Maybe I’m cynical (yes!), but it always strikes me funny when a company, sport, etc. conducts an investigation; proudly announces that there is no evidence of wrongdoing but the person at the center of the investigation is fired anyway.
For ages, I have been contemptuous of Big Ten officials, especially football referees. I think that the off-duty insurance salesmen and minor-league businessmen who referee football games are not worthy of conducting a one-car funeral, much less big time college games for one of the premier conferences in the nation.
At almost every Northwestern game I attend (and I have had home season tickets since 1996), I am either appalled by missed calls by the officials; stunned by the calls they did make; or silently happy that my team got away with an infraction that should have been called. One could say that I am looking at the games through the totally biased view of an alum, but NU has gotten screwed numerous times over the years as Commissioner Jim Delaney sticks his head in the sand, but is still ready to fine any coach who dares criticize the officials too loudly in the media. Twice the conference has publicly apologized to NU over calls that should have gone their way, and could have given them a victory.
Today, Yahoo Sports reported that, to no one’s surprise, the Big Ten Conference announced that an it conducted investigation into officiating conduct in two games last season found no evidence that the games were compromised. The investigation centered on two games – Illinois at Ohio State and Purdue at Penn State, officiated by the same crew, led by Stephen Pamon, a longtime Big Ten referee who was the subject of a Yahoo Sports investigation last fall.
In light of the Tim Donaghy scandal in the NBA, Yahoo! Sports reported that Pamon, a Big Ten official since 1988 and chief of a seven-man crew in 2007, and his wife filed for bankruptcy in 2002 and two of the creditors were casinos. According to Yahoo, a member of Pamon’s family said that Pamon regularly gambled in casinos and gambling was a chief factor in their bankruptcy, although there was no evidence that Pamon bet on games.
This report was heightened after Purdue coach Joe Tiller filed an official complaint to the league after Purdue lost a controversial game to Penn State on November 3rd. One week later, Pamon’s crew worked the Illinois-Ohio State game, which also featured some controversial moments. For whatever reason, Pamon and his crew were suspended for the final week of the regular season according to The Sporting News.
Delaney’s statement had the usual lawyer-generated BS, “Upon the conclusion of our investigation, the Big Ten is secure in its belief that these games were not compromised,” said the statement. However, the league announced that it will conduct annual background checks of all its football officials and tighten its oversight of officials’ legal gambling activities that aren’t related to sports.
Despite the lack of wrongdoing, sources told The Columbus Dispatch that the Big Ten did not renew Pamon’s contract for this season. So, the Big Ten announced that there was smoke, but no fire, but they threw the man with the matches out of the campground anyway. To be honest, while I always yelled at officials asking whether the “fix was in,” I never thought that the Big Ten officials were compromised. I have always considered them incompetent. I still think that most of them are too stupid to understand most big money casino games, much less get into trouble as a result.
That said, there have been too many poor calls to say that “compromised” officials along with down right poor officiating hasn’t been involved. I am glad that the Big Ten finally feels compelled to investigate the men who represent them on the fields every week. Now, if they could weed out the inept, then the Big Ten will really be a top flight conference

So, the ugly battle between Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers finally ended yesterday with the future Hall of Famer heading off to play for the New York Jets. Apparently, the Jets’ interest in the quarterback heated up as tempers increased in Wisconsin.
It’s a no-brainer deal for the Jets – Chad Pennington has had his day as starter, but he has always had a weak arm, a situation that was not improved by a couple of serious injuries to his throwing shoulder. With either Favre or Pennington, the Jets are going to need to draft a quarterback soon.
And they pay a draft choice that gets better for the Packers depending on how Favre and the Jets do. It’s a fourth rounder if he plays; if Favre takes so many snaps, it becomes a third round pick; if they make the playoffs a second round pick, and if Favre leads them to the Super Bowl, the Jets forgo their first round pick. The Packers get a player, and they negotiated a nasty little poison pill: if the Jets trade Favre to the Minnesota Vikings, the Jets have to give up THREE first round picks. That will keep Favre from playing in Minneapolis.
