Friday, December 18, 2009

Quickie: Bowls, Colts, Tiger, Knight, Week 15

With college bowl season starting tomorrow, it's time for my annual bowl-sponsor quiz, which leads today's SN column. (My favorite detail is related to sponsors who are only around in 2009 because they took taxpayer-funded government bailouts. It should be "The Rose Bowl presented by You." And shouldn't the GMAC Bowl be the Ally Bowl?)

Anyway, there's a ton in the column today:

*If the Colts are going to give up 31 points to the Jaguars, how many would they give up to the Saints?

*How the Bengals deal with the death of Chris Henry is a massively emotional storyline, but the fate of the Cowboys (against the Saints) and the AFC 7-6/6-7 log-jam will have more people interested.

*Bob Knight let off a broadside on John Calipari that might even make me like Knight. I certainly respect him for saying it.

*Watching PGA honcho Tim Finchem wriggle around in this Tiger mess is fascinating. He has to present confidence the Tour can survive without Tiger (ha), but he can't be so glib that he offends Tiger (ha).

*SN announced their athletes of the year, and I have a few issues. I'm actually not down on Mo Rivera as Pro AOY (better than Jeter!), although I'd make an equally strong (or stronger) case for Larry Fitzgerald, Drew Brees or Kobe.

*And SN names Colt McCoy their College AOY, which is wrong on a couple of levels -- SN just named Mark Ingram its CFB Player of the Year; Tim Tebow had a much stronger year -- January to December -- than McCoy, and if you've opened it to all college athletes, Tyler Hansbrough has a much stronger case than McCoy.

*I had an eye on that prep hoops game last night between No. 1-ranked Findlay (which I think is an astonishingly -- almost admirably astonishing -- cynical prep-hoops factory) and Northland (Ohio), which pulled the upset behind this awesome kid Jared Sullinger.

*I think we can all feel kind of bad for Cliff Lee. He certainly does.

Check out the entire column here. More later.

-- D.S.

2 comments:

psm said...

While I can understand having an issue with McCoy as College AOY, you'd really put TEBOW over him? Give it up already, Dan.

doublenickel said...

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/jeff_pearlman/12/18/pear/index.html?cnn=yes

Irrelevant to this topic, but I thought you'd find this interesting after your diatribe against youth football a few weeks back