A Mid-Summer Nights thoughts

SUMMER THOUGHTS


Yeah I know it has been too long, but I am back! And I have plenty of ammunition for this Rant.

The big question is where should I start. I mean, we have the good, (college football season is almost here), the bad (gambling referees and Barry Bonds is almost at 755) and the ugly (everything related to Michael Vick).

Well, let’s just go in order. College football season, maybe my favorite time of year. The season officially started on July 17th when EASports released NCAA 08. By the way, The Reitmeyer Invitational will be held this weekend and I will have a detailed summary of the events for the next Rant. But back to actual football, not the video game stuff, I am like a kid before Christmas I am so giddy. I am paging through all the different preview magazines as if I was looking through catalogs making my list for Santa.

I have already started my homework to release my preseason Top 25 (expect it mid-August). I have also been working on getting some D1 players from the area to do a weekly interview this year featured on The Rant as the season moves on.

Before I move on from my glory and giddiness of the upcoming college football season I will throw out some thoughts for discussion.

*The only way USC doesn’t go undefeated is if they beat themselves. This is the most talented and deepest team yet under Pete Carroll.

*Say what you want about the Big East (just remember they went 5-0 in bowls last year), but you may not find two better, more exciting and more high-powered offenses in the country then you will find at Louisville and West Virginia. Louisville returns all 11 starters on offense and WVU returns 8. Between the two, they have three VERY legit Heisman hopefuls in Louisville’s Brett Brohm and WVU’s Pat White and Steve Slaton.

*The Big preTENd will be overrated AGAIN. As I said repeatedly last year and was proven repeatedly during bowl season the Big Ten looks impressive, but they can’t beat ANYONE outside their conference. Michigan is in everyone’s preseason top 5, and they play NOBODY this year so we could see another blowout national title game because a Big Ten team runs the table in a league that is terrible. Let’s all hope this doesn’t happen again.

Okay, for the bad. How would you like to be a commissioner in one of the Big 3 major sports? Easy gig right? Not this week.

I truly don’t know who has it worse, Bud Selig or David Stern. Bud Selig for having to go to watch some juiced up hitter taint baseball record books by breaking the most storied record in all of sports, or David Stern who has to deal with possibly the worst thing possible for any sport, the idea of a ref fixing games. The idea of the purity of the game is no longer existent.

Given the choice I would be Selig.

Look at previous gambling issues in sports; these are the types of things people don’t forget. Google "sports gambling" and of course you will find all the sports books and gambling sites, but you will also see two distinct names. Go ahead, take a guess who, because years later they are still the names on everyone’s tongue when it comes to gambling on sports, Pete Rose and the Black Sox, specifically Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Yet, Selig is stuck watching a sure-fire Hall of Famer in Bonds make a mockery of the game by breaking the most storied record in baseball, while those other legends of the game are left out of the HoF for gambling on baseball (allegedly in Jackson’s case). However, let’s not all feel so bad for Selig. He has had every opportunity to address the issue of steroids in baseball and everyone turned their backs on it because it was good for the game, “Chicks dig the long ball.” Hell, they even promoted it with the McGwire/Sosa chase in ’98. Is there a fan out there that didn’t think that at least one of those two were literally JACKED as they kept jacking the ball out of stadiums made for natural sized human beings? Yet Selig and the rest of the owners ignored it. Well, Bud this is what you get. I hope that it takes Bonds the rest of the year to break the record so you have to go to every single Giants game for the rest of the year. You created the problem; you need to deal with it.

All that said, and I would still rather be Selig in a heartbeat over David Stern right now. Stern is coming off a terrible season for the NBA where the ratings were WAY down for the playoffs and that was due to the terribly boring playoffs that were provided by the league. The only reason that the NHL is not ahead of the NBA in fan base after last year’s debacle of a season is that 80% of the country still thinks the NHL is on strike because they do not get the Versus network.

THEN this bombshell drops.

There is nothing worse in sports then the idea of a game not being pure. The idea that you just spent your hard earned money to watch a game that was decided long before you got your first beer, just doesn’t sit right with most fans. The ones that it does sit right with are watching WWE.

The NBA has a ton of big name stars to showcase and parade around, but this will take much more than LeBron and Greg Oden playing on Christmas Day to get some fans back. This is worse then you could imagine. Think the ’94 baseball strike that cancelled the World Series and times it by 50. You could bring back Jordan, Bird, and Magic and it STILL wouldn’t be enough to have fans forget about the fact that a ref fixed games.

Enough of that, onto the UGLY.

I wish the absolute worst to Michael Vick. I was never a fan of his, being that he played for Virginia Tech and I’ve always thought he was a vastly overrated NFL quarterback, but all that a side I wish a long and painful life of suffering for this man (I use the term MAN very loosely).

I don’t want to get into many details on this because frankly some of the things that he is being accused of are just simply to disturbing to discuss. Bottom line is that he needs to go away to jail for a LONG, LONG TIME! Unfortunately our country has eased up on the death penalty, because I would love for Michael, for a split second while sitting in an electric chair, feel just as the dogs did that he electrocuted for losing a fight.

CHAO RON MEXICO!