But will Favre, a country boy at heart from Mississippi, be able to take the pressure of playing in the biggest city in the country, the home of all of the media conglomerates, and in front of some of the toughest fans in sports? What do you bet Favre will throw an interception in Giants Stadium and get soundly booed. He never heard that in Green Bay where he will always be revered as a football god. Again, however, the Jets needed to make a big splash, at least in the court of public opinion. To a certain extent, the Jets are the Chicago White Sox of the New York NFL scene; not as beloved as the Giants, not as old, but, more like the Cubs, now they face increased scrutiny in light of the Giants’ Super Bowl Championship.
So, Favre traded one green jersey for another. I wonder how the Packer faithful will handle this long term, especially if Favre has a good season and the Packers stumble out of the gate. If that happens, team president Mark Murphy, GM Ted Thompson, and Coach Mike McCarthy may all get run out of town by a horde of people who will look like it stepped from an old Frankenstein movie.
But, I think this is going to look much more like Joe Montana in a Kansas City chiefs uniform: the team will have some success, but age, an unfamiliar team and coaching staff, and young hungry opponents will make Favre’s New York career less than memorable.

This story has more sequels that Star Wars, with the same level of bad acting and dialogue. The Brett Favre vs. Green Bay Packers story was supposed to have ended Sunday, right? Favre was back in camp; he could compete for the starting job; and the only person PO’d was Aaron Rodgers. End of story: the 2007 Packers MVP, the man who led them to the NFC Championship Game; and finished second in NFL MVP voting was coming back to play in Wisconsin, right?
Ah, no! Favre has had numerous meetings with Packer President Mark Murphy, GM Ted Thompson, and Head Coach Mike McCarthy, but there’s still no “Number 4” on the field, and the sides are even further apart than ever before. ESPN.com quoted Favre after a Tuesday meeting that the sides were at a stalemate and he believed the “best thing for this team is for us to part ways.” Apparently, no matter what, there will be no “open competition,” Aaron Rodgers has the starting QB job despite Favre’s history and whether or not he outperformed Rodgers on the field. This isn’t right, and Favre on the field, while a distraction, probably gives the Packers their best chance at winning, but now egos have gotten in the way.
Packer management, to no one’s surprise, rejected Favre’s request to talk to teams about a trade within the NFC North, preferably to the Minnesota Vikings or possibly the Chicago Bears. Short of a Super Bowl championship, this management team has been pushed into the worst possible position, but still, they aren’t going to let Brett Favre lead the hated opposition against them. It makes sense.
But now, Favre has softened his stance on a trade to Tampa Bay. Still in the conference, but at least Favre won’t be playing for the Packers’ rivals. However, the Buccaneers have an issue at quarterback themselves: what does this say about Jeff Garcia? Garcia led Tampa Bay to the playoffs last season before coming up short against the eventual Super Bowl Champ, New York Giants. The 36-year-old Garcia had been trying to get a longer term deal for himself, but now with Brett Favre in the mix, he will be delegated to the bench, which won’t be great for team chemistry in Florida.
So, we have a Hall of Fame quarterback who retired too soon; a Packer team between a rock and a hard place concerning starting quarterbacks, and a Tampa Bay team who may have similar issues. The solution – the Bears should be having secret conversations with the Bucs for Favre. Our two quarterback options: Rex Grossman and Kyle Orton, aren’t setting the world on fire, and if we make a deal away from the Packers, Packer management doesn’t get massacred in the court of public opinion. And Jeff Garcia can continue to be the starter down in Florida.
But will this happen? Nah! And the wheel will keep turning.

I generally don’t watch the Cubs, but I admit that last week, while in Pittsburgh, I did see the end of the Cubs game against Milwaukee on ESPN that night, and did notice that ESPN’s dugout reporter, a young woman named Erin Andrews, was wearing a very risqué dress and was hanging on the players she interviewed in a fairly shameless way.
Coming from Chicago, where another reporter, Amy Jacobson, was fired for going to a murder suspect’s house with her children, and was photographed wearing a bikini at the guy’s house, the issue of women reporting is at the forefront of our minds, I guess.
