benaikey

I usually stay out of politics, and for good reason. They’re none of my business. But should I be held to a double standard? No. So here’s what I propose: Barack Obama, stay out of sports.

You heard me right. You’re a politician. You don’t have any business in the sports world. I know most of you are out there wondering where this is going, and I’m about to make things clear.

Last night, Mark Buehrle threw a perfect game for the Chicago White Sox, an amazing feat only performed 17 previous times in the 100+ year history of Major League Baseball. Buehrle should be commended for his superb control on the mound, his endurance, and his ability to lead his teammates. But by no means should the president be calling him minutes after the game to congratulate him.

By no means am I saying he shouldn’t be able to give kudos when it’s due. In fact, it’s customary for a championship team to visit the White House to meet the president. But this isn’t the first time Obama has stuck his nose where it doesn’t belong.

During the pre-game show of the Super Bowl, after he had already been inaugurated and hence should have been fulfilling his duties to this great nation of ours, he felt the need to do a pointless pre-game interview, rambling on about football, and if I remember correctly, Jessica Simpson.

Around the same time, he did a few interviews regarding the BCS after controversy reared its ugly head yet again, sending Oklahoma to the Big 12 Championship (and later BCS National Championship) instead of Texas or Texas Tech in spite of identical records.

Fast forward to just after Selection Sunday, the beginning of the greatest event in all of college sports – the NCAA tournament. President Obama feels the need to go on Sportscenter and publicly fill out his bracket with ESPN analyst Andy Katz. I don’t care who you think will win it all, and you had no right to drag the Tarheels through the mud (no pun intended) by saying you picked them last year and they let you down. There are over 350 teams in Division I. The odds of any team winning are staggering, and to criticize college kids for not winning is despicable.

Earlier this month, he threw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game in St Louis. Again, what are you doing? I could possibly justify it if the game was in your adoptive hometown of Chicago, or Washington DC, where you should have been working on fixing this mess of an economy.

Which brings me to last night. Obama called Mark Buehrle just minutes after pitching a perfect game, then calling a press conference to talk about it.

Are you out of your mind? The unemployment rate hasn’t been this low since the Great Depression and you’ve got time to watch a baseball game and then hold a press conference and gloat about how someone from your favorite team threw a perfect game?

This really is the last straw for me. I didn’t support the man to begin with, but this absolutely tears it. When you campaigned, you promised to turn this economy around and pull our troops out of Iraq. Someone remind me, are we still there? Are people still losing their jobs at alarming rates? Yes, as a matter of fact, they are.

Step 1. Remove your head from your lower body cavity. Step 2. Get to work doing what you promised the American people you were going to do.

I don’t care if you’re a sports fan. So was Gerald Ford (R.I.P.), our 38^th president. He played college football at the University of Michigan as an offensive lineman. Did he ever waste time rambling on about sports and trying to be a celebrity instead of a president? No, he did not. Granted his term was short and not much was accomplished, but at least he didn’t give false hope to the people depending on him.

You should be completely and utterly ashamed of yourself. You promised change, and this is what we get? The Hershey’s slogan is right after all – change is bad. As much as people disliked Bush, he at least tried to get things done. You’ve acted like a spoiled movie star, talking to cameras and doing promotional crap instead of actually working. You’re no better than Lindsay Lohan or Flava Flav in my book.

My point is this. You were elected to do a job, and you haven’t done it. If you’d rather be a celebrity than a leader, do it. Resign and go make buddy cop movies with Sean Penn or some other bleeding-heart liberal. I didn’t vote for you, and if I could go back in time, I’d vote against you. According to recent reports by Yahoo! Sports, I’m not the only person in America to feel this way. Shape up. If California can do a recall election to remove a corrupt governor that was leading their state down the toilet, we should be able to do the same for the United States as a whole.

