Back in 1981, I was the Maryland beat writer for The Washington Post. Lefty Driesell had two clear-cut first round draft picks on that team: Albert King and Buck Williams. King was a senior; Williams a junior.

After games, when I was in the locker room talking to players, I frequently saw two men who very clearly weren’t members of the media circling the room, glad-handing the players. Often, they would wait until those of us on deadline finished and then swoop in to tell King and Williams how wonderfully they had played.

The two men were David Falk and Donald Dell. In those days, they were still partners, Falk working for Dell at ProServ, which was then one of the mega-agencies in sports, trailing only IMG for prestige, power and name clients. I remember saying to Driesell back then, “why do you let agents in your locker room?”

Lefty shook his head and said. “If I don’t let ‘em in, the players will be upset. They’ll think I’m trying to keep them away.”

“You SHOULD keep them away,” I said. “Agents shouldn’t be talking to players during the season under any circumstances and you shouldn’t be sanctioning it by letting them in the locker room.”

Lefty didn’t listen to me just as 99 percent of the coaches alive would not have listened to me. Like most coaches, he was afraid that if banned the agents, they would tell the players (which they would) ‘your coach isn’t looking out for your best interests. He’s only worried about what you can do for HIM.’

At the end of that season, Buck Williams left Maryland a year early and turned pro. The agent who guided him through the process of making that decision was—you guessed it—David Falk. (Dean Smith once told me that the first time Dell introduced him to Falk he said to his assistants, “I don’t trust that young one.” Boy did he have the one right).

Years later, agenting had become more sophisticated. The big-shots like Dell and Falk only made their presence felt when they truly needed to do so. Falk spent a lot of time in the 90s traveling to Duke to woo Mike Krzyzewski. He didn’t spend much time with the players. Instead, he would go in to see Krzyzewski after games to tell him what a great job he had done that night. Eventually, Krzyzewski hired him as his agent and a lot of Duke players landed with Falk—just as virtually every Georgetown player has landed with Falk since John Thompson became a client of his thirty years ago.

In 1994 I was on a trip to Hawaii with Maryland. Joe Smith was a sophomore and a lot of people thought he had a chance to be the first pick in the NBA draft if he turned pro that spring. Throughout the trip there was a guy hanging around the team who was clearly bird-dogging for an agent. He was outside the locker room waiting whenever the bus pulled up and would hug most of the players as they walked inside. One afternoon I saw him walking on the beach with Smith.

Later that day, just prior to a game he walked up to Chuck Walsh, who was Maryland’s sports information director and said, “Hey Chuck, my man, you got a media guide for me?”

Gary Williams was standing no more than 10 feet away and his face was chalk white as Walsh went to get the media guide. He said nothing. As soon as the bird-dog walked away, Gary went off on Chuck. “What are you doing?!” he screamed. “Why are you helping him? Don’t you understand—he’s the ENEMY! You don’t help him in any way.”

Gary was exactly right. He WAS the enemy. Smith turned pro at the end of that season and there was nothing he could do about it. If he had told Smith to stay away from the bird-dog or any other agenting types, just as Lefty had said, Smith would have seen the order as selfish and self-serving and the agents would have reinforced that every chance they got.

That’s what makes this latest spate of NCAA investigations into player-agent relationship so difficult to deal with as an outsider. It’s very easy to say, “police the agents,” but how? To begin with, the NBA and NFL would have to work with the NCAA and that almost never happens. Beyond that, most agents are smart enough to not leave a trail behind. As Digger Phelps once said about coaches paying recruits: “it’s tough to prove cash.”

It’s tough to prove anything—especially given that the NCAA has always been monumentally understaffed in enforcement and seems more concerned with not talking to the media than with actually getting anything done.

Look, I’m not making excuses for anybody. The agents and the people who work for them shouldn’t be anywhere near college athletes and if they go anywhere near one, coaches should have the guts to tell them to get the hell away. If a player gets upset about it, you explain to him why he cannot be associated with an agent or anyone who has even been breathed on by an agent. If they don’t understand that, chances are they already have their hand out and you (the coach) have a serious problem.

Any agent caught dealing with a college athlete should be banned. And if it someone who works for him in any way, same thing. By banned I mean he can’t be registered with the NFL or the NBA or negotiate a contract with a team on behalf of an athlete for at least two years. I don’t mean if he’s caught giving a kid money, I mean if he shakes hands with a kid.

Years ago, when Eddie Fogler was still an assistant at North Carolina, I was standing with him on the court at University Hall at Virginia about 45 minutes before a game. All of a sudden, Eddie said, “oh dammit, now I’ve got trouble.”

I looked up and saw a man walking in his direction, hand out, smile on his face. I honestly don’t remember the man’s name but Eddie began waving his arms and saying, “Mr. Jones (made-up-name) nothing personal, but I can’t even shake your hand, I’ll be breaking the rules.”

The man was a potential recruit’s father. The last thing Fogler wanted to do was be rude. But the no-bump rules back then meant even accidental contact could be a violation.

Did Fogler act that way because I happened to be standing there? I don’t think so, but even if he did—fine—those are the kind of rules agents needs to be forced to live under. We all know all these excuses are, to put it in polite terms, hooey. The agents are friends of the family; they’re trying to help a kid out (that’s the biggest lie of them all); they just happened to have a house they could rent to a kid’s parents for $25 a month—and on and on. Just say none of those excuses wash. If it WAS an innocent mistake, well, too bad, you lose.

And the notion that the players don’t know they’re doing something wrong? Oh please. They’re all told the rules and they’re all told to stay away from three groups of people: agents, gamblers and the media. (We’re bad guys too because we ask questions). Here’s what I’ve heard coaches say to players: “If ANYONE wants to give you something for free, come tell me. Do NOT accept it, not even a movie ticket.”

The players know the rules but they’re also taught that they’re above the rules. And most of the time, even when they get caught—see Bush, Reggie; Mayo, O.J. et al—they don’t pay the price, the next generation of players and coaches pay the price. That’s another problem with NCAA enforcement: it moves so slowly that the guilty parties are usually out of dodge by the time the posse gets to town. (See Carroll, Pete and Floyd, Tim—who is somehow coaching at UTEP this coming season with no penalty while USC is still under NCAA sanctions).

The bottom line is this: It’s a hard problem for everyone. But the solution is NOT to do nothing. The solution is to understand that no answer is perfect but try to find one that sends a clear message to players, coaches and agents that this behavior won’t be tolerated. And if that behavior upsets a player—tough. Gary Williams was right—agents (and their surrogates) ARE the enemy. In college athletics it isn’t some of the time that they’re the enemy it is ALL the time.

On Monday, I made my weekly appearance on Washington Post Live, which is a daily show broadcast her on Comcast Sports Net in the DC area. I enjoy doing the show because I really like the people involved; because it often gives me a chance to see colleagues from The Post I don’t often see and because doing it Monday works perfectly for me since I need to go into the studio to tape my weekly Golf Channel essay.

So here’s what we led the show with on Memorial Day: the Redskins—or, as it is called on the show, ‘Burgundy and Gold Daily,’—which is code meaning that the bit is sponsored.

The Nationals played on Monday afternoon, trying to get back to .500 (they did), a pretty remarkable feat for a team that lost 103 games a year ago. One week from today, Stephen Strasburg, the most touted phenom to hit baseball in years, makes his Major League debut.

The Maryland women’s lacrosse team had won the national title on Sunday and the men’s national championship game was going on in Baltimore as we took our seats to start the show.

Here’s how much mention those stories got—not to mention Roy Halladay’s perfect game on Saturday and anything baseball—during a one hour show: zip, zero. Nothing. We did manage to talk about the NBA playoffs and the Stanley Cup finals. But the first 20 minutes of the show was all NFL.

Seriously. On Memorial Day.

In fact, the first question host Ivan Carter asked to Rick Maese, one of The Post’s 11 or 12 Redskins beat writers was something like, “I know there’s nothing going on right now but what are the Redskins doing right now?”

Look, it’s not Ivan’s fault. It isn’t the fault of the people putting on the show either. A few weeks ago I asked Scott Taylor, who produces the show and would (like me) do Navy football all the time given the chance (his dad played at Navy) why in the world we had to lead the show with the Redskins in the middle of May.

“The ratings people tell us that everything spikes when we talk Redskins and spikes almost as much when we talk NFL,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter if anything is actually going on. If we’re talking about the Redskins people watch.”

I actually wondered if the reason it was so hard to EVER talk about the Nationals was that their games are televised on MASN and not on Comcast. Scott said that wasn’t the case. “It’s the ratings thing,” he said. “When we talk Nats, unless it’s Strasburg maybe, we lose people.”

I swear to God I don’t get it. Look, I like watching the NFL on Sundays as much as anyone. I spent an entire season hanging out with an NFL team when I wrote, “Next Man Up,” and enjoyed the experience. So this isn’t about me being anti-football. Okay, I may be anti-Redskins because the owner is three of the most arrogant people who ever lived and no amount of spinning to try to convince me there’s a “new,” Dan Snyder is going to make me think differently.

I have no problem talking about or writing about the NFL or the Redskins when there is something going on. But when you open the show by saying, “there’s nothing going on,” and then spend 20 minutes discussing preparations for mini-camp? I mean OMG as my daughter would say. At one point we switched over to talk about the Ravens. You know what we revealed to the audience? That Anquan Boldin was a good pickup. Pretty insightful stuff, huh?

There are certain people in sports and certain teams in sports and I guess certain leagues in sports that completely fascinate people no matter what. Tommy Roy, who produces golf for NBC, once told me that an informal survey of golf fans had shown that more people would rather watch Tiger Woods lean against his golf bag than watch someone else actually hitting a golf ball.

The same is true in this town of the Redskins. There’s a truly awful show that airs on Comcast called ‘Redskins Nation,’ which is a daily infomercial on the wonders of the team. If you were to watch this show—and staying in the same room with it for five minutes is a major challenge—you would think the Redskins were about to begin their quest for a fifth straight Super Bowl title. Anyone—ANYONE—who criticizes anyone or anything about the organization is labeled, “a hater,” by the ineffable host.

I asked once WHY the show was allowed on the air. The answer was simple: It’s the highest rated show Comcast has.

Talk about the apocalypse being upon us.

At least now I have the next six days to watch golf, baseball, hockey and basketball. And to write and talk about them—especially golf with “Moment of Glory,” now out all over the country, Eldrick T. Woods playing this week and The Nationwide Tour coming to DC. Of course next Monday it will be more, ‘Burgundy and Gold Daily.’

Maybe we can talk some more about what the Redskins haven’t been doing.

******

Wanted to thank the poster, ‘Bevo,’ for absolutely proving my point about people in academia on Friday. If I had tried to make up a fictional character to prove what I was saying about the existence of people like him at colleges around the country I couldn’t have done any better. And thanks to those who responded on my behalf. No need for me to add anything to what they’ve already said.

And finally: I felt a little torn Monday when Duke won the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship game. The ending was certainly dramatic and you had to feel good for the players and for Coach John Danowski, who I’m told is a good guy. To say that he took over under trying circumstances is putting it mildly. And there are people out there who still refer to the ‘Duke lacrosse scandal,’ without mentioning that not only were the charges against the three players dropped but the prosecutor who brought them was disbarred.

I’m always hesitant to even bring this topic up because it makes people on both sides SO angry.

That said, I’ve never bought the argument that the players were martyrs as some people have made them out to be. There WAS bad behavior going on that night, including racial slurs that have never been denied. Beyond that though, there were fifth year players on this Duke team granted an extra year by the NCAA because DUKE decided to shut the program down in 2006. While it is impossible not to feel empathy for the young men who weren’t part of the incident at all, you can’t help but wonder why the NCAA felt obligated to bail Duke out after its administration completely mishandled the entire situation.

I guess, in a sense, some things will never be resolved. But Monday should give the school—and more important the players—some kind of closure and a legitimate reason to celebrate.


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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview about 'Moment of Glory', please click the play button below:

I was going to write today about Memorial Day weekend—what it is now and what it used to be when I was a kid and you could count on doubleheaders on the holiday.

But I think I need to say something about the ongoing controversy at The Naval Academy that centers on a professor named Bruce Fleming—someone I’ve never met but who I feel I know because I have met academics like him throughout my life.

Let me begin by saying a couple of things. I have been, at least technically, a college professor. I taught journalism—not sports journalism; journalism—at Duke for three years. I think my title was ‘visiting professor.’ I told my students to call me John because (among other reasons) I figured if Ben Bradlee wanted me to call him Ben when I was a 21-year-old intern at The Washington Post, there was no reason for anyone to call me anything other than John.

I enjoyed teaching. I really enjoyed the kids and I’m proud of what many of them have accomplished in journalism since graduating. I stopped teaching for two reasons: After the birth of my first child the extra travel became an issue and the leadership at The Duke School of Communications changed. The guy who took over—honestly I don’t remember his name and don’t know if he is still there—told a student of mine, Beth Krodel, that he wanted to get rid of me because I was influencing too many students to go into journalism instead of advertising.

Gee, I feel bad about that.

I’d like to teach again someday if I can do it locally here in Washington. The closest I came to that was several years ago when Bob Chernak, a vice president at George Washington, asked me if I had any interest in teaching there. I told him I would love to teach at GW: my mom had once been a professor there (music history) and I had taken two summer school courses in journalism there once upon a time since Duke (then as perhaps now for all I know) didn’t offer any journalism classes.

Bob said he would talk to the head of the journalism department and be in touch. Two weeks later he called back. “This is a little embarrassing,” he said. “The head of our journalism department has never heard of you. But she says you can submit a resume if you want.”

Actually I’ve never had a resume since I got hired by The Post right out of college. Plus, if the woman had never heard of me my guess was that my resume if it existed wouldn’t impress her.

There are lots of great teachers at the college level. I certainly encountered many of them as an undergraduate and have met many others through the years. There are also those who think that anyone who is involved in sports in any way is stupid. Every school has them: professors who object to athletes missing a class to play in a game or swim in a meet or do anything jock-related. They resent the attention successful coaches receive. They clamor all the time about academic standards being lowered for athletes.

You know what? They’re right: EVERY school lowers its standards for athletes from Harvard to the lowest-ranked D-3 school you can find. The military academies do it too. The rationale given by the schools is that athletes make the student body more “diverse.” That’s garbage. Athletes with lower grades and SATs are admitted for one reason: they help teams win games.

The question isn’t lowering standards it is HOW MUCH do you lower standards relative to the rest of the student body. To me the test has always been simple: If you start admitting athletes who simply can’t do the work and have no chance to graduate, you’ve gone too far. What’s more, if you bring in too many athletes who get into trouble—whether it’s through cheating or getting arrested or, worst case scenario, committing acts of violence—you have gone too far.

Professor Fleming, who has taught at Navy for 23 years, has been hammering the school publicly (he’s tenured) for years now. His main complaint (although there are others) is this: the school lowers its academic standards for athletes, especially football players, too frequently.

Let me pause to give my disclaimer here: Most people know I’m about to enter my 14th season as color commentator on the Navy radio network. I wrote a book in 1996 called, “A Civil War,” about the uniqueness of the Army-Navy football rivalry and how special the kids who play football at the academies have to be to play Division 1 football and graduate (which almost all of them do) from schools that are as difficult academically and militarily as West Point and Annapolis. I feel the same way, even though I don’t know people there the way I do at Army and Navy, about the Air Force Academy. So, I’m biased.

But the reason I’m biased is the quality of person I’ve met on the football teams at the two schools. Are there bad eggs? Of course. There have been Navy football players caught cheating and I disagreed this past winter with Admiral Jeffrey Fowler (the outgoing superintendent) when he did not follow the recommendation of his commandant, Matt Klunder, in the case of Marcus Curry.

Curry was a sophomore and easily the most talented returning slotback on the football team. He tested positive for marijuana during a periodic drug test that all Midshipmen take. His excuse was that he’d been given a cigar at a party laced with marijuana. (The dog ate my homework). The academy’s policy on all drug use is zero tolerance. Even if one believed Curry’s story, policy said he should be separated (expelled). Fowler let him off the hook.

Everyone connected to the academy knew Curry wasn’t going to be back for his junior year one way or the other (he was later tossed from the football team for an un-related offense and ‘resigned,’ from the academy and has transferred to Texas State) and Fowler just gave critics like Fleming a chance to pile on. In fact, when Fleming was criticized for having his piece—which suggested that all the military academies have become so mediocre they should perhaps be shut down—run in The New York Times a week before graduation, his defense was that he had been “shopping,” the piece since March—right after the Curry incident became public.

Shopping is an appropriate word. Fleming has been shopping his writing as the anti-Navy-establishment guy for years. He’s written at least one book and likes to tell people he has another one coming out.

I don’t think Fleming is anti-football or anti-jock (He uses one player, Craig Schaefer, as proof that he likes football players) or anti-Navy. I think he’s pro-Fleming. He knows he can’t be fired and if anyone at the academy says boo to him he can scream, ‘they’re out to get me because I criticized them.’

There’s nothing wrong with fair criticism. I think there have been times when Navy has pushed athletes along who had to cut too many corners to stay in school. Kyle Eckel’s dismissal from The Navy (he DID graduate) has never really been explained and just recently two more football players who graduated (including another star fullback, Adam Ballard) were thrown out of the Marines for cheating on an officer-training test.

Navy needs to look at all of these cases and figure out where it went wrong and try to do better. Let me say this though: I have met lots of Navy football players through the years. Almost all are exactly the type of person you would want representing your country and defending your country. They’re bright and tough and I would put them up against the football players from anyplace as human beings—forget the wins over Notre Dame.

It’s easy to find a couple of jock failures at any school and harp on them as proof the school is going down the tubes because of the evils of jockdom. If Fleming really wanted to make Navy a better place, I’d respect him for that. Every college in the country has weaknesses and could use some improvement.

I don’t think that’s what Fleming is about. I think he’s about calling attention to himself and making a few bucks while he’s at it. We all try to make money. To do it by publicly attacking the kids who play football at Navy is not—in my mind—an honorable way to go about it.



