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January 2008
‘Sharpe’ criticism for Blank
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Phoenix — Courtesy of a blunt tongue that rarely stops flapping, Shannon Sharpe doesn’t have trouble speaking for himself. This time, the future Hall of Fame tight end and NFL commentator for CBS was the strongest voice of many whispering behind the Arizona cacti when the subject was the Falcons and their goofiness of late.
That’s right. Even with the New England Patriots and the New York Giants slated to meet in the Super Bowl on Sunday, the Falcons were discussed often this week among former and present league officials, team executives and players.
They did get a little push from an Atlanta columnist. For instance: What does Sharpe believe omnipresent Falcons owner Arthur Blank must do to keep his team from imploding further?
“Mr. Blank needs to understand that you hired [general manager] Tom Dimitroff and [head coach] Mike Smith to do a job. Let them do their job,” said Sharpe, who grew up in Glennville and resides in Buckhead. “Mr. Blank, you don’t need to be the face of the Falcons, because everybody knows you own the Falcons. We don’t need to see your face to confirm that.
“I know who owns the Steelers. I don’t see Dan Rooney. I know who owns the Giants. I don’t need to see his face. I know who owns the Patriots. We don’t need to see you to confirm how much money and how much authority you have.”
Others concurred in what has been the center of the NFL’s universe with the Super Bowl around. This also has become the definitive place to get a sense of what the Falcons’ peers think of a franchise that has witnessed everything during the past few months from its franchise quarterback sitting in prison to its owner hiring a general manager after a Webcam interview.
Those peers generally responded to it all with a head shake, a chuckle of disbelief and something unprintable for a family newspaper.
That was off the record.
As for on the record, you had Richard Seymour, a former UGA star defensive lineman who plays for the Patriots. “It’s just at this point where the Falcons are looking for some leadership to head in the right direction,” Seymour said. “We, as players in the league, feel like it’s a team that a lot of guys would love to play for. It’s a city that a lot of guys would love to be in, so the Falcons have a lot in their favor.”
Well, not a lot. Did we tell you coach Bobby Petrino bolted for Arkansas before the end of his first Falcons season and left $2.4 million per year on the table?
Sharpe remembered. Not only that, he remembered something else. “Jim Mora [who preceded Petrino] has a job with the Falcons, and then all of a sudden, he’s auditioning for another job [the University of Washington through a radio interview] while on the job,” Sharpe said. “Something is going on. If it doesn’t make dollars, then it doesn’t make sense. Then for a guy like Bobby Petrino to follow Jim Mora and to sacrifice all that money for a college job in a middle of a season, you know something seriously is going on.
“Then you look at Bill Parcells. A couple of weeks earlier, he told Miami he wasn’t interested. Then he goes to Arthur Blank, and Parcells gets [ESPN] to leak the story that he was about to take the job in Atlanta, and then all of a sudden, he’s getting more money to take the Miami job he didn’t want two weeks earlier. Yeah, something is going on with the [running] of the Falcons.”
The question is, can that “something” get fixed before the Falcons drop off the face of the earth? Yes, said an accomplished NFL executive from the past and another from the present.
The past guy was Gil Brandt, the personnel director who contributed to transforming the Dallas Cowboys into America’s team from the 1960s through much of the 1980s. Unlike Blank, Clint Murchison, the owner of those Cowboys, was invisible, while Brandt joined Tex Schramm and Tom Landry in the spotlight. Said Brandt, “It’s like 20 years ago, you had a general practitioner. He took your tonsils out and did all of these things. Today, you open up a telephone directory, and there’s a hand surgeon. So what [Blank] has to do is draw on these people that he has there. If he does that, I think they’ll present him with some very good ideas, because he desperately wants to win.”
The present guy was Scott Pioli, the player-personnel director of a Patriots team that has appeared in four Super Bowls in seven years. He was Dimitroff’s boss before the former Patriots director of college scouting left for the Falcons.
Said Pioli, “Sometimes as an outsider, when it comes to perception and reality, you don’t know. But here’s what I do know: If Thomas wasn’t comfortable with the way he thought the situation was going to be [with the Falcons], he wouldn’t have accepted the position. Thomas was in a situation where he didn’t have to run to whatever job was offered. What he told me is that he had great confidence that he and Mr. Blank would have a good working relationship, and that he also was comfortable with how it was going to be.”
Sounds like Mora.
And Petrino.
Permalink | Comments (110) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Nothing ever comes easy for Thrashers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
In hopes of reassuring employees that the company is stable, life is grand, success is inevitable and, I believe, global warming is somewhat of a media creation, two Atlanta Spirit owners met with their front office staff Wednesday.
What happened later in the evening either continued to ease concerns or led to massive meltdowns — depending on your perspective.
The Thrashers opened the post-All-Star, it’s-now-or-never part of their schedule with a 4-1 win over Pittsburgh. It ended a five-game winless streak (0-3-2), which was their longest skid since a coach got fired. But we’ve seen this team morph from one form to another game-to-game, so excitement tends to be muted.
Or, to quote Bobby Holik: “I’m absolutely not pleased by anything because we’ve done this many times before, and we failed immediately after. Complacency is our worst enemy.” Imagine his comments if they had lost.
Then there is Ilya Kovalchuk, or at least the remains of him. He suffered a right knee injury early in the second period after being checked knee-on-knee by the Penguins’ Jarkko Ruutu.
There was some debate in the two locker rooms whether the hit was dirty, but Ruutu’s comment, “I barely hit him,” would be amusing, if Kovalchuk weren’t in so much agony. He returned late in the period for one shift, could barely move, then left for good.
The Thrashers actually showed some resolve after the hit. Steve McCarthy immediately went after Ruutu (who drew a major penalty and a game misconduct). The other players pulled together, as if, like, they really cared. Who knew?
But if Kovalchuk is gone for any extended period, so are this team’s playoff hopes.
Holik, again, with the dissenting view: “It’s a loss. He’s our best player. But time doesn’t stop.”
Right now, they’re just trying to become a normal, functioning franchise. But notwithstanding attempts by owners Michael Gearon and Bruce Levenson to calm the masses in the front office Wednesday, these are unsettled times for the Thrashers. The coach (Bob Hartley) was fired in October. The president and CEO (Bernie Mullin) resigned last week. There is a chance the general manager and temp-coach (Don Waddell) may be next. But we likely won’t know that until after the season.
Regardless, this is not quite a well-oiled machine right now. The Thrashers currently rank among the non-playoff teams in the standings. With the trade deadline less than four weeks away, there is a chance they may soon shift into fire-sale mode. All rumors start with Marian Hossa, who will be an unrestricted free agent after the season and wants to play for a Stanley Cup contender, which likely translates to somewhere else.
If Hossa doesn’t re-sign imminently, Waddell is likely to trade him to a contender before the Feb. 26 deadline rather than let him walk this summer. And if the general manager deduces the season is shot, he won’t hesitate to move Holik, Mark Recchi or any other veteran not deemed part of the future (which includes almost any veteran other than Kovalchuk).
The only thing that could quiet all the rumors would be an unlikely hot streak that would: 1) propel Atlanta past Carolina in the Southeast Division (plausible); 2) convince Hossa to sign a long-term deal, thereby smothering trade rumors (far less likely).
If the Thrashers are to make any kind of move, it has to start now. They play six of their next seven at home (game two in this stretch coming Friday against Buffalo, which annihilated the Thrashers 10-1 before the All-Star break).
“This was the kind of game we needed, but we can’t stop,” Recchi said. “We had a meeting [Tuesday]. We felt with six of the next seven coming at home, it would really help us, and we had to take advantage of it. This is when you need to come together as a team.”
We’ve seen too much to draw conclusions from this win. Yes, the Thrashers were in control for most of this game. But they beat a Penguins team that played the night before and was missing Sidney Crosby.
Now they may have to play without Kovalchuk.
It’s definitely not the time to feel at ease.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
Staying home for the Super Bowl … thankfully
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Things I Won’t Miss Not Being at Super Bowl 42 (they’ve played so many of these things I’ve lost track of the Roman numerals):
• Standing for press ID photos. (You feel like convict No. 8473658698 checking into state prison. And your picture comes out looking like one.)
• Catching buses to wherever, standing in line again. (You think you’re going to visit one of the teams for interviews. Careful, you may wind up in Surprise — that’s a suburb of Phoenix.)
• The interview, such as it is. Players are seated at tables with name cards. Forget Brady or Moss or Welker. There’s a table named Hochstein, but who is he and what do you ask him? I think I’ll wait till we get to the Giants.
• Media Lounge: Somehow it seems the same guys are always there, and the fat guys spend more time around the food tables. If their editors could see them now. When do they work?
• Finding a place to have dinner. Just try making a reservation, if you enjoy taking a shot in the dark. And remember, this is a cockeyed time zone out in Phoenix. Careful, you may wind up in Queen Creek.
• Careful wearing your press badge outside the hotel. Guys like characters out of “Guys and Dolls” will buttonhole you. “Got any tickets, buddy?” (Want to know the truth? I quit buying when the price reached 500 bucks. My wife said, “If I don’t go, do I get the money?” Sounded like a good deal to me.)
• Finding a place to play golf. A guy named Nick used to run a tournament for star players, and it was fun if you got a nice linebacker or defensive back. But get a 315-pound lineman who couldn’t hit the ball out of his awesome shadow, and who tried to show you how to putt, you were in for a wearisome day. I know. I did.
• Oh, those Tuesdays. Teams take turns being interviewed on the field. All sorts of creatures crowded into the stadium trying to ask questions about favorite hip-hop and sex preferences, and it’s like being part of a herd. It’s a lousy carnival, guys crowding and shoving, and dudes with no credentials and no manners. One year, a 12-year-old carrying a mike and some kind of TV accreditation showed up and got more attention than the playing stars. Mainly, it’s interviewers interviewing interviewers.
• The Friday night blowout, sometimes called the Media Party, but that’s mainly so it can be written off as “entertainment.” More noise than the ears can stand, longer food lines than we used to have in the Navy, team owners and hangers-on roped off from the great unwashed. The best of these was my last, the Henry Ford Museum at Detroit, and the worst, right here in Atlanta. It was awful.
• The annual head coaches’ press conferences, held each Friday. Bound to be a thigh-slapper this year with these stand-up jokesters, Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin. Not a grin in a carload.
• The game. First, you try to get there, played at the University of Phoenix Stadium, west of downtown. I could find the stadium on the map, but I couldn’t find the University of Phoenix. They are everywhere. There’s one, or more, in Atlanta, but they don’t have stadiums. In fact, I don’t know what the University of Phoenix does.
• The after-game. This is hellish. Try elbowing into one of the interview sessions, herd-time again. It’s right on deadline. What you get is a constant stream of interview printouts, for one and all. Enterprising journalism? That went out the door after Max McGee caught those two passes and Green Bay suffocated Kansas City.
• OK, you’ve had your fun. Get to Sky Harbor, check your bags, stand in line one more time; your flight is 45 minutes late, and it’s snowing back home. Where else are you going to have such fun!
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Truth’s stranger than fiction in sports
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN…
10: The “Oxygen” channel, which says it is “rewriting the rulebook for women’s television,” is debuting a new reality series with Deion Sanders and his second wife, called, “Deion and Pilar: Prime Time Love.” Just one question: Do the execs at Oxygen realize this is the same guy who, while dating his first wife, Carolyn, once said of his tastes in female company: “I can’t be seen with no seahag”?
9: According to scientists, an asteroid at least 500 feet long is approaching earth and will make a close pass next week. But, alas, it will miss Fayetteville, Ark.
8: Go ahead. Take the Giants and 12. I’ll take Bill Belichick and two weeks to prepare.
7: It’s comical watching Roger Clemens and his mouthpieces scramble to sway public opinion in drug allegations. Now comes a 49-page, 18,000-word statistical breakdown of his career, titled, “Analysis by Hendricks Sports Management.” The Hendricks, as it so happens, would be his agents.
6: I just skimmed the document (which you can find at http://www.rogerclemensreport.com). In short, it attempts to convince the reader that it’s not at all unusual that Clemens, after a slide with Boston, had a career rejuvenation in the late 1990s and has pitched with success well into his 40s. But if you’re looking for the nugget that dismisses the notion he took HGH and/or steroids to help get him through those workouts, it’s not there.
5: Forget the reports that Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson have broken up. E-Gossip (“Celebrity Dish, Served Daily.”) has photographic evidence that they’re still together! http://www.egossip.com/celebrity/jessica-simpson-and-tony-romo-booze-it-hollywood-7580. I provide this information only if Giants’ fans will need something to look forward to after Sunday.
4: Did you know that Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson have won the same number of playoff games?
3: Comrade Mark Bradley made a good case why the Hawks are in worse shape than the Thrashers in the Atlanta Spirit House of Horrors. But I’ve got to go with the pucksters. Both teams need coaches and general managers. But give the Hawks a point guard and they’ll be fine. Personnel-wise, the Thrashers need more than one fix.
2: Another reason why I would love to own a minor-league sports team one day: The Wheeling (West Va.) Nailers, an East Coast Hockey League team, are holding a “Shred Rich Rodriguez Night” Saturday. Any fan bringing an article or picture of Rodriguez to be shredded can buy a ticket at discount. It plays off reports of him shredding team related documents before he left West Virginia for Michigan. It follows that any fan wearing an Ohio State jersey also gets a discount.
1: One week to national letter of intent day. Any word yet on where Brian VanGorder is going?
Permalink | Comments (19) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Who’s worse: Hawks or Thrashers?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The Hawks. The Thrashers. We could argue for days over which of our winter sports franchises is better, but that would miss the depressing point. Since neither is any good, isn’t it more appropriate to ponder, category by category, which is worse?
TEAM The Hawks have a better squad than their record indicates. (They’re 18-22, having lost five of six.) Even after losing five in a row, the Thrashers have a better record than statistics would warrant. (The team that has yielded more goals than any other is 23-25-4, due mostly to its success in overtime and shootouts.)
You watch the Hawks and come away believing they should be better. You watch the Thrashers and wonder how they’re as competitive as they are.
WHO’S WORSE?: The Thrashers, because they wouldn’t be in the playoffs if the postseason started today, while the Hawks, not exactly on merit, would.
COACH
Almost a trick question, given that the Thrashers don’t actually have a coach. They fired theirs in October. Then again, the Hawks don’t really have one, either, given that Mike Woodson’s career record is an astonishing 87-199. (It was Woodson who once said, “You can’t control your record,” and the feeling persists that this coach has no control over anything — not his players, not the final seconds of a close game, nothing.)
Having done this fill-in business twice now, Don Waddell has gotten pretty good at it. His career record after he has fired somebody is 27-24-1-4, which doesn’t make him Toe Blake but beats the heck out of 87-199.
WHO’S WORSE?: The Hawks, because Woodson might be the worst coach in Atlanta history, Marion Campbell not excluded.
GENERAL MANAGER
Another stumper: Is it possible to be a worse GM than Billy Knight, who took the wrong guy with his first pick in each of his first four drafts here?
Yes, believe it or not. Because Knight, for all his documented whiffs, has still constructed the spine of a roster. (Having a point guard would have rendered it an entire skeleton, but that would have made things too easy, don’t you think?) Waddell has been in place twice as long and hasn’t fleshed out the Thrashers beyond Ilya Kovalchuk and Marian Hossa. And Hossa could be gone soon. Yikes.
WHO’S WORSE?: The Thrashers, based mostly on Waddell’s time served.
OWNERSHIP
Another trick-type question, given that each club is owned by the same people. But there’s a subtle difference. Of the many Atlanta Spirit partners, only Bruce Levenson cares much about hockey, and he doesn’t live in Atlanta.
The most visible owner-enablers, Michael Gearon Jr. and Sr., are Atlantans who believe they know a lot about basketball and seem, for reasons unclear, utterly sold on Knight and Woodson. Say what you will about Steve Belkin, but at least he had the wisdom to wonder if the Hawks know what they’re doing.
WHO’S WORSE?: The Hawks, because ownership actually takes an interest in their success. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.
OVERALL
The easiest choice on the board. The Thrashers have been a disappointment. The Hawks have been an embarrassment. Big difference.
It was a Hawks transaction — the Joe Johnson trade — that first dragged these owners into court. It was the Hawks who were ordered to replay the final 51.9 seconds of a game because the stat crew couldn’t count to six. It was the Hawks who designated Speedy Claxton and not Deron Williams or Chris Paul as their point guard of choice. And it’s the Hawks who have a GM who rarely deigns to speak with the media.
WHO’S WORSE?: The Hawks, because they still haven’t made the playoffs this century. The Thrashers haven’t ever won a playoff game, but at least they got there once. That modest accomplishment wouldn’t carry many debates, but it positively reverberates in this otherwise empty barrel.
Permalink | Comments (173) | Categories: Mark Bradley
Kovalchuk, Nabokov team up for chuckles
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
He took nine shots but pulled an 0-fer. Goalies stopped six. Two others bounced off legs. Another flew wide of downtown.
He was stopped on a breakaway, performed a snow angel while flat on the ice after being robbed of another chance in front and — emotional sort that he is — ended the second period by throwing his stick.
On most nights, this would set up a postgame meltdown for Ilya Kovalchuk. On this night, he was Henny Youngman.
“I threw my stick, [then] I gave it to the fan,” Kovalchuk said Sunday night. “But I don’t think he was excited.”
Thank you, he’s here all week. Tip your Zamboni driver.
The NHL All-Stars came to town. One (Rick Nash) scored three goals. One (Eric Staal) scored two goals. Another (Evgeni Nabokov) would’ve kicked out a
Winnebago Sunday if given a chance.
But the best performance — or at least, the best show — was put on by Kovalchuk, who had to settle for an assist in the Eastern Conference’s 8-7 win over the West at Philips Arena.
Despite being blanked, it speaks to Kovalchuk’s performance Sunday and his popularity in this town — as well as his security — that he was brought to the large interview room after the game but teammate Marian Hossa (who had a goal and an assist) stayed in the locker
room.
As a general rule, defense isn’t high on the priority list in NHL All-Star Games. Actually, it’s not anywhere on the list. There were 21 goals scored in last year’s game. There have been fewer than 10 scored only once in the last 17. And in 40 years of picking All-Star MVPs, defensemen have been picked only twice and goalies only five times (largely because they escaped with all of their vital organs, and no significant twitch).
But Nabokov, San Jose’s goalie, seemed determined to rob the attention Sunday, as well as knock a fellow Russian off the stage. He was the only one of six goalies to pitch a shutout in his one period, stopping eight shots in the second period.
“Obviously he was really trying to score, and he wanted it for his own fans,” Nabokov said, smiling.
And you had no desire to make him a hero?
“No.”
With 1:03 left in the second period, Kovalchuk was set up perfectly in the slot from less than 10 feet out, a relative gimme for him. He shot quickly, the puck air-mailed to the upper right hand corner of the net. But Nabokov gloved it. Kovalchuk, exasperated, fell back on the ice and stared to the ceiling.
This won’t make him feel any better: “You can call it a lucky save,” Nabokov said. “The whole top shelf was open and I just tried to swing my glove, and it ended up in the glove.”
In the final seconds of the period, ex-Thrasher Marc Savard sent Kovalchuk in on a breakaway, but Nabokov stopped him again, this time with his pads. Then came the stick chuck.
Kovalchuk and Nabokov were Olympic teammates two years ago in Turin, Italy.
“We’re good buddies,” Nabokov said.
“He’s really good for a small guy,” Kovalchuk said.
He meant that as a compliment.
More from the funny Russian: “I’m going to work on my shot in practice.”
Kovalchuk has scored 37 goals this year. It seemed like he could’ve scored 37 Sunday night. In his last All-Star appearance in 2004, he scored once. Surprisingly, he worked a give-and-go with Carolina’s Staal late in the third period — surprising in that Kovalchuk closed the deal by feeding Staal for a game-tying goal with 7:25 left.
“I think everybody in the building thought I was going to shoot it,” Kovalchuk said.
He had one final chance in the final minute. But a pass intended for him down low on the left side was knocked away by Calgary’s Dion Phaneuf. The East continued to press the attack but Kovalchuk headed for the
bench.
“I broke my stick and so I [went] to the bench,” he said. “I wanted to get another one, but [Alex] Ovechkin jumped [on] and changed [for] me. So I’m like, ‘OK, I need to change.’ “
Soon after he sat down, Savard buried the game-winning goal. It was that kind of night for Kovalchuk. But he didn’t seem to care.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
‘Climbing’ Dogs not getting far
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Knoxville — Georgia got an RPI bump just by showing up, not that the Bulldogs showed up in any competitive sense. Indeed, what they showed Saturday was that a program that hasn’t graced the NCAA tournament since 2002 isn’t as close to getting back to the Big Dance as it should be.
The Bulldogs entered as one of those odd-duck teams peculiar to college basketball: They had a decent record (11-5) but an awful RPI (117). Rule of thumb: Unless your RPI is under 50, you can forget being an at-large invitee. Conveniently enough, the schedule brought Georgia to the home of the current ratings colossus.
Tennessee is No. 1 in the RPI but entered having appeared pedestrian in losing at Kentucky on Tuesday. The Vols can look great when allowed to rip and run, markedly less great when forced to slug it out in the halfcourt. Against such an opponent, the idea is to slow it down and give yourself a chance at the end.
Georgia didn’t give itself a chance in the beginning. It made 15 turnovers before it sank its fifth basket. It defended so abominably that the Vols appeared to playing with an extra man. (Big Orange on the power play!) It trailed by 10 points after six minutes, by 21 at halftime, by 26 before Tennessee lost interest.
“Far too many times we weren’t strong and decisive,” said Dennis Felton, Georgia’s coach. “We were soft to start the game.”
Put bluntly, Georgia played a game that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 8-20 season of 2004-2005. That was Felton’s second season after inheriting Jim Harrick’s mess, and Felton could hardly be faulted then. But now it’s 2008, and there can be no more excuse-making for the Bulldogs.
Yes, Felton was dealt a lousy hand and has had some rotten luck since. The best recruit he has signed, Louis Williams of South Gwinnett, never enrolled. Last season’s team might well have made the NCAA had Mike Mercer not hurt his knee in February, and this bunch would be much more imposing if Mercer and Takais Brown hadn’t run aground academically. That said …
Felton has been coaching Georgia longer than the combined tenures of Tubby Smith and Ron Jirsa, nearly a full season longer than the disgraced Harrick. A U.S. president doesn’t get as long to fix the country as Felton has had to right a basketball program. Felton has been in place since April 2003, and still every discussion of Bulldog basketball — and there aren’t many — begins not with the incumbent but with the man he succeeded.
This is Bruce Pearl’s third season at Tennessee. While he didn’t follow anyone as egregious as Harrick, he did inherit a program that had run through four different coaches in 15 years. Pearl has Tennessee near the top of the national rankings — the Vols are No. 3 in the AP poll — and has brought a basketball buzz not felt since the days of Ray Mears and Bernard King and Ernie Grunfeld.
Asked to assess the state of Big Orange hoops, Felton said, “That’s a question for Tennessee.”
Fair enough. Asked then to characterize Georgia basketball, Felton said this: “Steady climbing. Steady climbing — that’s how I’d assess it.”
