Well, well, well - those silver-tongued devils are at it again. The brood of vipers that is the NCAA Selection Commitee.
In the morning light, we can sift through the rubble caused by the wreck of the NCAA Selection Committee (not the tornados and hail) and draw some general conclusions Of course the problem is that the precedent set by this year’s Selection Committee is that the only rule to be followed is that the Committee will act arbitrarily and capriciously in arriving at its conclusion. Nonetheless, here goes:
- The RPI isn’t worth much as a predictor. The Selection Committee will use it to rationalize its decisions or ignore it entirely when it is useful under the circumstances. The problem, however, is that the NCAA has strongly urged schools to put together a strong enough schedule to get their RPI and SOS up. Now, after teams like Missouri State have heeded their advice and earned an RPI of 19, they disregard it altogether
- Conferernces do get bids and the Selection Committee is keeping track. The single biggest factor in MSU being left out appears to be that the Committee had them 5th in a 4-bid conference. At the end of the process, the Committee was not going to give the MVC a 5th bid at the expense of a 2nd bid for either the WAC, Mountain West or Conference USA, etc. Similarly, the Committee was unwilling to give the MVC more bids than the ACC, Big 12 or PAC 10.
- Total out of conference strength of scheudule isn’t as important as playing several high profile games and winning at least one. Example: Air Force’s out of conference schedule was dreadful, but they played and beat Miami (who didn’t make the tournament).
- A good win is much more important than a bad loss.
- Last 10 games are important, but you better not lose in the first round of your conference tournament.
In the end, however, MSU left itself vulnerable to the vagaries of the Selection Committee by failing to perform well against the other top teams in the Valley and losing in the first round of the conference tournament. As the above demonstrates, a “mid-major” team takes a major risk when it leaves its fate in the hands of the Selection Committee.
But, to be a good sport and a greater fan, I have decided to fill out a bracket prediction (simply picking, no betting) and post to my tournament bracket for all to see.
Enjoy, and let me know your picks, or join my group tournament challenge on ESPN.com. The more the merrier!
Or rather, Barry … as in Barry Bonds.
Well, it seems like our old home-run hitting buddy is now in deep with allegations of know steriod use, not to mention the female fertility drugs, cattle steroids, human growth hormones and no telling what else Mr. Home Run took.
Just listen to what’s been alleged of the psuedo-star:
Excerpted from Game of Shadows, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, to be published this month by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA, Inc.). © 2006 by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams.
– On May 22, 1998, the San Francisco Giants arrived in St. Louis for a three-game series with the Cardinals. That weekend, Giants All-Star leftfielder Barry Bonds got a firsthand look at the frenzied excitement surrounding Mark McGwire, baseball’s emerging Home Run King.
Bonds had recently remarried, but on this trip he was accompanied by his girlfriend, Kimberly Bell, a slender, attractive woman with long brown hair and brown eyes whom he had met four years earlier in the players’ parking lot at Candlestick Park. Bell had been looking forward to the trip, and it was pleasant in many ways — a big hotel room with a view of St. Louis’s famous arch; a wonderful seat eight rows behind home plate; and even tornado warnings, which were exotic to a California girl. But Bonds was sulky and brooding. A three-time National League MVP, he was one of the most prideful stars in baseball. All that weekend, though, he was overshadowed by McGwire.
Even by the standards of the modern game, the Cardinals’ first baseman was a player of exceptional size and power. That summer the 6′5″ McGwire weighed 250 muscular pounds and was hitting balls that traveled in long, soaring arcs. The season was less than two months old, but he already had hit 20 home runs and was ahead of both Babe Ruth’s and Roger Maris’s record-breaking paces. Players, fans and the media were already eagerly anticipating that McGwire would break baseball’s most storied record, but Bonds’s mood remained irretrievably foul.
On that trip Bonds began making racial remarks about McGwire to Kimberly Bell. According to Bell he would repeat them throughout the summer, as McGwire and Sammy Sosa, the buff, fan-friendly Chicago Cubs slugger who also was hitting home runs at an amazing rate, became the talk of the nation.
“They’re just letting him do it because he’s a white boy,” Bonds said of McGwire and his chase of Maris’s record. The pursuit by Sosa, a Latin player from the Dominican Republic, was entertaining but doomed, Bonds declared. As a matter of policy, “they’ll never let him win,” he said.
As he sometimes did when he was in a particularly bleak mood, Bonds was channeling racial attitudes picked up from his father, the former Giants star Bobby Bonds, and his godfather, the great Willie Mays, both African-American ballplayers who had experienced virulent racism while starting their professional careers in the Jim Crow South. Barry Bonds himself had never seen anything remotely like that: He had grown up in an affluent white suburb of San Francisco, and his best boyhood friend, his first wife and his present girlfriend all were white. When Bonds railed about McGwire, he didn’t articulate who “they” were, or how the supposed conspiracy to rig the home run record was being carried out. But his brooding anger was real enough, and it continued throughout a year in which he batted .303, hit 37 home runs, made the All-Star team for the eighth time and was otherwise almost completely ignored. The home run chase, meanwhile, transfixed even casual fans, in the way that a great pennant race used to do in the old days.
