The back pages of the New York tabloids never disappoint - or, in some cases, the front pages. The covers of the Daily News this morning on Lindsey Jacobellis's stunt in the snowboard cross: "Fool's Gold'' on the front, "Slope Dope'' on the back.

A quick scan of the papers show reaction to be split pretty evenly between ranking this among the biggest goofs in sports history, and forgiving it because those snowboarders are pretty radical and freewheeling and put a big emphasis on flair and exuberance.

I can go along with the latter - as long as we get that same reaction the next time someone dances in the end zone, gazes at a home run or flexes and struts downcourt after a huge dunk. The funny thing is (and that's not being said sarcastically at all), no one can recall any of those exhortations actually costing a team the game, much less a championship.

So it might be just a matter of Lindsey getting her timing down: close the deal, then shake it like a Polaroid picture. T.O. and Barry and Shaq can give her lessons, and she should be ready to get it right four years from now.

Until then, she can head to the medals stand and receive her gold in Unfulfilled Hype, right next to Bode and Anton. They might have to make room for the Canadian men's hockey team the way it played against Switzerland (!) today, against the backup goalie, no less.

Posted by David Steele at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

One of the few advantages of having to miss events like the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Weekend (that pesky pneumonia again) is getting to see how they're covered by the league's respective in-house networks. Today, on NBA-TV, live from Houston, we get the announcement of the Hall of Fame finalists, the All-Star players and coaches' interviews - and, hold onto your seats, the practices by the Rookie-Sophomore Challenge participants.

Meanwhile, live footage of the American woman who showboated her way out of a gold medal in the snowboard cross? Nah. (By the way, does this make Lindsay Jacobellis the new Leon Lett? More important, is Lett now off the hook after 10 years?) In defense of the family of NBC networks (as they say), MSNBC is showing the competition right now, and the USA-Sweden women's hockey semifinal just ended a little while ago on the USA network. (SPOILER ALERT ... SPOILER ALERT ... The Americans lost.)

Actually, even while acknowledging the NBA-TV and NFL Network's insular, self-promoting coverage, wouldn't it help the Olympic coverage to at least have an outlet for post-competition interviews and press conferences? Don't you want to hear, as it happens, what Jacobellis has to say? What Bode has to say about his slip-ups? The women's hockey team? ESPN can do it for big events, and so can the in-house networks, but we're pretty much at the mercy of whatever NBC wants to show us tonight. After the hockey game ended, USA immediately went to, I swear, a rerun of "JAG.'' If the big network and the Games themselves think "JAG'' is a better programming fit than an extra half-hour of live coverage, then why should we viewers care that much?

Back on NBA-TV, a third consecutive Pistons player is being interviewed by the network hosts, which past experience tells me that they're not in great demand from the horde of reporters in the ballroom where the mass interviews are taking place. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, meanwhile, probably can't even move their arms, they're pinned in so tight by the mobs around them. That might be a microcosm of the first half of this season, but you'll have to read Sunday's paper for more on that.

Blog-gramming note: I'm counting on my vast network of correspondents in Houston for updates on the weekend. First update, unanimously agreed-upon by everyone who's checked in: the traffic is out of control already. Everyone made the same complaint two years ago when the Super Bowl was there, when visitors swore they wouldn't go back for another one unless the city implemented a full-scale mass transit system. Not much progress there since, apparently.

Posted by David Steele at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

All the Ravens conspiracy-theorists out there should love this: news about the two Ravens who arguably are the biggest names on the team has flown under the national radar, for reasons that aren't really clear. Actually, this may be more for the people with the inferiority complex about our city. Either way, the news Mike Preston broke on Saturday about Ray Lewis wanting out got no national attention until yesterday, when all of a sudden everybody was talking about it. Phones were ringing all over the place from reporters trying to figure out what was happening, and the ESPN networks were running scrawls on the bottom of their screens and inserting reports about what might or might not happen. (ESPN.com says it won't, but you have to pay to read it for yourself.)

Maybe everyone was preoccupied with the Pro Bowl (?), or the Olympics. Then again, Lewis was on-air for about 12 hours a day from Hawaii on the NFL Network; if he was asked about his future as a Raven, or had any thoughts about it, none of that has trickled out.

Speaking of trickling out, Deion Sanders chose James Brown's radio show on Monday to announce that he has, in fact, retired. That, again, floated under the radar, but that's attributable more to the fact that it's been a foregone conclusion since the final weeks of the season. His name has been flung around for weeks as Brown's replacement on Fox's pregame show; note the report from the league's official website, which refers to him, as pretty much everybody does, as "former Raven Deion Sanders.''

