Sports

Ok, this is getting a little ridiculous. The Braves offseason has been a rollercoaster ride to say the least.  First it was the blockbuster trade for Jake Peavy that never happened because the Padres were asking too much (they coveted the Braves’ #1 pitching prospect Tommy Hanson). Then it was AJ Burnett, who went with the big bucks in the Bronx (like everyone else) rather than go to the dirty South. After that it was the Rafael Furcal fiasco, where GM Frank Wren felt Furcal backed out on him the night before the prom because he couldn’t resist going to the dance with the starting quarterback instead.

As if that wasn’t enough, the face of the franchise for the past couple of decades and a future Hall of Famer, John Smoltz is tired of living off food stamps so he decides to go with the Boston sugar daddies to dine on clam chowder. Andruw Jones also seemed to be headed to Atlanta after recently being spotted at a Georgia Tech Basketball game in a Braves hat. The worst of them all (kidding of course) was George Michael look-alike Mike Hampton, who actually took less money to live close to home to play in Houston.

So now it’s Ken Griffey’s turn to reject an offer from the Braves. Some blame Frank Wren. Some blame the AJC’s Terence Moore who published an article saying a source close to Jr. made it clear that he was going with the Braves, which upset the free agent. Some even blame Willie Mays for calling Griffey to convince him to finish his career where it started. Regardless of what happened and why it happened, Griffey picked the Mariners because they wanted him more and they showed it by sweetening the deal with a lifetime position for him in the Seattle front office after his playing days are done.

Needless to say fans, players (especially Chipper Jones), and coaches are pretty annoyed at this point.  A constant weekly dose of superficially guaranteed free agent signings have given me a bad case of  “Braves blue balls” this offseason. But I again return to this question: who’s to blame? Not surprisingly, BOSTON RED SOX pitcher John Smoltz (I threw up a little typing that) has an opinion about this:  “It’s a philosophy for the Braves that worked for 14 seasons in the middle of a run to division titles. I just think that, now that it isn’t their automatic right to go to the playoffs anymore, it’s not as attractive to people to always take less.”

The only factor that seems to intice players to come to the Braves anymore is their legendary coach Bobby Cox. That was the big reason why Smoltz and Chipper have always given Atlanta the hometown discount and taken millions of dollars less every time free agency has come around. Money is apparently the simple reason why only one member of Mound Rushmore (Maddux, Smoltz, and Glavine) still remains in a Braves uniform.

So are Wren and the owners (Liberty Media) being cheap? Yes. Liberty Media just bailed out Sirius XM Radio for $530 million dollars yet they somehow can’t cough up a couple more dollars to keep Smoltz in Atlanta, nor can they spend any money on some power-hitting free agents to help out the dismal outfield. Of course we did squeeze out some dough for Derek Lowe and Kenshin Kawakami after blowing the Smoltz signing, which were much needed additions to the rotation to join Jurrjens and Vasquez. Even though some of the players the Braves missed out on in free agency were overpriced (Burnett) or a waste of time and money (Andruw Jones), they aren’t doing enough.

I’m not saying we need to spend our way to a World Series ring like the Yankees, but being #10 in payroll in 2008 behind the Seattle Mariners isn’t going to cut it anymore. However, we do have some promising young talent coming up through the Braves minor league pipeline like P Tommy Hanson, OF Jordan Schafer, 1B Freddie Freeman and OF Jason Heyward. With the exception of maybe Hanson, these guys may not pan out. Hopefully they do, but Freeman and Heyward probably won’t be promoted until another year or two. The recent Glavine signing has been a plus to take some of the pressure off Hanson to get to the 5th position in the rotation.

But in the meantime we need a proven slugger. Francoeur can’t get any worse, but I doubt many World Series champions have been won by teams with rookie platoons in two-thirds of their outfield. Let’s get it done Braves. Otherwise we’ll be “building for the future” forever.

