INDIANAPOLIS -- On his tippy toes, he might be 5-10, very easy to lose in the enormity of a football stadium where faces look like matrix dots and crowd noise drifts to the ozone. But no one strikes a larger pose in the Midwest today than Tom Izzo, public defender of the Big Ten's battered self-esteem. If trends and hipness start on both coasts in America, college basketball in the heartland also has been taking on an irrelevant, plodding look, to the point I stopped watching.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- There's no place like home for the Final Four.
Goran Suton scores 19 points and pulls down 10 rebounds and the Spartans hold Louisville under 40 percent shooting to knock off the overall top seed Cardinals 64-52 and advance to the final weekend for the fifth time in the last 11 years.
Only 90 miles from their campus, the Spartans will play Connecticut on Saturday at Ford Field in Detroit. A crowd of 72,000, the largest ever for college basketball's signature event, is expected for each game.
Let's not kid ourselves: The Motor City Bowl seriously stretches the concept that there's no such thing as a bad bowl bid. Sure, it gives the MAC a much-needed bowl slot, since that conference seems to have the most bowl-eligible teams left stranded at home in the post-season. But for the Big Ten team involved, the extra couple weeks of practice are probably more of an enticement than the actual thrill of going to Detroit in late December.
Then again, the Big Ten's actual involvement with the Motor City Bowl is mostly theoretical. While the conference has had a deal with the bowl since 2003, only twice has the league actually supplied a representative: Northwestern in 2003, and Purdue last year.
So far as I know, it was I who coined the term "MACrifice" in reference to the tendency of Big Ten teams to schedule non-conference games against the dregs of that conference. The Motor City Bowl, in essence, is the revenge of the baby-sat. It's one thing to rough up a mid-major also-ran in early September; it's something else entirely to face a pretty good MAC team at a neutral site in December when everybody knows you're only there because you had a hopelessly mediocre season. The MAC team has nothing to lose; the Big Ten team has nothing to win.
Meet Katrina Hancock. Aside from having a potentially unfortunate last name (tee-hee!), she is also a reporter for NBC's Detroit affiliate WDIV. Hancock was assigned to cover the Penguins and Wings Stanley Cup Final but at some point she became the interviewee and not the interviewer. KDKA, a Pittsburgh station interviewed her and, well, I don't want to spoil the YouTube. What I will say is that it's a lesson in instantaneous career suicide.
The money quote: "She was the only Detroit journalist to say that Pittsburgh has better fans than Detroit."
Really? The only one? You don't say! I guess the rest of them liked their jobs too much. Seriously, did she want to get fired? If she did, I can commend her for doing it in such a creative way. Otherwise, well, WHAT THE HECK WAS SHE THINKING?
What Hancock said might not have been the best quote of the whole piece, though. The Pittsburgh anchor, Paul Martino, finished his piece by saying "and I had to promise Katrina that we wouldn't be sending that interview back to Detroit." Somehow I imagine it took a Herculean effort on his part to not burst out laughing in the middle of that sentence. You had to figure that he was smart enough to know (unlike Hancock) that even though he wouldn't send it back to Detroit personally, in a digital world things like this do, in fact, get back to Detroit.
Whoops. I guess it is very different when you're on the other side of the microphone.
Lawyers representing Toronto-based player agent Don Meehan have issued "notices of libel" against Detroit Red Wing player Chris Chelios and an unspecified number of media outlets. "We have sent out notices alleging libel to Mr. Chelios and various media," said Meehan's lawyer, Graham Smith of Goodman's law firm in Toronto.
Smith declined to specifically name the media outlets which have been served with the notices, but it's believed the Toronto Star is one of them.
As TSN notes, the next move is up to Chelios and the other accused parties:
A notice of libel usually insists on a retraction or apology to mitigate damages. It also allows the parties who have been served with the notice to respond as they see fit. If the person issuing the notice of libel is not satisfied with the response, that person is entitled to commence legal proceedings.
Meehan has said that "the best deal is one that leaves both sides satisfied." I have a feeling the best deal will not be the one that's made when this situation finally hits critical mass -- if it hasn't already.
