When LeBron James revealed his cringeworthy “The Decision” in July, 2010 and announced that he would take his NBA talents to Miami to join Heat stars Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, the professional basketball pundits gasped at how putting three superstars on the same team would likely ruin the NBA forever.

Fast-forward to March, 2022, and we find a couple of these so-called “Super Teams” struggling to even make the NBA’s expanded playoffs.

LeBron James remains a constant in this business of putting three top players on the roster in hopes that they can carry the remainder of the team to an NBA championship.  His Miami Heat team eventually won two NBA championships (2012 and 2013).  James returned to Cleveland in 2014 and orchestrated the formation of a younger “Super” team with former Duke guard Kyrie Irving and forward Kevin Love.  The 2016 Cavaliers team won an NBA ring, too.

In his third act of attempting to create yet another so-called “Super Team” around him, LeBron James moved west to join the Los Angeles Lakers beginning in 2017.  He was able to convince Lakers’ management to make a trade to obtain New Orleans Pelicans big man Anthony Davis on board for the 2019-2020 season.  Along with young forward Kyle Kuzma, the Lakers won the infamous 2020 “NBA Bubble” world championship trophy as the entire playoffs were played at Orlando’s Walt Disney World complex due to concerns about COVID-19.

Though this type of team rebuilding may have worked well for at least one person (LeBron James), the rest of the NBA teams simply haven’t been as successful in trying the same model.

The Oklahoma City Thunder came close to winning the NBA title in 2012 with the combination of young stars Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden.  That team would lose to (of course) LeBron James’ Miami Heat trio of stars.  The Thunder’s Terrific (but increasingly expensive) Trio evaporated as James Harden was traded to Houston in 2013 and Kevin Durant left for Golden State in 2016.

Speaking of Golden State, the Warriors’ addition of Kevin Durant gave the team three highly paid stars as he joined guards Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.  The Warriors won the NBA title in 2017 and 2018 as this trio (along with playmaking big man Draymond Green) dominated the league.  Injuries to all three players in the ensuing years kept the Warriors from extending their championship winning streak.

Other NBA teams have also tried a variation of creating these so-called “Super Teams”, too.

After acquiring James Harden from Oklahoma City, the Houston Rockets spent a lot of money on expensive free agents to partner with Harden in an effort to win Houston’s first NBA title since 1995.   Center Dwight Howard (2013-2016), point guard Chris Paul (2017-2019), and former OKC teammate Russell Westbrook (2019-2020) were among the expensive acquisitions made by the Houston Rockets in order to assemble a championship roster.  Though the Rockets came close on a few occasions, they never made it into the NBA Finals while James Harden was playing ball in H-town.

On the East Coast, the Brooklyn Nets have been trying to create their own so-called “Super Team” beginning in 2019 by acquiring guard Kyrie Irving from the Boston Celtics and signing the injured Kevin Durant away from Golden State.  Durant would sit out the entire 2019 season due to injury issues prior to returning to the court in 2020 with the Nets.

Before to the start of the 2020 NBA season, James Harden loudly announced to the Houston Rockets that he wanted to be traded and, preferably, to the Brooklyn Nets.  Harden’s last few months in Houston were simply abysmal.  He put forth a half-hearted effort on the court and was eventually benched.

In January, 2021, the Rockets granted Harden his wish as he was traded to Brooklyn.   At long last, the Nets finally secured their trio of stars to chase the team’s first championship sin...

They booed him recently during his final visit to the University of North Carolina, but the University of Virginia courteously honored him before the tip-off on his final visit to Charlottesville.  And now, all of his ACC conference road games are finally over.

Though some basketball fans may dislike Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, no one denies that he has enjoyed a long and successful basketball coaching career.

After 42 seasons as the Duke Blue Devil’s men’s basketball coach, Coach K’s final regular season home game at famed Cameron Indoor Stadium will be played Saturday (5PM Central) on ESPN against arch-rival North Carolina.  Make sure and tune in early for the pre-game festivities as about 80 of Coach K’s former Duke players will be on hand to salute the school’s iconic basketball coach prior to the opening tip-off.

