Keith Arnold of Road to Game Day is at the Fiesta Bowl and will be posting from Glendale tonight. He swears he had nothing to do with those empty beer cans.



Welcome to the Fiesta Bowl, or the bowl game better known as the Coronation of Disappointment! Two proud teams, both dealing with massive heartaches, face-off tonight to salvage something from this disappointing season. Ohio State, hoping to save face and end a streak of embarrassing BCS appearances, and Texas, hoping to find some sort of redemption from being left out of the Big 12 Championship and complete their argument for a fraction of the national title.

University of Phoenix Stadium is shiny and new. Read the rest of this entry »

10. Matt Vasgersian. Let not a single "Ten Reasons To Watch X" list go without mentioning how awful Fox's broadcasts are, but do not throw the baby of Matt Vasgersian out with this bathwater. Vasgersian can not only call a game well, but he dropped the Owen Schmitt "Beer Truck" line last year, and thus earned our eternal admiration.


9. Brian Orakpo's Mind-Bottling Strength. Texas DE Brian Orakpo is one of the most well-wrought players you will see in college football, a monster who power cleans 380 pounds and took years off the life of Phil Loadholt in the Oklahoma/Texas game earlier this year. (Hey, did you know Texas won that game? If not, a Texas fan will remind you of that this week.) Ohio State's tackles have fared miserably against fast ends, so skip watching Planet Earth on Discovery HD tonight and instead watch Orakpo chase Terrelle Pryor around for predator/prey drama.

8. Jim Tressel, Gambler. It's fun to watch Jim Tressel gamble on 4th down conversions and fakes, staples of any quality bowl game. Watching the tightypants Buckeye coach play fast and loose with things is like watching the accountant in The Untouchables pick up a shotgun and begin gunning down Al Capone's men: it's all kinds of right and wrong all at the same time.

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Award whomever you like a national title, you rebel, you. At this point, any one of four teams will do, and each provides a little something for everyone.

1. Utah. Undefeated, beat five ranked teams, won their conference, and got a convincing win over Alabama to bump them from "Thanks for playing, mid-major wonder" status into real consideration for national title contender. BYU got a national title on less; Utah is deserving of the same consideration.

2. USC. Decimated all out-of-conference opponents, won their conference, and had the best defense in the country by many, many furlongs. Had one loss, but so do the remaining two Mythical National Championship contenders.

3. Texas (provisional) This is a conditional based on tonight's Fiesta Bowl, where Texas should come out in a justified blind rage at not being chosen for both the Big 12 Championship game or for the national title, but we can all thank the Big 12's inability to properly write up the correct and just procedure for a three-way tiebreaker making any sense. They beat Oklahoma.

4. Floridoklahoma/Oklahomida The team emerging from Thursday night's BCS Title game gets a legitimate vote, as well, having charmed the cold hearts of both voters and computers into this year's nominal BCS National Title Game.

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Toward the end of last season, it started to look like Rodney Stuckey, not Amir Johnson or Jason Maxiell, would be the centerpiece of Detroit's youth movement. Then in the playoffs, Stuckey filled in admirably for Chauncey Billups, when supposedly he wasn't a point guard. The Allen Iverson trade was generally thought of as replacing Billups with AI, but in fact, it's best seen as opening the door for Stuckey to step in and prove he's Billups, Part 2. Which raises something of a problem for the Pistons.

Stuckey's been on an absolute tear lately, the kind that, if nothing else, gives us a glimpse into his enormous potential. For the full breakdown, complete with overheated enthusiasm, peep NBA Mate (consider a name change, maybe?). The gist, though, is that Stuckey's emerged as an unstoppable yet prudent scorer, quintessential team player, capable distributor, and a beast with both the stats and intangibles that make the whole league sit up and pay attention. Kind of like Devin Harris, minus the years of previous observation. All that's missing—all that's keeping him from truly, clone-like replacing Chauncey, is a long-range game that's still under construction.

But, as the aforementioned post notes, all this has come with Rip Hamilton on the shelf. Playing Stuckey, Iverson, and Hamilton in the starting line-up may work on occasion, but besides the lack of size, there's the question of exactly how they interact. It's painfully clear that Stucky not only needs minutes, but needs to be installed permanently in the starting line-up. The question, then, is what happens with All-Stars Iverson and Hamilton. Rip is a shooter; Iverson a scorer, like Stuckey. Is it possible we see AI come off the bench to energize the second unit, or (if this is possible) moved again before the deadline? It sounds far-fetched, and yet what once looked like a risk-free rental has actually turned into a real conundrum for Michael Curry.

Ever since Sidney Crosby's arrival in the NHL at the start of the 2005-06 season, the powers that be at NHL HQ in New York have decided to go all in with the Nova Scotia native when it comes to betting on the future of the league in North America. Like it or not, Crosby has been painted as an "aw shucks," Canadian golden boy, never mind the fact that persona might not have much, if anything at all, to do with the reality of who he was on the ice.

But over the past two weekends, Crosby has done more than enough to tarnish that golden boy image. First up, who can forget this clip of Crosby sucker punching Atlanta Thrashers defenseman Boris Valabik below the belt while Crosby's teammate, Brooks Orpik, held him Valabik down.

If that wasn't enough, Crosby offended the hockey gods again this weekend with this memorable mugging of Florida Panthers forward Brett McLean:


Don't get me wrong, this is the NHL and I don't mind if and when grown men decide to drop the gloves. But all you have to do is take one look at the above video and it ought to be clear that McLean -- not at all a stranger to NHL fisticuffs -- wasn't exactly ready when Crosby went after him.

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