Why I Coach...

Anybody who thinks the Chicago Cubs are the most loveable losers in the world never met my little leaguers. Then again, no one has ever witnessed anyone, anywhere, lose quite like us. We were the Bad News Bears without a happy ending. We made the Washington Generals look first-class. I felt bad watching the runs pile up on my helpless little guys, but the other teams felt worse – you know things aren’t going well when the other coaches are rooting for you.

Winning just wasn’t our thing. Not that any of my little guys knew – once, after an especially bad whooping, one of my nine year olds tugged on my t-shirt and asked if we had won. Won? I gave him a perplexed look, “buddy, we didn’t even make it out of the batter’s box today.”

Such was life for my team during our 0-16 campaign. We struck out, we dodged groundballs, and for a bunch of fourth graders, we had an uncanny ability to remain clean (dirt also wasn’t our thing). But the truth is, I’ll probably remember the losing only slightly more than my team, and that’s only because I actually kept score for every game. It’s everything else, the hilarious stories and the head-scratching ones, the heartwarming and occasionally heartbreaking tales that made this season memorable for me.

Teaching baseball to children is a lot like teaching someone to speak English. Every time they think they’re getting the hang of it, another crazy rule pops up and throws everything off. The “infield fly” rule is just a preposterous as “I” before “E” except after “C.” And why, as my first basemen once asked, can’t you just throw the ball at the runner to get him out? Monkey ball works in kickball.

The key is learning all the positions, but that also means knowing right from left, which can be tricky. Sometimes it can also be hard to pronounce the names of each spot on the field. For example, one kid spent the entire year asking to go to the mountain and I would always say no. I thought he was talking about the big pile of dirt behind out dugout. Turns out he meant the pitcher’s mound, and he took the hill in our final game. Jose hit four batters in a row.

My actual pitcher (we only had one) was a 3’2 seven year old who played right field and batted dead last on opening day and was the starting pitcher and leading off by game three. He was so tiny that our catcher (his brother) would often knock him over when throwing the ball back to him. But Joey knew that pitching was all about intimidation, so he’d wear eye-black to look older and make his “mean face” to strike fear in the hitters. That’s heart.

Of course, every team has an overachiever. Ours was our shortstop. Chris knew how to catch and could throw all the way across the diamond. He liked to dive and slide and even though he had an awful habit of throwing his bat after swinging, he made contact enough to be considered our best hitter. In one already out of reach game, a ball was hit to shallow left field and he made the greatest catch any of my kids had ever seen, so they did what the pros do: They jumped on top of him and celebrated as though it were the game-winning catch. One problem: It was only the second out of the inning and a runner tagged up and scored.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t laugh or smile at everything that happened this season. Sometimes reality hits hard. They old motto is “kids say the darndest things,” but in actuality, they’re brutally honest. Mom drinks too much. Dad’s never around and he doesn’t pay child support. Or we’re going to be homeless. Real life problems that winning in baseball won’t solve. My friends often tease me by comparing me to Keanu Reeves in “Hardball,” but the truth is, real life tends to be a lot less entertaining and a lot more eye-opening.

It’s the tear-jerking stories that make me want to come back and should make you want to get involved. Sometimes we don't realize that kids these days are lonelier than ever. Not every child has a reliable parent to turn to or someone willing to pay attention to them. Too many grow up with John Madden as their male role model and Grand Theft Auto has taught them far more about stolen cars than they will ever know about stolen bases.

It's really sad, especially when you hear from people who have already given up on a generation. Children need coaches and role models in their lives now more than ever. It's so easy too. Spend a couple hours a week with a youth. Mentor them. Coach them. Teach them. Do something.

It's not hard to have an impact on a child's life.

So make it happen.

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MLB needs to promote its black players

At our first Little League practice last week, I asked my players to introduce themselves by stating their name, favorite team and favorite major leaguer. Being from southern New England, the majority of them were either Red Sox or Yankees fans who loved David Ortiz, Dustin Pedroia, Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez. No surprise there. What was shocking was when one of my little guys raised his hand and told me Ken Griffey Jr. was his favorite player.