As has been the case so many times during his years as head coach at Duke, hundreds of students are camping out in “Krzyzewskiville” outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium trying to get the best seats for Saturday evening’s game with Carolina.

The Duke student section (known for their creative chants and unique ability to get under the skin of opposing players and coaches) can be just as entertaining as the basketball game itself.

With tickets for the final home game being scalped for more than $4,000, it will be interesting to see how the generally stoic 75-year old Mike Krzyzewski handles all of the farewell emotions while trying to keep his Duke team (now 26-4 and winners of 12 of their last 13 games) focused on beating UNC Saturday night.

Coach K sits atop the NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball world with a record of 1,196 wins (and counting) during his illustrious coaching career (the first five years at Army and the final 42 years at Duke).  He also coached the USA Olympic basketball team to gold medals in 2008, 2012, and 2016, too.  His unique ability to get talented individuals to play within his “team” concept in order to win games has kept him at the top of his profession.

Mike Krzyzewski projects a fierce intensity on the basketball court.  He works the officials just as hard as he gets onto his own players, too.  Fans of opposing schools (such as North Carolina) think that Coach K gets far too many breaks from the referees as he stalks the sidelines and lobbies them for a break.  In what is a reflection of their coach’s laser-focused attitude, Duke basketball games are generally two hours of quite intense competition.

Coach K’s basketball teams have responded quite well.  With 12 NCAA Final Four appearances and five national championships to his credit in 42 seasons at Duke, he will be remembered as one of college basketball’s most successful coaches.

To this day, Mike Krzyzewski remains thankful for this chance which former Duke Athletics Director Tom Butters gave him back in 1980 to become the school’s basketball coach in the tough Atlantic Coast Conference.

During his first three seasons at the private university in Durham, North Carolina (which was founded back in 1838), the future basketball legend’s first years as Duke’s basketball coach were less than spectacular.  The team won just 38 games versus 47 losses.  After year #3, Duke basketball fans started calling for the athletics director to fire the young head coach.

Fortunately, Duke’s AD remained in his corner.  Since then, Duke’s men’s basketball team has won 20 or more games in 36 of the next 39 years and has remained one of America’s top college basketball programs for more than four decades.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski remarked earlier this week, “If I was in this day and age,

In the end, the shadow of one of college football’s greatest coaches was simply too large for Grambling’s newest (and now former) offensive coordinator, Art Briles.

Briles, the 66-year old former head coach at Baylor University, was seeking a second chance to coach in college football beginning this year.  He was forced out of the Waco, Texas school after the 2015 football season after a highly-publicized series of scandals which occurred on his watch.

Though coach Art Briles was (years later) cleared of any personal wrongdoing in the sexual misconduct involving several of his football players at Baylor, his lack of accountability for failure to report any misconduct occurring during that period ultimately resulted in a four-year probation for the Baylor football program.

Art Briles has been attempting to resurrect his college football coaching career after spending a few years out of coaching altogether.  He eventually traveled to Italy in 2018 to coach an Italian Football League team.  He then returned to the US to become the head football coach at Mt. Vernon High School in northeastern Texas for two seasons in 2019 and 2020.  His teams went 20-6 in his two seasons as head football coach.

Late last week, Grambling State University announced that they were hiring Art Briles to become the Tigers’ new offensive coordinator.

Four days later on Monday, Art Briles resigned from his new job at Grambling amidst a media-inflamed and alumni-driven firestorm.

“Unfortunately, I feel that my continued presence will be a distraction to you and your team, which is the last thing that I want. I have the utmost respect (for) the university, and your players.”

The legendary Grambling State University head football coach Eddie Robinson built the school’s football program into a national powerhouse and well-known name.  The Louisiana native and Hall of Fame coach headed the Grambling football program for an incredible 56 years beginning in the 1940’s and through his eventual retirement in 1997.   Grambling’s current football stadium (built in 1987) bears the coach’s name.