Mike Nadal of GateHouseNews, a man I do not know and have never to my knowledge read, is catching hell from, of all people, the cockroach, Jay Mariotti and others. Nadal wrote about Ms. Andrews’ “skimpy outfit” and said that she was “playing the sexpot.” Mariotti called Nadal “desperate, reckless, in search of cheap fame, resentful of women, crusty, and out of touch.”
ESPN bosses (who are also Mariotti’s bosses since he is a regular on “Around The Horn”) supported Ms. Andrews, as one would expect. Meanwhile, Nadal is getting blasted in the media and has received approximately 200 e-mails with the percentage 40-60 for/against. But it appears that the press agrees with him. As quoted by Teddy Greenstein in today’s Chicago Tribune, one of Mariotti’s colleagues, Sun-Times reporter Gordon Wittenmeyer wrote about Ms. Andrews’ “apparent misconception that ‘clubhouse’ means ‘nightclub’ when it comes to her wardrobe choices and touchy, fawning behavior before Cubs games she has covered.” And Nadal told Greenstein that of the 30 e-mails he had received from members of the media, 29 were supportive, including 13 from women journalists.
It is tough enough to be a woman in the historically male dominated world of the media, and even harder when trying to cover male dominated sports. A woman reporter is always walking the thin line between being competent and being sexy. I used to say (back when I was much younger, sexist pig) that a woman reporter needed to be either beautiful or knowledgeable. When Jayne Kennedy was on CBS’ “NFL Today” program back in the 1970s, she was obviously on television for her beauty, and it worked! My friends and I in college stared at the screen, salivating like Pavlovian dogs every time she came on screen. Hew football knowledge was negligible, but it didn’t matter to us.
But now that I’ve hopefully gotten more mature, I have found that I had a lot of respect for Linda Cohn and (now on Good Morning America) Robin Roberts. Both were attractive but not gorgeous, but, more important, both knew their sports, and were as knowledgeable as any of their male counterparts. That was true equality – they had achieved it. I still don’t mind women whose sole job is to go out there and look good, but I don’t respect them. The worst thing a woman reporter could be in my opinion was unattractive and uninformed. The main offender in this case is Lesley Visser, who has a job because her husband is play-by-play man Dick Stockton, himself able to turn a tied seventh game of the World Series into Sominex time.
In short, Mr. Nadal has a point, and maybe Ms. Andrews should consider which professional road she is going to take. As to Mariotti, I just wish he would crawl back under his rock.

To Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s chagrin, somehow I think that this may be the Olympiad in which the “Olympic Flame” dies.
Politics, cheating and apathy seem to be the main stories we are getting ready to cover in Beijing starting Friday. This Olympics has been plagued by the start: Darfur, Tibet, totalitarianism has caused protests during the running of the Olympic flame, and caused Steven Spielberg to pull out of filming the games.
The unrest continues, although many miles away from the Games themselves. There was an attack on a border station in western China on Monday morning, killing 16 police officers and wounding a similar number. Apparently, a pair of attackers crashed a truck into a group of police officers who were jogging near the station and then threw at least five homemade bombs into the police barracks. Authorities suggest that the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” is behind this and other attacks timed to coincide with the Games.
That is the major problem with the Olympics in general; they become a target for every whack job with a bomb and a cause. It is said that the Olympic Village and Games themselves are under very tight security, especially with the likes of President George W. (Lamest duck in history) Bush attending despite calls for him to stay away. But it will be ironic that the Olympics will be a “police state within a police state,” and it will be interesting to see if “ordinary” Chinese will be able to attend events, or will it all be foreigners and the ruling class?
This Olympics will be tough on the athletes as well. Beijing has high temperatures and some humidity this time of year, which is difficult under the best of circumstances, but with the high level of pollution in the air, which the government has tried to improve by limiting driving, but one has to wonder if it was too little too late.
With a world stage, athletes will do almost anything to win, and with several world class athletes already kicked out of the Tour de France; admission that china wants to make a major splash in these games on home soil; and allegations surfacing last week that some Chinese athletes are too young to compete; the cloud of performance enhancing substances, drug tests, EPO, etc. hangs over these games as thick as the air itself.