Yes that Ken Griffey Jr. The one whose batting stance I imitated when I was 12 years old. My favorite player. The one whose last 40 homerun season came a full year before any of my current players were born.

Do you realize it’s about time for “The Kid” to legally change his nickname to “The Grandpa?” Griffey is older than all of my players’ parents – by at least ten years.

It just goes to show you how far baseball still has to go in virtually every inner city in this country. And if you want to know just how sparse African-American participation is in baseball, start with Little League. The odds of seeing more than a couple black kids on any roster are slim-to-none, which is why when Connecticut baseball coach Jim Penders calls baseball a “white-collar” sport in this country, he might as well being saying it’s a white-faced game.

Penders isn’t the only one who has expressed concern in recent years. Not even close. In fact, at the beginning of every Major League season, the race issue becomes a major talking point. This season, Torii Hunter said that people don’t realize how bad it is because they see dark-skinned Latin players and assume they’re black. He referred to those players as “imposters.”

Many believe the reason less African-Americans are playing baseball is strictly a financial issue. In 2008, Penders told the New Haven Register that he recruits the best players who can afford to come to school, as opposed to just the best players. But that points to an across-the-board problem, one that affects Americans of all backgrounds and isn’t just happening in sports.

It still doesn’t explain why baseball continues to thrive even in poor white communities while it has become an afterthought in almost every urban area. The sport is becoming as segregated as hockey, golf or tennis in most parts of this country, which basically means an entire generation is missing out on our national pastime.

Like most of Major League Baseball’s problems, it has only itself to blame. The two most well-known black ball players right now are Griffey and Barry Bonds, the same as it was 15 years ago. But Griffey is at the tail end of his career and Bonds has essentially been banished from the game. Bud Selig and company have done an awful job in recent years at marketing any of the current African-American stars, all but passing up Jimmy Rollins, C.C. Sabathia, Prince Fielder and Ryan Howard in favor of guys like Joe Mauer and Tim Lincecum.

It’s not that Mauer and Lincecum don’t deserve to be stars, but when you have a serious lack of interest from the black community on your hands, why wouldn’t you make the effort to reach out using your most valuable assets? Fielder and Howard in particular have the ability to resonate with young fans the way Griffey and Bonds did in the nineties. Last year, Fielder took home the Home Run Derby -an event that is still quite popular with the Little League crowd- and Howard became the quickest ever to reach 200 homeruns, getting there in just 658 games.

It’s not just chicks who dig the long ball; it’s everyone, especially kids.

And Fielder and Howard and now Jason Heyward’s homeruns can reach the inner cities. These guys are young enough to be fan favorites for another decade and baseball needs to take advantage of that.

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Media deserves blame for Ireland's despicable question

Before castigating Miami Dolphins’ general manager Jeff Ireland for the question he asked former Oklahoma State wide receiver Dez Bryant during a pre-draft interview, think about all that rides on a team making the right choice. It’s not just the millions of dollars in guaranteed money; it’s the jobs of all the scouts and anyone else who had a hand in making the decision. The first round pick, as our Vice President would say, is a BFD.

So if teams want to dig deep and ask questions normally reserved for government or police psych tests, so be it. Given the endless amount of public scrutiny today’s athletes receive, teams need to be sure none of their players are going to throw a fan through a glass window for teasing them, as NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley once did. The NFL might not be the CIA, but then again, no one in the CIA is making $10-15 million before they even begin their job.

On Tuesday, Yahoo.com NFL writer Mike Silver tore into the Dolphins’ general manager for asking Bryant if his mother, who was once arrested for drug trafficking, was a prostitute during a pre-draft evaluation. By this morning, Silver’s piece had gone viral and every sports talk show in the country was debating whether or not Ireland should be punished for asking such an insensitive question.

And just like that, Bryant, who was eventually taken in the first round by the Dallas Cowboys, has gone from a villain to a sympathetic figure. The same people who held on to their wallets a little tighter every time he was in sight are now rooting for Bryant to stick it to Ireland, the Dolphins and anyone else who had questions about his character.

