Watchdog

Wow. That was fun.

I was surprised given the many mentions Jim Nantz and Billy Packer made of long-ago games and players down the stretch that an obvious reference did not come up:

That was much the same way North Carolina State beat Houston 25 years ago in another championship game classic - by fouling early and often, and taking advantage when the opponent botched its free throws.

Clark Kellogg hit Memphis hard on the post-game for its failure to foul with a three-point lead and less than 10 seconds left to prevent the tying three-pointer. Good for him; it's a strategy every sane person on Earth other than basketball coaches sees as a no-brainer.

UPDATE: John Calipari just suggested to CBS's Sam Ryan that Memphis was trying to foul. Hmm. Well, they didn't do it very well.

Whatever . . . on to baseball season.

An interesting item, and a valid excuse to post a picture of Hooters waitress.

A win-win post.

(Speaking of which, I've been telling people for years that I went to an early Hooters in the Tampa area in 1981. But the chain is only celebrating its 25th anniversary. Is it possible I'm confusing it with some other sports-themed bar/restaurant featuring scantily clad waitresses that predates Hooters? Help, please.)

Partnering with a secondary market seller to guarantee the validity of tickets and get a cut of the action is one thing for the NCAA, as explained in this story.

But this story indicates that RazorGator is getting many of its Final Four tickets at face value directly from the NCAA as part of its deal.

Non-profit, tax-exempt colleges and universities, scalping their own tickets!

Only in America.

Wisconsin's loss dropped me into the 0.7 percentile in ESPN.com's bracket challenge, good for 3,157,433rd place.

My wife and daughter both are in the 97th percentile at Yahoo.com.

Is it baseball season yet?

Here is the schedule and announce teams for regional semis:

Thursday:
7:10 p.m. . . . Xavier vs. West Virginia . . . Lundquist/Raftery
7:27 p.m. . . . North Carolina vs. Washington State . . . Enberg/Bilas
9:40 (approx.) . . . UCLA vs. Western Kentucky . . . Lundquist/Raftery
9:57 (approx.) . . . Tennessee vs. Louisville . . . Enberg/Bilas

Friday:
7:10 p.m. . . . Wisconsin vs. Davidson . . . Johnson/Elmore
7:27 p.m. . . . Texas vs. Stanford . . . Nantz/Packer
9:40 (approx.) . . . Kansas vs. Villanova . . . Johnson/Elmore
9:57 (approx.) . . . Memphis vs. Michigan State . . . Nantz/Packer

After one round, the total number of perfect entries in ESPN.com's bracket challenge is zero.

Must be a result of all those people who picked Cornell to upset Stanford.

I try not to enter these contests myself, since it's unfair to everyone else for me to exploit my insider's knowledge and expertise. But this year the family convinced me to do it.

I rank in the 17th percentile at ESPN.com, 2,617,405th overall.

At Yahoo.com, I'm in the 12th percentile, 1,963,583rd overall.

Maybe I'll do better in the women's tournament. For the second year in a row, I picked Rutgers to win it all.

CSTV became CBS College Sports this week, part of an effort to make the not-as-widely-distributed-as-CBS-would-like channel a more widely known, substantial outlet.

The new-look channel re-launched with new studio shows focused largely on a certain college basketball tournament shown on the CBS mothership.

CBS College Sports hopes to compete more effectively with ESPNU in the world of games that are not quite big enough to appear on CBS or ESPN or ESPN2.

At some point I'll write a story explaining how and why these channels have so much trouble getting on Cablevision and other big cable companies.

Not today.

I would have written this in the newspaper if I were a college basketball columnist, but I'm not, so I'll say it here:

The assorted coaches and TV analysts who have been advocating enlarging the NCAA field to 96 or 128 or 256 or everybody in Division I all are off base.

What the NCAA needs to do is go from 65 back to 64. The play-in game is an insanely unfair, anti-climactic, cruel joke on the two teams that get stuck in it every year.

The NCAA established a rule when the field expanded in 1985 that mandated there be 34 at-large berths. So when the number of automatic bids rose from 30 to 31 in 2001, a play-in was required.

Nonsense. Change the rule to read that the number of at-large bids shall be 64 minus the number of automatic bids. Period.

Sticking two teams on Tuesday, where they cannot feel like part of the tournament, just for the sake of sneaking in one extra mediocre major conference at-large, is ridiculous.

There, I said it. Enjoy the tournament, regardless of which red-clad, high-SAT squad you might be rooting for late Thursday afternoon in Anaheim.

(UPDATE: I guess I'm not alone on this. I just found this piece by Erik Boland that is better than my screed above.)