Of course, everyone was led to believe that he was going to make the official announcement immediately after the season finale Jan. 1. A locker-room full of reporters showed up at the Castle in Owings Mills on Jan. 2 to see the players pack up for the offseason, but mainly to hear Deion call it a career. He never showed up and hasn't been seen around here since (kind of like Ray Lewis). That led to a funny bit on Comcast that night where Sage Steele (no relation) sat in his empty locker all day waiting. A month and a half later, Sanders gave it up on a national radio show that isn't even carried here. Not that he absolutely owes anything to Baltimore on that front, but this was his NFL home for his much-ballyhooed comeback and for the final act of his Hall of Fame career. If Jerry Rice could retire as a member of a Broncos team for which he never suited up in a regular-season game, then Sanders could have thrown this city a bone on his farewell.

But that might all be an overreaction. Or it could be a blogger being anxious about a team whose offseason news flow has slowed since owner Steve Bisciotti made his big splash two days after the season ended. On that front, Bisciotti has kept quiet publicly while keeping a fairly high profile at courtside at Maryland basketball games. After that Clemson game last night, maybe he needs to give Gary Williams a taste of what he gave Brian Billick. Not to pin this latest debacle and recent downward spiral on Williams, but does anyone have a better idea?

Posted by David Steele at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
                    

That was NBC reporting yesterday on Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves changing to new sets of skis at the last second (and, after Bode bombed, Rahlves changing back to his old ones and also bombing). But they, and lots of others, may have missed this in their evaluation of Miller's subpar downhill run: he stayed up late and drank the night before. That's according to Reuters and the AP. Miller didn't deny it, but didn't think it made a difference in his race. Suuure it didn't. Same story about the changing skis - it didn't make a difference. Don't believe that so fast, either, says one of his own teammates.

Meanwhile, the snowboarders have two golds and a silver so far, while news on the skiers is only getting worse, with one of the American women involved in what's generally being described as a gruesome training-run crash. So far, one stick good, two sticks bad.

Posted by David Steele at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

So, who's responsible for screwing up the Olympics in the first couple of days? The candidates so far are Bode Miller, Apolo Anton Ohno and Michelle Kwan's doctors.

It's really hard to jump on Kwan for her role in this whole should-she-or-shouldn't-she-have drama. Figure skating is subjectively scored and rewarded, so who can argue when being let on or off the team is decided the same way? Besides, if somehow Kwan had pulled herself together and won an elusive gold while playing hurt, they'd be telling her story at every Olympiad for the next 200 years. Stories like that are why the Games even get televised in the first place. Yet you can't help wondering whether there ever was a chance for her to compete, since she's been hurt almost non-stop since late last year. Someone should have told her to try again in four years. It might have saved her a lot of physical and emotional pain yesterday, and gotten everyone focused on the rest of the field.

Ohno gets a pass, because it's apparent, two Olympiads into it, that winning in short-track speed skating is determined almost wholly on who falls down when. That was pretty dramatic to watch, though, even on tape delay.

Same for Miller in the downhill yesterday, even though you knew early in the morning that he had missed a medal. It seems more obvious this year than usual, though, that following the Games takes a delicate balance of monitoring results online or on the likes of ESPN News, watching the prime-time package (packaging, actually) and reading the papers the next day. The news alerts during the day never mentioned the changing-skis-at-the-last-second business. Maybe NBC exaggerated its importance, but it raised eyebrows as it was unfolding on-air.

Nevertheless, Bode almost certainly has viewers rooting both for and against him, including American fans who either love him or hate him. So in a sense he didn't disappoint. He's got more races to go. So does Ohno, with a segment of the viewers again watching it like a NASCAR race, to see if anyone wipes out. Meanwhile, the figure skating goes on, with one obvious storyline now missing, but with the likelihood that another will replace it. Except there will be that "what if Michelle hadn't gotten hurt'' cloud hanging over it, which never helps, even if the emergence of another ice queen or judging scandal spices things up.

So, Kwan's doctors win. They screwed the Olympics up. At least so far.

Posted by David Steele at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

This one is going to drive Maryland fans crazy the rest of this season. The anticipation for this game was at its usual insane pitch, with students filling up their seats in Comcast early and, according to players, cheering baskets during warmups as eagerly as if they were actually during the game. The signs they were waving showed that they completely ignored Gary Williams' requests earlier in the week that they don't take personal aim; the shots they took at J.J. Redick in his final visit here can't even remotely be mentioned here. All in all, business as usual at that end of the rivalry.

Worse for the Terp supporters, though, is that Duke would have lost yesterday to a sharper, more composed team. D.J. Strawberry and, in relief, Sterling Ledbetter, chased and hounded Redick as much as any defenders have all season; none of his 35 points came easy. The same can't be said for Shelden Williams, though, and that got Gary Williams seething. These players, he said, are on this team and in the ACC for a reason: because they know what it takes to fight teams like Duke and players like Williams and Redick. This group has done it before, he said. They didn't do it well enough yesterday. In an eight-point game, they did enough things poorly and brain-locked just often enough to let this get away.