UPDATE (2/22/09): Braves have just signed free agent Garret Anderson. I guess Frank Wren is a fan of the blog. Looks like Matt Diaz finally has a partner in the left field platoon. Great move Braves. This move looks very promising because he had much better stats and is probably less of an injury risk (knock-on-wood) than Griffey. Kudos

I don’t really know what to make of Alex Rodriguez’s press conference. He was telling the truth about certain aspects but I can’t believe his entire story.  His prepared statement was a bad idea and his feigned emotional pause for about 40 seconds was laughable.

The moment Rodriguez hired his PR firms I knew we were in for a show. Rodriguez has his agent Scott Boras, a “crisis management” firm Outside Eyes, publicist Richard Rubenstein and talent manager Guy Oseary. It was this team that evidently put together his written speech. I was a little disappointed that he had to write everything out. It obviously didn’t come from the heart and it’s much easier to put the right spin on his story in a written piece.

I don’t understand the questions about why he took steroids. I think that is pretty evident: he wanted to be better, stronger and faster. Why did anyone take steroids? There weren’t any rules specifically banning them and people thought they could get away with it. Is any other explanation needed?

I believe he and his cousin took the drugs and that he got them in the Dominican Republic. I was also pleased when he admitted to taking “Ripped Fuel” when he was with the Mariners. It seemed he was providing full disclosure (finally) about his drug use and habits.

But here’s where I have a little trouble believing his words. Rodriguez claimed he and his cousin didn’t know exactly what the drug did or if they were even taking it right. For a guy who is such a detail-freak about his diets and workout routines I have a hard time buying that he just decided to inject himself with something for three years without checking out what it was. I don’t think anyone would do that no matter what age.

Rodriguez knew exactly what he was doing while he was injecting himself with “Boli.” While he probably won’t ever admit to that, I’m glad he provided as much detail as possible about his use, access and a timeline. Hopefully this will be the last big name to break the hearts of us fans. It’s about time the steroid era came to an end.

Hawks guard Ronald Murray has been a very pleasant surprise to the 2008-2009 team.

Sitting pretty at 31-21, the Hawks find themselves with their best record at the All-Star Break since going 31-15 during the 1996-1997 season. To put that in context, Bill Clinton was beginning the second year of his 2nd term as President, the Atlanta Thrashers did not exist, UGA football was coming of f a  5-6 season under 2nd-year coach, Jim Donnan,  a  27-year old Brett Favre went to/won his first Super Bowl just two weeks prior, ‘N  Sync/Britney Spears were not on the National Radar yet and I was in 4th grade. Needless to say a lot has changed.

Just being four years removed from an embarrassing 13-69 record and a year after going 37-45, the Hawks currently have the league’s 8th best record and have a three game lead over the Miami Heat for the #4 Seed in the Eastern Conference. Among many things, the free agent pick-ups of G Ronald Murray (10.9 PPG) and SF Maurice Evans (7.1 PPG) have given the Hawks a nice boost in terms of both bench scoring and depth.

The team has clearly matured tremendously from last year and with confidence at an all-time high, things have not looked so promising for the team/organization in quite some time. The team’s nucleus is young and have persvered through several key injuries so far this season and must be very pleased with the position they are currently situated in.

However, like many quick turnaround teams, the fans/bandwagon has been lagging behind. The Hawks attendance this year is 20th in the league in average and % of seats sold. However, there are signs of positive change, as their last home game (a Tuesday nighter against the putrid 11-41 Wizards) produced a crowd of over 17,000, about 500 people over the season average) and their last Saturday night game against the lowly Clippers produced a crowd of 18,729.

The Hawks kick-off the start of the 2nd half of the season tonight @ LA Lakers, who currently hold the NBA’s best record at 42-10. If the team can stay healthy and be playing its best basketball towards the end of the season a decent playoff run could be in order (though the East does have three of the Top 4 teams in the NBA in Boston, Cleveland and Orlando).

And when you consider the fact that the Thrashers will likely be finishing up another horrible season and the Braves will be starting up likely their third straight season of not making the playoffs (sorry for the negativity, but the truth can hurt sometimes), the Hawks should hold the entire city’s attention…certainly a pleasant predicament for an organization that was mismanaged for the better half of last 10 years.

