Sports

CBS’ hiring Rodriguez a head-scratcher

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CBS Sports Network has hired Rich Rodriguez as a college football game and studio analyst.

The same Rich Rodriguez who regularly recruited and indulged criminals and assorted bad boys as the head coach at West Virginia and then Michigan?

Yeah, that one.

Pacman Jones and the late Chris Henry, for example, starred for Rodriguez at WVU. Both would accumulate rap sheets as thick as playbooks. But such players helped land Rodriguez the gig at Michigan, where the stadium they call “The Big House” began to take on the other meaning.

But you know the process (see: Jimmy Johnson, Oklahoma State, University of Miami, Dallas Cowboys, FOX Sports). Thus, we continue to hold these truths to be self-evident:

1. Big-time college football and basketball are as crooked as the lines on a polygraph. American universities continue to serve as see-through false fronts. Few college presidents, ADs or head coaches could beat racketeering indictments.

That many football and basketball players — recruited at great expense — have no other business enrolled in the college has been a given since Bear Bryant was just a cub.

No school’s charter, especially the charters of tax-funded state colleges, mentions a thing about football or basketball. They stress education and its benefits to society.

2. The primary underwriters of this racketeering are TV networks. It’s their money that drives the armored trucks. TV networks make no moral value judgments as to who gets their money (see: CBS, Charlie Sheen). A dirty conference stocked with powerhouse teams will be generously funded before all others.

FOX and ESPN recently signed on to pay about $3 billion over 12 years to broadcast football and basketball for the soon-to-be Pac-12. It’s easy. You hold your nose with one hand, sign with the other.

Then, to add to the insidious lunacy, you instruct your broadcasters to shill it up, to see and speak no evil. Why? Would any conference otherwise refuse to cash your checks?

3. Big-time coaches who fall, regardless of why, are “taken care of” by TV. They’re hired as analysts, hired for their “expertise,” though their expertise on exactly what it takes to succeed is left unspoken.

At CBS Sports Network (formerly CBS College Sports), Rodriguez joins Phillip Fulmer, who, as the coach of Tennessee, annually recruited a fresh crime wave, so much so that police cars in Knoxville carried football programs to help identify perps. Seriously.

But that’s not why Fulmer was fired by Tennessee. Don’t be silly. A 5-7 season was what did it. That was deemed inexcusable, insufferable, intolerable.

Colleges typically dangle large cash bonuses to coaches for a certain number of wins, for making bowl games and postseason tournaments. How do such incentives serve anything other than exacerbating the win-at-all-costs corruption?

CBS Sports Network, a fairly new entity, is just working off the same old plan. TV is loaded with college football and basketball coaches who were hired and fired for the same bad reasons. What should disqualify you only enhances your chances. But where do the clean guys go for a TV gig?

And ’round and ’round, lower and lower we go. And we call it college athletics. Yahoos, here there and everywhere, lap it up, love it, don’t care if it’s crooked. Besides, your school’s more crooked than theirs!

So how does American society benefit from all this? What’s our payoff for indulging this? What do we get in return for making college basketball and football coaches the highest-paid, by far, state or university employees?

Beats me.

Is Plaxico really a changed man? Not sure

So Plaxico Burress exits prison wearing a red Phillies’ cap, a hoodie over the cap, sunglasses and shorts (Was it hot out or cold?) claiming to be a changed man.

Hmmm. Put me down as “undecided.”

By the way, as noted by “Kurt from Hoboken,” ESPN’s repetitive “Bottom Line” claim that Burress was released after serving nearly two years “on a gun charge” didn’t tell the story. He wasn’t merely charged, he was convicted.

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Friday on YES, as the Yankees played the Cubs, Michael Kay authoritatively explained to John Flaherty Northwestern played Illinois in football at Wrigley Field last year.

“It was a bowl game,” Kay added.

No, it wasn’t. Northwestern and Illinois play in the same conference, have for decades. It was a regular-season game.

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Someone at NBC/VS/Comcast please inform Mike Milbury that it’s the 21st century. Using the word “stepchild” as a put-down is antiquated, and for good reason: It’s insulting to loving stepchildren and stepparents.

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That Dwayne Wade, followed by LeBron James, gleefully mocked Dirk Nowitzki‘s cough — he played Game 4 of the Finals with a fever and sinus infection — is one of those telltale acts that no amount of photo-op charity work can erase. Wade was Sports Illustrated’s 2006 “Sportsman of the Year.”

It’s Open season for wordiness

U.S. Open courses are set up to be very difficult. It’s a given. No further explanation needed.

But on ESPN, Terry Gannon gave it a shot. The way to succeed, he said, is to “Minimize your misses, minimize your mistakes. That’s what the U.S. Open is all about.”

While that sounds a lot like the Hokey Pokey, the same advice applies down at Harold’s Pitch, Putt & Pitcher.

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More Open: Which was more annoying during the first two rounds? Chris Berman‘s silly, self-promotional cracks or Andy North‘s forced laughter that followed?

Berman, Friday, did deliver a neat stat: After 36 holes, Rory McIlroy had 16 3s.

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There are times when NBC’s Johnny Miller, especially after someone hits a bad shot, makes you wonder how he ever lost a tournament.

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Amazing, Thursday and Friday, how NBC and ESPN were able to arrive just in time to show every long putt, chip and sand shot that was holed — even by guys 5-over-par and not previously seen. Kinda made ya’ think that some of them (All of them?) were on tape.