"They think they're getting up for games,'' Gary Williams said, "but the level you have to get up to when you play a Redick and a Williams, it's really hard to do. You have to do everything right to get ready to play this game. It's going to be a fight for 40 minutes, and you have to want that. We weren't as consistent in that area as I would have liked for the team to be today.''

This wasn't even about playing hard enough. As Nik Caner-Medley said afterward, "We might not have played harder last year; we played smarter and executed better against them, the whole game.'' They beat Duke twice last year. Last month in Durham they pretty much threw the game away with turnovers. Today, they messed up in so many areas (like missing 11 free throws), that fixing up any one of them would have kept the run of wins over Duke - and the aura of having the Blue Devils' number - intact.

Everything seemed muffled and off-kilter. The much-anticipated ceremony of Lefty Driesell taking part in the celebration of Williams breaking his wins record came off as too brief; Williams didn't stick around long after getting the commemorative ball from Driesell, and the Lefthander didn't even speak to the crowd. As for the crowd, once Duke came out of the box strong at the start of both halves, the passion cooled, the throng quieted and the big home-court edge was watered down. Duke is the kind of team that loves silencing hostile crowds. This is the first time in a while that it has done it in this building.

The Terps are running out of chances to turn this around. The troubled senior class, or what's left of it, isn't finishing strong. If this group hadn't already tasted so much success already, as recently as a year ago and dating back to the '04 ACC tournament, this could be written off as an unavoidable speed bump every program hits. But the bump popped up at an unexpected time, and that's making it hard for the faithful to grasp it or explain it.

Posted by David Steele at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

I must be living right. I passed up watching the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies to go see the Wizards and Cavs at MCI, figuring that if something spectacular happened, I'd see a couple gazillion replays in the next 24 hours. I also passed on recording the broadcast in favor of the final four episodes of "Arrested Development,'' the funniest show that apparently nobody ever watched.

So I see Gilbert Arenas - who got the NBA All-Star berth in the morning that he should have gotten the day before - pass on one-upping Karl Malone's record snit (see the previous post) and instead miss a triple-double by two rebounds while outplaying LeBron and leading the Wizards to a win. And I walk in the door an hour ago, and the opening ceremonies are still on! I hadn't figured on that, although I should have; this is what NBC does best, fit Olympic events into its schedule like a glove.

I caught Sophia Loren helping carry in the Olympic flag (she's 71; I looked it up. She don't look it, know what I'm sayin'?). I caught the very cool torch lighting, which was right up there with the flaming arrow from Barcelona in 1992 on the all-time list. And I caught Pavarotti. When you're the host country and you pull Pavarotti out of your pocket to wrap things up, you've done your job well.

Meanwhile on ESPN, Carmelo Anthony not only appears to be handling his All-Star snub very un-Mailman-like - he had 14 points at the half and he's letting Kenyon Martin be the star - the Nuggets are beating Dallas and threatening to end the Mavs' 13-game winning streak.

So I got away with blowing off the opening ceremonies, and yet I'm pressing my luck again, because I'm not watching anything during the day because of the Maryland-Duke basketball game at Comcast Center. The entire campus, as usual, is geeked up. Gary Williams has been alternately pleading for the crowd to be the sixth man, and begging it to keep it clean and not get personal (without mentioning Duke's J.J. Redick by name). The students seem to be interested mainly in being their usual Duke-game selves. And school officials are taking a particular interest in this game as well, although not in a particularly timely fashion.

Looks like there will be a lot to watch out for tomorrow in College Park. Hopefully no snow, but lots anyway.

Posted by David Steele at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Wayne Gretzky's post-game statements about his alleged role in the NHL gambling scandal fall under the "painful necessity'' category - as in, "I have no intention of saying anything about this, but they're making me, so I'd better do it, make it as innocuous as possible and get it over with.''

He would have been better off issuing a printed "no comment,'' because not only did he not convince anyone that he wasn't at least peripherally involved, but he looked and sounded way too smug while doing it. The vibe he gave off at the podium last night said: "You guys are crazy if you think my hands are dirty in any of this. I'm Wayne F. Gretzky. Who you gonna believe, me or some cop in Jersey? So I'm gonna say I didn't gamble, keep repeating it in case you boneheads didn't get it, then I'll tell you again to quit asking me what those others were doing slinging big bets around, even if one of them is my best friend and top assistant, and the other is my wife. That's their problem, not mine, and quit making it my problem.''

Actually, that would have been a great statement. Definitely a little less disingenuous than the one he gave. I'll throw it out there that whether Gretzky gambled isn't the point. The point is whether he knew what was going on, on his team, in his sport and in his home, and whether he not only looked the other way, but tried to cover it up. And whether he's now lying about it if, in fact, he got busted on it by the wiretap.

This might be a little premature to say, but it's worth wondering whether that appearance last night wasn't Gretzky's Mark McGwire-Rafael Palmeiro moment. For his sake, he'd better hope it wasn't.

