There is something special about the calendar hitting September. Kids complain about going back to school—although I know there are now lots of places where they start in August—but most are excited about seeing their friends again and talking about their summers.

For someone like me, September is right up there with March as a month I always look forward to on the calendar. It isn’t just that football starts, it is that pre-season football ENDS. Honestly, the number of meaningless games and stories that take place during the summer in the NFL could fill The National Archives. Yesterday on Washington Post Live I swear to God we spent five minutes—which in TV-world is the equivalent of five hours in the real world—talking about Malcolm Kelly.

Malcolm Kelly? Seriously? A guy who has about 12 catches in two NFL seasons and is always hurt? He’s finally been put on injured reserve after grabbing his hamstring AGAIN on Monday after returning to practice for the first time in a month. This morning, in The Washington Post there’s a story on the Redskins lost draft of 2008—the one that was run without adult supervision by Dan Snyder and Vinny Cerrato. There’s even a quote from Cerrato—put out through Snyder’s new flak—claiming Snyder had nothing to do with the decision to draft Kelly. Of course Snyder flew to Oklahoma to watch Kelly work out. That, Cerrato said was, “just for support.”

And Tiger still loves Elin.

I know I digress but why do guys like Snyder insist on hanging on to complete untruths? (Also known as lies). Why not just say, ‘yeah, Vinny and I really blew it in the draft that year. If we end up with two guys panning out we’ll be lucky. That’s why Mike Shanahan’s here now.’

In every NFL city there is talk about irrelevancies like Malcolm Kelly and who will be the third string quarterback or the No. 5 receiver. Once the season begins, that goes away and the games have meaning. College football is different because there are no exhibition games although there are some really BAD games played early in the season—power schools lining up against lower Division 1-A (sorry NCAA, that’s still the term I use) teams or 1-AA schools.

The most intriguing game of this first weekend won’t be played until 8 o’clock Monday night in the stadium formerly named for Jack Kent Cooke. That means the 90,000 or so who go to see Boise State and Virginia Tech can expect to get home well after midnight because a national TV game will take close to three-and-a-half hours to play and then it will take about that long to get out of those god-forsaken parking lots.

Still, it is a game well worth watching. Boise State has been begging for games like this in recent years and, of course, very few power schools will play them. That’s why I get annoyed when I hear people like my pal Tony Kornheiser say things like, “well Boise State couldn’t go undefeated if it played in the Big Ten.”

Really Tony? How do you KNOW that? There certainly isn’t anyone in The Big Ten willing to actually PLAY Boise State. Except for a couple of Pac-10 schools NO ONE will play them home-and-home or even coast-and-coast. You think Virginia Tech is going back out west for a rematch? The only reason Virginia Tech is willing to play the game—besides money—is that it has less to lose than Boise. Why? Because the ACC has become a laughingstock nationally in recent years and a win would help restore some luster. A loss merely confirms what everyone already thinks anyway.

If Boise wins and beats Oregon State and runs the table it should play for the national championship. If the power schools whine about their schedule, like I said, PLAY them. Last year the BCS conspired to make Boise and TCU play one another in the Fiesta Bowl because they were so frightened that both would walk in and beat power schools.

Okay, I’m not going to go on one of my BCS rants today—plenty of time for that later.

What I really want to say is that I’m psyched it is September. I’m looking forward to Monday afternoon (Thank God it isn’t a night game too) when Navy and Maryland play in Baltimore. I’d prefer Saturday—ALL college football games should be played on Saturday; sadly we know that ship has sailed—but that game should be a lot of fun. It is very important for both teams: Maryland is coming off a horrific 2-10 season and needs to rebound to save Ralph Friedgen’s job and Navy has extremely high hopes after going 10-4 and crushing Missouri 35-13 in The Texas Bowl.

I’ll be starting my 14th season doing color on Navy radio, which is hard to believe. As I’ve said before there are few things I enjoy more than my association with Navy. I like calling games involving good kids—and they ARE good kids in spite of occasional transgressions and that one angry Navy professor who has made a cottage industry for himself by ripping his employer in any publication that will accept his work—and I enjoy greatly working with (new dad) Bob Socci, Omar Nelson, Frank Diventi and Pete Van Poppel in the booth.

All that said, this Maryland game makes me very nervous. There’s too much hype around this Navy team: Ricky Dobbs Heisman talk (I love the attention the kid is getting, but please let him play a few downs this season first okay?); talk about an un-defeated season (won’t happen—too many tough road games: Air Force, Wake Forest, East Carolina, not to mention this Maryland game and Notre Dame in the Meadowlands with a real coach in charge. Heck, even Duke has a reasonable team) and people acting like the Maryland game is a semi-walk over.

Please. Maryland has two very good running backs, BCS caliber and BCS-size lineman and defenders and a mobile quarterback. I’ve always though Friedgen could coach and the reasons for the team’s recent failures are based on recruiting not actual coaching. Plus, there is nothing more dangerous than a team that has something to prove and Maryland has a LOT to prove and knows it will be 3-0 (it has two cupcakes after Navy) if it can beat the Mids.

Either way, it will be a fun afternoon. Either way, September is always fun. The weather cools, the football gets better and I actually enjoy September baseball. I’m one of those guys who likes going to late-season games even if they don’t involve contenders. I like seeing who is playing as part of the expanded 40 man rosters and I enjoy the relative calm of a September game with nothing except pride and perhaps the long-term future of teams at stake. The pennant race games—and postseason—are fun for entirely different reasons. Of course most of postseason is played so late that I struggle to stay up and rarely go anymore. If there is an early round afternoon or early evening game near me, I might go.

There’s also some interesting golf the next few weeks, the U.S. Open tennis where there’s bound to be an upset (I think) at some point and another month of being able to swim outdoors. So, if we can just keep the damn hurricanes away, this should be a lot of fun.

There was a lot going on this past weekend in sports. Lou Piniella retired. Vin Scully did not. (Thank God). Stephen Strasburg felt a twinge in his arm and everyone in Washington writhed in pain. Roger Federer won a tennis tournament. Serena Williams and defending men’s champion Juan Martin Del Potro withdrew from the U.S. Open. Fred Funk won an alleged major on The Senior Tour. (Are there any events on that tour that AREN’T ‘majors?’). Arjun Atwal, who was involved in a fatal accident in Florida three years ago won on The PGA Tour, the first player since Fred Wadsworth in 1986 to come through a Monday qualifier just to get IN to the tournament and then win.

Oh, and Albert Haynesworth is whining—which was apparently enough reason for the Washington Redskins to fire their PR guy on Sunday.

What a world.

Let’s start with the ridiculous—which is always the NFL team here in Washington. The Redskins should have conceded the folly of signing Haynesworth before training camp even started. It’s not as if Haynesworth was the first god-awful Dan Snyder free-agent signing, he was just the most recent and the most expensive. The minute Haynesworth refused to show up for mini-camps (or OTA’s or whatever the NFL calls them) that should have been a clear sign that he learned nothing from his embarrassing season a year ago, could care less about his teammates and was going to try to battle Mike Shanahan’s authority. Last I looked, Shanahan has pretty good credentials as both an authority-figure and as a coach.

We all know what’s gone on since. Haynesworth couldn’t pass the conditioning test he was required to take when he finally showed up for camp. He finally passed and began working out—occasionally. Then last week he didn’t work out, refused to speak to the media and the team said he had headaches. After he didn’t play until the second half in Saturday’s exhibition game, he whined that the team wasn’t telling the truth about his headaches and that he should have started the game.

I have two words for Haynesworth: SHUT UP. I have two words for the Redskins: CUT HIM. Sure, they’re going to take a huge financial hit but there’s an old saying about being penny-wise (okay in this case $21 million-wise) and pound foolish. The Redskins are trying to be good again; trying to get past all the embarrassments of recent seasons. This guy is a pox, who is likely to be unproductive. The sooner the Redskins get rid of him, the sooner the team can move on and focus on the future.

In the meantime, after Haynesworth mouthed off on Saturday, Redskins PR director Zack Bolno got fired on Sunday. For the past two years, most people who have to cover the team will tell you Bolno has been a voice of reason and (gasp) cooperation in a sea of stonewalling built by Snyder, former GM Vinny Cerrato and martinet-bully PR guy Karl Swanson. Cerrato and Swanson are finally gone but Bolno is being made the scapegoat for SOMETHING and it is clearly the team’s loss. Of course if the team wins, no one other than the people who know Zach (I got to know him when he was the Wizards PR director) will care.

The other Washington story is, of course, Strasburg. When he clutched his arm after pitching 4 and one-third shutout innings in Philadelphia on Saturday, you couldn’t help but go, ‘Oh God no, here comes surgery.’ It is now likely that bullet has been dodged but the Nats are also likely to shut him down for the rest of the season. After all WHY take any risk with him? The team is going nowhere, he’s proven he can pitch very well at the big league level already. The only reason to pitch him at all would be ticket sales and the Nats are smarter than that. If you pitch him now and God Forbid something happens, you will regret sending him out there forever.

On the tennis front: I think there’s a very good chance Roger Federer is going to win another U.S. Open. Del Potro has been hurt most of the year, so his withdrawal is no surprise. Rafael Nadal, as always seems to happen this time of year, is struggling on U.S. hard courts. Andy Roddick has had a so-so summer at best. In fact, the hottest player on tour this summer has been Mardy Fish, who lost a very good three set match to Federer in Cincinnati yesterday after beating Roddick for the second time in the last few weeks in the semifinals. For once, the Open is wide open. Someone like Novak Djokovic could get hot or Roddick could get on a roll in front of the New York fans.