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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview about 'Moment of Glory', please click the play button below:

Yesterday I joined The Sports Reporters' Steve Czaban and Andy Pollin in the normal timeslot (5:25 ET on Wednesday's). Click the permalink, then the link below, to listen to the segment that takes a look at the Ben Roethlisberger suspension along with college basketball topics including Kyle Singler returning to Duke and the potential CBS/Turner bid for the NCAA tournament.

Click here to listen to the segment: The Sports Reporters

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And once again on Thursday, I joined Tony Kornheiser's newest The Tony Kornheiser Show in my normal slot at 11:05 am ET Thursday morning.  This week the topics included Bob Woodward, the World Cup, Tiger Woods and college basketball.

Click here to listen to the segment (starts within the 1st minute): Tony Kornheiser Show

Walking into Augusta National this morning a number of people asked me what I thought about the national championship game on Monday. My answer was simple: “It was one of the greatest championship games ever played and if Gordon Hayward’s shot had gone in, it would have been THE greatest game and THE greatest moment in the history of college basketball.”

Yup, it was that good.

I’ve heard a few people say the game was exciting but not that well played—they say that looking at the shooting percentages. They also say that because they don’t understand basketball. Go back and look at the tape. I’m not sure there more than a half-dozen shots in the entire game that were uncontested. Every single possession was an absolute war. Throwing a simple perimeter pass was difficult. Both teams had help waiting for anyone who tried to drive the ball to the goal. There were almost no transition baskets because the teams changed ends of the court so quickly.

It is almost 36 hours since Hayward’s 45-foot shot hit the backboard and the rim and rolled off and I can still see it in the air and I can still remember thinking, ‘that has a chance.’

If it had gone in I would have been thrilled to have been there for the greatest moment in college basketball history. When it missed I was delighted for Mike Krzyzewski and all the people I know at Duke.

Let’s deal with Krzyzewski for a moment. Let’s start with this: He proved me wrong this season. I thought he made a mistake taking the Olympic job for a second time, especially at a time when Roy Williams had just won his second national championship in five years.

I forgot a lesson I learned—or thought I’d learned a long time ago—never underestimate The Captain. That’s the nickname my pal Keith Drum and put on him when he first came to Duke. Since Bob Knight liked to call himself ‘The General,’ we started calling Krzyzewski ‘The Captain,’ since that was his rank in the Army—unlike Knight who was actually a private.

Drum, who has been an NBA scout for almost 20 years, was the sports editor of The Durham Morning Herald in those days and was probably the only member of the local media who didn’t jump off the Krzyzewski bandwagon—not that there was one—when Mike went 38-47 his first three years at Duke. He was vocal enough in his belief that Krzyzewski was going to be a successful coach that Dean Smith noticed.

In 1984, after Krzyzewski’s first good team had stunned North Carolina (with Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins and Brad Daugherty among others) in the ACC semifinals, Drum and I walked down the steps in The Greensboro Coliseum into the hallway where the locker rooms were. Dean was standing outside his locker room and when he spotted us, he walked across the hall, making a beeline for Keith.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Your team played very well.”

It was a funny line since Drummer went to North Carolina. Dean was making a point about his support of Krzyzewski.

Turns out Drum had it right. Turns out I had it wrong this season. Here are the numbers: Four national championships, behind only John Wooden (10) and tied with Adolph Rupp. Eleven Final Fours—one behind Wooden and tied with Dean. Twelve ACC championships—one behind Dean. And, last but not least, 868 victories—11 behind Dean and 34 behind Knight.

Of course there are people out there who will say about 800 of those wins came because Duke gets all the calls. There are also people—just about all of whom have never met Krzyzewski or talked to him—who think he’s a bad guy, who make up things about him (like the columnist in Miami who claimed last week he ‘faked,’ his back injury in 1995) and who simply can’t stand to see him win.

Sorry folks, the guy is just good at what he does. And he’s a good man. The work he does very quietly for charities, for people who are sick, for friends—is endless. He just doesn’t make a big deal of it. For that matter, neither did Dean, who has always been that way too. That’s why I wrote a column Saturday saying they are a lot more alike than either would probably care to admit. If you want to say I’m saying these things because I went to Duke—fine. I’m saying these things because I’ve known the guy since 1977 and I know that they’re true.

He did a great job coaching this team, the key moment coming when he made Brian Zoubek a starter. Until then, this was another nice Duke team that probably would have lost in the Sweet 16. Zoubek changed everything. He gave the team an inside presence it hadn’t had since Shelden Williams graduated. He made Lance Thomas more effective because he knew he had help behind him and could be aggressive on defense. He made the Plumlee brothers better because they could play limited minutes and just buzz around when they were in the game.

As Bob Ryan said on Saturday night after Duke had dismantled West Virginia, “they have three piano players and three piano movers and they all know their roles.”

And, as Krzyzewski said, they became a very good team that did a great thing even though they didn’t have anywhere close to the pure talent many of his previous teams have had. And if Kyle Singler comes back next year—probably 50-50—they’re going to have a chance to do it again.

So will Butler if Hayward comes back. If there’s anyone left who didn’t think this was a wonderful team, they should find another sport. The only team I saw all year that played half court defense at Duke’s level was Butler. Hayward is superb; so is Shelvin Mack and the players around them all knew their roles. Matt Howard played as smart and as tough a game on Monday as I’ve ever seen.

And Brad Stevens proved he can coach with anyone. He beat Jim Boeheim, beat Frank Martin, beat Tom Izzo and missed beating Krzyzewski by two inches. He matched Krzyzewski move-for-move most the entire night. Every time out he called worked. So did his rotation, especially the way he went defense-offense the last few minutes.

It would be nuts for him to leave Butler for any second tier job in a BCS conference. His next job should be one of the BIG ones: Krzyzewski isn’t going to coach forever; neither will Roy Williams or Ben Howland and you never know when someone at a big school might be tempted by the NBA. (Forget The Captain to the Nets. He’d never coach a game if he even thought about it because his wife Mickie would kill him first). That’s where Stevens belongs. Butler right now is a better job than any of those other jobs anyway.

The only sad thing about Monday Night, especially one like this one, is that someone loses and has to live with the ‘what-ifs,’ the rest of their lives. To be honest, the Butler kids deserve better than that because they gave us memories we’ll all keep with us for a long, long time.

You see, Monday Night in college basketball is about forever. And this one was one worth savoring for at least that long.

******

Quick note on the ‘new,’ Tiger Woods. He’s not playing in the par-3 tournament at Augusta today, which is by far the most fan friendly event of the week. The excuse from his camp is that he hasn’t done it for years and if he did and played poorly tomorrow someone would say (not me for the record) that it was because he’d played the par-3. He should have just played. He should have auctioned off caddying for him and given the money to a charity of the winner’s choice—NOT his own foundation.

But no, he’s not doing that. He IS, I’m told, signing a lot more autographs than in the past. Good for him. But he should have played in the par-3.

INDIANAPOLIS - Arguably, there has never been a better NCAA men's basketball tournament than the one that ends tonight. From the very first games on the very first day there was one upset after another, one remarkable finish piling on another.

The championship game will be straight from "Hoosiers," the 1986 film based on the 1954 Indiana state championship won by tiny Milan High School over powerful Muncie Central. One finalist on Monday night in (naturally) Indianapolis is Butler. The other is Duke.

Duke is college basketball royalty, having competed in 15 Final Fours and winning three national championships. Butler had never been in the Final Four and came -- like Milan -- from virtual anonymity to compete for the championship. As luck would have it, Butler plays its home games on its campus at Hinkle Fieldhouse, which is six miles from the massive domed stadium where the Final Four was played but, more important, is the place where Milan won its title and where the movie was filmed.

In short, this NCAA Tournament is about as close to a perfect sporting event as happens in the jock pantheon.
So why is it almost certain that the NCAA will blow up a system that has worked so well for 25 years and completely change the landscape of college basketball?

Click here for the rest of the column - A basketball tournament only the NCAA would love

Monday is the longest day at The Final Four.

It is really all about waiting since the championship game doesn’t start until 9:21—why the heck it can’t just be 9:20 I’m not sure—but regardless there is a lot of time to kill.

The USBWA has its awards brunch in the morning and then the Hall of Fame announces its inductees right after that. I refuse to go to the Hall of Fame press conference (although I’m glad that long-time St. Anthony’s Coach Bob Hurley is going in) because I object to the secretive nature of the Hall’s voting system and the fact that the NBA has completely taken over the process and the Hall of Fame itself.

This year not a single college coach is going in. No Lefty Driesell, no Guy Lewis, no Jim Phelan—among others. It’s a joke and you can’t complain to the 24 voters because their identities are a deep, dark secret. The Hall says it is so they won’t be lobbied—which is garbage. If you have the privilege of voting you should be able to withstand any lobbying if you think someone isn’t worthy. And, under any circumstances, you should have to publicly stand behind your vote.

So, I have no interest in the Hall of Fame or its press conference. On the other hand I guess I could go and ask them embarrassing questions but I’ve already done that once this week in a press conference and that’s enough for me.

We can also kill some time today watching The Tiger Woods press conference. The only reason I’ll be watching is because I have to on ‘Golf Channel,’ afterwards and talk about it. I expect another lecture on Buddhism and meditation and someone in a green jacket to jump in and say, ‘golf questions only please,’ if someone strays into a question deemed ‘personal,’ in any way. (Maybe someone can ask Tiger if he thinks the NCAA Tournament is really about the ‘student-athletes,’ or if he’s as sick of that tired song as the rest of us. Heck, we might even agree on something for a change).

When the title game does finally begin tonight, I expect a great game. If people haven’t figured out yet how good Butler is then they’re missing the boat entirely. Was the Bulldogs win on Saturday over Michigan State pretty to watch? No. But this isn’t about style points and Butler, even with point guard Shelvin Mack and center Matt Howard both missing most of the last few minutes, managed to hang on and win. I’m hoping both are okay to play tonight. The last thing you want in a championship game is either team missing a key player.

The Butler kids are having fun and they ARE fun. Saturday night, when guard Ronald Nored—who made two critical free throws with six seconds left—was asked about the team’s tradition of patting the REAL Bulldog mascot on the head after being introduced he said this: “It’s part of what we do. Sometimes he barks, sometimes he bites but you gotta play through it.”

How good a line is that?

When Gordon Hayward, who plays the role of Jimmy Chitwood in this version of ‘Hoosiers,’ was asked if he had gotten a piece of the ball on Draymond Green’s last shot that came with Butler leading 52-49, he smiled the perfect ‘aw-shucks,’ grin and said. “I might have gotten a piece of the ball. Or I might have gotten a piece of his arm.”

The Duke kids aren’t nearly as fun or as funny—at least not in public—as the Butler kids. Combine that with their reputations as college basketball’s bad guys (which in most ways other than the fact that they win a lot isn’t deserved) and it is easy to understand why everyone in the country who doesn’t have a Duke affiliation will be pulling for Butler.

It also explains why CBS is over-the-moon about this matchup. It’s ‘Hoosiers,’; it’s a Cinderella story; it’s the white hats vs. the black hats; it’s the team you have to love against the team people love to hate. Ratings gold.

Duke is playing very well right now. It has gotten better, much better, since the start of the season. The Blue Devils play airtight defense—so does Butler—and if they have a night like Saturday when all of their so-called Big Three are on, they are very tough to beat. Saturday, Kyle Singler, whose shot was MIA against Baylor (zero-for-10) was eight-of-16, had nine rebounds and played superb defense on West Virginia’s Da’Sean Butler until Butler went down with a knee injury with 8:59 to go. Duke was up 15 at the time and Butler’s injury basically ended any thought that West Virginia might come back.

I just hate to see a kid end his college career like that. Butler, who is an absolute class act, sat in the locker room and answered questions after the game was over. Let me tell you something, if you didn’t like this West Virginia team, you were missing something.

That’s the nice thing about this Final Four: these are four very likeable teams. Oh sure, the Duke-haters have to do their thing and that’s par for the course. There was a lot of hoo-ha about a silly cartoon that appeared for one edition in The Indianapolis Star on Friday that depicted Mike Krzyzewski as ‘the devil,’ but that really wasn’t close to the dumbest thing said or written. That came from some guy in The Miami Herald who wrote a column claiming (among other things) that Krzyzewski, ‘faked,’ his back injury in 1995. No doubt he has access to the medical records that prove Krzyzewski ‘faked,’ the surgery he had for the back. I also know for a fact that the only thing that got him to go to the hospital and stop coaching was his wife Mickie telling him she was ready to leave him because he was killing himself by not getting medical help.

You see, it’s fine to criticize Krzyzewski. I wrote a column in The Post Saturday kind of lampooning his one-time animus for Dean Smith and how that’s changed over the years. Everyone knows I’m not exactly tight with my alma mater—in fact the Duke basketball website sometimes makes fun of me for being critical of Duke.

But the sometimes-crazed hatred of Krzyzewski makes no sense. It comes 99.99 percent of the time from people who’ve never met him. As Mickie once eloquently said, “I know the life my husband’s led and he doesn’t deserve the hatred that’s been aimed at him.”

She’s right. Tonight though, Duke will be wearing a black hat in a way it has perhaps never worn it before. Butler would be America’s Sweethearts regardless of the opponent tonight. They deserve to be in that role but let’s remember one thing: They aren’t here because they’re nice kids or because their 33-year-old coach (Brad Stevens) doesn’t look old enough to shave. They’re here because they’re a damn good basketball team that has already beaten Syracuse, Kansas State and Michigan State.

If the Bulldogs win it will be the best story we’ve seen in this tournament since Texas Western won in 1966—although for entirely different reasons. Those who shrug off the notion that Butler is Cinderella simply because it has been good for many years and was a No. 5 seed miss the point entirely.

Duke, like Michigan State and West Virginia, has all the advantages that schools from the power conferences have: money to recruit; money for top-notch facilities; money from TV; exposure from TV; a highly-thought of conference to pitch to players and the ability to buy eight-to-10 wins a year playing guarantee games at home.

Butler has none of that. It has a great old gym with an amazing history but that’s about it. The Bulldogs play in The Horizon League. Quick, name four Horizon League teams. They ARE Cinderella and if they win tonight you can throw every melodramatic cliché you can think of in their direction and you will be right.

I expect a very dramatic night. And to say I can’t wait for it to get started is a massive understatement.

From Monday's The Washington Post

INDIANAPOLIS- There are a number of people here who have grown tired of the comparisons being drawn between Butler 2010 and Milan 1954 -- the Indiana high school team whose story was made into the stuff of legends by the movie "Hoosiers."

Those people are going to have to deal with it -- at least for one more game, and perhaps forever if Butler can beat Duke in Monday's national championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium.

Duke is, without question, the opponent a screenwriter would choose for Butler in this game. The Blue Devils are to college basketball what Muncie Central was to Indiana high school basketball 56 years ago. They are the power team, the one with the superstar coach and the swagger of a team most people will expect to win a fourth national title when they play the Bulldogs.

What's more, the way the two semifinal games played out on Saturday night will give people reason to shake their heads and say that Butler has had a great run that is bound to end against the Blue Devils.

Butler scraped by Michigan State, 52-50, on pure grit. With two starters injured for most of the game's last 10 minutes, the Bulldogs had almost no offense. After a Willie Veasley steal and dunk put Butler ahead 44-37 with 12:18 to play, the Bulldogs made one field goal--a layup by Gordon Hayward with 1:36 to go after Shawn Vanzant had somehow grabbed a Hayward miss and gotten the ball back to him--and scored eight points in all down the stretch.

Click here for the rest of the column - Butler has the talent to upset Duke in the NCAA championship game

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From Sunday's The Washington Post

INDIANAPOLIS - When Milan beat Muncie Central in 1954 to win the Indiana high school state championship in arguably the most famous game in basketball history, the final score was 32-30.

That game took place about six miles from Lucas Oil Stadium. On Saturday night, in the opening game of the Final Four, Butler and Michigan State almost recreated "Hoosiers," -- without Bobby Plump hitting the winning shot. It was Gordon Hayward, who is to Butler what Plump was to Milan, who made the Bulldogs' only field goal of the last 12 minutes 18 seconds, but this was a game about missed shots, not about a made one.

"I really didn't think 15 for 49 was a great way to approach this game," Butler Coach Brad Stevens joked after his team had survived those shooting numbers to win, 52-50. "I never would have dreamed that we would have won the game that way."

They did win the game, though, with outstanding defense, with a critical offensive rebound late in the game, with a little bit of luck and perhaps a final push from the officials.

As is bound to be the case on a night when the teams shot a combined 33 of 91 from the field, the game came down to one possession.

With Butler leading 50-49, Ronald Nored had a layup go in and out. Michigan State called a timeout with 23 seconds left and -- not surprisingly -- tried to punch the ball inside to try to get the lead. Draymond Green caught the ball in the lane and went right at Hayward, who at 6 feet 9 plays inside on defense and often brings the ball up against pressure on offense.

Green went up and so did Hayward. The ball rolled off Green's fingers and came up well short -- an air ball from six feet -- with the Michigan State bench screaming for a foul. Given that the officials had been calling fouls on just about anything resembling contact all night, it probably wasn't an unreasonable hope.

Click here for the rest of the column: Butler is just one victory from another storybook ending

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From Saturday's The Washington Post

INDIANAPOLIS - In March 1993, Duke and North Carolina played each other in Chapel Hill in a game with all sorts of national ramifications. Duke was the defending national champion. North Carolina was ranked No. 1 in the country.

Early in the game the two coaches, Mike Krzyzewski and Dean Smith, both clearly uptight, were up on every whistle. After several minutes, lead referee Lenny Wirtz had seen and heard enough. He called Krzyzewski and Smith to the scorer's table.

"I know it's a big game," he said. "I know you're both a little hyper. But you have to calm down and let us work the game."

Smith nodded. Krzyzewski did not. "Lenny, there's 21,000 people in here who are all against me," he said. "You three guys are the only ones I can talk to."

Wirtz laughed. Smith did not. "Lenny, don't let him do that," he said. "He's trying to get you on his side."
Krzyzewski glared at Smith, who glared back. Krzyzewski stalked back to his bench and said to his assistant coaches, "If I ever start to act like him, don't ask a single question, just get a gun and shoot me."