Worse could be apathy. As a younger man, I used to look forward to the games, which was, at the time, the only way to see the best athletes in the world compete. With the raising of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the best athletes in the world already compete against one another. How much of the Olympics will I watch? Probably not much, and I follow sports regularly. If the casual fan doesn’t pay attention, NBC and its sister networks may take a colossal beating in ratings and profits. If that happens, the revenue stream of the Olympics could be seriously hurt if networks start seriously considering whether covering the Olympics makes sense from an economic standpoint.
The Olympic idea of using sport to bring people together is a noble one, but always flawed by greed, cheating, and politics. I know that Mayor Daley is in Beijing reviewing how the Chinese handle the Games in hope that Chicago wins the 2016 bid, but he may have a greater worry – if these Games bomb, there may not be an Olympics to bid on.

Unless your name happens to be Aaron Rodgers. It appears that the Brett Favre saga is ended, but not without more twists and turns. Last week, Packer President Mark Murphy (and former NU Athletic Director) went to Mississippi to talk with Favre (wish you had stayed in Evanston, Mark??). The story came out that the team was willing to pay him $20 million over 10 years to stay retired, and for a time, the quarterback was said to be considering it, but that quickly died. Which is a good thing: if this whole thing had been over money, then Favre would have tarnished his legacy. He “retired too early,” and wanted to play football. If he had just taken the money, it would have looked horrible. What had he done with his money (some $12.5 million in pay just last season alone)? And besides, he already owns Kiln, Mississippi; how high can the cost of living be in Kiln? Two bucks a week?
So, Favre has come back to the Packers and the team has now pledged that he will get the chance to compete for the starting job. Well, since Favre holds the record for consecutive starts by a QB, and he got the Packers to one game from the Super Bowl, where is that going to leave Rodgers? He has been told that he would be the starter once Favre retired, and the team stood up to that pledge, but then Brett changed his mind, and the team still stood behind Rodgers. But now, how can the team not let Favre start? End the streak? Waste $12.5 million on the bench? And even if Rodgers had a better training camp, will he and the entire offense be looking to the sidelines after every errant throw; after every interception? After this season, win or lose, start or back-up, look for Aaron Rodgers to look for a better situation. He’s waited patiently for three years, and he should be in the prime of his career, not holding a clipboard for another season. And if Favre does retire after this season, and Rodgers wants out, who will be playing QB in the green and yellow next season?
People in Green Bay love their Packers (they have nothing else to do up there), and this whole situation has been funny to me. They rarely ever have this type of turmoil in Wisconsin and, for a Packer-hater, I love it.

I like sports memorabilia. I like owning sports stuff, but I don’t have the money to spend on serious amounts of it. (The Indignant Wife holds the purse strings tight, let me tell you!) But that’s OK because I don’t like the concept of “investing” and I don’t like being ripped off.
On the former, I have often told a story (but not online until today) about working in a downstate Illinois in a bank where the grown-up son of the bank’s owner collected memorabilia, and he had a serious collection. He had a picture of Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams signed by both. At the time, both were still alive, but that particular week, Williams had gone into the hospital, and the banker’s son was talking to me about how much his picture would be worth if Williams died. It’s this type of speculating on the dead that made my skin crawl, and turned me away from sports collectors.
Then, of course, there is the real problem of counterfeit memorabilia. I remember a story on 60 Minutes several years ago that estimated that 70% of sports memorabilia was phony. This has been another reason to stay away for me.
Then there’s this story from today’s Chicago Tribune website: executives of Mastro Auctions of suburban Burr Ridge were subpoenaed last week as part of an ongoing fraud investigation. The company had made news last week as a result of an auction of a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card for $1.6 million. The subpoenas, delivered during the National Sports Collectors Convention in Rosemont, reportedly are investigating the possibility of “shill bidding,” which is rigging bids to jack up prices.
I went to one of these conventions once, just to get an autograph from a hero of mine, Ken Stabler. I spent about an hour walking around waiting until Mr. Stabler’s signing. I purchased nothing, looked at lots of “stuff,” got my autographs and left. It was kind of sad to see people lining up to either get taken, or hopefully get something that they could sell to someone else. I felt like I needed a shower when I left.
It is “let the buyer beware” for sure in this business. I, for one, don’t have the money to just let someone steal from me.