Notes, quotes, antidotes, anecdotes and mares eat oats for a Sunday morning:
The NCAA football champion Georgia Bulldogs will, naturally, be all over TV this season. Not a bad thing, as the streets will be safer when we can keep an eye on them. Over the past 13 months, at least 10 Georgia players have been cited for moving auto violations, with five arrested for reckless driving.
Then there was the post-championship episode during which a player, Devin Willock, and a female team staff member, Chandler LeCroy, were killed in a wreck allegedly tied to racing. That’s the one that included star defensive tackle Jalen Carter, who was driving one of the cars (LeCroy was driving the other). He was charged with reckless driving two months after the January crash, later pleaded no contest and was given 12 months probation, a $1,000 fine and 80 hours of community service, as if he hadn’t done enough to serve a community.
Carter is being sued by Willock’s family and by Victoria Bowles — also a Georgia team staff member, who survived the crash. No matter, Carter soon became a first-round pick, ninth overall, of the Eagles. And the Eagles, as the NFC champs, also will be all over TV.
So how are TV’s NCAA and NFL business partners going to handle this? My guess is quickly, near the top of telecasts to get it out of the way, then back to identifying “impact players.”
The issue will be shorted as we’re told it has already been “well documented.”
Get off the U.S. women’s soccer team’s backs! They’re merely exercising their constitutional right to behave as obnoxious, selfish, ungrateful louts on an international stage.
I wonder if they have any idea how much they’re loathed by so many Americans? How many are exercising their constitutional right to root for them to lose?
Migrant housing crises? Try this:
As long as Nike remains eager to demonstrate its social virtue-signaling via the likes of Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe — even at the expense of sweatshop labor from Communist China — Nike has the money and space to house thousands of migrants.
Nike’s complex in Oregon reportedly includes more than 75 buildings over 266 acres. Come one, come all! No? Why not? Just do it!
I’ve long maintained that Fox’s John Smoltz ain’t bad — until the games start. Only then does he sound as if he’s blankly and endlessly reading NASDAQ prices for the next three hours.
Before the Astros-Yankees game Thursday, a graphic noted that Yankees starter Clarke Schmidt throws “30 percent sweepers.”
Smoltz was quick to debunk such newly discovered or invented nonsense: “There’s no such thing as a sweeper, really no such thing. It’s a breaking ball.”
As I sit and watch — unless it’s one of those paywalled, Rob Manfred money-grab, streamed games — the Yankees’ Anthony Volpe has two choices:
He can be a .200 hitter who strikes out too much, but with intermittent home run power by trying to uppercut pitches — even with two strikes — or he can be a .280 singles and doubles line-drives hitter by swinging level. I’ll hang up and listen to your answer.
So ESPN studio regular and ex-NBA player Kendrick Perkins last week was ejected from an AAU kids game for misconduct.
And that, as well as Perkins’ crude explanation and the network airing the nothing-funny video of his ejection, brought howls of delight and laughter from a panel of his on-camera ESPN colleagues. But to expect better from ESPN, the nation’s all sports network, long ago became a waste of expectations.
It’s not exactly Rutgers, where Big Ten fever has put the school $265 million in debt, but Connecticut athletics has accumulated $53 million in debt. As with Rutgers, taxpayers likely will be forced to pay down much of that debt.
Is there no one with any sense of significant context?
During the Astros-Yankees game Thursday, Fox posted a graphic showing that Clarke Schmidt had started 13 straight games and allowed three or fewer earned runs in each. Wow!
But that would be wow-worthy only if Schmidt regularly pitched eight or nine innings per start rather than his Aaron Boone-delivered/mandated standard of five.
In keeping with Fox Sports’ habit of hiring miscreants and criminals, Skip Bayless’ FS1 show will now regularly feature face-tattooed gutter rapper Lil Wayne.
It would be difficult to detail all of Lil Wayne’s arrests and other legal issues, but they run the gamut. Guns, drugs, felony convictions, incarcerations. He once failed to appear in court in Arizona but had a strong alibi: He was doing time on Rikers Island.
One more reason to skip Bayless.
So ESPN busted up its one credible and even interesting live event team — its NBA trio of Mike Breen, Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson — to promote Doris Burke, dreadfully pedestrian and unwilling to offend even the most offensive.
But that’s ESPN. It hasn’t a clue.
As of Friday, the three teams with the highest payrolls — in order, the Mets, Yankees and Padres — were a combined 161-165.
With New York/New Jersey announced as one of the 2026 World Cup sites, one is left to wonder whether any public official in the tri-state area or beyond had to deal with the notorious pay-to-play winks and nods by soccer’s international governing body, FIFA?
Or was N.Y./N.J. willing to play that game? How does anyone reasonably think that the oil sheikdom of Qatar, with a climate best suited for camels and solar panels, was able to land the most recent Cup?
Millions in bribes to FIFA’s site electors have been alleged by western media. U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors claimed representatives working for Russia and Qatar bribed FIFA officials in 2010 to secure World Cup hosting rights later that decade.
Countless imported, ill-paid, poorly housed Third World laborers, lured to build soccer stadiums and facilities, were shipped home dead — on FIFA’s watch.
One would logically think that NBC Sports’ No. 1 guy, Mike Tirico, would avoid hosting a memorial to NFL legend Jim Brown given that Brown five times was arrested for assaulting or terrorizing women. Brown was even jailed for ignoring a court order to seek counseling for abusing women.
After all, Tirico, while with ESPN, was suspended for stalking and otherwise harassing female employees. Unlike Matt Lauer, NBC had no trouble with Tirico’s mistreatment of female colleagues.
Tirico saluting Brown as a peerless nobleman was a rotten idea. He should have passed on the invite rather than invite renewed inspection of his past.
Mike “Let’s Be Honest” Francesa still has his imaginary fastball.
After Shohei Ohtani recently pitched a complete-game shutout in the first game of a doubleheader, then cracked two home runs in the second game, we were reminded of Francesa’s authoritative insistence that Ohtani could never be both a successful big league pitcher and batter.
And one knew two weeks ago that Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander were goners after Francesa, on his podcast (which he had vowed never to sink so low as to host), insisted that both “are going nowhere. Both will be on the Mets next year.”
More lost tapes.
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