Earlier he’d said, “It’s really disappointing. There’s no shame in losing. Vanderbilt, one of the best teams in the country, came here and lost by 20. [Georgia lost by a fairly flattering 16.] You know that possibility exists against such a tremendous team. But we were soft to start the game.”
And that’s the alarming part. Even Felton’s 8-20 team could be counted on to play hard. Never well, but always hard. If ferocity has been lost and not much gained in the talent department, does that amount to steady climbing? Or is it instead an unsteady retreat?
Permalink | Comments (39) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
After all this time, just Kovy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Ten-plus years, seven-plus seasons, few plus-players, the remains of 15 goaltenders and zero playoff wins later, Atlanta sits in unfamiliar territory today: center ice.
Still seeking a presence in their city and direction in their existence, the Thrashers play host to the NHL All-Star Game Sunday night. These exhibitions, complete with skills contests and Alyssa Milano clothing lines, are designed to celebrate the sport and its stars. But more than a decade after the city was awarded a second-chance franchise, there is little to cling to, save Ilya Kovalchuk.
“I know they used to have a real nice team here, the Flames,” Kovalchuk said Saturday. “I think we’ve got a little history. But we never win anything. When you win the Stanley Cup, that’s when [fans] really realize that hockey is interesting. But when you’re not winning in Atlanta, it’s like they really don’t [care] because there’s a lot to do here. Shows, sports, football — that’s their favorite. You need to win here to get their attention.”
Atlanta has its core of hockey fans. It has its singular star. Ultimately for survival, it needs more. Certainly, Kovalchuk deserves more.
He is in his sixth season. He already has scored 239 goals. He ranks second in the NHL in goals with 37, fourth in points with 63. He’s a lock to surpass 40 for the fourth straight season and is on pace for another possible Maurice Richard Trophy as goal champion. (He’s four behind Alexander Ovechkin’s season pace of 64.)
Beyond that, Kovalchuk and his game have matured. Few could have envisioned that a talented but short-fused 18-year-old would ever develop into captain material. But Kovalchuk was one of the few Thrashers who didn’t look catatonic in the playoffs last year. He was the only one who played hard through this season’s 0-6 start, when his teammates seemed determined only to bury a coach. When general manager Don Waddell, survivalist that he is, sought career salvation by firing coach Bob Hartley, Kovalchuk was the only Thrasher who said Hartley made him a better player.
Suddenly, he isn’t merely Atlanta’s best hockey player. He is a centerpiece without a table. Or a room. Or a foundation.
Year 11. Season eight.
The hope was that the NHL All-Star Game would represent more for this city’s hockey fans than a welcome distraction. But now there is all this baggage.
Last season’s quick playoff exit smothered whatever hockey buzz might’ve existed after the division title. Waddell’s low-profile offseason moves did nothing to fuel interest. The slow start, the unofficial player revolt, the firing. The Thrashers got hot, then turned almost bipolar.
It all must wear on Kovalchuk. His early career reputation as being selfish has always been overstated, his desire to win understated.
“He cares a lot more about the team and winning and everything else than people give him credit for,” said former Thrashers captain Scott Mellanby, who is in town for the weekend. “He’s passionate. Last year in the playoffs, I thought he was our best forward. He got a taste of what it’s like to be there, and he doesn’t want to go through his whole career and not have team success. He knows people can be critical of athletes who don’t win, especially as superstars.”
The Thrashers have two players in tonight’s game. Only one seemingly has a future here. While Kovalchuk spent Saturday talking about his season and the All-Star Game, Marian Hossa again fielded questions about his contract and the likelihood of being traded in the next few weeks.
What then? With a weak farm system, Waddell’s uncertain status, a coaching vacancy, unstable ownership, how far off-stage will hockey be in Atlanta next year, with only Kovalchuk pulling the wagon?
Mellanby: “He’s only 24. I don’t think he would even want to try to think of the magnitude of what he means to the team’s future. I just know players want to be successful and know what it feels like to win.”
Asked if he is aware of his responsibility in keeping hockey on the map here, Kovalchuk said, “For sure. But I like that kind of pressure.”
Soon, he morphed into a chamber of commerce member.
“I think everybody will really enjoy it here,” he said. “Hopefully, everybody is in nice hotels and got a nice meal. Afterwards, they won’t say, ‘We’re not going to go back to Atlanta.’ “
Tonight is the diversion. People will need another reason to come back.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
NFL greats blindsided by final blow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Nobody tells a story better than Bill Curry, the former Georgia Tech player and coach, who starred in the NFL. So this one was riveting for several reasons.
Let’s start with the thought of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey wandering aimlessly around a packed Catholic church during the funeral mass for Johnny Unitas. Not only were Mackey, Curry and Unitas members of the old Baltimore Colts, but Mackey and Curry were roommates near the end of their tenure with the franchise.
“So there was John, unable to find his seat after he apparently got up to go to the restroom, and everybody just froze, but the priest just kept right on going with [his eulogy],” said Curry, sighing. Then he continued to paint an even more chilling picture of Mackey moving about the aisles in search of nothing in particular, before Curry added with another sigh, “It was like a nightmare.”
It was that, but it also was dementia, a condition that zaps an individual’s judgment and memory in dramatic ways. It’s a condition that the 66-year-old Mackey battles in Baltimore after years of getting clobbered in the head by opponents. He joins other former NFL players such as Larry Morris, a Tech Hall of Famer who suffers from dementia in Flowery Branch. They all prove each time they deliver blank stares at loved ones that there is a correlation between football-related blows and various types of dementia.
You know, no matter what the NFL, the players union and their carefully selected group of doctors like to say.
Even so, courtesy of Mackey’s wife, Sylvia, sending a letter two years ago to former commissioner Paul Tagliabue about John’s woes (“Paul said he was so touched that he even showed the letter to his wife,” she said), the league and the union agreed to form something called The 88 Plan. That’s “88,” as in Mackey’s former number.
Through the plan, families of former players suffering from dementia can receive as much as $88,000 per year.
The money is fine, but that isn’t the whole story on dementia that will come to Atlanta on March 29 at Agnes Scott College. There, Curry’s wife, Carolyn, will meet with her six-year-old group called Women Alone Together. It’s an organization for women of all ages who are “widows, divorcees, single by choice or married but feel alone because of a chronically ill spouse or because [they are] physically, mentally or spiritually separated from their mates,” its Web site says.
Sylvia Mackey will be the organization’s guest speaker that day on dementia and its effects.
“Sylvia is just an incredible lady, and the Mackeys have been friends of ours since [the late 1960s],” said Carolyn Curry, owner of a Ph.D in history. “But also this issue comes home to us because of Larry Morris. I mean, he was this great, great player for Georgia Tech, and he’s still strong and handsome, just like John. But when you see both of them now, they’re like a 2-year-old. Sylvia says that just to get John to do normal things that a human being has to do, she’s had to find a different way.”
That way is called using anything involving the NFL. It began when Mackey returned one day from a long walk and refused to shower. Sylvia thought and thought before announcing to John that the NFL mandated that all former players must shower after any activity.
John showered. Just like he began taking his medicine for dementia after Sylvia called them “vitamins” and wrapped them inside a box that she told him came from the NFL. “Sometimes I’ll use my cellphone to call our house phone, and I’ll tell John that it’s Paul Tagliabue calling, and it always works,” said Sylvia, chuckling.
Kay Morris, Larry’s wife, said chuckling is good to relieve the stress involving taking care of her husband, 74, a Decatur High graduate who played professionally for the Los Angeles Rams, Chicago Bears and the Falcons. “We’ve been dealing with this now for almost 20 years, and he’s a little worse than [Mackey],” said Kay Morris, mentioning how Larry’s dementia ruined most of his business ventures and placed the family close to financial ruin. “I don’t even think he recalls that he played.”
She didn’t chuckle.
Permalink | Comments (61) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Old-time All-Stars return, score again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
TJ’s Sports Bar in Alpharetta was a-bustle. Hockey was the theme. The NHL All-Star Game was in town, and its effect was being felt deep into the suburbs. Old hockey fans and young mixed and mingled, many who dated back to days of the Flames, and some not quite sure who was whom, as in the case of a young woman who boldly announced, “I want Gordie Hull’s autograph.”
Someone corrected her. “You mean Gordie Howe or Bobby Hull? They’re both here.”
“Oh, I’ll take either one of them,” she said, tossing her head, and in time, she did get both Thursday night.
This was not a mix of the old and the young. The stars of today were all downtown, doing what All-Stars do before they take the stage Sunday at Philips Arena. These were guys your dad and mom grew up with, Flames of the ’70s (before they took flight to Calgary) and Hall of Fame guys who had engraved their signatures on the game. Tough and unyielding on ice, warm and gentle as a parson nowadays. They spoke of collisions they had, of sticks across the face (skaters wore no masks then) and time spent in the penalty box. And they laughed and slapped one another on the back.
But now? “I went into the locker room at a game last year,” Gordie Howe said, “and I found out I couldn’t talk with the players. They all came from Europe, names I couldn’t spell and languages I didn’t speak.”
The league’s player supply once mainly came from Canada, and they spoke English, with a Canadian brogue. Rarely was a resident of the 50 states found in an NHL lineup. For that matter, at one time there were only four U.S. teams in the league, the Red Wings, the Bruins, the Rangers and the Blackhawks. Then expansion, and it did seem strange to see ice games being played in Tampa and Miami, and even stranger a couple of years ago when a team named Carolina won the Stanley Cup.
But I dawdle. This was more than a reunion, it was an occasion special to the old warriors. You see, players of the last century are strangers to most present-day headliners. Howe and Hull and the Espositos and Schultz and Clarke are not recognized as the stars they were. Present-day players were kids in some European country, not only didn’t read of the golden oldies, they didn’t know our language, and still have trouble with it. Even today names are botched. One sports club advertised a personal appearance by Dan “Rocket” Bouchard. Oops, the nickname was misapplied to Bouchard, the Flames goalie, who stopped “rockets,” confused with the great Maurice “Rocket” Richard.
This was something for the pensioneers, the introduction of the NHL Alumni Signature Wine line, all profits going to retired veterans and and charities of their choice. The NHL has a pension fund, but it is meager. Howe, as great a star as there is, gets $17,000 a year. And you may be aware of the drive to increase alumni benefits in other professional sports.
Jason Zentz was never a star. He played in the NHL, three years with the Bruins, “a cup of coffee,” as he described his career. He became a successful businessman in Boston, appeared at TJ’s in executive suit and tie, and spoke humbly of his dedication to the guys who went before him. This was the time and the place to announce it, and the wines got a popular introduction as the evening wore on.
It was like being in a living, breathing hall of fame. All 12 veterans were there to introduce their signature wines, and share with all the people TJ’s would hold into the night. Tim Ecclestone, the host and former Flame, was joined by two other Flame alumni, Willie Plett and Eric Vail, and there may have been others swallowed up in the crowd that grew into a milling throng. Many of the Atlanta Flames traveled on to Calgary for NHL seasons but never gave up their homes in the Atlanta area.
The league has lost much of its Canadian flavor. It has developed a pipeline to European sources, and as Gordie Howe said, you need an interpreter in most of the NHL locker rooms. But winning and losing is still the same in any language.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Thrashers / NHL
Smith looks, sounds good but …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Flowery Branch — In addition to snapping the ball dandy enough for 18 seasons to become one of the all-time great Falcons, Jeff Van Note met each of the franchise’s first 13 head coaches. He eased into a smile before offering his assessment of No. 14 across the way. “He sounds good, and he looks good, too,” said Van Note, nodding, while studying the white-haired Mike Smith on the podium.
Added Van Note, “With his glasses on, and when you see his profile, he looks a little like Vince Lombardi.”
Smith does, by the way. This isn’t to say that his Falcons will rush to Super Bowls across the Artificial Tundra of the Georgia Dome field. This is to say that Smith sounds good and looks good.
Whatever that means. I don’t know what any of this means for the Falcons, and nobody does. That said, since the Falcons aren’t close to reaching even mediocrity, why not hire somebody who at least sounds good and looks good?
Just like most head football coaches delivering their state-of-their-new-team address, Smith said all of the predictable things. He said he wants to run the ball and stop the run. He said he has an open-door policy. He said he wants “character” on the roster. Mostly, he said everything in soft tones from his 48-year-old tongue. Said Van Note, “You can tell that he is very analytical, and I like that type of approach to football. That has a lot to do with breaking down film and how you view other people. We’ll see what happens.”
Yeah, we’ll see. Ever hear of Mike Smith before he was introduced this week as the Falcons’ new guy? Join the rest of the universe. With the rumbling, bumbling, stumbling decision-makers of the Falcons searching for somebody to replace Bobby Petrino, who bolted before the end of his first season to do that “woo pig sooey” thing in Arkansas, the Falcons had to hire somebody like Mike Smith. Somebody obscure. Somebody just elated to get his chance as an NFL head coach.
In essence, the Falcons were desperate, because there wasn’t a definitive hire to fix this wretched situation.
The franchise quarterback is sitting in a federal penitentiary. The ever-present owner likes to roam the sidelines and dine with his skipper on Mondays. The roster is flawed and aging. The fan base is dwindling by the moment. Nobody with an accomplished résumé and the slightest name recognition was coming here.
Consider, too, that during Arthur Blank’s six-year ownership of the Falcons, he has preferred to hire coaches (Jim Mora, Petrino) and a general manager (Thomas Dimitroff) out of nowhere. While Mora and Petrino were disasters, Dimitroff is a potential one. He could prosper, too. It’s just that Dimitroff had zero experience as a GM before he was hired by Blank through a webcam interview. Reggie McKenzie also was available after 14 years in the front office of the Green Bay Packers, and he was groomed to run an NFL franchise by legendary GM Ron Wolf. In other words, the Falcons had other legitimate options for their general manager job.
The Falcons had few to zero legitimate options for their head coaching job. So they had to gamble, which is why they snagged Smith, a coordinator for an efficient defense in Jacksonville and somebody with the reputation as a nice guy. That’s opposed to whatever you would call Petrino, who partly opted to flee the Falcons after players hinted that they wished to stuff dirty sweat socks down his throat.
It isn’t likely that Falcons players will have similar thoughts with the personable Smith, and let’s face it: Who would do such a thing to a Lombardi lookalike?
“Nobody’s ever told me I look like Vince Lombardi. I’ve been told I look like Steve Martin,” said Smith, laughing, without sounding wild and crazy. “In fact, I’ve had people chasing me around the airport and saying, ‘There’s Steve.’ “
Smith laughed some more. Now we’ll see if he can keep folks from laughing at his Falcons.
Permalink | Comments (71) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Falcons go back to football fundamentals
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — Fundamentals aren’t fun. Truth to tell, they’re boring. But they exist for a reason: They work. And when you’ve bottomed out, the only proven way to pull yourself up is to embrace the basic.
The Falcons just hired a coach whose stated philosophy of football is to run the ball and stop the run. That sounds dull as all get-out, but right about now, this organization could use all the dullness it can find. It has tried the glib (Jim Mora) and the guileful (Bobby what’s-his-name), and here it sits, introducing its third new coach in 48 months.
The new man is Mike Smith. He answers to Smitty. (Sometimes, his wife conceded, she even calls him Smitty.) He’s a 26-year career assistant who once, to make ends meet between stops, grew Christmas trees in Irwin, Tenn. Can’t get any less artificial than that.
The new man describes himself as “a systems guy,” and that’s precisely what this careening organization requires. The Falcons have invested heavily in personalities, only to be betrayed at every turn. They need a baseline set of tenets. They need a guy whose burning ambition isn’t to coach the Washington Huskies or to run after every open job. They need a man who sees, to quote Mike Smith, the imperative “to focus on the task at hand.”
His task: To coach up a team that has been beaten down and, in so doing, bring order to chaos. And having a system, having core beliefs, is always the way to begin.
Mike Smith isn’t a big name or an outsized personality. He’s a football coach. He doesn’t bring the sizzle that would have accompanied the offensive man from Dallas — “Obviously we made the offer to Jason [Garrett],” said Thomas Dimitroff, the new general manager — but how excited were Packers fans in 2006 on the day Mike McCarthy was named head coach? How pleased are they today? Winning can come in different forms, but at bottom winning is always based on the fundamental.
There is about Smith a refreshing lack of pretense. When you’ve gone from living in San Diego to residing in Morehead, Ky. — “culture shock,” Smith said — due to the inherent vagaries of coaching football, you’ve looked at life from both sides now. He doesn’t come across as entitled (unlike, say, Mora) or egomaniacal (unlike, say, what’s-his-name). He comes across as a guy who has a job to do and has done it long enough to know what works.
And here’s the nicest part: What has worked for Smith is what the GM, newly imported from New England, believes will work anywhere. “Control both lines of scrimmage,” Dimitroff said. “That’s Bill’s philosophy [meaning Belichick] about the defensive line: Keep the stall full.”
Dimitroff is a personnel man. The chief reason he warmed to Smith is because this coach shares an affinity for personnel matters. “You can’t force-feed a coach,” Dimitroff said. “If he’s not fully invested in choosing personnel, you wind up being at loggerheads.”
Make no mistake: Smith is Dimitroff’s man. He recommended that Smith be offered the job, and Arthur Blank approved. (And Dimitroff saw no need to wait for an audience with Steve Spagnuolo.) The freshly minted GM introduced Smith to the media Thursday, a telling bit of symbolism. For his part, Blank seemed content to say relatively little.
Smith is a solid hire, a welcome addition to an organization that has been treading in shifting sand. Said Dimitroff: “What Mike brings to the table is stability and consistency to a team that needs those things.”
The belief here, though, is that the key to this offseason, the key to the Falcons’ whole future, wasn’t so much the coach as the GM. The way Dimitroff handled this first mission — calmly, methodically, fundamentally — suggests that an organization gone wrong is again, at long and blessed last, going right.
Permalink | Comments (130) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
Falcons shouldn’t feel embarrassed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The word “embarrassing” has been tossed around rather loosely regarding the Falcons’ search for new leadership. So here’s what I want to know:
Was it embarrassing to approach Bill Cowher, who won a Super Bowl with Pittsburgh?
Was it embarrassing to approach Bill Parcells, who won two Super Bowls with New York?
Was it embarrassing to approach Jason Garrett, the assistant everybody wants?
Was it embarrassing to sound out Pete Carroll, who might not have been a fit here but who clearly knows something about football?
Was it embarrassing to wind up with a general manager who apprenticed in the league’s finest organization and a head coach who coordinated a terrific defense in Jacksonville?
The Falcons, it says here, spoke with most of the right people. (I don’t understand why Marty Schottenheimer and Floyd Reese weren’t interviewed, but I can appreciate the desire to import newer blood.) They got used by Parcells, which has happened to teams - this one included - before and will doubtless happen again, but had he said yes this organization would have received an instant infusion of credibility. And he did, it must be noted, say yes to Miami.
The only truly embarrassing part was the way it was revealed, at the end of a post-Parcells press release, that Rich McKay had been kicked upstairs. There mightn’t have been a good way of breaking the news, but there had to be a better way than that.
Once McKay had been defrocked as general manager, there was no way this two-pronged process was even going to be without palpitations. But here, after all’s done and too much has been said, is the bottom line:
The Falcons today have a more astute personnel man as GM and a more stable individual (surely!) as coach than they’ve had since 2003. If that’s an embarrassing outcome, we should all be so abashed.
Permalink | Comments (94) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Smith fits bill for Falcons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
If there is any absolute about the Falcons’ hiring of Mike Smith as their new coach, it is this: If you phone the ticket office today, you’ll have no problem getting through.
They did not go for buzz. They did not go for somebody to schmooze old corporate sponsors or wow the young and hip. They did not hire a guy simply because of the way he will sound on radio or the way he will look at a news conference. Smith is 48 but he has white hair. In that sense, he’s already ahead of the Falcons’ coaching curve.
But regardless of whether Mike Smith turns out to be a great find or a huge mistake, the Falcons and general manager Thomas Dimitroff made this decision for the right reason: He is a football coach, not a carnival act. He is straightforward, X’s and O’s, respected by players, admired by peers.
At least in prototype, he is what the Falcons need.
“Look at what he’s done in Jacksonville, having one of the highest-ranked defenses with really not the greatest talent in the world,” said Jeff Lageman, the former NFL lineman and linebacker and a friend of Smith’s. “He’s taken rookie free agents and draft picks and turned them into players.
“The thing I like most about him is he’s organized. He’s detailed. He understands football and he knows opposing coaches and what they’re trying to accomplish. He understands playing to strengths and eliminating weaknesses. Most coaches would love to have him as a consultant just because he understands the game so well.”
The Falcons have taken a risk here. But anybody short of Bill Cowher would be a risk. Nobody among the final four of candidates — Smith, Steve Spagnuolo, Leslie Frazier, Rex Ryan — had a rich head coaching background.
The worst thing the Falcons did was leave themselves open for second-guessing should Smith not work out, given they didn’t want to wait until after the Super Bowl to talk to the Giants’ Spagnuolo. But there were obvious concerns: He could say no and leave the Falcons humiliated (again). Or he could say yes, but the timing might not leave any quality assistants still on the market.
There’s also this: Spagnuolo has been a coordinator for only one season (like Jason Garrett in Dallas). In that sense, Smith’s actually less of a risk.
Does owner Arthur Blank get his pyrotechnics? No. But there were bottle rockets with Bobby Petrino. How did that work out?
“Wow” picks only get you to the first kickoff. Dimitroff understands that. He presumably had to convince Blank of the same. In 2005, Green Bay was ripped for hiring general manager Ted Thompson, who then was ripped for hiring coach Mike McCarthy. But Thompson and McCarthy turned out to be a perfect match. The Packers made it to last weekend’s NFC title game before losing in overtime.
Jacksonville has had the fourth-ranked NFL defense over Smith’s five seasons as coordinator (only Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Tampa Bay allowed fewer yards in that span). The fact the Jaguars are not loaded with stars — no Pro Bowl players on defense this season, when they ranked 12th — makes them a nice blueprint for the Falcons, given the likelihood of Dimitroff blowing up the depth chart.
Some might downplay Smith’s influence. After all, Jaguars head coach Jack Del Rio is a defensive coach. But I seem to remember San Francisco coach Bill Walsh not having an offensive coordinator. Mike Holmgren was the quarterbacks coach. Dennis Green was the wide receivers coach. Imagine if nobody thought much of their contributions.
Lageman believes “Players will respect Mike because he’s a stand-up, honest guy. There’s no ulterior motive.”
Already, he’s one up on Petrino.
Now it can be told: A couple of weeks ago, Smith phoned former Falcons executive Ron Hill, who now works for the league. Smith asked Hill about the city, the team, the owner.
“He knew I had been there,” Hill said. “I told him Atlanta was a great place to live and the Falcons had a tremendous facility. I told him Arthur would do whatever it takes to win there. You just have to make the right decisions, and he’ll give you the money to make you a winner on the field.”
Now it’s about decisions, not marketing. If the team wins, it will sell itself.
Permalink | Comments (104) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Atlanta Spirit needed thinning
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
So Bernie Mullin just resigned as president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Spirit, LLC, which owns the Hawks and the Thrashers.
Good.
