The NHL’s lost cause in the South

Ray Ratto adds his booming voice to those condemning Gary Bettman for the largely failed Southern Strategy:

“It was a disaster born of eagerness to expand the product, reliant entirely as it turned out on the team’s ability to play for the Stanley Cup. There were sellouts in Miami when the Panthers were good, and sellouts in Tampa when the Lightning was good, and there are sellouts in Raleigh when the Hurricanes are good. And by good, we mean deep-into-the-playoffs good.

“Now if you want to rig results so that keeps happening, the Southern strategy worked. But for the most part, no. Carolina is a probable success, and Dallas will be for as long as Tom Hicks stays out of debtor’s prison. Colorado had a long run that finally ended last year.

“But Phoenix? No. Nashville? No. The Floridas? No. Atlanta? No. Even Columbus after a fast start looks more and more like a no. Bettman’s fascination with Americanizing the audience has done the one thing a commissioner cannot do — it needlessly used up the dwindling supply of multimillionaires in North America on lost causes.

“And that doesn’t even involve the owners who went to jail for one reason or another.”

All that’s left is IOC voting

Obama has made his pitch to the International Olympic Committee for Chicago in 2016; Lula and Pelé have done likewise for Rio. Will their presence make a difference?

“Some of what the I.O.C. considers has nothing to do with the strength of the bids themselves,” said Frank Lavin, the former U.S. ambassador to Singapore, who worked on New York City’s failed bid to host the 2012 Games.

“A lot of it is political and that encompasses different levels: international politics, personalities, internal I.O.C. politics,” he said.

A decision in Copenhagen is expected to be announced around 12:30 p.m. ET.

Hockey’s restarting, but who’ll be watching?

DirecTV subscribers won’t be able to watch games aired by Versus, the NHL’s official U.S. outlet, as the season gets underway tonight. That includes the Versus opening doubleheader featuring Washington vs. Boston and Colorado vs. San Jose.

Has Bettman done more than simply “speak to both sides?” Or does this add more fuel to fire that his time as commissioner ought to be up?

Oh, to be in Canada on this night instead, where Hockey Night is a many-splendored interactive thing: Habs-Leafs, Canucks-Flames.

That’s doing it right.

Kobe’s king across the pond, too

Kobe Bryant leads the list of top-selling NBA player jerseys in Europe, which is no surprise. But how many continental native sons grace Darren Rovell’s list?

Copenhagen quid pro quo?

Huffington Post digs into campaign reports and discovers that members of the Chicago committee bidding for the 2016 Olympics bundled nearly $2 million for Barack Obama. More smoke than fire?

“The campaign donations and close friendships have raised eyebrows among good government advocates. Would Obama have gone to Copenhagen if, say, the potential host city was St. Louis and committee members hadn’t opened up their check books for the president’s run at the White House?

” ‘I think it would be a lot less likely he would make that trip,’ said David Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division. ‘Supporting an effort for a major city in the U.S. to get the Olympics is a no-brainer… But the bottom line is, when you’ve got a group of that many people sitting on the board who have supported your campaign, it would be basically impossible to avoid that affecting your thinking. At some point, political judgments have to be made about how the president spends his time.’ “

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/chicago-olympic-committee_n_306135.html

Another BCS show trial in Congress

Glad the folks on Capitol Hill have taken the time to — ahem — tackle the most pressing issue of our time:

What do do with the Bowl Championship Series?

Ground zero at Washington

Crammed into Dennis Dodd’s lengthy, compelling piece on the state of University of Washington football is this 24-karat nugget about new defensive coordinator Nick Holt, who came from USC with head coach Steve Sarkisian:

Holt received a $200,000 signing bonus and signed a contract worth $650,000 annually.

The job of reviving a program that didn’t win a game last year and that Tyrone Willingham dropped in the bottom of Puget Sound in four short years isn’t going to come cheaply, easily or quickly. Unlike some other rebuilding BCS programs, however, Washington’s apparently got plenty of loot to try and get back into the big time.

College sports spending on the rise

An NCAA-commissioned report says the Football Bowl Subdivision schools are spending 11 percent more over the last three years, to a total of $42.2 million.

The culprits seem to be high coaching salaries, but I’d love to see how administrative and bureauctratic costs have gone up too.

NCAA wants it both ways on gambling

So says the FanHouses’ Greg Couch, who calls out some bland NCAA flackery that decries “student-athlete” wagering (in response to point-shaving allegations involving Univeristy of Toledo football) but is steadfastly neutral on “the membership” doing individual deals with casinos and other gaming entities.

Naturally, Murray Sperber can be counted on to be the snake in the garden party:

“At the very core of the NCAA, the mother’s milk they live on, the March Madness money, is this deep, deep hypocrisy. I remember their own poll showed that one in five athletes had bet on college sports.

“Should they encourage gambling? Especially when one of the problem groups of gamblers, people who can’t control their gambling, are college kids? They get in over their heads.”

Ah yes, the “H” word. Can’t write an NCAA-related piece about subjects like this without it.

Vaccaro speaks out on Jeremy Tyler

The wheeler-dealer who got Brandon Jennings to Italy out of high school is just as adamant that rising senior Jeremy Tyler has every right to do what he’s doing, the college basketball industry be damned:

“Why aren’t those people interested in the other 30 percent of kids in the state of California who don’t graduate high school? Why are they so concerned with one individual who won’t graduate right now, but who will be financially secure for the rest of his life.

“And let me take it a step farther. What if Shaun Livingston [who turned pro out of high school] would’ve gotten hurt at Duke and would’ve never been able to play again? By the grace of God, he got hurt when he was in the NBA, and so even if he hadn’t ever played again, he would’ve been financially secure for the rest of his life.

“People always talk about what happens if the players get hurt [in the pros without a college degree to fall back on]. I ask, what happens if they get hurt in college [and don't have the pro contract to fall back on]? We are so shortsighted that we forget the basic things in our existence are to be a good person and to financially take care of you and your family. Those are the two things. I don’t know what else there is, really. Be good and be self-sufficient.”