By the way, Canada is freaking out. Laugh at that if you like, but they've probably been laughing at us for years over the Pete Rose stuff.

Speaking of having a moment, it's worth watching tonight to see whether Gilbert Arenas or Carmelo Anthony, or both, have a Karl Malone moment.

Malone has never 'fessed up to one having to do with the other, but in the very first game after the Lakers' A.C. Green edged him out in fan voting for the 1990 NBA All-Star Game, Malone scored a career-high 61 points and added 18 rebounds. The shoes he wore in that game were immediately shipped out to be displayed in the National Sour Grapes Hall of Fame. He then sat out the All-Star Game with an injury, in the midst of a 13-year stretch in which he missed all of three games to injury (and two to suspension).

Arenas and the Wizards play Cleveland at MCI tonight, with Anthony and the Nuggets at home against Dallas later. Neither opponent is exactly a lock-down defensive team. The joke was already going around at the Wiz-Warriors game Wednesday: "82? Are they gonna pull a Kobe?'' No, the relevant reference is Malone.

Posted by David Steele at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Before I go into details about why this connection between Wayne Gretzky and the NHL gambling scandal has made me question everything I thought I knew about sports, a quick note: the NBA All-Star Game reserves will be announced in early evening. Local fans, don't hold your breath on Carmelo Anthony. A Denver TV station reported last night that he's going to be the odd man out on the West team. That's a real shame, with the season he's having. It's by far his best season, the Nuggets are leading their division, he'll never deserve it more than he does this year, and he apparently won't be there in Houston. That makes him 0-for-3. Meanwhile, if someone recalls the last Baltimore native to make the All-Star Game before Sam Cassell made it in 2004, feel free to pass it along.

Meanwhile, published reports say that the Wizards' Gilbert Arenas, having a better season than last year when he made the team, and now the No. 4 scorer in the NBA, didn't make it either.

Back to The Great One.

The one and only reason I am into the NHL as much as I am today is because of watching Gretzky back in the Edmonton days. Forget the L.A. days with the black jerseys, giving the sport its best and most widespread footing ever in this country. If you got to see him in the late '70s and early '80s when the Oilers were the dynasty, when you could barely get the games except in the playoffs, when he was with Messier and Kurri and McSorley and McTavish and Grant Fuhr (a black man in goal winning Stanley Cups back in the 1980s - whoa), you had to get hooked. The same way people can't get with the NBA now because Magic, Larry and Michael are gone, who can really watch it today without comparing it to the days of Gretzky? You can't. Don't try. Don't even fake like you're trying.

So it's a lot harder to crack on the scuzzy developments in this story - all the Rick Tocchet stuff, the Mob ties, the wife, even the big poster New Jersey crime official made up to illustrate their investigation. (If you've caught a glimpse on the news, you know what it is - a giant flow chart, straight out of the Sopranos with the bosses at the top and their underlings below, with drawings of hockey players blasting a puck. Operation Slap Shot, get it?) Because Gretzky's not an innocent bystander in this car wreck for the league anymore. He's in it way deeper. Not deep like Tocchet, but anyone who has watched Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco or any other of the Mob Pantheon movies, once your name and voice come up on a wiretap, it's hard to talk your way out of it or to hide behind your legend rep.

Is it cheesy to say, "Say it ain't so, Great One"? Sorry, can't help it.

Posted by David Steele at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Gary Williams nearly hit for the cycle last night at Comcast Center after finally reaching the top of the Maryland basketball victory list. He got choked up on TV, then on radio, then in front of the writers. He just needs to do it on the Internet now, maybe on a podcast.

Later that night, I mentioned to a friend who lives out West that Williams now had more wins than Lefty Driesell. "Williams passed Lefty?'' the friend said, obviously shocked. "How long has Gary Williams been there?'' Seventeen years, I said, not willing to believe it myself. "We're so old,'' was the reply.

Honestly, if you can clearly remember the N.C. State overtime game in the ACC tournament, with Len Elmore and John Lucas and Mo Howard, then you do have to feel old today, because that was 1974. Williams' first year here, 1989, was really a long time ago and not just yesterday, like it seems. You young whippersnappers who think Walt "The Wizard" Williams was ancient history, what do you know? Someone oughtta smack you, ya fresh kid.

Speaking of Williams, that was one of the topics that made Gary Williams pause while reflecting on his career here - saying, again, that if the Wizard had left back in the bad ol' days, the coach might not have made it to this milestone, much less to the national championship. "I'll always remember those first three years,'' he said, swallowing hard. "We were kind of left hanging those first three years. We weren't getting much support at the time. It was the players and coaches, and that was it.''

Walt has been out of the NBA for three years now. Joe Smith is in his 11th season - yes, 11th. You know Keith Booth is sitting next to Gary Williams on the bench. Man, time really, really flies.