I was so busy breathlessly reporting the return (and expansion) of March Madness on Demand in Friday's newspaper column that I neglected to link to an interesting, related story from long-time WatchDog supporter Mike McCarthy of USA Today.

Turns out not every business owner is ecstatic about the service.

(Remember, this is an even bigger issue on the West Coast, where an additional three hours of the tournament falls within the work day. At least East Coast bosses get half a day before their computer systems crash.)

I thought the most YouTube-worthy aspect of Saturday's Cal-UCLA tilt was going to be the discussion between Brent Musberger and Steve Lavin about UCLA's scantily clad dance team.

Brent made an amusing crack about not knowing there was a Victoria's Secret major at UCLA, or something to that effect.

But of course the finish trumped all that. There is some entertaining late-game yelling from Musberger and Lavin here.

What I find interesting is they did not discuss the potential illegality of the winning shot from behind the backboard, which was a major topic of conversation on SportsCenter.

Anyway, it was memorable. Must be March.

It's Thursday, so I gotta write a column now. But I will leave you with this, a serious contender for Friday's "Strange but true" entry in the newspaper:

At Friday night's Harvard-Columbia game and Saturday night's Quinnipiac-Wagner game, fans entering the arenas will be given a free box of TicTacs.

Said fans then will be invited to be videotaped while shaking said containers, with a chance to be entered into a nationwide TicTac-shaking contest called "Remake the Shake," for which the winner will receive $10,000.

Or something like that. I will look into this further.

Enjoy "American Powerboat Racing" on FSNY at 3:30 p.m.

Here is a strong piece from SI's Grant Wahl about college basketball fans crossing the line from clever and annoying to vulgar and dangerous.

Players and their families do not deserve this kind of abuse, period.

(Except opposing players at Lynah Rink in Ithaca. Kidding, kidding. Sort of.)

In case you missed it, here is Jim Baumbach's recent Web-only column catching up with former St. John's coach Brian Mahoney, who still works at the school.

I was on the St. John's beat for Mahoney's first three seasons, after covering the team for the final two years of the Lou Carnesecca regime.

A year after I left the beat, Mahoney was dismissed from the job. He chose not to comment publicly at that time, but a day or two later I went to his home in Rockville Centre and knocked on the door.

I was getting excited about a journalistic coup when he invited me in and we spent 10 minutes chatting at his kitchen table.

Then he said something unfortunate: "This isn't an interview, is it?"

Sure, theoretically he should have told me before we started he was talking off the record, but under the circumstances I was not about to quote him based on a journalistic technicality.

And that was that. Sigh.

When I began on the St. John's basketball beat in 1990-91, it was assumed the team then known as the Redmen would be in the NCAA Tournament pretty much every year.

So when they reached the Elite Eight in my first season, I figured it was no big deal and they'd have another shot the following spring.

Twenty victories was pretty much a given under Lou Carnesecca, who retired after 1991-92.

It appears things have changed a bit since those days.

As WatchDog readers are painfully aware, I still feel some connection to the Giants three years after leaving that beat. Not so St. John's basketball, which I covered from 1990-95 in what seems like a distant epoch.

But the fact Tarik Turner is a radio analyst for the team brings me back to my less-than-warm-and-cozy departure from the beat. In 1995, before my final Big East tournament, Newsday ran a long investigative story I wrote about the cash housing stipend the program was allowed to give out then, before it had dorms. Some rivals viewed it as a recruiting edge.

St. John's was extremely unamused by the piece. My last day on the beat I attempted to research an NIT preview after practice. Zendon Hamilton said he would talk to me after visiting the bathroom, but when he hadn't emerged after 20 minutes, I got the message.

Then I asked Turner if I could interview him. He pretended he had no idea who I was, then grudgingly gave a few one- or two-word answers.

I won't hold it against him if I ever review his sports media work. For that to happen St. John's first will have to become relevant enough for me to listen.

How did I spend my first Sunday afternoon since summer not watching football (or traveling to Arizona to watch football)?

Watching a nine-day old Cornell-Colgate hockey game on SNY. What else?

Speaking of Cornell . . . belated congratulations to the Giants' Kevin Boothe for joining Derrick Harmon (49ers, SBXIX) as the only Cornellians with Super Bowl rings as players.

Speaking more of Cornell . . . remember my guarantee in a Jan. 26 post that the Big Red would win its first Ivy League men's hoops title since 1988? Cornell now is 6-0 in the league.. .

As you all no doubt know by now, Cornell pounded Columbia in men's basketball on YES Saturday night.

