Posted by Teddy Panos

Sharing a few thoughts while wondering if I someday announce my retirement in a blog, will anybody read about it?

In this space, there’s really no debate. Curt Schilling is a Hall of Famer. If Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Ferguson Jenkins and Don Drysdale are Hall of Famers, then so is Schilling. There isn’t one of them, nor many others already enshrined in Canton, I’d rather hand the ball to in a winner-take-all game.

Sorry, but I’m not buying the Julius Peppers to the Patriots story. Think about it…when was the last time Bill Belichick let it be known he was working on acquiring a player a month or more down the road?

This was the guy who traded for, and totally reworked the contract of, Randy Moss before anybody had a clue what was going on. We simply woke up one Sunday morning to the news. Prime-time free agent acquisitions Roosevelt Colvin and Adalius Thomas? Signed, sealed and delivered without a peep or a leak to the media.

Now all of a sudden Belichick’s plans to add a little spice (Peppers, get it?) to the defense, even the exact draft pick that will be used to acquire the player, are public knowledge? Nah, doesn’t pass the smell test. I think we’re catching a whiff of an agent trying desperately to get his client out of Carolina.

The power brokers at the NCAA and their network television apologists are beating their chests again, telling us what a wonderful job they did selecting the field for the Men’s Basketball tournament. They point to the number of major conference teams still standing in the Sweet 16, as opposed to the number of mid-major entries, and tell us they got it right in excluding so many little guys.

Hogwash! When you select 6 or 7 teams from one conference, you’re bound to advance at least a couple of them into the later rounds. When a lesser conference gets only one or two entries max, all it takes is one slip up to eliminate that conference from Big Dance.

Oh, and the other little thing the selection committee does is place the power conference top seeds on familiar turf. North Carolina and Duke hardly ever leave their home state. Gee, you think it’s an advantage for the Tar Heels and Blue Devils to play in Raleigh and/or Greensboro? Not to mention, Villanova played in Philadelphia last weekend, where American gave the Wildcats all they could handle. Would that matchup have turned out differently if played on neutral hardwood?

While greed dictates the basketball wing of the NCAA, I’m starting to believe incompetence rules the hockey wing. These jokers wax poetic about taking objectivity almost completely out of the selection process. They rely on the PWR (PowerWise Rankings) and RPI (Rating Percentage Index) to select the field. So naturally, you end up with scenarios like this one playing out:

UMass Lowell and Vermont each had 20 regular season victories. They were the #5 and #4 seeds, respectively, in the Hockey East tournament. Yet despite losing to UML twice at home in the conference playoffs, the Mountaineers got the bid over the River Hawks, who just so happened to be one of the hottest teams in the country over the last month of the season. Yet, and I kid you not, the NCAA computer rankings place no more importance on a conference tournament game than on the first regular season game of the year.

Now, I might not be much of a college hockey Krishna, but I’m thinking it would be a great idea if the NCAA replaced the PWR and RPI rankings with the CSI….the Common Sense Index!!!

Happy Greek Independence Day tomorrow!