As a relatively late Cub-hater (2000 or so), I could join the chorus of White Sox fans who are loving the 3-0 deficit in the NLCS, but I’m not.
I used to root for both teams until the Cubs started scalping their own tickets and Cub fans, knowledgeable when I worked at Wrigley Field, became mediocrity accepting lemmings. But I admit that I enjoyed watching this young team lead by Joe “The Old Man and the Sea” Maddon, a man who I’d love to sit in a bar and have a beer with. The young players they have: Rizzo, Bryant, Schwarber, and Russell suggest that the future is bright. Jake Arrietta may never pitch as he did in the second half of the season – the best stretch in baseball history. And they knocked out the team that I hate much more than the Cubs – the St. Louis Cardinals who cheat, and whose fans are drunken rubes.
What has gone wrong? Like the Toronto Blue Jays (who I was rooting for due to the Indignant Wife being from that area), like by the long ball, die by the long ball. The Cubs have big boppers, but when the temperatures fall and the pressure rises, the bats can fall silent. The Cubs already strike out a lot, so with a great pitching staff of their own, the Mets have the Cubs trying to hit five run homers. Bad fielding and perhaps the hottest hitter I’ve ever seen, Daniel Murphy, who has now tied the Major League record for most home runs in a postseason with 5 and more games to play, had put the Cubs in an almost insurmountable hole.
Well, most pundits including team lead executive Theo Epstein thought that the Cubs were one year away from a serious run at a World Series title. Like the 2009 Blackhawks that went to the Western Conference Final before losing, these Cubs are young and perhaps, playing above themselves a bit. Another year of seasoning and experience in the playoffs worked very well for the Hawks, who won the first of three Stanley Cup titles in 2010.
Perhaps that will work well for the Cubs as well. We’ll find out quickly if they don’t win tonight…

Frequently, a coaching change is made by a struggling team; sometimes, it works marvelously, like Joel Quennville’s hiring by the Chicago Blackhawks in October, 2008 which has led to 3 Stanley Cups. All too often however, the team is not very good to begin with and it remains so, or the coach is able to bring a short term improvement. Too often, the coach brought in is a “veteran,” a coach who has been with several teams. I like to call them retreads, but often I blame the ownership or front office for laziness. Most retreads failed to get results in their last team (teams?) and got fired.
Then there are coaches who have a limited shelf-life: getting improved results from yelling and screaming and bullying players. This tactic only works for a short time however; highly paid professional athletes turn on the not as highly paid coaches, refuse to play and more often than not, the coach gets fired yet again. The poster boy for the “@$$hole” coach is Mike Keenan, who led the New York Rangers to their first championship in 54 years, then was fired shortly thereafter. Keenan’s act wore thin in seven other cities besides New York including Chicago, St. Louis, Calgary, Vancouver, and Miami (Florida Panthers).
Taking a page from the Keenan playbook is John Tortorella, who hoisted a Stanley Cup for the Tampa Bay Lightning and led the New York Rangers to Cup finals before getting fired mostly after Ranger superstar goalie Henrik Lundqvist refused to sign with the team if Tortorella was head coach. After leaving New York, Tortorella’s act got even wilder: he had always thrown players publicly under the bus with the press, but he also got into fights with opposing coaches, refused to allow press access, and generally went crazy. One would think that despite his winning track record, teams would be wary of hiring him. Even Keenan can only get a job in Russia with the KHL, but Columbus has started out he season 0-7-0. A coaching change was apparent to all and it came, as did a call to Tortorella.
Tortorella is once again coaching in the NHL after the Blue Jackets fired Todd Richards on Wednesday. Tortorella had been out of hockey since the Canucks fired him in May 2014. He takes over for Richards, who had been with the Blue Jackets since 2012 and led them to only their second NHL playoff appearance in 2013-14, when they lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the opening round.
After a 4-0 defeat against the New York Islanders on Tuesday night, Columbus is just the sixth NHL team to open with seven consecutive losses. It’s the Blue Jackets’ worst start in franchise history, and their longest losing streak since dropping seven straight in regulation from Nov. 11-25, 2005. Expectations were much higher for a team that restocked its roster this summer after closing last season on 16-2-1 run.