Whew, now I'm feeling a little misty. So much that I can't quite bring myself to ridicule the NHL gambling mess, even though it includes Wayne Gretzky's wife and, apparently, some South Jersey mobsters. Can't break off any cracks about NHL deputy commissioner Paulie Walnuts. Not right now. I have to compose myself.

Posted by David Steele at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

David Stern has to be sitting in the NBA's Fifth Avenue offices this morning, listening to the talk surrounding the Super Bowl and saying to himself, "Welcome to my world.''

Fans openly questioning the league's integrity, spurred on by the losing coach? Superstar players blowing off major events for money? Hmmm, where have we heard that all before?

Everybody nodded to themselves in silent agreement (or, in many cases, didn't bother being silent) when it's happened in the NBA over the past decade. How willing will America be to wonder aloud about how upstanding and aboveboard the NFL is, now that Seattle and the Seahawks organization are brazenly blaming their Super Bowl loss on the zebras, and now that Joe Montana has to answer reports that he spurned the pre-game MVP celebration because the league wouldn't pay him 100 grand to do it?

Please, like you have to ask any of that about the NTL (National Teflon League).

A better question is, will the NFL come down on Mike Holmgren the way Stern landed on Jeff Van Gundy during last year's playoffs? Van Gundy got docked $100,000 and was forced to apologize for turning his Rockets' playoff series against the Mavericks into a forum on the officials' integrity. Better, or worse, than what Holmgren pulled at the Seahawks' welcome-home rally yesterday? What he told the fans at the rally was, "I didn't know we were going to have to play the guys in the striped shirts as well.''

Never mind that Holmgren, otherwise a respected head coach with a Lombardi Trophy already, showed himself to be a garden-variety loser with that cheap stunt, that low-rent attempt to suck up to a crowd that should have been angry at him for his weak clock-management. Is he any different than the parade of NBA coaches who whined every time their teams lost to Michael Jordan or Shaquille O'Neal, blaming it on refs, league officials and network honchos who "wanted'' the superstars and/or big-markets teams in the championship?

The other question, however, is: is Holmgren any different than the Steelers' Joey Porter, who said the refs "cheated'' in that big overturned call against the Colts. The NFL didn't punish Porter. Apparently the NFL is solid and secure enough to shrug off accusations that either it or its paid game arbiters fix games. Or this country's sports fans think the NFL's credibility bank is full enough that they won't smear the entire sport because of one spate of incompetently-officiated games. Obviously, from all the talk Stern has to shoot down every year, fans don't give the NBA that same benefit of the doubt, for whatever reason.

Nevertheless - "The refs stole it from us.'' C'mon, Seattle, be bigger than that. Oops, too late. Well, try this. Find a tight end who can catch, or a quarterback who can call plays quickly at the line of scrimmage, or defensive backs who can read and react to a gimmick play the other team uses all the time.

Speaking of Shaq, the world dumped all over him back in 1997 when he was the only living member of the NBA's 50 Greatest Players not to attend the ceremony at the All-Star Game in Cleveland. Time will tell whether Montana gets a pass for blowing off the Super Bowl's 40th-anniversary MVP ceremony, the one that all but three living MVPs attended - because he wanted to get paid.

Montana denied it. Believe his denial if you like. Since he invoked his family, he made himself fairly criticism-proof, proving again what a convenient ploy that is. Still, where there's smoke, there's fire. Montana hasn't exactly been above shilling for whatever company is willing to pay; by all reporters, he did plenty of it in Detroit in the week leading up to the game. So it isn't exactly implausible for him to do it when the league called on him to help promote it.

Meanwhile, were the families of the MVPs who showed up all right with the arrangements, or was it only Montana's that ran the risk of being inconvenienced? Bet some of the older MVPs, like Len Dawson and Joe Namath, who have had health problems recently, could have pressed the league for a big payout for their services - but instead, they went willingly, and in Namath's case (catch the way he showed off the lining of his suit jacket, which was covered with Jets' logos), enthusiastically. Some of them, like Tom Brady, even withstood booing from the partisan Steelers' crowd.

This was a little bigger than your basic sit-wave-and-sign session; this was (literally, in some cases) a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Think about Harvey Martin, who didn't live long enough to attend this, and Reggie White, whose widow accepted his Hall of Fame selection. If this really was about spending time with his family, this wouldn't even be an argument. But if money was involved, Montana should be ashamed of himself.

The NFL should be ashamed, too, of this and the way its reputation is being trashed by its own people. Then again, all of it probably will roll off its back, as everything else does. After all, this dog of a game with the dog of a buildup all week, was the one of the highest-rated and most-watched Super Bowls ever. When all is said and done, it will be Paul Tagliabue laughing in his office, and David Stern shaking his head.

