Put Formula 1 on death watch. Eight Formula 1 teams, including perennial powerhouse Ferrari and current season leader Brawn GP, have announced their intention to leave Formula 1 and start their own racing series next year. The issue is financial, but not in the way that you might expect. The ruling powers of F1 want to limit team’s annual budgets to $60 million a year, and impose severe penalties if teams don’t adhere to the limitations. The eight teams aren’t interested in having someone else dictate how they can spend their money, so they are threatening to go out on their own. I have never heard anything so stupid. Going off on their own set open wheel racing in the U.S. back a decade or more, taking Indy racing from a rapidly growing sport to one that it all but irrelevant. F1 has a bigger base by far to build from, but they would still be badly crippled by this dissension. It seems odd that a series that depends so heavily on the car industry would be looking to find ways to spend more now, and it certainly seems like an odd way to try to garner public sympathy in the midst of a bad recession. I just hope that someone swallows their pride and blinks before this one gets totally out of hand. It’s not that I even care about F1 – I don’t – it’s just that I can’t stand to hear anything more about groups tearing themselves apart for stupid reasons.
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I think the NFL needs to tighten up their drug testing, because Chad OchoCinco is clearly high. He took the opportunity today to guarantee that the Bengals were going to make the playoffs. What? Which Bengals? Surely not the same ones we have seen the last couple of years. Marvin Lewis is still their coach, right? I can see how they might be better than they were last year, and I guess I could even see how they could make a go of it late in the season, but I certainly don’t see this as a guaranteed playoff team. There are holes all over the field, and the organization still seems like a sick one – they still have Lewis at the helm, after all. I’ll respectfully disagree with the artist formerly known as Johnson.
Cal State Fullerton picked a very, very bad time to hit the skids. Not only were they the second seed in the College World Series, but they had a relatively easy draw as well – Arkansas is red hot, but they slumped badly heading into the postseason, and Virginia had never been in the CWS before. Two bad games, though, and it’s back to Fullerton for them. They lost a wild one to Arkansas for their first lost in the double elimination tourney, then waited too long to wake up and mount a comeback against Virginia today. They were heavy -280 favorites today, so people who could find a reason to back Virginia are happy campers right now. A best-of-one tournament like this is very hard to handicap, but it is brilliant to watch and it deserves more coverage and respect than it gets (though the coverage has improved infinitely recently).
With the end of the NBA Finals I am thankful for one thing – that we will never again have to hear talk about Kobe’s inability to win without Shaq . No more bad rap songs, no more experts yammering endlessly, no more mind-numbing talk about a ridiculous subject. The guy is clearly the best player in the game, he has been for a long while now, and now we can let it rest and move on to something else. And by something else I don’t mean anything to do with LeBron James and Cleveland. New topics only, please.
1. There’s an article today on ESPN that suggests that Notre Dame is going to go 11-1 and return to the BCS this year. Apparently they aren’t kidding, either. I’m not sure I have ever read anything more stupid. They are returning a bunch of players and all, but it’s not like they are returning BCS caliber players or anything. Experienced garbage is still garbage. Eight or nine wins is believable, but 11 is a joke – even against the puffball schedule they have given themselves this year.
This Tim Floyd situation is going to get uglier and uglier. His resignation, and the speed and seeming joy with which the athletic department at USC took it, is a clear indicator of his guilt in the alleged cash-spreading incident, and it’s not hard to imagine him being guilty of more, either. The NCAA combined their investigation into the basketball team with their one into Reggie Bush and the football team et al . That would suggest that they are taking it pretty seriously, and this just adds fuel to their efforts. It will be very interesting to see what happens here. It could end very badly – loss of scholarships or post-season eligibility or the like. This really makes you wonder if maybe Pete Carroll will find the next NFL offer too good to refuse. If he does have some blood on his hands then he’d be much better off following the example of John Calipari – get out ahead of the scandal – than that of Tim Floyd.
Tiger Woods went directly from Ohio, where he made the entire PGA his bitch yet again, to New York to play a practice round at Bethpage Black, the site of the U.S. Open in just under two weeks. This is seriously bad news for the rest of his opponents – it clearly shows that he is intensely focused ad ready to defend his title. Add in the fact that he’s obviously in top form, and you have the makings of a heavy favorite. There are few things better than watching him when he’s in the zone.
It’s the 2008-2009 NBA Finals and this season sees the number three seed in the East, the Orlando Magic (59-23), meet the number one seed in the West, the Los Angeles Lakers (65-17). The Magic beat the Philadelphia 76ers in the initial round, the Boston Celtics in the second and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Lakers took it to the Utah Jazz, Houston Rockets and Denver Nuggets.
Andy Roddick lost at the French Open today. What a shock. Actually, he got crushed. He lost in three decisive sets to hometown hero Gael Monfils. This victory sets up one heck of a quarterfinal match. Monfils has only dropped one set, and he’s playing as well as he ever has. His next opponent – Roger Federer. Federer is building a nice unbeaten streak on clay, but he had to fight for his life to come back from 0-2 against Tommy Haas to win in five sets. Federer is obviously favored to win the match, but it won’t be easy for him. The winner of this match will be in very good shape to win it all, so this could be a classic. It should go down on Wednesday.
Three quick thoughts to end the week:
Joe Torre said today that he doesn’t think that Manny Ramirez should play in the all-star game if he gets voted in. I’d go a step further – if the fans vote Manny into the all-star game then MLB should immediately ban people from entering every stadium in the league. It would be better to play in empty stadiums then to let people who are stupid enough to vote a suspended druggie into the all-star game make the team. This would make a mockery of the all-star game. Of course, the mockery ship sailed years ago when it come to all-star games.
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