As for the women, I don’t know, I think Chris Evert is the favorite now. Maybe Martina Navratilova or Steffi Graf? With Serena Williams out—foot surgery after she stepped on some glass—Venus Williams having been invisible all summer, Maria Sharapova who-knows-where with her game, Justine Henin out hurt (again) and defending champion Kim Clijsters looking shaky ANYONE can win. Billie Jean King maybe. Now that would be a story.

Arjun Atwal is a remarkable comeback story—sort of. Certainly coming back from injuries that caused him to lose his PGA Tour card and to go through a Monday qualifier—players call it a ‘four-spotter,’ because there are four spots in the field open, often with more than 100 players trying for them—to win his first tour event is remarkable.

But Atwal’s story is a little murkier than that. He had made a very good living playing around the world after leaving India as a teen-ager and had moved to Orlando, where he often played at Isleworth with Tiger Woods. On a March afternoon in 2007, after playing nine holes with Woods and John Cook, he was driving home on county road 535 when a car—driven, as it turned out by another Isleworth resident—fell in behind Atwal.

The police believe to this day that Atwal and the man began racing. Apparently CR 535 was infamous for street racing. Atwal has admitted to going 85 miles per hour. The police say it was more like 94. The other man apparently got up close to 100. Both lost control on a curve. Atwal lived. The other man did not. Police wanted to charge Atwal with vehicular homicide but the Florida attorney general decided that making a case in court that Atwal was the CAUSE of the accident would be difficult.

There seems to be little doubt that Atwal was guilty of stupidity and was incredibly lucky to live and not go to trial—or to jail. He has told other reporters that as bad as he feels about what happened he knows he “did nothing wrong.” Maybe he’s talking—as instructed by his lawyers—about the death of Mr. Park, the other driver. Clearly he DID do something wrong based on the speed he was going so it is difficult to make his win on Sunday as much of a feel-good story as it might otherwise be.

I mean, good for him, hanging in through the injuries and the Monday qualifiers and the guilt he must feel after the accident. But, on a wholly different level, like his friend Woods, Atwal must bear some responsibility for the difficulties he went through after his accident. Totally different story—obviously—in fact one far more tragic.

*****

One final note: I couldn’t help but notice that some posters STILL think that there are waking rules officials only with SOME groups at majors championships. That is flat out wrong: At the U.S. Open, British Open and the PGA every group for all four days is assigned a walking rules official. The Masters does not assign a walking rules official to ANY group because of its tradition that no one goes inside the ropes except caddies, players and TV camera and sound men. Dustin Johnson had NO advantage over anyone on the golf course last Sunday. In fact, he had a disadvantage because David Price, his rules official, failed to warn him he was in a bunker as a good official would have done. I am really tired of hearing the apologists say he wasn’t ‘obligated,’ to do so. No he wasn’t. Often in life what is right is not what you are obligated to do it.

Even if you disagree with that opinion, let’s keep our facts straight. Everyone had a walking rules official that day. Johnson just drew the short straw when he was assigned Price.

As most people know there are few things in life I find more boring than stories about NFL training camps. The other day on Washington Post Live, my friends Ivan Carter and Rick Maese were droning on about the Redskins receiving corps when I snapped out of my slumber and said, “enough already, let’s talk about Buck Showalter.” (Good hire by the way, the guy may be an insane micro-manager but he’s good. Tony LaRussa is insane that way too and he’s had some success last I checked).

Carter and Maese were both kind of stunned that I went completely off the TV-format reservation but I couldn’t stand it anymore. Thank goodness I’ll be out of town next week for The PGA Championship.

That said, it is impossible not to sit back and giggle at the whole Albert Haynesworth fiasco. There may be no one who defines the 21st century athlete better than Haynesworth: He is gifted, spoiled, defiant, could care less about his team and if I were a Redskins fan I would have trouble wanting to see him succeed. Of course those who still care about the Redskins have already sold their souls to the worst owner in sports history so Haynesworth is just another brick in the wall.

Haynesworth signed with the Redskins about 15 minutes after the free agency period began in 2009 for $107 million, $41 million of it guaranteed. The fact that the NFL could find no evidence of pre-free agency tampering (the deal was made at 5 a.m. on the morning when you could begin TALKING to free agents) is proof that their security department must be run by Inspector Clouseau.

Haynesworth proceeded to be an even bigger bust last season than the rest of the team, which was quite a feat given the Redskins 4-12 record that led to the firing of both their coach and general manager., not to mention the beat-up starting quarterback. He was never in shape, constantly exhausted and often-injured. At least for one season he was as bad a signing as Jeff George—another brilliant Dan Snyder move—and that is saying a lot.

But then Snyder decided that 11 years of playing Fantasy Football (badly) was enough. Someone finally got in his ear and told him that he had done the impossible: he had turned Washington against the Redskins in large part because people were sick of his ridiculous football moves; his constant gouging of his fans; the awful stadium experience they had to put up with every week and, perhaps most of all, Snyder’s arrogance.

Snyder’s a bad guy and he has surrounded himself with enough enablers that he no doubt blames the media for everything that’s gone wrong with his team. But he’s not a fool and when his security people had to start removing home-made signs from fans entering the stadium because not all of them were shout-outs to soldiers in Iraq, a bell went off in his head somewhere.

He FINALLY fired Vinny Cerrato, who as a general manager did his best work as a lousy talk-show host. He fired Jim Zorn, who was more an innocent bystander in the Snyder-Cerrato fiasco than anything else but clearly never had the authority or the cojones to lay down the law to slackers like Haynesworth—among others.

Then Snyder hired Bruce Allen, who at least had a legitimate resume in personnel and, finally, to no one’s surprise, he hired Mike Shanahan as the coach and to actually be in charge of the football operation. No more watching tape with the owner; no more comments like, “I’ll consult with Mr. Snyder about what to do next.”

There are some who will note that Shanahan only won one playoff game in Denver after John Elway retired. That’s a little bit like saying Joe Torre never won a World Series until he managed the Yankees. The best coaches and managers need players. It isn’t as if the Broncos were awful post-Elway, they just weren’t as good. Check and see how good the Colts are in the five years after Peyton Manning retires.

Shanahan made it clear from the outset that, if nothing else, the Redskins were going to be run like a real football team. He stopped all the silly talk that the offensive line was fine and used the No. 4 pick in the draft to take a left tackle—something Cerrato and Snyder never quite got around to doing even as their quarterback was getting pummeled on a weekly basis. Prior to that, Shanahan somehow got the Philadelphia Eagles to trade Donovan McNabb for a second round draft pick.

McNabb isn’t Manning or Tom Brady but he’s pretty damn good and a major upgrade from what the Redskins have had at QB in the Snyder era. IF the line blocks for him he will make plays.

Shanahan also made it clear he wouldn’t play any silly games with players who didn’t want to show up for mini-camps or OTA’s. You can call them voluntary all you want, if the coach says be there, you need to be there. Even Joe Gibbs played that game with the late Sean Taylor when he no-showed. So, when Haynesworth no-showed, largely because he was sulking about having to play in a 3-4 defense, Shanahan bided his time—knowing HIS turn would come.

And now it is here. Haynesworth has no choice but to be in training camp. The Redskins could void his $21 million bonus—paid this offseason—if he failed to show up. Shanahan has declared that anyone who missed the pre-season camps has to pass a conditioning test to practice. Everyone knows he made this up to humiliate Haynesworth who, even if he is 30 pounds lighter, can’t run across the street without huffing and puffing. So, Haynesworth failed the test twice. Now he says his knee hurts and he can’t take it again until it stops hurting.

And Shanahan just smiles. He knows Haynesworth is the ideal nose-tackle for a 3-4 defense because he’s huge, takes up space and can occupy two blockers per play. Haynesworth doesn’t like that idea because there’s no glory in taking two guys out of a play while someone else gets a sack or makes the tackle. But he’ll be good at it when he finally starts to play.

And he will play. The whole notion that he missed valuable time is hooey. The only thing more overrated than training camp is ESPN’s ‘exclusive,’ reporting on Brett Favre’s retirements and un-retirements. Even with a new system a player needs about a week to ten days to learn what he’s supposed to do on the field. This is NOT rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. Many veteran players hold out just to miss training camp. In his final season with the Giants, Michael Strahan insisted throughout August he was retired. He came back the week before the season began and helped the Giants win The Super Bowl.

There’s no reason Haynesworth won’t be ready on September 12th, which is the only time it matters if he’s ready. Shanahan knows that. Which is why he’s letting him know loud and clear right now who’s in charge of the Redskins. It isn’t Danny Snyder and it sure as hell isn’t Albert Haynesworth. If nothing else, it’s pretty entertaining stuff for the month of August.

This moring I joined Tony Kornheiser for his newest version of The Tony Kornheiser Show at 11:05 ET.  Click the permalink, then the link below, to listen to the segment from this week. Among the topics we discussed were my golf game, some books I've been reading and more relevant topics like Bob Huggins and his broken ribs. Lastly, we discussed Mike Kryzewski and his coaching of USA Basketball and Duke, and finished off with a little talk on Tiger Woods.


Click here to listen to the segment: Tony Kornheiser Show

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Yesterday I joined The Sports Reporters in the normal timeslot (5:25 ET on Wednesday's).   In it, we discussed the Redskins, including the situation with Albert Haynesworth, and training camp hype in general.