I’m by no means politically biased. I consider myself an independent, and vote for whichever candidate I believe is going to screw things up less. I don’t think McCain would have done a particularly great job either; I think this was an election where America lost no matter who won. But this is simply unacceptable. Your stimulus package has cost more jobs than it’s saved, and all those greedy companies leeching off your plan are still failing in spite of how much money your plan threw at them. Your stimulus plan is the New York Mets.

I’ll make a deal with you. Leave sports alone for awhile and do your job. I know it’s hard, but do you really want to be known as someone less competent than good old Dubya? At least make an effort to fix our economic problems. You owe it to all the poor suckers than believed in you and put you in office.

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I’m gonna get straight to the point on this one – I have a serious beef with the state of the Home Run Derby. The scoring system is horribly flawed. Don’t believe me? Then take a look at this.

Let’s use last night’s Home Run Derby as an example. For those not familiar with the spectacle, I’ll give a quick run-down of the rules. Eight men compete, four from the AL and four from the NL. The point is to hit home runs. Each swing that does not produce a home run counts as an out. Once you’ve got 10 outs, it’s the next player’s turn. Simple enough right?

This is where controversy rears its ugly head. There are three rounds, each of which cuts the field in half. Home runs carry over from Round 1 to Round 2, but not to Round 3.

Does that not make sense to anyone else or am I going crazy? Either have a running total for the entire competition or don’t let any totals carry over.

Anyway, back to last night’s Derby for my example. The participants were Prince Fielder, Albert Pujols, Ryan Howard, Adrian Gonzales, Nelson Cruz, Brandon Inge, Carlos Pena, and Joe Mauer. The first round had Howard, Cruz, Howard, and Pujols advance, with Pujols having to defeat Pena and Mauer in a swing-off. Personally, I like the tie-breaker employed, but that’s besides my point.

Going into the second round, in which the home runs carry over, Fielder and Cruz had 11, Howard had 7, and Pujols had 5. In the second round, Howard led the way with 8 home runs, Fielder and Pujols hit 6, and Cruz hit just 5. However, since the running totals had Fielder at 17, Cruz at 16 (in spite of an inferior second round), and Howard at 15 (the most consistent of any of the four competitors to this point), Ryan Howard had to take a seat.

Did the lightbulb turn on inside anyone’s head just now? The guy that had the best total of the whole round didn’t get to move on to the finals, and the guy with the worst total of the round got to advance because he had a better overall total. Who really thinks that’s fair?

Remember last year’s memorable Derby during the last season ever at Old Yankee Stadium? I know you do. Josh Hamilton utterly destroyed the competition, hitting an unheard of 28 home runs in the first round alone. With the system of a running total for the first two rounds, he didn’t need to put any effort at all into Round 2. To his credit, his finals opponent, Justin Morneau, didn’t do half bad himself. He drove 8 long balls in the first round and 9 in the second, setting up the finals as Morneau vs. Hamilton.

And here’s where everything goes wrong. Morneau wins the Home Run Derby by a final round total of 5-3. Excuse me if I’m out of line here, but if you ask who won last year’s Derby, most people will (incorrectly) say Josh Hamilton. Looking at the totals for the whole competition, he would have. Hamilton hit 35, and Morneau hit just 22.

Does anyone out there believe Morneau really deserved to win when his 3 round total was less than Hamilton’s first round total? I didn’t think so.

Here’s the point I’m trying to make: only carrying over one round is going to cheat players out of a possible victory if they don’t have a good final round. If you’re going to carry over the totals from the first round to the second, carry it over to the third too. That way it really does allow the best player to win. Or just don’t have any rounds carry over so the participants have to give it their best attempt each and every time. If you do that, the fans are the big winners, as they should be for forking over that kind of money to watch a glorified batting practice for 3 hours.

The current system allows for nothing more than synthetic drama in the final round. Hamilton was the real winner last year, and Ryan Howard should have at least had the chance to win it this year. I know it can’t be both ways. It’s got to either be every round carries over or none do, and I’m ok with that. It would do the competition more justice than this monstrosity, which makes the BCS look like fair play by comparison.

