Well the story that has kept the nations breath bated has finally been resolved and hopefully left the headlines, leaving fans and ownerships across the country feeling cheated and abused. All except slick Pat Reilly in Miami. And why are they all upset; because a kid decided to play ball with his buddies. What a horrible crime. LEBRON JAMES HAS LEFT CLEVELAND. What an awful idea. Why would he do such a thing? How about because it was Cleveland?
Why is this a surprise to anyone? When you give twenty-year-old kids millions of bucks a year to play a child’s game you are turning the asylum over to the inmates. The owner’s greed created this problem and now they face a situation where three of the kids got together and will spend the next few years thumbing their noses at them. I’m just surprised that they didn’t buy their own franchise. That will happen in the not too distant future. Money is power and these kids have more money than they know what to do with.
Yes, Lebron could have acted classier about the announcement, like maybe telling Cleveland management before he went on TV but the bottom line is that he had every right to play with his friends. Who would have done differently? Those who say he wasn’t loyal to Cleveland just don’t understand professional sports. There is no loyalty in pro sports, only what did you do for me today. If Lebron has a career impeding injury tomorrow he will be dropped like a hot potato by whoever he’s playing for.
I was in my car listening to Sid Rosenberg on WFAN this morning. Sid, who I always liked, was saying how Lebron will never be as great as Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan because he has never won an NBA championship. An idiotic statement. Sid suffers from that terminal WFAN disease; championship fever. That’s when some supposedly knowledgeable sports commentator claims an athlete who plays in a team sport is less of a star because his team hasn’t won a championship. Mad Dog Russo was the first person I heard propagate this crap, but Moronic Mad Dog thinks tennis doubles is a team sport. I’ve even heard Mike Francesa make the same ridiculous assertion. Anyone who has ever played team sports knows that one man, no matter how great a player, cannot win a championship by himself. Even Wilt Chamberlain, probably the most dominant player in the history of the NBA only won when he got serious help. Yet I’ve heard any number of commentators say this even about football players, especially quarterbacks, who only play half of each game. It’s brain dead.
Anyhow, Sid was on with someone named Kim Jones. First time I’d heard her, lovely speaking voice, great on-air presence but ruined it all by making a series of even more brain dead comments about Lebron. She couldn’t resist slamming him by claiming that he ruined his image, (maybe his life) by doing the one-hour announcement show and how he was so awful and implying that it was his fault the show stunk. HELLO? This is not a slick entertainer. This is a twenty-five year old kid with a high school education, who put himself in the hands of supposed professionals at the behest of ESPN a huge sports network. And this dame is blaming Lebron because the show stunk. What is the matter with her? If the show was ill planned, ill paced; if the interview was boring, is this the fault of a kid who pays basketball or is it the fault of the so called seasoned pros who put it together? This woman is in the sports programming business. How could she not know who’s at fault here? How could she be so unaware, so ill informed that she doesn’t know how this deal works? I didn’t see the show, I was playing poker but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the network pros should have been carrying Lebron, not the other way around. He gets blamed for losing basketball games not tanking ill- conceived TV shows. I’m not even a Lebron fan and I can see that.
On another note, the NCAA missed a wonderful chance to have its whole football picture torn apart when only a couple of relatively unimportant schools switched conferences this year. The predicted realignment of the Big Ten and the Pac 10 neither of whom can count, didn’t happen and the Big Twelve, who now can’t count either has remained viable. None of this, unfortunately, has brought anything like sanity to the phony BCS championship series. How can it be a series when they only play one game and the opponents for that game are chosenby negotiation. Think how much more exciting it would have been last year if Boise State had a real shot at the National Title, or maybe Cincinnati. Guaranteed that Kelly would not have left for Notre Dame before Cincy’s Bowl game if it had any real significance. The reality is that it didn’t mean squat and more importantly Kelly understood that it never would under the current setup.
The game is rigged, guys. If you don’t come from a big conference or are Notre Dame, you will never get a shot at the BCS championship game and that is only one of the reasons why it’s outrageous to continue the way we are. This is a country that loves the underdog but the BCS just won’t let them play. Why, because they don’t want to lose power, they’re afraid that they won’t make as much money under another system. This just proves that the guys who run the system are brute stupid. A true college football champion series would be the biggest earner in American sports. Nothing would ever come close to it. The TV package would match the Super Bowl and dwarf the World Series. Can’t you just see a 16 team tournament, where little Boise State knocks off Michigan, Oklahoma and Stanford to face Florida in the Championship. Can you imagine the hype, the dollar signs. I just can’t understand how anyone is dumb enough to pass this up. And don’t give me that old BS about the kids being away from classes too long. As I explained in an earlier column, if you cut one game from everyone’s regular schedule thereby allowing all the bad teams to quit a week earlier and substituted the playoff games for the insignificant bowl games now being played you’d be left with 1 extra game for 4 teams and two extra games for the championship opponents. Not much of a sacrifice to get a true national champion. It’s the epitome of the American way in image and $-signs. Right now BCS stands for Boring, Crummy, Slop. It could stand for something much better, like the real thing.