To wrap this post up, I would also like to show a little love for the Men’s Basketball team. Unfortunately, I happened to miss out on by far their best performance/game of the year last Saturday afternoon as the Dawgs ended an 11-game losing streak overall and to the Florida Gators in basketball by winning a close-one, 88-86. Senior G Terrance Woodbury scored a career-high 32 points to help the Dawgs avoid becoming the first SEC team to go winless in conference play since the 1953-1954 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (to put that in perspective Vince Dooley was a senior at Auburn).

It has been a long season for the team and more than likely it will thankfully be over in another month. However, this will certainly be a game that the team and the 8,348 people that were in attendance at the Steg will not forget for a while.

I’ve got a short video that shows a glimpse on how cool we are at WUOG Sportz

Love him or hate him (most people are the latter), Jose Canseco was right about Alex Rodriguez. We scoffed at his allegations in Juiced. We rolled our eyes at his accusations in Vindicated. But we once again have to give props to the “Steroid Pimp” for being right again even if we don’t like the sleaze ball.

A-Roid is now officially inducted into baseball’s hated steroid era class with the likes of McGwire, Clemens, and Bonds. Sadly it took a leak in court documents to uncover the urine sample results (no pun intended) from the 2003 survey test by MLB to get him to fess up. He has done one thing right– he admitted to Peter Gammons that he did indeed take performance enhancing drugs after getting caught with his pants down (something he probably learned from Roger Clemens’ mistake).  However, he had his chance (see below).   . We all knew something was off with the eerie look on A-Roid’s face even though we couldn’t get any solid evidence on him …until last Saturday.

This now begs the question of we the fans would rather this stop now and assume most of the guys in baseball in the 90’s and early 00’s were using performance enhancing drugs, or would we rather find out the names of every single player that doped? Would this somehow help the healing process to know who did and who didn’t get caught? Nothing surprises us about these “new” steroids reports. The sad thing is these reports are not really “new” baseball gossip to us. Even the Braves’ hot CF prospect Jordan Schafer was busted for HGH last year even if he denies he ever used it. Maybe we should expect that this stuff will never end and just hope that the majority of players are clean.

But at the end of the day we gotta give Canseco our kudos. He is helping to clean up the game–even if he did rat out his teammates to make a few bucks.

In his 5.5 years as the 22nd head coach in the history of men’s basketball program, Dennis Felton went 84-91, including a 26-59 record in the SEC. He came in as a young, up and coming coach that was very successful during his tenure at Western Kentucky University and left as man who unfortunately did not complete his very ambitious goals:

“I want the opportunity to build the next great basketball program in the United States,” Felton said. “I want it to be a program that is the envy of everyone and the model for everyone.”

But, after a combination of guys transferring (Channing Toney), getting kicked off the team (Takais Brown, Mike Mercer, Billy Humphrey, quitting (Reshad Singleton) or never stepping foot on campus (e.g. Louis Williams, who was one of the Top 10 HS players in the country that decided to enter the NBA draft instead of going to UGA, Robert Dozier, another highly regarded prospect that did not have a high enough test score and ended up having a very solid career at Memphis) the dream never became a reality. In the end, it was a combination of terrible luck and bad coaching that ended up dooming Coach Felton.

It is a shame really, because publicly he seemed like a very likable person. Before every home game, he would walk up and down the Student Section at Stegman Coliseum and shake hands/mingle with the students. He seemed like a very sincere person that truly wanted to do what he felt was best for the program. In the end though, he just could not produce the results needed to get Georgia to the next level and clearly it was time for a change.

The question now, is what’s next for the program? Long-time  associate head coach Pete Herrmann, is the interim coach and considering the team is still winless in the conference (0-8) and are now 9-14 on the season after tonight’s 79-68 loss @ South Carolina, it appears that pending a miracle this team will not be going to the postseason for the first time in three years. With that in mind, there is still hope for the future of the program.

