Friday Fodder

Sports fodder for a Friday morning ... College basketball is going tournament crazy. This year the made-for-TV conference tournaments will be followed by no less than four more made-for-TV postseason tournaments " the NCAA, the NIT, the CBI and the brand new CollegeInsider.com. A total of 129 teams in college basketball will have their seasons extended into the middle of March. College basketball is becoming the NHL and NBA only with less meal money. It's 6-year-old youth soccer where everybody gets a trophy just for showing up. All we can say is it's about time. Why stop at four postseason parties? Why not make it a dozen? Heck, why not do away with the regular season entirely? It doesn't mean anything anyway, right? Get rid of those ridiculous road trips in the snow, ice and cold in January and February that force college kids to miss three or four days of classes and live in airports and hotels. Make it all tournaments all the time.

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If you can have 129 teams playing in four postseason tournaments why can't you have 129 teams playing in one amazing tournament? It's time the NCAA Tournament expands. Give everyone a chance to be Cinderella. Imagine the size of your office pool. Amazing.

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Alex Rodriguez couldn't have had hip surgery at a better time. Nobody is asking him about steroids anymore. Nobody cares about which needle was injected where and by which cousin. Now all New York Yankee fans care about is how to make Cody Ransom disappear. It's almost as if A-Rod's publicity team planned this whole hip fiasco. Nobody is that public-image conscious, right? Right? Hey, what's the big deal with a little unnecessary surgery if it helps your public persona, right?

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Brian McNamee is now saying he injected Roger Clemens with steroids in the Jacuzzi at Yankee Stadium. Does anybody really care? If Madonna wasn't sitting next to the Rocket in that Jacuzzi it's not even a story in New York.

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Mike Singletary of Texas Tech (no, not the San Francisco 49ers coach) scored 43 points to beat Texas A&M in a Big 12 tournament game Wednesday night. Singletary, who had never scored more than 25 points in an entire game, scored 29 points in a row. One question. Does Texas A&M have a coach? OK, two questions. Was he watching the game? Here's an idea. Guard the guy who is scoring all the points. Make him pass the ball. It might work.

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It would have been easy for the Western Athletic Conference to give Nevada's Luke Babbitt its Player of the Year award. Nobody scores in as many different ways as Babbitt and he's only beginning to scratch the surface of his talent. But we applaud the league for giving the award to Utah State's Gary Wilkinson. The 26-year-old worked his tail off to become a solid college basketball player. He dropped out of high school right before graduation his senior year. One of his best friends took his own life. Wilkinson then joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, turned his life around and went on a two-year mission to Canada. He didn't even play organized basketball until he went to Salt Lake Community College. And now he is the WAC's top player. Wilkinson's story is what makes college sports so great.

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It's no secret that the WAC basketball coaches want to play the league tournament at a neutral site starting in 2011. And it looks like the league is seriously considering the idea. Moving to a neutral site (like Las Vegas) might be a horrible idea for the WAC. Why risk having 4,000 people in the stands for every game? Why would anybody in Las Vegas care about WAC basketball? If Las Vegas wanted the WAC in town they would have stayed in the league. Also, why make all of the fans, especially in these tough economic times, travel to a neutral site? Here's an idea. How about giving the tournament to the school that wins the tournament (or the regular season title) the year before? If that school doesn't want it, then offer it to the second place team. Coaches want a neutral site because they don't like playing on somebody's else's floor. And the coach who hosts the tournament doesn't like the pressure. If we start to let coaches make the rules then we'd have games behind locked doors at neutral sites on Monday afternoons so nobody could watch.

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Terrell Owens in Buffalo? Could Owens even find Buffalo on a map? Does he know it gets cold in Buffalo? Does he know Dick Jauron is the head coach in Buffalo and Trent Edwards is the quarterback? Does he know that if he acts like a fool in Buffalo somebody might stuff him in a barrel and toss him off the edge of Niagara Falls? It might be time for Owens to fake a hip injury.