Time to round up the guns.

That's not to say that Krzyzewski has morphed into his former arch rival, but as he has become older, more successful and more famous, it is clear that he has come to see the world through a prism far more similar to Smith than he might ever have imagined. 

Click here for the rest of the column: Final Four 2010: It's not so easy to tell Coach K and Dean Smith apart

This SHOULD be a fun Final Four for the simple reason that the games should be close to the finish, regardless of who wins on Saturday. There’s no one nearly as good as North Carolina was a year ago and our long Saturday drought should come to an end.

Think about it. Semifinal Saturday is always billed as one of the best days in sports. Not so much the last five seasons. In 2004, both semis were decided in the final seconds: Georgia Tech’s Will Bynum hitting a buzzer-beater to beat Oklahoma State and Connecticut coming from behind the last three minutes to catch Duke.

Since then, there have been ten Saturday games played and not one of them was decided in the final seconds. Last year’s Connecticut-Michigan State game had the emotional element of the Spartans playing ‘for,’ Detroit but the game itself wasn’t that dramatic. Carolina-Villanova was over at halftime as was the title game two nights later. In 2008 the championship game between Kansas and Memphis was great but the Saturday games were both over before the last two minutes.

I just can’t see any of these four teams either collapsing or running away. For one thing, none of them play that style of basketball. Duke-West Virginia should be a donnybrook inside. Both teams play very good half-court defense, rebound like crazy and are inconsistent on offense. Butler and Michigan State have both played superbly to get this far and believe—correctly—that they are as capable of winning the title as anyone.

There are also great story lines, the most obvious being Butler, The Little School That Did, coming home to Indy to play The Final Four. For the record, Butler’s campus—I’m told—is the third closest to a Final Four site. Apparently Louisville in 1958 was a two-mile drive from Freedom Hall and UCLA traveled about three miles cross-town in 1967 and 1972 to the L.A. Sports Arena. (For some reason I had it in my mind that they played in Pauley Pavilion in ’67 but Matt Bonesteel at The Post says not so and since my memory isn’t what it used to be, I’m taking his word).

Butler’s not George Mason. For one thing, the Bulldogs had a tournament pedigree coming in—two recent Sweet 16s—and were a No. 5 seed. Mason was a No. 11 seed and had never won an NCAA Tournament game. But Butler didn’t back in by any means. It beat the top two seeds in the West, Syracuse and Kansas State and made big plays at the end in both games after falling behind. Frequently when an underdog loses the lead after having it for a while it spits the bit. That didn’t happen.

Michigan State’s two victories this weekend are a tribute to just how tough-minded the kids Tom Izzo recruits are year in and year out. Losing your point guard is hard enough but when he’s your best player—as Kalin Lucas was—no one would blame you if you mailed in the rest of the tournament. The Spartans not only won twice but if you watched them there’s no reason to believe they can’t win twice more. Izzo is just flat out good—which isn’t exactly going out on a limb since he’s now been to six Final Fours in 12 years and is going for a second national championship. He’s also a good guy, universally respected by his peers. You will never hear any whispers about Izzo or his program.

Bob Huggins has heard more than whispers through the years. He became kind of a national whipping boy because of his graduation rate at Cincinnati and because his players found off-court trouble often, including most famously a player pulling a ‘Blazing Saddles,’ move and taking a swing at a police horse. There were health issues too—drinking problems, a serious heart attack—and finally a battle with the school president he couldn’t win.

No one—NO ONE—ever said Huggins couldn’t coach and if they did they were flat out wrong. That’s why there wasn’t any doubt that West Virginia would be good when he came home to his alma mater three years ago. This is a classic Huggins team: it plays, “ugly,”—to quote assistant coach Billy Hahn—but it will guard you getting off the bus and rebound all day and all night. It is also mentally tough, a lot like its coach. Huggins was unhappy with the 23 turnovers the Mountaineers committed against Washington. I haven’t double-checked but I think the number was THREE in the Kentucky game? And that’s against a team that can really attack on defense. Joe Mazzulla’s performance, coming in for Truck Bryant at point guard, was phenomenal. Plus, he’s a smart, funny kid, the kind you want to root for to do well.

I think West Virginia’s the best team left. Its game with Duke, as I said, will probably be a 65-61 type of game. Let me pause here though to give some credit to Mike Krzyzewski for getting this group to The Final Four. I’ve said all year—and still believe—this isn’t even close to one of his best teams. The so-called Big Three—Jon Scheyer, Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith—are all nice players but wildly inconsistent shooters. Singler was zero-for-10 from the field yesterday. Scheyer had been in a slump until the second half of the Purdue game. Smith was excellent yesterday but has bouts when he can turn the ball over three times in four possessions.

But Duke’s good. It plays great defense and the four big guys it plays can’t throw the ball in the ocean but they get rebounds and make it tough to get inside.

Of course there will be the ritual whining about Duke’s draw and the charge that Brian Zoubek took with Duke down two late in the game. Yup, the Krzyzewski-haters (and they are a legion) will say he’s now won 793 games thanks to the officials. (I think they concede the 73 wins at Army may have been legit). Fine. If that makes you feel better, go ahead and think it. And if saying Krzyzewski’s one hell of a coach makes me a ‘Duke guy,’ that’s fine too. Somehow thinking Izzo is great doesn’t make me a ‘Michigan State guy,’ but that’s life.

Krzyzewski has NOT recruited as well the last few years as in past years. But he’s in his 11th Final Four—as many now as Dean Smith; one less than John Wooden. It’s tough to shoot that number down.

One other note on Baylor Coach Scott Drew who has done amazing work rebuilding that program after the Patrick Dennehy tragedy and the Dave Bliss debacle seven years ago. I’m sorry, I know this will upset some people but I have to say something about his comment yesterday that a postgame prayer is, “the right way to do things.”

Look, if Drew and his team want to pray before, during or after games, that is absolutely their right. But praying is neither right nor wrong on a universal level. For some people it is the right thing to do; for others it isn’t. I remember when I was working on ‘A Civil War,’ and Charlie Weatherbie was Navy’s coach. Weatherbie believed in praying as a team all day every day. On game day he led a prayer before pre-game breakfast; before the coach’s morning meeting; before the team met at the hotel; in the locker room before the game; on the field after the game; in the locker room right after that.

Once I got to know some of the players I asked them how they felt about all the prayers. Some thought it was great. Some shrugged it off. Some didn’t like it at all. “God has better things to do,” was a frequent comment. And some said this: “If coach thinks it will help us win, I’m all for it.”

Like I said, if Scott Drew and his players choose to pray on the court after a game, that is absolutely their choice. But it isn’t the right way or the wrong way to do things. It is just their way—period

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Last thing: I see where Norman Chad is taking shots at me again in his stale Washington Post column. Apparently I can’t write and he can. Let me just say this: If I ever end up commenting on poker on TV for a living, don’t ask any questions, just shoot me.

And so, the Self-Righteous Ten have spoken for another year.

As anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written knows, there are few days I enjoy more than Selection Sunday and I dread what it will be like next year. But one part of Selection Sunday I can’t stand is hearing the chairman—Dan Guerrero of UCLA this year—droning on about the purity of the selection process.

Oh please. These guys are human like the rest of us. They have biases and agendas. I’m not here to tell you they don’t try to do a good job but they need to quit claiming their purity while at the same time insisting on conducting their decision-making process in absolute secret. Guerrero won’t even answer the simple question: who was the last team in and the last team out. What is this, the CIA?

If it is all so above-board and pure and wonderful why not let at least one pool reporter—my suggestion has always been the U.S. Basketball Writers President, a job that changes yearly, or Bill Brill, who knows more about the selection process than all 10 committee members combined—sit in the room to explain exactly how the field was picked and seeded.

I’ve been suggesting this for most of 20 years now. The answer I get back, regardless of who is on the committee, is usually pretty direct: No. The reason given is also the same: Because we said so. The only committee member who was willing to even consider it was George Washington Athletic Director Jack Kvancz who actually brought it up in a meeting one year. He was shouted down quickly. He also got passed over the next year when he should have been chairman. I wonder if that was a coincidence.

The last few years the committee and Greg Shaheen, the NCAA staff member who runs the tournament from the NCAA side (and is very much behind the move to 96), have come up with one of the great bogus creations of our time: the mock bracket. The NCAA invites media members to Indianapolis—or in some cases to other cities for the media’s ‘convenience,’--and sets them up for a couple of days to pretend they are the committee. Ostensibly this is done so we in the media can, ‘better understand the process.’

What a bunch of garbage. It is done so that guys in my business will feel more important and think they really do know how hard it is to put the field together. Let me say this one more time: IT IS NOT THAT HARD. Eric Prisbell of The Washington Post had exactly one team different than the committee in his bracket in Sunday’s paper and missed on a few seeds by one spot. He did this ALONE without all sorts of staff members scurrying in and out, without free satellite TV all season, without first class airfare and without a five-star hotel. He’s also a lot less pretentious about it than The Self-Righteous Ten.

Driving in the car this morning hearing the two ESPN morning commercial- readers repeatedly saying, “the committee did a very good job,” I can’t help but giggle. What good job? I’ll give them credit for giving a couple of mid-major conference champions who lost in conference tournaments at-large bids. Fine. For once they did the right thing. Should Mississippi State have gotten in over Minnesota? Yes. The Gophers beat a hobbled Purdue team on Saturday and got killed by Ohio State on Sunday. Mississippi State gave Kentucky everything it could have wanted and beat two tournament teams over the weekend prior to that.

Should Virginia Tech have gotten in over Wake Forest in my opinion? Yes. But I can see the argument going the other way too based on top-50 wins and strength-of-schedule. Seth Greenberg, who is a friend, knew he had a weak schedule in the fall. Penn State turned out to be lousy when people thought they would be decent, but every other team on his schedule turned out about the way people knew they would. All of that said, Virginia Tech finished ahead of Wake Forest in the conference; beat the Deacons head-to-head and did NOT get embarrassed in the ACC Tournament. Wake’s performance against Miami was just completely god-awful.

What’s more, Wake’s AD Ron Wellman was on the committee. PLEASE do not give me the speech about committee members recusing themselves and leaving the room when their team is being discussed. Do you think the other nine guys don’t know how the guy outside the room feels? Committee members talk all the time about how close they become working under such great pressure. Well? Put it this way: every single time a bubble team has had its AD on the committee in my memory, the team has gotten in. That doesn’t mean the committee didn’t get it right—they certainly did with George Mason and Tom O’Connor in 2006—but it happens WITHOUT FAIL.

Having said all that, Guerrero’s not-so-subtle little pitch about how there was SO MANY teams they had to consider for the last few spots, rings pretty hollow. The only reason for that is that none of those last few teams could create any solid reason to get picked. Minnesota, a loser by 29 on Sunday? Florida, which lost to Mississippi State on Friday? Wake Forest? (see above). Texas—which hasn’t won a game since the end of football season? (Oh wait, it didn’t win that game either). California, which couldn’t even win the tournament in the miserable Pac-10?

Did these teams deserve to be in the tournament? Probably—because Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, Illinois and Rhode Island, were just about as mediocre overall. You could put those four in and take four of the above-mentioned out and you’d have essentially the same tournament. (For the record, NONE of these teams deserved to be seeded ahead of Cornell—check out Cornell’s schedule.)

Guerrero is clearly trying to set up the move to 96 by saying SO many teams were deserving. Hogwash. Worst-case scenario you expand to 68 teams, send the last eight at-larges to Dayton to play for the last four spots and there is just about no one who has ANY complaint at all.

Gary Williams claimed to me the other night that there are more good teams today than in 1985 when the tournament expanded to 64 teams. With all due respect, he’s flat out wrong. In 1985, Villanova, a No. 8 seed WON the tournament. In 1988, Kansas a No. 6 seed WON the tournament. IN 1986, a Maryland team led by Len Bias finished SIXTH in the ACC. There were more teams in big conferences with juniors and seniors back then, there was more depth because of that and the quality of basketball was better at all levels than it is today.

Back to the committee. The matchup that screams to be screamed at—among all of them—is Temple-Cornell. Both teams are under-seeded. And, when the committee tries to tell you this game is a coincidence, make sure you have a firm grip on your wallet. Temple is coached by Fran Dunphy; Cornell by Steve Donahue. Guess who was Dunphy’s No. 1 assistant at Penn for 10 years? If you guessed Steve Donahue you win my place at next year’s mock bracket. You win two spots at the mock bracket if you guess the committee guys will claim, ‘gee we never thought of that.’

Uh-huh. These guys are supposed to be hoops experts, right? They watch all these games, study all these computer printouts, read up on the conferences they’re assigned to study. Nah, how would they know about the Dunphy-Donahue connection or think it would make a great first round story for their ‘partners,’ from CBS. Just like Duke and Louisville—and thus Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino—is a likely second round matchup. Absolute coincidence. Heck, they might not even know where Krzyzewski and Pitino are coaching these days.

Someone get me a shovel.

I don’t mind that the committee does this stuff every year, I mind that they claim it is all by accident and they are all Caesar’s wife. If so, then why not let Dick Jerardi (this year’s USBWA president) or Brill, who has been putting brackets together since about 1952, observe this brilliant and totally above-board process. (For those of you who want to write, ‘oh Feinstein you just want to get in the room,” I seriously don’t want to get in the room. I’d rather watch basketball than sit in a room with those guys for four days. But someone should be doing it).

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. Tomorrow we’ll start to deal with who is playing whom and which games should be the most fun this weekend. I’ll leave you with this for today: I’m glad Wake Forest is playing Texas because I like Dino Gaudio and Rick Barnes and this is probably the only way that one of them will have a chance to win at least one game.

Good job, Self-Righteous Ten.

So, here we sit, less than a week from Selection Sunday with tournaments going on all over the place. What makes the next few days so cool is that all the bracketology becomes pretty meaningless because upsets blow up what everyone has been speculating about for the past two months.

That said, this past weekend certainly provided us all with a raft of interesting story lines.

I begin with Duke-North Carolina, not because Duke finally beat the Tar Heels at home to end a four game Cameron losing streak or because Duke tied for the ACC regular season title with Maryland by completely embarrassing the Tar Heels.

To me, the fascinating story line is this game was Carolina. Duke is good and will be a No. 1 or a No. 2 seed depending on what happens this week in conference tournament play around the country. Fine. I still don’t think the Blue Devils are a Final Four team. They’re too dependent offensively on their big three and if Brian Zoubek gets into foul trouble—as he often does—they’re in trouble against a team with a big front line. Who ever thought anyone would write that line: ‘If Brian Zoubek gets in foul trouble…’ The Plumlee brothers aren’t ready to be go-to guys in March. But we’ll see. One never knows how brackets will play out or who will get upset along the way.

What was tough to believe on Saturday night was how quickly Carolina disappeared. The game was pretty much over at 9-3. It isn’t as if the Tar Heels are often intimidated by loud crowds and the days when the Duke students (I refuse to call them by their cliché nickname) were clever enough to really distract anyone have long since passed. (“Our House?” That’s the best they can do? Last I looked it was Tyler Hansbrough’s house for four straight years.)

Carolina had nothing to lose Saturday and everything to gain. All the pressure was on Duke: four game home losing streak to the Tar Heels; needing to win to tie Maryland for the ACC title; senior night; not to mention the endless ESPN hype. Certainly Roy Williams isn’t scared to coach in Cameron. He sat next to Dean Smith on many a night when Dean told his players to, “listen for the silence,” at the end of the game and then walked off with a big smile on his face listening to just that. Even with the loss on Saturday, Ole Roy is 4-3 in Cameron.

So why did his players look scared? Why did they simply die when Duke hit three early three’s? The score was 53-26 at halftime. Are you kidding? Was that North Carolina or North Carolina-Asheville in the visiting uniforms? I know Carolina’s had injury problems this season and there’s no doubting the talent drop-off with Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green gone. But there’s still enough talent to be better than this team has been. The only team Virginia’s beaten in the last month is Carolina—in Chapel Hill, by double-digits.

Look, these aren’t Matt Doherty’s Tar Heels, the group that went 8-22 in 2002. This is a team coached by ROY WILLIAMS, who is deservedly in the Hall of Fame, who has won two national titles in five years and who has been to SEVEN Final Fours, which puts him behind only Dean Smith, John Wooden and Mike Krzyzewski. His numbers as a coach in 22 years are ridiculous.

In the last few weeks Roy has taken to pummeling himself in public, to doubting himself and his team to somehow comparing the way he feels about this season to what happened in Haiti. Frankly, it’s been sad to watch, especially if (like me) you like and respect Roy.

I’m not the least bit worried about him or his program long term. The fact that Ed Davis was having a disappointing sophomore season even before he got hurt may lead him to return next year. With Harrison Barnes signed up to join the cast, with Davis and some of the other young players back, Carolina should be much better—although Roy needs to find a point guard considerably better than Larry Drew II.

In the meantime though, it will be fascinating to see the approach the Tar Heels take to their Thursday evening first round ACC Tournament matchup with Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets may need to win two games in the tournament to make the NCAA field and if they fail, the argument can be made that they’ve had the most disappointing season of any team in the country given their talent level.

Tech will be—should be—a desperate team. Which Carolina team shows up? The one that won at Wake Forest nine days ago or the one that was back-pedaling the minute it set foot on the floor two days ago in Cameron? It’s actually okay for the Tar Heels to lose this game but if I was Ole Roy the next three days would be pretty miserable for my players. I’d call them a few names Coach Smith never used and challenge them to prove that they have pride in the name on the front of their uniform.

To me, the last two months have been shocking. I would not have been surprised if Carolina had been a bubble team this season. But a bubble team for the NIT? To quote the wise man John Patrick McEnroe Jr: You can NOT be serious.

Meanwhile, for me, the most disappointing outcome of the weekend was Winthrop’s upset of Coastal Carolina in the final of the Big South tournament. Nothing against Randy Peele, who is a good guy and has done a nice job replacing Gregg Marshall down there. Winthrop has now made the tournament nine of the last 12 years which is a great run at any school.

