Since everything on network TV Friday night was repeats, and I couldn't get excited about the Giants at Marlins game featuring 0-8 starter Barry Zito, I spent most of the evening watching the Penn-Duke Women's NCAA Lacrosse Semifinal game up in Towson, MD at Johnny Unitas Stadium on CBS College Sports, Channel 610.
It was the second D-1 Semifinal game of the night, following Northwestern's impressive 16-8 win over Syracuse earlier in the evening, which I caught the tail end of. Northwestern clearly deserves to be ranked number one in the country based on the three Wildcat games on TV I've seen so far this year on ESPNU.
Plus it clearly helps recruiting a bit when you win the NCAAs three years in a row and are marching towards your fourth!
I really wish NU's beautiful and cozy lacrosse stadium in Evanston, near the northern part of campus, right off Lake Michigan had been there when I was living there.
Though I could be wrong, I think it's actually located right where I used to sit at a picnic table writing colorful and impassioned letters to my friends around the country in those pre-email days of the mid-'80's, right when Kellogg (KGSM) was named by the Wall Street Journal as the #1 Business School in the country.
Those were heady days in Evanston, what with Kellogg's new found notoriety, plus the town of Evanston having recently consented to a McDonald's within township limits, but with strict provisos included, like bistro tables each with a small flower arrangement instead of the regular McDonald's tables, and NO take-out allowed.
The off-duty Chicago cops they had work there were guys with muscles on top of muscles = no funny business.
It was great to be able to go there late on a Friday night/Saturday morning with friends and not worry about somebody coming into the place and causing a scene.
During the timeouts/halftime and commercial breaks of the Penn-Duke match, I went down a number on my remote control to ESPNU and caught bits and pieces of the California-Florida NCAA Super-regional Softball tourney being hosted in Gainesville.
Having so recently heard and read so much nonsense in the area when the BCS schools met at the Westin Diplomat three weeks ago to discuss, among other things, a BCS football playoff taking too much out of the kids and them missing too much school, I heard the ESPNU commentators say that because the Cal Golden Bears don't really have a home field, per se -which is weird to contemplate- they played something like 53 of their 68 season games on the road, though obviously, most of those were games in Cali or the Left Coast.
But still...
To demonstrate that the Bears weren't afraid of playing the top-seeded Gators in Gainesville, someone even dropped a knowledge nugget that Cal's been on the road for the past four weeks. Four weeks!
Isn't someone afraid of how much the travel will take out of them and how much classroom instruction they'll miss? Guess not.
And yet those lil' factoids weren't the ones that really left me slack-jawed Friday night, something South Beach Hoosier rarely if ever is, absent the sight of one of his longtime favorites, like, well, you know who I mean.
Because of the rain situation in the Gainesville area, one of the commentators said that it was important that they get that game -Game #1 of the tourney- played and out of the way, otherwise, should all the games be washed out, Florida advances based on being the highest seed.
That being the case, in retrospect, I guess it was a good thing that the Ga. Tech basketball arena was available during the SEC basketball tourney when the tornado hit downtown Atlanta a few weeks back and caused damage to the arena where the SEC tourney was being held, so Dennis Felton's Georgia Bulldogs could show such great heart and spirit in playing and beating Arkansas, lest Arkansas have advanced due to their being the higher ranked.
For highlights of the two Semifinals, see http://www.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/cs-w-lacros-body.html and http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/more/05/23/womens.lacrosse.ap/
Reminder:
Saturday the 24th at Noon on CSTV is encore telecast of Women's Semifinal game #1, Syracuse-Northwestern.
Following that game at 2 p.m. is the repeat of Women's Semifinal game #2, Penn-Duke
The way the Quakers kept their cool and came from behind to win in the second overtime on Rachel Manson's goal to beat a very talented -more talented?- Duke team was pretty damn impressive.