Click here to listen to the segment: The Sports Reporters

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Also, I joined The Gas Man show on Wednesday evening in my normal 8:25 ET spot. This week was hosted by Elise Woodward, and we spent a great deal of time discussing this weeks US Senior Open Championship at Sahalee Country Club, why the PGA Tour doesn't have a regular stop in the Seattle area and Larry Scott and his branding campaign of the PAC-10.

Click here to listen to the segment: The Gas Man

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:

One of the more recent trends in college athletics is the quaint notion of schools accused of rules violations, “self-reporting,” their indiscretions and then doling out punishment to themselves. This is a little bit like someone caught robbing a bank coming into court to describe to a judge or jury what he did and then saying, “Yup, I did it, but I don’t think it was THAT big a deal so I’m giving myself two years probation and banning myself from that bank for five years.”

The judge and jury nod accordingly and the guy who robbed the bank goes back to planning his next robbery.

The NCAA copout usually goes something like this: “The school cooperated in every way and thoroughly investigated these violations.” Often they will even add that the notion to levy harsher penalties has been bypassed BECAUSE the school undertook its own investigation.

In short, once caught red-handed, the school said it was really, really sorry…for getting caught.

That brings us to today’s revelation that the University of Michigan has concluded its investigation into its football program and Coach Rich Rodriguez. Last fall when the Detroit Free Press quoted former players as saying that Rodriguez and his staff routinely violated NCAA rules on the amount of time players could spend on football related activities, everyone at the school rushed in to issue denials and defend Rodriguez. Now the school is saying that, yes, there were violations both in terms of hours players spent on football and the number of coaches on staff. It is proposing to slap itself on the hand by cutting back on its auxiliary staff and (gasp) not letting some of them attend meetings. It is also proposing a two-year probation—with no sanctions attached to that probation.

The first thing you might say—especially if you’re a Michigan fan—is what is the big deal in any of these violations? No one bought players; no one cheated on a test. That’s true. And no one is saying here that Michigan should receive the death penalty or anything like that in this case.

That said, the rules limiting practice and workout time exist to protect players from over-zealous coaches. We all know they’re out there in every sport but especially in football where a lot of coaches think the road to success leads through hundreds of hours in the weight room. A number of rules changes have been made through the years to limit coach’s ability to punish players for poor performance.

One favorite, especially of basketball coaches, was to make players practice immediately after a poor performance in a game. Nowadays, a team can’t stage a practice the same day as a game. There are still coaches who will make their players come back after midnight to practice but it’s rare if only because the extra few hours often gives the coach a chance to cool down a little.

What’s a little bit chilling in the Michigan case is the attitude of the school and the athletic director. The report itself denies the charge of coaches ‘abusing’ players by making them work extra hours—clearly that’s a subjective term—but goes on to say “in start contrast to media reports.” Those reports came from ex-players. My suggestion to Michigan would be to shut up on this issue.

Then there are the quotes from Athletic Director David Brandon, who, according to the AP, ‘bristled,’ when it was suggested that Michigan cheated in breaking the rules it is admitting to breaking. “Bad word, inaccurate word,” he said. “We made mistakes and where I come from, a mistake is different from cheating.”

Wow. Talk about splitting hairs. Where I come from you break a rule that everyone knows is a rule, you knowingly do it and then you initially deny it, it is called cheating. Let’s be clear, this isn’t going 65 in a 55, this is—at the very least—reckless driving. If Rodriguez told his coaches to break the rules or knew they were breaking them he screwed up. If he didn’t know the rules or didn’t know they were being broken, he screwed up. Last I looked the Michigan job isn’t Rodriguez’s first rodeo. He knows the rules and so does his staff. If they don’t, they should probably be fired for incompetence.

So let’s not jump on a high horse here Mr. Brandon, and get bent out of shape if someone says breaking the rules is cheating. Michigan also denied an NCAA allegation that Rodriguez failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance within his program. “We think that is overly harsh,” Brandon said. “We do believe that there were things that could’ve been done better and Rich would be the first to agree that details he delegated shouldn’t have been in retrospect.”

Aah those pesky delegation details. This is the part where assistants get thrown under the bus. One staffer was fired according to Michigan’s report. Question: If Rodriguez did a bad job of delegating in the compliance area doesn’t that mean he did a pretty lousy job of promoting an atmosphere of compliance? Just asking.

Rodriguez is 8-16 in two years as Michigan’s coach. If the Wolverines don’t show marked improvement this year, he’s going to be fired. Of course it won’t be because he and his staff broke rules it will be because he and his staff didn’t win enough games. Judging by Michigan’s response to the NCAA’s accusations—which were brought on by statements made by former players—losing is the only crime anyone in charge at Michigan is really concerned about.

Which probably doesn’t make Michigan different than anyone else playing big time college football. One other thing that’s a good bet: The NCAA will go along with at least 90 percent of the Michigan report. Do you think it is going to make Michigan ineligible for postseason or take it off TV? Central Michigan maybe. Eastern Michigan perhaps. But Michigan? Not going to happen.

******

In the wake of the announcement yesterday that New York-New Jersey has been awarded the 2014 Super Bowl, there’s a big headline in today’s Washington Post that says, “Why not Washington?”

Here’s why not: The stadium is one of the worst in the NFL, complete with obstructed seats, terrible roads in and out and an owner who literally gags his fans if they want to express opinions about the team inside the stadium or, in some cases, if they want to send a shout-out to a relative serving overseas.

The NFL should reward any of THAT with a Super Bowl? Please.


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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:

During my weekly appearance on Tony Kornheiser’s radio show yesterday, Tony asked me if I thought Tiger Woods had used performance enhancing drugs. My answer was direct: “I don’t know.”

I’m well aware of the circumstantial evidence, or as some people call it, the “PED checklist,” that seems to fit Woods in many ways. I’m also aware of his categorical denials and the fact that he was one of the more outspoken golfers in favor of drug-testing when the subject first became an issue on The PGA Tour. Since neither Woods nor anyone in his inner circle confides in me very often the only honest answer was that I simply don’t know.

After I’d finished my segment, Tony, as he was going to break, said dismissively: “’I don’t know,’ that’s a really good radio answer.”

That, to be honest, annoyed me. Tony and I make fun of one another all the time and it is almost always good-spirited. I called him during the break and asked him if he would have preferred I pretend to have inside information or that I just rip Tiger and declare him guilty of all sins—something I’ve been accused of doing (incorrectly in my humble opinion) by Tony and others in the past. Tony conceded the point and that was that.

Maybe I was sensitive to the situation because the night before, while watching TV, I heard a golf writer say this: “I know Tiger pretty good and I’m sure he never took PED’s.”

Really? If there’s one thing we know for sure about Tiger since November 27th it is that those who thought they, ‘knew him pretty good,’ were fooling themselves. I used to joke about it when Tiger would call guys by nicknames during press conferences—Tiger’s like a hockey player, he loves adding Y’s to people’s names or shortening them—and you could almost see the guys blow up with pride at the recognition.

No one—let me repeat this NO ONE—in the media knows Tiger, ‘pretty good,’ and none of us have a clue as to whether he has used PED’s or not.

All of which brings me in a long-winded way to today’s drug-accusations: Floyd Landis, four years after being stripped of his Tour de France title and vehemently denying he did any blood-doping, now says he systematically doped his blood for at least four years. He also says that Lance Armstrong and just about every American who ever rode a bike—and I think Paul Revere in prepping for his midnight ride on a horse—was involved in blood doping.

There’s also the story about Santana Moss of The Washington Redskins receiving HGH from Dr. HGH himself, Anthony Galea—who also treated Woods in this six degrees of Everyone’s on Drugs World—and everyone here in Washington being in a tizzy over that.

You know what: Santana Moss doesn’t matter. Oh he matters to the Redskins and their fans who want him on the field September 13th against the Cowboys but there’s no moral issue here for most people. The only real question on Moss isn’t so much did he do it but if he did it how big a penalty will Commissioner Roger Goodell slap on him for the transgression. Moss issued a non-denial, denial a couple days ago—a weak one at that—and Coach Mike Shanahan reverted to the, “just because he saw a doctor (who hands out HGH like jelly beans) doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”

Fine. As with all athletes in team sports, Moss may be an HGH user but he’s WASHINGTON’s HGH user and people will stand behind him—as long as they believe he can get deep on the Cowboys secondary.

Lance Armstrong is an entirely different story. Armstrong is a genuine American hero: a guy who not only recovered from cancer to win The Tour de France seven times, but has used his fame to raise millions and millions of dollars for cancer research. You can call him cocky and arrogant and a lousy husband/boyfriend or any other name you want but there’s no getting away from what the guy has done and from the people he has inspired.

On Thursday, the fifth graders at my daughter’s school put on a ‘wax museum,’ exhibition in which each kid picked an American hero and dressed up like them as if they were part of a wax museum. You pressed a button on the kid and they read you that person’s biography. My daughter was Lance Armstrong.

Which is yet another reason on a long list why I don’t want to believe Armstrong was a cheater. Landis has now become another voice claiming he was, giving details about—among other things—storing blood for Armstrong in an apartment in 2002. Armstrong has already pointed out that the race Landis claims he was in while this was going on took place in 2001, that Landis doesn’t even have his dates correct and has denied Landis’s charges. So have the other American riders accused by Landis. We’re still waiting for comment from Paul Revere.

I am skeptical of just about every person accused of using PED’s who denies using them because history shows that in almost all cases, the denier becomes the confessor at some point in time. How much would you like to bet that some time in the future Barry Bonds will write a book copping to everything, saying the pressure got to him after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa broke all the home run records in 1998.