Posted by David Steele at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

Watching an event like the Super Bowl with other people is so much better than watching it alone; you have to be able to bounce reactions and commentary and moments off someone else. I was watching with a family member and, in the fourth quarter, also talking to a friend on the phone. With that kind of support system, it's easier to watch Antwan Randle El throw the game-breaking touchdown pass to Hines Ward and them make with the observation that Marcus Trufant, the last Seahawks player in the Ward's general vicinity, was the second Seattle defensive back to get his pants pulled down during the game.

As we heard from sideline reporter Suzy Kolber in arguably the most intrusive in-game report in Super Bowl history, in the first quarter Marquand Manuel had injured his groin, and staffers had to surround him and hold up towels to shield his pants being lowered so his groin could be taped. First thought? That's good color, but I could have lived without that much detail. Still, not a bad report. Her halftime report was even better: the booth cut to her just as Mike Holmgren was airing out the officials as they left the field. She had time for one question, and it was the right one: what were you talking to them about? He told her, the call on Ben Roethlisberger's touchdown.

Speaking of clothing, do we know exactly what Mick Jagger reached down, picked up and threw off stage during the halftime show, and do we know what was at Keith Richards' feet during his solo during "Satisfaction''? They looked similar to each other, they looked like garments, they didn't look like outergarments. A quick check of reports from the halftime show don't indicate what they were, but they do tell us that ABC had them on a five-second delay, and that it came in handy when it bleeped a couple of Mick's lyrics. They wouldn't have needed one for Stevie Wonder, I bet.

Of course, the whole Motown pre-game show lasted about five seconds, and for three of those seconds, the mikes didn't work. Glad the NFL paid proper homage, like they promised. To be clear, though, the point of the column in this morning's paper about the NFL's snub of Motown wasn't to put down the Rolling Stones. Any other year, they'd be the ideal halftime pick. Just not this year.

Back to Roethlisberger: it really had to have been the Steelers' year, considering they won even though he threw possibly the ugliest interception in many a Super Bowl - the suggestion from my man on the phone was that it was the worst since Joe Theismann's Rocket Screen in 1984. The Seahawks looked ready to take over after that pick down at the goal line. They even got a touchdown from Jerramy Stevens, who until then had proven what Joey Porter said about was wrong; there was nothing "soft'' about him, particularly his hands.

But the air went out of the Seahawks' balloon immediately after. In fact, Matt Hasselbeck quickly challenged Roethlisberger and Theismann with that horrendous pick on Seattle's last real chance at scoring. And apparently in six weeks of training camp, 17 weeks of the regular season, three weeks of the playoffs and two weeks preparing for the Super Bowl, the Seahawks never worked on end-of-half or end-of-game clock management.

It was the least efficient of the Steelers' postseason games, and Seattle, the dominant team in the NFC all season, still wasn't up to the task.

Selecting Ward as the MVP was a good choice, and it had to be a tough one, because no one player stood out enough to make it a no-brainer.

Your guess is as good as mine on the best commercial; it all comes down to individual taste. I'd pick the Sprint commercial with the couch catching on fire, but only because I'm a big Benny Hill fan. Second is the Burger King commercial early on, for being so surreal. They get extra points because you knew what product they were advertising, which is never a given, especially when companies try to get creative on Super Sunday. Least favorite: the Gillette spots, simply because the idea of a razor with five blades scares the mess out of me. Jake Plummer wouldn't even need a razor with five blades.

Haven't heard about any civic unrest in Pittsburgh yet. But the night is young.

Posted by David Steele at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

Think the weather in Detroit on Super Bowl Sunday is an issue? (It is, since it started snowing yesterday and there are flurries and temperature plunges today threatening to wreak havoc on fans getting to the game.) It's a much bigger problem in Seattle, where heavy rain and high winds from Saturday have knocked out power. As of now, much of it hasn't been restored yet. Which means that a substantial portion of the city won't be able to see their team play in the first Super Bowl in the 30-year history of the franchise, trying to get the first championship in 27 years. If it were any other city than mellow Seattle, we might be witnessing the first-ever PRE-championship-game riot.

It's good that the game is finally here, though. After all the talk of how stupefyingly boring both teams are, and of how the Joey Porter-Jerramy Stevens feud was too manufactured, we've finally got football to talk about. For all we know, despite the fact that everyone ran out of story lines early - wait a minute ... have you heard that Jerome Bettis is from Detroit, and they're playing the game there? - this could be an all-time classic, and we'll all forget about the two weeks of so-called pre-game hype.

Meanwhile, it went completely over my head that Warren Moon was about to become the first black quarterback in the Hall of Fame. Amazing. Considering that he was the prototypical black quarterback of the 1970s - great in college, but completely overlooked by the NFL and forced to play in Canada - this sort of came out of the blue, overshadowed in the anticipation by Troy Aikman, Reggie White, John Madden and Michael Irvin (who didn't make it). Is that good or bad? Even Moon saw that it was a little of both; he acknowledged that it should not be an issue now, but that in the context of history, it was huge. Nevertheless, it didn't sink in with me until his name was announced yesterday - "Hey, he's the first black quarterback to make it, isn't he?''.