It was certainly not something we've seen the likes of in South Florida for quite some time, given the general ineptness of the Dolphins, Hurricanes and Heat the past two years, with few gut-check wins against very good teams to their credit.
http://www.pennathletics.com/ViewArticle.dbml?SPSID=8964&SPID=554&DB_OEM_ID=1700&ATCLID=1474196
http://laxmagazine.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/recaps/052408aac.html
That said, it's hard to see how Northwestern's larger and faster team won't be at quite an advantage when they play for the title on Sunday night at Stade Johnny U.
But I'll be watching anyway, hoping for a close game thru three-quarters of the match.
At that point, it's all about sheer talent and physicality.
Sunday May 25th on CSTV from 7-9 p.m. is the Women's championship game between #1 Northwestern and Penn.
The Quakers beat the Wildcats earlier this season to give them their only loss and also stop their thirty-SOMETHING match winning streak.
And didn't Michael Steadman meet Hope at Penn?
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Chicago Tribune
Familiar path Northwestern lacrosse
Bowen's 6 goals put NU back in title match
By Philip Hersh, Tribune reporter
May 24, 2008
http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/cs-24-northwestern-lacrossemay24,1,2050462.story
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Saturday at Noon down the dial at Channel 209, ESPN2, the Men's Semifinals from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough begin. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/espnu/index
ESPN's excellent lacrosse analyst Quint Kessenich, the former Johns Hopkins goalkeeper, comments on the NCAA tourney so far:
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/columns/story?columnist=kessenich_quint&id=3405646
Lacrosse Magazine's analysis and predictions: http://laxmagazine.cstv.com/sports/m-lacros/uslx-m-lacros-body.html and http://laxmagazine.cstv.com/sports/m-lacros/spec-rel/052308aaf.html
Game # 1, from Noon-2 p.m. is #3 Syracuse vs. #2 Virginia, featuring two Orange-crazy teams.
ESPN's Meredith Galante's analysis of the rematch of the Konica Minolta Faceoff Classic game up at Ravens Stadium, where 11 weeks ago, I watched on ESPN as UVA prevailed 14-13, is here: http://blogs.insidelacrosse.com/2008/05/23/ncaa-semifinals-preview-syracuse-vs-virginia/
Game #2 at 2:30 p.m. is the big one, #1 Duke against defending NCAA champ and #5 seed
Johns Hopkins. I've seen the Blue Jays play about as often as I've seen the Northwestern Women's team, on ESPN, ESPNU as well as on MASN, the Mid Atlantic Sports network.
MASN, i.e. the Orioles and the Washington Nationals Channel created for the financial benefit of Orioles owner Peter Angelos, is where I watch Tom Davis and Phil Wood every Saturday morning give me the lowdown on what's what baseball-wise in the Baltimore-DC area.
See analysis of Blue Devil-Blue Jay game by John Driscoll at
http://blogs.insidelacrosse.com/2008/05/22/ncaa-semifinals-preview-hopkins-vs-duke/
In case you didn't notice it above, both Duke and Syracuse had the unique distinction of having both their Mens and Women's team make the NCAA Lacrosse Semifinals.
That's damn impressive and something that I wish that IU or the U-M could do that in a sport I cared about, instead of, in the U-M's case, having a Women's athletic program that's light years behind Duke, North Carolina, Maryland and Wake Forest just in the ACC.
More often than not, those four schools annually compete for a national title in either basketball, field hockey, soccer or lacrosse.
A future post here will examine why that's so, and even worse, if possible, why print and TV sports reporters/columnists in South Florida never mention the feebleness of the U-M
Women's teams.
Sorry, individual titles in tennis, while nice, in Audra Cohen's case, don't compensate for being sorry and mediocre in so many team sports, especially when good men's teams had to go buh-bye to make way for Title IX.
Is it too much to hope that they'd be more than mediocre?
Maybe even be entertaining?
Not that it'll affect my rooting interests, but one of my friends back in DC played on the Duke lacrosse team in the early 1980's.
Still, nobody from IU can ever root for Duke.
It's just not done.