But Cliff Ellis making it back to the NCAA Tournament at the age of 64 after being fired at Auburn in 2004—one year after taking the Tigers to the sweet sixteen—would have been a wonderful story. Like Bobby Cremins at College of Charleston who came back six years after leaving Georgia Tech, Ellis came back after a three year sabbatical and did a wonderful job rebuilding the program in Conway, South Carolina. Now the Chanticleers will settle for the NIT, which is nice but not the same as The Dance.

Six days to Selection Sunday. It will be fun. As I’ve said here before, savor it, because if the NCAA has its way and ESPN throws enough Disney Dollars in its direction, this will be the last one where truly good teams will be on the bubble. A year from now a team like Carolina—16-15 and 5-11 in the conference—will go into the ACC Tournament figuring one win will wrap up a bid. Compelling stuff, huh?

Oh well, we can worry about that later. In the meantime, I’m psyched for the MAAC Final tonight. And then for The Southern Conference Final. Not to mention The Patriot League on Friday. You get the idea.

I’m not exactly sure where to begin today or where to go once I get started.

So, let’s start with something easy that—for some reason—people seem to be interested in. The Feinstein-Wilbon feud of 2010 is over. Mike called me on Wednesday and we talked and agreed to get together—with Kornheiser serving as the referee—next week. We still disagree on Tiger Woods and no doubt will continue to do so. But we agree that disagreeing on any subject isn’t a reason to start publicly calling each other names.

Mike said one thing that’s absolutely true: This isn’t a lot different than the arguments we used to get into—with Kornheiser and Sally Jenkins usually joining in—in The Washington Post newsroom 25 years ago. We’d often scream at one another and, frequently, the subject was a coach or an athlete we disagreed on. Tony used to joke that Mike only killed people he didn’t have to deal with regularly. We always gave Tony a hard time because he liked attention (all attention) but particularly that which he got from the very wealthy. That may explain why he’s the one person in Washington who doesn’t hammer Dan Snyder on a regular basis. Sally got teased because she liked tennis players and NO one liked tennis players. She once declared the young Andre Agassi to be, “charming.” We declared her to be insane.

I got nailed for not dressing well (that certainly hasn’t changed); for always getting into fights with security people and for liking basketball coaches too much. The one area I’ve actually improved in is security people. I’m not perfect but I’m a lot better.

One of Kornheiser’s favorite stories that is, unfortunately, absolutely true took place at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. I had been stricken with gout, a really terrible case that made walking just about impossible. Any of you who’ve had the misfortune to have gout know how painful it can be. Thank God for modern medicine.

Tony and I were in transit from, I think, the swimming venue to the boxing venue and the bus system had broken down so we jumped into a cab. The cab couldn’t get around to the front of the LA Sports Arena where the media entrance was so it dropped us off in the back. I was really hurting by then.

So, I convinced Tony that we should try to talk our way into the back door, especially since the media workroom was literally 10 yards from there. We walked up to the guard and explained the situation, showing our badges—which had photo ID on them—to the guard.

He kept shaking his head and saying no he couldn’t do it. This was way pre-9-11 but because of the boycott by Eastern Bloc countries, security was very tight. I kept saying, ‘come on, the media room is RIGHT there. Don’t make me walk all the way around this building.”

The guy finally relented. “Okay,” he said. “Just this one time.”

We walked into the media room at which point I turned to Tony and said, “guy’s not even doing his job.”

YES, I was a jerk—or worse. The only good thing about it was that it gave Tony a story he could tell about me—without exaggerating—for years.

What happened with Wilbon and I the last couple of weeks really wasn’t different than what used to happen except it took place in public. Twenty-five years ago Tony and Mike didn’t have a TV show and Tony didn’t have a radio show and I wasn’t on radio all the time and there was no internet. Now, all of that is in play and that’s how this became a “story,” if you want to call it that.

I’m not trying to say Mike and I weren’t pissed at each other; I’m not pulling some jock, “our comments were taken out of context,” move. We were both pissed. We’ve been mad at each other before, we’ll no doubt be mad at each other again. We’ll continue to disagree about Tiger. But that’s all there is to it.

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I’m almost hesitant to even bring this up because I know a lot of Maryland people will drag out the tired, “he’s a Duke grad,” argument but when is something going to be done about the behavior of the Maryland fans—particularly when Duke is in town?

Look, I was really happy for Gary Williams on Wednesday because he’s been a friend for more than 30 years and I think he’s done a remarkable coaching job this season. He’s going to be ACC Coach of the Year and Maryland will almost certainly do no worse than tie for the regular season title after being picked fifth in preseason. As he almost always does, Gary has squeezed every last drop out of his team.

Good for him and for his players.

But why do the Maryland fans HAVE to chant profanities constantly when their team is playing Duke. That was a great game Wednesday and it was sullied by the fans behavior—not to mention the 27 arrests after the game. To begin with, Maryland fans should have more respect for their team and their program. Maryland beating Duke isn’t exactly George Mason beating Connecticut.

Maryland won the national championship in 2002—that’s more recently than Duke. Maryland was ONE game behind Duke in the ACC standings going into Wednesday’s game. Maryland coach SHOULD be in the Hall of Fame someday soon, especially if the Hall of Fame nominating committee and voting panel stops being so NBA-centric.

So, Maryland beats Duke and the fans storm the court (I know part of that is caused everywhere by TV but it still makes no sense) after beating a team that is, for all intents and purposes, it’s peer? Then they take to the streets and the headline the next day becomes that, not Greivis Vasquez’s shot in the final minute but the arrests?

It’s ridiculous. I have a great deal of affection for Maryland and for a lot of people who have gone to the school and work at the school. In fact, having lived in the Washington area for more than 30 years and—given my relationship with Duke—I probably have closer ties to Maryland at this point in my life than Duke. That’s NOT to say that Mike Krzyzewski isn’t also a friend and he is obviously someone I have nothing but respect for.

All of that said, I wish the Maryland people would clean up their act. Oh, and by the way, don’t throw the, “Duke fans behave badly,” argument out there because it just doesn’t work—especially these days. In fact, I’ve said before that Krzyzewski has gone TOO far in reigning in behavior in Cameron. It’s good that there are no profane chants, but in toning the students down as he’s done, they’ve lost all their spontaneity and cleverness. I can’t remember the last time I heard a truly funny chant from the Duke students. Their whole ying and yang now is to paint their bodies and get on TV.

There’s a happy middle ground out there somewhere. Enjoy the game and be really loud. Be funny if you can be. My all-time favorite chant was years ago at Duke when the students, after being admonished by Duke President Terry Sanford for going too far during a game, decided to come up with a replacement for the tired, “b-----,” cheer. They replaced it with: “We beg to differ.” THAT was funny.

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Last thing: For those of you who seem to think I confuse opinion with fact. Here’s a fact: Today is Friday, March 5th. Just about everything else you will ever read in this blog is going to be opinion. My suggestion to those of you who find my opinions somehow offensive or disconcerting is to read another blog. Seriously, why bother with someone who is always so wrong about everything? God knows I wouldn’t read Rush Limbaugh if he had a blog. Life’s too short. Read what you enjoy, not what makes your blood pressure go up.

I guess I have to start this morning with Duke-North Carolina because it is always a game people talk about and because of my obvious connections to the rivalry that date back more than 30 years to my undergraduate days at Duke.

Let’s put aside last night’s outcome for a minute except to say this: It was a game Duke had to win. Carolina is down this year and when your arch-rival is down—especially when it is usually very good to excellent—you have to take advantage. What’s more, the Tar Heels had won three in a row; five-of-seven and seven-of-ten against Duke. The game was anything but pretty, Duke finally pulling away in the last five minutes to win 64-54 in a matchup that certainly won’t be an instant classic anywhere. The Blue Devils were no doubt glad to get out of Chapel Hill with a road win and now face a very tough game Saturday against what will be a rested Maryland team—the Terrapins taking the day off Wednesday after the latest Washington blizzard postponed their game with Virginia until Monday.

All that said and with my usual admission of an anti-ESPN bias, I really am sick of the way the network acts as if every Duke-Carolina game is the next coming of the U.S.-Soviet hockey game of 1980. ESPN hypes everything it televises but it goes to new levels with Duke-Carolina. A lot of it starts with Dick Vitale, who just can’t help himself. To be fair, if Dick was doing Bucknell-American (which I’ll be doing tonight if I can get out of my driveway) he would think IT was the greatest thing he’d ever seen in his life.

At least his hype is genuine.

And look, Duke-Carolina has been a wonderful rivalry through the years. Carolina has had three of the all-time great coaches work at the school in the last 60 years: Frank McGuire, Dean Smith and Roy Williams. Bill Guthridge never got the credit he deserved going to two Final Fours in three seasons. Matt Doherty was a failure—although he DID recruit the key players on Williams’ first championship team in 2005. Duke has also had three superb coaches: Vic Bubas, who made Duke a national power in the 60s; Bill Foster, who rebuilt the program after it had fallen apart in the 70s and, of course, Mike Krzyzewski who won his 853d game Wednesday—putting him 26 behind Smith and 49 behind his old coach Bob Knight for the all-time record.

There have also been truly great players (interestingly there is not ONE Duke player in the basketball Hall of Fame; Carolina has, I believe, 15) and great games and great moments.

So what did ESPN show prior to the game to prove how great the rivalry is?; fights. Instead of showing Walter Davis’s miracle shot in 1974, it showed Doherty and Chris Collins yelling at one another. Oh please. Instead of showing Gene Banks’ buzzer-beater in 1981 it showed a bloodied Tyler Hansbrough. THIS is what makes a great rivalry: coaches yelling at each other and elbows to the mouth?

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: I think the rivalry has been hyped to the point that fans on both sides act stupid. The Duke students lost their spontaneity and humor years ago. All they want to do is paint their faces and get on TV talking on their cell phones. Carolina people are obsessed with Krzyzewski’s success because they feel it somehow diminishes Smith’s accomplishments—which is completely ludicrous. Nothing can diminish what Dean did—on and off the court.

Last year a friend if mine from Carolina grabbed me in a press room and said, “you’ve got to see the FUNNIEST video ever made.” The video was basically some Carolina kids mocking all white Duke point guards and saying they were gay. Maybe I’m just old. I didn’t think it was even a little bit funny—just dumb to tell you the truth.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I respect Dean and Roy (and Bill Guthridge too, one of the best men I’ve ever met) and Mike. I like all of them a lot and think they’ve all done great work building model programs with (for the most part) good kids who graduate. Of course whenever I say something good about Krzyzewski it is because I’m a Dukie. When I say something good about Roy it is because I’m a traitor.

Gee, I wonder why I don’t like being around the rivalry very much. When HBO asked me to be part of their Duke-Carolina documentary I said no. It was a no-win for me. Unfortunately I thought they leaned on some very bad sources—particularly a couple of people on the Carolina side who claim to be journalists but hate Krzyzewski with a passion that defies reason.

So, like I said, it was a good win for a Duke team that I think is far from special and another tough loss in a down year for Carolina. It didn’t come close to being worthy of the hype. But then few things on ESPN can live up to that sort of hype.

By the way, what exactly is Rivalry Week? Other than Pitt-West Virginia on Friday I can’t find a single real ‘rivalry,’ game other than Duke-Carolina on their schedule. Clemson-Florida State? That’s a big rivalry? Georgetown-Providence? Syracuse-Connecticut MAYBE but they don’t even play home-and-home every year anymore because of the silly Big East schedule. You have to love the way the network marketing geeks just make stuff up and throw it out there. Maybe they can have, “Hype Everything Week.” Oh wait, that’s every week.

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I got a call yesterday from Ryan Bucchianeri. If you read ‘A Civil War,’ you will know the name right away. If you are a football fan, you will know who he is when I remind you. Ryan was a kicker at Navy. He missed an 18-yard field goal as a freshman that would have won The Army-Navy game. The field was soaked, the game was played in a driving rain—there were plenty of excuses available for Ryan after the game.

He took none of them. He just took the blame. “I missed the kick, that’s all there is to it,” he said repeatedly.

For taking responsibility and not making excuses Ryan became something of a national hero. Sports Illustrated did a long piece on him the following fall. Early in the next year’s Army-Navy game he missed another makeable kick. It was the last field goal he ever attempted at Navy.

Many of Ryan’s teammates resented the fact that he was made into a hero—even though he never asked for that status. They thought (correctly) that in accepting blame he had simply done what they are all taught to do: No Excuse Sir is a mantra at both Army and Navy.

I wrote ‘A Civil War,’ during Ryan’s junior season. There was a new coaching staff that basically wanted no part of him. Too many bad memories. He was shunted down to fourth string and got into two games all year—both times to kickoff. He became almost a pariah within The Brigade of Midshipmen and was badly treated—very badly treated—at times. Writing the book, I reported all this. I liked Ryan a lot and appreciated his willingness to talk to me about all that had happened. I thought my version of events was sympathetic to him, which it was meant to be.

Apparently not everyone read the book that way.

Ryan is now running for Congress after a distinguished career in the Navy. He was running in The Democratic Primary in Pennsylvania’s 12th district (that’s in Western Pennsylvania where Ryan grew up) against 19-term incumbent John Murtha. You may know the name: Murtha was well-known for a number of reasons: A marine veteran who served in Vietnam, he came out against the war in Iraq in 2005 after initially voting to support it in 2002. But he also became known as, “The King of Pork,” and was famous for ear-marking bills to give companies whose lobbyists had contributed big money to his campaigns contracts that benefited the companies and, frequently, his district in Pennsylvania. He has been investigated for possible ethics violations more than once.

Ryan’s campaign was a long shot given Murtha’s time in Congress, his contacts and his campaign war chest. On Sunday, Murtha, who was 77, died after complications from gall bladder surgery. Suddenly, Ryan’s campaign isn’t a long shot anymore.

I had seen Ryan in September when he was campaigning outside Heinz Field before the Navy-Pittsburgh game. He still looks 21 even though he’s now 35. The reason for his call was direct: there were people writing and saying that if you read, ‘A Civil War,’ it was apparent that the author (me) didn’t think very much of him.

If so, that was bad writing on my part. I have great respect for Ryan Bucchianeri and it isn’t because he’s a Democrat or that we agree on most issues. He’s just a good PERSON, who has served his country overseas and who I am SURE will work like crazy if he gets to Congress. So, if anyone has any doubts about how I feel about him because of the book, that’s on me. Did his teammates view him as a loner? Yes. A lot of kickers are viewed that way and Ryan took one emotional hit after another and kept coming back.

If you want to know how his teammates REALLY felt about him, I’d read the scene I witnessed in the locker room after the Notre Dame game that year when Andrew Thompson, the team’s defensive captain, told Bucchianeri how much he respected his un-willingness to give up when it seemed everyone at Navy wanted him to give up. Thompson, by the way, is still serving in the marines today and is as tough a guy as I’ve ever met.

So, if you want to know more about Ryan and his campaign, click on: Ryan2010.com. I’m not writing this for any reason except that I like and respect the guy and I feel badly if anyone read ‘A Civil War,’ and didn’t come away knowing that.

Today I joined The Sports Reporters' Steve Czaban and Andy Pollin in the normal timeslot (5:25 ET on Wednesday's). Click the permalink, then the link below, to listen to the segment. This week we spent a great deal of time talking about the Duke-UNC game, as well as the overall state of the Duke program.

Click here to listen to the segment: The Sports Reporters


I also made my regular appearance on Tony Kornheiser's newest radio show during my regular segment at 11:05am.  This week we discussed the weather, of course, before moving on to college basketball, including the Duke-UNC game.

Click here to listen to the segment (starts within the 1st minute): Tony Kornheiser Show

I’m brooding just a little bit this morning. To be honest, it’s tough to feel THAT bad about the Jets loss to the Colts. Peyton Manning was just too good. I think if his wide receivers were Don Maynard and George Sauer Jr.—today, not 41 years ago when they were catching passes from Joe Namath—Manning would find a way to get them the ball. He’s just that good.

Although I’ve now seen all the highlights, I heard a lot more of the game on the radio than I saw on television. I had to drive to the eastern shore of Maryland yesterday for a funeral. Pat Hughes, the wife of former Maryland Governor Harry Hughes, passed away on Thursday after a long, difficult battle with Parkinson’s disease. They had been married just a little less than 60 years. Governor Hughes gave an emotional, touching eulogy, revealing something that he said even his children didn’t know: he and Pat had secretly gotten married when she was 19 and still in college almost two years before their, “wedding.”

“I have a feeling if her dad had known he wouldn’t have sprung for the party,” Governor Hughes said, drawing laughter in the packed church. He choked up on a couple of occasions, pausing once to say, “I’m going to get through this,”—and did. It was typical Harry Hughes: clever, funny, touching, genuine and classy.

The respect people have for him was evident: Martin O’Malley, the current governor, was there and so were both of Maryland’s U.S. Senators—Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski. Steny Hoyer, the Majority Leader of the House was there and so was former Senator Joe Tydings along with—as you might expect—many members of the state legislature, which is where Governor Hughes began his political career. I believe I was the only sportswriter in attendance but there needed to be one since Governor Hughes signed with the Yankees out of college and had a brief minor league career.

“No signing bonus,” he noted in the eulogy.

I had driven down with my old friend Tim Maloney— a former House of Delegates member—and, after we’d stopped by the house for the reception, we headed home. The Hughes house is on The Greater Choptank River (the governor corrected me when I called it The Choptank River) a couple of miles from the Harry R. Hughes Bridge that crosses the Choptank. Pretty cool, I think.

It was halftime by the time we were back in the car and the key moment of the game—the Colts late second quarter drive—had just taken place. With the margin at 17-13 I wasn’t optimistic about the Jets chances. Mark Sanchez had played very well in the first half apparently but I knew the Colts defense was very solid.

We all know what happened in the second half. I honestly don’t believe the Saints can beat the Colts in The Super Bowl but upsets do happen. Maybe the Colts will turn the ball over five times. One thing I’m about 99.9 percent sure won’t happen is Manning making a mistake like the one Brett Favre made at the end of regulation, a mistake so heinous that even see-no-evil ex-quarterback Troy Aikman had to call it, “a cardinal mistake.”

