And another thing...

So sorry

I see where Duke University president Richard Brodhead finally got up and offered an apology to the Duke lacrosse team, and only a full year-and-change after the fact. Big of him.

Unfortunately he blunted it a bit by lamely trying to justify why he and other school officials sat back and let their own get savaged by a lunatic prosecutor and various media vampires. Brodhead's exceedingly flaccid excuse: He was afraid if he had come out and made more forceful statements it might have prejudiced the case.

Altogether now: Huh?

Bottom line is this clown jumped to conclusions just like so many of us did -- and I'll gladly include myself in that number. The difference is, I'm just some ink-stained wretch in Indiana and my prejudgment carried no weight, while Brodhead's carried the ultimate weight.

Shame on him. An apology at this late date -- after he'd blown up the program and cut loose a fine coach and decent man, Mike Pressler -- might make him feel better, but it means exactly bupkus to the people most affected by his craven absolution of leadership.

You wanna make a conciliatory gesture that means something, Dick? Give Pressler his job back.

-- Ben Smith    

Sign of the apocalypse

WEST LAFAYETTE -- This being a family blog that occasionally strays from the righteous path, a  bit of fair warning: This post may not be suitable for all family members, especially if they're Notre Dame fans.

With 9:32 to go in the first half, Purdue up 13-0 and Notre Dame making Rockne cover his eyes again, you can carve this one in stone. I know this because I just looked across the field to the Purdue student section and, yes, that IS a giant inflatable male body part aloft in the stands.

Which of course calls to mind that old saying: It's never over until the inappropriate object d'art appears.

-- Ben Smith

Sign him up

Good to know that Indiana is still going after solid, quality scholar athletes.

Take this Bud Mackey guy, for instance.

Kelvin Sampson got an oral committment from the Top 40 hoops star last fall, and was looking to lock him up on the Nov. 14 signing day.

Oops. On Friday, the 6-foot-4 Mackey got collared for cocaine trafficking within 1,000 yards of a school in his native Kentucky. I don't want to make rash judgments here, but I'd have to say that might hurt his chances with Coach Sampson.

Just a thought: I hope Mackey wasn't one of those 700 illegal phone calls Sampson made. Though there would be an odd sort of karma to it if he was.

  -- Ben Smith

Fight of the century

WEST LAFAYETTE -- Over here for Purdue-Notre Dame -- general consensus is that the engineering school opens a can of whup-you-know-what on the lore school by, um, the square root of pi -- and I'm looking at the leprechaun and Boilermaker Pete down there, and I'm thinking that what this game needs is not Jimmy Clausen vs. Curtis Painter but Pete vs. O'Pete.

Mascot fights. They're the best thing about college football that aren't the USC cheerleaders.

And so, just to get everyone in the proper mood, here is one of the alltimers: The Oregon Duck throwin' down in serious fashion on rhe Cougar from Washington State. It earned the Duck a one-game sitdown from the university buzzkills, but it's still one of the best college football moments you'll see this fall.

Outside of, again, the USC cheerleaders.

-- Ben Smith

Woe is Vick

So who is Michael Vick, anyway? Al Capone?

Every day now it seems like the guy's either getting indicted, investigated, questioned or charged. First it was the dog thing. Then it was the gambling thing. Then he tested positive for marijuana. Now he's getting sued by 1st Source Bank out of South Bend for $2 million his company, Divine Seven, owes on some auto deals, and for more than $2 million by Royal Bank of Canada, which says Vick borrowed $2.5 million in January to invest in real estate.

I swear on a stack of Dog Lovers' Illustrated, I wouldn't be Vick right now if you threw in Jessica Alba, a Lear jet and a private island in the Caribbean as part of the deal. The man's in so much hot water he should change his name to the Human Teabag.

The Human Teabag!

Maybe he and Pacman should form a tag team.

-- Ben Smith   

Solo's soliloquy

Hope Solo used to be just a pretty face with a cool name, one more athlete you never heard of from a sport you never think about.

Now that we've heard FROM her, though, obscurity is no longer a problem.

For all you card-carrying citizens of I Hate Soccer Nation out there (and if you're fleeing this site right now, all I can say is, I warned you this would not be a no-soccer zone), Hope Solo is, or was, the starting goalie for the U.S. women's national team. And a good one. She had not, in fact, given up a goal in more than 300 minutes.

And yet, inexplicably, U.S. coach Greg Ryan yanked her before today's semifinal World Cup match against Brazil, throwing the more experienced but exceedingly rusty Brianna Scurry into a situation for which she was clearly not ready. A profoundly moronic coaching move was thus followed by a thoroughly predictable 4-0 Brazilian rout, sending Solo into a fuming rage.

