A WANDERING (WONDERING?) MIND IS A DANGEROUS THING ...

Some random thoughts on a beautiful Sunday (at least here in South Florida). ...

According to CBS announcer Jim Nantz, a win by Butler over Connecticut in Monday night's national championship game would assure it as being the “greatest Cinderella team” in NCAA basketball tournament history. Frankly, I’m not too sure about that. Nobody, I mean nobody except the players involved and a few of its most rabid fans, gave Villanova a shot at beating Georgetown in 1985. It won’t be that big of a surprise if  Butler beats UConn, however. ...

To be fair about that previous comment, Nantz actually made his comment before Butler had beaten VCU in the national semifinals, but he applied it to whichever teams were playing in the title game ...


Finally saw the movie Secretariat the other night (Thank you, Netflix). Even if you aren't a big fan of horse racing, it is a great story, particularly at this time of the year with the Kentucky Derby just a month away. What a magnificent horse he was.

Many race fans -- and driver Ryan Hunter-Reay -- took the opportunity to criticize the decision by the IndyCar Series to go to double-file restarts after yellow flags following the confusion and crash in the first turn of the first lap of the opening race at St. Petersburg a week ago. But even if that decision hadn’t been made, the race was still going to start in double-file, and that’s when the biggest crash occurred. ...

The biggest reason for the crash, as race winner Dario Franchitti pointed out, was driver error. Robin  Miller, the former Indianapolis Star columnist who writes for SpeedTV now, quoted one team manager bluntly: “There’s no cure for stupid.” ...

Homestead-Miami Speedway officials have put out a release saying it has added a twist to Ford Championship Weekend in November when champions of all three of NASCAR’s divisions -- Sprint Cup, Nationwide, and Camping World Trucks -- will be crowned. The track, a release says, will become “the first North American track to run a NASCAR series oval race in reverse (clockwise).”

Among other things, this will require teams to build cars with refueling receptacles on the right instead of the traditional left side of the car, the Speedway states.

Please note that the date of this release was April 1. ...

Two games into the season and my Cardinals are off to a discouraging start. They lost their opener when they blew several scoring chances to add to an early lead and Alfred Pujols hit into three double plays, and they were blown out in their second game. Pujols did homer, though. ...

I didn’t see either of the two shows on HBO or PBS examining the role and problems of intercollegiate athletics, but if they advocated reform, I’d have to say I agree wholeheartedly with them. Unfortunately, we have seriously strayed so far from the original idea of college athletics that I don’t think we can ever get back to proper perspective.

I don’t deny coaches and others in athletic administration have the right to make all the money they can, but contracts have become so extravagant they put an unnecessary burden on everybody to keep up.

But it’s not just coaching salaries that are the problem. Consider this: schools now find it necessary to build practice facilities -- yes, practice facilities -- to keep up in basketball. The University of Miami, which can’t fill its arena for real games against the likes of even Duke or North Carolina, now has a building for practice next door.

To quote former NBA star Allen Iverson once sneered: “We not even talking about the game, when it actually matters. We talking about practice.” ... 

It this is what “karma” is all about? The Fiesta Bowl, which spit in the face of college football tradition when it bullied its way into the top-level BCS rotation, leaving the historic Cotton Bowl in the dust, now may be left out with all the dirt being dragged up in an investigation into its financial past. The Fiesta director, John Junker, recently was fired after the investigation revealed that nearly half of the $4.85 million in expenses he was reimbursed for over the last decade could not be verified. ...

Speaking of bowl games, there isn’t any better evidence of how screwed up college football has become when teams like Connecticut are losing more than a million bucks to go play in the postseason. A bowl is supposed to be a reward, not a financial punishment. ...

When universities started making media guides glorified recruiting publications with all sorts of color displays and a huge number of pages, the NCAA, in all its wisdom, passed rules limiting the number of pages and barring color shots from inside pages. So now some schools have simply taken all the statistics out of their media guides and put them in separate “fact books.” ...

With the NCAA so concerned about the size of media guides and phone calls a coach can make to a prospective recruit while ignoring the true corruption and hypocrisy in collegiate athletics, it reminds me of a story a veteran sportswriter told me years ago.

It seems the Southeastern Conference once called a meeting to address a big problem that had come up. But when the athletic directors began the meeting, they were leery of actually talking about it. Nobody wanted to bring it up.

Finally, one AD broke the ice.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we’re talking about mouse turds here and we’re up to our ass in elephant crap.”

Except he didn’t use the word crap.