No, I'm not talking about his slow feet or his running style that White Sox color analyst Darrin Jackson described as "He looks like he's running in a straight jacket. Just fighting himself."
On Thursday of last week, Casey flew home to Pittsburgh for the Tigers off day. Upon returning back to Detroit, he received a surprise.
Sean Casey flew home to Pittsburgh for the off day last Thursday, only to return to Detroit City Airport and find his car up on cinder blocks, with the windows smashed and all four tires gone.
He can now officially call himself a Detroitan. Detroiter? Detroitite? What the hell do people from Detroit call themselves?
There's no mention of what was taken from Casey's car besides the tires, but if the windows are gone I think it's safe to say his stereo and anything else he left in the car is gone too.
As for who broke into the car, nobody has a clue as it was just a random act, but I'm gonna go ahead and say Jerome Bettis is a suspect. He's from Detroit you know.
Are Wings fans spoiled? Are they becoming the Atlanta Braves fans of the NHL?
How else can you explain the fact that the Red Wings didn't have a full house for their Game One tilt against the Flames?
... the sight of so many empty red seats at Joe Louis Arena in the Wings 4-1 victory against the Calgary Flames on Thursday evening was sad. Good old Bud Lynch, the Wings long-time public address announcer, declared the crowd for the series opener at 19,204, which is more than 800 fans from JLA's 20,066-seat capacity.
If the no-shows were factored in, that attendance figure was likely 3,000 shy of a sellout. The prevailing theory is that Detroit's hockey fans are sick and tired of being sucked in by strong performances in the regular season, only to be quickly let down in the playoffs.
Now, why didn't so-called "HOCKEYTOWN" sell out?
Ticket price hikes, perhaps? Boredom? Or, is this simply an anomoly?
Blogger Christy Hammond was certainly blown away to find tickets available:
I can't even explain it. It's 2:20pm on Tuesday afternoon and there are still plenty of playoff tickets to buy. I've never been able to get playoff tickets on Ticketmaster before and this year there seem to be plenty. Yes, I know tickets went on sale at 10am, but there was a presale yesterday and I guess I expected there to be less tickets available.
Perhaps set to become baseball's Gilbert Arenas (minus the swag), Tigers CF Granderson has a personal blog set up at MLB Blogs.
A sample:
We are at about the halfway point of Spring Training games now and a little bit of the talk around the clubhouse is about opening day in Detroit. The main talk now dealing with that is how many tickets each person will need and get. If you don't know me, I always leave a lot of tickets for friends and family throughout the season, and sure enough opening day is just like a majority of the season for me with a lot of requests. So I have to check and make sure with the Tigers that there will be enough tickets for my family and friends.
Now hearing that the opening day starter will be Jeremy Bonderman, a lot of talk is based on how important our pitching staff is to the success of our up coming season. I think it is very important especially with the guys we have and the type of guys we have. We have veterans with Kenny Rogers and Todd Jones. We have future veterans with Bonderman, Mike Maroth, and Nate Robertson. We also have young and exciting youth with Joel Zumaya and Justin Verlander. I think we have a very exciting mix and guys that at any given time can be the standout guy and pitch great for us. If they can be anywhere close to how good they were last year, our season should be pretty good.
It's not the most riveting stuff, sure, but it's a smidgen of a look at Granderson's thought process and personal life. Can't beat that. (Unless, of course, the blogger is Tommy Lasorda.)
INDIANAPOLIS -- On his tippy toes, he might be 5-10, very easy to lose in the enormity of a football stadium where faces look like matrix dots and crowd noise drifts to the ozone. But no one strikes a larger pose in the Midwest today than Tom Izzo, public defender of the Big Ten's battered self-esteem. If trends and hipness start on both coasts in America, college basketball in the heartland also has been taking on an irrelevant, plodding look, to the point I stopped watching.
An ugly situation just got fugly, 
No, I'm not talking about his slow feet or his running style that White Sox color analyst Darrin Jackson described as "He looks like he's running in a straight jacket. Just fighting himself."
Are Wings fans spoiled? Are they becoming the Atlanta Braves fans of the NHL?
Why, of course he is: 