Look, to do anything but respect Favre’s grit is simply stupid. He took a hit on his ankle and knee that would have had most quarterbacks in the locker room and never missed a snap. He could barely walk to and from the huddle, yet every time he took a snap and dropped back, you were pretty certain the ball would be on target. Even after the Saints went up 28-21, Favre brought them back and had them one play—plus a successful field goal—from winning.

I’m not sure who screwed up when the Vikings came out of the time out with 19 seconds left with 12 men in the huddle, but one way or the other, that’s on the coaching staff. My God was this game full of bad plays: the turnovers, the penalties—I didn’t think the officials had such a good day either—the fumbled snap (Drew Brees) on a key third down. Was it just me or did it seem as if every single play of the last hour was a bobbled pass, a questionable call or another dreaded booth review. I’m surprised there wasn’t a booth review of the coin toss before overtime.

And yet, in that final minute of regulation, Favre had the Vikings at the Saints 33—then the 38 after the penalty. There he was, rolling right on third down with acres of yardage in front of him and no reason not to run since he had a timeout left. Maybe it was the pain in his leg that caused him not to run. Worst case, he’s going to pick up five yards and Ryan Longwell is going to have a long, but makeable (especially in a dome) field goal.

But the old Favre Achilles heel kicked in at the worst possible moment and he threw across his body and across the field right into an interception. Like the one two years ago against the Giants, that’s one Favre isn’t going to be able to get out of his mind because it was his last throw of the season. He had talked all week about this opportunity being a chance to redeem himself after that Giants game. He was thatclose to that redemption. Unlike in the Giants game, where he played poorly all day in frigid conditions, Favre was heroic on Sunday until that last pass.

Even if you felt badly for Favre—how could you not?—you couldn’t help but feel the joy of New Orleans. When players and coaches warble on about how great their fans are after a victory I usually roll my eyes: all fans are great when a team is good. But this was different. These were fans who had been to hell and back and almost lost their team after Hurricane Katrina because owner Tom Benson was ready to ride right out of town to San Antonio or Los Angeles. They truly deserved a moment like this. I have a feeling though that it will be their zenith. We’ll see when they play The Super Bowl, which is in about six weeks. At least it will feel that way once all the hype and chatter are finally over.

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A few notes from the last few days. My friend Bill Brill e-mailed me on Friday to say my “Duke,” blog on Thursday had caused all sorts of talk on the Duke Basketball Report site. I checked it out and found it interesting.

There were, as you might expect, some loyalists who were angry at me: I’m a bitter person because my friend Tom Mickle didn’t get the Athletic Director’s job. (Damn right I’m bitter because he was SO clearly the right choice and Nan Keohane intentionally picked Joe Alleva for just that reason). I have a lot of nerve implying I belong on the list of ‘distinguished Duke journalists,’ over a woman who was a ‘Survivor,’ finalist. (Guilty again, I really do think my resume is a tad better than hers). The most interesting ones were from people who defended Mike Krzyzewski’s decision to coach the Olympic team again. Some sort of missed my point: I didn’t write that because Duke lost to N.C. State—nor have I changed my mind because it beat Clemson—I felt that way last summer and told Krzyzewski that, not that he does care or should care what I think. What’s more I was NOT against him doing it once because it is—and should be—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was the second time around that he didn’t need in terms of time or energy or ego. He’d done all that. (Note to guy who pointed out that Jim Boeheim is an assistant coach and doing fine: Being an assistant is wholly different. Not only is Krzyzewski giving up time, his entire staff is involved in the effort. Plus, coincidence or not, Syracuse missed the NCAA’s two years in a row right after Boeheim became an assistant).

Anyway, the big defense was, “being Olympic coach has energized him.” Really? Being the Duke coach doesn’t provide enough challenge or energy? I would think going 3-7 the last five years against his good friend Ole Roy while not coming close to a Final Four would be enough to energize Mike Krzyzewski…

And finally, from the category of why it is often tough to take women’s sports that seriously: Two Georgetown women’s players and one Louisville player were suspended by The Big East after a pre-game brawl nine days ago. When the league announced the suspensions it refused to identify the players even though it would become apparent who they were the next time the teams played. Okay, that’s just plain ridiculous.

Then, on Saturday, after Kenya Kirkland (a tri-captain) and Tia McBride were absent from her team’s win over DePaul, Georgetown Coach Terry Williams-Flournoy said this: “I think there’s a privacy right that those kids should have. They’re kids. They’re children. Their names shouldn’t be put out there like that.”

Huh? They play COLLEGE basketball and are old enough to vote. People are asked to pay money to watch them play which means anything they do in that public domain is public. Children? They made a mistake, they were suspended. It happens all the time. Claiming some ludicrous right to privacy just makes everyone involved look stupid…

And then there was this: During the Maryland-North Carolina State men’s game Saturday night, the PA Announcer at the corporate-named Center that replaced Cole Field House pleaded with fans to buy tickets for the next night’s Maryland-Duke women’s game. “Come see the best rivalry in women’s college basketball,” he said.

There aren’t many rivalries in women’s college basketball that anyone not in uniform or related to those in uniform cares about. In fact there’s one: Connecticut-Tennessee. That’s the list.

Then, after Duke had won a close game on Sunday, Maryland Coach Brenda Frese said this: “This proves we can play with anyone.”

Really? Her team loses at home to a team that lost at home earlier in the week BY THIRTY-THREE to Connecticut and this proves her team can play with anybody? Sometimes I think coaches—in all sports—just throw stuff out there and figure it will go un-challenged because often it does. If Duke and Maryland combined forces they would lose to U-Conn by 20. NO ONE in the women’s game can play with Connecticut right now—which is a problem for the women’s game.

Maybe Frese should have insisted on not making public the names of the women on her team who missed shots. You know, they’re just children. They have a right to privacy.

For some reason Wednesday was one of those days when I couldn’t seem to escape my alma mater.

My relationship with Duke is, to put it in polite terms, an interesting one.

Let’s start with the good: I’ve known Mike Krzyzewski since 1976. I met him when I was a Duke senior and the basketball team played in New York against Connecticut in Madison Square Garden. The day before the game I flew in with then-Duke Coach Bill Foster and then-Duke star guard Tate Armstrong to attend the weekly basketball writer’s lunch at Mamma Leone’s Restaurant. I’d always read about the lunch as a kid so actually getting to go was a thrill.

Foster was kind of a returning hero at the lunch since he had coached at Rutgers. Afterwards, he introduced me to three young New York area coaches I was familiar with: Tom Penders of Columbia; Jim Valvano of Iona and Mike Krzyzewski of Army. He made me do my Dean Smith imitation for them and I told Penders and Krzyzewski how much I’d enjoyed going to games at their schools as a kid and Valvano how vividly I remembered Rutgers’ run (with Foster as the coach) in the 1967 NIT.

Obviously I got to know all three much better as they moved up in the business after I graduated from college. Often, when I talk about what a good guy Krzyzewski is or even what a good coach he is (gee, he’s only won 848 games) people start claiming I’m a “Duke apologist.”

That’s where the story gets funny. You see, even as an undergraduate, I was extremely critical at times of the school and the athletic department. My senior year Athletic Director Carl James only scheduled four home games in order to make the football team into a cash cow—the first three non-conference games were at Tennessee, at South Carolina and at Miami. The next year it was at Tennessee, at Michigan. I wrote a column prior to the first home game in the fall of 1976 (game 4 of the season) in which James flew to Pittsburgh—that was the first home opponent led by Tony Dorsett—to protest the actual playing of a home game. I also had Coach Mike McGee going to the campus police department asking for directions to Wallace Wade Stadium.

The administration loved me for that.

But I was also a big fan of Foster’s and was delighted when he turned the program around and took the team to the national championship game in 1978 after four straight last place finishes in the ACC during my undergraduate years. And I’ve always admired Krzyzewski as a man and a coach. I make no apologies for that.

That said, he and I had a minor falling out and Duke and I had a major falling out when Duke President Nan Keohane named Joe Alleva to succeed Tom Butters as athletic director. I’m not going to go through the details AGAIN but this was one of the all-time stupid decisions made by any college president—which takes in a lot of ground. Anyone and I mean ANYONE who has been around college athletics for more than 15 minutes knew that Tom Mickle should have gotten the job. Keohane didn’t hire Tom for one reason: he had IDEAS, real ideas, about how to fix football and how to fund under-funded non-revenue sports better.

Let me quote Gene Corrigan, the former commissioner of the ACC, also a Duke grad who hired Mickle as his No. 2 man in the conference office: “I was the beneficiary of Tom Mickle’s brilliance. I never met anyone smarter in collegiate athletics.”

Keohane didn’t want Mickle because Mickle was too smart. She wanted Alleva because she knew he’d just ride Krzyzewski’s coattails and never bother her with an idea. She thought sports were too important at Duke and Krzyzewski too powerful. She didn’t want sports to get better, she’d have been happy if they got worse. (Which, amazingly, football did under Alleva’s watch).

I was angry at Krzyzewski in the aftermath of the Alleva hiring because he kept quiet during the hiring process. He played racquetball with Alleva and felt he owed it to Alleva to not line up against him. I’ve always admired Mike’s loyalty but I told him back then: “your loyalty is misplaced here. It should be to DUKE. You owe it to Duke to make Keohane pick the right guy and you know it’s Mickle.”

Years later he finally admitted that of course it should have been Mickle. But by then it was too late. Tom died in 2005 of a heart attack at the age of 55.

To say I was critical of Keohane—who told me in a phone conversation that if she hired a “Duke person,” (the school had hired one of those dopey headhunters that had no interest at all in recommending the best person, just someone it could take a bow for ‘finding.’) it would, “of course be Tom Mickle,” is an understatement. When I publicly called her a liar my relationship with the school sort of went downhill.

As in, I ceased to exist. The alumni office ordered local alumni groups to NOT ask me to speak—in fact it forced the local chapter here in Washington to cancel an appearance I’d been asked to make by (of all people) Tate Armstrong. The President of the club at the time called me to say, “well, um, we can’t get a room the right size.” I told the guy not to worry, I understood, but next time he should come up with a better story.

Keohane mercifully left and was replaced by Richard Brodhead, who appears to be a perfectly nice guy. Unfortunately, Brodhead has the leadership skills of an amoeba. He completely blew the entire lacrosse situation and in spite of one embarrassment after another actually gave Alleva a new contract a couple of years ago. When I sent him an e-mail saying, “WHAT were you thinking?” he wrote back and said, “Joe has some weaknesses, yes, but he also has strengths.”

I replied: “Can you please name ONE for me?”

I’m still waiting on an answer.

The Alleva era finally came to an end when a different dopey headhunter actually recommended him to LSU. Kevin White, a nice guy who seems perfectly competent (but is no Tom Mickle) was hired in his place. I’m still pretty much persona non grata at Duke outside the basketball office perhaps because I keep calling Brodhead, “Mr. Chips,” perhaps because I ripped the football team for failing the basic courtesy test of shutting up while the Navy band played its alma mater after the game in Durham two years ago.

If you think I’m exaggerating pick up a Duke media guide and look under “distinguished journalism alumni.” My classmate, Sean McManus, President of CBS Sports, is listed—as he should be. So is one of my mentors Bill Brill and several other distinguished journalists—Judy Woodruff being another. There’s also a woman who was a finalist on ‘Survivor.’ Seriously. Me? Nowhere to be found. Does that make me laugh? Yes. Does it piss me off? Being honest, of course it does.

All of which brings me (finally) to yesterday. I got a call from a woman on behalf of my friends at the alumni office. Apparently I was invited to some cocktail party in town next week—gee, think they’re asking for money?—and hadn’t RSVP’d. She was hoping I could come. Actually I COULD come but, no thanks, I’ll take a pass. Maybe they could invite the woman from ‘Survivor.’ Did I get a kick out of that?

Yes, guilty.

Then, during my regular radio appearance on WTEM here in town one of the hosts, Andy Pollin, accused Jim Calhoun of “abandoning his team,” because he’s taking a medical leave of absence. I told Pollin that was patently ridiculous and he shouldn’t make a comment like that without knowing any of the facts.

At which point his co-host, Steve Czaban—who comes from the view of a Maryland fan, Krzyzewski is the root of all evil club—asked about the ‘rumors,’ that Krzyzewski had left his team in 1995 because it wasn’t any good and he didn’t want to be saddled with a bunch of losses.

As it happens, I know how sick Krzyzewski was that year and I know his doctors practically had to strap him to a bed to keep him out of the gym and told him if he tried to coach again that season he might not ever coach again. I also know where the ‘rumor,’ started—two North Carolina grads who more or less posed as journalists for a long time who hated Krzyzewski for making Duke good again. So, I did my, “Duke apologist,” thing and defended Krzyzewski.

Then I watched N.C. State blow Duke out later that night and couldn’t help but think—again—what I’ve thought since this summer: Mike shouldn’t be coaching the Olympic team again. He’s won his gold medal, he’s done his bit for the country, he’s proven he can coach NBA players. He needs to hunker down and make his last run at Duke and not have his apologists—not me in this case—running around saying, “30 and 7 and the sweet sixteen is a very good year.”

For a lot of teams, most teams, it is a very good year. It just isn’t up to the standards Mike Krzyzewski set. I remember in 1997 when he was still rebuilding after the ’95 disaster when his team lost a close game at Maryland. A couple days later with Carolina in town, Dick Vitale came into the locker room prior to the game and was giving a Vitale pep talk: “You guys’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll win your 20, you’ll be in the tournament.”

When Vitale left, Krzyzewski turned to me. (I was there working on my book on the ACC that season). “I don’t care about winning my 20 or being in the tournament. We’ve let the standards slip around here. I want this team and this program to play to MY standards, not anyone else’s.”

During the next seven years, Duke went to three Final Fours and won a national title. Since then: no trips beyond the sweet sixteen. The standards have slipped. Mike needs to re-think HIS standards again.

Of course he doesn’t need me to tell him how to coach that’s for sure. He can always consult with the woman from, ‘Survivor.’

Well, I blew it on Sunday.

Every week when I cast my ballot for the AP basketball poll I use the 25th spot to try to give a tiny bit of recognition to a smaller school, one that isn’t likely to compete for the national championship in April but is playing good basketball without getting much notice for it.

I know—because coaches have told me—that showing up in “also receiving votes,” is a big deal to the schools I vote for and I have the luxury of being able to do it because the poll has absolutely nothing to do with deciding the national champion. It exists to give people something to talk about and to allow players to talk about being a ranked team or, perhaps more important, beating a ranked team.

I’m not exactly sure how many years I’ve been an AP voter but I remember when I started casting the 25th place vote for the little guys: it was during the ’99-2000 season when I was working on “The Last Amateurs.” Lafayette had won something like 14 straight games and had a good basketball team. The Leopards had won in overtime at Princeton—when Princeton was still very good—and had lost in the last minute on the road to a ranked Villanova team. So, one week in February, I ranked them 25th in my poll.

I didn’t think much of it until a few days later when I was in Easton for a game and the sports information people told me that someone had voted for the Leopards in the poll. (This was before AP made each pollster’s vote available on a weekly basis). I’m pretty sure they didn’t even know I had a vote. So, I told them I had been the voter. That pretty much made me a hero to everyone but Coach Fran O’Hanlon. “Now the kids may get big heads about it,” he moaned, half-joking. Pat Brogan, his assistant coach, who had a sign on his desk that said, “recruit every day,” had already blown up the “also receiving votes,” into giant type and was sending it to recruits.

It never occurred to me that something like that mattered even a little bit. Apparently, it did.

So, I began making it a habit to the point where the guys on the AP desk in New York would actually speculate before I told them who was No. 25 on who I might be voting for that week. I made a general rule—sometimes broken—that if the No. 25 team kept winning it kept its vote.

The whole thing actually got some attention in 2006 when I began voting for George Mason in the poll in early January. I’d seen the Patriots play and thought they were really good. In fact, after they beat Wichita State in February I moved them up to—I think—No. 21. By then others had noticed and they actually cracked the poll at No. 25. After that happened, Joseph White, the AP sports editor here in Washington did a little story on me and my quirky No. 25 vote.

I like to think I’ve always had an appreciation for the little guy in college hoops. I grew up going to games in Columbia’s University Gym and was insane enough to actually LISTEN to games on the student radio stations of Columbia (WKCR); Fordham (WFUV) and Seton Hall (WSHU). I had a math tutor when I was in seventh grade named Steve Handel who was a Columbia grad. He frequently took me to Columbia games during the golden era of Jim McMillan, Heyward Dotson, Dave Newmark and Roger Walaszek. The fifth starter, if you’re scoring at home, was Billy Ames. That group actually reached the Sweet Sixteen in 1968 before losing to a Davidson team coached by—you guessed it—Lefty Driesell.

Anyway, back to Sunday.

Two weeks ago I cast my No. 25 ballot for Army. The Cadets are off to a great start and were 7-2, including a win over a Harvard team (who I almost voted for) that has beaten Boston College and lost a close game at Connecticut. This Sunday I was torn: Army had beaten Division III Mt St. Vincent’s in less-than-convincing fashion. Harvard was still 7-2 and Cornell was 8-2.

The Big Red is one of college basketball’s more fun stories right now. Steve Donahue left a fairly cushy job as Fran Dunphy’s No. 1 assistant at Penn nine years ago to take over a woebegone program that had dropped to the bottom of The Ivy League. He methodically rebuilt—I suspect that’s the only way to rebuild in Ithaca, New York—and after five losing seasons during which Cornell was 51-85, he began to get it turned around in 2007—going 16-13 and finishing third in The Ivy League. The breakthrough came the next year: a 14-0 Ivy record, the school’s first NCAA bid since 1988 and a 22-6 record. Last year produced another Ivy title and this year with a core of senior starters, including Ryan Wittman, the son of former Indiana sharpshooter Randy Wittman, the Big Red is the real deal.