But here’s the problem: It was the media –with their labels and their gossip—who started this. Ireland was just asking a question they were scared to ask.

A week ago, the decision to take Bryant in the first round (or at all) was considered questionable, if not downright ludicrous. Bryant, we were led to believe, was a thug. Of course, that word was never used. When a largely white media utters the “T” word, the largely black player base interprets it the way they interpret a much more offensive label. Hint: It begins with an “N”.

Instead, we heard phrases like “character issues” or “personal problems” and the consensus from the majority of the so-called draft experts was that teams should avoid Bryant like he was Pac Man Jones. He was unstable, a liar, a kid who came late to games and sometimes, he even skipped English class. By god, I bet he even chugged Natty Ice from a keg once or twice. If this were sports betting or Apuestas deportivas, I'd bet the online sports odds say he's total thug.

One can only assume that Ireland was testing his extremely vulnerable interviewee, deliberately trying to make him as uncomfortable as possible to see if Bryant would snap under pressure. Why would he do this? Because the media had a label for Bryant before he turned 21. National talk show panels were criticizing a kid most of who had never even seen play.

This is what happens when you have so much air to fill and not enough substance to fill it with. This year’s NFL Draft was longer than a Ken Burns’ documentary and the coverage lasted longer than an entire football season, including the Super Bowl. The analysts needed to talk about something other than Tim Tebow’s likeability, so they often focused on the rumors surrounding Bryant.

Ireland was simply asking about one of those rumors.

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Character means very little in the NFL

Twenty-four states in our country use some form of the Three Strikes Law to prosecute criminals. In the NFL, it usually takes that many incidents for a guy to pop up on anyone’s radar. Until then, players are just labeled as having “character issues” while owners turn their heads and pray no one gets killed.

The greatest farce in sports is that moral makeup matters. It doesn’t. At least not initially. A team won’t give up on a player capable of producing on the field until he’s exhausted the use of his get-out-of-jail-free card, the pass every athlete with any kind of ability receives the minute he goes pro (and usually, long before that).

Even when one franchise decides to sever ties with a player, another one will bite the bullet. They don’t see felons; they see finds. Bargains. That’s why the New York Jets were right there to offer a fifth round pick to Pittsburgh in exchange for Santonio Holmes this week. Holmes, who has admitted to selling drugs as a teenager, has been arrested three times since entering the league in 2006 and was only dealt following accusations that he threw a glass at a woman in an Orlando nightclub in March. Following the trade, the NFL suspended him four games for violating the league’s substance abuse policy.

Holmes isn’t the first player with off-field issues the Jets have acquired this off-season. Last month, the team sent a third round pick in 2011 to San Diego for Antonio Cromartie. Cromartie, who would be even money to get the Virgin Mary pregnant if he were alone in a room with her, has seven children by six women in five different states.

It should be noted that the Jets will be featured on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” series during training camp this year. Maybe the goal is to produce a reality show with more drama than “Jersey Shore.”

Or maybe they just don’t care.

Character flaws aside, the Jets recent additions will almost certainly make the team a trendy pick to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl this season. Holmes will return from suspension to join Braylon Edwards (currently facing assault charges) and Jerricho Cotchery to make up one of the top receiving corps’ in the league. Comartie will be a major contributor in what might already have been the best defense in the league.

Why should it matter if the team is on track to become New York’s sixth crime family by the time the season opens? Winning trumps all.

Of course, the Jets aren’t the only team following that motto. The Steelers may have had enough of Holmes, but it’s clear that quarterback Ben Roethlisberger still has a few swipes left on his get-out-of-jail free card.

Because they have a crush on the Steelers’ do it right persona, some media members decided that the Holmes trade was supposed to serve as some kind of message to Roethlisberger. False. A message to Roethlisberger would be to suspend him even before Commissioner Roger Goodell got involved. Make it clear that if his name so much as appears in the news for anything other than football, his career in Pittsburgh would be over.

