Rundown By the Run-Down

With the way work has been, this might just be a weekly feature.

In brief:

• By the time you read this, Lloyd Carr will probably have retired as coach of the University of Michigan Wolverines football team. I hope he left on his own terms and not just because his team put Appalachian State on the map. Literally. I know I'm not the only one who didn't know where it was before they beat Michigan.
  

• The Miami Dolphins are now 0-10, dropping to the Philadelphia Eagles without Donovan McNabb, who went down in the 2nd quarter with an ankle sprain. The '72 Dolphins went 14-0. This team may well have the complete opposite distinction. Unfortunately, this won't be a record since the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers also went an entire season without winning a game. Darn. Well since they can't break a record by winning no games at all, maybe they'll try to get one this season.

• Someone explain to me the friendship of Jessica Alba and . . . Baron Davis? Davis plays for Golden State, which is not anywhere near L.A., so I'm not sure how she made her way up there. Apparently her man is/was friends with Davis. He's also friends with Kate Hudson (?) But she was at their game on Sunday night in Golden State, seemingly by herself. "Bestest buds," they said. I bet.

• Roger Federer won the season-ending Masters Cup for the fourth time. I told you, even if he has a hiccup, he's coming through when it counts. And, oh, it counted, to the tune of a $1.2 million check and a new Mercedes CLS 500. That brings Fed to $10 million in prize money for the season. It's no $300 million, but I'd take it!

• Pretty decent day of football. I watched the Dallas Cowboys v. Washington Redskins, which is a huge rivalry that turned out to actually be a rival-worthy game. Tony Romo and the Cowboys prevailed, but the Skins had a chance to win on the last play of the game, but came up short. 4 touchdowns for T.O. . . . The New England Patriots utterly destroyed the Buffalo Bills, taking the Pats to 10-0 on the year. Tom Brady threw for almost 375 yards, and Randy Moss also had 4 touchdowns to match the other #81's total. And most importantly, I'm winning my head-to-head fantasy match-up. Mainly because I'm not playing any team that had any of the 4 guys I mentioned.

• Weird ending to the Cleveland Browns/Baltimore Ravens game. Browns' kicker Phil Dawson kicked a 51-yard field goal as time expired that the refs said was no good. That ended the game, the Ravens thinking they had won, and some players walked back to the locker rooms. One ref says they are reviewing the play. Except field goals aren't reviewable with instant replay, so, instead, they went with the opinion of one of the refs in front of the goal post who said that he saw the ball hit the backside of the cross-bar and trickle through the uprights. The good kick sent the game to overtime, where the Browns won with another field goal. The game had big implications for both teams. If this had been the Patriots instead of the Skins, people would be calling for asterisks on their perfect record. Now, we'll just never hear the end of it from Ravens fans, and that I can handle.
  

• I guess the NBA instituted the dress code because they didn't want them wearing "hip hop attire"? But towels are apparently OK. I watched the Detroit Pistons' Chauncey Billups post-game locker room interview, where he sat in only a towel and proceeded to bend forward and put lotion on the entire time he was talking. I'm glad he feels so comfortable, but at least let the man handle his ashiness first.
  

B.S. in Basketweaving

So the NCAA has released figures indicating that graduation rates are rising among student athletes at Division I colleges and universities. Of course, the story begins with statistics on the "high-profile" sports like men's basketball, football, and baseball, and women's soccer, basketball, volleyball, and softball. They say that men's basketball graduation rates jumped 8 percent.

Then, in the press release, NCAA President Myles Brand tells a bold-faced lie:

“NCAA student-athletes are students first, and by and large they are good students,” he said. “They have been afforded the privilege of competing in their chosen sport while pursuing their studies as full-time students, and most of them are handling those twin responsibilities quite well.”

Perhaps he's referring to the National Civil Aviation Authority, and not the NCAA that employs him. Because that's the biggest load of crap I have heard since . . . I'll stop picking on him, so never mind. It's B.S., and I don't mean a bachelor of science.

