Newz Forum: OTHER: The Sports Curmudgeon on Dennis Rodman, Oakland Raiders, BCS plus more...

I know that I've demonstrated to all of you here on multiple occasions that I am not a marketing and promotional genius. In fact, I'm pretty bad at that kind of thing. But the Oakland Raiders are trying to sell something that is beyond anything that I can begin to understand.

Since the Raiders have been back in Oakland for a decade now - how the time flies - the fans who bought Personal Seat Licenses upon the return to Oakland now see those PSL's expiring and needing renewal. Forget that the Raiders are a miserable team now and have been good but not great for the previous decade. The fact is that the Raiders rarely sell out their games; one of the complaints from people in Oakland is that they rarely get to see the home games on TV because Al Davis invokes the blackout rule. In fact, Davis sued the city of Oakland over lack of revenue, which he said he was guaranteed by the city when he moved back.

So, riddle me this... If I lived in the Oakland area and wanted to see a Raiders' game and could walk up to the ticket window and score a seat for 6 of the 8 home games in a season, why would I pay money for a Personal Seat License and then be obligated to buy tickets to all the home games even if I could not or did not want to go to all of them? This is like trying to sell Stephen Hawking a card that will get him discounts at Foot Locker for the next ten years.

The most recent thing I read about the famous "Ron Artest CD" that he now has lots of time to promote is that the CD had sold a total of 1200 copies nationally. I had planned to say that was one of the worst selling things you could imagine given that its existence was widely known. And it is. But then I read a news report in the Chicago Sun-Times that tells me there is something else that will be an even smaller seller...

Kim Jong II - that zany North Korean politician - has written a book called Let Us Achieve the Independent and Peaceful Reunification of the Country Through the Great Unity of the Entire Nation. That is only the title; it is not Chapters 1-4. I can imagine that it is wildly popular in Pyongyang but now it has been put on the market in Haiti. Once again, I'm no marketing genius but there seem to be a couple of things wrong with putting this book on sale in this venue:

1. How many Haitians can read Korean?

2. How many Haitians can read?

3. Why would Haiti want to reunify its country when it can't manage to deal with what it has? Oh, for the same reason North Korea might; I get it.

4. How many Haitians can afford to buy a book? Haiti is one of the few places on Earth that might actually apply to Darfur for foreign aid and get some.

According to something I was reading on CBSportsline.com, Dennis Rodman has "requested his release from the ABA's Orange County Crush". It seems as if the Crush have not been able to find a home court on which to play their games - normally something that teams do early on in their organizational endeavors - and so Rodman seeks a release so he can play a few games for the Long Beach Jam. (Aside: How big an arena would you need for a game between the Crush and the Jam? I'm thinking any high school gym could handle it with room to spare...)

What turns this story into something that makes you want to hurl is the comment from Rodman's agent related to all this: "Dennis is all about the fans and getting fan support, and being that they had no venue to play in, he felt he needed to sign with another team."

Memo to Agent: Dennis is all about Dennis. He'll even dump your butt in a heartbeat if he figures that it will benefit Dennis.

Obviously, the final chapter has not been written in this book yet, but I wonder if Archie and Eli Manning are still so unalterably opposed to playing in San Diego...

I saw a note in the LA Times that said that Mater Dei High School in the LA area has produced two Hesiman Award winners (Matt Leinart and John Huarte). Wow, there are lots of colleges that haven't done that yet.

A Senator in the California Legislature has introduced a resolution calling for the dismantling of the BCS. Of course, the fact that Cal was nudged out of the big money BCS games this year at the final hour had nothing to do with this. Neither did the fact that this guy graduated from Cal in 1964. This resolution has about the same standing and impact as your typical run of the mill UN General Assembly resolution - - that is to say, squadoosh!!

Surprisingly, no one in the Texas legislature has introduced anything similar. How long will it be until the mayors of Birmingham and Auburn and Montgomery Alabama take a similar resolution to their city councils?

Look folks, the BCS is not very good. But asking a bunch of politicians to come up with something better would be incredible folly. Most of them could not find their way out of toilet stall even with a map. This is merely another political blowhard who just needs to stuff a sock in it.

And speaking about the BCS and football polls, some people have seemed to be surprised that writers in various geographic areas would vote favorably to support local teams. Excuse me? That would surprise anyone? In Alabama, one writer did not vote for Auburn ahead of USC or Oklahoma and wrote a column saying why. The newspaper publisher did a front-page apology for that column because - supposedly - some big time Auburn backers threatened to pull ads from the paper(s). Do you think that writer got the message here? So next time you read something lofty and philosophical about "journalistic objectivity" and about how the first thing they teach in J-school is that "we report the news; we don't make the news", think about this situation. It will put all that emoting into perspective for you.

Finally, the Washington Redskins just signed an OL named Dan Goodspeed. I doubt it. If he had good speed, he would be a wide receiver...

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...

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