Miscellaneous Musings

The NFL's in full swing.  College basketball season is fast approaching.  Baseball's awards are right around the corner (and so is free agency).  In other words, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world of sports.  Time for my thoughts on some of it:

• I have to admit, I've been suckered into ESPN's "live" coverage of the World Series of Poker.  It's not really live.  The Nevada Gaming Commission is making them do it on a 15-minute delay, but that's more live than some Olympic coverage, so I'm going to count it.  They did this over the summer when the main event was actually going on, and I thought it was really stupid.  Not seeing or being able to talk about the cards the players actually have really takes a lot away from televised poker.  Then the "live" coverage returned for the final table and, embarrassingly enough, I found myself watching it.  It's not even close to the same, but it's still addictive.
• The New York City Marathon was yesterday.  There's been talk that they want to extend it into a two-day event in the future.  I'm somewhat lukewarm about this idea.  I just can't envision some random schmo from Brooklyn who didn't actually "win" crossing the finish line first.  The only way I see a two-day marathon working is to separate the men's and women's events entirely.  Have the women go on Saturday and the men go on Sunday.  That way, the first person to cross the line each day is an actual winner of the race.
• I'm starting to rethink my position on the Colts drafting Andrew Luck.  I've been saying all along that they obviously don't need a quarterback (the fact that their quarterback's out is the main reason why they're in this position in the first place).  They really won't next season when Peyton's back.  But it wouldn't be a bad idea to draft Luck and have him apprentice behind a Hall of Famer for a couple years.  Just ask the Packers how well that plan can work out.  It could benefit Luck, too.  If he goes to Indy, not only does he get to learn behind Peyton, but he won't be in the position where he's starting from day one and automatically anointed as the franchise "savior."
• Am I the only person who's completely confused by what's going on in the NFL this season?  Other than the Packers, you have no idea who's going to win each week, let alone who the second-best team is.  (That's clearly been my problem with my picks this season.)   And then there are the teams that came out of nowhere like Cincinnati and Buffalo.  Behind Green Bay, the rest of my top five NFL power rankings is: 2. San Francisco, 3. Baltimore, 4. Detroit, 5. Giants.
• Tony Stewart has won four straight Sprint Cup races and is now just three points behind leader Carl Edwards with two races remaining.  I don't really have a preference one way or the other.  I'm just happy that it's finally going to be somebody other than Jimmie Johnson that wins the championship.
• David Stern and the NBA owners are still trying to convince themselves that there's going to be a labor deal in place that will still allow them to have a season.  The rest of us know that they're fooling themselves, so why don't they?  The players seem perfectly content to go without playing for the foreseeable future, which they should take as a sign.
• The Mets are moving in the fences at Citi Field.  Evidently they realized that the stadium is a little too big.  In the five games I've been to at Citi Field since it opened, I've seen a grand total of one home run, which didn't even go out (it hit the orange line on the top of the wall).  Bringing the fences in was necessary if they ever want a hitter to come play for the Mets.  The best part is that the "Mo's Zone," that stupid area in right field where the wall is 15 feet further back than it should be, will be eliminated.  What made the "Mo's Zone" even stupider is that there was an overhang that jutted out that same 15 feet, and if it hit the overhang, it was a homer.
• I think the fine institutions that make up the BCS conferences are done being selfish, greedy hypocrites (at least for this year).  The only school I'm letting off scott-free in all this conference-jumping is TCU, which is the only one that made its decision based on the best interest of all its student-athletes.  The West Virginia thing is the latest disgusting twist in this whole mess.  They're suing the Big East to get out early, claiming that they can't be held to the exit time frame that every Big East school agreed to when joining the conference.  All of these moves were exclusively about football, which we all already knew.  The worst part is that all of the travel these athletic departments will now be making all of their other student-athletes do will mean they'll rely on the football money even more.
• Call me blissfully ignorant, but I do think that Joe Paterno was being honest when he said he didn't know anything about these sexual assault allegations against the former Penn State assistant.  He saw something and reported it to the AD, which was his job.  If Paterno had known, that guy would've been fired long before he was.  He doesn't strike me as the type to turn a blind eye to that sort of thing.
• The term "all-star" was used very loosely for the MLB team that played five games in Taiwan.  Robinson Cano and Curtis Granderson were there, and so was Pablo Sandoval, but the rest of them certainly don't qualify as all-stars.  It was a bunch of random Marlins and Nationals, with the occasional Royal or Oriole thrown in.  The starting catcher was Drew Butera, who's Joe Mauer's backup in Minnesota.  I was watching one game where Kansas City's Felipe Paulino started, then was relieved by some completely random middle reliever from Washington who went a whopping 1-5 last season.