The Big Red put a mild scare into Duke recently, too.

Let the word go forth from this time and place: Cornell is going to win the Ivy League title for the first time since 1988, when Arizona lucked out in a first-round NCAA Tournament game and won, 90-50.

Remember where you read it first.

Before I forget . . . I wanted to alert everyone to a very special event on SNY this Friday night:

Yup, Cornell at RPI hockey, a showdown of traditional programs, both of which Ned Harkness coached to national titles. (UPDATE: Good Guys 2, Other Team 1.)

(I have a copy of the picture at right on the wall of my office in the basement, by the way.)

The first time I ever saw MTV was on a visit to Troy for the 1982 Cornell-RPI tilt. It was mesmerizing. We were easily amused back then.

Here's something funnier about Cornell athletics:

The basketball team executed one of the most radical two-game swings in NCAA history this week, going from losing at Duke Sunday to winning at home against Division III Alvernia Thursday.

Next up: Tuesday night against NJIT in Newark.

NJIT currently is 0-17, but it could build some momentum by beating Columbia Saturday.

OK, that's it. Enjoy the hockey game. And the NFL playoffs, if you are so inclined.

It's weird how college football went from one of its best regular seasons ever to a dud of a postseason.

I skipped most of the BCS Championship Game to play "Life" with my daughters - old school, like, on a board! - and then watch Jon Stewart with Mrs. WatchDog.

Meanwhile, back in the NFL . . . Here's a free ad for the NFL Network, since the entire cable industry thinks I'm in the league's back pocket anyway:

The network altered its schedule for today to offer a four-hour Redskins block.

It will run "America's Game'' episodes on Joe Gibbs' three championship teams at 1, 2 and 4 p.m., as well as Gibbs' presser at 3.

See, the NFL Network does have programming betwteen New Year's and Thanksgiving!

As the entire sports world knows by now, Cornell lost by 14 to Duke Sunday evening, easily covering the spread and securing a glorious wagering victory over Mrs. WatchDog.

My prize: A visit to the Ice Hotel in Quebec City, payable as soon as these children living in my house are old enough to be left alone for a long weekend or can be unloaded on some other local family.

Were there football games on Sunday also? I'll look into that.

I was planning to demand 30 points from Mrs. WatchDog to accept a wager on today's Cornell-Duke game.

Now it turns out that is exactly what Vegas thinks of the matchup. Deal.

The game is set for Cameron Indoor at 5:30 p.m. on FSNY, conveniently between Giants-Bucs and Wallace-Clemens. Enjoy.

If we don't get 'em this time, we'll get 'em when they finally agree to a hockey game in Ithaca.

I wanted to get this post over with early, so as not to disturb everyone's International Bowl parties at noon. But let me be the last to weigh in on the obvious:

College football's lack of a playoff system makes its regular season the best of any major sport. But its postseason setup has rendered every bowl other than the championship game an afterthought for most sports fans.

If there is not to be a playoff, let's go back to the system in place in olden times, when major conferences were tied into specific bowls and everyone played on New Year's Day and then argued about who is No. 1.

For example: Why not Kansas?

OK, I know I'm dreaming. Too much money involved. I'll leave it alone. I'm going to try to post only one more time this Saturday, for the gala announcement of the winner of WatchDog's 10,000th post award.

Which could be coming . . . any minute now!

It might appear that I lean heavily toward baby boomer stuff in the nostalgia department, which is only because it's true.

But I am capable of looking back fondly at much more recent stuff, such as this from one year ago tonight - the best sports event of 2007.

It appears Hawaii will not match Boise State's exploits, alas.

Anyway, thanks so much to all of you out there who have stuck with WatchDog since Dec. 22, when most Americans were goofing off FROM work rather than AT work, and thus were less inclined than usual to waste their employers' time by reading blogs.

As of Wednesday morning, everything will be back to normal, but you holiday season diehards never will be far from my heart. I'm starting to tear up now. Or maybe it's a head cold. Bye.

Early in their show Friday, Mike Francesa and Chris Russo promoted an upcoming appearance by Greg Schiano, hours after Chris Carlin announced during WFAN's morning show that the Rutgers coach had spurned Michigan to stay put.

Schiano never appeared, though. Why, you ask?

Perhaps because reporters who cover the team regularly had been told Schiano would not be talking about the story on the record Friday, only through an official statement.

And perhaps because when said reporters learned he planned to go on a 50,000-watt, clear-channel radio station . . . well, let's just say, pandemonium in Piscataway!

Schiano eventually passed on the WFAN spot.