Of course there’s a big difference between being skeptical and KNOWING. I can’t have it both ways can I? I can’t say, yeah, Moss is probably guilty because I don’t have any feelings for him at all and he plays for a team owned by a bad guy and then turn around and say that Armstrong is innocent because he’s a truly heroic figure and my daughter chose him as her subject for the wax museum exhibition.

If only life were that easy. If only I could sit on a TV set somewhere and say, ‘I know (fill-in-the-blank) pretty good and he would never use PED’s.’ I knew Mark McGwire, if not pretty good at least a little bit and I didn’t know he was using steroids. I wondered, but I didn’t know. I DO know a lot of college basketball coaches pretty good and I can’t swear to you that any of them cheat or any of them don’t cheat. I have my suspicions but, as with Armstrong and Moss and Paul Revere, I certainly don’t know one way or the other.

What’s saddest about this is that, know-it-alls aside, none of us DOES know and therefore we end up having to wonder about just about everyone. That’s really a terrible way to have to approach sports isn’t it?

Here’s the one and only thing I THINK I know for sure about sports right now: When they run The Presidents Race tonight at Nationals Park after the top of the fourth inning, Teddy Roosevelt will lose. Then again, someone said to me last night that word is Teddy’s going to break his five year losing streak the night Stephen Strasburg makes his debut.

If that happens then there is NOTHING I know for certain about sports.


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

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:

This past Monday I was making my weekly appearance on Washington Post Live, which airs here in town on Comcast Cable. Because of some kind of sponsorship deal the show has a segment EVERY day on the Redskins (and then later airs a show called, ‘Redskins Nation,’ which is so god-awful you would fall down laughing while watching it if its presence on the air—ANY air—wasn’t so downright sad).

Anyway, with the draft coming up and the Redskins having just completed their first mini-camp under new Coach Mike Shanahan, we actually did two Redskin segments. One of the other guests was Jason Reid, who does an excellent job covering the team for The Washington Post. Covering the Redskins for The Post is such an awful job I once left sports for two years rather than accept the assignment. (More on that in a moment).

During the mini-camp ‘discussion,’ (what the hell is there to discuss about mini-camp?) Jason casually mentioned that the media was not ALLOWED to be at the Redskins facility on Friday and Saturday. Only on Sunday did Shanahan grant them a few moments with the God-like figures who inhabit Redskins Park.

At first, I was literally stunned. No media at a mini-camp? What are they doing, plotting an invasion into Afghanistan? It then occurred to me that this lack of access, although it varies from team-to-team, is the way the NFL does business. Why does it do business this way? Because it CAN.

Even with a potential strike or lockout looming in 2011, there is nothing bigger in American sports (I throw in American only because of the soccer World Cup which occurs every four years and just about brings the rest of the world to a complete halt) than the NFL. I mean look at all the hype going into the draft, which is now a ‘prime-time,’ event. I mean, has there been enough speculation yet? What amuses me most is that with all the speculation—much of it usually flat out wrong—even after the draft takes place no one really knows what they have, who will be a true impact player and who won’t.

A draft usually becomes a good draft in the third round and beyond. If you blow your first pick—see the Oakland Raiders—then you’re going to be awful because even those guys who never stop talking on ESPN aren’t likely to screw up the first round. Heck, even the Redskins picked a good player in the first round last year. The best teams and general managers do their most important work in the late rounds and in signing college free agents. The teams with the most depth win in the NFL and depth is built in the late rounds of the draft and through free agent signings that usually rate one paragraph. You don’t get good by signing Albert Haynesworth—or for that matter Terrell Owens—you get good by signing Torry Holt and having him catch 70 balls for you on a one-year contract. Things like that.

Okay, back to the NFL and the lack of access the media has. I know most people reading this will say, ‘who cares about your access.’ Well, if you are a football fan YOU should. Look, watching practice or mini-camp doesn’t really matter a lick. I watched most Ravens practices (and mini-camps, which WERE open to everyone in the media) during 2004 and was mostly bored doing so.

Years ago, shortly after I had stopped working at The Post fulltime, I was doing some work for The New York Times. I had a contract with Sports Illustrated but liked keeping my hand in at daily journalism and Neil Amdur, then the Times sports editor, allowed me to do it.

The Redskins were playing the Giants and Neil asked me to go out to Redskins Park to write a couple of features during the week. I was standing on the practice field while the Redskins warmed up talking to Richard Justice, who was then The Post’s Redskins beat writer. Joe Gibbs walked over.

“John, I’m really sorry but we only let our local writers watch practice,” he said. “You’re going to have to leave.”

“Gee Joe, thanks,” I said.

“Thanks?”

“Yeah, thanks. Thanks for thinking for one second that, even if I cared, I’d have any clue what you guys were doing. And thanks for giving me an excuse to go write while you’re practicing.”

Gibbs actually laughed. I happily went off to write.

Nowadays, most NFL practices are shut tight—mini-camps apparently included. When Brian Billick coached the Ravens, he was about as open with the media as any coach that ever lived. All his pre-season practices were open. Once the season started he’d let people watch the beginning but once the team actually started scrimmaging or putting in a game-plan, everyone was shooed inside. Nowadays, ANY access to players on or off the field is extremely limited.

Access in almost all sports—golf is the notable exception—has been cut back greatly in recent years. Hockey locker rooms used to be open pre-game. No more. Baseball clubhouses are still open but for less time and players spend far more time in the off-limits areas, which have been greatly expanded in new ballparks. College basketball is the worst offender: Once, almost every college hoops locker room—even Georgetown under John Thompson the elder—was open postgame. Now, except during the NCAA Tournament (all credit to the NCAA on that one) most are closed and a few ‘selected,’ players come to an interview area. One notable exception? Duke. Maybe some of the coaches who complain so bitterly about Duke getting good publicity all the time should think about that for a moment.

The shame of it from the public’s point of view is that it is so much harder to get to know players when you have almost no access to them. I’ve always found that the best stories usually occur when you’re standing around casually talking to someone. It certainly benefits me in golf where I spend a lot of time hanging out on the range and the putting green just talking to players.

There is no casual time with NFL players for most guys in the media. I had the chance to spend casual time with the Ravens in ’04 and the best stories I found were about guys most people in the public never hear much about: the long-snapper; the punter brought in for a couple of weeks because of an injury; a backup offensive lineman who had played his college football at Williams.

But NFL coaches don’t care if the public hears those stories. They care about controlling everything in their little world on a day-to-day basis and they are allowed to do so by the league, by the media (which has little wherewithal to change anything) and by the public whose only real concern isn’t a good story about a backup lineman but whether last year’s 4-12 team can make itself over into a playoff team.

I get all that. Which is why, back in 1982 when George Solomon, then The Post’s sports editor called me into his office and announced, “congratulations, I’m making you The Redskins beat writer,” I said no. I was very much enjoying myself covering national college football and basketball and I knew that, even then, covering the Redskins beat was basically being a hard-working stenographer: who was injured, who didn’t practice, what did Coach Gibbs think of next week’s opponent? (Greatest team in history every single week).

That’s not to say I wasn’t flattered being offered the most read beat in the newspaper. I just thought life was too short to waste even one season doing that. I told George, with all due respect, I didn’t want the beat. He told me he was the boss—he was right—and I’d do what he said. I walked straight to David Maraniss’s office. He had just been promoted to Metro editor, replacing Bob Woodward. Both had told me I had a standing offer to come back and cover Maryland politics for them anytime I wanted.

“Does the offer still stand?” I asked.

“Absolutely.”

A week later I was in Annapolis. I never covered the Redskins. When I went back to sports two years later it was to cover national college basketball and tennis. I was reminded again on Monday just how lucky I was to never spend one day as an NFL beat writer. Back then, it was lousy. Now, it’s a lot worse.

News Item 1: David Stern finally gets mad—justifiably—and suspends Gilbert Arenas indefinitely.

News Item 2: Andre Dawson is voted into The Hall of Fame—good job by the voters. Robert Alomar is not—he should have been but will be next year. Bert Blyleven is not for the 13th straight year. I just don’t get it.

News Item 3: Mike Shanahan is introduced as the new Redskins coach. He deftly ducks questions about who will be in charge and does everything but kiss Dan Snyder on the lips during his press conference. Of course for $35 million most of us would kiss almost anyone on the lips.

News Item 4: Kansas comes from eight points down AT HOME to beat CORNELL. I was a little stunned at game’s end based on the way the fans were acting in Allen Field House that they didn’t storm the court.

News Item 5: The PGA Tour begins the 2010 season today on Maui. Hallelujah. It might be possible to talk about golf for at least a sentence or two without using the words Tiger Woods.

News Item 6: The Islanders come from behind in Colorado, then blow a lead but beat the Avalanche 3-2. They are now at .500. Okay, this may only be a news item to me but what the heck. I went to bed happy.


Now, to review.

Item one--I have no doubt that David Stern would have preferred to wait for the legal process to move further along (he is, after all, a lawyer) before taking action on Gilbert Arenas. But after Arenas’s idiotic behavior on Tuesday in Philadelphia, he had no choice but to act.

The photo of Arenas pretending to ‘shoot,’ his teammates with his fingers—while they all stood around laughing—may have been the most damning moment in this entire debacle. Arenas then made it worse (if possible) with his postgame comment that, if he felt as if he’d done anything wrong, then he’d apologize.