It has two losses to date: to Seton Hall and at Syracuse. It has wins at Alabama, at Massachusetts and at St. Joseph’s. So, I sat there on Sunday thinking I should give Cornell the 25th place vote after it survived in overtime against Davidson in the opening round of The Holiday Festival in New York. I’d already voted for the Big Red once earlier in the season before the loss to Seton Hall.

But I chickened out and stuck with Army. Here’s why: I knew Cornell had to play St. John’s in The Garden in the Holiday Festival final on Monday night. St. John’s is better this year. Its only loss had been at Duke in a good game and I really didn’t think the Red Storm was going to lose on a home court to Cornell. I figured the game would be competitive but St. John’s would win and people would be saying I jinxed Cornell.

Don’t think it doesn’t happen. When Ralph Willard was coaching at Holy Cross he pleaded with me to NOT vote his team No. 25 because the Crusaders always seemed to lose when I gave them a vote. What’s more, now that our votes are made public—which I think is a good idea—I’ve had people ridicule my 25th place votes so I really try to be sure there’s SOME logic behind them.

I gave the vote to Army. Cornell beat St. John’s, 71-66, coming from behind in the second half, outscoring the Red Storm 11-6 down the stretch to break a 60-60 tie. Oh Me Of Little Faith.

Listen, Cornell’s good and a great story too. I definitely want to make it to one of their games with Harvard once Ivy League play begins. In the meantime, their win over St. John’s is worthy of note—serious note. The last Ivy League team I remember beating St. John’s in the Holiday Festival was that Columbia team 42 years ago. I believe the final was something like 61-55. I know I was there—that was when the Festival was an eight team tournament and the last night was tripleheader.

I wish I’d been there last night but at least I had excuses—kids, the weather—for not being in New York. There’s NO excuse for my vote on Sunday night. Maybe I’ll vote the Big Red No. 24 this Sunday.

---------------------------

Several people asked yesterday where I stood on Bob Knight’s comments on John Calipari. I actually wrote my Sporting News column for next week on the topic and don’t like to copy myself too often but here’s my synopsis: Is Knight right that Kentucky would sell its soul to the devil to win and that Calipari’s track record—two vacated Final Fours—makes him tainted? Yes. Are those who respond that Knight never broke any NCAA rules but has broken just about every rule of etiquette, courtesy and how to treat other people right too? Yes.

But all of them miss the larger point: Kentucky isn’t the exception, it is the rule. There isn’t a big time program in this country that doesn’t put winning ahead of all the alleged values the presidents espouse. Heck, forget big time—Penn just fired a coach in December.

The other day I asked Mike Krzyzewski this question: “You were 38-47 after three seasons at Duke and you had a perfect graduation record. If you had kept winning at that rate and graduating players at that rate where would you be today?”

His answer: “Not coaching at Duke.”

Which is, of course, true everywhere. When Kentucky looks at Calipari it doesn’t look at a coach with two vacated Final Fours. It looks at a coach who took one program that was way down (Massachusetts) and another that had slipped (Memphis) and went to The Final Four. The rest is just detail.

So, bottom line: Knight’s right (although his acting as if this is something new in college basketball is kind of silly) but the problem isn’t Calipari or Kentucky, the problem is the value system we’ve built in big-time college athletics. And that isn’t likely to change anytime in the near future—if ever.

The good news this morning is that there was a newspaper at the end of my driveway. The New York Times didn’t make it; The Washington Post did after neither paper had any chance of being delivered Saturday or Sunday in the midst of The Blizzard of ’09. (No mail on Saturday either. What happened to, “neither wind, nor rain, nor snow…”)

The bad news is that the lead story in The Post sports section was—I swear to God—a feature on Ron Jaworski in which he revealed that he thought, having watched hours and hours of tape, that the Redskins looked better the last few weeks. Oh my God. What next? Mike Tirico’s 10 favorite Redskins moments of the decade? Also on the front was a lengthy story on the Maryland women beating American on Sunday afternoon.

Okay, it WAS a slow news day. And at least I had SOMETHING to read at the kitchen table so I’m grateful.

Having grown up in New York I frequently make fun of the absolute panic that hits this area anytime there is a HINT that there might be snow coming. In fact, my first front page—as in front page of the newspaper—story in The Washington Post was about an impending snowstorm. I was the night police reporter on the Metro staff and I was assigned to write a story about how big the storm might be and what preparations were being made. I made all the requisite phone calls and wrote about a 20 inch story—18 inches longer than I thought necessary, but I never complained about extra space.

I went down to the police station to spend the evening after I’d written the story and, as always, the first edition of the paper showed up in the press room at about 10:30. At that point in time The Post was the only news organization in town that sent staffers to police headquarters on a daily basis. Al Lewis, the man whose byline appeared on the first day Watergate break-in story, worked the day shift. Whoever was the lowest person on The Metro staff totem poll worked the night shift—that winter it was me. One of my assignments was to take the 25 papers delivered at 10:30 and walk around the building handing them out to the cops—homicide, robbery, sex (which had some euphemistic name I can’t remember) and perhaps most important, communications. A good source there could give you a major jump on a story.

The free newspapers were a big deal to the cops. If there was any delay at all in their arrival my phone would ring. I’d pick up the phone and there would be a homicide detective on the other end, not telling me there’d been a murder somewhere but wanting to know where the hell the papers were.

On this particular night I picked up the paper before making my rounds and flipped to the Metro section to see if my snow story had made the Metro front. It hadn’t. Disappointed I paged through the section—nothing. I was about to call the desk to demand where the hell my story was when it occurred to me that it had been stuck inside the ‘A,’ section. As I picked it up, my eye picked up a headline at the top right corner of the front page: “Area Girds For Snow—Up to Eight Inches Expected.”

I started to laugh. This was it, my big moment, a front page story—a LEAD front page story and it was on a possible snowstorm. Not the stuff you call your parents about to make sure they notice. By the way, it didn’t snow an inch; it didn’t snow AT ALL. My good friend and mentor Marty Weil, the night rewrite guy then as now, shook his head the next day and said, “Just goes to show what happens if you can’t trust your sources.”

Those sources got this weekend’s storm right. They said it might be up to two feet and it was. I actually did the Washington thing of over-preparing: shopped on Friday; bought a new flashlight because I couldn’t find the old one; bought plenty of logs for the fireplace; got gas for the car--the whole deal. I had a weekend project: clean-up my office, which hadn’t been touched in six months and looked like a storage room.

That worked out fine (I’m still not finished but I can see the floor again) and I took turns working and watching games and then taking a break and watching games. The only two games I DIDN’T get to watch were UCLA-Notre Dame and Duke-Gonzaga. Why? Because the people who run the CBS affiliate in Washington-_WUSA-TV—went to round-the-clock coverage of the snow.

You can’t make this stuff up. It isn’t as if they were telling people stuff they needed to know, like closings—EVERYTHING was closed. It isn’t as if they were reporting injuries or accidents. They just kept saying over and over that it was SNOWING. Then they would show someone standing in their parking lot—they called it a “snow terrace,”—to confirm that it was snowing. They spent several minutes talking about one female reporter’s cute little snow outfit. “Bought it today,” she gushed. “Look, it fits.” They interviewed two people who had skied to the store and showed a dog wearing snow boots.

I kept flipping over in part because I was convinced that at some point they would go back to the games (wrong) and also so I could write today about the inanity of what I was watching. My always-helpful brother, who was able to get some kind of out-of-town feed on his cable system kept calling me with updates. At one point in the second half of the Duke-Gonzaga game he said, “You know you’re missing one of the great defensive performances in history.”

Shut up Bobby.

I DID watch most of The New Mexico Bowl, which was actually a fun game with Wyoming winning improbably in overtime against Fresno State. As silly as it is to play 34 bowl games and include all those 6-6 teams and force schools to buy (and eat) thousands of tickets, I kind of enjoy seeing the little guys have a moment in the sun (or in the case of The St. Petersburg Bowl—brought to you by beef-a-Roni or something, their moment in a dome) and occasionally you will get a game worth watching.

I didn’t even mind when Terry Gannon (who was a great shooter once upon a time) and David Norrie (I have no idea who or what he was) went on about how it was a “great way to start the bowl season.” But when Gannon, no doubt prompted by someone in the truck said, “Wow, what a great beginning to Capital One Bowl Week on the ESPN family of networks,” that was enough for me. He sounded almost as silly as Andy Katz (wait, this just in, Andy Katz reports that North Carolina won last season’s national title) actually referring in WRITING to the ESPN family of networks. If ESPN is a family in any way it is The Simpsons.

Oh, one more note while we’re being silly: Did anyone else notice during the Villanova-Montana Division 1-AA national title game Friday night—which was a terrific game—that it was being referred to as, “The Division 1 National Championship Game.” Why? Because Division 1-A doesn’t officially have a national championship game sanctioned by the NCAA. Where does this insanity end?

By Sunday I had to get out of the house one way or the other. I struggle to watch entire NFL games unless there’s something truly compelling about them. I love Rex Ryan but Jets-Falcons wasn’t getting it done for me. I finally decided to see if I could get down the driveway (it’s pretty long) to our street, which had been plowed just enough to create one lane. My son Danny came out to help and I got almost down the driveway before getting stuck. Danny shoveled for a while and then our neighbor, Pete Henry, rode to the rescue. He keeps a snow-blower in his house for these occasions and he dug me out and got me to the street. It wasn’t easy getting to the main roads from there, but we made it.

Everyone has a snow story of some kind. Mine goes back a long, long way. It was my senior year in college. By then I was covering Duke basketball road games for just about every newspaper in North Carolina as a stringer. Duke wasn’t good enough (seriously) to be staffed on any non-conference road trip so I would write game stories for Durham, Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Greensboro. I’d write a different lead for each and a different ending mixing in different quotes depending on the newspaper. (Greensboro, for example, liked player quotes over coaches quotes). They were all fully aware that I was being shared and didn’t care. At 25 bucks a story I was getting rich.

Duke had a two day road swing in late January to West Virginia on Saturday night and Duquesne on Monday night. I drove to my parents’ house in Washington on Friday (by my senior year classes were something I attended when I had free time) and heard that a major storm was approaching. The interstate in West Virginia was closed so I left early Saturday morning to take Route 50 through the mountains in Virginia to get to Morgantown. It was slow going but I was almost there mid-afternoon when I came upon a truck that had turned over and was stuck in the middle of the two-lane road.

Two hours later it was still stuck and there was no way to get past. I was running out of gas, periodically turning off the engine until I got too cold, then turning it back on. FINALLY, several tow trucks manage to move it just far enough so that we could all get by—10 cars from one direction; ten from the other, at a time.

I got to Morgantown just before tipoff, still shaken and cold. The building temperature was set at 56 degrees because of the energy crisis and there might have been 3,000 people there. Duke lost a really bad game. As soon as I walked out of the locker room, I noticed that the heat had been turned off. I could see my breath. I had four stories to write.

Tom Mickle, then the Duke SID and, as it turned out, one of my best friends in life, stayed with me in the press room. He wore a coat, a ski cap and kept taking off his gloves long enough to send one page at a time on the old telecopier (six minutes per page) that was used then to file. He stayed with me for two hours in a completely empty, un-heated building until I finished (my fingers cramping in the cold) all four stories.

We made it to Pittsburgh at 2 a.m. Never in my life was I happier to see a hotel.

Tom died suddenly of a heart attack three years ago. I have lots of memories of him but none more vivid than that one.

Let me begin today by trying to explain how in the world I left Jackie Robinson off the most important athletes list yesterday—before realizing on my way to lunch, ‘Oh My God I Left Jackie Robinson out!’ Here’s my explanation: I have none. Sometimes you just mind-block. Usually I do it at the grocery store—‘what the heck did my kids tell me to get?’—or on Christmas shopping—“Is today the 16th, jeez maybe I ought to do something about gifts.”

This one I just screwed up. Curt Flood and Jesse Owens should have been on there too and I somehow mentioned Muhammad Ali as an example of someone whose influence went well beyond his ability to box and then left HIM off the list. That may have something to do with the fact that I almost never think about boxing anymore. Ali was just about the last boxer I really cared about because even though I covered Sugar Ray Leonard a little bit I never really bought into his act.

The other person who was mentioned by posters yesterday who I don’t consider an automatic but deserves serious consideration is Bobby Orr because he did change the way defensemen played hockey. The notion of a defenseman scoring 20 goals, much less leading the league in scoring was unheard of before Orr.

I’m not going to go through the entire list today, maybe I’ll just do one guy at a time over the next few weeks so that I can go into a little more detail than a sentence or two on each. What is interesting, as some people pointed out, is that I had 20 people even with the omissions which means there are about 25 who seemingly HAVE to be on the list. To try to pare that list to say, 10, would be virtually impossible. And all of us can think of others who deserve consideration: Did Cal Ripken save baseball in 1995? Should all the steroid stars—Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Clemens et al—be mentioned because they certainly changed the way their sport was viewed. Althea Gibson? John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors—both of whom certainly changed tennis?

Plus, I didn’t even try to include coaches or managers on the list and trying to pick just ten of THEM would be almost impossible. Let’s just say you were doing Mount Rushmore for those guys: John Wooden, right? Vince Lombardi? Red Auerbach? Scotty Bowman? That would mean leaving out (among others) Dean Smith, Bob Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, Phil Jackson, Casey Stengel, John McGraw, Toe Blake, Al Arbour, Chuck Noll, Don Shula, Bill Walsh, Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden, Bear Bryant and Knute Rockne. That’s just in the four major sports and no doubt I’m mind-blocking on someone right now.

In short, there’s plenty of room to discuss this more in the future.

This morning though I feel I have to weigh in on this Roy Williams controversy because I keep getting asked about it—which is actually a little bit of a relief because it means a few minutes less of being asked to psycho-analyze Tiger Woods.

Ole Roy—as he often calls himself—had a fan of the Presbyterian Blue Hose removed from the Dean Dome last Saturday during a North Carolina rout of a badly overmatched team. Apparently the guy stood up as Deon Thompson was shooting a free throw and yelled, “Don’t miss Deon!”

My guess is his major crime was waking up what was left of the crowd from a nice nap. Since he was sitting in the section reserved for FOR (Friends of Roy) and since Roy and others could clearly heard him, Roy got upset and had the guy removed.

Okay, let’s not make this into a big deal because it’s not. Did Roy overreact? Yes—even if some of his loyal supporters have jumped in claiming the fan in question was drunk, was rude, didn’t have a ticket (or should NOT have had a ticket) in that section, had used profanity prior to his crack AND was involved in the conspiracy to kidnap the Lindbergh baby. Deon Thompson, by the way, somehow shook off the ‘heckling,’ to make his free throw.

The fact is Roy didn’t have him thrown out for any of that—whether it was true or un-true as the fan in question and others sitting around him have said. Roy had him thrown out for yelling, “Don’t miss Deon.” Roy should just apologize and let that be the end of it.

Let me say this about Roy Williams right here: I really like the guy, which galls some of my Duke friends. If you question his abilities as a coach, you’re insane, just check the record. And I know people roll their eyes at times about all the ‘aw shucks, I’m just an ole country boy stuff,’ but most, if not all of it, is genuine. If some of it is put on because it helps recruiting guess what?—it works.

In 1991 when I was working for the late, lamented National Sports Daily I wrote a column about Dean Smith after the ACC Tournament basically saying that some of the little feuds he picked were beneath him. The freshest example I used was his refusal to go on the Raycom ACC Tournament telecasts either pre-game on tape or postgame live, in part because he was upset that they hadn’t hired any ex-Carolina players to do color commentary and in part because he thought that Dan Bonner (by far Raycom’s best analyst) had defended what he (Dean) perceived to be dirty play by Virginia. Bonner—surprise—played at Virginia so Dean saw a conspiracy.

The column set off a firestorm. Even though I had always had a good relationship with Dean and with almost everyone I knew at Carolina this was proof—absolute PROOF—that I was a Duke apologist and I was out to get Dean. Frank Deford, who was the editor of The National, showed me some of the letters which accused me of being guilty of most crimes committed in the 20th century, virtually all in the name of embarrassing Carolina and Dean.

Eddie Fogler, who I’d been friends with for years, walked up to me at The Final Four and said, “You are the worst sportswriter in America.”

“Coming from you Eddie,” I answered, “I consider that high praise.”

Duke ended up winning its first national championship that year—no doubt because of my efforts—beating Kansas, coached by Roy Williams, in the final.

A couple of weeks after the Final Four I got a lengthy handwritten letter from Roy. He talked about how much he had always valued our friendship and how much respect he had for me. Then he began to talk about Dean—“Coach Smith,”—and how much he meant to him. At the end of the letter he wrote: “John, I know a lot’s been said that’s unfair to you but I think you know not a word of that has come from Coach Smith. He may disagree with you on this but I know he respects you just as I know how much you respect him. I think the two of you should talk at some point this summer. If need be I will fly into Chapel Hill to make the meeting happen. This is that important to me because of how I feel about you and because there is no one in the world more important to me than Coach Smith.”

Dean and I did talk and agreed to disagree on Bonner and who should or should not be doing color on ACC games and on several other topics. I remember him saying, “At least concede this: when you and I argue it’s usually because I’m standing up for my players.”

I told him I knew that he ALWAYS stood up for his players. I also told him about Roy’s letter. There wasn’t anything phony in that letter and I could tell you a half dozen other stories that would illustrate why Roy is a good guy.

The only thing as silly as Duke fans trying to make Roy out to be a bad guy is when Carolina fans try to make Mike Krzyzewski out to be a bad guy. BOTH are Hall of Fame coaches and BOTH are outstanding men. They have very different styles on and off the court and I enjoy them both.

Do they make mistakes? Of course they do—who among us doesn’t? Theirs are just made in public a lot of the time. So Roy overreacted and it set off a minor firestorm. He ought to shrug his shoulders and say, “Ole Roy is probably a little bit sensitive sometimes.”

Because he is. Which doesn’t make him a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination.

If you want to know why I love college basketball, consider the following: In the calendar year 2009, Harvard University has a record of 2-0 against crosstown rival Boston College. In that same calendar year, North Carolina coached by hard-working Hall of Famer Roy Williams was 0-1 against Boston College. Duke, coached by two-time Olympic coach and Hall of Famer Mike Krzyzewski was 1-1 against the Eagles.

