Deep Thoughts From the Weekend

I did not feel like writing a full blown page on any of these issues, but it seemed a shame not to at least mention them for discussion as I think that each are interesting in their own way.

1) What about the SEC basketball tournament from this weekend? I started watching the thing on Thursday when it began and there were good games both that day and the next. The real crazy stuff happened on Friday night when a tornado hit the Georgia Dome in Atlanta and messed up the scheduling for the tournament, forcing the Georgia Bulldogs to play two games in one day. Georgia won both, as well as the championship the next day, when they were the underdog in every game. Frankly, winning two games in one day against superior teams just boggles my mind and I give all types of credit to Georgia for this feat.

2) The evil empire had its talking heads going full force this weekend as the NCAA tournament pairings were being announced. ESPN must have believed that it did not have enough nonsense being spouted by "said heads" so they brought in Bobby Knight to add even more nonsense, and boy did he deliver. His viewpoint (which he backed off of after one night) was that there should be no automatic qualifiers and the NCAA tourney committee should simply choose the best 64 teams regardless of conference affiliation since most of the champions from the small schools are not as good as the average schools from the BCS conferences. WOW! Sounds like Bobby is still a little bitter about losing to some of those smaller schools back when he used to get teams into the tournament. This is just more of the big conference bullshit that has been put out for years where the big schools argue that if the little schools had to play in their conference, then they would do not better than them; or, if the big school played in that little school's conference, it would have just as good of a record. This is quite some argument when one considers that none of the big schools will play games on the home court of the little schools, nor will they even schedule the better little schools to come to their court if the little schools have a strong team. Just more elitist claptrap from a BCS conference supporter.

3) I am going to do a little bragging now. In my second article on this blog I talked about a change in the hierarchy in NASCAR. Specifically, I argued that we could be looking at an end to the dominance of Hendricks' Motorsports. Well, if you check the standings after yesterday's Bristol race you will not find Jeff Gordon, Jimmy Johnson or Casey Mears in the top twelve drivers qualified for the chase. Not only is Hendricks not the dominant team in NASCAR, it is not even the dominant Chevy team, that honor goes to Richard Childress Racing. Hendricks, it seems, took the offseason off, literally. While its competitors were figuring out how to make their cars better, Hendricks believed that their equipment was so much better that they could celebrate the two championships in a row instead of upgrading and it has now caught up with them. I would say that they are about a couple of months behind and that they will probably make a push with their cars around late June or July, however it may be too late by then to matter.

4) Do you like the drivers in the chase for the cup in NASCAR right now? I hope so, because since the Chase was created a few years ago, 75-80% Of the cars that were in the top 12 (used to be top 10, hence the percentage range) after Bristol made the official chase. When you look at the ones that are in the top 12 right now, the weakest cars would appear to be the #8 position of Ryan Newman and the #12 of Martin Truexx, Jr. That doesn't leave many spots for Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Denny Hamlin or Carl Edwards to fight over.

5) I know that people tend to forget the past and glorify the present. It is human nature and it happens in sports all the time. Look at any of those greatest player lists that you see and it is skewed by the living memory of the person putting the list together as he will recall the great all-americans that he has seen and only the greatest of the great from the past will be mentioned. Having said this, I would still have to say that we are seeing the performance of, what I believe history will declare, the best player to ever be, when we see Tiger Woods take a course. Seven titles in a row after this weekend. Tied for third all-time in tourney titles and second for grand slam events. He is truly unreal.

There now. Discuss amongst yourselves.