Category: Sports

Urban Meyer may be the next head coach of the Florida Gators.

With good reason have many of the usual suspects anointed the 40-year-old head coach of the University of Utah. He’s been highly successful at Utah and prior to that as head coach at Bowling Green. Known as a hard-driving innovator, Meyer loves a spread out, high-octane offense. And he’s tight with first year UF President Bernie Machen, who hired Meyer at Utah.

But here’s one variable that could be a double-edged sword. He’s a strict disciplinarian. Very strict. And that includes the deportment department.

No boorish, “look at me” antics euphemized as unbridled enthusiasm. No “trash talk” explained away as cultural gamesmanship. Players scoring touchdowns are expected to toss the football back to the referee as if they’ve done it before. No choreography. No showboating. Don’t embarrass your team, your coach, your school or yourself. Show some class or be shown the door.

Frankly, that’s refreshing. Many coaches make a deal with the devil to bring in blue-chip players with cow-chip characters. It’s the trade-off to win games, fill stadiums, get on TV, go to bowl games, appease the alumni and keep their jobs. Miami, Florida State and Florida are not exceptions to this rule.

But Utah is. What it is not is Florida. Not in its highly prized, highly praised high school recruiting base. Not in its take-no-prisoners alumni. Not in the pressure to win the Southeastern Conference and compete for a national championship every year.

Frankly, Meyer may be a better philosophical fit at Penn State, but, well, never mind.

Re: The flap over the controversial pre-game promotion before last week’s Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys.

Get over it.

Not because “it’s no big deal.” And not because “that’s ‘show biz.'”

But because we’re not re-bottling the genie known as mainstream cultural sludge. And prime-time pro sports – notably basketball and football – are chronic offenders. From cheesy chorus lines and police-blotter players to gangsta promos. From “trash-talking” thuggery euphemized as “gamesmanship” to cameras following every boorish showboat’s customized choreography.

It is what it is, and the ratings and ad rates haven’t crested yet. As for that racy locker room exchange between Terrell Owens and some towel-clad bimbo actress, it was merely an extension of the increasingly sleazy entertainment product that is the NFL. And as black Indianapolis Colts’ coach Tony Dungy has acknowledged, they even played the racial stereotype card — lest someone be left unoffended.

It is the height of hypocrisy for ABC, the NFL and the Eagles’ organization to feign any regret over the incident. After a few pro forma apologies, they are high-fiving themselves for all the publicity.

If you’re a parent, don’t waste your breath complaining. Any more than waxing disturbed over an MTV awards’ show. The best thing you can do is to be an example to your kids and not applaud the “colorful” antics of dysfunctional-culture athletes because they are home town players.

The NCAA just released figures showing graduation rates for Division I athletes holding steady at 62 percent — which is 2 percent higher than the general student population. It then broke it down by gender and race. For example, 70 percent of female athletes graduated — as opposed to 55 percent of men. In addition, 55 percent of major college football players graduated. Among all Division I sports, 48 percent of black male athletes and 59 percent of white males graduated.

Even more telling — and hopefully helpful — would be a breakdown across all sports. It’s a lot easier to bury men’s basketball statistics in the context of cross-country, tennis, gymnastics and swimming.

Moreover, it might be illuminating to look at majors and to separate prize-recruit, front-line players prepping for the pros from those who mainly ride the pine. Many of the latter are often better students than athletes — and their GPA’s and graduation rates help inflate the overall averages that their teams, universities and NCAA can then tout.

As if the National Hockey League needed another reminder of the stupidity of its labor-management ways.

Witness the sell-out crowd that recently packed the Forum for that pre-season, National Basketball Association game between the Miami Heat and The Orlando Magic. That’s right, more than 20,000 turned out for a lounge act EXHIBITION. Some tickets cost as much as $250, and, no, that’s not a typo.

But hippity hopping hoops along with baseball and — especially — pro football, are three big, entrenched reasons why hockey must keep scrambling for a fan base in the American marketplace. Hockey, which is religion in Canada, is relegated to soccer status in the States.

Which means that hockey, with TV deals worth chump change and most franchises needing to win the Stanley Cup to turn a profit, can ill afford to do anything that would turn its formidable financial challenge into a Sisyphean task. But that’s what it has done — and continues to do.

The three major athletic leagues can survive strikes, lockouts, drug scandals, police blotter publicity and even replacement players because they are the big three — and they are woven into the fabric of American sports entertainment. When hockey in America shuts down, it can fully expect fewer fans to return. Tampa isn’t Toronto; nor is Miami Montreal.

The timing, of course, couldn’t be more unfortunate for the Tampa Bay Lightning. This would have been the season of fortuity — maxing out on Stanley Cup momentum. Moreover, it would have filled a feel-good, vicarious vacuum created by the Bucs’ free fall from fan favor. The Lightning could have been the winner of their discontent. Instead they capped their own growth.

Everybody loves a winner — even, apparently, of exhibition games. But you can’t win without playing. But you can lose. Big.

