And another thing...

Tiger, burning bright

At this rate professional golf's only hope is that Tiger Woods goes "Sybil" on us.

Then he can play himself. Or one of his 13 distinct personalities, including Tiger Flambe, an exuberant  sou chef from Provence, and My Little Tiger, a shy 6-year-old girl who obsessively collects tiny multi-colored ponies with brushable hair.

But enough silliness. Hear what Tiger did today?

Only win the Accenture Match Play Championship by grinding poor Stewart Cink into dust. Beat Cink 8-and-7, Tiger did, by making 14 birdies in 29 holes. It was his fourth straight PGA Tour win since last September, and the third straight time he set a tournament record for margin of victory.

It's pretty much beyond ridiculous, what he's doing now.

"I think maybe we ought to slice him open to see what's inside," the mutilated Cink said. "Maybe nuts and bolts."

Nah, Stewart. Come on, man, this is the 21st century.

I say it's microchips and fiber optics.

-- Ben Smith

To sit or not to sit

So now it begins. At least one national columnist is calling for Indiana to self-impose a postseason ban come March as a way to soften the inevitable NCAA hammer.

It's an idea I fully expect to gain traction in the coming days, even if it shouldn't.

Couple of points:

1. If Indiana decides to voluntarily sit out the postseason, who's it benefiting?

Not the players, who are blameless in the whole Kelvin Sampson fiasco and, God knows, have been through enough without getting jobbed out of a postseason berth they've more than earned. And not the fans, who ought to have at least SOMETHING to look forward to after the agony of the past few weeks.

A move like this benefits only those who frankly don't deserve it: The people who pushed for and subsequently approved the hiring of a known NCAA felon. Why should the players and fans get thrown under the bus so they can (possibly) save their own skins?

2. A voluntary postseason ban guarantees nothing.

The NCAA is still likely to come down hard on the school, if for no other reason than plain dumbness. That IU had to pay Kelvin Sampson $750,000 to go away just two years after hiring him has left the program in turmoil for the third time in eight years, and stained by scandal to boot. It pretty much deserves whatever the NCAA decides to do to it.

All a postseason ban would do is enable Indiana to make the argument that it's suffered plenty for Sampson's trangressions, alleged and otherwise. And the NCAA could still come back and say, "No, you haven't."

And so: Let 'em play. The players deserve it. The fans deserve it. No one else matters at this point.

-- Ben Smith

   

Cheap tricks

No one has more admiration for Tippecanoe Valley's venerable coach Bill Patrick, whose 39 years and 658 wins walking a sideline make him one of the legends of Indiana high school basketball. But what he pulled last night was more the work of a con man than an icon.

If you missed it, Patrick's Tippy Valley Vikings were clinging to a 55-53 lead over Wawasee with 50.9 seconds left in overtime last night when Patrick noticed a spot of blood on the tail of Wawasee junior Grant Ruch's jersey. Ruch tried to remedy the situation by simply tucking it in, but Patrick protested, accurately saying the rules dictated that Ruch had to change the jersey.

It was, to put it bluntly, a setup. Knowing the rules better than the officials, Patrick suggested innocently that Ruch simply swap jerseys right then and there. When Ruch dutifully peeled off the old jersey, Patrick immediately insisted that a technical be called, because the rules ALSO say that if you pull your shirt off on the floor, it's a tech.

He was right. And when senior guard Ryan Scherzer stepped up to make the free throws, and Tippy Valley scored on the ensuing possession, the crisis was over in a 62-53 Viking win.

"We knew the rules, let's put it that way," Patrick said when questioned about the maneuver.

Wrong, Bill. What you did was take advantage of the rules, and take advantage of a callow high school kid in the bargain. Shame on you.    

  -- Ben Smith

All aboard

Scratch one player revolt.

A day after half the Indiana basketball players went AWOL from practice in the turbulent wake of Kelvin Sampson's resignation, all of them were present and accounted for when the team bus boarded for Northwestern. And look for all hands to be on deck for the game tonight, too.