I predict that the Blue Jackets will get a win, perhaps as early as tomorrow night against Minnesota. Most hockey pundits said that the team needed a strong disciplinarian, which Tortorella is. Richards was much quieter. However, it won’t be long, I give it until Februiary 1 before the veterans on the team get tired of being yelled at and vilified in the media and tell Tortorella where to go and what to do when he gets there. He could get fired earlier if he repeats the stunts he pulled in Vancouver.

I have to give it to ESPN’s Outside The Lines – they do a very good job of investigative reporting despite the inherent conflict of interest in investigating teams and sports that the network pays billions of dollars to broadcast.
The latest involves the University of Louisville, the haven of Coach Rick Pitino, he of the great hair, great suits and at least one affair that became public. Apparently, like Gary Barnett’s University of Colorado football team a few years ago, Louisville believes in plying recruits with strippers and sex as inducement to attend the school. Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team’s former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee. One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.
“Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen,” written by former escort Katina Powell, 42, details nearly two dozen stripping and sex parties from 2010 to 2014 inside Billy Minardi Hall, the on-campus dorm for athletes and other students named for Louisville men’s basketball head coach Rick Pitino’s late brother-in-law. Ms. Powell has said that McGee arranged the parties and paid her $10,000 for supplying dancers over those years. Powell told ESPN that McGee also supplied cash for “side deals,” which included sex with some recruits, guardians who accompanied them on visits and some Louisville players.
McGee left Louisville in 2014 and is an assistant coach at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is on administrative leave with pay while the school conducts a review. The NCAA and Louisville also are investigating.
Will the investigations bear any fruit? Probably. I see NCAA Tournament sanctions and lost scholarships; the same old, same old. I just wonder if Pitino will take a page from Barnett’s book saying that they were just doing what Memphis and other schools are doing (Barnett claimed Colorado was just doing what Nebraska did). The only thing that makes Barnett’s discretions worse is that they were reportedly recruiting female students to “tend” to the players; in this instance, the women were at least “pros” and getting paid (not that I’m condoning prostitution, mind you).
This prehistoric “boys will be boys – wink-wink, nudge-nudge” attitude has to stop. Big money, greedy schools, coaches, boosters who won’t grow up who are willing to do anything for their programs and impressionable and often naïve young men have been a mixture of corruption and rules violations for decades.
I have an idea – instead of giving these young men sex, how about recruiting based on a good, valuable education?

As I have written before, having been fired once, I am very cautious in calling for a team’s coach to be fired. I remember the blow to self-esteem and self-worth as I tried to get another job. Of course, most coaches and players make many orders of magnitude more money than I do, so that certainly makes it a bit easier.
However, as hard as it is, when someone is obviously doing a horrible job, at some point, the employer needs to pull the plug. That time is long since past for Northwestern University Offensive Coordinator Mick McCall. McCall has been in Evanston since 2008 and in his tenure, his major move has been to bring in the spread offense. Yes, he coached some good QBs: Persa, Colter, Bacher, Kafka and Siemian, but in my opinion, it has been the QBs’ ability to operating in McCall’s never changing offense than McCall’s coaching.
The best coaches craft their scheme and game plan toward the strengths of the players they have, not try to fit square pegs in round holes forcing players to do things that aren’t natural to them. NU is running essentially the same spread offense whether the QBis mobile and can run the option (Colter, Persa) or more standard drop back passers (Bacher, Kafka and Siemian).
The 2015 season looks curiously like 2013 when NU started 4-0 and was ranked in the Top 25 teams in the nation, then lost 7 or 8 games to end the season. This season, NU went 5-0, even beating a ranked opponent, Stanford in the first game, but now has lost 2 straight, both blowouts – 38-0 at Michigan and 40-10 at home against Iowa. In many ways, Trevor Siemian regressed in his senior season, another 5-7 campaign only saved by beating Notre Dame last November. Another gripe – quarterbacks get hurt, and almost every season, NU’s starter has lost at least a portion of a game to multiple games to injury. When this happens, the second string QB never looks ready to play and it takes a couple of games before the kid even appears confident on the field. That is the QB coach’s responsibility.
