Newz Forum: OTHER: Chicago State University, Matt Doherty, Todd Bozeman, Kobe Bryant plus more...

Chicago State has chosen to withdraw from the Mid-Continent Conference and pursue life as a college basketball independent. Let me say here and now that this is the college basketball version of 'Tournament Suicide'. The Mid-Continent Conference has tournament representation; independents have to be really - and I mean REALLY - good to get in the tournament. And Chicago State is not really good; in fact, they've been really bad for a while; they've won 37 games, which sounds good at first, until I tell you that it has taken them the last 5 seasons to do that.

So why this move, you ask? Well the geniuses who run the university and/or the athletic department there said that they wanted to be in a conference that was more 'metropolitan'. I don't know what that means exactly but I did check the conference members and I found that the schools are in Tulsa, the Detroit area, and Kansas City. Given the geography of Chicago State and the realities of its travel budget and athletic stature, what conference do they think might have a sufficient 'metropolitanosity' for them?

Speaking of college basketball, Matt Doherty left Florida Atlantic University after one year there to take the head-coaching job at SMU. This is the second school that Doherty has left after being there for only one year. (Name the other one and the duck will fly down and give you $50 as Groucho Marx used to say.) Dan Daly in the Washington Times said Doherty may be the latter day Larry Brown in terms of being peripatetic and said that SMU had stenciled his parking space in chalk. I think that if Doherty gets involved only one more of these situations he will forever be known as Matt 'One and Done' Doherty.

I said before that Indiana's hiring of Kelvin Sampson might not have been the 'splashy' hire that some IU diehards had been hoping for, but it might have been the best the school can do. Now there is some potential that an NCAA investigation into 'difficulties' at OU might follow Sampson to IU. And there is at least one report that IU anticipated this problem and can fire Sampson outright if any sanctions were to come to the school on the basis of Sampson's presence there. You know how they say that the apple never falls far from the tree? Well Sampson had a head assistant at OU who allegedly made a boatload - and I mean a boatload - of improper/illegal phone calls to OU basketball recruits. And that assistant then went on to become the coach at Fresno back in 2002 or 2003, and the NCAA just slapped Fresno with four years of probation because that former Sampson assistant was on the 'wrong side of the line' in various recruiting situations. I have no inside pipeline here, but there just may be another job opening up in the collegiate ranks. Now if Matt Doherty were to go there, he would really set a new standard since he hasn't even coached an official practice at SMU yet.

I think that I made it perfectly clear that I thought Dave Bliss was the equivalent of a sub-humanoid as a college basketball coach after the horror show he precipitated at Baylor. And when he got another job in basketball - even with a useless semi-pro team in North Dakota - I said that was an outrage. Well, I'm not sure that Todd Bozeman is significantly more deserving of another shot at a college coaching job than Bliss would be even though Bozeman never tried to label one of his murdered players as a drug dealer. Bozeman 'resigned' the job at Cal after he also admitted paying thousands of dollars to the family of a kid he was recruiting. He's been living with a 'show cause ban' from the NCAA meaning that any school that had wanted to hire him for the past ten years or so had to go to the NCAA and tell the NCAA why this guy should be allowed back into college coaching. Not surprisingly, no one wanted to do that. Now the ban has run out and Bozeman has been hired by Morgan State. And while it is not politically correct to challenge a Historically Black University on its personnel decisions nor is it politically correct to ask why a black man is really qualified to do a job, let me ask:

If paying cash money to the family of a potential recruit does not contravene the most fundamental precepts of college sports, then what does? Why is Todd Bozeman worthy and deserving of this position at Morgan State?

By the way, May 6th was National Do-Dah Day. So did you all remember to go out and run all night and run all day? And this week is also National Life Coach Week, so I hope that when you see someone this week who exhibits world class asshat behavior, you'll just go up to them and suggest that all they need to is to go and find a Life Coach. I had a Life Coach once but he really pissed me off so I told him to go ...

There is some rhetorical gassing going on at the moment about whether or not Kobe Bryant 'quit' in the seventh game against Phoenix. I don't read minds so I don't know and I suspect the mind-reading skills of the other pontificators here. However, his performance in that 'Game Seven' tells me that any comparisons between him and Michael Jordan need to be put on hold for about another five years. Forget the physical skills; those can always be debated. Here is what is not in doubt. In a Game Seven, Michael Jordan would not - and never did - disappear. And if Raja Bell had dared to clothesline Michael Jordan in the series, Jordan would have come out and dropped 50 on him for the rest of the series and made sure that Raja Bell would be scheduling tee-times in mid-May.

Quick Quiz:

Are the New York Knicks more of a laughingstock in the NBA in 2006 than the LA Clippers were all through the 1990s?

Discuss in 200 words or less...

I understand that there are rumors out there that the Mets will try to acquire another pitcher via a trade now that Victor Zambrano is down for the year. But can we please stop referring to whomever they seek to acquire as a 'hurler'. He is a pitcher; his job will not be to go out on the mound and puke his guts out.

Finally, here is an observation from Sir Charles Barkley on what he would do if he were Madison Square Garden chairman and Knicks honcho, James Dolan:

'The first thing I'd do is kill myself.'

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

Curmudgeon