When UGA fired Coach Felton last Thursday, Georgia AD Damon Evans said, “I’ll say this. Our commitment and my commitment to build Georgia basketball is strong. And when I say strong, I’ll add very strong onto that,” Evans said. “We’re going to go out and find the best possible person for this job. That may mean we commit more resources than we have in the past but we’re not letting that (money) hold us back from doing what we need to do to have a successful men’s basketball program.”

With that in mind, here are the rumored Top 5 names that the AD has begun to discuss internally:

-Jeff Capel, Head Coach of #2 Oklahoma

-Sean Miller, Head Coach of #9 Xavier

-Tubby Smtih, Head Coach of #19 Minnesota

-Anthony Grant, Head Coach of  VCU

-Lon Kruger, Head Coach of UNLV

Each of those coaches would be great options in my opinion. Capel has turned around an Oklahoma program that had to deal with the mess left behind by former coach Kelvin Sampson. Sean Miller has built up the Xavier program to become a consistent, National program. Tubby Smith, who was once a very successful at UGA during the mid-90s before having great success at Kentucky, has successfully rebuilt Minnesota in just two years. Anthony Grant has had great success at VCU, including a big upet victory agaisnt Duke in the NCAA Tournament two years ago, was set to become the head coach at Florida when Billy Donovan had taken the Orlando Magic head coaching job. Lon Kruger built up the Florida program for Billy Donovan in the early 90’s and now has resurrected the UNLV program.

Much has also been made of the possible hiring of former Indiana and Texas Tech head coach Bob Knight. While he is certainly a big name and would bring a lot of hype to the Georgia program, the reality of the matter is that Knight is 68 years old and will be 69 in October. Not to mention, in his final three years at Texas Tech he won three more games than Dennis Felton did over that same stretch. He has not produced an All-American player since 1993 and in fact quit at Texas Tech midway through last season. Yes, people will likely pack the stands, at least early on, to see Coach Knight coach the Dawgs. However, if he has the same kind of success (or lack thereof) that he had in his last few years at Texas Tech, then likely the novelty of having Coach Knight roam the sidelines of the Steg will wear off very quickly.

I think the bottom line is that the Bulldog faithful wants to see a consistent winner. To have that, UGA needs to hire a coach that wants to be here/win for the foreseeable future. The 5 coaches that the athletic department have come up with all fit that criteria in my opinion. Bobby Knight does not. More than likely he will likely stick around for three, maybe four years before retiring one way or another (aka whether the program is in good or bad shape).

The program has a lot of potential. The state of GA produces some of the best basketball talent in terms of quality/quantity in the country and UGA’s recent $30 million dollar investment in the new practice facility should pay off for the program in the coming years. The one thing the program lacks, besides the fact that it does not have any prestige/a nice stadium is a coach. Under the right guidance, the program can soar to unforseen heights. All it takes is the right coach. Easier said than done, of course, but if Damon Evans walks the walk like he is talking the talk (e.g. saying that money will not be a factor in terms of finding the right coach)  then UGA finally might hire a coach that can take the program to the next level.

Monday was a horrific day for me. I missed UConn dominated Louisville because I have a Marine Biology lab from 7-9.  Even worse, Kobe torched my Knicks for 61 points. What the hell, Kobe?

As much as I’m a Knicks fan, that was an absolute gem. It says a lot about the state of the Knicks franshise when the fans at the Garden start M-V-P chants for an opposing player. Kobe said it was just because the fans can appreciate a great performance, but lets be honest, that wouldn’t have happened if the Knicks were a legit title contender (I guess they’d also play defense if they were a legit title contender). Knicks fans are settling for 2010 when they can sign two major free agents and in the mean time can enjoy epic performances from Kobe or LeBron.

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We’ve got to talk about Bob Knight and the rumors surrounding the now-vacant Georgia basketball position.  I’ve been doing some thinking as to whether he’d be a good hire for Georgia right now. The Pro’s are pretty obvious: Instant credibility, 902 wins, automatic interest from the top recruits in Georgia and a chance to compete for SEC championships each year. The guy would be an insane hire for Georgia. I would freak.

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