McGwire hit number 62 on Sept. 8 in St. Louis, amidst a wild celebration and before a national TV audience, and then continued hitting bombs: five of them in his final 11 at bats, including two on the last day of the season, to finish with 70, four ahead of Sosa.
On the West Coast, Barry Bonds was astounded and aggrieved by the outpouring of hero worship for McGwire, a hitter whom he regarded as obviously inferior to himself. Bonds was 34 years old, had played in the big leagues for 12 years and was known for an unusual combination of speed and power. Before the 1993 season he had signed what was then the richest contract in the game: $43.75 million for six years, and he knew he was on his way to the Hall of Fame. For as long as he had played baseball, Bonds had regarded himself as better than every other player he encountered, and almost always he was right.
But as the 1998 season ended, Bonds’s elite status had slipped a notch. The game and its fans were less interested in the complete player who could hit for average and power and who had great speed and an excellent glove. The emphasis was shifting to pure slugging. As McGwire was celebrated as the best slugger of the modern era and perhaps the greatest who had ever lived, Bonds became more jealous than people who knew him well had ever seen.
To Bonds it was a joke. He had been around enough gyms to recognize that McGwire was a juicer. Bonds himself had never used a performance enhancer more potent than a protein shake from the health-food store. But as the 1998 season unfolded and, as he watched Mark McGwire take over the game — his game — Barry Bonds decided that he, too, would begin using what he called “the s—.”
He began working out with a real gym rat, a trainer who spent 12 hours a day pumping iron in a gym on the San Francisco peninsula. Bonds’s new workout partner called himself the Weight Guru, and he had a sophisticated approach to training. He prescribed specific, intense workouts for individual muscle groups, and he tailored the program for baseball to maximize hitting power while maintaining agility. He could talk about nutrition and blood tests and body-fat percentages with such authority that you might mistake him for a doctor.
Not incidentally, the Weight Guru was a longtime steroid user and dealer. He had expertise with drugs ranging from old reliables like Deca-Durabolin and Winstrol to more exotic substances like human growth hormone. The drugs could quicken recovery after workouts, build stamina, add muscle. They could eliminate that slump in August, when the minor injuries and fatigue of the long season would otherwise wear a ballplayer down. Beyond that, for a player with the natural ability of Bonds, the sky was the limit as far as what the drugs might do. The Weight Guru told Bonds all of this, and Bonds decided to go for it. The Weight Guru’s name was Greg Anderson.
Anderson was an unlikely agent for the transformation of Barry Bonds into the greatest hitter who ever lived: A muscular, spike-haired man, Anderson was at once unknown, unlucky and financially strapped. In 1998 he was working as a personal trainer at the World Gym in Burlingame, a place where the gym rats sold steroids out of the trunks of their cars. Anderson wore a long-sleeved sweatshirt that covered his heavily tattooed arms and concealed just how much muscle he had packed onto his 5′10″, 225-pound frame.
Like Bonds, Anderson grew up on the San Francisco peninsula, in San Carlos. As a shortstop at Fort Hays State University, in Kansas, Anderson had begun using steroids to boost his weight training. Over time he had become extraordinarily knowledgeable about performance-enhancing drugs, as a secret recording made years later would prove. An old friend from San Mateo hooked Anderson up with Bonds. Anderson offered to put together a baseball-oriented strength program for him. He would tend to Bonds’s weight training and nutritional needs. Bonds agreed, and before the 1999 season began, Anderson was hired to supervise Bonds’s strength conditioning.
Anderson felt he had stumbled into an awesome job. Just when his connection to baseball had withered down to doing group workouts with high school kids, he suddenly found himself near the center of the game at its highest level. Every year Anderson got a trip to spring training. When the Giants moved into their new ballpark in 2000, Bonds gave him the run of the clubhouse. He met many Giants players and eventually would supply some of them with steroids.
But the most amazing part of it was his association with Bonds and his opportunity to play an important role in molding him into the greatest player who ever lived. Bonds was dedicated to the program. He was eager to push the workouts, demanding more weight, more repetitions, more sets, and he also showed interest in the nutritional aspects of the training. Anderson kept track of the workouts. It was a gratifying job, but there were downsides. People believed that anyone doing important work for a multimillionaire ballplayer was well paid, but that wasn’t the case. Bonds had his people give Anderson $10,000 in cash from time to time, but the payments were erratic, and he didn’t earn nearly enough to give up his other clients, let alone buy a condominium in the overheated Bay Area housing market.
Anderson didn’t like to talk about another downside. Anyone who worked for Bonds had to take a great deal of abuse. If Bonds told you to do something, you had to drop everything and do it. If you were slow to comply or if you tried to explain why it wasn’t such a good idea, Bonds would get right up in your face, snarling, calling you a “punk bitch,” repeating what he wanted and saying, “Did I f—— stutter?” You had to suck it up and take the abuse and the humiliation — everyone did.
Of course Anderson’s primary job, and the real reason he was hired, was to provide Bonds with performance-enhancing drugs and to track his regimen. Anderson obtained the drugs and administered them. In file folders, and on his computer, he kept calendars of Bonds’s use of the substances, recording the drugs, dosages and cycles.
