Today’s Calls: Mark Cuban vs. the SEC, Phil Dawson vs. Rian Lindell, Joey Porter vs. the Pats, Albert Pujols vs. the A.L. MVP, Stephen Curry vs. Blake Griffin, Tracy McGrady vs. Mindy McCready and More.

The Opening Pitch: The first rule of scandal management is to make the scandal goes away as quickly and quietly as possible.

Mark Cuban is pursuing neither.

It was predictable that sports’ biggest Maverick would push back at the Feds over this insider-trading lawsuit. But Mike Florio makes a good point that this probably isn’t the best strategy, because it sets up an “either-they’re-lying-or-I-am” dynamic that rarely works for the target of the G-men.

Compare that to the way the NFL is reacting to (yet) another baffling officiating mistake, from the Steelers-Chargers game. The league reacted quickly, not only committing to reviewing the replay policy in the offseason, but potentially implementing changes before this year’s playoffs.

Battling the government isn’t quite like battling gamblers who faced a $64 million swing (or irate fantasy GMs who really needed that TD from the Pitt D), but the rules of engagement are the same:

Admit error. Fix quickly. Move on.

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Barack Obama, the United States' President-elect, favors a college football playoff. This means nothing, since ultimately the President has little to do with how the BCS works, and because he went to a combination of Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard University. Collectively, the three schools have as much to do with the BCS as Beano Cook has to do with renegotiating WTO trade agreements. This is to say that he has nothing to do with it, and nothing will change because of him. (Now, if we'd elected Beano president, now we're talking about change we could believe in here. He'd also appoint Ron Pawlus as Secretary of State. No one's perfect.)

Barack will ask, negotiate, and cajole. However, other world leaders have distinctly different tacks on this BCS matter.

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France. "I weel prezehnt you with mah beautifool wife Car-lah Bru-knee, who weel have you eating ze foie gras from her hahnd before you announce ze first playoffs, commencing immediately. Seriously, zees whole thing iz an excuse to show you mah hot wahfe, who is compleetely smo-keeng in evree sense of ze word."

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The biggest threat facing President-elect Obama isn’t going to be the economic crisis, or the war(s), or even the NCAA playoff system. No, it will be the internet, which is ruining the technology-free world we once knew. From a review of ESPN’s new webshow “Mayne Street,” the Daily Herald’s Ted Cox takes a moment to let the World Wide Web know it needs to get off his lawn:

In fact, it's just more proof of how the Internet is ruining the world, including the sports world, which many believed couldn't get any worse. ...

"Tell 10,000 co-workers to click on it so they order a second season," [Kenny Mayne] wrote in the chat.

And clicks, my friends, are what it's all about in the current media environment. Page views - from different computers, not the same one over and over - are where it's at. So blogs make reference to one another and exchange links to get the click-go-round going. Altogether, it produces a narcissistic, self-referential attitude.

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Hallelujah, it's raining Mavs, or at least sketchy stories about the franchise. Recap: First, we had Mark Cuban expressing an interest in Stephon Marbury, while talking up his franchise's built-in babysitting infrastructure. Then, Cuban's getting tagged for inside trading.

Now, amidst all this drama, another weird development in Mavs-land. Jerry Stackhouse is in street clothes, and healthy, and no one quite understanding why. From The Dallas Morning News:

Despite appearances, the Mavericks insist there is no controversy with the veteran swingman. Sunday's game against New York was simply a bad matchup for Stackhouse to get minutes. So he was put on the inactive list. ...

Said coach Rick Carlisle: "He was just inactive. I talked to him about it. I'm going to talk to him [today] and see about the next game. He's fine. It was matchups and some other stuff. But it's not a big deal.

The article references the need for youngsters like James Singleton and Brandon Bass to get minutes. But inactive? Is this another case of the D'Antoni doctrine, the one that says it's better to declare big name vets inactive rather than trot them out for six minutes of garbage time? If so, there's a big difference between applying it to a human landmine like Marbury, and Stackhouse, a valuable, tough, clutch scorer who has been a key player on the Mavs these last four seasons.

Dallas won, and Singleton and Bass played well. And be very clear on this, Carlisle, not Cuban decided this. Still, it's yet another weird bit of news coming out of Dallas. At what point do we break out the Quarantine gift baskets?

Back over the summer, when the new owners of the Tampa Bay Lightning -- Oren Koules and Len Barrie -- hired Barry Melrose to replace John Tortorella, there were more than a few snickers around the league.

After all, it had been more than 13 years since Melrose was behind the bench in Los Angeles with the Kings, and while his tenure there included a run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1993, it's impossible not to notice that in a little less than three seasons behind the bench, Melrose was 22 games under .500.

But what had to be even more disconcerting were the things that Melrose, who had been behind a microphone at ESPN since leaving the Kings, still didn't understand about the game. Always more of a master motivator than a master of Xs and Os, Melrose was ill-suited to the challenge in Tampa Bay -- that of molding into a cohesive unit a team of disparate parts that weren't familiar with one another.

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