BOO-LA BOO-LA! (MINUS THE -LA)

Is there anything more suffused with intemperate evil these days than Big Time College Football?

First, it's the coaches who pull up anchor and scram at the slightest increase in pay and/or prominence: Rich Rodriguez, Nick Saban, Lane Kiffin, Pete Carroll, Brian Kelly...the list is endless, as is the list of knuckleheads who think that now that he's coaching our team, he's not in it for the money.

Then it's the scumbag "runners" who supply the coaches with recruits and the recruits with cash.  Reggie Bush decided to give up his Heisman Trophy without admitting any actual wrongdoing.  Whatever happened, it must have been pretty bad.

Not to be outdone are the poobahs of the BCS, whose hypocrisy is more transparent than Lady Gaga's latest stage costume.  Hmmm, looks like the best team in the country, Boise State, will once again get screwed out of a chance at the national championship.  Try again next year, fellas!  Maybe in 30 years, you'll have the aura and prestige (and buckets of major conference cash) of Missouri or Oregon, and we'll let you in.

Now, we hear of the story of 20-year-old Declan Sullivan, who was gamely doing his job filming Notre Dame practices on a scissor-lift thirty or forty feet above the outdoor practice facility in South Bend during a record-setting wind-storm.  Winds were gusting over 50 miles per hour, and barometric pressures were the lowest ever recorded in that part of the country.  Fighting Irish Coach Brian Kelly, one of the aforementioned money-grabbers who had left his Cincinnati recruits for a shot at raking in a piece of NBC Sports' lucre, nevertheless decided that he couldn't bear practicing indoors, even on such a miserable day.  He ordered Sullivan and his camera up the lift to record whatever inconsequential things players do on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a mediocre season.  Sullivan tweeted, only half-jokingly, "I guess I've lived long enough" and then not jokingly at all, "holy fuck holy fuck this is terrifying!" before the lift finally tipped over, killing him.

As is typical, Kelly has managed to escape all accountability for this tragedy, with Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick saying that the weather that day was "unremarkable".  Yeah, you know, except for the 50 mph winds that knocked the scissor lift over, it was a great day!

When is enough enough?  The Organization Formerly Known As NCAA Division 1 Football has just about used up all of my patience, and I'm ready to write it off my sports viewing docket forever.  Granted, I didn't go to a big name school with a powerhouse football program, and I really have no built-in allegiance to any of these teams, but Glorioski is this a horrible bunch of greedy thieves and crooks, and now manslaughterers (maybe not legally, but still, the kid is dead for no good reason).

I think it's time, in a perfect world, for Congress to get involved, but in this world, that's like asking a gang of Somali pirates to adjudicate a dispute between the captains of two leaking oil tankers. Probably not a good idea.  But somebody has to do something.

The BCS should just split off into a separate entity, completely divorced from the NCAA and their cockamamie rules.  They can retain affiliations with the schools, but nobody has to go to class or pretend to be a student.  The BCS would strictly be a money-generator for the schools and themselves.  The stadiums would still fill, they players would still wear the same colors, but the whole enterprise would throw off the yoke of education and all the attendant nonsense that goes with it.  However - they have to live by OSHA regulations, anti-trust laws, corporate taxes, and everything else that major companies have to deal with.  They would become a Fortune 500 business, free to make money any way they want within the confines of the law, providing the nation with entertaining minor league football on Saturdays, and maybe even paying the players a living wage.  If they do all that, then I would have no problems with team-hopping coaches, the runners would be unnecessary, the BCS could have a playoff system, and maybe the other poor saps doing Declan Sullivan's job can stay alive.

Of course, the BCS pricks make even more money (and hide it better) by pretending to be an educational institution, so none of this will ever happen.  And I'm going to stop watching, except for the Ivy League, and Boise State, my new favorite team.

SEVEN AND DONE

Games, that is.  The Gunslingers were bounced out of the playoffs by the mighty Mammoths in seven agonizing games.  The Mammoths had a 3 games to 1 lead, and were leading in Game Five by a score of 4-0 in the bottom of the ninth inning at one stage.  Aaron Hill hit a 3-run shot to make it interesting, and then after a walk, Carlos Quentin made his only playoff plate appearance count with a put-the-champagne-back-in-the-case two-run homer to send the series back to the Mammoths home park (San Francisco's AT&T Park) for Game Six.  Talk about the walking dead.

We won Game Six by a 9-7 score after some shaky work by Darren Oliver in the 9th inning made a 9-3 game get uncomfortably close.  Game Seven was all Timmy Lincecum, though.  The Freak shut us out 1-0, and it wasn't even that close.  So, the better team won, as it should have, but it was a fun, wacky, series.  Manager Bill Lee was proud of the boys, saying, "I think they just really wanted to get back to California for some more medical marijuana.  I know I did."

Oh, and I'm naming my blogs posts from the frozen North "TCP's Alaska".  They ought to have less carnage than Sarah Palin's Alaska, and definitely less unprotected sex with 20-year-old girls, although I can always hope.