Long time readers know that I think that PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – are more than a little nuts. I don’t want to see animals harmed, and I don’t want my dinner tortured, but humans are omnivores – meaning that we eat plants and animals. Like atheists, the PETA people are as belligerent and self righteous as fundamentalist religious people. You don’t want to eat meat? Fine. You want to make slaughterhouses more humane? Great, I’m right there with you. But leave my steak alone, dammit. (To my credit – I say modestly – I have resisted the temptation to wear a shirt a dear friend bought for me to PETA protests: “PETA = People Eating Tasty Animals.)
Now, PETA wants to go high tech. They want to enlist drones to watch for animal abuse. The group announced this week that it plans to purchase drones — small, remote-controlled, camera-carrying aircraft — to watch for illegal activity among hunters. In a press release, PETA said it would “monitor those who are out in the woods with death on their minds,” using spotlights or feed lures, or drinking alcohol while in possession of a firearm. PETA also intends to fly the remote-controlled aircraft over factory farms, fishing spots and “other venues where animals routinely suffer and die,” it said.
Hunters are, on the other hand, salivating. This gives them something else to shoot. I can see them now, covering in their duck blinds, looking out for the small planes; and when they see one, a barrage of gunfire.
PETA and the hunters are both crazy and deserve one another.

One day after writing that he would be taking a “leave of presence” Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert has died at the age of 70.
There will be a ton of words written about the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, and all of those words will be warm and welcoming, because that’s how Roger was. I can only say that he was most kind to me. As a film lover and occasional critic and writer, Ebert was always positive to me in e-mails until we actually met several years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival. After that, he always was kind when we saw each other, smiling and giving me his trademark “thumbs up” when he saw me because of the previous cancer and jaw surgery that took away his voice.
The last time I saw him, he was signing one of his books “Scorsese By Ebert” and he was as glad to see me as I was to see him. He signed my book “To Tony – a film lover – Roger Ebert.” It means a lot. Readers, fans, and lovers of film will miss him. To those of us who got to meet and know him, we will miss him even more.

While the whole Rutgers situation has taken front page news, Auburn has also been in the news, and if the stories are true, would confirm what many of us believe about the 2011 National Championship team.
A report by former New York Times and Sports Illustrated columnist Selena Roberts alleges that Auburn changed the grades of as many as nine players leading into the 2011 BCS national championship game, which Auburn won 22-19 over Oregon. One of the players, safety on the team Mike McNeil not only says that grades were changed, but that players received payments from Auburn coaches, and that more money was spent on luring recruits than permitted by NCAA rules.
There has always been discussion about payments to star quarterback Cam Newton who transferred to Auburn, led them to the national championship amid allegations that Newton’s parents received $100,000 or more in return for Newton coming to Auburn. It obviously worked, since the year before Newton, Auburn barely defeated Northwestern in a bowl game, and the team has been decent afterward but not a national championship contender. Each of the allegations occurred under Coach Gene Chizik, who was fired after last season.
It should be noted that McNeil’s allegations come because he alleges that the university is not supporting him as he faces armed robbery charges. The report allegedly says that shaky testimony links McNeil to a crime he says he didn’t commit, and that Auburn’s coaches went out of their way to avoid helping the former safety. McNeil’s trial begins next week (April 8) and he faces 21 years to life imprisonment if found guilty with connection to a 2011 incident.
Do we believe this report? I don’t know about McNeil’s innocence or guilt, and it does look like he is trying to save himself, but how can the coaches exonerate him? Don’t they have a duty to keep an innocent man from jail, or now that McNeil is no longer a valuable commodity on the football team, they don’t care? Chizik is no longer at Auburn, so there’s nothing much the NCAA is likely to do.
It just seems to me that college sports, football in particular – always dirty as hell, is just getting dirtier as the revenues keep increasing. Now that coaches make millions; athletic departments have budgets nearly the size of the universities they are affiliated with; there is more reason to cheat, and of course, more reason to cover up the misdeeds.
So, let talented athletes into colleges and universities who shouldn’t be eligible academically; do nothing to better their status in life intellectually; and throw them away when their eligibility is done. If they make the NFL, great – they can come back to help recruiting, and if they end up in jail, that’s life.
These are young men coaches and athletic directors and university presidents. You have a commitment to improving their lives, not just in making them more attractive to professional teams. We all know that there are far more players in college sports than there are roster spots in the pros, so the likelihood is that most of them won’t make it. What happens then?
Does anyone give a damn? Shouldn’t the coaches, ADs and presidents?