Again, I’d like to know what you think. Should it be every round carries over, or should every round be a clean slate? What would be the best value for your money?

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A recent trend in punishments for college football programs is the vacating of past wins. Being the cynic I am, I don’t agree with this practice, and here’s why.

The old system worked. If a school cheats at recruiting, or if they put academically ineligible players on the field, they deserve to be punished. The NCAA used to put schools on probation, which would limit their number of available scholarships as well as banning them from postseason bowl games for a certain amount of time in more severe cases. The team, as a result, is unable to sign as many players per recruiting class, forcing players to walk on to the team and ensuring a lesser talent level. Without the talent level or legal ability to play in a bowl game for x amount of years, usually three, the team loses some of its prestige and money. A devastating blow to the program in such a manner ensures the coaching staff won’t try to pull a fast one on the NCAA again.

For some bizarre reason, the practice recently has added vacating past wins to the loss of scholarships. First of all, how do you vacate a win? Do you go back in time and forfeit, changing the records of both the team and their opponents? No, you can’t do that. And to change the records after the fact creates controversy due to the fact that a possible fraudulent loss could have been the difference in a team’s season, whether it would have resulted in a national championship or bowl appearance, or even to save a coach’s job. It doesn’t mean anything to go back and say the win is vacated. You can’t change what happened, so don’t label it with some bogus asterisk.

By vacating wins, you’re also tainting a coach’s legacy whether it’s his fault or not. Take the recent example of so many Florida Gators and their arrest records. Urban Meyer is catching heat for it for no reason – the overwhelming majority of those players with arrest records were recruited by former Gator coach Ron Zook. A similar situation exists with Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide. It was under Mike Shula’s watch that Alabama players abused their scholarships to obtain free textbooks and other materials for other students, yet Saban’s team has to forfeit 21 wins. An appeal has been made, but the point remains valid; Shula isn’t even at the school anymore, so what is the point of vacating wins and punishing current players?

Even being a Gator fan as I am, I’m most appalled by the current situation involving Bobby Bowden and Florida State’s current vacating wins scandal. A number of students cheated in their classes, and became academically ineligible as a result. I’m not disputing that. If you cheat, you should be expelled immediately. The fact that the school did not expel these students, nor did they notify Coach Bowden of their cheating, is what angers me. Here is one of the greatest coaches of all time in any sport, nearing 80 years old, and being told he has to surrender 14 wins because of something he didn’t even know about. Bowden is currently one game behind 82 year old Joe Paterno for the all-time wins record, and both are active coaches. This effectively gives Bowden, the former holder of the record, absolutely no chance to win it back.

NCAA officials, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Are you honestly going to deprive a great coach and innocent man the chance to regain his record? Are you honestly going to smear his good name over something the Athletic Director should have been punished for? I hate the Seminoles as much as any Gator fan, but this is injustice. There is no telling how this will affect Coach Bowden, and given his age, it could be more serious than the NCAA has considered. You could be putting his already questionable health at risk by inducing stress over this whole situation, and that’s not right.

Florida State has appealed the ruling, but let’s face facts – it’s not going to happen. They already lose scholarships for this violation, and I think a postseason ban is more appropriate. Playing one fewer game every year for three years is a much more fitting punishment than giving up two years worth of victories. The NCAA needs to take a long, hard look at itself and re-evaluate this travesty of a system before it’s too late.

Let me give you something else to think about – Spygate. Remember that? The New England Patriots were caught filming the opponents’ signals on the sidelines, then reviewing the tapes at halftime. At least nothing Florida State or Alabama did was directly cheating; nothing occurred to change the outcome of the game. The Patriots were cheating to ensure being able to read the defense and offense, hence calling audibles and turning the tables in their favor. But wait a minute, that’s not all. New England had just won three of the last four Super Bowls, which included this practice as far back as taping St Louis Rams practices the week before their first Super Bowl win. All the NFL did was take away the Patriots’ first round draft pick the following year.