Ray Lewis is still lighting it up on NFL Network, on the field with Rich Eisen, Terrell Davis and Steve Mariucci. You'd be stunned to hear that he loves what Joey Porter said and agrees with him 100 percent.

Posted by David Steele at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

... and a few thoughts as the week comes to an end...

* Ray Lewis is on live in Detroit on the NFL Network, and all cracks about  his hamstring rehab aside, he's been good. Really good. So good, you couldn't help but wish he'd been around the second half of the season just to spill about his 6-10 team the way he just did about all the Super Bowl stuff.

* The NBA, like every other sport, is waving the white flag this Sunday. The actual choice of ABC for its national game and Super Bowl lead-in, is the Rockets at the Knicks. Two and a half hours of static would have been a better choice.

* Lots of drama over Paul Tagliabue's gloomy forecast on the labor negotiations in his State of the NFL address - but that, and Gene Upshaw's comments the day before, sounded like carbon copies of what they both said last year in Jacksonville. If we're lucky, things will get as nasty at the 11th hour as the NBA negotiations did last year. What fun that was.

* The Smoking Gun website has posted the police report from the Panthers' cheerleaders' incident. Some of the descriptions are a bit graphic.

* The New York high school girl who scored 113 points, and took 60 shots, in a game her team won by 105 points, has been fun to talk about, if only because it gives more people opportunity to rip Kobe. But here's a weird angle to it: the previous two girls to crack 100 points, Cheryl Miller and Lisa Leslie, became superstars, while the last two boys, Dajuan Wagner and a Texas kid named Cedrick Hensley (who did in on the same night in 2001), have disappeared into oblivion. Wagner, who went to the NBA after one year at Memphis, had two injury-and-illness-plagued seasons with the Cavaliers and has missed the past year after undergoing major surgery for colitis. Hensley rode the bench for two years at Houston and transfered to (and is now playing at) D-II Minnesota State-Moorhead.

* Anybody remember the wait for Lefty Driesell to get his 500th career win? We're not in for that kind of wait with Gary Williams' record-breaking win, are we? Winning at N.C. State Sunday will be no joke. How do you force 24 turnovers at home and still lose by 15? This is starting to feel way too much like the end of last season.

* Don't be surprised if the state's only representative in the NCAAs is Coppin State.

* And, the guess for Sunday: Steelers 23, Seahawks 21.

Posted by David Steele at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

So, you've made plans to go to Detroit for the weekend, without tickets to the game, but just to hang out and soak up the atmosphere. In fact, you might already have blown off work, but I won't tell. Anyway, the city has thoughtfully provided a fairly comprehensive list of Super Bowl parties (a friend even more thoughtfully provided them to me earlier this week). Be forewarned, though:

1) Lots of events this weekend are invitation-only, which means your only other option for getting in is knowing someone.

2) Lots of the parties are expensive, at least $100 and as much as $500 for so-called VIP access. Again, having the hook-up helps.

3) Just because Diddy's name is on it doesn't mean you'll see him there. One of the memorable sights from last year was the hordes of people stomping around Jacksonville holding party fliers with Diddy's name on it and complaining that he wasn't there. Magic Johnson, on the other hand, tends to show up at everything his name is attached to.

Social note of interest: Terrell Owens is hosting a party tomorrow night at ... Club Envy. You can't make this stuff up.

Now, if you're passing on the Super Bowl to go to Houston for NBA All-Star Weekend in a couple of weeks, you might enjoy this guide to the All-Star parties there. Just turn down your speakers before you log on; it's almost as loud as the ESPN.com Motion video. Full disclosure: I found this site through a basketball site called Truehoop.com - which I got to through the blog of the L.A. Times' excellent columnist, J.A. Adande.

And speaking of that, there has been a Ray Lewis sighting in Detroit. By this account, his hamstring seems much better.

Posted by David Steele at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

So far, the email reaction to my column this morning about bringing Lefty Driesell back one more time to honor him (as Gary Williams passes him on the Maryland coaching wins list, possibly tonight when he faces North Carolina) has been mixed. Some fond memories, some bitter. So guess what: you get to do the blogger's work for him again. What do you think - do you want to see Lefty at Comcast Center, or not?

I'm interested in the replies for a reason besides the obvious one. Yesterday's questions - about interested in the Super Bowl and about Terrell Owens possibly becoming a Redskins - pushed no buttons at all. T.O., I get, since the Redskins talk faded away fast. But as for the first question, either no one is reading this, or no one truly cares about this game. Poor Joey Porter and Jerramy Stevens are trying so hard to get you into it, too. It ain't working. The game itself had better be a classic, because the buildup has been DOA.