But Anderson didn’t think of himself as Bonds’s drug dealer. When Bonds paid him, he liked to think it was for weight training. As far as supplying drugs, Anderson thought of his role as “middleman.” In San Francisco he knew AIDS patients who had prescriptions for testosterone and human growth hormone and were willing to sell their drugs for cash. Anderson bought and resold them virtually at cost to clients who wanted them for their anabolic effects. Likewise, Anderson knew many sources of conventional bodybuilders’ steroids like Deca-Durabolin and Winstrol. He resold those at almost no markup as well. Bonds was keenly interested in performance-enhancing drugs. He asked their pharmaceutical names and then sought, through third parties, medical advice about the drugs. The medical advice was negative. You shouldn’t take the drugs, he was told, but Anderson said those concerns were overblown, and Bonds ignored the advice he had sought.
Certainly the program Anderson devised worked. In the years after he linked up with Anderson, Bonds completely remade his body, and the results of Anderson’s drug regime are now reflected in the record books. At an age when his father’s baseball skills had begun to erode badly, Bonds’s drug use would make him a better hitter than he had been at any time in his career — and, perhaps, the best hitter of all time.
Greg Anderson started Barry Bonds on Winstrol after the 1998 season. It was also known as Stanozolol, the old favorite of body builders, infamous as the drug that brought down Ben Johnson. Anderson provided the steroids and syringes and injected Bonds’s backside, although Bonds eventually learned how to inject himself. Anderson began keeping calendars to track Bonds’s drug cycle: If a user didn’t come off steroids periodically, his body would lose the ability to produce testosterone naturally. Anderson held the unused drugs. There was to be no stash at Bonds’s house or in his locker.
Aside from such side effects as acne, baldness, shrinking of the testes, mood swings, surges of anger, reduction of libido and the risk of liver damage and prostate cancer, Winstrol’s drawback was that it took months to clear the user’s system. No athlete subject to drug testing dared use Winstrol because the likelihood of getting caught was so great. But of course that wasn’t an issue for Bonds as the 1999 season approached; baseball was still years away from confronting its steroid problem …
Read the rest of the story on SI.com »
If these allegations prove true (and even if they don’t - just for setting himself up for these allegations), then Bonds would have to be considered one of civilization’s biggest morons.
Just my opinoin, there … no facts (yet) involved.
but, Friday night’s performance leaves a lot to be desired!
Absolutely horrific nauseating would be a good description of the entire game. Before the game, my dad and I had been talking about the uneasiness we felt coming into this game.
“It’s either going to be the Bears in a squeaker, or Northern Iowa in a near blowout.”
Well, the first half ended in a squeaker: MSU - 23, UNI - 21. My hopes were that everything could stay status quo and the Bears would pull out the victors in a squeaker … but, not so fast my friend.
Northern Iowa won the game 57 - 42.
The biggest atrocity was that the Bears’ starters only scored 13 points all night! The Bears just looked nauseating. Apathetic, lazy, uninterested, dribbling into double-teams, not creating open shots, not getting guys open, not using off-the-ball screens … just blech!
And to top it all of, it was my birthday! Thanks for topping that one off Bears, I needed a little disappointment to bring me back down to earth on my birthday!
Oh well, I’ll still say go Bears and root them on in the Big Dance.
Have we crossed into some kind of alter-dimension?
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) - Paula Abdul probably could hit a fastball about as well as Barry Bonds could impersonate Paula Abdul.
Bonds entertained and delighted a small gathering of fans and teammates Tuesday by dressing up as Abdul to judge the San Francisco Giants spin-off of the hit Fox show “American Idol,” called Giants Idol.
Bonds, who wore a strapless dress and a blonde wig, surprised everyone watching the mock contest, where young players had to sing in front of the judges.
“I’ll never tell my wife to hurry up any more,” Bonds said. “Because it took me forever to get ready. I’ll never do that again. I couldn’t get my hair right. There were a lot things I went through during the 30 minutes I was getting ready.”
The event raised $337 from fans that will be matched by the Giants organization and donated to the Giants Community Fund. Giants Idol was the brainchild of Mark Sweeney, who decided to bring a little levity to the clubhouse.
Sweeney, who signed as a free-agent with the team during the winter, decided the “Idol” competition would promote team chemistry and raise some money.
“It was up in the air whether Barry would do this,” Sweeney said. “We asked him this morning. It was almost embarrassing to have him do it.”
Sweeney’s idea was to bring together the team and help spark team unity after last year’s disappointing season when the Giants finished under .500 for the first time since 1996.
“It was pretty cool,” said Omar Vizquel, who acted as host Ryan Seacrest. “I just thought he was going to be a judge. As long as you have fun you connect with each other.”
Rounding out the judging impersonators were second baseman Ray Durham as Randy Jackson and Jeff Fassero as Simon Cowell. Comedian Rob Schneider, who was visiting the Giants, also participated in the mock contest.
The second round of the contest will take place on Wednesday before the team plays an intrasquad game.
Bonds is unsure whether he will again dress up as Abdul.
end AP story
Yeah, this isn’t going to come back to haunt him this year …
