Sports

Since the Colts and Bears are both out of it, I have zero interest in Sunday's Super Bowl. I'm sure they'll be playing the best commercials on Monday-morning TV, so I don't even have to watch it for them. I don't much care about someboy's list of the top 10 Super Bowl teams of all time, either.

After living in Michigan City and rooting for Chicago teams for eight years, I should have known better than to let the Colts break my heart. Year after year, they get to the playoffs, then forget how to play the stupid game. Why did any of us think this year would be any different? I hope this isn't remembered as the game Mike Vanderjagt lost. True, he missed the field goal that could have sent the game into overtime. But he wouldn't have been in that position if Pittsburgh hadn't outplayed Indianapolis for the whole game.

Just because the Indianapolis Colts have "clinched everything that needs to be clinched," that doesn't mean people have stopped having fun talking about them. The great philosophical debate right now is whether the Colts should rest their stars for the last three meaningless games of the season, with their eyes firmly on the Super Bowl, or try as hard as they can to win the last three games and make history.

Indiana University basketball coach Mike Davis won his 100th basketball game, and the media seem to be totally buying the I.U. PR line that he's the "second-fastest in school history" to reach that milestone. Steve Straiger explains why the claim is nonsense.

Pete Rose is baseball's career hits leader, and no one who ever saw him play can doubt he put his heart and soul into the game. He is also a compulsive gambler who violated clearly understood rules about betting on his own team. Now, his eligibility for the Hall of Fame has expired, and I have mixed feelings about it. It seems overly judgmental to leave him out considering some of the cretins who are in halls of fame in other sports; isn't the idea to reward excellence?

I probably don't care about baseball and steroids as much as I should -- their game, their rules and all that. But it's fair to say that baseball officials haven't really been serious about stopping the use of steroids, as evidenced by fines that no one took seriously. Now they are getting serious:

Never mind Red State vs. Blue State and all those other puny divisions in the American psyche. Today is the day we get down to the division that really matters: the AFC. Can the Colts add to their seven-game winning streak and end their string of nine straight losses in visits to New England? In keeping with this blog's practice of letting people have their say, even vile, despicable people, here's the view from a Patriot Web site.

First, the NCAA puts the squeeze on Native American mascots and nicknames. Now, New Mexico State University is disarming Pistol Pete and putting a lasso in his hands. Guess we're supposed to purge both Indians and Cowboys from our history.

This is the kind of thing that gets people in other parts of the country exercised but doesn't seem to gain much traction here, even though "Redskins" (as in North Side High School) is surely on the more-objectionable end of the spectrum (as opposed to, say, "Indians").

Now that Lance Armstrong has won his seventh big-deal bicycle race, is it OK for me to say I was really getting tired of it, and I hope he really does retreat to a cabin in the woods somewhere for a few years and assess his future, quietly? I admire pluck as much as the next person, but that "perseverance of a cancer survivor" life story started wearing a little thin after the fifth win. Call me mean.