Rutgers University did the right thing for the wrong reason and also did the wrong thing at the same time. The university properly fired head basketball coach Mike Rice today, but only after ESPN broadcast a video showing him physically and verbally abusing players.
The university first gave Rice a three-game suspension, a $75,000 fine and a ticket to anger management classes, but the public reaction forced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to weigh-in on the school’s decision (no pun intended since Christie is a heavy man, by the way). The penalty might have been justified if it had been one incident, but the video, the network said contains excerpts of practice sessions shot between 2010 and 2012.
Athletic Director Tim Pernetti said that he had made a mistake in favoring suspension. “I am responsible for the decision to attempt a rehabilitation of Coach Rice,” Pernetti said in a written statement. “Dismissal and corrective action were debated in December and I thought it was in the best interest of everyone to rehabilitate, but I was wrong. Moving forward, I will work to regain the trust of the Rutgers community.”
In the video, Rice appears to say “You f**king fairy … you’re a f**king fa**ot” to one player in one incident. Other portions showed Rice shoving and throwing basketballs at players.
Under pressure from incensed state officials to take stronger action,
Gov. Chris Christie, who a spokesman had said was “deeply disturbed” by the video, said he supports Rice’s firing. Rutgers President Robert L. Barchi said he had agreed last year with an outside investigator’s recommendation that Rice be suspended, fined and sent to anger management classes.
Of course they did – they are all in the good ‘ole boys network of coaches and coordinators whose first reaction to anything is to protect themselves. Who cares about the players who Rice subjected to that type of behavior? I don’t think that parents of the kids on the team expect the head coach to be acting like a petulant child and cursing their children. And the players would get caught in a code of silence and be ostracized by the team, the coaches, and the whole of college basketball if anyone reported Rice, especially since Rice would have just gotten a slap on the wrist like Pernetti wanted to do in the first place.
To prove my point, the whistleblower on the video was former NBA player Eric Murdock, the team’s former player development director. He told ESPN that the school fired him for bringing forth the video on Rice. The school says he was let go for “insubordinate conduct” unrelated to the video, according to ESPN.
So, Rutgers fired its head basketball coach knowing since at least December that Rice was abusing players, and only doing so when a video surfaced showing the abuse. Then the university fired the person who released the video. The AD and the President of the university keep their jobs. I thought that a university education was supposed to teach people how to think, and to help provide a guide of how to act as an adult in the world and for athletes to learn certain values along with their education off the field/court? It seems to me that the lessons that college athletes learn are about greed, self-dealing, hypocrisy, and blatant self-preservation. Just the lessons parents send their kids to college for… NOT!

Work and spring break have taken their toll on the old Evilopinion, so let’s catch up, shall we?
• Chris Collins is the new Head Men’s Basketball Coach of Northwestern. I know that some people felt that Bill Carmody got a raw deal due to all of the injuries and one suspension that happened for the team, but it was time for a change, and a young, fresh face can’t hurt.
• The Cubs, in their attempt to get funds/permission to modernize Wrigley Field, got an unsolicited offer from suburban Rosemont for land to build a new Wrigley Field. Considering that Rosemont has a reputation for organized crime straight out of a novel, if the Cubs move there, maybe their mascot should be Marlon Brando in The Godfather?
• My thoughts are with my friend Roger Ebert who once again is undergoing cancer treatment. I hope that he has many more thumbs up to give in the future.
• How would you like to be Marwin Gonzales today? The Astros shortstop broke up Texas pitcher Yu Darvish’s perfect game with two outs in the ninth inning. Gonzales hit a ball up the middle through Darvish’s legs for the only single and man on base. I don’t know, but I might have swung on three bad pitches if I were in that situation.