Now if the Spirit can get rid of a few owners, the Hawks and the Thrashers would fly a little higher.
Make that a lot higher.
This ridiculously top-heavy operation didn’t need Mullin, not with nine folks listed in the front of the Hawks’ media guys as owners of the Spirit.
One of those owners, Steve Belkin, is suing the others in a nasty and lengthy battle for control of the team. Until that legal mess is over, the Hawks and the Thrashers have to deal with their current ownership setup, which isn’t great, but at least it just became slightly more efficient.
Out goes Mullin, and in comes a system that requires the likes of Thrashers general manager Don Waddell and Hawks general manager Billy Knight to do more of what they’ve already done: Report directly to the slew of owners. That’s opposed to going through Mullin, who then went to the slew of owners.
Next step: Have the general managers of the Hawks and the Thrashers report directly to one owner someday.
We can dream, can’t we?
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Mullin’s departure another symptom of ‘broken’ Spirit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
If the Atlanta Spirit had written an owners playbook, I imagine it would have begun with an ill-conceived offense (nine receivers, two spokesmen), followed by several misdirection plays, a few banged noggins, maybe a pie fight, all with the intention of someday getting across midfield.
Four years later, I’m not sure what yard line they’re on. Let’s just say that if sports owners are like any other industry, with newbies trying to mimic success stories, they’re not quite being held up as the standard.
On Tuesday, Atlanta Spirit LLC dumped a CEO and a CFO.
I know. First reaction: Don’t care. They’ll eat it up at the Wall Street Journal, and maybe Staples. In terms of tangible product impact, this isn’t quite like the Hawks or Thrashers dumping a center, which is to assume either team has one of those, either.
The fact Bernie Mullin (the outgoing CEO, president and traffic cop for the nine-headed ownership group) and Bill Duffy (bean-counter) are out of work illustrates that this remains sports’ most dysfunctional executive unit.
The owners basically eliminated a layer between themselves and the teams. But Michael Gearon confirmed they also have created a new seven-person committee of relative department heads that reports to the nine-membership group, which runs the two teams, which have a combined zero playoff wins.
So, once again, the Atlanta Spirit math: Nine over seven divided by two equals zero.
I will say this: When the owners come together for a single purpose, they can accomplish things quickly. Mullin and Duffy were erased from the Hawks’ and Thrashers’ Web sites by lunch Tuesday.
Just to remind you: These were supposed to be the good times.
The Thrashers are hosting the NHL All-Star Game this weekend at Philips Arena. But one of the league’s centerpiece events is sitting on a wobbly table, and Atlanta’s hockey team is no more stable. The Thrashers made the playoffs last year. But when they left town for two games in New York starting Tuesday, they had a three-game losing streak, were out of the playoff picture and had only six more points than the worst team in the Eastern Conference despite playing the second-most games.
The Hawks have some nice pieces, but their lineup too often resembles mismatched china, and their record (17-20) illustrates that. They took a three-game losing streak and a 5-11 road record into a five-game trip through the Western Conference (the good conference).
Mullin might have decided to leave Tuesday on his own — this was announced as a mutual decision — but it’s really semantics. His contract was up this summer. It wasn’t going to be renewed. The good news: His headache is about to go away.
Some in the organizations viewed Mullin as an asset, others as a waste of space. Some liked him, some didn’t. Regardless, he was in a relatively impossible situation.
The owners aren’t even on the same side in court. How can they be on the same page? Conference calls must have been like listening to static with the sound cranked up.
The original concept that one man could run the point for owners and deal with the teams’ general managers wasn’t working out, in part because Don Waddell and Billy Knight — they’re the ones who still have jobs — were dealing directly with the owners (primarily Gearon and Bruce Levenson).
Gearon understands why there has been criticism. But he also believes things aren’t as bad as perceived, and they’re getting better.
“The Hawks are coming off the best December they’ve had in 14 years, and they’re competing for a playoff position,” he said. “The Thrashers are fighting for first place in their division. So to characterize things as messed up is an incorrect characterization.”
He then downplayed the exits in the executive offices, saying: “Those changes are related to the business, not the teams. This is seamless.”
Except as we are reminded every day, sports is business. A team’s success starts with a suit behind a desk and filters down to a pair of sneaks in the locker room. There is still too much negative filtering down. Until it ends, the teams will not be going up.
Permalink | Comments (57) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
Here’s to the Flames who never left
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Billboards around town announced their impending arrival. “The Icemen Cometh,” they trumpeted. Hardly original, but a catchy means of advertising Atlanta’s introduction into the National Hockey League. The year was 1972. Nine men of prominence, and wealth, shepherded by Tom Cousins, had bought into it. The Atlanta Flames burst into life in the playpen Cousins had built for them, The Omni.
Opening night, something you could never have imagined this deep in the South, where the NHL had never ventured before, men speeding about at 30 MPH on thin blades of steel, brandishing a stick, burdened by about 10 pounds of protective gear. The Flames lost, of course, to Buffalo, 5-3, but within two years they were in the playoffs. By this time, Bernard (Boom Boom) Geoffrion had struck up a worshipful following, intrigued by his French-Canadian version of our language.
“Da Boom,” as he sometimes referred to himself. “Da Flame,” as he referred to his team. Cliff Fletcher was general manager, and he saw the franchise all the way to its new destination in Calgary. (But that’s another story.) The public relations director — ah, this will catch your eye — was Jim Huber. You know him now as TBS’s sort of version of, well, Walter Cronkite.
Almost as swiftly as they came, they went. In 1980 the franchise was sold and moved to Calgary. There were complications. A new rival league had driven up costs, but that was not the base cause, and we turn here to Dan Bouchard, the goaltender, one of several Flames who had to follow the team to Calgary, but never changed home addresses. And still hasn’t.
“Tom Cousins was an honorable owner,” Bouchard said. “The players had no pension plan, and he said there’s something wrong there. He brought up the need for a pension plan, the other owners turned on him, and it eventually cost him his franchise. That’s why he had to sell it.”
Bouchard has lived 29 years in the Marietta area. He has coached in Switzerland, run a hockey camp in Czechoslovakia, coached in Quebec, but always came back to Marietta. He coached the Life University team seven years, and is reviving that program now. He has a French restaurant in Vinings, his wife has a cleaning business, and while NHL players now have a pension plan, it is but a whisper of major-league baseball and football plans.
There is an all-star lineup of former Flames who, like Bouchard, came to play and never left, except on hockey business: Randy Manery, Eric Vail, Tom Lysiak, Greg Fox, Bobby Simpson, Willie Plett, Tim Ecclestone, and the same may be said of Boom Boom. He later went back to Montreal to coach the Canadiens, but home remained East Cobb, and so it was unto his death about two years ago. And so, too, did that distinctive French-Canadian accent stay with him to the end. It is ironic that he passed away on the day the Canadiens retired his jersey in The Forum. He never made the ceremony, but Marlene and the family represented him. To most of us who were here then, Boom Boom remains the face, rugged and humorous, and the voice of hockey here. He would be 76.
Well, this is another era, and another team and another arena in which the All-Star Game takes the ice this weekend. But our old Flames will be having their time. Thursday afternoon they gather in a Hall of Fame atmosphere, in Tim Ecclestone’s place on Holcomb Bridge Road, used to be Timothy John’s, now shortened to TJ’s Sports Bar, in company with Gordie Howe, and Bobby Hull, Bobby Clarke, Ted Lindsay, Tony Esposito, Dave Schultz, Frank Mahovlich, Johnny Bower, Clark Gillies, Kurt Walker and Pat Quinn, an original Flame who went home to Toronto.
“Our old Flames,” if we may readjust the lyrics of the song of yore. We just didn’t want the memory of them to be crunched in the All-Star pandemonium. Yep, they left under disturbing circumstances, but now you know that Tom Cousins was in pursuit of a just cause. And, that the Flames later won a Stanley Cup, it just wasn’t in Atlanta’s name.
Permalink | Comments (43) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Thrashers / NHL
The Tuesday Countdown - Long playoff drought
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: So after seeing the Hawks and Thrashers extend losing streaks and sink (again) in playoff races, it got me wondering: How long has it been since this town witnessed a post-season win?
9: That’s easy. Too long. The last win by one of Atlanta’s four major pro franchises came in game two of the National League divisional playoff series. The Braves defeated Houston, 7-1, on Oct. 6, 2005. They lost the next two games and were eliminated. That win: 838 days ago. If neither Philips Arena tenant make the playoffs this season, that number will bust 1,000 in early July. This has been your Atlanta Sports Century moment.
8: An ESPN talking-head Tuesday morning referred to the Falcons’ coaching search as “disastrous” and “a totally botched operation.” Maybe I missed something. What’s today’s date again?
7: Notwithstanding the bizarre twists in Arthur Blank’s two-headed search it’s not at all uncommon for teams to delay coaching searches so that they can interview an assistant from a Super Bowl team. The fact the Falcons are pushing things back two weeks to talk to New York Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo does not make for a “disaster.” All it makes for is bored individuals in 24-hour news cycles to overstate the issues.
6: Can the Falcons look bad when all of this is over? Sure. They looked bad in dancing with Bill Parcells and Pete Carroll, and in being rejected by Jason Garrett. They can really look really bad if they offer the job to Spagnuolo in two weeks and he says no - or takes the Redskins job instead. But if Arthur Blank and Thomas Dimitroff end up getting the guy they want, it won’t matter what happened before that. And it will still be the first week of February.
5: And why do you need a coach when you don’t have any players to coach yet?
4: Kiefer Sutherland was released from jail Monday. Excuse me, but the guy spent 18 months being tortured in a Chinese prison and has cheated death for seven seasons - I think he can survive 48 hours in a drunk tank.
3: Just wondering: As bye week diversions go, what’s the difference between Tony Romo going to Mexico with his hottie girlfriend and Tom Brady going to New York with his hottie girlfriend? (That’s a shot at deranged Dallas Cowboys fans, not Brady.)
2: Brady was seen walking into Bundchen’s Greenwich Village apartment wearing a walking boot. But fear not. Bill Belichick will come clean in the injury report next week. Brady: questionable, shoulder.
1: Foot or no foot - Patriots in a walk.
Permalink | Comments (34) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Hawks taking too long to figure it out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s never easy, going from bad to good, but it needn’t be as hard as the Hawks are making it. They’ve gone from being a team that lacked talent to one that lacks direction. They’re gifted enough now. They’re just not clever enough.
You wouldn’t trade the Hawks’ starting five for Portland’s. (The Blazers, as we know, have been forced to operate without Greg Oden, the best collegiate center since Patrick Ewing.) We were, however, reminded Monday that talent is only part of basketball.
Portland beat the Hawks in overtime because the callow visitors played to their strengths — spreading the floor and finding the open man, being quick and decisive as opposed to slow and uncertain — and the Hawks, even at this late date, still aren’t sure where their strengths lie. A case study:
Ninety seconds left in overtime, Hawks down two. Josh Smith misses on a drive but makes a majestic swoop to save the rebound; Joe Johnson misses on a drive but Josh Childress rebounds, and now the ball comes to Smith on the perimeter, the scrambling Blazers having played defense for 43 seconds and …
Smith casts a 3-pointer. The same Smith who has missed 41 of 54 treys on the season. The same Smith who hasn’t even attempted the shot in the game’s first 52 minutes. The same Smith who bricks this one.
No, that play didn’t wind up being the outright difference. Smith would steal the ball from Travis Outlaw and Marvin Williams would make the tying free throws and Outlaw would hit the winner over Smith’s not-terrible defense, but still … on an elongated possession near the end of a frazzled game, the Hawks’ second-best player took not the shot his team needed but the shot an opponent on the sixth stop of a seven-game trip was praying he’d hoist.
“It’s really about taking care of the little things,” said Al Horford, not speaking specifically of Smith’s missed trey but of the whole cracked mosaic. “When we do that, we’re pretty good. When we don’t — when we don’t go after a loose ball or we don’t block out — that can add up and affect a game.”
After a brief spell above .500, the Hawks have lost eight of 11. They’re 17-20 as they embark on a five-game Western swing. Everybody assumed they’d start slowly, owing to a front-loaded schedule, but the optimists among us figured they’d be further along by now.
Not many teams can put five better players on the floor than Johnson, Horford, Marvin Williams and the two Joshes, but here again we see the folly of Billy Knight’s drafting. There’s no point guard to control a game. (Yes, Anthony Johnson was suspended for Monday’s game, but he’s still Anthony Johnson, journeyman. And Acie Law IV, of whom too much was expected too soon, has developed a bad case of the timids.)
The Blazers, by way of contrast, have three point guards, four if you count Brandon Roy, whom Knight deigned not to choose with the fifth pick of the 2006 draft. Instead he took Shelden Williams. Roy played 41 minutes Monday and scored 18 points; S. Williams didn’t play a second and could be observed running sprints on the practice court afterward.
Without a real point guard, the burden falls on the coach to teach his men the difference between right and wrong, and Mike Woodson still hasn’t gotten through. Portland’s Nate McMillan has taken a team with a built-in excuse to fail and has lifted it to 25-16. Woodson’s Hawks still keep losing the same old game the same old way.
“The sky’s the limit for us,” Horford said, but you wonder how high a team with no floor leader and a coach who’s 111 games under .500 over three-plus seasons can rise. And then Horford, whose Florida Gators were a joyous example of a team with really good players but an even better mesh, said this:
“Until we figure it out, things are going to keep going back and forth with winning and losing.”
The Atlanta Hawks. Figuring things out. Will any of us live so long?
Permalink | Comments (67) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley
Fear part of Super Bowl preparation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Nobody understands this Super Bowl drill better than Steve Wallace, the former standout offensive tackle for the San Francisco 49ers via Auburn University and Atlanta’s Chamblee High School. He spent part of his 10th year in retirement from the NFL on Sunday at a local sports bar, where he studied both games that produced this season’s Final Two.
That Super Bowl drill, by the way, involves a number of steps, according to Wallace, owner of three Super Bowl rings after nearly a decade with the magic names of Bill Walsh, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Ronnie Lott and the rest.
Step One: Reality.
No question, a slew of Patriots have a wonderful sense of their past, present and future at 18-0. They just reached a fourth Super Bowl in seven seasons after surviving the San Diego Chargers and themselves on a frigid afternoon in New England.
Then came a night game in Green Bay that made Foxborough seem balmy. The New York Giants ignored the below-zero temperatures and ridiculously frigid winds to win a classic in overtime against the sainted Brett Favre and his Packers.
So, given the postgame smiles and hugs for those associated with both teams, your eyes would say the giddy Giants joined the veteran Patriots on Sunday in already understanding what they just accomplished. Not only that, it’s sort of been all over the news lately that these teams that faced each other just 23 days ago will meet in Glendale, Ariz., in 13 days for the world championship.
“Yeah, but it won’t hit them until Tuesday,” said Wallace, adding that such was the case for the 49ers before each of his Super Bowl trips after the 1988, 1989 and 1994 seasons. “There are just so many other things going on around you during the first couple of days. Everybody is telling you how sweet it is for you to be in the Super Bowl, but it doesn’t sink in.
“On Tuesday, that’s when team officials start telling you about all of the responsibilities you have. Which is [buying] Super Bowl tickets and taking care of family members. And then you start to realize that you only have about a week to put it together.”
The thing is, soon after you deal with Step One, Step Two is just a “something” away from trying to stiff-arm you.
It’s called fear.
You know it’s significant, because the usually fearless Wallace had to use every bit of his 6-feet-5 and 285 pounds to overcome Step Two before each of his Super Bowl trips. That included the third one, when he was terrified after he rose on the morning of the 49ers’ game against the San Diego Chargers. He flipped on the television in his hotel room to hear an ESPN analyst predict that Wallace would get mauled by his defensive counterpart.
So much for critics. “It inspired me to play the game of my life,” said Wallace, before explaining the reason for his fear prior to those Super Bowls, along with the upcoming fear for the Patriots and the Giants. Added Wallace, “The fear is that you start thinking to yourself, ‘Oh, we’re at the pinnacle, and we don’t want to do anything to blow this thing.’
“I’m pretty sure New England will be going through that by saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a chance to make history. We have to do everything correctly so we don’t blow this thing.’ “
Which brings us to Step Three: Bashing, not from your opponents, but from your coaches. To hear Wallace tell it, the Patriots’ Bill Belichick and the Giants’ Tom Coughlin, both noted tough guys, will find actual things or phantom things to sling in their players’ faces with anger.
“Somewhere along the way during Super Bowl week, they are going to have to go off on their players and do something to just check them a little bit,” said Wallace, recalling how his teammates once gave former 49ers coach George Seifert one of those actual things to use. They were 18-point favorites in their Super Bowl against San Diego, and 18 players missed curfew a few days before the game.
Added Wallace, “Once [Seifert] went off that Thursday morning, everybody was like, ‘Well, this is the real deal.’ “
The 49ers won by 23.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Tech’s ‘Lethal’ trio just want to help
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
It’s a long climb for Georgia Tech’s basketball team, which mostly is double-dribbling in the valley of the ACC standings. Even so, Saturday’s 81-70 victory over Virginia Tech at Alexander Memorial Coliseum was a step for the Yellow Jackets toward higher ground.
They just have so far to go before reaching decency with the only losing record in the conference at 8-9 overall. This also was their first ACC victory after three previous tries, but here’s the deal: They could rise faster as a team and as a program if they had the legendary likes of Kenny Anderson, Brian Oliver and Dennis Scott, not only on the court, but off the court as well.
Remember those guys? They were christened as Lethal Weapon 3 after they shot and inspired the Jackets to their first Final Four trip in 1990. We mention this for a couple of reasons. First, they spent Saturday’s postgame in the annual Tech alumni game. They hadn’t been together in uniform since their glory days of yore. You know, as opposed to the Jackets’ gory days of now, with Tech trying to avoid its second losing record in three seasons and third in Paul Hewitt’s eight seasons on campus.
As for the second reason, Anderson, Oliver and Scott still bleed old gold and white, and they want to help.
They’ve asked to help.
They’ve pleaded to help.
“I wish Paul would use me more and use us more,” said Scott, the 3-point king back then who currently is the general manager of the American Basketball Association’s Atlanta Vision and a color analyst on Hawks radio broadcasts. “Right now, we’re used very little, and I understand that Paul is trying to create his own legacy, but every school has a tradition. Every school has a foundation. I know different coaches reach back to their history, because that’s where [the magic] is.”
For the Jackets, it is Scott playing all 40 minutes of a victory over Minnesota in that regional final 18 years ago and scoring a point per minute. It is Anderson connecting on a prayer at the buzzer the game before that against Michigan State to send Tech into overtime, where Michigan State didn’t win. It also is Oliver pushing his teammates as the gallant captain who kept playing and producing throughout the tournament despite a damaged ankle.
They want to help, all right, because as Anderson said, when contrasting his Tech experience with his 15 seasons in the NBA and his role now as head coach of the Continental Basketball Association’s Atlanta Krunk: “Those two years that I spent at Georgia Tech were the best years of my whole life, really.”
Oliver laughed, saying, “I’d have to say marrying my wife provided me with my best years.” That said, Oliver, who lives in his native Smyrna, added in a hurry that he cherishes his Tech experience so much that he wishes to contribute to a renaissance for the Jackets between erecting things (he just got his Tech degree in building construction) and working as a television studio host for college basketball.
Said Oliver: “I want to help the program, but in the same sense, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m meddling. I don’t want to make it seem like, well, they’ve been struggling, and now I want to put my hand in the cookie jar as if what he’s doing is not right. I have the utmost confidence in Paul Hewitt and what he’s done. I’m one of those who believes that what he’s done in the past is what he can do right now.”
What Hewitt has done in the past is take Tech to the Final Two. That was only four seasons ago. And despite the Jackets’ recent struggles, Hewitt wants them to become the Final One sooner than later, and he also wants Lethal Weapon 3 to help Tech accomplish as much.
“Those guys, they’ve been great to me already, and anything that we can do to have them involved, I’m willing to do,” Hewitt said. “Going back to the first year I was here, Brian Oliver gave the pregame talk at the ACC tournament, and I know Dennis and Kenny, they’ve been terrific and supportive. … Obviously, NCAA rules come into play, and they can’t help us in recruiting or things like that, but so maybe we need to figure out a role for them.”
Not maybe. Definitely.
They’re waiting.
Permalink | Comments (23) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Despite flaws, Thrashers a major threat
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Say this for the Thrashers: They’ve held our attention. On Tuesday they beat the NHL’s best team and pulled into a tie for the Southeast Division lead. On Thursday they lost to Montreal in a shootout but claimed first place by themselves, and afterward center Eric Perrin said, “Consistency — that’s the one thing we’ve got to work on.”
On Friday, as if on cue, the Thrashers fell out of first place by losing 10-1 to a Buffalo team that hadn’t won in calendar 2008. Not that this franchise has been around all that long, but when you match the most-lopsided loss in team annals … well, that’s news.
If you’re the Thrashers, still being newsworthy is a victory. The way this season began — an 0-6 start and a coach firing — they seemed to have embarked on one of those nobody-cares campaigns. (A Hawks-like season, in other words.) But the Thrashers have risen to .500, and the rest of the division has backed up to meet them, and with 33 games remaining they have a realistic chance to make the playoffs.
“We knew we were a way better team than the way we started,” said Don Waddell, who has been vindicated in his decision to dump Bob Hartley and assume the coaching duties. The Thrashers are 23-17-3 under Waddell, and the GM/coach has come to believe in his team’s potential to the extent that he’s ready to make another round of roster-juicing moves.
“I’m a buyer for sure,” said Waddell, asked his stance as the Feb. 26 trade deadline approaches. “Things are so tight that if there’s a piece out there, it could make a big difference.”
Three months ago, you’d have figured the Thrashers would be deadline sellers and that Marian Hossa, whose contract is up at season’s end, would be their principal lure. But Hossa, who’d been having a tepid season — not quite an Andruw Jones contract year, but not anywhere close to vintage Hossa — has scored six goals in the past seven games and seems assured of being here through April if not longer.
Will calling out line changes keep Waddell from being as managerially active as he was at the deadline a year ago, when his moves for Keith Tkachuk and Alexei Zhitnik pushed the Thrashers into the postseason? “In our business, calls happen at 11 at night. It’s not like the New York Stock Exchange, where you can only trade between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.”
The Thrashers could stand another February stimulus package. Even with the splash made by rookie Tobias Enstrom — after nearly a decade of drafting, Waddell finds a defenseman! — the back line doesn’t scare anybody. (Nobody in the NHL has yielded more goals.) And Ilya Kovalchuk has scored a league-highest 27 percent of his team’s goals, which is a testimony to one man’s skill but an indictment of his supporting cast.
That said, just being in a place where strengths and weakness still matter is no small thing. Back in October, this season had all the makings of an unqualified surrender: A franchise reaches the playoffs for the first time only to hand back every shred of credibility it struggled so long to earn. That abject retreat has been arrested. The Thrashers still have a shot.
“We’ve beaten all the top teams — Detroit, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Boston,” Perrin said Thursday. “All those top teams know we’ve got the potential. … We want to make the next step and get above .500. We’re haunted by the fact that we can only get one game above .500. We want to be two games above.”