As Northwestern’s website hails McCall as an offensive innovator, over the past three years, his play calling has become more and more conservative. The playbook has become a pamphlet with the offense running many of the same plays over and over. Last season, calls for McCall’s job were clearly heard at McGaw Hall, but Head Coach Pat Fitzgerald stayed with McCall, citing loyalty. Many alums, myself included, were upset and skeptical.
This season, McCall anointed red shirt Clayton Thorson as the starter, but the play calling has become as vanilla as snow and predictable as a train schedule. Thorson has looked good in short stretches, but I have brought my section in stitches as I yell out a dive play up the middle to Justin Jackson on first down, then, like clockwork, that is the play that’s run. Based on his record of fitting players into his scheme regardless of their strengths and weaknesses, it appears to me that McCall believes that the problem is simply execution. ‘We can run the same play; it will work if we block better or run better,’ is the message I get from the coaches. However, when the defense knows what you are going to run, the best you can expect is a minimal gain. Far too often, the offense is faced with a 2nd down and 8 yards to go (or worse) after running the same dive play again and again. Already, we are seeing people criticize Thorson but I don’t see an offense suited to him.
On Facebook, I’ve seen comments that McCall’s play calling is conservative because he doesn’t have confidence in his offense. WHAT??? This is HIS offense. I think it means that he doesn’t have confidence in running his “off-the-shelf” offense, and he is unwilling or unable to adapt to the talent he has. It doesn’t get easier, NU goes into Lincoln to play Nebraska Saturday before a bye week (Nebraska is an early 6 ½ point favorite).
The Mick McCall era should have ended at the end of last season, but the woeful offensive performance along with the mediocre (at best) special teams performance has weakened what appeared to be a stout defense early in the season. Thirty second 3-and-outs don’t give the defense any time to rest and by the end of the last two games, the defense has been Swiss cheese. (It should be noted in some articles that many defensive players have missed assignments, tackled badly, and taken bad angles trying to stop opponents. This certainly doesn’t help.)
Pat Fitzgerald is a member of the Northwestern University Hall of Fame. As an All-American linebacker on the 1995 Rose Bowl team, Fitzgerald may have been the best player to ever play in Evanston. As a coach thrown into the top job after the untimely death of Randy Walker, Fitzgerald literally bleeds NU purple. I even understand how important loyalty and teamwork are, but if a player isn’t playing well, Fitzgerald has no reluctance to bench that kid. Mick McCall is not effective and its time to try someone new.
If Pat Fitzgerald and Athletic Director Jim Phillips can’t see that McCall needs to be fired, then perhaps their jobs should be forfeit also.

Life has kept me from the site, gentle reader, so I appreciate your patience.
But I am back, and while I was gone, I was going to write a piece on the explosion of fantasy sports websites and their almost complete domination of the airwaves through commercials on sports stations and even regular programming. Fan Duel and Draft Kings and bombarded the airwaves with commercial touting that people are winning millions of dollars on minimal input, in effect betting on players, not games.
One of the drawbacks to traditional fantasy football is the amount of time it takes – drafting, watching games, keeping track of who’s injured, who a player’s team is playing, deciding who to start that week. But the online casinos have broken that down for each week, giving you 17 different lineups to choose from.
That’s all fine – we know that gambling is the “poor, dumb, hidden” stepchild of the NFL – while the game doesn’t like it, they know it is happening and it does lead to more interest = higher ratings = higher revenues. Of course, where there’s lots of money being made, one of the issues in to keep building up the number of players, keep the money flowing. So, we the fans have been inundated by commercials showing average looking schlubs jumping off their couches having won one of these big paydays. How many other coach potatoes are losing, is the question, and I’d say that the answer is massive. The “casinos” are raking in the money, certainly enough to generate winnings, cover the cost of the ad campaigns, and probably pay themselves handsomely. It’s a sham for suckers who think they know the NFL.
As I wrote above, I had planned on writing about this last week, mostly to discuss what a sham it is and how many suckers are being taken, and also to complain about the media saturation of these commercials. However, in the interim, it has been reported that insiders who can see who most of the players are betting on, are picking other players that do well and winning the weekly pots. In other words, they are using inside information to rig the games.