Think about that: Harvard, which last played in the NCAA Tournament in 1946 (its only appearance) has beaten BC twice—once last January a few days after the Eagles had won AT North Carolina—and once last night, 73-67. Both Harvard victories took place (surprise) at BC.

Now you may say I have a bias here—and I do—because I’ve known Harvard Coach Tommy Amaker since he was a high school junior. In this case though my bias has very little to do with it, especially since Frank Sullivan, the man Amaker succeeded at Harvard, is a good friend whose firing three years ago was grossly unfair.

In fact, I would say this: if any Ivy League team beat an ACC team two seasons in a row I would get a big kick out of it. It just isn’t supposed to happen. And yet, in college basketball, results like that DO happen. Already this season Cornell has won at Alabama and in seasons past my friends in The Patriot League have pulled off some decent sized upsets as in Bucknell over Kansas and Arkansas in back-to-back NCAA Tournaments and Holy Cross going into Notre Dame and beating the Irish in the NIT.

Let’s go back to Amaker for a moment. I remember the first time I saw him play because it’s a funny story. I was doing a magazine piece on Mike Krzyzewski, who had just finished his first season at Duke and had more or less washed out in recruiting—finishing second for players like Chris Mullin, Bill Wennington, Uwe Blab and Jim Miller. In recruiting, finishing second and $4 will get you a latte at Starbucks.

Krzyzewski was in Washington to see Johnny Dawkins play in the old Jelleff League, which was up Wisconsin Avenue in northwest DC. The league was a Washington tradition, with games played indoors and outdoors and was most famous for a game in the early 1970s when DeMatha was supposed to play St. Anthony’s for the championship. Because DeMatha Coach Morgan Wootten had refused to schedule St. Anthony’s during the regular season, St. Anthony’s Coach John Thompson played his cheerleaders in the game.

“If he won’t play me in the winter, I’m not playing him in the summer,” Thompson said at the time.

When Thompson was the coach at Georgetown he refused to recruit any of Wootten’s great players. I asked him about that once and he said to me, “there are some people on this earth who you can live away from.” Of course now that Wootten and Thompson are both retired and in the Hall of Fame they joke when Wootten appears on Thompson’s radio show about how the media created their alleged feud.

Sure. And Thompson and Lefty Driesell were buddies back then too.

Anyway, on this particular night, Krzyzewski was sitting in the stands watching Dawkins play when Red Jenkins, then the coach at W.T. Woodson High School in northern Virginia stopped to say hello to him. “You need to stay for the next game,” Jenkins said. “You need to see my point guard. He’s only going to be a junior and he’s little but watch him play.”

Krzyzewski figured he didn’t have much else to do so he decided to stick around at least for a few minutes to see what Jenkins was talking about. “Red’s a good coach,” he said. “I don’t think he’d tell me to watch this kid unless he was pretty good.”

By halftime, Krzyzewski was like a teen-age kid in love for the first time. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Amaker, who probably weighed about 140 pounds at the time. Someone had pointed Amaker’s mother out to Krzyzewski and at halftime he walked over and said (probably breaking about 14 NCAA rules) to her: “Your son is going to look great in Duke blue.”

The funny thing is Amaker really wanted to go to Maryland because John Lucas had been his boyhood hero. But Lefty had recruited a kid named Keith Gatlin so he didn’t pursue Amaker, who was only 6-feet-tall, that hard. A few years later when Amaker was a junior at Duke and Gatlin was a sophomore at Maryland, Gatlin sat out a game at Duke with a bad back.

That was the year I was in Indiana doing ‘Season on the Brink.’ Two days after the game at Duke, Maryland played at Notre Dame. I drove up to South Bend to see the game and my friend Sally Jenkins, who was covering the Terrapins at the time. When I walked into the arena the first person I saw was Driesell.

“Hey Lefty, how’s Gatlin feeling?” I asked.

Lefty looked at me quizzically. “Gatlin?” he said. “He’s fine.”

“Really? I saw where he didn’t play at Duke because something was wrong with his back.”

“Oh that was nothing,” Lefty said waving his hand. “He just had a case of Amaker-back.”

Any guard knowing he was going to be guarded by Amaker for 40 minutes began to feel back pain. Gatlin was no exception.

Amaker seemed destined for stardom when he became a college coach. In his third year at Seton Hall he took the Pirates to the Sweet Sixteen and he had a big time recruiting class on the way including Eddie Griffin, who was supposed to be a superstar. But Griffin proved to be a troubled kid and at the end of the ’01 season he left for the NBA and Amaker left for Michigan. There, he constantly seemed on the verge of turning the program around after taking over in the wake of the revelations about The Fab Five, but never made the NCAA Tournament in six seasons. He was fired after the ’07 season—a stunning turnaround for someone who had appeared to be a lock for coaching stardom.

He landed at Harvard but not without controversy, although it wasn’t his doing. Frank Sullivan had done remarkable work keeping Harvard competitive for 16 years working with one hand tied behind his back in recruiting because Harvard’s admissions standards were far more difficult than any other school in the Ivy League—not to mention the entire country.

When Amaker got the job, Harvard agreed to loosen the admissions standards to bring them in line with the rest of The Ivy League. Naturally, other Ivy League coaches instantly noticed that Amaker was recruiting kids that Sullivan couldn’t have touched and they talked about it to Pete Thamel of The New York Times. Harvard’s response should have been simple: “Yes, we decided to give our new coach a level playing field to recruit just as we do in football and hockey.” Instead, some blowhard in admissions insisted the standards hadn’t changed and Bob Scalise, the athletic director, tried to claim Amaker was just a better recruiter than Sullivan.

Whether that’s true no one will ever know because the two men were working under completely different sets of rules. Regardless, Amaker’s done a good recruiting job with a more level playing field and his third Harvard team appears to be behind only Cornell right now in The Ivy League. The Crimson play at Cornell on January 30th and host the Big Red on February 20th. Both those games will probably be worth seeing.

Maybe next year there can be an ACC-Ivy League Challenge Series. As of right now, The Ivies appear to have the edge. Come on, even if that’s not close to true, you have to love it. I wonder when the BC folks will let Harvard know that they won’t be playing anymore. My over-under is sometime this morning.

I actually feel good for Alex Rodriguez this morning. I think.

He really is one of the more confusing figures to come along during my lifetime. On the one hand, he’s an absolutely brilliant player who has had some breathstreaking streaks and seasons. On the other hand he got caught cheating this past spring and then hid behind partial truths—blaming a cousin at one point for helping him acquire steroids, then claiming he didn’t really know what he was taking—and a refusal to answer direct questions.

He’s had some terrible postseasons and his off-field judgment has, at times, been really, really bad. Forget being seen in clubs with other women while he was still married, the announcement he was opting out of his Yankees contract during game four of The World Series in 2007 was absolutely brutal. If he wants to blame that one on Scott Boras—fine. Who hired Boras?

That said, he probably hasn’t done anything to deserve being pilloried the way he’s been pilloried by some although that comes with the territory in New York. No one is ever good in New York. You are either “absolutely great,”—a favorite saying of Yankees broadcaster John Sterling—or you absolutely suck—a favorite saying of anyone who has lived in New York for more than 15 minutes.

If the Yankees win one more game this season, many, if not most of Rodriguez’s sins will be forgiven in New York because he will have played a key role in delivering a World Series title. You will see the word redemption linked with his name a lot. Don’t be surprised if there isn’t a book next spring and the word redemption appears in the title.

The smartest description I’ve ever heard of Rodriguez came from Mike Mussina during the time I spent with him in 2007 researching, “Living on the Black.” Mussina was never one to pull a punch when you asked him a question and when I first asked him about Rodriguez, sitting in the living room of his home in Tampa during spring training, he smiled.

“Try to imagine this,” he said. “You’ve been told, with a good deal of justification, that you are the best baseball player of your era that, in fact, you might end up being the best baseball player of all time. Then you come to New York and you’re told this: ‘You might be the best player in the game today but you’re no Derek Jeter.’ No matter what he does he’s always going to be in Jete’s shadow. He can’t escape it. If he wins a World Series, Derek will have five. If he wins four, Derek will have eight. He’s like a little brother trying to be as old as his big brother. It isn’t going to happen.”

Think about that. Rodriguez’s ego is as big as it gets. I remember watching him in the Yankee clubhouse during that ’07 season and you could almost read the pain on his face when the media would surround Jeter and gobble up every word he said. Jeter is the kid everyone wants to be—and Rodriguez can hit 1,000 home runs and what Mussina says will always be true.

When Mussina talked about Rodriguez he always called him, ‘Rod.’ Never ‘A-Rod,’ and rarely Alex; almost always ‘Rod.’ One day, sitting in the dugout I asked Rodriguez if anyone else on the team called him, ‘Rod.’ He shook his head, smiled and said, “No, Moose is the only one. I think it’s because he knows I’m the only guy on the team who likes him.”

Mussina was as well-liked and respected as anyone in the clubhouse short of Jeter and perhaps Mariano Rivera. When I ran that line past him he shook his head and said, “Do you think it might be the other way around?”

I suspected he had that right although if the Yankees end up dumping champagne on one another either tonight or by the end of the week, we will be told by one and all how much all the Yankees love ‘Rod,’ and vice-versa.

One other thought on Rodriguez that has very little to do with him directly: Am I the only one who finds Sterling’s, “it’s an A-bomb by A-Rod,” home run call offensive? I really don’t mind all of his little sayings for home runs, its shtick, he knows it and most Yankee fans enjoy it. I wasn’t alive when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but I know the damage they did. I’ve also lived through all the fear that has gone hand-in-hand with the spread of nuclear arms and remember what the cold war was like.

Maybe I’m overreacting but I have to say I wince every time I hear that call. A ‘Tex message,” never killed anyone. A-bombs did.

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The other night my son showed me my ‘Wikipedia.’ I have steered clear of looking at it ever since I first looked it up whenever it came into vogue a few years ago. I honestly don’t know who writes them and I gave up long ago on the notion I was ever going to get mine to focus on the fact that I’ve written 25 books—not the 23 they report—or that several of them are, well, pretty well known and were huge best-sellers. I’ve also never HEARD of The Chapin Report which I write for according to Wikipedia.

It DOES annoy me that the first sentence of my bio claims I’m best known for being wrong on the Duke lacrosse case. I’m not even going to go through that mine field again but I really don’t think I was wrong when I first said the kids should lose their scholarships if they didn’t cooperate with police (which they initially refused to do); then wondered how Mike Nifong could keep the case alive after all the DNA tests came back negative (he ended up being disbarred) and said when it was all over I thought they were probably guilty of everything but rape—as in stupidity, being out of control at parties long before the fateful night, shouting racial epithets that night and sending out hateful e-mails. Okay, I got into it and I know some of the pro-Duke folks out there will want to open the debate again: I don’t. It’s over, the players received millions of dollars in judgments (which they deserved) and so did Coach Mike Pressler who was the real martyr in the case.

It also says I was the subject of major controversy when I called for the abolition of the second amendment after Plaxico Burress shot himself. Major controversy? Lots of people disagreed with me, so what? Happens all the time and that wasn't the first time--by any stretch--I called for the abolition of the amendment, knowing full well it will never happen. THAT was a big moment in my career? I wouldn't put it in the top 100 to be honest.

What got me the other night and the reason my son showed it to me was an update that included my heart surgery. Whomever wrote it, quoted from my post-surgery appearance with my pal Mike Gastineau on KJR in Seattle. According to what was posted I “claimed,” to be a-symptomatic, and “claimed,” to have had an angiogram done because of one small black spot detected on a stress test.

Why the hell would I “claim,” any of that?

Here’s what’s most disturbing. My son said, “don’t worry dad, I can fix it.” Sure enough, an hour later, he had fixed it. What that tells me is that just about anyone can hack into the Wikipedia system. My ‘claim,’ would be that anyone using it as a research tool ought to be very careful.

By the way, kudos to Coach David Cutcliffe for winning five games in a season at Duke for the first time since 1994. It really doesn’t matter that the bottom of the ACC is awful this season, that’s real progress for a school that was a complete joke for most of the last 15 years. One warning for you Dukies who think the team is one game from being bowl eligible: It’s not so.

Because some genius in the athletic department decided to schedule North Carolina Central this year (not sure who made that call) before NCCU is officially a Division 1-AA team, that win doesn’t count towards bowl eligibility. Duke will have to win seven to play postseason.

I made my regular appearance on 'The Sports Reporters' with Steve Czaban and Andy Pollin in my regular spot (5:25 ET on Wednesday's) yesterday. Click the permalink, then the link below, to listen to the segment on a multiple topic day -- Navy and Duke football, Andre Agassi's book revelations and of course, brief Redskins talk.

Click here to listen to Wednesday afternoon's segment: The Sports Reporters


This morning I was back at the regular time with the newest The Tony Kornheiser Show (Thursday's, 11:05 ET) while at the Patriot League Media day for basketball.  It was a typical segment with Tony, and we discussed everything from dinner to a Sally Jenkins article, but spent most of the time on the Agassi talk (which led into a good discussion on tennis players vs. golfers).

Click here to listen to the radio segment: The Tony Kornheiser Show


I make regular appearances on Seattle's The Gas Man Show on Thursday evenings (5:35 PT), and this week we started off talking the Seattle Sounders (I covered the original team a couple times back in my earlier days) then led into Redskins talk - what is the endgame for Snyder and this team?

Click here to listen to the radio segment: The Gas Man Show

The other day, after I joked about reminding Furman Bisher that there was, "no cheering in the press box," a number of people wrote asking how strictly that directive was adhered to and if I had stories about moments when it was not.

Overall, I would say there are few breaches of decorum--certainly not many at all like the one that made the rounds on YouTube a couple weeks ago showing former Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert going nuts after his former team recovered a fumble in the end zone--are pretty rare. But they do happen.

My most embarrassing breach of course was in 2005 when Navy played at Duke and I reacted to a string of terrible calls against Navy by saying "f----- referees!" The weird thing about it was when I said it I actually looked around the radio booth to see who had said it. When I saw everyone staring at me I realized I was in trouble. There's no excuse for that kind of thing and I was lucky the Navy people stuck by me.

Of course an enclosed radio booth is different than the press box itself. No one at Duke that day was aware of what had happened until I came out of the booth to tell Eric Ruden, who is in charge of the radio network, what I'd done. I'll always be grateful to him and to Chet Gladchuk, the Navy AD for the way they dealt with the incident. When I asked Eric to let Chet know what had happened because I was willing to resign on-air if he wanted me to, Eric came back and said, "Chet said to tell you he said the same thing on the play."

To which I replied, "Yeah, but he didn't say it on the air." The next week when Chet and Eric got phone calls from the media wanting to know if I would be punished in some way their answer was the same: "John made a mistake, he apologized for it instantly and he feels bad about it. It's over as far as we're concerned."

To this day people still ask me, "did you get through the broadcast Saturday without an f-bomb?" Hey, I made the mistake, I have to live with it and the stale jokes that come with it. Eric once pointed out to me that about 10 times more people knew I'd been doing the games for nine seasons (now 13) after the incident than before the incident.

Inside the press box or on press row at basketball games you rarely see breaches to etiquette. We all have biases and some are more obvious about them than others. There are also times when guys just get caught up in the emotions of a game. Bob Ryan, the great Boston Globe columnist tells a story about the famous Duke-Kentucky game in 1992 when Christian Laettner made the shot at the buzzer in overtime and he was so stunned and amazed that he leaped to his feet. "I thought, "Oh My God, what am I doing I look like a fan," he said later. "Then I looked around and saw that everyone else was standing too. We were just overwhelmed by the whole game and what we'd seen."

I wasn't in Philadelphia that night. I was in Tampa, Florida watching the game in a hotel room with Tim Kurkijian, then of Sports Illustrated, now of ESPN. In spite of that fact, I got a call on Monday from a Charlotte radio station wanting to know if I would come on the air to discuss the fact that I had been seen leaping the press table to run on the court and hug Laettner. I suggested they call Tim to verify where I was at that moment and told them I did not have the ability to beam myself from Tampa to Philadelphia. I later found out that the rumor had been started by a guy I'd known early in my journalism career who blew up his own career and was very bitter about anyone who'd had more success than he had.

There are also times when people assume biases. When Mike Kryzewski was still trying to build his program at Duke, the one local journalist who stuck with him during the first three seasons was Keith Drum, who was sports editor of The Durham Morning Herald. Because Keith--who is now a scout for the Sacramento Kings---was supportive of Krzyzewski many North Carolina people, including Dean Smith, began to label him, "a Duke guy." As it happens, Keither went to North Carolina, but that didn't matter. In 1984, Duke beat Carolina in the ACC Tournament semifinals, one of Krzyzewski's first really important wins since that Carolina team included Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Brad Daugherty and Kenny Smith--among others.

Keith and I have been friends since I was in college. We walked down the steps that led to the locker room area and there was Dean, smoking a postgame cigarette. (He gave up smoking a few years later). As soon as he saw us, he made a beeline for Keith, hand out and said, "congratulations, YOUR team played very well."

Keith and I thought that was pretty funny, congratulating the guy who went to Carolina on a Duke victory while the Duke graduate stood there watching (with a huge smile on his face because it WAS pretty funny). I still tease Keith about that to this day,

Actually I lied when I said my only breach of decorum was the Navy-Duke football game. In 1978, Duke played Kentucky in the national championship game. It was my first Final Four. I was a year out of college and knew the players and coaches well. Needless to say I was pulling for Duke. Early in the second half Jim Bain, one of the referees, missed a traveling call. Bill Foster, the Duke coach, got off the bench and, from across the court, made the traveling signal and then held his hands out, palm up, as if to say, "where was the call."

Bain gave him a technical foul on the spot. Al McGuire and Billy Packer, working their first Final Four together for NBC, were stunned by both calls. "That's taking one mistake and turning it into two," McGuire said at the time. I might be wrong, but I don't remember another coach getting teed up in a championship game since then. Good refs give coaches a lot of rope under that kind of pressure and--most of the time--the refs working the final are good ones.