Call it another entry in the “Timing is everything” file. After that disappointing and dispiriting Florida Gator loss to LSU, ESPN analyst Mike Gottfried had some encouraging things to say about UF.

Gottfried frankly doesn’t think the Gators are far from contending for the national championship. “I think next year,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want Ron hearing me say this,” added Gottfried, “but next year this is going to be a great football team. They are a year away.”

Unfortunately for Zook, who didn’t help himself with that fraternity-shouting incident, he is even money to be less than a year away from being fired. He may have to beat BOTH Georgia and Florida State to save his job coaching a national championship contender next season.

In many contexts USF is still a relative upstart in the world of big-time college athletics. So, it’s noteworthy that the Bulls were prominently mentioned in “Sports Illustrated’s” 50th Anniversary Issue. Among all the chronicling of a half-century’s worth of prominent players, big games and notable trends.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that SI focused on the female basketball player who, as a recent convert to Islam, had wanted to take the court and represent USF in a Muslim head scarf, long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Ultimately the student, Andrea Armstrong, left the team amid an unfortunate, if predictable, backlash of negative public opinion.

Included in the SI piece was this quote from Ahmed Bedier, a spokesman for the Council of American-Islamic Relations: “Had Andrea been a Buddhist, Jew or even a Satan worshipper, she would not have sparked this kind of controversy.”

That’s probably true unless, of course, the Satan-worshipping power forward was holding out for a devilishly customized look. Or she wanted to wear a Gators’ jersey.

Needless to say, these are extraordinarily sensitive times for all post-9/11 Americans. We can’t mandate that ethnocentrism be purged; xenophobia be banned; or common sense be uniformly applied.

But we should be able to say to public university, scholarship-subsidized athletes: You can wear your religion on your sleeve — of your uniform.

Let’s hear it, albeit temperately, for NASCAR. It made good on a warning to its drivers that swearing in broadcast interviews wouldn’t be tolerated. So it fined Dale Earnhardt and assessed him a stiff 25-point penalty. He had blurted out on air — in Victory Lane — that his win at the EA Sports 500 at Talladega “don’t mean shit, (oops, earthy expletive).”

Of course NASCAR had been motivated by the Federal Communications Commission’s crackdown on foul language over the airways. But it’s more than that.NASCAR is alone among the major sorts in this country in ensuring that its well-cultivated fan base — including a number of families — always comes first. This is a function of that. A refreshing one.

St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker thinks it would be a splendid idea if USF would start bringing some of its higher-profile sports — read: basketball, baseball and even football — to his side of Tampa Bay. “It would be good for the city and good for more regional support of USF,” reasons Hizzoner.

Actually, there’s precedent for such. As recently as 2000, the USF men’s basketball team played Morgan State at the Trop, and the following year USF hosted the Conference USA baseball championship at Florida Power Park. And this season the USF men’s basketball team will play Bethune-Cookman College in Lakeland.

“It’s an opportunity to be around another campus,” explains USF Sports Information Director John Gerdes.

But no one, of course, is confusing a USF-BCC game with a big-time, big-crowd-generating event. Those are rare enough in Tampa and aren’t likely to be exported to a satellite or even a regional campus. And that probably goes for the fast-growth, downtown-catalyst that is USF-St. Pete, which could be home to 10,000 students — a number living in dorms — within a decade.

According to Gerdes, USF isn’t flat-out precluding playing some meaningful games in St. Pete. “We would entertain that possibility in the future,” he says. “Nothing is presently scheduled, but we would look at any opportunity.”

They should. St. Pete isn’t Lakeland, and the Trop, which has already accommodated a Final Four, isn’t the relatively undersized Sun Dome. Plus this area should be using all the means at its disposal to build regional bridges across the bay. And few entities, frankly, are better positioned than USF to play a pivotal role.

And as for football?

“Raymond James is an ideal home for us,” underscores Gerdes, who agreed with a columnist’s assessment that a football scenario sounded “feasible but highly unlikely.”

Enough, already, of the whining, hand-wringing and excuse-mongering over the American team’s latest embarrassment in Ryder Cup competition with Europe. C’mon, let’s be real. What do you expect? It’s one country against a whole continent.

Just when we think we’ve heard it all from Keyshawn Johnson, we ain’t heard nothing yet.

It wasn’t enough that he was paid handsomely to go away last year. That would have embarrassed better men.

It wasn’t enough that he continued to badmouth the only organization that could win him a Super Bowl ring.

It wasn’t enough that he could run off at the mouth even as his value plummeted with every dropped pass and each public pouting session.

Now he’s lashed out at one of the classiest players to ever suit up for the Bucs — Ronde Barber.

But it was no garden variety insult. Between blacks, it’s a veritable epithet: “Meshawn” called Barber an “Uncle Tom.” In Meshawn-speak, that’s a black athlete who sublimates himself to the identity of the team. Comporting himself with dignity in wins or losses and not using the media as a personal-vent vehicle only compounded it. Hence the insulting plantation idiom.

Ronde Barber an “Uncle Tom?”

Such an outrageous, racist cheap shot only makes sense from the perspective of one who’s a slave to his own malignant ego.