During Coach Robinson’s years at Grambling, his teams won 408 games and lost just 165.  The team had just one losing season in thirty years between 1960 through 1990.  By the middle 1990’s, though, Grambling suffered three consecutive losing years.

Coach Robinson finally retired in 1997, and the beloved coach passed away in 2007 at age 88.

Grambling has employed five head football coaches since Coach Robinson’s exit 23 years ago.   The most recent head coach, Broderick Fobbs, had the longest tenure (eight years) prior to being dismissed last year following a 3-7 record in 2021.

Grambling is a relatively small state university in north Louisiana whose proud history has been energized by a competitive football program.

During the decades of success which Coach Eddie Robinson’s football teams enjoyed, Grambling became internationally famous.  The Tigers have traveled across the country over the years to showcase their football team and, of course, the incredible Grambling State University Marching Band.

Winning and tradition are both quite important to the school, its proud alumni, and the small community which bears the same name of the school in north Louisiana.  Since the end of the Coach Eddie Robinson era, Grambling has struggled to maintain its once-dominant football program.  The increased competition for top high school football players has ma...

Next week, long-time Duke University men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski will coach his final regular season home game for the Blue Devils as they face arch-rival North Carolina.  He is retiring after this season after 41 years with Duke.

If you’d like to purchase a ticket to Cameron Indoor Stadium to watch that final home game, one source indicates that one ticket will cost you over $3,000!

The 75-year old basketball legend has his team ranked in the top ten yet again this season (currently at #7 with 24-4 record) as the Blue Devils have won eleven of their past twelve games.   Coach K continues to add more wins to his NCAA men’s basketball record total of 1,121 wins and counting.

He received his start as a head coach at his alma mater, Army.  After completing his required service time upon graduation, a 28-year old Mike Krzyzewski returned to coach the West Point Cadets for five seasons as the team posted 73 wins and just 59 losses in what is considered one of the toughest coaching assignments in America.

Coach K was offered the head basketball coaching job at Duke University in college basketball’s tough Atlantic Coast Conference in 1980.  Before the new coach’s arrival in Durham, the Blue Devils had appeared in just three NCAA tournaments over the previous 14 seasons.

Under Mike Krzyzewski’s direction, Duke University has been a constant in the NCAA’s “March Madness” college basketball tournament with an incredible 35 appearances and five national championships in his 41 years at Duke.

Coach K may be the best known college basketball coach of our time, but there are others who have done a great job of turning around college basketball programs, too.

Had anyone heard of the Gonzaga men’s basketball program before coach Mark Few arrived on the scene in 1999?   Since 1963, the Zags from Spokane, Washington had participated in the “Big Dance” just twice in 36 seasons!

Now in his 23rd year as the head coach at Gonzaga, the 59-year old coach has put his team into the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament in every season since arriving at Gonzaga.

The only thing which has escaped Mark Few’s Gonzaga team has been their first national championship.  Though the coach’s career winning percentage is ranked #1 in NCAA history at nearly 84%, his Gonzaga team has twice finished runner-up in the NCAA tournament.  This year’s team is now 23-2 and ranked #1 in the country with just two regular season games remaining.

Perhaps this will finally be the year where the Zags and Coach Mark Few will cut down the nets.

Down in the SEC, Auburn University men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl has literally turned around the school’s basketball program since his arrival on campus eight years ago.  This year’s team was briefly ranked #1 in the nation for the first time in Auburn’s school history.  The Tigers are currently ranked #3 with a sterling 24-3 record and is expected to contend for the national championship next month.

Prior to his arrival at Auburn in 2014, Bruce Pearl enjoyed six years of success at the University of Tennessee.  His teams won 70% of their games and made the NCAA “March Madness” tournament in each of his six years at Tennessee.

Unfortunately, the head basketball coach was caught in a lie to the NCAA about whether a basketball recruit and his family had attended a cookout at Pearl’s home.   The coach was eventually fired by Tennessee for other reasons, and the NCAA infraction related to his recruiting kept him out of college coaching for three years from 2011 until 2014.