Within 24 hours the Thrashers slid back to .500 and ceded the division lead on a night when they yielded 10 big fat goals. By any measure, Friday was a lousy night. But the greater point is that the Thrashers haven’t let this become a lousy season. The greater point is that an 0-6 team has put itself in position to lead a division.
Permalink | Comments (24) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Thrashers / NHL
McKay finds end of bench
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Four years ago, Arthur Blank viewed Rich McKay as his football messiah. That was fairly well known even before he admitted, “I’ve been dreaming more about Rich McKay for two years than I have about my own wife,” which was something we basically allowed Stephanie Blank to sort out.
We now know that Blank miscalculated on McKay, whose relative unmasking as a general manager become an ugly sidebar to this Falcons’ season.
Executive meetings aren’t held before a live studio audience, so we may never know who exerted the most influence on matters regarding hirings, signings and direction — Blank or McKay. But this much is clear: McKay doesn’t want to talk about it. His roughly $3 million annual contract apparently comes with a cloaking device and a mute button.
Having been to several strange news conferences — including one called by Tom Cousineau specifically to announce that he wasn’t homosexual, as well as several others with Don King in the center ring — I can tell you that none had the bizarre overtones of Thomas Dimitroff welcoming.
It was a surprise in itself that McKay — who was publicly stripped of his GM title at the end of a Blank statement on Bill Parcells — showed up at the Dimitroff news conference. Maybe he just wanted to play the good soldier. Maybe he was told to play the good soldier. Maybe he had concerns about direct deposit being interrupted.
Regardless, he clearly didn’t want to be there. He looked worn and distracted. He briefly sat at Blank’s table but soon moved to the back of the room, which was adjacent to the door, which opened to a hallway, which led to an elevator, which descended to the garage, which is where his car was parked, waiting to take him anywhere but the palatial family offices of Arthur M. Blank.
I don’t know if McKay blew out any tires when he left. But I’m fairly sure he blew out the soles of his shoes.
While still in the room, two questions were directed to him. He answered from a distance. He ignored someone who tried to hand him a microphone. He said he would be there to support Dimitroff. He made some crack about his white hair. He admitted, “It’s been the longest 14 months of any one person’s life.”
But that’s as much as you will read from McKay in this column. I just didn’t think it was right to ask McKay a lot of questions during Dimitroff’s official introduction. And when the formal news conference ended, all but one guy stayed around for extensive one-on-ones.
I turned to find McKay, but he had vanished. Sort of like he did at Flowery Branch every time a fire broke out.
A team official promised that McKay absolutely, positively, happily would be available for an interview later in the week. I’m still waiting.
It’s sort of like the old county-western song: “If the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.”
In as a savior. Out as a ghost.
It’s understandable to a degree why Blank would want to keep McKay around. He is liked and respected in the NFL office. He sits on the powerful Competition Committee. He is well versed in many things that Dimitroff isn’t.
That said, any definition of “healthy situation” does not include the Falcons’ executive flow chart right now.
How can having a stripped-down executive in the front office be healthy? How can McKay function while someone else performs his former job? Does he desire to run a team again one day?
These and other questions will not be answered. The next time the Falcons hold a news conference, I’ll be better prepared. I’ll wear track shoes.
McKay took over in December of 2003. Six days later, the downtrodden Falcons won at Tampa Bay. The following season, they went to the NFC title game.
Then everybody and everything spiraled. The quarterback. The coach. The general manager. Now Michael Vick is in jail, Jim Mora is in Seattle. McKay remains in the executive suite, shuffling papers and planning lunches for a stadium deal.
When things started to go bad, McKay began to live down to a reputation of disappearing in times of crisis. That became even more exaggerated this season when Bobby Petrino resided here. At one point, when the Falcons were falling apart and McKay was asked about changes, he actually said his practice is not to talk about personnel issues during the season.
I’m still not sure when he adopted that practice. Probably sometime after the 11-5 season. Sometime after Blank’s dream.
Permalink | Comments (25) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
John McHale was major league
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Let it not be said that John McHale has passed on and that Atlanta hasn’t paid him due homage. Before we go further, let it be pointed out that he was the first president and general manager of the Atlanta Braves as they arrived from Milwaukee, and we go from there. McHale sort of midwifed the delivery of the Braves franchise from Milwaukee to us, and that involves a lot of complicated history.
It begins, from this point of view, with a dinner before the major league All-Star game in Washington in 1962. Seated next to McHale, I was no less than shocked when he said to me, “Mr. [Lou] Perini is thinking about moving the Braves out of Milwaukee and he has Atlanta in mind.” Out of the blue.
Before that could take place, the Perini Co. suddenly sold 90 percent of the Braves to a group of young and wealthy Chicagoans. Enter Bill Bartholomay, Tom Reynolds and their band of 12. McHale was left to hold the fort in Milwaukee, and as the major remaining club official, the frequent target of disgruntled fans, knowing their ballclub was headed south. They littered his lawn with “For Sale” signs and garbage, wrote venomous letters, and the McHale children were often assailed. McHale bore the brunt of it. The new owners had the luxury of distance.
Once the transfer was official, the McHales moved to Atlanta. (Two of the sons schooled at Marist, and the elder, John Jr., is now vice president of Major League Baseball.) A little over a year after the move, a retired general, Spike Eckert, a shocking case of mistaken identity, was appointed commissioner of baseball — known as the “Unknown Soldier” — and there being a stressful need of a baseball figure in the office, McHale was appointed and took office as commissioner-without-portfolio. Then the Bronfmans of Canada came calling, and he was hired to escort Montreal into the major leagues in 1969, the Expos’ first president.
Baseball was John McHale’s life, and Atlanta was lucky to have him as its escort into the major leagues. MLB.com identifies him as “one of the towering baseball executives of the 20th Century.” He worked his way up, from the dugout to the head of the line. He had been a baseball star and played football at Notre Dame, signed with the Tigers and broke in at first base with their Winston-Salem club on a Class B farm club. A military call cut into his major-league prospects, and thus he was detoured into the front-office side of the game. He did, however, manage to work in an appearance in the oft-maligned World Series of 1945 against the oft-maligned Cubs, as a pinch hitter for the Tiger champions. Sorry to report, he popped up.
When the Braves transferred to Atlanta, McHale brought with him a cast of citizens who never left. The most enduring of them all, Ernie Johnson, arrived as an part-time director of public relations (and ticket dispenser), then after moving into the broadcast booth, has prevailed to this day. I must confess that the Braves fractured a friendship with our newspaper when they stole Lee Walburn away from the Journal staff to fill the vacancy Ernie left in the public-relations shop. But who was to complain? We had the Braves. The city had a new playpen. Atlanta was major league, which pleased Mayor Ivan Allen to no end. Each day the Braves played at home, a story went out across the country datelined “Atlanta.” Thus, the mayor’s dream had become reality.
At the head of all this was the fine figure of John McHale, of whom it is written in the book “Miracle in Atlanta,” “there is not a more honest man in baseball.” I believed it then. I believed it to the end, which came Thursday in Palm City, Fla. John McHale was 86 years old.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Things aren’t ‘fine’ under Hewitt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Paul Hewitt said on 790 The Zone the other day, “I personally think we’re doing fine.” And he’s absolutely right — if we define “fine” as a program being 38-38 over the past 2-1/2 seasons.
Georgia Tech is 7-9. (“We should be better this year,” Hewitt conceded in his radio interview.) No Tech squad has had a worse record after 16 games since 1981-82, Bobby Cremins’ first season. The Jackets have played tough against three really good teams (North Carolina, Kansas and Indiana) but hasn’t beaten a school ranked in the RPI top 50 as compiled by Ken Pomeroy at kenpom.com. It has beaten Notre Dame, which is 51st, and Charlotte, which is 96th.
Opponents have made 45.4 percent of their shots against these Jackets, which puts them a distant last in the ACC in field-goal percentage defense and which, if carried over a full season, would mark Tech’s worst yield since 1989-90. Contrast this with the defense offered up by Hewitt’s first Tech team (opponents made 40.8 percent of their shots) and his Final Four club (38.8 percent). Where’d that go?
Tech has played a difficult schedule, yes, but it needn’t have been this difficult. The Jackets opened at home by losing to UNC Greensboro, which just fell to 9-6 after a 23-point loss to Appalachian State. They lost to Winthrop, which is 10-7 and has since been bested by Mount St. Mary’s and High Point. They lost at home to a Florida State team missing four inside players.
Unless Tech makes a rousing turnaround, this will mark the fourth consecutive season of underperformance. Hewitt, perhaps not surprisingly, will argue the point to his last breath: He said after the UNC Greensboro loss that he considered last season a success because his team made the NCAA tournament, albeit briefly. (In his radio conversation, he referred to Tech’s loss to UNLV as “controversial.”)
This much, however, is indisputable. Only three programs had more than one player taken in the first round of the 2007 NBA draft. (Boston College, which had Jared Dudley and Sean Williams, doesn’t count, seeing as how Williams was dismissed from the team in midseason.) Florida and Ohio State, each with three apiece, were No. 1 seeds in the Big Dance and met for the national championship. Tech, which had Thaddeus Young and Javaris Crittenton, was a No. 10 seed and was ousted in Round 1 by an opponent that made 31.7 percent of its shots.
The bar should have been raised after Tech’s ascent to the 2004 national championship game, but it doesn’t seem to have budged. The 2004-05 squad took six of the top eight players from the Final Four team and lost 12 games and was routed in Round 2 of the NCAA. The 2005-06 team finished 11-17. Last season’s Jackets didn’t win a game in either the ACC or the NCAA tournament. If you’re athletics director Dan Radakovich, would you consider this “doing fine”?
And where’s the assurance next season will be better? The Jackets’ leading scorer and leading rebounder are seniors. Hewitt has signed a highly regarded guard in Iman Shumpert but missed on several local prospects, chief among them Al-Farouq Aminu, who signed with Wake Forest despite the presence of his older brother Alade Aminu on Tech’s roster.
Hewitt told 790 he was “the eighth or ninth choice” to coach Tech and suggested, “There might have been a reason seven or eight guys turned the job down.” And then: “We have done as good as we can do, but we should be doing a little better this year.” Only “a little better” than sub-.500? Why not a lot better?
Hewitt earns $1 million per year doing the job he essentially belittled. His career record in ACC play is 51-64. In ACC road games it’s 14-43. If this is indeed as good as he can do, should we be faulted for wondering if that’s good enough?
Maybe no other coach could have taken Tech to the 2004 title game, but several other coaches could have done more since. And 2004 was, not to put too fine a point on it, a while ago. That giddy season was supposed to have been a springboard. It seems to have become a cushion.
Permalink | Comments (153) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
Brady carries coaches on back
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Now it’s Thomas Dimitroff’s turn to join those who should blow kisses toward the primary reason they’ve become highly favored in the NFL.
Tom Brady.
“Quarterbacks probably have made everybody in this league successful,” Ken Herock said Thursday. He served as an accomplished NFL general manager for more than three decades after drafting the likes of Steve Young, Doug Williams and Brett Favre.
Added Herock, who still lives in the Atlanta area after his stint with the Falcons: “Your whole franchise’s success is based on the quarterback. Even when I was back with the Raiders [in the 1970s], we had Ken Stabler. I went on to other places. So did Ron Wolf [another noted GM]. The coaches went on. It just happens when you have a great quarterback.”
Yeah, but never like this. I mean, without Brady, Dimitroff doesn’t use his role in New England, as mostly a glorified scout with zero experience as a general manager, to get hired by the Falcons after a Webcam interview.
Without Brady, Eric Mangini doesn’t go from serving as an NFL position coach for 10 years to Patriots defensive coordinator for a season and then to head coach of the New York Jets at 34.
Without Brady, Charlie Weis doesn’t get virtually a lifetime contract at Notre Dame after just a few games on the job after leaving Foxborough.
Without Brady, Romeo Crennel doesn’t leave the Patriots at 58 for the Cleveland Browns for the opportunity he should have gotten years ago when he was a young and gifted assistant.
Without Brady, Josh McDaniels doesn’t go from nobody to somebody who is considered among the “hot” head coaching prospects at 31 after two years as the Patriots’ offensive coordinator.
Without Brady, Bill Belichick, well, it’s like this: He isn’t the Hall of Fame coach he’s expected to become. He’s just another valued coordinator who keeps floating from team to team. If you include his stint as head coach in Cleveland, his record without Brady is 42-58, and 5-13 with the Patriots. That’s opposed to the 99-26 record, the three Super Bowl trophies and the ongoing perfect season Belichick has enjoyed with Brady.
Now consider that little problem for those who leave the Patriots for elsewhere: Brady doesn’t go with them.
“Yeah, and just because people get jobs from these kinds of situations, it’s not necessarily a means that those people will be successful,” said Herock, telling the truth.
Mangini went from magic to mush in New York after he pushed the Jets to a wild-card berth in his first season. They dropped to 4-12 this year. As a result, Mangini has become more noted for feuding with Belichick (Mangini triggered Spygate) than X’s and O’s.
Maybe you heard: Notre Dame vanished from the face of the earth last season under Weis during his third season, and whether the Fighting Irish will return next season is anybody’s guess.
Crennel was on the verge of becoming the Browns’ former head coach last season, but Derek Anderson forgot he wasn’t supposed to be any good at quarterback. So can Crennel get lucky two years in a row with Anderson? Who knows?
Then there is McDaniels prospering with a New England offense that just set all kinds of records. Then again, McDaniels still has Brady. The same goes for Belichick, who should join McDaniels in checking Brady’s temperature every day.
In other words, the Falcons’ hiring of the snowboarding Dimitroff is an all-or-nothing thing. It could produce a touchdown courtesy of a youthful 41-year-old with fresh ideas, or a turnover courtesy of an overmatched neophyte GM who worked in a front office where Scott Pioli and Belichick made 100 percent of the decisions.
Just a thought: Dimitroff can solve a lot of problems by trading for … Tom Brady.
Permalink | Comments (81) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Blank searching for his Handy Dan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
As the Falcons apparently close in on a new head coach - I say “apparently” because with this club we can never be sure of anything - I feel obliged to say a few words about the Falcons’ next-to-next-to-last head coach. Revisionist history holds that Arthur Blank’s biggest mistake was firing Dan Reeves. As with most revisionist history, this is incorrect.
Dan Reeves did the greatest coaching job in team history - heck, maybe in the history of football - in leading the 1998 Falcons to the Super Bowl. But even with that giddy season factored in, he still had a losing record in seven seasons here. Dating from the end of his tenure with the Giants, Reeves posted winning records only twice in his final nine years as an NFL coach.
We remember him - actually, we remember Michael Vick - winning that famous playoff game in Lambeau Field in January 2003, but we forget that those Falcons lost three of their final four regular-season games and backed into the playoffs. Had they not qualified for the postseason, Blank might well have fired Reeves then. Blank had taken ownership in February 2002 and, out of respect and fairness, had kept the incumbent in place. But any owner wants his own man, and it soon became clear that Reeves, for all his experience and expertise, wasn’t a man after Blank’s corporate heart.
Blank believes a business should be inclusive. (“Listen to your employees” is a Blank tenet.) Reeves didn’t much care what anybody in human resources thought. He wanted to coach the Falcons in 2003 the way his mentor Tom Landry had run the Cowboys in the 1960s.
Yes, it was unlucky that Vick broke his leg in the 2003 preseason, but the way that team splintered told Blank he needed a new coach with newer ideas. (It’s also a truism that, once players start believing their coach is in peril, they never view him the same way again.) As cold as it was then, as cold as it sounds now, Reeves needed to go.
And for those who insist Vick would have stuck to the straight and narrow had Reeves been there to guide him … there’s a grand jury indictment that suggests otherwise. According to the indictment, Vick bought the property at 1915 Moonlight Road two months after Reeves traded up to draft him, and in 2003, even as Vick was supposed to be rehabbing his broken leg, he was allegedly traveling out of state to attend dog fights.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Dan Reeves a lot. He’s a pro’s pro, and in his prime he was a coach’s coach. But he wasn’t the same coach in 2003 that he’d been in 1998, and local consensus - how conveniently we forget - when Blank did the deed was that the owner had done the right thing.
Firing Reeves wasn’t the mistake. The mistakes were in hiring two men who, for various reasons, weren’t long-term upgrades. Maybe this time Blank will get it right. Maybe Blank, who was himself fired by a home-improvement chain name Handy Dan, will finally find a handier Dan.
Permalink | Comments (124) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Perhaps a turning point for Jackets, Hewitt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
They are still winless in the ACC and 7-9 overall, even if you count narrow losses to North Carolina and Kansas as moral victories, which Paul Hewitt doesn’t.
“It’s a tired song,” he said late Wednesday night. “We still believe we can make something out of this season. We’re trying to get to the NCAA tournament, but we’re 0-3.”
It was the right thing for the Georgia Tech coach to say, even if the Yellow Jackets had just played their best game of the season in defeat. Their performance in an 83-82 loss to North Carolina projected something other than disaster this season.
These have not been fun times for Hewitt. He took Tech to unexpected heights in 2004, exciting the masses and raising the expectation level in the process. The Jackets hadn’t won an NCAA tournament game in seven years. Then they won five, reaching the national finals.
But coaches will tell you the only thing more difficult then elevating a program is keeping it there. Tech’s one tournament win in three seasons since might’ve satisfied the masses before, but not now. That, combined with this year’s dreadful start, seemingly has worn on Hewitt. The losses of Javaris Crittendon and Thaddeus Young to the NBA hit the team harder than he expected, or at least publicly projected. With each defeat, Hewitt has become increasingly sensitive to perceived criticism. It all bubbled over on a sportstalk radio show Wednesday morning, when he vented frustrations on the team’s flagship station (790 The Zone). He countered perceptions that the program was on a slide with statistics. He made some bizarre reference to several coaches being offered the Tech job before he was, effectively saying people shouldn’t expect so much at little old Georgia Tech. Hewitt also said the media has been overly critical and connected that with this newspaper’s declining circulation figures. It’s believed to be the first time a coach connected readership habits with his team’s situation at point guard.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Hewitt said of his radio comments. “Everybody has a job to do. Your job is to sell papers. My job is to win games.”
The latter comment still suggested some disconnect, as if there’s an agenda to attack Hewitt or the Tech program. The coach denies such paranoia.
Then came this: “If somebody wants to make the case that we’re not doing the job this year, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. But if you’re trying to make the case that we haven’t been getting it done here in general, that’s unfair.”
It hasn’t been easy. But maybe Wednesday’s game will signal a turnaround.
The Jackets ran step for step with the nation’s best team, only to fall by a point. The same team that suffered losses to UNC-Greensboro and Winthrop took the now 18-0 Tar Heels down to the final second.
A moral victory?
“No,” he said. “There are no moral victories, although I do take some positives out of this.”
The Tar Heels won their first 17 games by an average of 22 points. The Jackets entered the night as the only team in the ACC with an overall losing record (7-8) and had only one victory in their last four games, that over Presbyterian. That Tech nearly pulled the upset of the upset leads to one obvious conclusion: UNC-Chapel Hill isn’t nearly as intimidating as UNC-Greensboro.
Actually, Tech has made a habit of this. Carolina had dropped four straight in Alexander Memorial Coliseum, including 84-77 last season, when the Tar Heels reached the NCAA East Regional final before losing to Georgetown (their last loss).
Nothing else suggested there would be much in the way of drama Wednesday. But the Jackets ran with the Heels from the opening tip. They had been averaging 76 points per game, but had matched that with seven minutes left Wednesday.
“We showed we can run with the fastest team in the country,” Hewitt said.
Trailing 54-49 early in the second half, Tech went on a 14-2 run to take a 63-56 lead. But the Heels’ depth eventually took over, they went to the free-throw line 26 times (making 20) to the Jackets’ 10 (making eight).
“We’re hanging around,” Hewitt said. “But Saturday has to be a turning point for this team.”
Tech faces Virginia Tech. If it’s a real victory and not a moral one, a coach won’t have to be on the defensive so much.
Permalink | Comments (68) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
Pacman Jones gobbles trouble
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
If you’re among the young athletes out there with more than a little talent and with the propensity for resembling a knucklehead, please become the anti-Pacman Jones.
More specifically, please seek to remain your version of Adam Jones (Pacman’s real name, by the way), which means don’t devolve into an out-of-control character instead of yourself, which means please act like you have some sense.
Just trying to help.
Not to bore you with all the details, because you likely already know the ongoing silliness of Jones, the former Westlake High School football star turned NFL standout for a moment. That said, since joining the Tennessee Titans in 2005, Jones has spent more time in courtrooms than locker rooms. You name it, and Jones probably has been accused of it, or he actually has done it.
As a result, Jones was suspended for all of last season by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Later, with help from the players’ association, he tried to return early by claiming he’d learned his lesson, but Goodell wasn’t convinced.
Good thing. Now Jones is involved in another mess. According to officials of the Fulton County Magistrate Court, Jones allegedly punched a woman in an Atlanta strip club. I mean, after everything Jones has encountered, why is he even putting himself in these situations?
No, he doesn’t get it. Hopefully, he is creating others that will.
Well, hopefully.
Permalink | Comments (46) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Homegrown touch for Gwinnett Braves
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The coming of the Gwinnett Braves, as opposed to their going, going, nearly gone Class AAA forefathers in Richmond, makes so much sense. “I mean, if there was a day game here [in Gwinnett], I wouldn’t be surprised if Bobby and the coaches stopped by to see a couple of innings before they went to [Turner Field],” said Braves general manager Frank Wren, referring to Bobby Cox and others involved with the major-league staff.
Cox is the game’s best manager. Not only that, he showed his brilliance as a talent evaluator while serving as general manger during the Braves’ acquisition and development of David Justice, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Mark Lemke, Steve Avery, Jeff Blauser and the rest of those who set the foundation for their run of goodness through the 1990s.
It’s also like this: If you think you’ve already seen this team become the “Atlanta” Braves in recent years, with homegrown folks such as Jeff Francoeur and Brian McCann sprinkled throughout their roster, just wait a short while. Added Wren, nodding when asked if the Gwinnett Braves means the Atlanta Braves will be even more apt to scout and sign local talent: “The exposure that these players will have in close proximity to us I think will make a change in the way that we’ve done business in the past, and also in the way that we’ve developed players.”
In other words, if you can hit, pitch, run, catch and throw a little, and if you reside within a couple of fungoes of I-285, you suddenly have more of a chance to play for your local major-league team.
It all goes back to officials from the Braves, Gwinnett County and the International League announcing a couple of interesting things on Tuesday at the Gwinnett Arena. First, they said that the Class AAA Braves will make their move from Richmond official with the first pitch of the 2009 season, and then they said that the Gwinnett Braves will do so in a new $38 million facility.
Francoeur still is smiling. Before becoming a rising star with the Atlanta Braves, he was a baseball and football standout at Gwinnett’s Parkview High School. He also lives in the county, along with other Atlanta Braves. “In addition to myself, you have McCann, and I’m still counting Andruw [Jones], even though he’s gone, and Kelly Johnson lives just on the other side of the line,” said Francoeur, thinking and smiling. “Clint Sammons lives here, and Chipper [Jones] used to live here.”