It's so bad, we're back to revisiting T.O. and Donovan McNabb. By the way, note to McNabb: a little late on the comeback, aren't 'cha, brotha? Maybe you should take some lessons from Joey Porter. Either that, or just maintain the high-road, non-engagement tactic you'd been using. You came off a lot better then. Now, at least three months after the fact, you come off as not a whole lot better than T.O.

I guess I'm obligated to react to what's so far being portrayed as the most inflammatory portion of McNabb's interview, the "black-on-black crime'' comment. Sorry you can't actually see my eyes rolling back. Yeah, tying some stupid contract squabble to images of actual crime is a pointless exaggeration. McNabb can't possibly be that thin-skinned to feel so hurt by what a character like T.O. says that he throws out a line like that. If you want to say that he wished his black teammate would support a black quarterback more, after what he'd gone through to be accepted by the NFL, the Eagles and the city of Philadelphia, go ahead. But get a grip, OK?

Still, a few things are worth pointing out. One, Owens has now backstabbed quarterbacks of nearly every racial and ethnic background, either directly (McNabb and Jeff Garcia) or indirectly (Kyle Boller). The next Asian or Native American quarterback he plays with is going to get buried, too. Two, Owens once compared himself, in his attempts to gain free agency, to Rosa Parks. Again, he tested the principles of nonviolence, because someone should have stuck a foot up his rear end for that one. Three, what did McNabb expect, after the way T.O. tried to throw Ozzie Newsome, the league's first black G.M., under the bus in his book? Who did McNabb think the Eagles were signing, Barack Obama?

The lesson: Just let it go. Terrell Owens isn't Donovan McNabb's problem anymore, and he needs to stop making him our problem now. It's starting to become more and more clear why McNabb's teammates weren't leaping to his defense all season long. He's coming off as mighty weak right now.

Posted by David Steele at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

All right, Q&A time.

The No Respect train has officially gone off the tracks. In this morning's paper, Seahawks tight end Jerramy Stevens decided that the reason his team hasn't been embraced by the football world is that dreaded, ever-present, evil-to-the-core East Coast bias. "There's a lot more media on the East Coast than the West Coast. We're up in the northwest corner of the country and they don't get to see us,'' he blathered.

Do we have to go through this again? Are Seahawks games starting at 11 p.m. Eastern time and ending too late to make the papers or the late newscasts? Is there some logical reason a game involving the Seahawks would be shown in an East Coast market during a regional broadcast? Are there not 24-hour TV sports networks in operation today? Did Shaun Alexander win a media vote as the NFL's Most Valuable Player? Did SEVEN of their players get selected to the Pro Bowl?

Plus ... does anyone remember a pretty decent team from a few decades ago featuring Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and Steve Young, coached by Bill Walsh - and can anyone tell us what time zone they played in? How about this basketball player who's putting up a bunch of points for some West Coast team - is he struggling to get attention? How about that college football team that went unbeaten for about three years in a row, turned out three Heisman winners in four years, won two national championships and played for another last month? Ring a bell? Their games started kind of late, too, and they really got overlooked, didn't they?

In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that in my nine years working in San Francisco, I gave this topic a lot of thought, and observed the legitimacy of the complaints pretty intensely, albeit as a native East Coaster. My conclusion: People fall back on it when it's convenient. When the 49ers and Raiders and Chargers were good, no one overlooked them. Same for the Lakers and, yes, the Sacramento Kings. Same for UCLA, Arizona and Stanford basketball. Same for USC football, or Washington or Stanford. Same for the Sonics (from, you know, Seattle) the year they went to the NBA Finals - unfortunately for them, the same year Michael Jordan came back and led the Bulls to 72 wins. Same for the Utah Jazz when they had Karl Malone and John Stockton, and the Portland Trail Blazers when the entire country knew of them as the Jail Blazers. Yet if some team or player needed a cheap motivational tool, or if they were clearly outmatched by some opponent, they pulled out the ol' reliable: we're three hours behind New York, and that's why no one "respects'' us.

The moral of this tale: shut up and play.

Which brings me to Question 1: Now that we know this Super Bowl matchup isn't grabbing America's attention the way most do, would it be a lot different if the Colts were in it?

We know the replay official from the Colts-Steelers game thought it would. (Hey, don't fine me. If you didn't fine Joey Porter, you can't fine me.) But that makes it even more interesting: if Mike VanderShank hadn't missed that final kick, had the Colts sent that game to overtime and won, would this whole week be jam-packed with hype off the scale? Even without that particular controversy, would the Colts have brought a full package of plotlines to the game that the Steelers and Seahawks combined couldn't match?

That one was gift-wrapped especially for Baltimore fans, but anyone else can join in.

Now, for the D.C.-area readers, Question 2: It's being reported in various venues (but apparently primarily by Peter King, in Sports Illustrated and on HBO's Inside the NFL) that the Redskins are interested in Terrell Owens.

Good or bad?

Discuss.

Posted by David Steele at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)