... 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.