Francoeur even joked with Braves management about allowing him to play “25 games” in Gwinnett instead of Turner Field to save on gas money.
Except for those in Virginia’s state capital, where their sporting life will soon revolve mostly around the Richmond Spiders and the VCU Rams instead of their Class AAA team of more than four decades, everybody into tomahawks is a winner with this decision. Yes, the Braves’ top minor-league affiliate can prosper in Gwinnett. And, no, the arrival of that team to the Atlanta area won’t affect the historically slow-clicking turnstiles at Turner Field.
Such also will apply when both of these Braves teams are playing on the same day or even at the same time. These are two different animals.
Speaking of animals, while the majority of those attending Atlanta Braves games will be going for Smoltz, Chipper Jones and Francoeur, the majority of those attending Gwinnett Braves games will be going for Pee Wee Geese, Shaquille O’Seal, Deion Salamander.
You know, ZOOper creatures. Then you have The Chicken, and the merry-go-rounds, and the clowns, and the whatever you can think of that’s zany. That’s all part of the minor-league experience, which is more about the atmosphere than the game. “I also think it’s cool because this will give the family that sometimes can’t afford to go down to [Turner Field] for four tickets — because it can get expensive — to come out to a minor-league game and see good baseball,” said Francoeur, pausing, before adding in a hurry. “Not that we don’t want them to see us.”
They will. They’ll do both, at least occasionally.
Permalink | Comments (32) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Blank, McKay need to let new GM do his job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Thomas Dimitroff trotted out a phrase that applies to the New England Patriots — “indisputable role understanding.” Loose translation: Robert Kraft pays, Bill Belichick spies, Tom Brady throws. And Dimitroff, up until Saturday, did the college scouting. Now he’s the general manager of a franchise where roles are less understandable.
“I’m very clear on the org [neo-speak for ‘organizational’] chart,” Dimitroff said Tuesday at a meet-and-greet with the Atlanta media. “Rich McKay [once the GM, now just the president] has a wealth of knowledge, and I look forward to tapping into that. But I will have final say on the football side.”
So, someone asked, does that mean the GM-since-Saturday will be hiring the next coach? Said Dimitroff: “Along with Mr. Blank, yes.”
Said Arthur Blank, seeking to clarify: “He does have final say. At the end of the day, he and I will decide who the next coach will be.”
So: Does that make the final say the semifinal say?
Give the Falcons credit for hiring their GM first and letting him have a voice in choosing the coach. Give them credit for finding a fresh face — Dimitroff looks, it must be said, 20 years younger than his age, which is 41 — who spent the past six years apprenticing in the NFL’s finest, er, org. Heck, give them credit for conducting their initial interview via Webcam. “Ask your children about it,” Blank said. “It works very well.”
And say this for Dimitroff: He gives the impression of youth without seeming immature. He’s clever and pleasant and enthusiastic. He prefers “Thomas” to “Tom,” perhaps because it sounds more distinguished. He has clear ideas about the draft — pick for need above all — and he doesn’t appear fazed by a mission that might, to someone less bold, seem impossible.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t see this as a daunting task,” he said. “I think we can right this ship. If we put the right people and the right system in place, we can get this going the right way.”
The concern isn’t so much Dimitroff as a hire as the Falcons as a hierarchy. Blank is, as we know, among the most visible owners in sports and, final say or no, Dimitroff still must report to McKay. The new GM wants, as most new GMs want, to “change the culture,” but will a 41-year-old steeped not in office intrigue but in on-the-road scouting be able to budge Blank and McKay if they decide to act mulish?
“To me as an owner,” Blank said, “there’s a very bright line. And for this owner and for most owners, I don’t want to cross that line. I ask simply that I be informed and be knowledgeable [about football affairs].”
That’s the ideal, sure. But is that the way it really works in Flowery Branch when, as Blank conceded, “my passion sometimes overflows”?
The hope is that Blank (and McKay) are smart enough to defer to Dimitroff, who didn’t come here because the Falcons are in tip-top shape. He’s here because, as McKay noted Tuesday before ducking out, “these have been the longest 14 months of anyone’s life.”
Blank can be an intimidating figure, especially if he’s paying your salary. That said, Dimitroff can’t be seen as just another employee. He’ll require free rein. Even if he offends the folks who built the failed status quo, he has to do what needs doing, lop what needs lopping.
It would be unreasonable for Blank, who has invested much in this franchise, not to have final say on the next coach. Once that’s done, the Falcons’ new general manager must be allowed to manage both generally and specifically, and the activist owner must be willing to sit back and own. Like those newfangled Webcams, that arrangement might work very well.
Permalink | Comments (146) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
Adams’ playoff push caused by Sugar Bowl boos?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH: To catch up on a few things that may have slipped your mind as well as mine:
• A lot of the Bulldog Nation is suspicious that Michael Adams was pushing too vigorously for his football playoff plan — which is hardly new — as a balm for what some call one of the loudest boos ever heard at the Sugar Bowl game. Rousing cheers for the president of the University of Hawaii, drowned out by overwhelming jeers for the man of the University of Georgia.
• Just not sure Billy Payne’s Junior Pass Program is going to work out to the enthusiastic interest of longtime Masters badge holders. One child between ages 8-16 will be admitted free along with an accredited patron, in case you need refreshing, one guest per day. Concerned e-mails are already arriving, fearful Augusta National will be overrun with untethered young ‘uns.
• When West Virginia made its first major bowl appearance in the Sugar Bowl after the 1953 season, sophomore Sam Huff, a lineman later to be a New York Giant and Pro Hall of Famer, recalls “every player found a $20 bill under his plate. I’d never seen that much money in my life. We were just happy to be in New Orleans. Those Georgia Tech guys had been playing bowl games for years.” Tech won in a rout, 42-19, and Pepper Rodgers set a passing record for the game.
• Travel & Leisure magazine has just rated Sea Island as the most desirable golf community in the United States. And while on the subject, Davis Love III, the island’s leading professional, just played his first full round since the injury that took him out of action last August. Stepped in a hole, and as he says, “If I’d been Fred Couples, or somebody with a bad back, I’d probably be done as a player.”
• Maybe the Roger Clemens steroids charges will bring relief in one respect: an end to that annual Clemens Spring Derby, in which he plays the Astros, Yankees and Red Sox against one another, then signs after the season is one-third over. He won’t find many sympathetic fellow players in his camp, and in case you missed it, he’s giving second thought to testifying under oath.
• Jim Leyland is taking a fling in thoroughbred racing. Just recently paid out $50,000 for a weanling colt at the Keeneland sales. A little later a mare sold for $2.5 million and he began to get the drift of things: The purchase price is merely the down payment on a long-term investment. Joe Torre has had some luck in the game as part owner of a filly that finished fourth at the Kentucky Oaks last year.
• Does it occur to you that these overseers in the challenge booth in college football are injecting themselves into the game too often without cause?
• When John Heisman was named football coach at Georgia Tech, he was given the title “Chief Football Director.” When he left in 1920, it was the result of an arrangement between him and his wife. They were divorcing and part of their settlement was that his wife was given first choice as to where she would live; the other would have to get out of town. She chose Atlanta. The “chief director” had to hit the road, Tech lost its coach and Heisman found work at Penn.
• The scarcely known Jamie Spears was a football player at Southeastern Louisiana. Later, he became the father of a daughter too often in the news named — you guessed it — Britney.
• Some sidelights from the PGA Tour of ‘07: Toughest hole, No. 18 at Doral, scoring average 4.625. Most rounds played in the 60s, Heath Slocum, 43. Most money earned without winning a tournament, Sergio Garcia $3,721,185, an all-time record.
• In case you’d like to take a trip to Newland, Paul Johnson’s hometown in North Carolina, you’ll find it between Montezuma and Cranberry.
• When Claude Willoughby was pitching for the Phillies in Babe Ruth’s waning days, the Babe hit a home run that traveled more than 500 feet and out of sight. Some of Willoughby’s teammates protested the ball was foul, and when Willougby took it up with the umpire, the ump wisely said to the young pitcher, “Son, do you really want to throw him another pitch?”
• In all the Christmases I have lived, this is the first during which I never heard “White Christmas” played on any broadcast or telecast, notably the once-most-popular Bing Crosby rendition. Strange. … Selah.
Permalink | Comments (36) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf, UGA / SEC
Giving Dimitroff benefit of the doubt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN…
10: Sending this a little early this morning. I’m among a group lunching with new Falcons general manager Tom Dimitroff. I have several important questions, not the least of which is whether he is really 40 years old because his mugshot makes him look like he just walked off the Faber College campus.
9: Am I jealous Dimitroff has all of his hair? Damn straight. But, seriously, anybody who’s getting caught up in the fact Dimitroff doesn’t look like an NFL general manager needs to get over it. Switching sports for sake of argument, Theo Epstein looks like the kid who got beat up on the way to school everyday. But he’s done pretty well with the Red Sox.
8: No, I don’t have a strong feeling on whom the Falcons’ next coach should be. Several weeks ago I threw out three names: Jason Garrett (Dallas), Josh McDaniels (New England) and Mike Singletary (San Francisco), only to have an excited headline writer make it look like I was campaigning for Singletary. That said …
7: Here’s what I do think: The Falcons are not going to be a great offensive team next season, given their issues on the offensive line and at quarterback. Hiring a strong leader with a defensive background makes the most sense. The Falcons will need to win close games, and they need to re-learn the process of punching somebody in the mouth. So here are the names, all defensive coordinators: Jim Schwartz (Tennessee), Rex Ryan (Baltimore), Mike Smith (Jacksonville). And, yes, Singletary (San Francisco assistant head coach).
6: Initial reaction: The Braves just replaced the best centerfielder in their history (Andruw Jones) with somebody who was limited to 56 games last season because of a bad back (Mark Kotsay). Well. At least we’re not starting with high expectations.
5: Note to all of you very nice people who keep sending me your perfect plan for a college football playoff: Really, I’ve already seen them all. But you’re welcome to mail them to: NCAA, —700 W. Washington St., —P.O. Box 6222—, Indianapolis, Ind., 46206-6222. Just don’t tell them Michael Adams sent you, because apparently that doesn’t count for much.
4: Regarding Adams’ failed playoff pitch, I’m convinced of two things: 1) Local sentiment largely was negative, not because of the plan but because it came from Adams (as Mark Bradley wrote today); 2) Conferences currently control the money. To implement a system means somebody else will control the money. Conferences will give up that control when you pry it from their cold dead hands.
3: While the Thrashers are busy issuing alibis such as almost every NHL team is inconsistent this season, they might want to consider this: They have 22 regulation losses. Only Tampa Bay (23) and Los Angeles (27) have more. Ten of their 22 wins have come in overtime or a shootout. They’ve given themselves no margin for error. (Only Edmonton, with 12 wins, has been more dependent on overtimes and shootouts for their record.) …
2: And finally this: In the NHL’s generous system, where only a regulation loss counts as a loss, 22 of 30 teams have more wins than losses. The Thrashers are one of the other eight. So I guess everybody doesn’t have the same problems.
1: I’m still waiting for Roger Clemens’ explanation about why Brian McNamee would tell the truth about Andy Pettitte but lie about Clemens.
Permalink | Comments (28) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Adams has right idea, poor execution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Michael Adams wasn’t aiming just to spur erudite discourse before settling back into the overstuffed status quo. He believed the time had come for a change and he was in position to effect that change. He was, not for the first time, politically wrong.
It took the NCAA’s board of directors, of which Adams is the chairman, all of seven days to deposit his grand scheme in yonder trash can. That tells us much about Adams’ fellow presidents, upon whom he believed his cutting insight would not be lost, and even more about the massive might of the bowls.
Say what you will about Adams, and I’ve pretty much said it all, but this time he was on the side of the angels. The BCS is a travesty, the bowl matrix a bloated joke. Adams might have been politically wrong, but there’s no sin in being politically wrong on the right side of an issue.
Maybe he misread the desires of NCAA chief Myles Brand, who in the days after Adams made his proposal — an eight-team playoff incorporating the four BCS bowls, the teams to be chosen by an NCAA selection committee — sought to remain agnostic. Maybe Adams misread his fellow presidents, who are, by definition, supposed to be smart and reasonable folks. Maybe he simply misread his own station, glossing over the incongruity of the president of the school that had been shut out of the BCS title game being reborn as a playoff crusader. It wouldn’t be the first time the former politico has fallen victim to both naiveté and hubris.
But this is different than haggling with Vince Dooley over a half-year’s extension. That was simply a hissing match between men of ample egos. This was something greater, something worse. Adams’ basic premise was and is correct: Big-time football does need a playoff, and it remains a source of embarrassment that the NCAA seeks to control everything else but chooses to wash its hands of the biggest moneymaker in collegiate sports.
Instead the board of directors chose to dump the matter in the laps of the conferences, which is where it rested already. (You only had to see the anger in SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s face the morning after Adams revealed his intentions in this newspaper to know how seriously the conferences take any threat to their sovereignty.) Handing the issue back to the leagues is tantamount to asking a public official to impeach himself.
The BCS was created by Roy Kramer, then the SEC commissioner. It exists to preserve conference ties (and payouts) to the bowls while giving the impression — but not nearly the reality — of a national championship game. The Plus-One model that’s suddenly the rage is essentially BCS 2.0 — someone picks who goes to what bowl, and then someone picks who’s No. 1 and No. 2 after that and those teams get to play for the mythical title. It’s better than the existing system, but it’s still not what’s needed.
What’s needed is a playoff. Adams’ proposal nailed it on every count: Sixteen teams would be too many, four too few. The established bowls shouldn’t be abolished, but they should stand for something more than a New Year’s Day parade. But that’s what happens when the silliest of sports sees its moneyed institutions challenged: It reacts by stonewalling, by refusing even to acknowledge that there might be a better way.
“I don’t think there’s a desire on the part of the board to do anything other than what the current structure would yield,” Clemson president Robert Barker told reporters Monday, and there you have it. The NCAA takes all of one week to quash the best idea anybody is apt to have. And you wonder why — actually, you probably don’t — almost every football season drags to such a messy end.
“I know [the NCAA] to be willing to help on this issue,” Adams said 11 days ago. He learned otherwise Monday. His proposal got the gate. The BCS emerged unscathed. And everyone who cares about the sport was just handed another reason not to care.
Permalink | Comments (86) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Dale Murphy comes clean
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
That Dale Murphy has not been hosting any Hall of Fame voting viewing parties says something about both his chances for induction and his humility. In summation: “I realize I’m not knocking on the door, and it’s just not my nature to campaign for it.”
Enshrinement doesn’t drive Murphy’s emotions, unless the subject is another player. If you wonder whether Murphy can still swing, bring up any suspect from baseball’s steroid era. Bring up Barry Bonds.
Bring up Roger Clemens.
“I’m not a lawyer or anything, but I think he’s getting kind of weird advice,” Murphy said by phone from Utah. “These press conferences he’s doing, the taped phone conversations his responses to some of the questions — it’s all been pretty strange. It hasn’t changed my opinion of anything.”
In playing days, he would’ve stopped right here. In retirement, he has become outspoken, particularly about the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Last year, he publicly admonished Bonds during the home-run chase. Now he watches as Clemens scrambles to protect his legacy with choreographed fits on “60 Minutes.” He finds it all rather disgusting.
“If you’re asking me if I think Clemens took steroids or something — yes, I think he took them,” Murphy said. “I don’t have any proof. I’m just giving you my opinion, and that’s my opinion. I’m like everybody else. This isn’t a court of law. I don’t see all the evidence. Why would Brian McNamee just throw [Andy] Pettitte and Clemens out there? What does he have to benefit from it?
“The advice some of these guys are getting, to not admit anything, I don’t get it. Why don’t you say you made a mistake and then move on? Guys like Clemens can help us solve the problem. Is the punishment strong enough? Is the testing too weak? Guys like Clemens understand the temptations athletes have and why they make mistakes. It doesn’t minimize that it was the wrong thing to do. But if [Mark] McGwire came out and said, ‘I got caught up in everything. I did something I shouldn’t have done,’ it would help a lot. To me, not talking is just counterproductive to trying to maintaining your stature.”
Is it too late to add this guy to the November ballot?
Murphy started the “I Won’t Cheat Foundation,” which preaches ethics in youth athletics and against the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Maybe this will be his legacy.
He won consecutive MVP awards (1982-83) with the Braves. He hit 398 home runs. But in 10 years on the ballot, he has never come close to being elected to the Hall of Fame. Candidates require at least 75 percent of the vote. Murphy has never garnered more than 23. Interestingly, his 75 votes this year (13.8 percent) were his most since 2001. So maybe he’s talking his way back into the spotlight.
At the least, he’s no worse off than McGwire, who drew 23 percent of the votes for the second straight year despite 583 homers. But McGwire’s career has been tainted by suspicions of steroid use, and when he pushed the mute button before Congress.
There are counter-arguments to not enshrining players suspected of steroid use, the most common being that “everybody” was doing drugs. Murphy doesn’t buy it. Estimates have varied from five to 30 percent.
“It wasn’t everybody,” he said. “It was the players who made the wrong decision. They can argue technicalities. ‘Well, they weren’t testing for it at the time.’ But guys would’ve done it out in the open instead of on the sly if it were OK. There are legitimate reasons for these controlled substances, but hitting home runs is not one of them.”
McNamee, Clemens’ former trainer, says he injected the pitcher with steroids and/or HGH in 1998, 2000 and 2001. Now a House oversight committee on performance enhancing drugs wants Clemens to testify. Clemens initially said he would answer all questions. But now his attorney is balking, and Murphy isn’t surprised.
“I hear he’s not getting immunity, and he’s involved in a lawsuit [against McNamee], so now he’ll just say he can’t speak because of the lawsuit,” Murphy said.
Like McGwire and Bonds, Clemens and actual proof of drug use may never intersect. But Hall voters will help determine the pitcher’s legacy. They are determining McGwire’s. Maybe of a few of those votes should spill over to a certain retiree in Utah.
Permalink | Comments (125) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Blank goes with a football man, not a sideshow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
This isn’t about selling tickets, as difficult as that must be for a former retail whiz to swallow. It’s not about the name on the marquee, or the pre-kickoff buzz, or the once-famous coach who keeps un-retiring in different cities, only to wind up back in a studio when he’s done scratching his itch.
The Falcons didn’t need to hire the big name. The Falcons only had to hire somebody to fix a mess. Tom Dimitroff — meet your mess.
The next few years will tell us if owner Arthur Blank chose well. This much we know: Blank has absorbed a lot of criticism of late. But after being conned by Bobby Petrino, used by Bill Parcells and dancing an illogical dance with Pete Carroll, he bounced back with a reasoned choice, free of emotion, pyrotechnics and clowns with exploding feet.
Blank didn’t hire a sideshow. He hired a football guy.
I know. You’ve never heard of Thomas Dimitroff. You’re worried. I mean, Dimitroff has never been on ESPN so how good can he be, right? It’s sort of like when Lucy Van Pelt told Schroeder: “Beethoven wasn’t so great. He never got his picture on bubblegum cards, did he?”
Nobody outside of football insiders has heard of Dimitroff, and few of those could pick him out of a lineup. But to view that as a negative would be shortsighted. Fact is, this franchise could use a little anonymity about now.
Eight years ago, the New England Patriots weren’t quite the present-day Falcons, but they were headed in that direction. They finished 5-11 in 2000. They were bumped up against the salary cap and were paying for a series of personnel mistakes.
Then owner Robert Kraft did something radical: He hired a personnel chief (Scott Pioli) known only to hard-core football geeks and a head coach (Bill Belichick) who had been a disaster in Cleveland.
How did that turn out?
This is what I know about Dimitroff: He works for the New England Patriots. I’m sold. The bio could read: “Tom Dimitroff: Washed towels in Foxborough,” and that would be good enough.
For the past six seasons, he has worked for arguably the best owner (Kraft), the best personnel director (Pioli) and the best coach (Belichick) in professional sports. There is something to be said for osmosis.
When the Patriots went from 5-11 in 2000 to Super Bowl titles in three of the next four years, they excelled at finding low-budget free agents who could help form a team. It was football’s version of “Moneyball.”
Overshadowed is the fact they also have been pretty good on draft day. Dimitroff has spent 18 years in player personnel, the past six with the Patriots, most recently as the director of college scouting. He has been there for the past five drafts, which yielded 19 roster players and 11 starters, including four who were named to this year’s Pro Bowl: Asante Samuel (2003 draft), Dan Koppen (2003), Vince Wilfork (2004) and Logan Mankins (2005).
Koppen and Mankins are offensive linemen.
What a concept.
Blank seemingly strayed only once during this process, when he spoke to Southern Cal’s Pete Carroll. We’ve never heard the specifics of that exchange from either party. But if few fans appeared to embrace the concept of such a successful college coach with an NFL background working in Flowery Branch, there was a reason. Carroll was not overwhelming as an NFL head coach — he took a team that went to the Super Bowl in 1996 and the Pats regressed each of the next three seasons.
But more important, there was a belief Carroll wanted total power, and he has no background in personnel. That’s a far greater issue for the Falcons than coaching. They don’t need an interior decorator. The house is falling down.
Dimitroff will be in charge of football operations. Rich McKay is out as general manager. He remains as president, but he will have nothing to do with football decisions. Blank gave him a contract extension, but don’t make too much of that. Some of these things are done for window dressing. Remember: Jim Mora received a contract extension the year before he got fired.
An educated guess: McKay will be gone within seconds of finding another job offer to his liking. Until then, he’ll make a lot of money to glad-hand sponsors and orchestrate a stadium deal.
The best thing Blank could do now is allow his new general manager to run his football team. Fix the mess, and wins and fans will follow. Then everybody will have heard of Tom Dimitroff.
Permalink | Comments (94) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Does PGA really need drug testing?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
And so we — speaking of the PGA Tour — move ahead into the second year of one cup and the first year of another. For a whole lot of golf interests the FedEx Cup is still on trial. The other cup is one that involves the somewhat unceremonious process of collecting urine. The professional tour has decided to plunge into the process of testing its players for drugs, outside agents that are thought to enhance performance. Works for racehorses and other professional athletes, so goes the presumption, so why shouldn’t it work for golfers?
At least that’s the apprehension of Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, and so he has set the program. He held a press conference the other day, in company with David Fay, executive director of the U.S. Golf Association, and Steve Mona, once head of the Georgia State Golf Association, now about to become chief executive officer of the World Golf Foundation. Not an organization widely recognized, but enough for Mona to give up his place at the head of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. Somehow or another, the idea that golf should find itself lumped into the sweaty world of muscle sports goes against the grain. Players being lined up to pee in a cup to be tested like grunt athletes comes across as offensive. Golf, known as “the gentleman’s game,” in which cheating is the most deadly of sins, and the use of enhancing drugs would be cheating. Golfers police themsleves, call penalties on themselves. Imagine, if you will, Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus being called upon to prove themselves “clean.”
There is a difference between performance enhancers and substance abuse, though that wasn’t made made clear in the press conference. How, in heaven’s name, could drugs improve Tiger Woods’ performance? That’s a frightening thought.
As it came out in the invocation of the FedEx Cup, there is much yet to be done. “We haven’t worked out the details yet,” it was pointed out, a familiar phrase harking back to the prematurity of the FedEx planning.