Since then, ESPN has reportedly pulled all commercials for the two sites (I say “reportedly” since I saw a Fan Duel commercial this morning on the “Mike & Mike” show on ESPN 2). There is talk of government investigations and potential laws passed to rein in the gambling sites.
Of course, gambling is the biggest taboo in the sports world. Big money has leg to rigged games in baseball, college football, soccer, boxing, and who knows what other sports. Players have been banned for short periods or permanently for gambling (Pete Rose, many of the 1919 White Sox) of just hanging out with gamblers (Mickey Mantle). At the heart of sport, there is a presumption of maximum effort and will to win. If that does not exist, sport become professional wrestling.
I had planned on writing a piece about how crooked these sites were and warning of believing their claims. I didn’t know it would blow up so quickly.

I think that I’ve cut Chicago Bulls’ guard Derrick Rose a ton of slack. We both grew up in impoverished Englewood (many years apart of course); and after a sterling start including an NBA MVP award, knee injuries have limited Rose’s playing time to a handful of games and limited the team’s chances at an NBA title. Many have jumped all over Rose’s case about how he has handled the injuries and apparent no interest in rushing back to the court when other athletes have been chomping at the proverbial bit. The $99 million contract Rose signed before the barrage of injuries didn’t help public perception.
With the NBA training camps opening up this week and Rose apparently injury free and ready to play, the media microphones and attention has turned in his direction. As usual, the guard hasn’t fared too well this week. First, over the weekend, Rose was interviewed and he said that his main focus is on his pending free agency in two years. Never mind winning games or championships, or feigning appreciation for the massive contract already being paid by Jerry Reinsdorf and the Bulls; he is focused on what he could garner in two seasons. Needless to say, he would have to return to the form of his first three seasons and, most important, stay healthy.
He was unable to do the latter again. Rose was hit by an elbow in the face at the Bulls’ first practice of the season, suffering a left orbital fracture which received surgery today. How long he will be sidelined with the current injury remains unknown.
Despite no evidence or word to the contrary, one has to ask whether Rose’s big mouth got him hit in the face? If I were a teammate of Rose’s, his apparent nonchalance toward the upcoming season and will to win would have upset me. Even before his got injured, I was going to blog about that very thing – despite being bored with basketball, I was incensed with Rose’s cavalier attitude. Of course, we who have been around for years were spoiled by Michael Jordan whose Type A personality drove him to wanting to win every game, every time. Golf, gambling, basketball didn’t matter to His Airness – we went all out to win. And here was this rich young man stating that pending free agency was his biggest motivator.
Joachim Noah is another Type A personality and I don’t think he has a similar attitude to what Rose espoused; nor do I think he would appreciate his teammates not doing everything they can to win. No one has said who hit Rose, or described the circumstances in which Rose was hit, but did someone send Rose a message, albeit perhaps a bit too strong?
Maybe? Just saying…

For a few years now, the “business model” that has made billions of dollars on the backs of unpaid “student athletes” has been crumbling. The head injury settlement; the ongoing courtroom fight over paying players like employees; the big conferences being allows to break slightly from the rest of the NCAA in adding stipend money to athletes’ scholarships and of course, the practice in which the NCAA owned players’ likenesses in perpetuity without having to pay them any royalties has been chipping away at the bedrock foundation that was the NCAA. However, the NCAA, like an animal cornered by predators is fighting back. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that that the NCAA’s use of college athletes’ names, images and likenesses in video games and TV broadcasts violated antitrust laws but struck down a plan allowing schools to pay athletes up to $5,000. The court said the NCAA couldn’t stop schools from providing full scholarships to student athletes but vacated a proposal for deferred cash payments.
The NCAA had appealed U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken’s 2014 decision to allow players in the top division of college football and in Division I men’s basketball to be paid up to $5,000 a year. The money would have been put in a trust fund and given to them when they left school.
The decision came in a lawsuit filed by UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon and 19 others. A statement from NCAA President Mark Emmert says the organization agrees with the court that the injunction “allowing students to be paid cash compensation of up to $5,000 per year was erroneous.”
Perhaps the problem was putting a distinctive value on the compensation, but I firmly believe that the NCAA will be forced to share their vast wealth with the athletes eventually. I don’t think anyone believed they would share willingly or without a fight. This proves it.