Still, there was another twist later in the day when he turned up in an on-camera interview with Ch. 4's Bruce Beck. Huh? Presumably that had something to do with the relationship the two have from doing a weekly TV show together during the season.

Whatever. Welcome back, Greg. And beat, um, whoever you're playing in whatever that bowl in Canada is called.

Seems as if our friends in Hawaii are not getting the traditional concept of college football bowls:

They're supposed to be a chance for pasty Midwesterners to visit a warm weather city in the dead of winter and soak up some rays and some suds.

Turns out many people in the 50th state are determined to visit New Orleans next month.

I used to live in Alaska. People there would really, really appreciate a bowl bid. But they don't play major college football there.

Two more things about Cornell hockey, then I'll move on to less interesting sports:

1. I heard about this last week but didn't get around to writing it, and now College Hockey News has beaten me to it. It's about the cheesy manner in which CSTV covered Saturday night's sold out Cornell-BU game at the Garden.

A CBS spokesperson told me Friday it is not unusual for events to be covered with announcers in a studio rather than on location, complete with a production truck, but in this case the studio in question was just a mile or so from the game itself!

Weak.

2. During my visit to NBC's "Football Night in America" studios Sunday, I finally got my chance to confront Keith Olbermann over a mistake he made in an entry for Eric Mirlis' recent book, "Being There."

Olbermann identified the Providence player who missed an empty net in the 1979 ECAC quarterfinals as Behn Wilson. In fact, it was Randy Wilson. (Cornell came back from a 5-1 third-period deficit to win in overtime - a feat it failed to repeat against BU Saturday.)

Keith (Class of 1979) was properly contrite and humbled. (No, really.). Apology accepted.

It's nice to see at least one team based in the Bronx doing well this autumn.

What was weird, though, was not that Fordham won a big game over Holy Cross Saturday, or even that it was on TV, since pretty much every college football game is on TV these days, even Cornell's (see post below).

What was weird was where the game was shown: on WNBC 4.4, the digital version of the channel, seen on Ch. 110 for Cablevision customers.

Bruce Beck had the play-by-play, lending a professional feel to the production. One suggestion: Next time shrink the scoreboard graphic, which took up nearly a quarter of the screen!

WNBC 4.4 is looking to make a mark with original sports programming, including a weekly discussion show.

The sports media parade never, ever stops.

(The first reader to correctly identify the Fordham football star in the picture will earn the respect and admiration of WatchDog readers everywhere.)

This is the best news for northern California football fans since Trey Junkin retired:

Because of weak ticket sales for the Texans-Raiders game Sunday, the game will be blacked out in that area and instead fans will be stuck with . . . Pats-Colts!

Here is a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about that.

Bodog sent an e-mail today with the news the betting over under for Sunday's TV rating is 21.5 percent of U.S. homes. That's really a lot for a regular-season game.

That's more than double what the World Series averaged.

WNBC 4.4, the digital channel that appears on Channel 110 for Cablevision customers, will televise Saturday's Fordham vs. Holy Cross game, with Bruce Beck handling the play-by-play and WFUV's Bobby Coyle on color. (The game also can be heard on WFUV (90.7 FM).

The fact WNBC is pioneering sports coverage on a new outlet with a Fordham game is appropriate, given that the station presented the first ever televised football game: Fordham vs. Waynesburg on Sept. 30, 1939.

Bill Stern called that game on the station (then known as W2XBS) to demonstrate the new gadget at the World's Fair.

So what if it came on a very slow Friday night in the sports world . . . and in a loss!

It still was cool to see Cornell football, of all things, featured at No. 1 on the top 10 plays list on ESPN's "SportsCenter'' Friday night.

(Some guy from Princeton ran a long way thanks to the Big Red's failure to grasp the basics of tackling.)

While we're on the subject of Cornell football, it's time for one of those periodic reminders to Pat Sullivan to give back that 1971 Heisman he stole from Ed Marinaro.

C'mon, Pat, you know you should.

WatchDog does not advocate illegal wagering on sporting events. But if you happen to be a loyal reader living in Las Vegas and happen to glean valuable information from reading the blog and then act upon said information legally . . . good for you!

Check out this prescient post from Monday of last week:

Time to stop ignoring the e-mails from Versus about their college football package, even if there are 1,869 other games on every darn weekend.

Versus lucked into the ultimate stunner Saturday with Stanford's mega-upset of USC, much as the Big Ten Network did last month with Appalachian State over Michigan.

So you never know where and when these things will happen.

Versus is reshowing the Stanford victory at 4 p.m. Monday.

Next up for the channel: Oregon State at Cal Saturday. Look out, Bears!