PSoTD

The NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four will be held in Indianapolis, Indiana.

This is about the closest thing to a handy guide for information on ordering tickets for the Final Four.

I watched a little bit of them in exhibition against the 49ers last night, and I have to say, if this is as lifeless as the Bears defense is going to be, then Lovey Smith should get fired by the end of the season, because that was listless.

Is Rashied Davis the only BEAR that is PUMPED Up? I don’t see many players motivated to win. You cannot turn the switch on/off in a blink of an eye. No enthusiasm and intensity, especially on defense. Where is the sense of urgency? Are the Chicago Bears in game mode? Indianapolis awaits - when will the Bears come out of hibernation?

Hey Bears fans - let's not get too excited.

I'll run a freebie on Yahoo for anyone that wants to play along, just email me or post a comment and I'll put you in.

I'm not watching the Olympics except for when it's on at the YMCA while I'm working out, and the one thing that has stood out to me during whatever competitions are on (this morning was women's volleyball) - there's a hell of a lot of empty seats.

Apparently events are sold out but people just aren't going? I saw this happen at the NCAA Men's Basketball first round in Anaheim this year as well, and I think it's truly screwed up. The idea that people can afford expensive tickets - and particularly the good seats that you can see on a televised angle for a sport are good tickets - and don't bother to show up should be unacceptable to amateur sports. I suspect that if you lowered the price of the tickets to something that the average person could easily afford, you wouldn't have this problem.

I knew I couldn't get through a whole season without wanting this.

And now, Brett Favre finds himself in treacherous waters if he decides to play this season after being traded to the Jets. His handling of the situation in Green Bay doesn't allow much expectation of his ability to deal with the media in New York/New Jersey. If Favre chooses to play for the Jets, and things go bad for the Jets this season - and there's really no reason to expect they won't - Favre is going to get eaten alive.

I'm sure I'm in the minority. But I have two contrasting mindsets:

I am a sports fan. I like watching sports.

I dislike what the Olympics has become, and have no interest in watching any of it, and in fact, am sorry that they are preempting reruns for it. And I've attended an Olympics, in 1984 in Los Angeles, and loved it.

But I can't watch the Olympics on TV anymore. In no particular order, here's why I won't watch the Olympics:

Fervent broadcast American nationalism and medal-counting. Rooting for somebody or a team because of what country they are from no longer makes enough sense to me. If there's a compelling story behind an athlete or team, that doesn't depend on the country. Counting medals doesn't make some country "the best" at anything other than the arbitrary standards of this athletic event.

Rampant commercialism.

Rampant elitism. For many of these sports, in America at least, there's no way to compete unless there's access to great amounts of money spent on this pursuit.

Ridiculous focus on few events.

Up Close and Personal. Every 5 minute bio is 5 minutes they could spend actually showing a sport they never show.

No sense of humor.

Bob Costas. I don't know, there's a smugness factor with him at this point that just makes him impossible to watch.

It's boring. There's no build up of a challenge that I can invest in, no push of a sport that I really want to watch that I can't get any other time as a viewer if I really want.

Ken Griffey's trade to the White Sox is old news now, but I just wanted to weigh in. Griffey probably helped sell tickets for a bad team, and kept Cincinnati's faithful interested. But it is impossible to say that the deal to bring him to Cincy was a good deal for the Reds. It just wasn't. It's not that he didn't produce for the Reds when he wasn't injured, and it wasn't that the guys traded for him turned into superstars, although Mike Cameron has always been a pretty good player - and has received more MVP votes since the trade than Griffey has.

No, the problem has been the salary, and everyone has known it. Griffey had to be a monster for at least some of those years in order to justify it, and that never happened. Because it didn't happen, and because of the injuries, the Reds couldn't move him at a reasonable price, either, so he was there, eating salary the whole time. Now, I like Ken Griffey as a ballplayer, and as a person, and if there's going to be a player that the Reds do that for, Ken Griffey is a good choice. But... those decisions kill revenue franchises the size of Cincinnati's, and this one surely looks like it didn't help a team with a horrible record this century.

The main area it hurt, I think, was actually the pitching. The Reds have had one of the worst pitching staffs throughout the zeros. They keep trying to catch lightning in a bottle, bringing in some guy who had some good year or years in the past but most other teams thought was pretty much done, a guy they hoped would be a stud - on the cheap. It almost never worked out, it almost always was a horrible pitching experience:

Eric Milton
Paul Wilson
Cory Lidle
Todd Van Poppel
Joey Hamilton
Shawn Estes

Everyone takes flyers on these kinds of guys, because every once in a while it works out. But the Reds weren't in a position to take a flyer - it HAD to work out, there wasn't much of a backup plan, which you'll recognize if you look at their pitching rosters.

So, I look at the trade as a bittersweet end of a very bad Reds management decision, at least as far as baseball on the field was considered. The Reds got their new ballpark, and they got Griffey's 600th homer, which they didn't even give the Reds' fans the benefit of watching at home. Ken Griffey did what he could, but it was an impossible deal to succeed at, and the injuries took away a lot as well. Good luck Ken, and I hope you get to a World Series some day as a player.