That didn’t happen because Big Ben is still worth big bucks in the eyes of the Rooney family.

Now he’ll get yet another chance to correct his behavior.
And that, as we head into the NFL draft, will be the lasting message to everyone entering the league. As long as you can get it done on the field, you can do what you want off it.

It takes an awful lot to strike out in the NFL.

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Tiger might be impossible to root for

The next act of Tiger Woods’ career will be just as dramatic as the first one, but it will have little to do with the number of majors he wins or the amount of money he earns. What the Masters proved over the weekend was that no matter how much success Woods has on the golf course, he’ll never again have the chance to be the heroic sports figure. There will be no more tears shed for him. He can’t have what Phil Mickelson has. He spent the first act nailing everything in sight and now wherever he goes, the media and the public will take great joy trying to nail him.

It’s not just that Woods will never be able to stand near a woman again without the entire world speculating that he’s relapsed; it’s also that he can never swear, never even raise his voice, without everyone calling him a fraud. Just before the tournament began last week, he promised that he was going to try to control his attitude o, the golf course. By Friday, he was back to being the old Tiger, chastising himself after a couple of misguided shots. He’s always been like this. The difference now is that even though his vulgar language has nothing to do with the number of women he slept with, the two will always go hand-in-hand. Every time something negative happens to him, he’ll be treated as though he fell off the wagon and back into bed with another blonde waitress.

That’s how it will be for Tiger in 2010 and beyond. That’s the next act. He might still be the best golfer in the world, but what makes him so captivating is the idea that he could blow up at any minute and chances are a camera will be there to catch it.

There was this false notion on Thursday afternoon that when Tiger approached the first tee, the crowd was cheering for him. They weren’t. They were cheering for themselves. They were cheering because they were a part of a moment that will always be remembered in sports. It had everything to do with Tiger, but it was not a sign of all the fans suddenly forgiving him for his mistakes. Of course it was sold that way. There was even a story on ESPN about a guy who asked another fan to move over so his teenage daughters could watch Woods tee-off. How touching. For some reason, the World Wide Leader decided to follow Nike’s plan and attempted to make Tiger the sympathetic figure.

That all changed as soon as the real sympathetic figure started to charge up the leader board. Right when it became clear that Mickelson might be able to win the whole thing, the focus on Tiger shifted. No longer were we hearing about Woods signing autographs (something he never does) for fans or how relaxed he looked. Now the questions about the pressure being too much took over. And the swearing led to the most important question of all:

Has Tiger Woods really changed?

Obviously, it’s too early to tell. But Woods has no one to blame for this but himself. He was obligated to promise that his behavior off the course would be different. He didn’t have to address anything about his actions off the course. Now, whether he likes it or not, the two will go hand-in-hand.

Which just makes it all the more difficult for anyone to actually root for him.

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At Seton Hall and St. John's, a tough task ahead

I never hated anyone until my freshman year of college. That’s not to say I never told anyone I hated them; for Christmas one year my sister bought me the wrong miniature wrestling ring and I’m pretty sure I called her some awful names. But Louis Orr was, for sure, the first person I had ever despised. He was the basketball coach at Seton Hall (now at Bowling Green) and what makes this story sad is that Orr didn’t have an ounce of hate in his entire 6’8, 180 pound body. He was the type of guy who quoted the bible the way his players quoted 50 cent.

None of that mattered to me. I was a punk 18 year old who had but three expectations in life: 1) That my embarrassingly fake id would work at Bunny’s in South Orange. 2) That the Nathan’s on campus wouldn’t serve hot dogs that tasted like Newark. 3) That Seton Hall basketball would be the national powerhouse I expected it to be.

And you wonder why I finished school in Providence.