Are you kidding me? Cheating that directly affected the outcome of many games, including Super Bowls, and all you’re giving them is a slap on the wrist? That’s just disgusting. All three Patriot Super Bowl wins were by three points each. You’re going to take away wins from Bobby Bowden over something he didn’t know about and let Bill Belichick keep wins and championships when he personally ordered the cheating practices? Give the Rams, Panthers, and Eagles the Super Bowl rings they deserve. After all, they nearly won in spite of the dubious practices of the Patriots. If you’re going to vacate wins for college, do it for the professional games too.

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The college football season is rapidly approaching, and the Florida Gators will try to capture back-to-back championships for the first time in school history. Both previous attempts ended in heartbreak, with the 1997 Gators losing to both LSU and the University of Georgia, and the 2007 Gators dropping three out of four games midway through the season. The Gators are the definition of college football excellence, being the winningest program in Division 1 since 1990. But how will Florida fare this year?

Taking a look at the 2009 schedule, the Gators have their best opportunity yet to win a second consecutive title. Three out of their four non-conference games are against weak opponents (Charleston Southern, Troy, and Florida International), and all four non-SEC opponents take on the Gators in The Swamp. Their schedule does not contain Alabama, Auburn, or Ole Miss. Not to mention 2007 Heisman Winner Tim Tebow will play his senior year for the Gators instead of entering the NFL Draft. Tebow has some help too – every defensive starter from last year has returned this year. It’s easy to like the Gators as a repeat pick, but there are a few other things to consider before crowning the champions this early.

First of all, and most surprising, the Gators have never had a perfect undefeated season. Look it up if you didn’t believe me - I couldn’t believe it myself. Florida went 5-0-1 in 1911, but they were not in a conference, it did not take place in the modern era, and they didn’t win the national title that year (Princeton did). Every national championship year has consisted of exactly one loss, including the 1997 team losing to their hated rival Seminoles, only to get revenge in the title game.

Speaking of Florida State, all three championship seasons featured a win over the Seminoles. And while the easy non-conference schedule guarantees at least three easy wins, and probably a fourth over FSU, a loss will hurt their chances at reappearing in the BCS title game.

To consider past champions, if you’re going to lose a game, do it early on; a late-season loss is a BCS rankings killer. At least if it happens early enough, other top teams will fall as well, and a chance arises to reclaim one of the top two spots. A prime example is last year’s Oklahoma team, losing to Texas in the Red River Shootout, and later annihilating Texas Tech late in the season to controversially win the Big 12 South title.

The biggest obstacle the Gators will face all year is avoiding trap games. Every year, a high-profile team takes a seemingly weaker opponent lightly, and after what Appalachian State did to the University of Michigan a few years ago, no win is a guarantee anymore. The September 19 matchup against the Tennessee Volunteers has such potential. After a season of mediocrity in 2008, Lane Kiffin has lit a fire under his team. And with his father, the great defensive mastermind Monty Kiffin on his staff, this team is going to be back to prominence soon. The fact that the game is in The Swamp makes it even more alluring. After all, the Wolverines dropped the ball in the Big House to App State, so home field isn’t a guarantee either. Other trap game possibilities are road games against Kentucky and South Carolina, and their former coach Steve Spurrier. The Gators are 3-1 against the Old Ball Coach since his return to the college game, and there’s no doubt he wants to beat them as many times as he can.

The last three seasons, and four out of the last six overall, the SEC champion has appeared in the BCS National Championship, and all four teams won. The SEC Championship game may be the toughest game of the year for the Gators, with all likelihood of a repeat of last year’s game against Alabama. If they can win that game, Florida is home free, and you can expect to see Tim Tebow hoisting the BCS trophy for a third time.

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