and the institutions that comprise it so that when wrongdoings do arise, nobody can be deemed untouchable.