Another puzzling observation came across. “We have never concluded that there are substances out there that enhance performance,” one of the panelists said.
Yet, in light of such, the program plods ahead. “Consultants” will be provided, so that players are not going to make a mistake that could lead to a positive test. Open locker-room discussions are planned so that no player leaves a question unanswered. All this is due to be put into effect by July, so it is said. In other words, this is a work in progress, so to speak.
Now, are we speaking of steroids here? Of cocaine, hashish, meth, or merely pot, either of which I know just enough to be ignorant. Just what advantage would drugs give a golfer? Steroids might add distance to tee shots, but no added advantage to putting and the short game. Might help their foot speed, but sprinting comes in handy only getting out of the rain.
What seems to come across is that this creates more questions than answers. Does one guy’s test show that he dabbles in “recreational” stuff, which refers mainly to marijuana, I think? And does that put him on the hit list, and then what?
From the other side of the ropes, seems to me that the Tour is exacerbating a problem that isn’t there. That may sound naive, but from close up, it would appear that drugs would create more of a disadvantage than advantage to the player on tour. Only players inclined toward self-destruction would get involved with the stuff. And as for those so inclined, good riddance.
That having been said, stand by for July, or until such time that it dawns upon the Tour that just because football, baseball, rasslin’ and such sweaty sports have a problem, does it necessarily spill over into golf?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
It could only happen to the Hawks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It was as if someone in the NBA office took a hard look at the standings and said, “The Hawks? At .500? Tied for the next-to-last playoff spot? This can’t be.”
And then it wasn’t.
The Hawks awoke Friday at 16-16. They left Philips Arena last night at 15-17. This wouldn’t seem possible, but a slew of things have happened in Atlanta sports this young century that have beggared all belief. From two head coaches being fired on the same day to owners suing one another to a quarterback doing time to a coach leaving to call the Hogs …
And now this: A not-so-instant replay of a game that, for 23 days, the Hawks had every reason to believe they’d won.
Put it this way: As weird as the Falcons’ season was, they weren’t — mercifully, it must be said — ever asked to play a doubleheader.
For 57 days, the result of the Hawks-Miami game of Dec. 19 will be held in abeyance. Indeed, if you clicked on ESPN.com Friday night, the box score of that game read, “In progress, 0:51 OT.” And it will remain so until March 8.
“That’s crazy,” said Josh Smith said, having been informed by reporters that his team had been stripped, at least for now, of one victory. And then, thinking quickly: “I don’t think I can play in that one [the restart on March 8]. I fouled out.”
As coach Mike Woodson met the assembled media in his office, a voice could be heard yelling in the locker room. Quoth the high-volume Tyronn Lue, delivering a mock pep talk for the upcoming twin bill: “We can win that game! We’re going to win two games!”
Not that Tyronn Lue will be a part of the final 51.9 seconds of Game 1 come March 8. He didn’t dress for the fateful December game, so he can’t even sit on the bench in uniform for those 51.9 seconds. He’ll have to change into his work clothes when that one is, once and for all, done.
Said Woodson: “We’ll put our game plan together for those 51 seconds.”
And then they’ll have to turn around and play a 48-minute game afterward. As amusing as this all seems — the long-suffering Hawks can’t even win when they finish a game with more points than the opponent — losing twice on March 8 could put a serious crimp in what has been, at least until Friday afternoon, a season of upward mobility.
Woodson again: “We’re not going to let 51 seconds determine our future.” But then, being the Hawks, they went out and lost to the Wizards in overtime. (Pending official review.)
Said Michael Gearon Jr., one of the Hawks’ many owners: “We’re a team used to adversity.”
There was human error involved on Dec. 19 — Shaquille O’Neal was adjudged to have committed his sixth foul when it was only his fifth — but logistics were also at play. In order to sell more courtside seats for bigger money, NBA teams have shortened their scorers’ tables. This marks the second season in which the Hawks’ stat crew has been separated by 26 rows of seats: The official scorebook is kept at courtside, while the computer system is housed in the aisle behind Philips Arena’s lower tier. Someone sitting somewhere should have noticed the mistake, but apparently nobody did.
The reason the Hawks were hit so hard — “grossly negligent” was the official NBA word — and fined $50,000 and ordered to replay those 51.9 seconds is because they’d had a similar snafu against Toronto last season, when the Raptors were denied a rightful point. Said Arthur Triche, the Hawks’ chief publicist: “In no way was anybody cheating or trying to make money off the [Miami] game.”
OK, so it was an honest mistake. But, as happens on what seems a daily basis in our fair city, a mistake ballooned into something embarrassing, something beyond bizarre. Only in Atlanta, kids. Only in Atlanta.
Permalink | Comments (36) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley
Hall voters designate one position out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
This is from the same guy who thinks the American League ought to join major league baseball and ditch the designated hitter. The DH: a sort of an obtuse intrusion in the box score. The Hall of Fame hasn’t flung open its doors to the bullpen performers, but another edged through the voting process the other day. Hoyt Wilhelm was more than a relief pitcher, as was Rollie Fingers. It was Bruce Sutter, with five seasons of just over 100 innings, a losing record and one-third as many blown saves as saves, who really sneaked in, a mystery to most of us who have the purity of the game at heart.
Goose Gossage made a quantum leap at the ballot box. He was more than one of those one-inning wonders, the closers. Still, with Bert Blyleven to vote for, a record of 287 wins, fifth all-time in strikeouts among other credentials, I could see Gossage going in, but only flying in on Blyleven.
The point here today is, since relief pitchers have crossed the bar, is there some conspiracy against the DH? (Ugh, I have to swallow hard when I say that.) To date, only one player registered as a designated hitter has crossed the barrier, Paul Molitor, voted in four years ago. Not that I’d care to be found guilty of launching a campaign opening the way for such half-players, but Harold Baines does come to mind here.
Baines became eligible in 2007 and barely aroused a whisper of support. Same again this year. He barely cleared the 5 percent barrier to stay eligible. Those rejects you read of more often are Jim Rice, Andre Dawson and Dave Parker, and those with heart refer to Dale Murphy — who, sorry to say, is never going to make it.
Baines hit more home runs than Rice and Parker, drove in more runs than Dawson, Rice — and Murphy, had more hits than Dawson and Rice and a higher batting average than Dawson and Murphy. Yet, this fellow, 22 seasons in the major leagues, drew only 18 votes while Dawson and Rice soar.
This was Baines’ record: 384 home runs, 1,628 runs batted in, .289 batting average — 27 points better than incumbent Reggie Jackson, by the way — and he barely scratches the surface of voter interest. Main flaw in his dossier is, it seems, that he was a DH in more than half the 2,830 games he played, l,644 exactly. I heard one of those panels dissecting the candidates the other day, and Baines was mentioned one time, negatively.
Now, I’m not beating the drums for more borderline delegates to Cooperstown. Matter of fact, it’s getting rather crowded up there anyway. Some years, candidates get votes because there’s “no one else to vote for,” as they say. So it was in Sutter’s year. And to a lesser extent this year with Gossage, though the Goose had a long career, won 124 games, spent some time as a starter, pitched in three World Series and struck out 1,502 batters in 1,809 innings. He had a case going for him. Sutter didn’t.
Rarely will we have the kind of overwhelming slate of candidates that we had last season. Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn had places in Cooperstown dusted off and waiting for them, both popular with fans everywhere — never has an induction attracted such a sprawling crowd — and not a cynic to be found. It happens once in a while. Heaven forbid one of those years when “there’s no else to vote for.”
Not that this is intended or expected to arouse a supporting electorate for Harold Baines. I’d say, offhand, that after two years of barely squeaking over the 5 percent line, there’s no hope down the line. No room in the inn for DHers. Sort of sad, especially if they’re clearing the way for “one-inning wonders.”
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Falcons seem clueless in coaching search
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
When it comes to decision-making involving the Falcons bosses, it’s about to get uglier. Uglier than staying with the overmatched Rich McKay too long as general manager. Uglier than hiring the coaching disasters that were Jim Mora and Bobby Petrino. Uglier than allowing Bill Parcells to play them for suckers to get a better deal in Miami.
Uglier than anything you’ve seen from an NFL franchise in recent years, or maybe during any year.
They’re clueless. I mean, what are the Falcons doing? Their clumsy, convoluted and comical search for a head coach and general manager is even bizarre for what historically has been a goofy franchise. In other words, something outrageous is on the way, and it won’t be the hiring of Southern Cal’s Pete Carroll, another overmatched college coach. That’s because Carroll will save the Falcons from themselves by pulling a Bill Parcells by saying, “No,” on his way to somewhere else in the NFL or back to the USC campus.
Among other oddities, the Falcons have spent weeks in a simultaneous search for a head coach and a general manager. Then again, what can you expect when you have owner Arthur Blank demoting McKay by taking away his general manager duties and then giving the guy a contract extension along with a raise to remain as president? Not only that, Blank assigned McKay to pick his successor as GM.
Yeah, that makes sense. So does trying to hire another college head coach after the one you foolishly signed a year ago bolted with three games remaining in his first season to call hogs in Arkansas.
Pete Carroll? Is this a joke, or do those who run the Falcons just enjoy being the punchline? Since they’ve taken a vow of silence until they find a GM or whatever they’re doing, I’m guessing they’d say Carroll isn’t Bobby Petrino. I’m guessing they’d say Petrino wasn’t an NFL head coach before he joined the Falcons from Louisville, but that Carroll ran pro teams twice before leaving to win Pac-10 titles and national championships.
I’m guessing they’d prefer not to say Carroll bombed in the pros. He was fired after going 6-10 during his only season with the New York Jets. Then he was fired after he inherited a nice New England team from Parcells that digressed during each of Carroll’s three seasons. Even so, Carroll reportedly is the Falcons’ primary target, not only as their head coach, but as their general manager. Two things: History has shown that few can do both and for another, Pete Carroll?
Even if Carroll does lose his mind and joins the Falcons, you’d have the makings of Bobby Petrino II. Carroll likely wouldn’t leave before the end of his first season, but he would do so sooner than later. Consider that he has mentioned he wouldn’t return to the pros without full control of a team. Well, no matter how the Falcons bosses would spin it, Carroll always would have an omnipresent owner. Not only does Blank walk the sidelines, but he wants to meet with his head coach every Monday for dinner.
Carroll also would have McKay down the hall. You know, the old GM who obviously has the owner’s ear, especially since the old GM was able to get that demotion, that extension, that raise and that ability to choose his successor.
It gets uglier. You have the Falcons’ search committee that consists of Blank and McKay at the top and others below them, including former NFL executive Ernie Accorsi as an adviser. It’s a committee that still is interviewing candidates for the Falcons’ head coach and general manager jobs during the Carroll rumors.
Which brings up a question: Why? If you want Carroll to be the guru of your franchise, why waste the time of others with phony interviews? If you don’t want Carroll, why not say so? Otherwise, you give the impression to those you’re interviewing that they only are backups if (when) Carroll pulls a Bill Parcells.
Maybe you don’t care. Maybe this Carroll thing is just to make you look flashy in public, just like that Bill Cowher thing and that Bill Parcells thing.
Instead, you look silly.
Permalink | Comments (140) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Falcons, Carroll match seems strange
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Had Dan Radakovich sought to hire Pete Carroll to coach Georgia Tech — a far-fetched scenario, but bear with me — I’d have said, “Hooray!” But this is different.
This is the Falcons approaching Carroll, and the Falcons play in the NFL. And Carroll, who’s one of the five best college coaches now working, is a two-time NFL washout. In New York he’s remembered as the guy whose Jets fell for the Dan Marino fake spike. In New England he’s scarcely remembered at all, coming as he did between Parcells and Belichick.
He lasted a total of four NFL seasons as a head coach, which isn’t bad by Falcons’ standards — June Jones and Jim Mora got through three years, Bobby Petrino not even through one — but still: Given that the NFL and the Pac-10 are separate entities, what makes you think he could not only win big as a professional coach but also set a falling-down house in order?
Looking at it from the other side, what about the Falcons would appeal to Pete Carroll? He told the L.A. Daily News, “They’ve had a lot of problems there. It’s not the most sought-after job.” And that’s about the nicest thing anybody has said about the Falcons lately.
In L.A. he’s a king. He has won over USC’s snooty fans — who were hugely skeptical when he was hired — and he enters every season with a realistic chance of playing for the national championship. He has coached three Heisman winners, and when he needs a player he doesn’t wait in line to draft a specific guy; instead he signs three high school All-Americans and lets them fight it out.
A famously nice fellow, Carroll would bring a ton of enthusiasm to any job. But Mora was pretty enthusiastic, if not quite so nice. How’d he pan out?
If I’m the Falcons, I’m wondering what about Carroll’s background leads me to believe he’d be half as good in the salary-capped NFL as he has been at the football factory of Troy. If I’m Pete Carroll, I’m wondering what the flailing Falcons could offer me, other than money, that I don’t already have. And if money is indeed everything, why did Petrino take a pay cut to go coach Arkansas?
Permalink | Comments (80) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Two programs tread water, one founders
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Athens — As just-down-the-highway rivalries go, Georgia vs. Georgia Tech in basketball is very similar to Duke-North Carolina, only without the 30 Final Four appearances, the eight championships, the two legendary coaches, the McDonald’s All-Americans or any sense of drama.
The state of the state was on display Wednesday night. Not pretty.
The flagship has been dented by academic issues. The institute has been wrecked by early defections and a general inability to recapture whatever pixie dust it carried to the Final Four. Academic issues won by seven points.
A chant was audible during the final seconds in Stegeman Coliseum: “Just Like Football.”
Well, not sure. These Bulldogs aren’t likely to make an argument to be in a national title game at the end of the basketball season.
But if there’s any question about which coach is doing more with less, that was answered Wednesday. The Dogs and Jackets both played hard, but Georgia looked like the better-coached team. They functioned as a unit, even if they sometimes functioned poorly. The Jackets still look only like pieces.
“One of the biggest factors in this game was fatigue and endurance,” Georgia coach Dennis Felton said. “There were times when we looked tired, but they looked tired, too. We wanted to keep pressing the issue and see who looked tougher.”
Felton got his answer. Georgia led by as many as 12 points in the first half, saw Tech rally and even the score at 51-all, then responded with a punch in the mouth: seven straight points.
“That was one of the most complete efforts we’ve had,” he said.
Embrace the joy on one side. It may be a rarity this season.
Even by normal modest standards, this is a down year for basketball in Georgia. If you want to attach numbers to the state of the state, refer to Wednesday’s projected RPI rankings (on the Web site kenpom.com).
The top basketball school in Georgia wasn’t even on the court Wednesday.
That distinction belongs to Georgia Southern, who ranks No. 1 in the state but No. 76 nationally with an RPI of .561. Southern is the king of a very small hill. The Eagles are looking down on Tech (ranked No. 84), Georgia (185), Savannah State (256), Mercer (266), Georgia State (294) and Kennesaw State (which at 339 out of 341 is one spot behind the New Jersey Institute of Technology, which is 0-17).
Duke-North Carolina? No. Can it be? Unlikely. But it’s not going to stop a coach from dreaming.
“I think it can,” said Felton, who lost three players for several games before the season due to academic reasons, two of whom — seniors Mike Mercer and Takais Brown — have since been thrown off the team. “There’s no doubt Duke-North Carolina is a great rivalry. But it was built a long time ago, years before basketball was ever really emphasized at either one of our schools. I believe we can become a premier program, and Tech — we know what Paul Hewitt can do from when they went to the Final Four.”
That seems so long ago. Whereas the Dogs at least have a nice jumping off point in the SEC part of their schedule, the Jackets already resemble a punching bag for most of the ACC. How do you fall behind by 12 points to a team that lost to East Tennessee State by 18?
Neither of these programs is headed up or down right now, as much as they’re trying to stop the bleeding. Consider that the score was still only 2-2 five and a half minutes into the game.
It was significant when Maurice Miller made two free throws to give the Jackets’ a 6-3 lead, because then the teams had finally combined for as many points as turnovers (nine). At halftime, Tech was shooting only 9-for-27 from the floor, and had more turnovers (10) than shots made.
It was enough to make Georgia feel superior for a night.
“We definitely still feel we can do something this season,” said guard Sundiata Gaines. “I know we lost those guys before the season, and that was disappointing, but we have to fight through that and pull together.”
It’s nothing but SEC games from here on out for Georgia. No more opponents from within state boundaries.
Permalink | Comments (48) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Be honest when pushing for playoffs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Even if Georgia was in the national championship game on Monday, UGA president Michael Adams said he still would have come out of nowhere this week to propose an eight-game playoff for the big boys of college football.
Yeah, well. And it is just a coincidence that the only other university president to campaign loudly and boldly for such a playoff system is Florida’s James Bernard Machen, another SEC guy.
That’s SEC, as in Division I-A’s most powerful football conference.
That’s SEC, as in a place dominated by fans obsessed with having their team win a national championship NO MATTER WHAT!
That’s SEC, as in all of the above, and as in why Adams, Machen and other prominent folks in the conference want a playoff system as a backup plan - you know, just in case the Bowl Championship Series doesn’t put their team in the title game.
Those bellyaching for a playoff system should say the obvious. Which is: We could care less about “the student-athlete,” especially if it hinders “the athlete-athlete” from helping us go all the way.
Said Adams to the AJC, “I’m first and foremost an educator, so there’s a part of me that hates to run into the second semester. But that’s a small ill, considering the dissatisfaction that we have now. I think more and more, presidents like me are coming to that conclusion.”
Uh-huh. The only thing Adams forgot to say was, “Go Dawgs.”
Permalink | Comments (287) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Never will be a perfect bowl system
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Yep, it’s somewhat unseemly when a football team that lost two games to teams in its own conference is saluted as champion of the nation. When the one team with only one defeat (mainland) sails through the Orange Bowl with gusto, unceremoniously disregarded by those in the BCS power seat, probably because its coach is seriously overweight. (Just kidding. The rest of this is quite serious, though.) Is this all it takes to arouse the dander of a college president near to us, Michael Adams of the University of Georgia?
Is this new? Has this not been going on for years? Has there ever been any foolproof system of determining a national college football champion? And the answer is no, and there never will be.
You begin with the first flaw in the Adams Plan: “A committee would select and seed the top eight teams.”
You can stop right there. How is the committee selected, and by whom?
Next, when you speak of “seeding,” once again you get into the area of individual judgment. There is no equalizing the Western Athletic Conference and, say, the Big Ten or the SEC. Take the start of the season, when Appalachian State threw the system into turmoil, beating Michigan in Ann Arbor. Then later lost to two teams in its conference, Wofford and Georgia Southern. After which Michigan beat Florida in a bowl game.
The idea of creating the perfect bowl system is a pipe dream. What these people can’t come to understand is that football is not a tournament sport. No more than the Triple Crown of thoroughbred racing could be turned into a three-day tournament.
There wasn’t an “official” national champion until 1936, when Minnesota won the first Associated Press poll. Various and sundry individuals had created “systems” earlier, dating back to the Helms Foundation in 1883, but nothing drew such general acceptance as the AP poll.
Now, as for the BCS, Adams says, “I’m just convinced that it’s not working and that it’s not going to work.”
Of course not. His forward stance is suspect since his own Georgia team, which also lost to two teams in the SEC, was not among the chosen, a point which he judiciously speaks to. So, why not? Should not the president of a university speak out for the school he represents? No doubt he would not have been so agitated had Georgia not been passed over, nor would he have attracted such attention had he been speaking as president of Auburn or Vanderbilt, just to pick a couple of names. He drew a lot more attention than had he been speaking from the United Nations.
Speaking from one man’s podium, just how much longer can the college football season be spread out? It opens the last week of August and now runs into the second week of January, by which time I’m past caring who is the BCS champion. (After all, Georgia did beat the only unbeaten team in the mix. Declare yourself the champ, Michael.) Worn down to the tread from an overdose of so-called “bowl” games, truly nothing more than postseason stuff. After Michigan beat Florida, giving Lloyd Carr a gracious exit, my enthusiasm waned. Which is neither here nor there.
One of Adams’ observations I do subscribe to: ESPN has too much power over the bowl system. The sports network tells the BCS when to roll over and when to bark. But then, ESPN pays its dues and feeds the colleges’ kitty.
I veer from my original track here, that there is no perfect playoff system, and that to stretch the season into the icy shadows of January is no cure for anything, other than another big dollop for the budget. I can’t see any committee of college presidents buying into that, if their basic obligation is to education. And shouldn’t it be?
Permalink | Comments (76) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
2008 really could be Georgia’s year
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — Les Miles pretty much figured this would be LSU’s championship season, but we shouldn’t put great stock in that. “I’ve kind of been wrong,” he said Tuesday morning. “I thought the first two years [at LSU] would be as well, and it ended up I was wrong.”
Miles’ Tigers won the BCS title here Monday night. There’s a good chance Georgia, which finished No. 2 in the final Associated Press poll, will play for the national championship in Miami on Jan. 8, 2009. But as we move from the crazy season just completed to the one that commences in August, we need ask: How do you actually know when it’s your year?
Much of it, duh, has to do with players. LSU had 15 holdover starters but lost four NFL first-round draftees from the team that finished No. 3 in the rankings. Georgia is scheduled to have 17 starters back, which augurs nicely. But LSU had something Georgia won’t have.
Back when Florida State was a factor, Bobby Bowden used to say, “You can have a national-championship team but not a national-championship schedule.” (He pronounces it “SKED-jule.”) The Tigers had the requisite series of high-profile games, and four of what appeared to be their six toughest games were staged in Baton Rouge.
The Bulldogs, by way of contrast, must face South Carolina, Arizona State, LSU and Auburn on the road and Florida in Jacksonville. (They also have to go to Kentucky, which won’t be as formidable next season.) Only two or three of Georgia’s eight toughest games — Alabama, Tennessee and, depending on how well and how quickly Paul Johnson works, Georgia Tech — will be played in Sanford Stadium. That’s a really rutty road.
Georgia, however, might well be strong enough to negotiate it. It’s probably too much to ask that a team with such a schedule go undefeated, but LSU just proved that even two losses — provided they’re honorable and provided everybody else keeps losing, too — is no barrier to a national title. And the Bulldogs will have the same thing working for them that worked for the Tigers, and that’s the ever-expanding aura of the SEC.
This was Miles late Monday night, his team having thumped Ohio State: “The SEC isn’t a league where you’re just going to have dominant games week after week after week. You’re going to have to play competitively, play from behind and take risks. I think that puts the SEC champion in a game like this with some comfort. Down 10, there’s no panic in this team. Are you kidding me? We’ve been down 10 before. We understand how to play.”
As frustrating as LSU could be to watch — all those penalties! — there was an undeniable toughness about these Tigers, about Matt Flynn and Early Doucet and Ali Highsmith and Jacob Hester. And that, Miles concluded, was how he knew LSU’s time was at hand. “This team in this instance,” he said, “saw it as their year.”
Will Georgia develop that same tenacity? Will Knowshon Moreno and Matthew Stafford and Rennie Curran see a national championship as their manifest destiny and refuse to accept anything less? Will they play with the same verve as they did that transforming day in Jacksonville? Will they see all those road games not as banana peels but as launch platforms?
