Busy Week

Well, this has certainly been one busy week in sports, hasn't it? 

Today we finally had the inevitable: the NFL Players Association de-certified and the players filed antitrust litigation against the owners.  It's not like I wanted a lockout to happen, but I was sooooo sick of all the fake posturing both sides were doing.  Everybody knew there was eventually going to be a lockout, so why did they keep extending the CBA?  They were just going through the motions.  Both sides.  Every time I heard anything about the NFL my reaction was always the same: "Just do it already!"  Now they've finally done it.  I loved the NFL's statement calling on the union to go back to mediator and negoitate.  The NFL Players Association no longer exists, so I'm not exactly sure how that's supposed to work.  I also loved it how Patriots owner Robert Kraft kept providing the media with updates on the negotiations while he was in Israel!

Spring Training has kicked into full gear with various players and teams making news for all kinds of reasons.  Rangers CEO Chuck Greenberg resigned because he couldn't get along with Nolan Ryan and was replaced by...Nolan Ryan.  Speaking of the Rangers, Michael Young is currently working out at third base because Adrian Beltre is injured.  I'm not going to say "I told you so," but I will say "guess you're glad you didn't trade him, huh?" 

In other baseball news, Carlos Beltran voluntarily moved to right field.  As if that's going to help the Mets.  They need to not be paying Carlos Beltran anymore.  At least they've realized that paying both Beltran and Ollie Perez to be useless is a bad idea, so they're going to release Ollie.  But the fact that Beltran is stealing money from them is the least of the Mets' problems.  The money that the Wilpons gave to Bernie Madoff, who then stole money from a whole bunch of other people is the problem.  The New York Mets, such a trainwreck.  They're so damn unintentionally entertaining that you don't want to look away out of fear you'll miss something.  Just like a Charlie Sheen press conference.  (Sidebar, does anyone even care how John Cryer and Angus T. Jones feel about having their show effectively cancelled because he's a whack job?)

On to the NHL (yes, believe it or not, there is a hockey season currently being played).  With a little more than a month left in the regular season, the playoff races are getting nuts, especially in the West, where just six points separate the defending champion Blackhawks in fourth and the Wild in 11th.  The race is tight in the east, too.  Six teams are solidly in, but the Rangers, Sabres and Hurricanes are in a dogfight for the other two spots.  And I completely agree with the NHL's decision not to further penalize Zdeno Chara for his hit on the Canadiens' Max Pacioretty (the video is below).

Chara's not a dirty player.  He's a 6'9 monster wearing ice skates.  The play was just an unfortunate combination of circumstances where Pacioretty hit the boards at exactly the wrong place.  The fact that the Montreal police are pursuing charges is completely ludicrous.

And, of course, there's college basketball.  I enjoy the first week of March Madness (the conference tournaments) as much as, if not more than the NCAA Tournament.  I'm currently watching UConn-Syracuse in the Big East semifinals, a matchup that will always have special significance for me.  The first college basketball game I ever went to was the UConn-Syracuse Big East final when I was seven years old.  It would take me about three more blog posts to talk about all the twists and turns of the conference tournaments, so I'm not going to do that.  The officiating in the St. John's-Rutgers game would deserve one of its own. 

I will say this though: the "other" Joe Brackets is driving me crazy with his constantly changing bracket.  It's not so much the constant changes that bother me (in fact, just the opposite, I like that ESPN gives us those updates on the bottom line), but the fact that some of those changes don't make any sense.  Case in point, Notre Dame slaughters Cincinnati last night to move up to a No. 1 seed.  No problem there.  But the No. 1 seed that got dropped down to Notre Dame's No. 2 wasn't Pitt, which lost to UConn earlier in the day, it was Duke, which didn't even play until today.  And teams that don't play keep getting moved around between the "Last Four Byes," "Last Four In," and "Last Four Out" categories.  I have no problem with moving teams around on those lines based on winning or losing (for example, Marquette and Colorado have both played their way in), but just doing it arbitrarily when they don't even play really bothers me. 

Maybe that just means I've been watching way too much college basketball over the past few days for something like that to annoy me.  As for my bracket, it probably won't be updated until sometime tomorrow night or Sunday when we know who's in from all the mid-majors (the Big Ten and ACC championship games will have little bearing on who I think is in the field).