There are some guys in sports who need John McEnroe following them around repeatedly saying, “You cannot be serious!.” (Quick aside: Years ago I was in a hotel room with McEnroe after a match. Mary Carillo was also there as was a friend of McEnroe’s whose name I honestly can’t remember. Room service had been ordered and hadn’t shown up after 45 minutes. McEnroe finally told his friend to call and find out what the hell was going on. The friend picked up the phone and said to McEnroe, “do you want me to just ask what’s going on or, you know, give them the ‘You can NOT be serious,’ bit?’ McEnroe opted for the latter. The food showed up about five minutes later).

Once Stern saw the photo and the quote he had to get Arenas off the court right away. If he hadn’t, he would have looked foolish. Flip Saunders looked pretty bad not taking action right away in Philadelphia but Stern seems to be covering for the Wizards and their inaction by saying he had ordered them not to take action until he did.

My guess is Arenas doesn’t get it and isn’t going to get it. He still thinks his mistake in bringing guns into The Verizon Center was akin to forgetting to slow down in one of those camera speed traps—pay the 40 bucks and move on. It’s pretty clear his teammates haven’t gotten it yet either even though they tried to act as if they did in Cleveland Wednesday night. Still, you could hear them clinging to the, “when the truth comes out it won’t be so bad,” line.

Wrong. This is already really bad and, in all likelihood, the more truth that comes out the worse it is going to be for Arenas.

It’s truly a sad story because this was a guy who lit up a bleak sports skyline when he first came to Washington. And, as if so often the case, the reaction to the mistake has been at least as costly as the mistake itself. If Arenas had instantly thrown himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion and said, ‘My God, what was I thinking, I’m so sorry,” and NOT twittered jokes and NOT shrugged it off as no big deal and NOT still been playing it off as a joke the day after his lawyer released his clearly insincere apology, people would be saying by now, ‘hey, leave him alone, he made a mistake and he acknowledged it.’

Now, even the perpetual jock-defenders are shaking their heads and saying, ‘what was he thinking?’

We all know the answer to that question.


Item Two: I’m happy Andre Dawson made it to the Hall of Fame. In the years that I voted, I always put him on my ballot. (The Washington Post no longer allows writers to vote for Halls of Fame which I think is silly but, hey, they’re writing the checks and I’m cashing them so I don’t vote). He was a great two-way player for a long time, a superb base runner who had a long, productive career. I think his batting average (.279) held him back but all his other numbers were so good—including eight gold gloves—I thought he was deserving.

Alomar is a lock Hall of Famer. The only reason he came up just short this time (73.7 percent of the votes when 75 percent is needed) is because some voters are still punishing him for the 1996 John Hirschbeck spitting incident (Hirschbeck BTW has forgiven him and endorsed his candidacy) and because there are some guys who will not vote for a guy his first time on the ballot.

The second reason is a joke: You either are a Hall of Famer or are not a Hall of Famer. I had this argument with Bill Conlin, for whom I have great respect, when he didn’t vote for Nolan Ryan the first (and only) time he was on the ballot. I’ve always believed that if a voter leaves certain players off the ballot for any reason—like a Cal Ripken or a Tony Gwynn to give two recent examples—he should lose his vote for the next year. Seriously, who died and made any of us God?

The Hirschbeck incident is different. The ballot DOES say that a player’s actions as a person can be taken into account. Alomar—surprise—was initially unrepentant when the incident occurred in 1996. In fact, one of the sadder scenes I’ve ever seen was the first game of the playoffs that year when Oriole fans, normally among the best in baseball, booed the UMPIRES when they came on the field because Alomar was going to be suspended to begin the next season.

That was Alomar’s one truly bad moment and you don’t wipe out an entire career for that. (Steroids is another story entirely).

Blyleven is the mystery to me. He came up a little shy of 300 wins—287—but had some other great numbers, notably the fact that he pitched SIXTY shutouts. Just as one means of comparison, that’s more shutouts than Tom Glavine had complete games (57). Sure, different era, but not THAT different—Glavine was in the big leagues for several years before Blyleven retired.

I’m not picking on Tom—obviously—and he is and should be a lock Hall of Famer since he won 305 games. But sixty shutouts? Are you kidding? Blyleven pitched on a lot of bad teams but on good ones too. There are parts of his record you can nit-pick but overall? He should have been in years ago.

For the record, this isn’t personal at all. The couple of times I dealt with Blyleven as a player he wasn’t especially pleasant. I remember in 1992 when I was doing my first baseball book trying to set a time to talk to him when he was pitching for the Angels. I was in Anaheim for three days and asked if he could give me some time on any of those days since he had just pitched the day before. “I’ve done my media for the week,” he said. (He had done Roy Firestone’s show the day before).

So, I went instead to talk to Jim Abbott, who you may remember became a solid big league pitcher even though he was born without a right hand. “I’ll make you a deal,” Abbott said. “I’ll talk to you for as long as you want about whatever you want if you tell me everything you know about Steffi Graf.” (I’d just written ‘Hard Courts.’)

Jim Abbott is a Hall of Fame guy. Blyleven is a Hall of Fame pitcher.


Item three: Shanahan arrives. Building of monument begins. There’s not much to say about this except that everyone knows if Dan Snyder doesn’t get out of the way it won’t matter how good a coach Shanahan is. When Shanahan was asked who was in charge he answered the question as if the issue was whether he or Bruce Allen had final say. Good answer even though that wasn’t the question.

He also kept saying over and over that he had never met anyone who was more enthusiastic about the Washington Redskins than Dan Snyder. Wow, that’s out on a limb. It’s a little bit like saying you’ve never met anyone more enthusiastic about my books than me. Then he said Joe Gibbs had told him no one had been more supportive of him than Snyder. Last I looked Jack Kent Cooke gave Gibbs everything he could possibly want to help him win three Super Bowls AND chose him in a power struggle with Bobby Beathard—which was probably a mistake. Then again, Snyder did FINANCIALLY support Gibbs better than anyone ever did.

Oh, one more thing: Word today is that Jerry Gray may become the defensive coordinator. What a surprise, the guy Snyder used to get around The Rooney Rule, who stood there and stonewalled for three weeks not only keeps his job but gets promoted. So unlike Snyder.


Item 4—I wrote here last week that Cornell is really good. The Big Red came very close to becoming national darlings last night but couldn’t quite hold on against the No. 1 ranked team in the country. ESPN correctly switched to the late stages of the game from a desultory Duke-Iowa State game and I swear I thought I was watching Kansas-Texas the last five minutes based on the crowd reaction to the rally.

No doubt they were relieved at dodging what they thought would be an embarrassing loss. But really it wouldn’t have been that embarrassing: Cornell’s good. Of course now they will be everyone’s first round upset darling in March. That’s IF they can beat Harvard to win The Ivy League. And if you think the committee is giving the Ivy League an at-large bid you should apply for a job at The Fritz Pollard Alliance and oversee the Rooney Rule.


Item 5—I did my Golf Channel Essay this week on the start of the new season and the fact that it would be nice to be able to watch golf and talk about golf without Tiger coming up in every other sentence. I was trying to make the point that while Tiger is no doubt the face of the game to MANY, there are lots of us who liked golf before Tiger and will continue to like it without Tiger—however long that may be during his ‘leave of absence.’ I brought up the fact that when ‘A Good Walk Spoiled,’ reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list in 1995, the name Tiger Woods appeared once—for two sentences.

One of the better regular posters on the blog, Vince, accused me yesterday of being self-serving by bringing up the book. Maybe, but I honestly thought it tangibly made my point. He said if I’d written the book five or six years later with Tiger as a major character the book would have been on The Times list for three years instead of seven months. Again, maybe. But I’ve written golf books since then that featured Tiger and, while they’ve sold well, they didn’t outsell ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ And, for the record Vince, I was making fun of the 50 percent who only watch golf when Tiger’s playing when I said, “50 percent of us who watch golf do so with or without Tiger.”


Item 6—There was a Rick DiPietro spotting on the Islanders bench last night. He’s been out so long his 15 year contract may be up soon. Dwayne Roloson has been great all year but if DiPietro could actually come back healthy…No, not going there, too far out on a limb.

I made my regular appearance on The Sports Reporters with Steve Czaban and Andy Pollin in the normal timeslot (5:25 ET on Wednesday's) this evening. Click the permalink, then the link below, to listen to the segment on a variety of topics, including the Redskins hiring of Mike Shanahan and the situation with the Wizards' Gilbert Arenas.

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

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I also made my regular appearance on The Gas Man at 5:25 PT on Wednesday. In this segment, we spoke about the Redskins, Gilbert Arenas and the Baseball Hall of Fame election.

Click here to listen to the segment: The Gas Man

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Thursday morning at 11:05 I made my regular call-in to the newest Tony Kornheiser Show. As usual, it was a good discussion and we had plenty to talk about, including Gilbert Arenas and we spent a large amount of time discussing the BCS/Playoff issue.

Click here to listen to the segment (my spot starts in the first minute): Tony Kornheiser Show

This has been said before by me and many others but it continues to amaze me just how bad a sports town Washington, D.C. is except on the high school level.

I realize as I write this that a lot of you who live around the country are starting to yawn—although you should find Letterman’s list on Gilbert Arenas’s 10 excuses because it is fall down funny—but it really is remarkable how often things go wrong and how consistently poorly they are handled by the people allegedly in charge.

The town’s obsession is with the Redskins. The way the local media kowtows to the team is remarkable. On Tuesday I was doing a local cable sports show and Redskins rookie Brian Orakpo was scheduled to appear. Five minutes before air time we were told that Orakpo was balking at doing the interview because it was too cold outside.

Let’s be honest, Orakpo wasn’t going to say anything newsworthy: he was going to say Jim Zorn was a good coach but gee Mike Shanahan is a great coach and we’re just SO close to being a really good team. Rather than lose those five minutes with him the producers agreed to let him SIT IN HIS CAR with a mike on while the cameraman shot him through the window of the car.