We can’t know that now, no more than Miles could know anything for sure five months ago. All that’s knowable today is that Georgia figures to enter the 2008 season no worse off than LSU entered 2007 — the Tigers were No. 2 in preseason behind Southern Cal — and that we’re assured of seeing the game next season we were denied this time.
Georgia and LSU will meet in Baton Rouge on Oct. 25 and perhaps again in the Georgia Dome on Dec. 6. The Bulldogs might or might not have been as strong as LSU this season. Next fall they’ll have ample chance to prove their point.
Permalink | Comments (256) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: I don’t know if there’s any chance of him pulling this off. But before Arthur Blank hires a new general manager or coach, he needs to take a shot at bringing one legend back into the Falcons’ organization: Joe Gibbs.
9: Gibbs, who retired as Redskins coach Tuesday, sat on the Falcons’ Board of Directors before leaving in 2004 to return to the sideline with Washington. The fact he never returned the Skins to glory - though they did make the playoffs this season - doesn’t diminish the man’s depth of football knowledge. Should Gibbs coach the Falcons? No. Should he be the GM? No. But if there’s any possibility of Blank getting him involved in the hiring process, it would be his best move of the off-season.
8: What was the final score of the BCS title game? I went to sleep at 11:15, or roughly a half-hour after Ohio State.
7: Just guessing out loud here: If ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit doesn’t leak that Les Miles is going to take the Michigan job - which clearly blew up the process and Miles’ obvious intentions - the Tigers might not be national champions today. There’s a good chance the distraction of Miles’ impending departure would be too great for the team to function. And if he had left, the team would’ve been coached by an interim replacement.
6: According to a sports gambling website (bodoglife.com), “Other” is even money to be the Falcons’ starting quarterback next season, followed by Joey Harrington (3-2), Chris Redman (2-1) and Byron Leftwich (5-2). Who is this Other guy, and did he have a better bowl game than Colt Brennan?
5: Dr. Phil met the other day with Britney Spears. He later said he will not do a TV special on her mental breakdown, but plans are in the works for an examination on the Falcons’ coaching search.
4: It’s impossible not to like Brad McCrimmon, whom the Thrashers say was “promoted” from assistant coach to associate coach. But for what it’s worth, I punched “assistant” into my Word thesaurus and it came up with three meanings: helper, subordinate, associate.
3: While “associate” coach conveys some pecking order in NHL-speak, the title change means next to nothing, unless general manager/coach Don Waddell suddenly leaves the bench and allows McCrimmon to run things. Is McCrimmon next in line as coach? Probably. But that would’ve been the case, anyway. And if Waddell loses his job after this season, the next general manager will determine the next coach.
2: Concerns about the Rose Bowl not wanting to be a part of Michael Adams’ proposed college playoff system - or any playoff system - will go away if the Big Ten and Pacific 10 say goodbye to the Rose Bowl.
1: Sorry. I still don’t believe Roger Clemens.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Categories: Jeff Schultz
New playoffs push comes at right time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Possibly college football’s best regular season ever ended six weeks ago. Possibly college football’s worst bowl season ever ended Monday.
This is what the BCS has become. Imagine dining on steak and lobster, only to finish off with a HoHo.
Enough already. It’s time. It’s not time because fans are screaming. It’s not time because networks need another 41/2-hour game that stretches into the next morning. It’s time for a playoff because the landscape has changed. The parity, the upsets, the weekly makeovers atop the rankings that we witnessed this season might just become college football’s new norm. Polls, computer rankings and darts just won’t get it done anymore.
This week, University of Georgia President Michael Adams will discuss an eight-team, seven-game playoff at the NCAA meetings in Nashville. Some might consider an eight-team playoff too big of a leap, considering college presidents are having a hard enough time convincing people that academics, not television dollars, remains their top priority. A “plus one” scenario following bowl games — set under the old bowl system — would be a safer transition from the BCS. Even a four-team playoff might not stretch things too much. But at this point, even a series of coin flips would be an improvement (and more competitive).
Adams has long been an opponent of a playoff system. In an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he admitted it has taken him “11 years of watching it up close” to pull a 180. His body couldn’t fight off the BCS virus any longer.
“There have been growing doubts by a lot of us [college presidents],” Adams said. “I think you have to keep this in perspective. I don’t think the fate of the Western world is resting on this decision by any means. But what has gotten me there more than anything is the fairness quotient. I feel some responsibility to at least leave thinking we’ve given [players] a fair chance of achieving their goals.”
He understands this may be viewed as another money-grab. He understands some will see it as “sour grapes” because Georgia was snubbed for the title game. That would be shortsighted. Forget the Ohio State-LSU game. This year’s BCS bowls were nonsensical at the start and unwatchable at the end.
A non-BCS bowl (Florida-Michigan) was more entertaining than anything else on New Year’s Day, save Hawaii’s pre-game war dance. Adams didn’t need any of his three degrees to conclude, “They ended up with some really screwy games.”
The whole concept of the BCS was flawed from the outset. Even when achieving its objective of a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup, which has been rare, other bowls are rendered meaningless. In the old bowl system, six to eight teams in four major bowls could rationalize having a shot at the “mythical” national championship. The games were better and actually meant something.
The lone downside was that the “champion” was determined by polls. But it worked. The emphasis on the regular season and the arguments over the polls were what made college football great. But that was fine when the debate was just over a few schools like USC, Oklahoma and Notre Dame. Now the debate is over a dozen. Of the top 12 teams in the pre-bowl AP rankings, 11 had one or two losses.
Guessing is futile.
Roy Kramer, the former SEC commissioner, has tried to convince everybody the BCS is the answer. Adams’ response is appropriate: “I have great respect for Roy Kramer. … But I just think he’s dead wrong on this one.”
In the old bowl system, we could’ve sat in front of our televisions on New Year’s Day and watched USC vs. Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, LSU vs. West Virginia in the Sugar, Oklahoma vs. Georgia in the Fiesta, and Virginia Tech vs. Missouri or Kansas in the Orange. That, with a “plus one,” may be the best compromise for college presidents.
An eight-team playoff would overlap with the spring semester. That makes Adams uncomfortable. He realizes approving 12-game schedules made college presidents look bad enough. But he’s willing to suggest the reversal of that decision.
Another obstacle will be getting the Rose Bowl to sign off on this. But Adams senses this year’s debacle — USC 49, Illinois 17 — has altered the climate, even in Pasadena.
He termed the system “fundamentally flawed.”
The regular season was great. It deserved a better ending.
Enough already. It’s time.
Permalink | Comments (44) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
SEC’s dominance is evident
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — After all LSU had been through — trailing Alabama with three minutes to go, trailing Florida with two minutes left, trailing Auburn with two seconds remaining — this was nothing. Having fallen behind Ohio State 10-0 not six minutes into the BCS title game, the swaggering Tigers fairly laughed at the deficit.
That’s LSU’s nature. It laughs when lesser teams would cry. It entered the SEC championship game ranked No. 7 in the BCS standings, and somehow it wriggled free of Tennessee in the Georgia Dome — naturally, the Tigers trailed the Vols with 10 minutes left — and by the time their charter landed in Baton Rouge they’d learned Nos. 1 and 2 had lost. When it’s your year, it’s your year.
And this was LSU’s night, that early hole notwithstanding. The Tigers needed barely a quarter to catch and pass Ohio State, and once behind, the Buckeyes were done. For the ninth time they’d met an SEC opponent in a postseason game, and for the ninth time they’d lost. Big Ten loyalists will insist to their dying breath there’s no difference in conferences, but clearly there is.
The SEC is superior, and LSU was the SEC champion.
Whether Georgia could have beaten the Tigers had they met in Atlanta will remain unknowable, but it’s apparent from the way the Bulldogs played in this building six nights earlier that they’d have handled the Buckeyes.
That’s the distressing part of college football: No matter how loud and vibrant a BCS title game is — and the atmosphere at these rivals even the exalted Final Four — you’re never sure if the right teams are playing. That could well be subject to change, and such a change would be a blessed event. Because there will be a chorus of voices this morning wondering why Ohio State was here at all.
Once again, the Buckeyes jumped ahead. Last year Ted Ginn Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown; this time Beanie Wells took the game’s fourth snap 65 yards. (Memo to Jim Tressel: Next time, let the other guy score first.) And then Ohio State kicked a field goal, and at that moment you could feel the pressure tightening on the Tigers, roundly favored and playing a mere 80 miles from home.
Only thing was, the Tigers didn’t feel it. They simply started playing — they scored on five of their next six possessions, the exception being when they ran out the clock before halftime — and when they play at peak capacity, they’re a joy to behold. Their offense spreads the field and Matt Flynn makes every tough throw and, even as you’re watching in utter wonder, a tiny voice in your head keeps whispering: “How’d these guys lose two games?”
“We were the first two-loss team to play for the national championship, so I have to give great credit to some divine intervention that allowed us to be in the position,” Les Miles said afterward, but once here LSU made sure luck played no part. The team that ranked next-to-last in the nation in penalties wasn’t flagged once in the first half, while buttoned-down Ohio State came undone, getting a field goal blocked and being called for five personal fouls in the first three quarters. The first two gave LSU’s comeback a rolling start, and the fourth — a roughing-the-kicker call against Austin Spitler on fourth-and-23 when Spitler did everything except block Patrick Fisher’s punt — was essentially the clincher.
Soon it was 31-10, and the LSU fans were chanting, “SEC! SEC!” and Ohio State was exactly where it was a year earlier, a cruiserweight being pummeled by a bigger and stronger and swifter opponent. No, the Buckeyes weren’t as wretched as they’d been in the desert a year ago — they gained 353 yards this time, as opposed to 82 — but it made no real difference.
The SEC is the gold standard of college football. If you win the SEC, you’ll probably win the BCS title. If you’re Georgia, you can hardly wait for your chance 366 days hence.
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LSU’s Miles has a nose for spotlight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — Six weeks ago, Les Miles was just another college coach who’d never won a conference championship. Now he’s ubiquitous. He’s the man in the hat, the gambler with the golden gut, the loyal Wolverine who spurned Michigan. He’s the guy who ended the irregular 45-second pregame briefing in the Georgia Dome with the famously insincere, “Have a great day.”
On Sunday Miles met again with his good buddies in the press, and this time he offered what seemed a sincere thank you. He said he appreciated “the number of stories to come out” about his LSU Tigers in the run-up to tonight’s BCS title game, and he even lauded the media’s “effort to get different and quality stories.”
Then this: “Whatever you do in covering me, I’d appreciate if you minimize it.”
And that last bit, it must be said, rang hollow. To see Les Miles now is to observe a man living high, wide and handsome. Jim Tressel is a great coach, but his interviews have all the brio of calculus class. When Miles gets going, and lately he has been operating at full vocal throttle, one response can consume five minutes. Indeed, he went on at such length after one question Sunday that he had to stop himself by saying, “I could go on.”
As football men go, Miles is fairly intriguing. With the big hat — when he deigns to doff his white LSU cap, you’ll note the thinning brown hair toward the back — and the square jaw, he looks like most every other coach to come from Ohio (where he grew up) and Michigan (where he played and apprenticed). But he has a lively mind and a deft, if slightly odd, way with words.
An example: “I hope we back off on emotion [for tonight’s game], to be honest with you. I hope we reach the field with a nice clean framework.”
And another, this in reference to the possibility that Ohio State might deploy Antonio Henton as a change-of-pace quarterback: “We’ve seen the tape on him. We’ll have a feel for his tendencies once he steps on the field at the opponent’s request.”
A minute later, a reporter began a question thusly: “Les, you’re known as being old-school …”
Miles, interjecting: “How do I still get the old-school moniker? I still have humor.”
That’s true. He does. The “have a great day” signoff was the funniest moment of a funny ol’ football season. (Mike Gundy’s much-viewed rant was amusing only in the sense that he made himself seem a braying donkey.) And Miles’ less famous press session of the day his Tigers won the SEC championship — the postgame one, in which he pledged himself to LSU despite his obvious love for Michigan — was darn near poignant.
The Michigan stuff keeps coming up. At Saturday’s media day, Miles admitted his lingering love for the Great Midwest but noted, “What I don’t miss is having to scrape my windshield.” On Sunday he admitted tearing up when he saw his mentor, the late Bo Schembechler, on an HBO special about the Ohio State-Michigan series.
Whether Miles was ever as close to coaching Michigan as Kirk Herbstreit would have us believe might never be known, but it’s clear Miles hasn’t exactly recoiled from the crush of publicity. “I’m a guy who likes to support his team and coach his team but who stays on the perimeter,” he said, protesting. “I’ve always enjoyed the position of being a coach and not being an issue.”
These past six weeks — heck, the whole wild LSU season — he has been both. He’s the wild man who kept going for it on fourth down against Florida and who ordered up the long pass that decided the epic Auburn game at 0:01 of the fourth quarter. He’s the coach of a “damn strong football team” (another Les-ism) who’s on a giddy run of great days.
Permalink | Comments (44) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
Hawks must have stability at point
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Well, this wasn’t good. Moments after Hawks coach Mike Woodson used his tongue to wrap his arms around the most veteran of his point guards (“We’ve been pretty successful with Anthony Johnson, so I’m not going to buck the system that much”), the object of his affection responded with limp shoulders.
I mean, this was a potentially explosive situation for a Hawks team that needs no internal distractions during its attempt to become relevant again for the first time in a decade. There was Woodson, speaking about Johnson while smiling in his office before Saturday night’s deflating 113-107 loss to the New Jersey Nets, and then there was Johnson, speaking about Woodson while smiling at his locker, but only to avoid clenching his teeth.
Said Johnson, with a long pause and that smile after he was informed about Woodson’s praise, “We were shorthanded, and with that being said, there were a lot of minutes to be played, and I tried to take advantage of that situation. But with people getting healthy the last few games, my minutes have dropped tremendously.”
As for the Hawks in general, Johnson smiled again, adding, “You have to look at this as a unit. Since I’ve been here (for 11 months during his current third stint with the Hawks), we normally get away from what has made us successful. That being said, the onus is on everybody. Not just on the guys on the court, but on the coaches as well. Everybody needs to look at themselves in the mirror to see what made us successful and try to keep it consistent.”
No, this wasn’t good, but then Woodson spent much of the evening avoiding making a bad situation worse by doing what he should do for the rest of the season. That is, he should play Johnson until his 33-year-old legs say, “No mas,” or something, on a fast break. That might not happen anytime soon, since Johnson nearly was the catalyst for a Hawks comeback during his 36 minutes against the Nets. He helped the Hawks’ early surge to a 14-point lead with a couple of 3-pointers and several of his 10 assists for the game. Then, during the Hawks’ frantic sprint from a 10-point deficit inside the final four minutes to trailing 105-103 a few minutes later, Johnson provided two steals and a driving layup in the valiant but futile cause.
It only made sense. After all, the Hawks have been point guard-challenged for years (Did they really pass in the draft on Chris Paul and Deron Williams?). Even so, there was Johnson spending the past couple of weeks dribbling out of the mostly limping scrum at the position that included Acie Law IV, Tyronn Lue, Salim Stoudamire and Speedy Claxton.
The Hawks even managed a five-game winning streak through the day after Christmas, with Johnson starting and excelling while playing 38, 45, 37, 39 and 32 minutes. Just guessing, but it likely wasn’t a coincidence that the Hawks entered Saturday night’s game with Johnson mostly sitting and stewing during a subsequent three-game losing streak. His minutes dropped to 18, 23 and 22.
So now the Hawks’ losing streak is four, with much help from an opponent that has been point guard-efficient, courtesy of Jason Kidd. This time, he finished with 10 points, 13 rebounds and 14 assists. His starting counterpart, Johnson, wasn’t as spectacular, but he was solid enough to produce 14 points overall to complement his 10 assists and his hustle plays down the stretch.
The Hawks will need more of that, because they are in the midst of their most important stretch of the season. Now that the Nets have helped push the Hawks from promising to plunging at 15-16, the Hawks have four more consecutive home games before playing seven of eight on the road.
They still need more consistency on defense. They still need to remember to share the ball. They still need to remember that a game is four quarters.
They still need a point guard, but Johnson will do in the meantime.
That is, if Woodson just keeps starting and playing him.
Permalink | Comments (33) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Terence Moore
Be wary of opening the checkbook for Hossa
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Marian Hossa came to Atlanta in a somewhat unorthodox way. He was an NHL superstar who had just signed a new contract with his snow-belt team in Ottawa, only to get shipped south when circumstances forced the Thrashers to take bids for the distraught Dany Heatley.
Marian Hossa’s exit from Atlanta wouldn’t be nearly so unorthodox: He is an impending free agent, and he wants to play for a winner.
But before general manager Don Waddell drops to his knees, opens the checkbook and implores Hossa to stay, he needs to realize something: The Thrashers are a .500 team partly because of Marian Hossa.
Through 42 games, Hossa is second on the team in goals (14) and points (36). Those numbers are decent, not great. The pace of 27 goals and 70 points pales when compared to last year’s 43 and 100, respectively. He has four power-play goals after scoring 31 the past two years. Shot totals and shooting percentages are down.
And how is it one of the NHL’s best two-way forwards is a minus-10 — worst among the team’s forwards?
What the Thrashers have right now is not Hossa-like. What the Thrashers have is Hossa Lite.
Hossa acknowledges his production is down. But he says he feels fine physically. He denies feeling any pressure from the contract status.
“I have a contract to play now, so there’s no reason to feel pressure,” he said Saturday.
He might want to start.
The NHL trade deadline is Feb. 26. If Hossa does not sign a new contract in the next month, Waddell will start weighing trade offers. He said Saturday that he won’t let the deadline pass and risk losing Hossa without compensation after the season. Bottom line: Sign or be gone.
“We’ve had as much dialogue as you can have,” said Waddell, who had three face-to-face meetings with Hossa’s agent in December. “Now it’s time. We need to hear if there’s a deal there to be made.”
Waddell is showing some urgency. Hossa, not so much. That says something.
He says his focus is not salary but the direction of the team.
What does he want to see?
“Consistency,” he said. “Basically we are around a .500 team, and that’s not good enough. I believe we can be better, but we have streaks. This is a big decision. If you’re signing a long-term deal somewhere, you want to make sure the team will win more. But we just go up and down like a roller coaster.”
When asked about the possibility of being traded, Hossa said: “I understand that’s a possibility.”
He said that with little emotion. He says everything with little emotion. The only time he bristled slightly was when he was asked if he felt he needed to produce more this season to justify a big contract. “I’ve been in the league for 10 years, so teams know what kind of player I am.”
There is little question that Hossa will hit it big in free agency, even with a down year. He would be the most sought-after player on the open market. He turns only 29 next week. When he’s on, he’s still one of the best.
The problem: He’s not a difference-maker right now. He hasn’t been for sometime. Go back to last season. Hossa banged his knee when he crashed into the boards against the New York Islanders on Jan. 26. He returned that game to score his 31st goal, but his production dropped significantly thereafter. After scoring 31 goals in 51 games (one every 1.65 games), Hossa managed just 12 in the past 31 (one every 2.58), including three in the past 12 (one every four). Then came the playoffs: no goals, one assist, minus-six.
This season: 14 goals in 39 games, one every 2.79.
We still see flashes. Hossa will fly down the right wing, using his speed and strength to hook around a defenseman and drive to the net. But those scenes are the exception.
The Thrashers have other significant issues: goaltending, defense, neutral-zone play, forechecking, grit. But the biggest is an offense overly dependent on Ilya Kovalchuk. They are 4-13 when he doesn’t score. Hossa is supposed to make a difference. He was barely visible in Friday’s 4-3 loss to Carolina except during penalty killing — and penalty killers don’t make $8 million a year.
Hossa played in the All-Star Game in Dallas last year. This year the game’s in Atlanta, and he might not make the cut. If he still ranks among the league’s elite, this would be a good time to show it, because right now the team is average, and he isn’t much better.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
Buckeyes love underdog role
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — A year ago they were ranked No. 1 and presumed impregnable. This time the Ohio State Buckeyes are ranked No. 1 and given little chance.
“We’re seeing it from a different end,” said fullback Dionte Johnson, and in motivational terms, there’s no question which end is more powerful.
The only way the Buckeyes could have shocked the populace on Jan. 8, 2007, was by losing. If this year’s bunch can upset — it sounds funny, the notion of a No. 1 team upsetting somebody — LSU on Monday night, these Buckeyes get to pound their chests and say, “See? Told you we weren’t that bad.”
Much of football-watching America expects Ohio State to play the same game with the same result. (Florida won last year’s BCS title by trashing the Buckeyes 41-14.) Ohio State, as you’d expect, is sick of hearing about last year’s game. And what sort of tonic is it, being the underdog?
“It’s a blessing,” said Cameron Heyward, the true freshman from Peachtree Ridge High who has become a starting defensive end. “Everyone’s counting on LSU.”
The belief here is that the Tigers are more talented but pay less attention to detail. As the inspired Gators proved in the desert 12 months ago, details matter.
Ohio State acted as if it expected to win by 40, and the opening kickoff — Ted Ginn Jr. took it back 93 yards — only reinforced that foolish notion. Soon the Buckeyes were panicking in a way they never panic. The estimable Jim Tressel made two terrible decisions — going for it on fourth down and then allowing Troy Smith to be sacked with no backs behind him to help block — that turned a winnable game into a 20-point halftime deficit.
It was a wretched performance, but it seems the exception that proves the rule. It’s easier to imagine Monday’s title game bearing a greater resemblance to the Fiesta Bowl of January 2003, in which the unassuming Buckeyes felled mighty Miami in two overtimes, than to last season’s. “Don’t get sucked in,” said Vernon Gholston, the other defensive end. “We’re going to play tough. We’re going to battle for 60 minutes.”
And the pressure to win will fall almost entirely on LSU, which will be playing 80 miles from home and which will doubtless have more backing in a building named the Louisiana Superdome. But the capacity of the Ohio State fan to travel and scarf up tickets shouldn’t be discounted. Owing to geography, this won’t be a neutral site, but it won’t be like venturing into Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night, either.
The belief here is that, provided Ohio State can hang close for three quarters, Tressel can outflank Les Miles at the end. And that’s another reason to like the Buckeyes: Miles is no Urban Meyer, who coached a game for the ages that night in Glendale. Already Tressel has seized on Meyer’s no-respect tack, having DVDs burned so his Buckeyes can hear all the terrible things the TV guys have said about them.
The trouble with us media folks is that sometimes we turn into generals, and generals are forever fighting the last war. We expect what happened once to happen again. It’s the reason a terrific Texas team was afforded no shot against Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl two years ago: Media types recalled what the Trojans had done to Oklahoma — USC 55, OU 19 — the year before, and the thought process went: “Sooners, Longhorns … what’s the difference?”
The difference was that Texas had Vince Young, which made it unlike anyone else. Texas won, beating Southern Cal in Pasadena, which was even closer to the Trojans’ campus than the Superdome is to Baton Rouge.
It will surprise many if Ohio State even gives LSU a
game, but it shouldn’t. This
is a proud programof vast resources, and its coach is the nation’s best. There’s no reason the Buckeyes won’t play well. There’s every reason they might just win.
