Sports fodder for a Friday morning . . .
It's almost impossible to root for the New England Patriots anymore. How do you root for a perfect football team? How do you root for a perfect quarterback with perfect hair, perfect teeth and perfect girlfriends? They run up the score, Tom Brady has babies with models he doesn't even live with, the head coach cheats and dresses like a sportswriter. How can you not root for the Indianapolis Colts, a team that has gotten no respect since winning the Super Bowl. A team, by the way, with a quarterback you'd want your daughter to marry and a head coach who just might be the nicest man on the planet. New England 28, Indianapolis 24. Hey, you can't bet with your heart, buddy.
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Will the winner of Sunday's Game of the Century go undefeated this year? Well, nobody goes undefeated in the NFL. The Colts, after all, will probably lose Sunday and then lose again next week at San Diego. The Perfect Patriots? Bill Belichick will probably determine that a loss will be good for his team so the Pats will likely dump a game somewhere along the line. But this is the best NFL team since the Dallas Cowboys of the early 1990s and they won't lose a game that means anything this year.
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Forget the Colts and Patriots. The best football game this weekend will be Reed at Douglas in the first round of the Northern 4A regionals. The two teams have played nine times since 1995 with Reed winning five, including earlier this year (38-15) and last year (21-0). Reed would have to be considered a slight favorite based on the scores of the last two meetings between the teams and the fact that the Sierra League has gone 1-7 in the first round of the playoffs over the last two years. We also like McQueen, Reno and Galena to advance to next week's semifinals.
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The only way Joe Torre makes sense for the Los Angeles Dodgers is if Torre brings Alex Rodriguez with him. Otherwise, they just should have kept Grady What's-His-Name. Then again, the last guy to replace Grady What's-His-Name (Terry Francona in Boston) has done pretty well.
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It's official. The San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders are now the two most boring teams in the NFL. Actually, they have held that title for the past three years. What happened to Bay Area football? And why aren't Raider and Niner fans more upset?
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Yes, the ending to the Trinity-Millsaps football game last week was fun to watch. In case you somehow missed it, Trinity lateralled 15 times, Millsaps missed about 20 tackles and Trinity won the game. Millsaps just stood around and stopped chasing the Trinity ball carrier two or three different times, thinking the play was over. It was a nice play but there is no way it is better entertainment than the Stanford band running interference for Cal on a kickoff return against its own team in 1982. Hey, you can't beat tubas and trombones on special teams.
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Do you think the good folks in England are upset that we sent them the Miami Dolphins? Nice way to showcase your league, huh? But the fans in England weren't half as angry as the folks in Miami when they learned that the Dolphins actually came back home.
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Vince Young has replaced Michael Vick as the most overrated quarterback in the NFL. Eli Manning is second. Everybody other than Tom Brady and Peyton Manning is tied for third.
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The Los Angeles Lakers need to trade Kobe Bryant. Now. Toss in Jack Nicholson to sweeten the deal. Whatever it takes, do it. Just get rid of him. The Lakers allowed Bryant to run Shaquille O'Neal out of town. And what did it get them? Bryant turned into the most selfish player in the league and now he's bad-mouthing the organization every chance he gets. If the Chicago Bulls offer an old pair of Air Jordans, the Lakers should take it before the Bulls reconsider.
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The Boston Red Sox won the World Series. The New England Patriots are going to win the Super Bowl. Boston College might be in the football national title game. The Boston Celtics are a favorite to get to the NBA Finals. Gee, I wonder which city is going to be named the best sports city in the country by The Sporting News this year.
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ESPN is actually going to Las Cruces, N.M. for a football game tonight? Wow. Now we've seen everything. Maybe ESPN is trying to relive its old tractor pull days. Yes, folks, there is too much football on TV these days.
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Wolf Pack quarterback Colin Kaepernick has yet to toss an interception since he replaced Nick Graziano last month. That's 111 passes in a row without a pick, an incredible total for a young quarterback thrown into the fire in the middle of the season. How does this happen? Well, Kaepernick has made great decisions with the ball and the Pack has turned into a run-first team. This is clearly Chris Ault's best coaching job since he returned to the sidelines.
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How much money does Alex Rodriguez need? The guy was going to get roughly a quarter of a million dollars a year from the New York Yankees but that wasn't enough. And now his agent has the nerve to pick the day of Game 4 of the World Series to tell the world that Rodriguez has become a free agent. Classy move. Now we know why Yankee fans booed the guy.
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Detroit Lions quarterback Jon Kitna and his wife went to a Halloween party of one of Kitna's teammates this week dressed as a naked man and a fast-food drive-thru attendant. It seems Kitna was making fun of Lions assistant coach Joe Cullen who was arrested earlier this year for going through a Wendy's drive-through without his clothes. Kitna insists, "I wasn't trying to demean Joe." Yeah, right. Then again, it is almost impossible to further demean a man who orders a single with cheese and a Frosty without wearing any pants. We're guessing Cullen wasn't asked whether or not he wanted to super size his order.
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The Colts-Pats game is all well and good. But the game I want to see is Dolphins-Rams. It's too bad the NFL didn't have the foresight to schedule those two powerhouses this year. Now that would be a true game of the century. The NFL could invite the 1976 Tampa Bay Bucs - the last team to go winless in a season (0-14) - to the game. Do you think the 1972 Dolphins - the only NFL team to go unbeaten in the Super Bowl era - would beat the 2007 Dolphins? We figure the '72 Dolphins would only win by a field goal. Hey, most of those guys are at least 60-years-old.