Sports

Colleges giving star athletes easy classes and inflating their grades? I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you!

Boy, who would have guessed? If you want to win the game, you must try to score more points:

"We would always like to score more goals and we're going to need them for the Ghana game," US forward Brian McBride said. "We need to be smart, pick our chances to go forward. When the opportunity comes we have to go for it.

What? Give a sports team money that should go to schools?

The Cavaliers want taxpayers to help pay for a proposed $20 million practice field in Independence.

The team wants to borrow money from the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and then use some of the taxes it will pay on the sports complex -- which normally go to schools and government -- to repay the loans.

Ah, it's so nice to see someone admit the error of his ways, thus taking the first step on the road to recovery:

The judge also ordered Green, 41, to attend anger-management classes and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

"That's crap," Green said in court of the AA meetings, according to his attorney.

The West Bloomfield resident argued that the incident had nothing to do with alcohol.

Just in case you doubted that college sports was big business, check out this database of Division I schools' sports revenue collected by the Indianapolis Star through Freedom-of-Information requests. You can do some interesting searches there, discovering, for example, that Indiana University leads the Big Ten in men's basketball ticket sales. Big shock, huh?

Holy cow. Not only can we watch live streaming of the NCAA games on our workplace computers -- a helpful Boss Button is provided, "which will instantly cover any viewer's screen with a spreadsheet." Of course all this nonproductive time will cost companies an estimated $250 million (said to be a conservative figure), not to mention the disruptiuon of services customers might encounter:

A Nebraskan wanders into a hockey game and discovers, to her horror, that the fans can be rude. It so unsettles her that it compels her to root for the visiting team, the Indiana Ice. The experience did have an upside; she reached deep inside herself and found this wisdom:

Try to remember that if there were no opposing team, there would be no hockey for you to watch.

I don't know who the next basketball coach at Indiana University will be, but I predict a long and healthy relationship. I base this not on sports knowledge but on my understanding of the rules of breakups. The No. 1 rule is: The first relationship you have after your heart is broken is never a permanent one; it is the interum affair, the placeholding fling that you enter into lightly while you mend. Mike Davis was the post-breakup beau; he was never destined to be the next true love.

I don't have Reggie Hayes' basketball knowledge, but his assessment of Indiana University head coach Mike Davis -- that he will be gone and should be gone after this season -- strikes me as the right one.

Oh, why not? This group wants to make Super Bowl Sunday a national holiday, with the Monday after designated as a "day of observation" (read: three-day weekend).