My oldest niece's high school in Maryland, Glenelg, just won the Maryland state lacrosse title in both Boys and Girls this past week for their division.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/20/AR2008052002117.html
For Glenelg, Perfect EndingsBoys Finish Unbeaten; Girls Are Champs, Too
By Jeff Nelson
Special to The Washington Post
May 21, 2008
Since she'll be going to college this fall back in the state I used to live in, Virginia, I'm going to predict a UVA-Johns Hopkins Mens final on Monday afternoon.
That'll be on ESPN from 1-3:30 p.m.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/919/story/536308.html
Miami Herald
FSU president: College football playoff inevitable
Posted on Fri, May. 16, 2008
By JAIME ARON
AP Sports Writer
GRAPEVINE, Texas -- Here's a ray of hope for college football fans bummed by the recent rejection of the plus-one model to determine a national champion.
The president of Florida State not only believes a playoff is coming, he thinks it'll start with four teams, then grow to eight and eventually 16.
"The bottom line is the money, unfortunately, is going to drive the train," FSU's T.K. Wetherell said. "The 12th game, right now, is solving the problem. The reason there is a 12th game in football is the money. People may not want to admit that, but that's the facts of the matter."
Wetherell's comments came Friday at the National Football Forum, during a panel discussion of the future of college football. He spoke after the playoff concept was pretty much rejected by Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, Washington coach Ty Willingham, Kansas coach Mark Mangino, TCU coach Gary Patterson, Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White and Army athletic director Kevin Anderson.
"Who is it for?" Willingham asked.
Tressel emphasized scheduling problems that would be taxing for players physically and for their studies. Mangino talked about changes spoiling the fun of bowls.
"If you go to a championship, there's first and second and that's it," Anderson said, a theme Patterson touched on, too, by noting the current system produced 32 bowl winners.
"We have a tournament - it starts the first week in September," White said.
Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, spoke up, too, crediting the BCS for record levels of attendance and television ratings.
Getting his say at the very end, Wetherell turned the discussion upside down.
"In my judgment, if you take every argument that's been made today and apply it to any other sport on a college campus, then you'd have to cancel the (College) World Series, the Final Four, the soccer tournament," he said. "If you want to do it, it can be done. ...
"Everybody's going to be sitting here - I don't know, probably not in my lifetime at Florida State - saying, 'You know, we really could move this back. And, by the way, we do play 63 baseball games and we play baseball through two final-exam periods, not one. Somehow, they all seem to graduate and do pretty good. Oh, those basketball players, we have a real problems with academics in basketball, but we seem to play right on through the tournament.'"
Once the problems are solved and the "ungodly amount of money that it will produce" starts rolling in, Wetherell expects everyone decide it's a good thing and want more of it.
"It'll start off with plus-one, then it'll go to four or eight or 16 at some point in time - just like the NCAA (basketball) tournament," he said.
Commissioners from the Bowl Championship Series leagues, plus White, met in Florida two weeks ago and opted to keep their national champion format the same at least until the 2014 season. In doing so, they rejected the plus-one model, which essentially is a four-team playoff. The No. 1 team would face No. 4 and Nos. 2 and 3 would meet, then both winners would square off in a championship game.
Only the Southeastern Conference - whose commissioner, Mike Slive, presented the plus-one plan - and the Atlantic Coast Conference, which includes Florida State, even wanted to keep talking about the new format.
According to Wetherell, schools are happy to stick with the status quo because budgets are padded with money from the 12th game, which was added for the 2006 season.
"We'll spend all that money. We're not going to bank it," Wetherell said. "Then the question will be, 'Where do I get me more money?'"
A playoff will be the logical alternative, Wetherell said.
"And the fight won't be over whether we do it or not anymore," he said during a break following the session. "The fight's going to be on the split. It's going to be a totally different discussion."
Wetherell, who played receiver at Florida State in the 1960s with Bobby Bowden as his position coach, closed his remarks with this prediction: "Now, I don't think it's going to happen this year or next year or whenever. But it is going to happen. No doubt about it."
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http://www.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/stories/043008aam.html#
Let's Talk This Over
Open discussions needed on plus-one model and potential playoff
April 30, 2008
By Trev Alberts
Special to CSTV.com
http://www.southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/
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