It was Saturday Night Live parody TV and Orakpo was every bit as predictable as you might expect.

And Orakpo is one of the GOOD guys on the Redskins.

What is most remarkable though is the way every new coaching hire is treated as the second coming. (Of course Joe Gibbs WAS the second coming). People do everything but dance in the streets. No doubt there are Redskins fans checking out flights to Dallas for February 2011 and next year’s Super Bowl, now that Mike Shanahan has been announced as the next second coming.

Is Shanahan a good coach? Based on his track record, absolutely. He won two Super Bowls and I really don’t buy the nay-sayers who say “how many did he win without John Elway?” Okay, how many did Vince Lombardi win without Bart Starr? Bill Belichick without Tom Brady? Chuck Noll without Terry Bradshaw? Don Shula without Bob Griese? Last I looked they were pretty good coaches. The only real exception to that rule might be Gibbs who won Super Bowls with Joe Theisman, Doug Williams and Mark Rypien at quarterback. Only Theisman was much better than ordinary and he wasn’t exactly a Hall of Famer. There are others but for the most part you don’t win Super Bowls unless your quarterback is better than ordinary. The Super Bowl winners in this century have been The Rams (Kurt Warner); the Ravens (Trent Dilfer); the Buccaneers (Brad Johnson); the Patriots (three times with Brady); the Steelers (twice with Ben Roethlisberger) the Colts (Peyton Manning); and the Giants (Eli Manning).

That’s seven wins for quarterbacks who either will be in the Hall of Fame or will come very close to it; one for a young quarterback who may yet become special (Eli) and two for guys considered competent—Dilfer and Johnson. Dilfer was working with arguably the greatest defense in the history (at least statistically it was) and Johnson, who many believe was very underrated) was helped by having his counterpart, Rich Gannon, throw five interceptions.

But I digress. Shanahan can coach—no ifs ands or buts. And let’s all stop with the, “he wasted a pick taking Maurice Clarett,” in the third round. So what? Third round picks flame out all the time—so do first round picks for that matter. He took a gamble and it didn’t work. Big deal.

Shanahan’s not the major issue with the Redskins. The owner is the major issue the same way he’s been the issue since he bought the team in 1999. There seems to be an assumption that because Shanahan and Bruce Allen signed on that Snyder is finally going to stop meddling in every football decision.

I’ll believe it when I see it. So far, Snyder is still acting like Snyder.

He completely humiliated poor Jim Zorn, who handled a ludicrous situation with total class, in his final weeks as coach. Forget stripping him of play-calling duties, that was bad enough. He then “interviewed,” one of Zorn’s own assistants with the season still going on in order to subvert the Rooney Rule so he could hire Shanahan as soon as the season ended. It’s a shame NFL commissioner Roger Goodell didn’t step to the plate and call the sham interview of Jerry Gray a sham, because that’s what it was.

Gray was obviously told by Snyder that if he wants to be considered for employment on the new staff he better keep his mouth shut. Gray initially lied when he was asked if he’d been interviewed; then the Redskins staff put out a written, “he meant to say no comment,” release and then he simply refused to answer questions even after John Wooten, who runs the Fritz Pollard Alliance announced that Gray’s interview had satisfied the parameters of the Rooney Rule (which was a joke in itself).

Snyder is paying Shanahan an outrageous amount of money--$7 million a year for five years according to today’s Washington Post. What’s more, he simply HAD to get on his plane and fly to Denver to pick Shanahan up and fly him to DC.

Why? Because he has to be in the middle of all this. He has to show off his wealth every chance he gets. This is an organization that laid close to 100 people off earlier this year citing the need to cut costs. How much did it cost to fly that jet back and forth to Denver? Snyder couldn’t have sent Shanahan a first class ticket and said, “We’ll have a car meet you at the airport?”

No, he had to play his silly game with “Redskins 1,” (oh please) knowing that the DC media would run out to the airport to cover the airplane’s landing. He LIVES for this stuff.

So what makes anyone think he’s not going to be sitting in the draft room talking about, “Redskin grades,” or trailing along with Shanahan and Bruce Allen on scouting trips the way he did ONE MONTH AGO with Vinny Cerrato. Maybe Shanahan and Allen have told him that’s over as a condition of their employment. Maybe.

And maybe Snyder made that pledge like he did with Marty Schottenheimer nine years ago and it will stick for about 20 minutes. We’ll see. The Redskins have the fourth pick in the draft. If they do anything other than draft a left tackle (especially if they take a quarterback instead) then you’ll know Snyder’s still involved in the decision-making and, if you’re a Redskins fan, you better dig in for even more disappointment.

Of course these days—remarkably enough—there is actually a team in Washington in more disarray than the Redskins and that’s the Wizards. Everyone now knows about the Gilbert Arenas guns saga. On Monday, when someone explained to him that he could actually go to jail, Arenas stopped joking about the situation and put out a lawyer-written statement saying he was sorry. That appeared to be a step in the right direction until Tuesday in Philadelphia when Arenas, upon being introduced by the PA announcer, jokingly pointed his fingers at his teammates as if he was shooting them.

My God Gilbert when will you learn? This isn’t funny (okay, Letterman was funny but that’s because he was saying Arenas was a joke not that Arenas’s joke was funny) and every time you act as if it is you look like a dope AND you send a terrible message to every single kid who has ever worn your jersey top—and in DC that’s a lot of kids.

You know what Flip Saunders should have done at that moment? He should have said to Arenas, ‘go sit on the end of the bench and watch the game.’ But the Wizards management has been virtually silent since this whole thing began, only putting out statements about waiting for the investigation to run its course. The given excuse has been that the collective bargaining agreement doesn’t allow a player to be punished twice for a violation of the CBA (which carrying a gun into the arena very much is) and they don’t want to suspend Arenas when clearly Commissioner David Stern is going to suspend him at some point.

You know what, that’s crap. Pick up a phone, talk to Stern and find out what he’s thinking. The facts in the story are clear here. There’s no he said/he said, Arenas has admitted he did it. His guns weren’t even registered in Virginia where carrying a gun is akin to carrying a wallet in most places as long as you register the gun. Even gun-owners will tell you that one of the responsibilities that comes with owning a gun (or guns) is following the laws of your jurisdiction and other jurisdictions if you carry a gun out of state.

If Stern says, “I’m going to suspend him for the season,” the Wizards should go ahead and do that NOW. If he says 20 games, same thing. You can’t just keep sending him out there when he’s admitted his guilt but clearly has no real remorse about it. And let’s not even get into the, “well they could still make the playoffs even at 11-21 because the East is so lousy,” argument. Forget being the eighth place team in the conference with a 37-45 record and take a look at your long-term future—which right now doesn’t look any better than the short term.

Things aren’t a lot better on other DC sports fronts: Tom Boswell, The Post’s superb baseball columnist who may be the all-time Nationals optimist, thinks the moves made so far this winter MIGHT get them to 75 wins. Maryland football is awful. The basketball team looks like it will be fighting for an NCAA bid—again. Navy football is terrific but not enough people understand why they SHOULD be paying more attention—including the editors at my newspaper. Georgetown basketball is very good but it’s hard to wrap your arms around a team that keeps itself shrouded in secrecy all the time.

There are lots of good college basketball programs locally but Georgetown won’t even play in a charity event that has raised almost $10 million for kids-at-risk in the DC area and hasn’t played George Washington in more than 30 years. DC could have local rivalries every bit as much fun as Philadelphia’s Big Five but no one wants to do anything about getting it done.

Heck, even DC United has been so mediocre recently that their fans can’t scream, “what about United?” when someone does a breakdown of sports in DC.

At least the Capitals have a very good team that is filled with appealing people. Fans here have jumped on their bandwagon since they started winning.

Overall though, this is a pretty bleak place. Have no fear though Redskins fans: March isn’t far away and that’s usually the best month of the year for your team. One hint: the less free agents you see Danny having his picture taken with, the better it is going to be for you and for the future of your team.

Let’s start today with the big news of the weekend: The Islanders, after blowing a three goal lead on Saturday night, won a shootout against the Atlanta Thrashers to pick up two critical points.

Okay, just kidding. But I love having the NHL center ice package even though watching the Islanders some nights is about as much fun as listening to Mark Jones say that one of Navy’s football players will be reporting to “Quan-TEE-co,” this spring. Several people pointed out to me on Friday that I forgot to mention that one. I’m also told that Jones and his partner Bob Davie showed up in the TV booth not long before kickoff and didn’t have time to go through the usual ritual of having the SID’s (at least the Navy SID) make sure they knew how to pronounce all the players names.

Thus Davie managed to mispronounce the name of (his words) “the greatest captain in Navy football history,” Ross Posposil. Or, as Davie called him, “Poposil.”

Oh, one more thing: a friend who is a Missouri fan tells me they botched a number of Missouri players’ names too so let’s give them points for consistency. Then, during The Alamo Bowl, Davie kept going on about the “passion,” of the Texas Tech fans because they’re all so angry about Mike Leach being fired. What I heard directed at Adam James didn’t exactly sound like passion.

Okay, let’s move on to a review of the first three days of the New Year.

And, for a moment, let’s stay with hockey.

When the NHL started the “Winter Classic,” in 2008 I thought it was terrific. The whole spectacle worked. I also thought that by the third year or the fourth year the uniqueness would wear off and it would become an over-hyped regular season hockey game.

At least for me, it hasn’t happened yet.