Long time readers know that I am not on Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany’s favorite person list, and the feeling is mutual. I have been a vocal critic of the officiating in the conference and of many of Delany’s money-grubbing plans like the television network, conference expansion, and championship games/tournaments in men’s basketball and football. Letters that I have sent to Big Ten Conference headquarters have all gone unanswered.
So, anything that concerns the Commissioner invariably involves money and probably has the concerns of the “student athletes a distant second. Sure enough, Delany is issuing “the end of college sports as you know it” Chicken Little pronouncements in the national media.
What will bring about the end of college sports according to the Commissioner? The end would come if the plaintiffs prevail in Ed O’Bannon vs. the NCAA lawsuit. If you remember, O’Bannon is suit the NCAA’s ability to make money off players while in school, and in “owning” their likenesses in perpetuity.
The NCAA has a motion pending before the court that the organization hopes that the judge will rule against class action certification and in a declaration filed last week in federal court, Delany threatened that any outcome that results in athletes getting a piece of the schools’ television revenue could force the schools of the Big Ten to de-emphasize athletics as the Ivy League’s schools did decades ago.
The statement (quoted on SI.com) says “…it has been my longstanding belief that The Big Ten’s schools would forgo the revenues in those circumstances and instead take steps to downsize the scope, breadth and activity of their athletic programs,” Delany wrote. “Several alternatives to a ‘pay for play’ model exist, such as the Division III model, which does not offer any athletics-based grants-in-aid, and, among others, a need-based financial model. These alternatives would, in my view, be more consistent with The Big Ten’s philosophy that the educational and lifetime economic benefits associated with a university education are the appropriate quid pro quo for its student athletes.”
In other words, the Big Ten would rather downsize than share the billions of dollars that it makes off of the backs of the athletes than share the revenues with them. I do see the problem with current athletes setting up bidding wars with players (although I’m sure that schools are doing this under the table all the time), and I think Delany is correct that the Big Ten would not do that (beyond any NCAA rules infractions that are currently being done unbeknownst to me).
However, I believe that all athletes should get a fixed stipend at EVERY school, so that each athlete gets to share in the gargantuan profits that the NCAA and “it’s member institutions” earn from every avenue.
Delany and the NCAA may have had a better argument if they didn’t make money off players long graduated/left school. The O’Bannon case centers on the fact that the former UCLA basketball standout’s likeness has appeared on video games long after he left school/played pro ball, and was working a regular job like the rest of us, but he gets no money in return. The NCAA doesn’t see anything wrong with this, and now this suit has opened up the full can of worms about the indentured servitude that is college athletics.
I follow college sports and I am a fan of Northwestern, but the players should be paid, and certainly the NCAA should not be allowed to profit off players after they’ve left school. This shows tremendous hubris on the part of the organization. If the schools had to pay players, would that bring about the end of college sports? Would the Big Ten network suddenly shut down? Hell no. The Commissioner and the school athletic directors and presidents are smart people – they’d find a way to profit out of this. But they have enjoyed the free labor for over a century and any threat to the status quo must be quashed.
Commissioner, I certainly hope you don’t win this one.

The big stories in Chicago sports this week are about two iconic players who people want to see play, but aren’t. Derrick Rose, of course, tore his ACL in the NBA playoffs last spring and despite reportedly being cleared to play, has yet to log a minute with the Bulls.
And the team needs him: they started well, but more injuries have decimated the team. Instead of being near the top of the NBA East, they are plummeting out of playoff contention and the fans and shoe maker Adidas are getting antsy. Rose says that he doesn’t know when he will play but that his knee still isn’t where he would like it to be.
Again, I am a fan and understand that fan is short for fanatic, but I can’t understand the fans’ willingness to risk long term results for short term risk. In the old days, it took 13-18 months to recover from such a serious knee injury, but medical science is better, just look at Minnesota Vikings’ running back Adrian Peterson, but if Rose doesn’t feel he is quite ready, shut him down for the season and let it get fully recovered in time for next season. Besides, much as I hate to say it, it doesn’t look as though anyone can stop the Miami Heat anyway.
Meanwhile, the Bears have severed ties with middle linebacker Brian Urlacher. Urlacher returned from nagging injuries over the past few seasons to return to play at a nearly Pro Bowl level. However, Urlacher is 34-years-old, and like many players, don’t want to take a pay cut, and they want a longer term deal, probably 2-3 years. Today’s NFL in the salary cap era don’t have the money to throw around.
Unfortunately, sports is a business and the Bears were not about to pay Urlacher $6 million per season; he HAS lost a step, and as a player ages, the risk of injury, already high in the NFL, grows exponentially. At $2-3 million per season, the risk is reduced, which is apparently what the Bears offered, but he middle linebacker called it “a slap in the face” and he is a free agent looking for work elsewhere.
Yes, the Bears are losing an icon – the latest Hall of Fame bound middle linebacker after Akins, Butkus, and Singletary, and he deserves all of the accolades, but, like so many athletes nearing the end of their careers, they don’t want to accept that they ultimately are commodities and often even the great ones get replaced. It hurts us when stars finish their careers with other teams: Joe Namath with the Rams; Joe Namath with the Chiefs; Willie Mays with the Mets. This often happens because the player(s) refuse to listen to the call of Father Time.
We Bear fans will miss Brian Urlacher, but right now, we have to admit that he has a better chance of being retired when the season starts than playing starting middle linebacker in the NFL.