By the time I got to the Hall, the rumors were already flying around campus. Despite winning a game in the NCAA Tournament in 2004, Orr’s days were numbered. He couldn’t recruit New York and north Jersey effectively and alumni and school officials felt the program wasn’t in a position to compete with the upper tier of the Big East. They were right, of course, and we all bought into it. I remember the very first game of the 2004/05 season (a loss to Richmond) and the crowd was already tearing into Orr (and trust me, it wasn’t just the students who smuggled cheap vodka in Gatorade bottles to the Meadowlands that were chanting “Fire Louie”. Orr was let go a year later.

Everyone in the Seton Hall community felt the program deserved better. They still feel that way today. The same goes for most of the other tiny catholic universities that helped to start the Big East. It seems as though anyone involved with the Hall, Providence College or St. John’s wants to jump in their Hot Tub Time Machine and flash back to the days when their school mattered in the nation’s top basketball conference. That’s why every time the head coaching job opens up in South Orange, people want to make P.J. Carlesimo (who led the Pirates to the Final Four when I was 2) the top candidate. In Providence, it’s Rick Pitino. At St. John’s, it’s whoever has the biggest name and the slickest hair cut.

Recently, both Seton Hall and St. John’s were in the news for firing their respective head coaches. At the Hall, Bobby Gonzalez was let go not because he wasn’t the model catholic, but because he wasn’t successful enough to not be the model catholic. The Johnnies got rid of Norm Roberts mainly because he didn’t want to make nice with the sleaze balls that dominate youth basketball in New York City.

Neither school managed to hire their first, second or even third choices.

Seton Hall fans wanted Carlesimo; they got Kevin Willard, a 35 year old who never led his Iona team past the quarterfinals of the MAAC tournament. St. John’s wanted everyone from Billy Donovan to John Calipari (I think they even offered Phil Jackson the job); they settled on Steve Lavin, whose hearing has to be damaged after spending the last seven years working with Dick Vitale at ESPN.

Almost all of the experts seem to agree that even if they weren’t the ideal candidates, Willard and Lavin were both good choices. But what lies ahead might be too difficult for even the craftiest coaches to navigate. They don’t have to change the fans’ perception of each program. They have to change the recruits’.

High school basketball players in the New York City area don’t view Seton Hall or St. John’s as elite programs because, well, they weren’t alive when these schools were relevant in college basketball. Seton Hall simply doesn’t have the facilities to impress recruits and as far as the Johnnies go, is Madison Square Garden honestly a selling point? The New York Liberty has been the winningest team in that building over the last decade.

Look, I’m rooting for both Willard and Lavin. I wouldn’t know but I’m told there’s nothing like successful New York City-area basketball. But I can’t help but remain skeptical.

The times have changed. At Seton Hall and St. John’s, only the coaches have.

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With little pro talent, Final Four might bore us

Here is the one guarantee I can make about the Final Four: Sportswriters will have no trouble meeting deadlines with this group. The storylines are endless. We’ve got the traditional powers in Duke and Michigan State. Three of the best coaches in the history of college basketball will be there – including Bob Huggins looking for his first National Championship. And of course, there’s always Butler’s Cinderella story as it tries to become the first team from a mid-major conference to win it all since UNLV did so two decades ago.

Only one thing will be missing in Indianapolis.

Talent.

For the first time since the inception of the NBA draft lottery, it’s likely that no one playing in the Final Four will be selected in the first 14 picks of June’s draft. In fact, NBAdraft.net projects West Virginia’s Devin Ebanks and Da’Sean Butler to be the only two guys playing in Indianapolis that will be drafted at all. When you combine the lack of NBA prospects and the amount of upsets that took place earlier in the tournament, this might be the most diluted Final Four in the history of college basketball.

So is it worth watching? Well, if you went to Duke, West Virginia, Michigan State or Butler, then sure. But be prepared for what could be the lowest scoring Final Four since the shot clock was implemented 24 years ago. You’ll see three defensive-minded, fundamentally sound games that should all remain close if for no other reason than none of the four teams have a guy who could take over a game and win it by himself. It will be the type of basketball you’ll want your 8 year-old son to pay attention to; but chances are he’ll want to change the channel to watch something with a little faster pace, like that P90X infomercial.