Permalink | Comments (61) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
Knievel flew above radar
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Evel Knievel may be dead, but they won’t let him rest in peace. First, a few words on Robert Craig Knievel himself and we’ll move on to the flying leap planned in his name New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas — in case you missed it, which most of us did. On the 40th anniversary of Knievel’s flight over the fountains at Caesars Palace on his motorcycle, this Australian dude planned to fly the distance of a football field on a machine of his own.
Evel was a pretty nice guy, once you scraped off the scowl and the clownish hardware. Of course, by this time he had switched from bone-breaking jumps to golf. Oh, he wanted strokes on the first tee, but he had no established handicap and he would dicker with you to the last green. He was, I’d guess, about a plus-12, but he wanted you to think he was in the neighborhood of scratch.
He’d come to Atlanta for some sort of event and stayed over a few days, sometime in the early 1980s. He traveled in a motor home, and it was some kind of palace on wheels. His wife (and a lovely person she was) presided over the scene and could whip up a rather sumptuous meal on wheels. I guess that Mr. Knievel must have relieved me of around 50 bucks, or more, on the golf course during the week, but it was worth the experience. Plus, he sent me one of those early steel-head drivers, thoughtfully left-handed, and I still have it.
As I’ve said, Evel was through jumping things by that time. Previously, every time he had advertised a jump, all hospitals in the area prepared the emergency room for a casualty. It was stock stuff to say that he must have broken every bone in his body. A jump at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was his real introduction to the front page and national news. The distance was 150 feet. He and his machine cleared 149, and Evel went the rest of the way and several feet more skidding on his stomach. He was in a coma for 29 days.
He jumped here and there, he cleared some, missed some, and of course, there was a widely exploited leap across Snake River Canyon in Idaho. Oh how the suckers bit. Television had him covered like a presidential inauguration. Municipal Auditorium was packed for the pay-for-view telecast. I know I was there. Suffice it to say that the contraption he created for the “flight” barely got liftoff. But at least he walked away.
What Knievel had done created an outbreak of copycats. So it was on a quiet July 3 afternoon I looked up from my desk and standing there in front of me was a blustery Phil Silvers-type, full of hype, and standing beside him was a shy kid, about 18, I’d say. He was a sprouting jumper in pursuit of fame and had leaped over stuff before. On Independence Day, the shy kid was going to jump over 16 buses in Columbus. The kid barely said a word, but blustering Phil did all the talking. The next day the kid jumped, he came up short and they give him a nice funeral.
About the leaper from Australia, he made it, I hear. Never saw it. Few did, from what I know. Never made the papers. Never even made “SportsCenter” on ESPN. His name, in case you want to look it up, was Robbie Maddison. Knievel missed it, too. He was 69. After all those attempts at self-destruction, he died in a hospital bed peacefully.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Mathis eager to be Falcons’ next GM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Long before the Falcons culminated one of the worst seasons on and off the field for a professional franchise, Terance Mathis wanted to become the team’s general manager. He was obsessed with the job, and nothing has changed.
It’s a challenging job, even for those involved with franchises used to prospering instead of reeling. And, no, Mathis hasn’t any experience at that job, and, yes, his most striking qualification for the job is that he excelled as an NFL wide receiver for most of his 13 seasons.
Still, the Redan High School standout who was a significant player and leader on the Falcons’ only Super Bowl team had an interesting thought on Friday. “If Barack Obama can win Iowa, why can’t I be the general manager of the Falcons?” said Mathis, 40, which makes you sort of wonder why not, indeed?
Let’s start with this: Mathis is excited about the job, which puts him in a group that nearly could squeeze inside a Gatorade bucket. The franchise quarterback is in prison on dogfighting charges. The rest of the roster is a mess. There is no head coach, because the previous one preferred to leave with three games left in his first season and call hogs at Arkansas. The owner is omnipresent, and the Georgia Dome is becoming omni-empty.
So Bill Cowher turned down the Falcons, and then Bill Parcells said yes or something before taking over as guru of the Miami Dolphins. Now the Falcons’ search committee of owner Arthur Blank, whatever you want to call Rich McKay and consultant Ernie Accorsi is interviewing candidates for the general manager and coaching jobs from around the nation.
Mathis said that search committee needn’t go farther than driving distance of Flowery Branch. “With me as your GM, you’re hiring a DeKalb County product, who had eight strong seasons with the Falcons, and who still lives here and is active in the community,” said Mathis, who boldly told Blank in early 2002, soon after he purchased the franchise during Mathis’ last months as a Falcons player: “I’m going to be your next general manager of this team.”
The incoming general manager back then was McKay, who has recently been demoted by Blank to work mostly on stadium projects, and Mathis said he is ready to fulfill his self-proclaimed prophecy. He spent the summer as a coaching and scouting intern with the Baltimore Ravens under respected general manager Ozzie Newsome. He spent the season analyzing the Falcons’ issues at length. He spent the time afterward developing something called “The Gameplan,” which he hopes to show Blank during an interview that he has requested but has yet to receive.
What’s first in “The Gameplan?”
“I would sit down with everybody in the personnel department, both pro and college, and I would ask them about their philosophy in regard to going out and acquiring players,” Mathis said. “Then I would see if their philosophy fits my philosophy, which is getting the best player for the positions that we need.”
Then what? Mathis said, “I would meet with the team to tell them the direction that we’re going and what we’re thinking. At that time, if there wasn’t a head coach, I would tell them that I was going to find a guy that I knew who would be loyal and dedicated to the organization for the long term.
“I want a young, upstart guy who could relate to today’s players and who could motivate and put together a staff that can communicate with these guys.”
What else? “One of my first initiatives would be to go to different community events, just to assure folks where we’re going as an organization and how we’re trying to build our reputation,” Mathis said. “Actually, I’d be out trying to sell season tickets to get the fans back. That would include getting players to do public-service announcements and not just personal endorsements. Your ticket holders want to know that you care about them.”
They mostly want you to win, which also is in “The Gameplan.” Mathis said, “The next two to three years, we want to win the division, go deep in the playoffs and eventually win the Super Bowl.”
The tough part for the Falcons is doing all of those things. The tough part for Mathis is getting an interview with Blank, then getting the job, and then getting all of those things done.
Permalink | Comments (29) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
GM, coach searches far from simple
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The Falcons have three hires to make - two men and one commodity. They need a general manager and a coach, but above all they need credibility.
This franchise, for reasons voluminously documented, is now regarded as the NFL’s least adroit. Even Miami, which finished 1-15, landed Bill Parcells as Mr. Fix-it, while the Falcons let the temperamental Tuna wriggle away. For this flailing organization, there can be no more whiffs, no more Moras or Petrinos.
For Arthur Blank and whoever happens to be advising him - Rich McKay? Ernie Accorsi? Bernie Marcus? - here’s an unsolicited list of concerns/considerations regarding these fairly momentous decisions:
1. With McKay outgoing as GM, Blank needs to be clear about what he did wrong. Draft Jimmy Williams and Jamaal Anderson? Recommend Jim Mora and Bobby Petrino? Sign Joe Horn? Or were the Falcons disappointed that McKay seemed to disappear during the tumultuous season just past? Was his failing one of personnel or profile?
2. With McKay apparently staying as president, are the Falcons looking to hire a real GM or are they simply seeking someone better able to wrangle the draft? Would a seasoned NFL hand - Floyd Reese, recently of the Titans, or Tom Donohoe, formerly of the Bills - come here if he believes Blank’s hand will be on his left shoulder and McKay’s on his right?
3. Toward that end, how many voices does a franchise need? Blank shows no signs of backing off. Even in a diminished capacity, McKay would remain a big name in the industry. Add to that a new GM and a new coach, and isn’t it fair to wonder how many egos Flowery Branch can accommodate?
4. Blank and Co. are believed to be on the road interviewing candidates for both jobs. How exactly do you do that? Do you ask a prospective GM, “Who would you hire as coach?” and then scurry off for an audience with the supplied name? What if that supplied name says he really wouldn’t want to work for the guy who recommended him? Do you scratch both from the list?
5. Given the inherent difficulties of conducting a “simultaneous” search, mightn’t you be better served tabling the coach part until the GM is in place? (There are, at the moment, only two other NFL coaching vacancies.) But if the new GM isn’t going to be a real GM, should you care what he thinks about coaches in the first place?
6. Given that you’re filling two jobs, can you afford to hire someone who has never been an NFL head coach in tandem with someone who has never been an NFL general manager? Even if you wind up with two hot names - Dallas offensive coordinator Jason Garrett as coach and Green Bay personnel man Reggie McKenzie as GM, say - does introducing two newbies buy credibility?
7. If credibility trumps everything, shouldn’t Marty Schottenheimer be atop the list of coaches? (In 21 NFL seasons with four teams, he has made 13 playoff appearances and holds a career winning percentage of .613.)
8. If credibility trumps everything, shouldn’t the aforementioned Reese be atop the list of GMs? (He had an overall winning record in 13 years as general manager of the Oilers/Titans and was universally hailed as a savvy drafter: He picked Eddie George, Steve McNair, Jevon Kearse and, in his final draft with Tennessee, Vince Young.)
9. And if you’re saying, “Gee, what sort of buzz would we get with Schottenheimer and Reese, neither of whom currently holds an NFL job?” … well, weren’t there extenuating circumstances? (Yes. Both lost power plays with their owners: Alex Spanos fired Schottenheimer after the Chargers went 14-2 but were upset in the playoffs, and Bud Adams shoved Reese aside after his GM had just picked the AFC rookie of the year in Young.)
10. If you’re Blank, isn’t this your chance to prove you’re not that type of owner? To show you value competence over the ephemeral concept of “buzz”? To acknowledge that, while fresh faces might be nice, there’s no substitute for hands-on experience? To admit to one and all that a franchise seen as amateurish can only redeem itself by calling in the professionals?
Permalink | Comments (107) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
BCS process is hopeless
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
That makes three duds in three BCS games, and only the Fiesta Bowl didn’t seem a mismatch going in. Southern Cal beat Illinois, which didn’t belong, by 32 points. Georgia beat Hawaii, which was a nicer story than a football team, by 31. And now West Virginia has beaten Oklahoma, which has become to the BCS what Kansas is to the NCAA tournament, by 20.
And I say: Heh, heh.
I also say this, not for the first and surely not for the last time: The BCS doesn’t exist to produce great matchups or even a truly deserving national champ. It exists to give the impression that a deserving national champ will be crowned even though the overarching goal is to preserve the bowl system in all its moneyed bloat.
This is twice now that, apart from the mythical title tilt, a clear marquee game pairing Georgia and Southern Cal was there for the making, and twice now that the match went unmade. The first time was after the 2002 regular season, when Georgia was No. 3 in the BCS standings and Southern Cal had Carson Palmer, who was about to win the Heisman.
Instead the Trojans wound up in the Orange Bowl — couldn’t blame the Rose for messing things up that year — and beat Iowa by three touchdowns, while Georgia handled four-loss Florida State by 13 points in the Sugar. Bad as that was, this year was worse.
I’ve long since abandoned hope that the BCS will ever get No. 1 versus No. 2 right, and now it’s apparent that even No. 3 against No. 4 is beyond its capacity. All we want is the prospect of a really good game, and instead we get Illinois because the Rose wants a Big Ten rep and Hawaii because Fox is desperate to drum up another Boise State. Instead we get three blowouts in two days, and who among us sees Virginia Tech against Kansas in the Orange tonight as the game to right all wrongs?
Permalink | Comments (168) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Whiney Dogs need to look in the mirror
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Before we reach the section that should cause Georgia folks to bark, let’s make sure the Bulldog Nation doesn’t have amnesia: It wasn’t the BCS that lost to mediocre South Carolina at Sanford Stadium and then later to sputtering Tennessee in Knoxville.
It was Georgia.
So put a muzzle on this silly BCS bashing and save your anger for what the Bulldogs should have done regarding their national championship hopes. They should have taken control of their destiny. It’s a gaffe from the past that will do wonders for Georgia’s future, which we’ll discuss after a review of that gaffe.
If the Bulldogs beat South Carolina, Tennessee or both, they are preparing right now for a Superdome date on Monday night in the title game instead of whining after playing and prospering Tuesday night in New Orleans during the Sugar Bowl against overmatched Hawaii.
Take it from Asher Allen, Georgia’s splendid defensive back and return man, who already is among the team leaders at putting things in perspective as only a sophomore. “Especially in the SEC, you have to try your best to win most games that you play in, because with the BCS, if you lose just one game, it’s kind of hard to recover,” Allen said Wednesday. “In the Tennessee game [a 35-14 blowout], we had never played like that before, especially when they jumped on us early. But after that game, we just stopped being uptight and started having fun.”
Thus Georgia’s victory sprint of seven consecutive games, including a rare conquering of Florida, a bashing of rivals Auburn and Georgia Tech and a thorough dismantling of Hawaii to end the season with a 41-10 victory.
Remember, too, that Georgia did so with a youthful and inexperienced bunch. Not only were the Bulldogs without the significant likes of defensive ends Quentin Moses and Charles Johnson, both destined for NFL rosters after the 2006 season, but they were missing accomplished leaders.
Now the Bulldogs aren’t so youthful and inexperienced. They’ll have the full maturation of leaders such as Allen. They’ll return 17 of 22 starters from an 11-2 team that likely will finish among the nation’s top five. Mostly, they’ll have players who’ll remember this year’s gaffe and work to keep another “South Carolina” and “Tennessee” from happening.
They’ll also benefit from experiencing other stuff this season, so you may bark now.
“Through the wins and the losses, we stayed tight as a team, and we didn’t point fingers,” Allen said. “The seniors helped us to stay focused. That’s why the sky is the limit for what we can do. We showed this year that we had the ability to contend for it all with a bunch of underclassmen on both sides of the ball. Obviously, just from what we did against Hawaii, we learned that we can play with the best teams.”
That’s true. Except Hawaii isn’t one of the best teams. Hawaii beat only two opponents with winning records, but Georgia couldn’t control that. Hawaii nearly lost to shaky squads from Louisiana Tech, San Jose State, Nevada and Washington, but Georgia couldn’t control that. Hawaii hasn’t much depth, because of a recruiting budget that is $50,000 compared to the millions associated with most Division I-A programs, but Georgia couldn’t control that.
Hawaii also was a fraud at 12-0, with the historically flawed run-and-shoot offense and a slew of beefy but immobile linemen who couldn’t protect quarterback Colt Brennan and his famous arm. But Georgia couldn’t control that.
Georgia could control Georgia, and Georgia did so impressively against Hawaii. Courtesy of a flawless game plan by Mark Richt and his assistants, along with intensity from their players from start to finish, the Bulldogs took the Bob Knight philosophy to heart: You don’t play the opponent. You play the game.
If you’re Georgia, for instance, you play the game as well in September (South Carolina) and October (Tennessee) as you do in January (Hawaii), or you won’t play for a national championship.
End of controversy. Not that there even should be a controversy.
Permalink | Comments (492) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
Tech’s Johnson shoots straight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
This has to be some kind of record in college football. For the third time in a row, Georgia Tech hired a head coach who says what he means, and means what he says.
Good.
If nothing else, the Yellow Jackets will lead the ACC in straight-talk next season with Paul Johnson, the new guy who is as direct as the old guy (Chan Gailey) and the guy before that (George O’Leary).
For instance: What happens if you want a player to switch positions, but he would (ahem) prefer to stay put?
“It’s usually been my take that I’ll let guys start where they want to,” Johnson said. “Then we’ll look at them, and I may say, ‘You have a better chance to play (on a regular basis) over here.’ “
Johnson flashed a quick smile, before adding, “Now if they’d rather be third string somewhere else, then more power to them. You know?”
The Jackets will know sooner than later that the plain-speaking North Carolina native who managed a 107-39 record as a head coach at Navy and Georgia Southern already has an outline of what he wishes to accomplish.
“We’ll get them together (next week), and I’ll start going over my way of doing things,” Johnson said, with his way of suggesting the following to Tech players about that upcoming meeting and those afterward: Don’t show up if you (ahem) prefer not to hear the truth.
Permalink | Comments (72) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Everyone but BCS saw Dogs maturing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
New Orleans — It had been five years since Georgia ended its season with a win in the Sugar Bowl. Mark Richt was in only his second season. He had already won an SEC title. We now can consider that foreshadowing.
The Bulldogs ended another season in New Orleans on Tuesday night. They often toyed with an unbeaten but overmatched opponent. The same team that looked so lost early in the season appeared mature and resolute at the end. Feel free to consider it foreshadowing.
This season, they were very good. Next season, they should be the next level up.
Presumably, this time the BCS will notice.
If the Dogs wanted to make a statement about playing in the wrong bowl game, they did so. They led Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl 24-3 after their first four possessions. They led 38-3 when the game wasn’t even three-quarters old, though it already was clear that Hawaii would be four-quarters awful.
It was another nightmarish result for the BCS, which was not to be confused with the nightmarish result in the Rose Bowl earlier in the day. Southern Cal smacked Illinois in the Rose Bowl 49-17. Georgia was on the way to doing much the same to Hawaii. Once again, the system created muck, not magic.
There are many who believed that the Bulldogs and Trojans, not LSU and Ohio State, should’ve been matched in next week’s BCS title game. Nothing that happened on New Year’s Day will change those sentiments.
Hawaii brought a perfect record to New Orleans. They also brought hula dancers, the “ha’a” dance and band members with war paint. If window dressing and pageantry counted for anything, the Warriors would’ve led before the kickoff.
That would’ve been their only lead.
After zipping through the season 12-0 against a schedule most would consider soft — the toughest opponent: Boise State — Hawaii looked out of place in a BCS bowl. Coach June Jones had admitted concern about how his players would react to being on this stage (“This is a Sugar Bowl for Georgia, but it’s a Super Bowl for us.”), and his worries were justified.
From the outset, the Bulldogs looked at home. Hawaii merely looked in awe.
The Warriors were penalized twice before their first official snap, first for delay of game, then for a false start. Colt Brennan, who threw 38 touchdown passes and finished third in the Heisman voting, looked rushed and nervous on his first two pass attempts. Hawaii’s first possession ended with a punt, after which the Warriors’ Keenan Jones drew a personal foul for hitting returner Mikey Henderson early and illegally (helmet to helmet).
Henderson suffered a concussion. That would be the closest Hawaii came to having its presence felt. The Bulldogs’ first four possessions of the game went touchdown-touchdown-field goal-touchdown as they built a 24-3 lead. They were bigger, deeper and better.
Hawaii’s defense had no answer for Knowshon Moreno, who had two early touchdown runs of 17 and 11 yards. (Actually, in that sense, Hawaii fit right in with the rest of the SEC, which also didn’t have an answer for Moreno.) Hawaii’s offense and Brennan didn’t have an answer for Georgia’s defense, which in the first half sacked the quarterback five times and forced two turnovers.
If the Bulldogs were still upset Tuesday about being snubbed by the BCS, they did what good teams do: They vented on the field.
Consider this another step in the maturing process for a young team that had some early season hiccups, then closed the regular season with six straight wins. The youth that was so painfully apparent in losses to South Carolina and Tennessee, and in a narrow escape at Vanderbilt, looked remarkably stable in New Orleans.
Growing pains shouldn’t be a problem next season. The Dogs return 17 of 22 starters next season, including the quarterback (Matthew Stafford), the running back (Moreno), three-fifths of the offensive line (which started three freshmen this season) and all but one defender in the front seven (end Marcus Howard).
For a fan base that sometimes has difficult maintaining perspective, it’s hard to imagine Georgia fans keeping their feet on the ground heading into next season.
But it’s hard to imagine any projection being excessive. Maybe this time the BCS will notice.
Permalink | Comments (342) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, UGA / SEC
Clemson, Auburn share more than orange
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
When last Auburn played in this state, the occasion yielded the now-famous Blackout in Athens. Fifty days later, another Auburn visit produced an Orangeout in the Dome. There hasn’t been so much of the garish color on display in Georgia since …
Well, since Jan. 2, 2004, when Clemson and Tennessee met in the Chick-fil-A Bowl and we were offered a study in shadings. (Turned out Clemson had the brighter, prettier orange, while the titular Big Orange was, by way of contrast, washed-out.) This edition produced no such revelation. Indeed, the orange of Auburn and Clemson looked pretty much the same.
Which is pretty much what you’d expect from programs of powerful parallels. Both are nicknamed Tigers. Both sport massive stadiums in the midst of modest burgs. Both sit roughly two hours from Atlanta along I-85. And here they were, meeting under an off-white roof in an arena where the seats and the turf are green, and their collision generated the strangest thing:
Tons of orange in the stands, but not much on the field.
Auburn wore blue jerseys and white pants. Clemson wore white jerseys and purple pants. All their respective backers, however, came clad in you-know-what. (Befitting the New Year’s Eve color scheme, the invocation was given by Jeff Francoeur, who was a Clemson football signee and who played his high school games — wouldn’t you know it? — in a stadium dubbed the Big Orange Jungle.)
Auburn and Clemson had something else in common. Each is coached by a man who flirted with Arkansas and who chose to remain in place. Tommy Bowden even got a four-year extension, which means that his record tenure on the ol’ Hot Seat is now slated to run through 2014. And, proving yet again that it’s a small world after all, the final night of 2007 brought together two coaches who’d rejected the Hogs’ calls, while the man who briefly guided the Falcons under this roof — Bobby somebody — fled for Fayetteville three weeks ago under cover of darkness.
Auburn entered having executed one coaching change: Al Borges resigned as offensive coordinator, presumably after a strong shove from Tommy Tuberville, and the Chick-fil-A Bowl marked the debut of new coordinator Tony Franklin, lately of Troy. In the first half, Auburn looked like a team running the spread offense for the first time, managing just 147 yards and three points. Matters improved thereafter, backup quarterback Kodi Burns becoming increasingly adept in the spread. Auburn scored the tying touchdown with 8 1/2 minutes left in regulation and the winning one on its first series of overtime.
Say this for Auburn, though: It can still chop block with the best (or, more precisely, the worst) of them. An unflagged chop block on LSU’s Glenn Dorsey left Les Miles raging — he called it “immoral” — and induced this declaration from Tuberville: “We will not tolerate it.” Barely seven minutes into the Chick-fil-A Bowl, tackle Ryan Pugh dove into the back of Clemson nose guard Dorell Scott’s knees while Scott was being blocked high by Tyronne Green. This time a flag was thrown, not that it was much consolation to Scott, who had to be helped from the field and who missed the rest of the half. And what was Intolerant Tommy’s immediate response? There was none. Pugh started the next series. The game itself served to illustrate why these teams weren’t playing on New Year’s Day or later. It was close but not especially enthralling. With victory there for the seizing, neither side could move much on the final five series of regulation. The SEC Tigers always seemed the slightly stronger side, and it took more than four quarters but they finally proved it.
“War Eagle and Happy New Year!” said Tuberville, addressing the happier half of the orange-clad patrons after the first overtime game in the 40-year history of the bowl formerly known as the Peach, and his constituency roared its approval. The other folks in orange, already headed for their cars or a downtown bar, were less cheerful. As 2007 became 2008, Clemson fans had to be thinking that 2014 seems awfully far off.
Permalink | Comments (50) | Categories: Mark Bradley
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