Friday afternoon I kept wanting to hit the remote and switch back to Penn State-LSU or Florida State-West Virginia because both those games certainly had intriguing story lines and, in the case of Penn State-LSU a dramatic ending. But the setting—hockey in Fenway Park!—was just irresistible. The NHL and NBC have gotten lucky with the weather each year: cold enough to make it really feel like a game on a rink somewhere in Canada but not so much snow that you couldn’t play.

That said, the whole concept just works. Even though I can’t help but curse the day Mike Milbury decided to draft Rick DiPietro with the No. 1 pick, seeing him skate over to Bob Costas and talk about playing outdoors as a kid was cool. There was also the added bonus of a very good game between the Flyers and Bruins. Word is next year’s game will be between The Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins, probably in Pittsburgh because the risk of warm weather in DC is too great (not this year that’s for sure). If it is at all possible, I’m going.

Switching to the football games, the highlight of Penn State-LSU was hearing Joe Paterno screaming at Erin Andrews, “come on, let’s go, let’s go,” when Brad Nessler was a tad slow throwing it down to her for the mandatory (dull) halftime interview. That’s one thing about Joe, he is almost ALWAYS in curmudgeon mode.

A friend of mine tells a story about being at a dinner with Joe one night a couple of years ago. The appetizer was some kind of bruschetta and when the teen-age waitress—thinking Joe was finished—started to clear his plate he screamed at her, “What do you think you’re doing! I’m not finished here yet!” Poor kid apparently almost fainted.

Flashing forward to the end of the game: I am really tired of officials not using common sense and then falling back on the letter of the law (or the rules) as an excuse. Down 19-17, LSU had moved the ball to midfield with about 20 seconds remaining—maybe it was 25, I don’t remember exactly—and one of the Penn State players was doing exactly what he should do in that situation: lying on top of the ball for as long as he could to keep the clock running. One of the LSU linemen tried to move him off the ball and got nailed with a 15-yard penalty that, for all intents and purposes, ended the game.

Basically, the officials made LSU pay for their not taking control at that moment. As soon as they saw the Penn State kid clearly not getting off the ball, they should have stopped the clock, gotten him up and then re-started the clock right away. No penalty either way, let the kids decide who wins. It would still have been a long shot for LSU to get into position for a field goal, get their field goal unit on the field (with no time outs left) and get a kick off in the mud to win. But there was a CHANCE and the officials, basically being lazy, took it away from them.

That said, I was glad to see both old coaches—Paterno and Bobby Bowden—win.

Bowden, as you might expect, was all class all day. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for the people running Florida State who kicked him out the door and couldn’t bring themselves to give him one more season as if he hasn’t done enough for the school to merit that. The spear toss was magical and Bowden’s wife Ann coming into his press conference to say, “it’s time to go honey,” was almost a perfect metaphor: Bobby Bowden always had time for everybody.

Back to field goal kickers for a moment. I really felt for the Northwestern kid who missed the three field goals in The Outback Bowl (is it over yet?) but much worse for Ben Hartman, the kicker from East Carolina. He had two chances from 39 yards to win The Liberty Bowl for his team in the final 67 seconds of regulation and then missed a 35-yarder in overtime opening the door for Arkansas to win the game, 20-17.

Hartman was a very good kicker at ECU but there’s no doubt it is going to be hard for him to forget the last game of his college career. I really feel for kickers at moments like that. I still vividly remember Ryan Bucchianeri, who as a Navy freshman in 1993 missed an 18-yarder at the buzzer that would have won the Army-Navy game. Even though Bucchianeri talked to the media afterwards and took full responsibility for the miss—it was a very wet field and a tough angle—but his response was simply, “I have to make that kick,” the miss haunted him during his entire time as a Midshipman.

I noticed in the Sunday paper that Hartman had not spoken to the media afterwards. I was curious who made the call: did the kid simply not want to do it? Did Skip Holtz, his coach make the decision? I dropped a note to Tom McLellan, the associate AD in charge of PR at East Carolina and asked him the question.

Tom not only got right back to me, he took the hit for the decision. He said he had made a judgment on the spot that Hartman was in no condition—emotionally—to speak to the media at that moment. I don’t disagree with Tom at all. His first job is to protect the players UNLESS they’ve done something really wrong like cheating on a test or getting arrested. This wasn’t close to that: he missed three kicks. No crime was committed.

Having said that, as I said to Tom later, I actually think Hartman might have benefited if he’d talked. Even if he broke down and cried, people would have respected him for giving it a shot. I’m also frequently amazed by athletes’ ability to handle themselves with grace under that kind of pressure. More often it is college athletes who do well in those moments because they haven’t been nearly as spoiled or over-protected as the pros (See James, Lebron).

Bottom line in it all is this: I had no vested interest in who won the game but my heart goes out to Ben Hartman.

One basketball note for the day: Did anyone see the 70-foot shot that Chandler Parsons hit at the buzzer to give Florida a 62-61 overtime win over North Carolina State? I happened to be watching, in part because State Coach Sidney Lowe was doing exactly what I would have done in that situation: fouling with a three point lead in the final 10 seconds and not letting Florida get off a tying three point shot. (Two hours later Xavier would allow Wake Forest to take a three in the last 12 seconds of overtime and would get burned by the decision).

Unfortunately, because Parsons threw in a miracle shot—which was RIGHT on line all the way and was, naturally, his only field goal of the game—coaches will now cite that as a reason not to foul. They’ll be wrong. Lowe got it right. He—and his players—just got amazingly unlucky.

There is so much more to talk about: the Redskins firing (at 4 o’clock in the morning) of Jim Zorn and their hiring (no doubt) of Mike Shanahan; the team formerly known as the Bullets and gun play; Kansas’ remarkable performance on Saturday at Temple and—did I mention the Islanders won in a shootout out?

More on that—okay, not the Islanders—tomorrow.

Here is my column this week for The Washington Post -----

It was certainly a relief, wasn't it, to learn that the Washington Redskins have complied with the NFL's Rooney Rule by interviewing secondary coach Jerry Gray for the job currently filled by his boss, head coach Jim Zorn.

John Wooten, the president of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which is charged with monitoring whether teams comply with the rule requiring that minority candidates be interviewed when an NFL head coaching job is open said his group is satisfied that the Redskins are seriously considering Gray to be the Redskins next head coach.

Really? Did Wooten also try to stay awake on Christmas Eve so he could meet Santa when he came down the chimney?

Gray has as much chance of being the next Redskins coach as Mike Krzyzewski has of being voted Man of the Decade on the campus at the University of Maryland.

Click here to read the rest of the column: Redskins make a mockery of Rooney Rule 


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Because Urban Meyer’s resignation/non-resignation was the dominant story in sports over the weekend, I didn’t get the chance yesterday to write about the passing of George Michael.

I often joke about the fact that television makes people famous for being famous and they are thought of as stars because people recognize them regardless of the quality of their work. The list of people who fit in that category is a long one.

George wasn’t one of those people.

He was famous because he outworked his competition; because he did things differently and because he had the kind of personality that, even if you completely disagreed with him on something, you walked away from the argument admitting to yourself that the guy knew his stuff.

When he first came to Washington in 1980 I was skeptical about the notion of him doing sports. I didn’t know him, but knew of him—as a rock-and-roll disc jockey at WABC radio in New York where he replaced the legendary Cousin Bruce Morrow and as a hockey color man for the New York Islanders.

He had a big voice, I knew that. I didn’t know much else. But George rode into town with a commitment from the local NBC affiliate—WRC—to spend money to make a dent in the ratings and with a concept that no one had thought of in local TV before: use the new-fangled satellites that TV stations were acquiring to pull down highlights from all over the country.

Washington had a pretty good history when it came to local sports. Warner Wolf had become a local legend before leaving to go national with ABC. Frank Herzog, who had been Wolf’s backup, was a superb basketball play-by-play man on the Washington Wizards before moving to the Redskins in 1979 where he stayed 27 years before Dan Snyder pushed him out the door so he could put one of his see-no-evil house men behind the mike.

Michael took it to a new level—with the satellite highlights (that led to his national show, “The Sports Machine,” which was huge on Sunday nights until ESPN became dominant) and with an open checkbook. Backed by WRC’s money, Michael had weekly shows in which he “exclusively,” interviewed Joe Gibbs, whomever was quarterbacking the Redskins and anyone else who really mattered on the local sports scene.

Michael’s “checkbook journalism,” was mocked by many (me included) but it has now become the norm on both local TV and radio. WFAN in New York spends huge dollars every year ensuring that local football coaches and players; both baseball managers and selected stars in other sports show up on their air every week. Trust me, Joe Girardi and Jerry Manuel aren’t on WFAN every week because they’re so fond of Mike Francesca. Other local stations, including the ones here in DC, do the same thing.

I still remember being in the Redskins locker room in 1986 when Jay Schroeder, then Washington’s quarterback, had come out of the game with what appeared to be a minor injury. Those of us charged with finding out how Schroeder felt or what had happened on the play had little chance to do so because he was back in the training room and then went to an off-limits part of the locker room to dress.

Finally, my boss, George Solomon, who took an injury to a Redskins quarterback about as seriously as an injury to one of his children, demanded that Charley Taylor (not the wide receiver) who was the Redskins PR guy at the time, find out when Schroeder would be available to talk.

Taylor came back a couple minutes later. “Sorry George, he’s just not up to it,” he said.

“Not up to it?” Solomon screamed. “I’ll bet he’ll be up to it tomorrow for his paid appearance with George Michael!”