Me? I’ll keep track of the score, but without Kentucky involved, it’s going to be hard to keep me glued to the television. Any John Calipari-led program has replaced Duke as the most polarizing team in college athletics and something is just missing without him. He’s just so easy to root against. And Thursday night’s matchup with Cornell was the closest thing we’ll ever see to the 1980 USSR/USA hockey game. It was pro versus Joes. Future lottery picks and the guys who will represent them in court someday. Only the bad guys, led by Calipari, won.

It’s too bad those NBA-ordered mandatory minimum essentially become contract years for players, because as good as Kentucky was this season, they would have probably advanced further if they could have dropped that “I gotta get mine” mentality. And no matter how you feel about Calipari, the Final Four would be much more exciting with him in it.

Even without Calipari, this week will still be all about the coaches. Krzyzewski, Izzo, Huggins and the new kid on the block, Brad Stevens. College basketball has always been more about the guys who build programs than the kids who play in them. And this year, with the Final Four so big on heart and little on talent, will be no different.

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For the record: My NCAA Picks

My NCAA tournament bracket checklist: 1) Have I left emotion out of it? Yep, Connecticut wasn’t invited to the Big Dance so I’ve got no allegiances. (The same can’t be said for my NIT bracket) 2) Have I been real with myself? Check. I’ve never seen half of these teams play and chances are, even the loudest experts on ESPN have only watched Siena play twice all season. I won’t get sucked into the trendy upset picks. 3) Did I pick the team with most talent to win it all? Absolutely.

Look, I realize you care about my tournament picks about as much as I care about your bad beat stories, but I think I got it this time. Really I do. So sit back and let mine be the 187th tournament preview you read this week.

Big East Beware
Last week, I wrote that I was concerned how difficult the Big East was this season and nothing has changed. Just look at the NIT, where three of the four teams from the conference were eliminated in the opening round against inferior teams. The other, UConn, was down with a minute to go against Northeastern.

The biggest question professional scouts have about college players is how they’ll respond to playing 82 games in a season. A lot of young guys break down because they just can’t handle the beating they take night in and night out. The closest comparison to the NBA in college is the Big East, where an off night against any team in the league will result in a loss. Villanova looked exhausted at the end of the season. Notre Dame was gassed by the end of the conference tournament. And Syracuse is banged up and has lost two straight. West Virginia is the only team I have making it to the regional final, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

The upset that won’t happen
You know why almost every Major League Baseball players spends a few years riding busses in the minor leagues? Because they need to first prove themselves against guys their own age. Then they need to do it against guys just as good as them. And then they need to hold their own against the best of the best. That’s when they make it the show.

Cornell might have the best three-point shooting team in the tournament, but they’re still from the Ivy League and Temple is pissed off about getting no respect. Don’t be surprised if this one is never close and the Owls cruise into the second round.

The 13-16 seed with the best shot to win a game
Sam Houston State, because they can score a ton of points and Baylor is already thinking about a regional final matchup with Duke.

The biggest sleeper
Washington. The Pac 10 champions had one bad month, losing five times in January. After losing at USC on Jan. 23, the Huskies went 12-2 down the stretch and started to look like the team that was considered a Final Four contender at the beginning of the season. This is a team that has a great chance of making a run to the regional finals, especially if I’m right about Big East teams having fatigue problems.

Defense wins championships, but you still need a scorer
Which is why the only teams with a legitimate chance to win a national championship are Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio State and Syracuse. For the record, I do have the Orange going out in the Sweet 16, but that’s because I think they’ll struggle against Vanderbilt, a team that plays a completely different style than anyone in the Big East.

My Final Four
Ohio State over Kansas State
Kentucky over Duke

National Championship
Kentucky 75 -67

Feel free to list your picks in the comments section.

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Goodell should suspend Roethlisberger immediately

This is where I get to write about Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback who displays incredible poise in the pocket every Sunday yet allegedly can’t keep his hands in his pockets anytime a young woman comes around.

