Monday, March 08, 2010

Quickie: March Really Starts Right Now

It's a gorgeous day in NYC today -- it feels like the perfect moment to coincide with a 4-week stretch of college basketball that starts with Championship Week (among bigger leagues), continues through Selection Sunday and the Tournament itself and finishes four weeks from today with the national title game, which -- without seeing the brackets or second-guessing myself into oblivion next Sunday night -- I'll say will be Syracuse over Kansas, in a repeat of the 2003 title-game result. But today's SN column is precisely about what a great month we're kicking off.

There's a lot more:

*John Wall: Freshman of the Year, obviously. And, I would argue, First-Team All-Time All-Freshmen. Not quite Carmelo, but more than Durant/Beasley. Yeah, I said it. (Hell, I bet there's an argument to be made that Cousins is as impactful of a freshman as Durant was.)

*Big winners in NFL Free Agency? Bears (Peppers), Giants (Rolle) and Dolphins (Dansby), obviously, but I really like the Kampmann deal for the Jags, who desperately need help with pass rush (which is ridiculous, given the high draft picks they spent on pass rushers recently).

*If you're firing umps, maybe you should consider a more robust replay system.

*Bullock/Blind Side: I think you can make the strong case that with her Oscar win (over Meryl Streep!), Sandra Bullock's character is the greatest female character in a sports movie of all time. Certainly the most-decorated, which puts her right up there with Stallone's Rocky and DeNiro's LaMotta -- both of whom earned their actors an Oscar.

Complete SN column here. More later -- still thinking about my MIT post, but there's tons out there, including a lot on TrueHoop and elsewhere.

-- D.S.

3 comments:

spchang said...

Stallone didn't win an Oscar for the Rocky role.

R.A. Porter said...

Though nominated for both, Stallone won neither the actor nor screenplay Oscar for Rocky. Peter Finch and Paddy Chayefsky took those honors in '77.

Al Neri said...

Stallone didn't win best actor; Rocky won Best Picture.