In whose universe are student-athletes "students" first? Only in the name you call them. Half of these so-called student-athletes aren't going to class (I said HALF, so every school does not fit in this category), and if they do, they are likely not doing the work . . . NOT because they don't want to (ok, not always) but because the coach and the team's boosters, who did graduate from that school, don't want classes to interfere with their playing. And heck, playing some sports is a full time job. Who wants to do extra work after that? And if studies did take precedence, then how come they don't take you to meet the professors on recruiting trips? Please. Don't let school interfere with their ability to play their sport. Because if they do, they are going to get lambasted by the press and their classmates for under-performing.

I wanted to save my NCAA rant for the Reggie Bush post, but I think I'll just jump right into it here.

College sports are only amateur because the NCAA has one of the biggest rackets going. They get, for free, the services of these soon to be pro athletes under the guise of promoting education when nothing could be further from the truth. They exploit their talent, give them a few bucks to attend their school, and get, again for free, what they should be paying for. The players become household names but they don't get paid a dime for anything, all in the spirit of not tarnishing the sanctity of college sports. The NCAA says that a free education is payment enough to these kids, but when they're making millions while the kids get flack for taking $1 from anyone other than their family, the whole thing smells a little funny.

Once you parse through the minuscule increases in the graduation rates, and keep in mind that these are numbers for people who entered the college or university from 1997 to 2000 and graduated by 2007, you get to the real numbers. The lows. The bottom line is that if a school is graduating less than 1 in 5 of all of its players - or none at all, if you played basketball at the University of Maryland - then these overall increases are irrelevant because somebody is being failed.

Plus, just graduating is not enough. What classes are they taking and what kind of degree are they getting? And more importantly, are they doing the work themselves? I don't think it's a big secret that the administrations themselves do everything they can to make sure that the students pass their classes, by any means necessary. They just don't trust their student-athletes to do their school work. This does an extreme disservice to the student-athlete, who won't be able to get another job besides the one and only job they recruited them to do: to play ball.

The student-athletes have suffered enough for far too long with this system. If you're not going to really emphasize education in the "high profile" college sports, then so be it, but please don't insult our intelligence by trying to convince us otherwise.

Race Car Driving is Not a Sport . . . yeah, I said it

So for my first official post, I thought I would give you a list of activities that I consider to be a sport. For a definition, I turned to the trusty Answer.com, which offered this among the many definitions:

"An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively."

Note the phrase "physical exertion." I know that some of you may disagree and that is fine. You may even go on Answers.com and see that the first definition says only "physical activity." Nevertheless, the following is my not-so-exhaustive list, in no particular order, of some activities that I consider to be sports:

Sports

1. Basketball
2. Jai alai
3. Baseball
4. Football
5. Tennis
6. Boxing
7. Soccer
8. Hockey (Yep, few cared when it was gone a year but it's still a sport)
9. Track & field
10. Golf* - ONLY thanks to Tiger Woo

* But as long as people like this are playing, too, it's always going to be fringe in my eyes.


Whether or not the above sports will appear on Pleats 'n Cleats (i.e., does anyone care who's the next Carl Lewis?) is another question, but suffice it to say they made the list. What did not make the list? These are activities that involve skill, but just because you get a winner and a loser doesn't make it a sport. They are:

NOT Sports

1. Race car driving (If something really eventful happens, I MAY mention it)
2. Bowling
3. Poker
4. Fishing
5. Iditarod (maybe for the dogs, not the people chillin' on those sleighs)
6. Hunting or shooting at anything, especially clay pigeons
7. Billiards
8. Bocce ball
9. Spelling bees
10. Eating competitions

I believe what all these non-sports have in common is that sweating - and therefore, physical exertion - is due to lighting, outside temperature and/or pressure/nervousness, and not in any way related to the activity itself. Let me know if you have any others to add to this list.

Someone has already taken me to task for race car driving, saying that NASCAR and that other league are popular. I said, "Well, so is the circus." Also not a sport.

Remember: Just because you see it on ESPN doesn't mean it's a sport!