It’s time to stop tiptoeing around what we don’t know and focus on all that we do know. Of course Big Ben is innocent until proven guilty. But that doesn’t change that he now has more sexual assault accusations than playoff appearances in the last two years and it doesn’t mean NFL commissioner Roger Goodell should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to taking disciplinary action.

When Goodell chose to suspend Pacman Jones for the entire season three years ago, he talked a lot about how it is a privilege to play in the NFL and said “players, and all members of our league, have to make the right choices and decisions in their conduct on a consistent basis."

In a letter to Jones, he wrote, “Your conduct has brought embarrassment and ridicule upon yourself, your club, and the NFL, and has damaged the reputation of players throughout the league. You have put in jeopardy an otherwise promising NFL career, and have risked both your own safety and the safety of others through your off-field actions. In each of these respects, you have engaged in conduct detrimental to the NFL and failed to live up to the standards expected of NFL players. Taken as a whole, this conduct warrants significant sanction."

Now it’s time for Goodell to be consistent. I’m not someone who necessarily believes the same punishment should apply to everyone every time. If this were Peyton Manning, a guy with an immaculate record off the field, facing similar accusations, then it would be completely okay for the commissioner to wait for more facts to come out before making a decision on whether to take action. But because of Roethlisberger’s previous poor decisions, he has lost the benefit of the doubt.

And don’t think for a second there won’t be plenty of people waiting to pounce on Goodell for suspending a black guy named Pacman even though he had never been convicted of a crime and not taking similar action against Roethlisberger.

Let’s see. Has Roethlisberger put in jeopardy an otherwise promising NFL career? Has he risked his safety and the safety of others? Has he engaged in conduct detrimental to his team and the league? Two sexual assault accusations along with a motorcycle accident that nearly cost him his life and a budding reputation as a guy who likes to party too much suggests the answer is yes.

The trouble with sexual assault allegations is that in the wake of the Duke Lacrosse scandal, no one wants to drag the accused’s name through the mud for fear of a lawsuit and the chance of being disbarred. In Goodell’s case, it’s that he doesn’t want to get it wrong and give the Player’s Association another reason to despise him heading into labor negotiations.

But what we all conveniently tend to forget about the Duke Lacrosse situation is that while those players may have not committed a crime, they also weren’t acting like model citizens that night. At the very least, they verbally abused the stripper who accused them of raping her. And if down the line, if one of them happens to be running a Fortune 500 company and gets accused of sexual misconduct or discrimination, get what’s going to be brought up in court?

Same goes for Roethlisberger, who is at least guilty of putting himself in a bad situation for the second time in less than a year. Goodell gave him a pass the first time he went through this, but there’s no way he can let him go clean this time around.

The commissioner will do whatever he can to protect quarterbacks on the field.

The same shouldn’t apply off of it

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Is the Big East too difficult for its own good?

When the final buzzer sounded at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence Saturday night, another wild regular season in the Big East came to an end. The last game of the season didn’t feature two of the league’s elite teams, but there might not be anyone better than Providence College and Seton Hall to give you an idea of just how difficult the conference was this year.

If not for DePaul, the Friars would have finished at the bottom of the Big East. They ended the season having allowed more points-per-game than any team in league history. But they were also the sixth highest scoring team in America, which meant that even for a team that went 4-14 in conference play, they weren’t exactly a pushover. A poor shooting night against Providence and it would feel like you were playing Syracuse or Villanova.

Seton Hall is what Providence wishes it could be. The Pirates finished just outside the top ten nationally in scoring, played a little bit better defense, were slightly deeper and probably caught a few more breaks than the Friars this season. Bobby Gonzalez’s team finished .500 in league play and put itself on the NCAA Tournament bubble by beating all the teams worse than them and very few of the ones better than them. They were the most average team in the most exceptional league in the country.

So if a team who finished in 15th place in the conference could beat you on any given night and a 9-9 team featured the league’s third leading scorer (Jeremy Hazell) and top rebounder (Herb Pope), the teams at the top of the conference must be tailor-made for deep runs in next week’s NCAA Tournament, right?

Right?