I figured this would happen. Yesterday -- this entire last week, really -- was just the culmination of a trying and emotional time for the IU players, and they are still just college kids, after all. As Rick Greenspan accurately said last night, players form attachments to coaches. Yesterday had to be a hard, hard time for them, and the short-lived "boycott" was simply a manifestation of that.

Exacerbated, I might add, by the athletic department, which pretty much left them to their own devices and the untender mercies of a ravenous media crowd hungering for a quote, any quote. All of that could have been avoided if IU officials had simply designated a time and place at which the players would be made available, but they didn't. Just one more component of an appallingly confusing and disorganized day.

Anyway ... that's over. Thank God.

-- Ben Smith   

Pinch me again

It's official, finally. The Indy Racing League and Champ Car reached an agreement Friday to merge what's left of the latter into the former. This officially reunites the splintered open-wheel genre for the first time in 12 years.

Still don't think it will matter much, as there wasn't much left of Champ Car but spare parts, anyway. But we'll see.

-- Ben Smith

Sampson gone

BLOOMINGTON -- OK, so it didn't happen at 2. Or 4. Or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8.

Not until 9 tonight did Indiana finally convene a news conference it had a week to prepare for, and the news was not much news at all: Kelvin Sampson is out as IU's basketball coach. He accepted a $750,000 buyout in exchange for his resignation and promise not to file a wrongful termination suit against Indiana.

To which I say (after a week in which I've been repeatedly hammered by the readers for daring to suggest that cheaters shouldn't prosper), thank God.

Now, then. Can we just get back to basketball again?

-- Ben Smith

More rumors

BLOOMINGTON -- Finally made it here, 22 hours or so after I left Fort Wayne, thanks to the Ice Storm From Hell. No word yet on when IU drops the hammer on Kelvin Sampson, although there are unsubstantiated rumors floating around (love those unsubstantiated rumors) that something's going to happen around 2 p.m.

So more later.

-- Ben Smith

Start your Huggies

Reason No. 1,247 why I like Sam Hornish Jr.:

The man's not afraid to get his hands dirty. And I mean that literally.

Almost as soon as he put up a solid 15th-place finish Sunday in the Daytona 500, the 2006 Indy 500 champ and NASCAR rookie was on a plane home to -- get this -- take over the midnight feeding of his and wife Crystal's infant daughter Addison, born just two weeks ago.

Presumably the feeding duties also included the inevitable diaper-changing duties, seeing how those two functions seem to just naturally follow each other with babies.

"My wife's been pretty much home alone taking care of things herself and I had to give her a little bit of a break," Hornish told the Associated Press. "It's been great as a first-time father and is something that I've been looking forward to for a very long time."

Pass the baby wipes.

-- Ben Smith

Pay the man

In a ruling which might or might not impact what happens with Kelvin Sampson at Indiana, the Ohio Supreme Court refused to hear Ohio State's appeal of fired basketball coach Jim O'Brien's wrongful termination suit. Which means the Buckeyes have to pony up $3 million to their ex-coach.

If you want to know why Indiana is taking seven days to "investigate" the latest charges against Sampson, this is why.

-- Ben Smith

Strange and stranger

BLOOMINGTON -- Well, THAT was weird.

Kelvin Sampson just left the postgame news conference here, and I have to say, in 30 years covering basketball at Indiana, it had to be one of the more bizarre postgames I've ever witnessed.

(This is saying something considering how many times it was Bob Knight up there talking. Or not talking. Or telling fishing stories after the Purdue game).

Anyway ... here Sampson is, two days before likely being ousted as coach here, and it was as if none of that existed. When he talked about what a tough stretch this has been, he wasn't referring to the last week or his own situation, but to the five-games-in-10-days stretch Indiana's just gone through. He looked eagerly ahead to the rest of the season and the Big Ten tournament. And when someone brought up the way the students chanted his name after the win over Purdue, Sampson replied, "Well, we've been pretty good in this arena."

And then he said this: "I expect to be back in here ... Tuesday, is it? Wednesday?"

So do his players.

"We don't expect our coach to leave any time," Eric Gordon said.

Ooo-kay.

-- Ben Smith