"It was the wrong decision, and I think anybody knows anything about the game knows that," Solo said after the loss. "There's no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves . . ."

Well . . .probably not. Brazil, frankly, was just that much better than the Americans. But Ryan was still an idiot to yank a hot goalie right before the biggest match of the year to date. Do you pull Patrick Roy right before the seventh game of the Stanley Cup Finals? Sit Tim Duncan for Game 7 against the Suns? Tell Mariano Rivera you don't need him with the season on the line and the sacks jammed in the ninth?

Not that Solo's anything like as important as Roy or Duncan or Rivera. But in its own context, Ryan's move was just as lame-brained. You don't mess with what's working, isn't that the No. 1 rule of coaching?

No. 2, of course, being that if you forget No. 1, don't bother to come home.

-- Ben Smith      

Miracle cure

So I see where Greg Oden's knee surgery was a success, and that he hopes he'll come out on the other side of rehab better than ever.

"I'm hoping for a 40-inch vertical," he told the Associated Press today.

Not to sound like some cheesy lounge act, but this reminds me of an old joke.

Guy goes in to see the doctor. Doctor tells him he needs surgery. Guy says "Will I be able to play the violin?"

Doc says he doesn't know why not.

Guy says, "Great! I always wanted to play the violin!"

I'll be here all week, folks.

-- Ben Smith

Brand *

Every so often I get out of bed in the morning and the sun is shining, my Pirates aren't the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers Plus Jason Bay, and the lead story on SportsCenter isn't about steroids, Michael Vick, O.J., crooked refs or Dante Love dropping the pass that would have beaten flippin' Nebraska.

Every once in awhile Marc Ecko shows up.

If you don't know who he is, he's a fashion designer who paid $752,467 for home run No. 756. Now he's announced he wants to send to Cooperstown -- branded with a big fat asterisk.

I love this. I love it because it's probably making steam come out of He Who Shall Not Be Named's ears in mighty plumes. I love it because all the doddering, tapioca-slurping codgers who run baseball probably think it defiles the game. I love it because He Who Shall Not Be Named has already called Ecko "an idiot" for conducting an online vote on what to do with the ball.

The choices were send it to Cooperstown untouched, send it with an asterisk attached or launch it into space.

Personally I would have voted "C," launch it into space. But there's probably already enough trash orbiting the planet.

-- Ben Smith         

Evil, evil media

And speaking of Mike Gundy . . . as we have a habit of doing in this country, his little tirade against columnist Jenni Carlson has been blown completely out of proportion.

Now it's morphed into yet another Does The Media Go Too Far deal, and naturally the vast, vast majority of people came down on Gundy's side -- even though a lot of us now suspect that he used Carlson and her story on backup quarterback Bobby Reid to deflect some of the heat that's on him as a barely-.500 coach at a program no one in America cares about.

Here's what I think: I've got no problem with what Gundy did, as far as it goes. He has a right to stand up for his players. He has a right to yell and scream if he wants to. And while I think he really was doing it to get out from under the heat, I read the column in question, and some parts of it did stray over the line. I've got no problem with criticizing a college athlete's performance, because contrary to what Gundy said, they're neither amateurs nor, in a lot of cases, kids. But when you start cracking on a college athlete's attitude or questioning his fortitude, then you've gone too far.

On the other hand, I didn't think the story was egregious as a whole. Certainly it didn't merit Gundy's over-the-top response.  And if three-fourths of it was inaccurate, as he claimed, why would he refuse to  identify any of those inaccuracies when directly asked to do so? Could it be because he was just flapping his gums to hear his gums flap?

Not that the mouth-breathers understand this, of course. Some of the blog and message board traffic has been truly ridiculous, including the predictable shots at women sportswriters and even, amazingly enough, at least one suggestion that women should stay in the kitchen where they belong.

Can't wait until THAT guy learns to walk upright.

-- Ben Smith

Isiah on the stand

You can call off the Oscar race right now. Isiah Thomas has Best Actor locked up like Fort Knox.

In this week's installment of "Sleaze in the City," the sexual harrassment suit brought by former employee Anucha Browne Sanders against Thomas and the Knicks, the little crud himself went up on the stand, and what a performance it was. Why, of course he would never call a female employee a "b----." Why, of course, he wouldn't make inappropriate advances. Why, of course degrading women is "never OK."

Very impressive. No person with half a working brain cell would believe a word of it, but very impressive.

And thoroughly disgusting, of course. I'd say Isiah was the dictionary definition of "two-faced," but that would be an insult to two-faced people everywhere.

To quote Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy: Makes me want to puke.

-- Ben Smith