Many Kentucky fans think I blame Bain for Duke losing the game. I don't. Kentucky was the better team and was almost certainly going to win that night whether Bain got the travel right or didn't lose his temper. But those two calls certainly didn't help Duke's cause.

Two years later, I was covering a Virginia-Ohio State game in Columbus. It was Ralph Sampson's freshman year. Jim Bain had the game. During a time out, I found him standing right in front of me. "Hey Jim" I called out. He turned around and said, "what?”

"Remember the Duke-Kentucky championship game two years ago?" He nodded. "That technical on Foster, WORST call I've ever seen."

Bain just stared at me for a second and then said something profane. I was about to respond when the late Barney Cooke, who was then Virginia's SID, grabbed my shoulder and said, "don't say another word." Barney was right of course. I shouldn't have said anything in the first place. But it DID make me feel better. And no one can say that I was cheering in the press box--or on press row--that day.

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Just for the record, last night was one of those that's special to me. Three or four times a year I have dinner with three men I got to know well covering Maryland politics: one is Harry Hughes, who as the governor when I covered the state house, one of the best men I've ever had the chance to know. (And it isn't just because he's a Democrat. He's simply a wonderful man, liked and respected by Democrats and Republicans alike). The others in the group are Steve Sachs, the former state attorney general and Tim Maloney, who served five terms in The House of Delegates (he was 22 when he was elected) who left to become a wealthy lawyer.

We usually go down to Easton, on the Maryland eastern shore, because that's where Governor Hughes lives and have a great time talking about today's politics and reliving old stories.

A couple of years ago, I walked into the restaurant where we were meeting to see if Governor Hughes had arrived yet. Traffic had been surprisingly light on The Bay Bridge so we were a few minutes early. I was looking around the bar area when I heard a voice say, "what the hell are you doing down here?"

I turned around and there was Bob Pascal, who had been Governor Hughes' Republican opponent in 1982. I covered that election, which Hughes won in a runaway. Throughout the summer, Pascal kept saying to me, "When I get on the tube (TV advertising) Harry's going to hear my footsteps. He got on the tube and ended up with 37 percent of the vote. I told Pascal why I was there--we were celebrating Gov. Hughes birthday that night--and he laughed and said, "I always knew you were a Democrat." (True, he did, because I told him up front but also told him that some of my best sources in the legislature were Republicans, which was also true).

"Tell you what," Pascal said. "Because I'm a good guy, I'm going to buy Harry a bottle of wine for his birthday."

Sure enough, the governor showed up a few minutes later and we all sat down. I was telling him the story when Pascal walked up behind him. Hearing the footsteps, he turned around.

I couldn't resist. "Bob," I said. "It finally happened! Harry heard your footsteps! It only took 25 years but he DID hear your footsteps!."

Some things, I swear, you just can't make up.

There is a story on the front page of this morning's Washington Post about kids who are now fifth, sixth and seventh graders who are learning about the events of 9-11 from history books. When I saw the headline I was briefly stunned, because like most people, I'm sure, I remember the events of that day as if they took place yesterday. But eight years is a long time in the life of a child. My daughter Brigid, who is 11, claims to remember 9-11, but I think she remembers more of what she's read than what she saw or heard. Danny, my 15-year-old, does remember it. In fact, one of my most chilling moments--among many--was going to school to pick him up and hearing him say, "dad, are they going to try to fly a plane into our house?"

One thing that came out of 9-11 was a toning down, at least for a while, of political vitriol. Most of us can still remember the sight of members of Congress--Democrat and Republican--standing on the steps of the capitol that night singing, 'God Bless America.' For once, the country banded together because never had evil been more clearly defined for us. It wasn't a liberal; it wasn't a conservative, it was crazed zealots who steered airplanes into buildings and those who danced in the streets to celebrate.

Now, that's all gone. (Those of you who don't like reading me on the subject of politics should skip the next couple of paragraphs). The scene the other night in The House of Representatives when Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted, "you lie," at President Obama during his health care speech--and, even worse some of the reaction to it--shows just how far we have slid backwards in eight years. Let's not even debate here (because this really ISN'T a political blog) about whether illegal aliens would be included in the bill even though people on both sides of the aisle reading the bill on Thursday said they clearly would not.

The point is this: under no circumstances do you heckle The President of the United States. The guy who threw the shoes at President Bush went to jail--which is fine with me because he tried to assault him. Wilson shouldn't go to jail, but he should resign. Imagine, for a moment, if, say Barney Frank, had screamed at Bush during a speech to Congress what the reaction on the right would have been. Instead, there were still Republicans trying to claim that Wilson's facts were right--as if that would be a defense--and then the insane right wing pundits were saying he should not have apologized.

Sorry folks. You can completely disagree with any president on any issue. But there is such a thing as respect for the office and decorum. Several years ago, at the height of the Iraq war I was invited to a breakfast at The White House as part of the National Literary Festival. I sent regrets for this reason: I could not, at that moment, bring myself to shake hands with President Bush because I believed he was needlessly putting thousands of young Americans in harm's way and I was very angry about it. I had friends in Iraq and had known several people who had died or been wounded there. But I would NEVER accept the invitation and then be rude to The President in The White House. If I went, I would shake his hand and say, "Mr. President, thank you for the invitation. It is always an honor to be inside The White House."

If Wilson was so emotional on this issue, he should have stayed away from the speech. What's more, his apology was a non-apology. Even after making it he was still insisting he was right about the bill.

(Okay ditto-heads et al it is now safe to return to the blog).

As luck would have it, I will be at West Point tonight, certainly a place that is appropriate on this anniversary. Army is having its annual Hall of Fame induction dinner tonight and I was asked to MC, largely because the best-known of the eight inductees is Mike Krzyzewski. I'm old enough that I saw Krzyzewski PLAY at Army, on Bob Knight-coached NIT teams. In 1969, Army played South Carolina in the NIT quarterfinals. South Carolina had been ranked in the top ten most of the year but had lost the ACC Tournament and since only the tournament champion made the NCAA Tournament back then, the Gamecocks came to New York. Krzyzewski shut down John Roche and Army won the game. Years later, Bobby Cremins told me a story about that night.

"We were down and had to come out of our zone and go man-to-man," he said. "As we came out of the huddle Frank (McGuire) said, 'Bobby, who've you got?' I said, 'I got the kid with the big nose whose name I can't pronounce.'"

I first met Krzyzewski my senior year in college when Duke played Connecticut (not a power back then) in Madison Square Garden. I flew to New York a day early with Coach Bill Foster and Duke's star guard, Tate Armstrong. We attended what was then the weekly New York coaches luncheon at Mama Leone's where Foster--who had coached at Rutgers--spoke to a lot of old friends. By then, Krzyzewski was coaching at Army and Jim Valvano--who had played for Foster at Rutgers--was at Iona. After lunch, Foster introduced me to both of them.

"John does a great Dean Smith impression," Foster said. (Actually to quote Dean's long-time SID Rick Brewer, EVERYONE did a Dean impression in those days). It didn't take a lot of coaxing before I did it, referring often to the importance of seniors.

Krzyzewski and Valvano both laughed, little knowing how important Smith would become in their lives a few years later. Of course I had no idea how important Krzyzewski and Valvano would become in my life.

The funny thing is there seems to be a rule that, because I went to Duke, I'm not supposed to say or write anything good about Krzyzewski because I'm doing it just because I'm a "Dukie." Anyone who knows me at all knows I'm hardly considered a loyal son by Duke people and most people know just how much respect and affection I have for Dean Smith. But just as people in politics like to put simplistic labels on people, those in sports do the same. Heck, if you pick up a Duke media guide on the distinguished graduates page under "journalism," they list some woman who was on 'Survivor." I don't make the cut. Maybe calling the last two presidents a liar (Nan Keohane) and a weakling (Richard Brodhead) has something to do with it.

I don't need to defend Krzyzewski's coaching record on any level so I will leave you with one story about Krzyzewski the person and if telling it makes me a "Dukie," so be it. Three years ago, my father died two nights before Duke played North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The funeral was on the day of that game. Duke won in the final minute. Needless to say I didn't get to watch.

The next morning my phone rang and I heard Krzyzewski's familiar nasal voice. Almost always he will open a conversation with some kind of joke or putdown. He once returned a call I'd made to him on New Year's Day and said, "how does it feel knowing the highlight of your year (his calling) has come and gone and the year isn't even 24 hours old yet?"

This time he just said, "how are you holding up?" I told him I was okay, my dad had been almost 85 and he'd lived an amazing life.

"I want to tell you something," Krzyzewski said. "Last night, during our last time out, I stepped away from the huddle for a second and looked up and just said, 'Martin, this one's for you.'"

The last college basketball team my dad ever cared about was CCNY--where he graduated in 1941. Even so, I got pretty choked up at the thought and the sentiment.

That's why, Dukie or not, I'm honored to be part of the ceremony tonight. And I know that all of us in the room, Democrats and Republicans, will take a long moment to honor those who were killed eight years ago today. I can only hope that most of us will remember how that day felt when this day is over.

The biggest story in sports today is, of course, Michael Vick signing with the Philadelphia Eagles. I certainly get why it is a big story but, to be honest, I’m sort of one with it. I really don’t care how much they use him or whether they put in the ‘wildcat,’ to get him some snaps behind Donovan McNabb.

Like a lot of people I’ve said what I have to say about him. If he gets back on the field and is productive and stays out of trouble, good for him. He’s a relatively low-risk signing for the Eagles because they have an established quarterback who isn’t going to be worried about losing his job to Vick. If he doesn’t behave or doesn’t perform, they can just cut him and say, ‘oh well we tried.’

I’m actually more interested today in a report someone sent me from Scout.com that lists the access policies college football teams have to their practices. I know that this is something fans really don’t care about and, to be honest, I don’t care that much either. It’s not as if being unable to watch Nick Saban’s practices has any affect on my life.

In fact, as I wrote recently about an incident years ago with the Redskins, I’m just as happy most times to not watch practice. Years ago, shortly after I had made the decision to give up covering politics to cover sports again, I was up at Holy Cross writing a story about a coach named Rick Carter.

To be fair, the story was my idea. I was going up to cover the Hall of Fame tip-off game in Springfield between North Carolina State and Houston and I suggested to my boss that I stop en route to see Carter. He was, at the time, a hot young coach who people thought might someday coach the Redskins since he was a friend/protégé of then Redskins GM Bobby Beathard.

Carter seemed like a very good guy and, after we had talked awhile, invited me to watch practice and then finish our interview afterwards. That sounds good to me. Holy Cross’s practice field is right at the top of the campus, essentially on top of a mountain. It was mid-November and the sun set about 30 minutes in to the practice. It then started to snow. I honestly can’t remember ever being colder but I couldn’t leave - I’d been INVITED by the guy I was writing about to watch.

All I could think standing there was: “I could be in a bar in Annapolis right now having a drink with a politician. Instead I’m standing here freeing to death. WHAT was I thinking?”

I made it through practice and finished the interview. Of course I couldn’t know that behind his friendly smile, Carter was a very troubled man. Not long after I wrote the story he had a chance to get the North Carolina State job but, as I recall, Holy Cross wouldn’t let him interview. The program slipped a little bit and a couple years later, Carter committed suicide.

If you are a beat writer—which I haven’t been for a long time now—you need access to practice. That’s because you have editors breathing down your neck wanting to know how a quarterback looked or if someone hobbled off the field and went straight to the training room.

What’s more striking about it all is the continuing—and escalating—paranoia—of coaches. If someone is putting in a trick play for a specific game and doesn’t want it on tape or reported in a newspaper or online, I get that. But generally speaking there are no secrets in football—or any sport really—anymore. Do you think Ohio State is going to be surprised on September 5th when Navy comes out and runs the triple option?

It’s interesting to note that Pete Carroll at Southern California, who has been as successful as anyone in the game for the past 10 years, runs what are essentially open practices. One might think—MIGHT think—that other coaches would look at that and say, ‘well, somehow the Trojans have overcome the presence of the media at their workouts.’ Having really good players tends to be more important than closing practices.

I couldn’t help but get a laugh when I noticed that Duke—my alma mater—allows TV crews to tape ‘B role,’—I think that means they can’t show live plays, just show players stretching and talking and warming up—for the first 20 minutes of practice.

Duke won four games last year and people acted as if David Cutcliffe was Bear Bryant reincarnated. Certainly the four wins were a major improvement over the four wins in four years prior to 2008 but let’s not get carried away here. Right now, Duke should be sending a stretch limo to the home of anyone who wants to publicize the program in any way. It basically takes a court order these days to get into one of Mike Krzyzewski’s practices—unless you’ve known him for 100 years as some of us have—but he’s won THREE national championships. Let’s see four WINS vs. three NATIONAL TITLES. Yeah, I’d say their access standards should be about the same.

One other note before we all go off to watch Tiger Woods win The PGA this weekend: I wrote the other day that the reason Tiger reacted badly to being put on the clock is that last Sunday in Akron is that he doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do. Someone put up an angry post demanding to know how I knew Tiger didn’t like being told what to do. The answer’s simple: I’ve watched him in action for 13 years now. He’s a control freak—and I say that as a complete control freak myself—and it’s part of what makes him great. Why do you think he’s fired caddies, agents and plenty of others in the past? Why don’t you think his current caddy plays the role of attack dog for him? Since his dad was brought up, the fact is Tiger, who loved his dad without any doubt, asked his dad to back off and give him some space to make his own decisions after he turned pro.

I don’t dislike Tiger and my respect for him as an athlete knows no bounds, but unlike a lot of people who cover him I’m not going to roll over and write and say that he’s always right so he’ll call me ‘Johnny,’ in press conferences (he tends to add a ‘y’ to the names of people he likes).

He was wrong last Sunday. The pace of play he and Padraig Harrington were moving at all day was ridiculous. Athletes ask officials to be one thing in sports: consistent. That’s what John Paramour was doing—being consistent. Tiger didn’t like that. Doesn’t make him a bad guy, just means he was wrong.

He’s also the greatest player in the history of golf.

I guess it is now official that Mike Krzyzewski will coach the 2012 Olympic basketball team.

From the point of view of USA Basketball, the decision makes absolute sense. You are putting the team in the hands of a coach who has proven he can coach the international game; has won the confidence of the NBA stars who will make up the team and already has three years of experience in preparing to win an Olympics.

From the point of view of Krzyzewski, who has been a friend of mine for 30 years, I think accepting the job is a mistake.

I understand why he did it: he feels an obligation to his country—Krzyzewski isn’t one of those guys who talks patriotism, he really and truly believes it—to Jerry Colangelo, who picked him to coach the team in spite of many doubters back in 2005 and to USA Basketball, an entity he has worked with for more than 20 years now.

I get all that. There’s also the simple fact that he’ll enjoy it. If you’re a coach, why wouldn’t you want to coach the best players and represent your country? There’s also ego involved: all the great coaches out there and USA Basketball wants him—again.

As I said, I understand the decision, I just wish he hadn’t made it.

When Krzyzewski was asked to coach the Olympic team following the debacle in Athens, he NEEDED to do it. Why? Because anyone who is any good at anything needs new challenges and needs to find out if he can do something he’s never done before. He’d made the decision years earlier that the NBA lifestyle wouldn’t fit him so this was his chance to prove—to himself and others—that he could coach NBA players, deal with all the egos, put together a cohesive unit and win the gold medal.

He did it. And, by all accounts, he did a superb job at every level, learning as he went—always one of his great strengths—so that he was a much better international coach in 2008 than he was in 2006 when the U.S. finished third in The World Championships.

Now, there’s nothing left to prove. The Redeem Team redeemed. Krzyzewski’s resume is as complete as any in history and, in all likelihood, he will pass his mentor Bob Knight as the all-time winningest coach in college basketball history sometime in 2012. He’s currently sitting at 833 wins—46 away from Dean Smith and 69 short of Knight.

Krzyzewski’s got one thing he needs to do over the next few years: restore Duke basketball.

On the face of it, that’s an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. Duke was 30-7 last season. It won the ACC Tournament and reached the NCAA Sweet 16. That’s the kind of season that gets most coaches lucrative contract extensions.

But Krzyzewski is not most coaches. He’s a coach who went to 10 Final Fours in 19 seasons from 1986 to 2004, winning three national titles along the way. He’s also a coach whose arch-rival, North Carolina, has been to three Final Fours in the last five years, winning tow national championships during that time. Duke’s record against North Carolina during that time is 3-7. You think that makes Krzyzewski happy?

No. Duke can put out press releases all over the place citing the gaudy numbers of last year or the year before (28-6) but here are the only numbers Krzyzewski cares about. Since 2005 Duke’s been to zero Final Fours. It barely squeezed into its first Sweet Sixteen in three years last March and then got crushed in Boston by Villanova. Elliot Williams, who would have been a key player in the backcourt this coming season, transferred to Memphis.

Duke has not—NOT—been getting the kind of player it got during the Golden Years. There are lots of reasons for that—one being the over-the-top anti-Duke backlash that exists (if I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, ‘you’re a pretty good guy for a Duke guy,’ I would be long-retired)—but they have added up to a clear recruiting gap between Duke and North Carolina and a handful of other top programs.

Krzyzewski likes to do lots of different things. He’s a wonderful speaker; I think he’s been involved in more books than I have; he does loads of charity work. You can’t knock any of that. But right now, at this moment in his life, he needs to dig in the way he’s dug in before and really get after it. I’m not knocking his work ethic on any level: in fact, I’m someone who has at times urged him to work LESS hard.

But here’s what opposing recruiters are going to be saying about him right now: You want to play for a coach whose focus might not be 100 percent because he’s coaching the Olympic team again? You think he’s going to have time to recruit the best players around you?

Doesn’t matter if there’s any truth in it at all. Recruiting isn’t about reality, it’s about perception.

I sincerely hope Krzyzewski proves me 100 percent wrong on all of this and tells me—as he most certainly will—to stick my opinions in a well-hidden place. But I still think this is good for USA Basketball, not so good for Mike Krzyzewski. And, to be honest, I care a lot more about the latter than the former.