As it turned out Solomon was exactly right. Schroeder’s first interview that week was “exclusively,” with Michael.

By the late 1980s, Washington had a remarkable quartet of local TV broadcasters: Michael was at channel 4; Bernie Smilovitz, who would go on to New York and then Detroit was at channel 5; Herzog was at channel 7 and Glenn Brenner was at channel 9. Each was outstanding in his own way, though Brenner’s humor simply put him in a different class from anyone else. You literally couldn’t stop laughing when Brenner got on a roll. He reminded me of Jim Valvano.

And, tragically, exactly like Valvano, Brenner died at the age of 47 of cancer. The whole town essentially came to a halt when Brenner died and all four local stations went wall-to-wall that night with Brenner. The two most touching moments came when Gordon Peterson, then the anchor at channel 9 and probably Brenner’s best friend, talked about him and when Michael, his No. 1 competitor did the same.

I had my run-ins with George. Like most of us, he didn’t like being criticized and he HATED being called a homer—even though he very clearly was one. When I wrote a column prior to Super Bowl XVIII urging everyone in the local media—including my newspaper—to quit being such Redskins homers I singled out George for his repeated references to the team as, “we.”

The next week my phone rang and I heard the booming voice. “Feinstein, that was out of line! I ask tougher questions than anyone in town and you know it!”

“Questions like, what do WE have to do to win?” I answered.

“Okay, maybe I cross the line every once in a while but that’s what the viewers want! I give ‘em what they want and you know it!”

He did—but he was still a homer. A couple of weeks later George ripped me in an on-air essay for calling the Georgetown basketball program “secretive.”

I knew he was expecting a call from me in response but I didn’t give him the pleasure. A couple weeks later we ran into each other at a Maryland basketball game.

“Hey, you know I ripped you for that Georgetown piece,” George said as we shook hands.

“I heard something about that,” I said. “So I guess you get into practice over there every day, huh?”

He smiled. “You know you’re a pain-in-the-butt,” he said. “But I gotta admit you do what you do well.”

George did what he did very well, right until the end when cancer began to run him down. Even though I’d heard he was sick, I honestly didn’t know it was that bad until Tony Kornheiser called me Thursday morning to say he was on his way in to do his radio show—which wasn’t supposed to air on Christmas Eve—and could I come on and talk about George for a few minutes.

I did and I listened to the stories others told throughout the day and into the night. The overwhelming theme I heard was this: George loved what he did and people loved watching him do it. He had a unique personality—I said to Tony that George always came into a room doing George—and he changed local TV in Washington forever and also pushed the limits at the national level with The Sports Machine.

He was 70 when he died. Way too young. But no one can say he didn’t love just about every minute he had.

I really don’t want to write about The Washington Redskins this morning. For one thing, I’m pretty sure people around the country really don’t care very much about the team except in those weeks when the Redskins are playing their local team.

In Dallas, they care about the Redskins twice a year even though here in Washington when the Cowboys are next on the schedule everyone starts talking about Dallas Week as if it is the football equivalent of Thanksgiving or Christmas.

That mentality is symptomatic of the obsession with the team here. All cities are NFL-centric these days but, having traveled to a lot of NFL cities, I can tell you none are quite like Washington. I know I’ve told this story before but it bears repeating because it is so symbolic. When I first started working at The Washington Post, the NFL draft was still held mid-week and wasn’t on TV. (Yes, I am THAT old).

On the day of the draft in 1978, the great Ben Bradlee, then the executive editor (he was played by Jason Robards in ‘All The President’s Men,’ if you’re scoring at home) came striding back to the sports section shouting at sports editor George Solomon, “hey George, who’d we get?”

I had only been at The Post for nine months at that point but had already been indoctrinated into the all-that-matters-is-the-Redskins mentality and was already pretty sick of it. So, I couldn’t resist.

“Gee Ben,” I said, “I didn’t realize The Post had a pick in the NFL draft.”

Without missing a beat, Bradlee whirled on me, pointed his finger and said without a hint of a smile, “listen Feinstein, you don’t like the ------ Redskins you can get the ------ out of town. You got that?”

Given the look on his face, my response was swift and to the point: “Yes-sir.”

In those days of course, Bradlee sat in the owners’ box every Sunday with then-team President Edward Bennett Williams, who was also The Post’s lawyers. There’s no need to even get into any possible conflict of interest issues because they didn’t matter: The Post was like the rest of the media in town. As the late Jerry Claiborne, then Maryland’s football coach once said to me, “Every time I pick up your paper it’s nothing but Redskins, Redskins, Redskins.”

Believe me, I felt his pain. And his frustration.

Amazingly, if anything, it has somehow gotten worse over the years. The Post now has three reporters assigned pretty much full time to the Redskins. There’s a god-awful show that runs on local TV here every night ALL year called, “Redskins Nation,” for which the script must be written by the team’s PR department. I think Dan Snyder was awarded The Nobel Peace Prize on the show one night. It is the highest rated show on Comcast Sports Net.

All of that said, a lot of people in this town have gotten pretty tired of Dan Snyder’s act. He’s owned the team for 10 years and, like any owner, would be forgiven pretty much anything if the team was winning. But after being a truly great franchise from 1982 to 1992, the Redskins have won two playoff games since Snyder bought the team. Every year he spends huge money on free agents because he loves having his picture taken with them and bragging about how rich he is to other owners and then, because all the team’s cap money is spent on a half-dozen players, the Redskins usually fold somewhere along the way when the inevitable injuries that hit every team hit them because they have no depth. Hearing Joe Gibbs talk about injuries during his four year return as coach almost moved people to tears. The Redskins, it appeared, were the only NFL team that EVER had an injured player.

While Snyder has spent big money on big names, he has done everything in his power to make every possible dollar. Some call this good business; others call this ripping off a public that adores the team. He’s jammed more seats—many of them obstructed—into the stadium, upped prices every chance he gets, charged outrageous ($35) prices for parking and tried a few years ago to more or less blackmail club seat holders into renewing with years left on their contract at twice the price by threatening to raise prices even more if one didn’t renew instantly. A lot of people—I was one of them—didn’t take him up on it.

At the same time that Snyder was paying $107 million for Albert Haynesworth this winter, he was laying off office employees. Again, fans will forgive that if Haynesworth produces and the Redskins win. Winning will get you forgiven for just about anything.

But now Snyder may have crossed a line that there’s no coming back from. The Washington Post reported this week in a two part series that employees in the Redskins ticket office even with a waiting list that the Redskins claim has 160,000 people on it, bypassed that list for at least two years to sell tickets to brokers—who then re-sell them at profit. The brokers got the tickets, the Redskins got the brokers to buy some of those club seats they can’t sell (I’ve received several letters since dropping mine offering me the ‘opportunity,’ to buy back in at a ‘bargain,’ price).

A nice deal for the Redskins, a nice deal for the brokers. Those on the waiting list, well, too bad. The Redskins claim they learned of this last spring and stopped it. My guess is they got scared they were going to get outed. None of the employees involved have been fired, merely, ‘discipline,’ according to the team.

Apologists for Snyder—one of whom is a friend of mine who is a famous TV star—say that the season ticket waiting list isn’t nearly as large as the Redskins claim and that not that many people were affected. Really? What if the list only has 16,000 people on it—one-tenth of the team’s claim. All those request probably could have been filled if they hadn’t been bypassed to sell a few club seats. My same friend says Snyder is in “private business,” which apparently means he can do whatever he wants—including suing season ticket holders who, in this economy have been unable to pay for their club seats. Instead of just taking back the tickets, they’ve gone to court to sue these people—who it is probably fair to assume were loyal fans when they bought the tickets hoping to see the team play.

A professional sports team is NOT a private business in a moral sense. There is a public trust you take on when you put the name of a city on the uniforms worn by your most important employees. It is the public’s interest in your team—buying tickets, helping jack up TV and radio rights, buying licensed gear—that makes you money. Snyder had a profit on the Redskins (not so much on his other businesses) last year of $90 million. He owes the public something other than bypassing waiting lists, law suits, outrageous prices and remarkable arrogance n return.

My same friend, let’s call him TK, insists the Redskins will win 12 games this season. If he’s right, a lot of people will calm down because that’s what winning does. If he’s wrong and it’s another 8-8 year filled with excuse-making, a lot more people are going to be angry with Snyder and his henchmen. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

****

A couple of quick notes based on some comments this week. Someone asked about college football traditions I enjoy other than Army-Navy. A few come to mind quickly: The dotting of the I at Ohio State which I’ll get to see on Saturday; anytime they play the fight song at Notre Dame; the Clemson players being bussed to the opposite end of the stadium so they can run past ‘Howard’s Rock,’ down the hill into Death Valley; the Williams players going into town for their postgame haircuts after the Amherst game and Traveler, the white Trojan horse being ridden around the stadium whenever USC scores a touchdown while the fight song plays. When I was a junior at Duke, the opener was at USC and Ricky Bell ran wild and the final score was, I believe, 35-7. Afterwards Duke Coach Mike McGee was asked if he saw any weaknesses in Southern Cal: “Yeah,” he said, “that horse was looking a little winded in the fourth quarter.”

Would love to hear others that people enjoy and have witnessed through the years.

Finally: There are always going to be people who object when I inject politics into the blog. Sorry. Politics are part of sports at times and vice-versa and I have opinions—just like all of you---on political topics. We can disagree, heck Chris Wallace is a good friend and we NEVER agree as was Bob Novak, but let’s not pretend the issues don’t exist. For example: President Obama is right: there should be a football playoff. Just about all of us can agree on that.