BrokenCowboy: Sports Views with a West Coast Bias

March 10, 2004

All-Pac-10, or All of the Pac-10?
The Pac-10 announced its all-conference team on Monday, a watered down honor which is extended to the top ten players in the league rather than five, the way that conferences such as the almighty ACC do. Being named All-ACC means that a player was great; the All-Pac-10 award doesn’t quite carry the same weight. The names on the Pac-10 list, however, offer hope for the future of the much-maligned conference. USC’s Desmon Farmer and Oregon’s Luke Jackson are the only seniors, and of the eight players with remaining eligibility, only Stanford’s Josh Childress appears to be considering the NBA. There may be hope for this conference yet.

Evil Empire Good for the Pocketbook
Aside from the enormous luxury taxes and revenue sharing bills George Steinbrenner will likely pay over the next few years (amounts which could be more than $100 million annually), the Yankees line the pocketbooks in other ways. The Los Angeles Dodgers opened sales for individual game tickets last Saturday morning, and had a record turnout. Fans bought 87,000 tickets, with 33,000 of those for a weekend series in June against the Yankees. Not bad. But the Pinstripe Effect actually extends beyond that series. According to Derrick Hall, Dodger vice president for communications, “a number of people were turned away after the Yankee series was sold out, so rather than leave with nothing, they bought tickets for other games with the Giants, or maybe for July 4th.” We obviously can’t know how many tickets were sold to disappointed fans hoping to see the Yankees, but we can track the Pinstripe Effect in another way, by counting road sell-outs. It’s my guess that they’ll sell out at least 70 of their 81 road games. You probably won’t hear those opposing owners complaining too much about Rodríguez, Sheffield, and Brown as they’re counting the gate, concession, and parking receipts.

Distance Dominance
I will probably never again link to anything having to do with distance running, so I’m hoping that my two distance fans are paying attention...
The Los Angeles Marathon was run over the weekend, and the organizers came up with a novel twist. They gave the elite women a twenty minute head start on the rest of the field and put up a $50,000 bonus to the first runner -- male or female -- to cross the finish line. The winner, of course, was a female, forty-nine year old Tatyana Pozdnyakova of the Ukraine. Here are some amazing facts about Tatyana:
• Her finishing time (2:30:17) would’ve won the men’s over-40 division.
• Only fifteen men in the field bettered her time.
• She beat the next closest over-40 woman by forty-eight minutes.
• She would’ve beaten me by about three weeks.

More Baseball
I remember seeing Dave McCarty wearing a Twins cap in the stands at a football game a few days after Minnesota selected him with the third overall pick of the 1991 amateur draft. Thirteen years later, you'll never guess what he's doing now -- working on his slider and trying to make it with the Red Sox as a pitcher. Well, sort of.

26-1? No Need to Worry • March 8, 2004

The Stanford Cardinal lost to Washington on Saturday afternoon, 75-62, and we really shouldn’t be too surprized. This Washington game looked dangerous even before Matt Lottich’s miraculous shot shocked Washington State on Thursday night, before the team had to spend four hours sitting in an airport, before coach Mike Montgomery had to scrap the usual Friday practice because of team-wide exhaustion. Aside from the Cardinal, the Huskies have been the hottest team in the Pac-10, but their horrid 0-5 start in conference play put their postseason plans in limbo. Essentially, their NCAA tournament started Saturday evening. They knew that a loss to the Card would eliminate them from NCAA consideration, and they played with the expected level of motivation for forty frenetic minutes. With the exception of a six-minute scoring drought to open the second half, they controlled the game completely, disrupting the Stanford offense with aggressive guard play and converting turnovers into fastbreak lay-ups.

Meanwhile, nothing was going right for Stanford. Josh Childress was severely limited by foul trouble, and Matt Lottich turned in one of the worst shooting performances imaginable. The stat line says 1-11, but it was much worse than that, as he tossed up at least three airballs, one an open twelve-footer from the wing. Rob Little scored at will for brief stretches, but then wouldn’t touch the ball for minutes at a time.

Really, though, there are two stats that tell you all you need to know about this game. Washington was 7-13 from three point range, while Stanford was 5-24. Take out Childress’s numbers and the rest of the team was an atrocious 2 for 18. The second discrepancy came at the free throw line, where Washington was 24 for 30 and Stanford, although perfect, was only 3 for 3. The Husky total was certainly inflated in the final minutes as Stanford began sending them to the line, but it’s difficult to imagine a Stanford team shooting only three free throws. The officials should take part of the blame on this, but if the Cardinal had been as aggressive as the Huskies, the free throw numbers would have been more equitable.

And so the Cardinal lost.

Yes, they lost an opportunity to be the first Pac-10 team ever to finish the league schedule undefeated.
Yes, they lost an opportunity to be the first team since 1991 to enter the NCAA tournament with an unblemished record.
And yes, they lost their number one ranking.

But really, that’s about it. Regardless of what east coast talking heads like Jay Bilas would have you believe, they only need one win in the Pac-10 tournament to secure a #1 seed in the West region of the NCAA tournament, something that probably wasn’t even on the Cardinal’s list of goals for this season. All of this will be forgotten when the Mighty Card rolls into the Final Four four weeks from now.