Cultural Insensitivity Alert

Courtesy of ESPN again:

On Theo Ratliff's multiple rejections of Chinese-born Yao Ming: "That toy has been recalled."

At least he didn't mention lead.

Sports-Industrial Complex

After reading this Jason Whitlock article someone posted on HoyaTalk about ESPN's role in propagating the BCS-Centrism of college football, I turned on SportsCenter, where the 11 am show's anchors Stan Varrett and Josh Elliott "argued" for about 10 minutes about a playoff.  And by "argued," I mean that Elliott came up with a hypothetical playoff system, and Varrett offered stale, falsely equivalent rejoinders supporting the BCS.  The two anchors functioned as metaphors for what I imagine will be the coming debate in college football, particularly if Texas-- 11-1 and victorious over Oklahoma-- gets leapfrogged for the national championship game by Oklahoma.  

On one side, there will be President Barack Obama and, well, most sports fans who understand that playoffs are both a fair and exciting way to determine the best team in a league.  On the other side, there will be ESPN, the Sports-Industrial Complex, who recently purchased the rights to broadcast BCS games.  They need a return on that $500M investment, and if there's no BCS, well, that's just not going to cut it.  Having largely erased the pretense of journalism, I imagine they will use their new and opinion programming to wage a battle against implementing a playoff.  I'll be interested to see if Gregg Easterbrook writes about this in next week's TMQ (as he hinted this past week), but I imagine that he'd come to a similar conclusion.

As always, follow the money.

Weird, Wild Stuff

For the first time in my memory, there is a college basketball game being played on a weekday morning.  It's a part of ESPN's college basketball kick-off marathon.

TMQ Shows Georgetown Some Love

In his lengthy, weekly column on the NFL, Gregg Easterbrook gives a shout out to Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz ('89):

Schwartz is one of the NFL's underappreciated figures: A smart guy who graduated from Georgetown University, Schwartz not only does a fabulous job but also belongs to that small club of NFL coaches who read the New York Times and books about intellectual affairs. 

Easterbrook runs the risk of being redundant--generally, "smart guys" (and "smart girls") tend to graduate from Georgetown--but still, always good to see Georgetown mentioned in a positive light.

On a related note to the title: the McCain campaign has been trying to say that Barack Obama is "flip-flopping" on his pick for the World Series.   Politico piles on, as well.  One problem: "showing some love" for the Rays, which is what Obama did at a rally the other day, does not mean what McCain and Politico think it means.  Easterbrook showed Georgetown some love in his article; he didn't say he roots for Georgetown football, think that Georgetown is the best school in the country, or anything like that.  Rather, he gave it the written version of a pound/fist bump/dap/terrorist fist jab.  Same with Obama: shaking hands does not equate to picking them, or even rooting for them to win, the World Series.  He's just showing some love.