The answer might not be as clear as it seems. Yes, Syracuse, the regular season champion, Pittsburgh, West Virginia and Villanova all have the talent to reach the Final Four. But after playing 18 games plus a conference tournament in a league where you rarely ever get a night off, the question is, will anyone have anything left in the tank?

Hours before Seton Hall defeated Providence, the top ranked Orange lost to Louisville for the second time this season. The loss wasn’t all that surprising considering it was senior day for the Cardinals and the last game ever at Freedom Hall. Syracuse also had very little left to play for. They were already guaranteed the top seed in the Big East Tournament and most pundits have penciled them in as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

None of that stopped Wesley Johnson from playing 38 minutes in the game. The Orange’s best player was among the league’s leaders in minutes played this season despite concerns about a leg injury he suffered against Providence in earl y February. After his minutes were limited in that game and the one that followed, Johnson played at least 36 minutes in each of his team’s final seven games.

The reason for his overuse was simple: Five of those games were against teams likely heading to the NCAA Tournament; another was against UConn, one of Syracuse’s biggest rivals; and the other one was probably the final home game of his career assuming he declares for the NBA Draft after the season.

Johnson isn’t the only player in the Big East who could see the wear and tear of such a treacherous regular season take its toll at the worst possible time. The league saw more players average at least 34 minutes per game than any other conference in the country this season.

The concern will only get worse at the Big East Tournament in Madison Square Garden this week. Barring a major upset, it is conceivable that any team who survives until Thursday’s quarterfinals will be safe on Selection Sunday. That means winning the Big East Championship will take beating three tournament-bound teams in three days. It has the chance to be one of the most exciting and competitive tournaments in league history, but at what cost?

Making it to Saturday could leave teams running on empty come the NCAA tournament.

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What did Tiger accomplish by speaking?

The following is just a small collection of events that took the place between the night Tiger Woods’ life changed forever and last Friday morning when he spoke to the world and said nothing.

President Obama announced the United States would be sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and in the next breath, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas brought three guns into the locker room, which led to a season-long suspension and possibly jail time down the road. One of the worst natural disasters in history decimated Haiti. We met Scott Brown. The New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl.

Plenty of major news stories. None of which had a lifespan much longer than your average Paris Hilton relationship.

Woods outlasted everything. The New York Post featured him on its front page for a record 20 consecutive days. 9/11 didn’t even get that type of coverage. He was all anyone wanted to talk about from Thanksgiving weekend on through Christmas and New Year’s and into February. But things were starting to settle down. The story was dying.

And then he decided to speak.

He handled his speech (it was a speech, not a press conference) with the same obsessive-compulsive attention to detail that made him the world’s greatest golfer and also what allowed him to cheat for that long with that many women and not get caught. No part of the day could go unscripted, so if you thought the State of Tiger Address sounded like it had been prepared by the guys from The West Wing, you’re probably right.

Everything was planned. The people in the room. The hug for mom. The two camera angles. Even the part of his speech where he tore into the media for following around his wife and daughter was probably written in all caps so he could remember to sound angry.

The problem is, Tiger really had nothing to say. He basically read a statement similar to the one that appeared on his website in December and he didn’t answer the one question we all had: When will you be back?

“I do plan to return to golf one day,” he said. “I just don't know when that day will be. I don't rule out that it will be this year. “

And the world stopped for that?

He offered nothing new. That may very well have been the goal. If he truly believes he can repair his marriage, his return to golf might not matter to him all that much. Some have speculated that this was one of his 12 steps – making amends. Maybe he just wanted to show the world that his wife didn’t decapitate him on Thanksgiving night. Or maybe he was doing it for his sponsors.

All we do know is that Woods was back at the center of the news cycle without actually delivering any news. He talked about trying to reconcile his marriage and wanting a little privacy, but it’s difficult to believe Friday’s production helped accomplish any of that. How could it? It just puts more pressure on him and keeps all of us wondering when or if we will see him again.

We all knew questions were off limits on Friday.

But we still could have used some answers.

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