When he was given a new chance to coach at Auburn, Bruce Pearl said,

If you’re over the age of 50, you probably remember the original United States Football League (USFL) of the 1980’s.  The spring/summer football league was yet another of many failed attempts to keep America’s football loving fans satisfied outside of traditional fall college football and NFL seasons.

We’ve said, “Rest in Peace” to the World Football League (1974-1975), USFL (1983-1986), XFL (2001), Arena Football League (1987-2008), Alliance of American Football (2019), and XFL-II (2020).  Former wrestler-turned-Hollywood star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is trying to resurrect the XFL yet again beginning in 2023.  He paid a reported $15 million to take the bankrupt league off the hands of his former WWE boss, Vince McMahon, and wants to try for yet a third XFL launch in 2023.

But right now, in 2022, a reborn version of the USFL will begin to draft football players today,  and the first spring football game will be played on April 16.

America is going to get another chance to see if spring professional football can survive.   Though the odds would be in your favor it you pronounced this latest iteration doomed from the start, this is far from a traditional new football league.

I was surprised to learn that the new USFL is owned by Fox Sports.  That certainly takes care of having a television network to show your football games!   Since the network has been handling NFL football for a long time, they should do a solid job with affiliates around the country to carry the games.

According to one report, Fox Sports has acquired all copyrights to the USFL brand along with branding of the league’s former teams.  If these USFL teams sound familiar to you, it’s because they are!

Here are the eight teams which will get things underway in 2022’s version of the USFL:

USFL – North

Michigan Panthers – Head Coach – Jeff Fisher

New Jersey Generals – Head Coach – Mike Riley

Philadelphia Stars – Head Coach – Bart Andrus

Pittsburgh Maulers – Head Coach – Kirby Wilson

USFL – South

Birmingham Stallions – Head Coach – Skip Holtz

Houston Gamblers – Head Coach – Kevin Sumlin

New Orleans Breakers – Head Coach – Larry Fedora

Tampa Bay Bandits – Head Coach – Todd Haley

These head coaches all have recent college or professional football experience.

However, don’t go looking to buy football tickets for home games in seven of these eight cities just yet.

You will need buy a ticket in Birmingham, Alabama if you want to watch your favorite USFL team play one of its ten regular season football games this spring.

That’s right!

Every single regular season USFL game (40 in all) this year will be played at a brand new $200 million football facility in Birmingham which will become home for college football’s UAB Blazers.  A few other USFL games are to be played at the cavernous legendary Legion Field in Birmingham.

The league will televise all four games (eight teams) every week via both Fox Sports and NBC.

Due to a scheduling conflict with a World soccer competition, the USFL playoffs will be held in Canton, Ohio this June at the recently-renovated Tom Benson Hall-of-Fame Stadium.

Let’s stop for a moment to examine this unique idea of playing all of the games in the same location.

Though it feels a bit insulting to be living in Houston and seeing your new USFL Houston Gamblers squad competing in Birmingham every weekend, there are some valid reasons why this is being done – at least during the first season.

If you were ever going to run a league “on the cheap”, the arrangement which Fox Sports has worked with the city of Birmingham, Alabama sounds like a win/win idea in 2022.  With the ability to negotiate a positive financial arrangement with

Within the next week, the Sunbelt Conference has a very difficult decision to make.  The conference is expected to publish its 2022 football schedule soon which might draw a legal response from a wounded competitor in Conference USA.

The Sunbelt Conference has recently added three prestigious universities away from Conference USA by no later than July 1, 2023.  The new teams will help to build-out the conference to 14 football playing members.  By doing so, the Sunbelt has smartly devised a more fan-friendly geographic configuration along with a superior television package than Conference USA has to offer.

Conference USA will lose three member schools (Marshall University, Southern Mississippi, and Old Dominion) to the expanding Sunbelt Conference.  In addition, six other C-USA members (UAB, Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice, and UTSA) have announced their intentions to vamoose and join the American Athletic Conference (AAC) at some point soon, too.

With 14 member schools right now, the current C-USA roster will dwindle to just five holdovers in Louisiana Tech, UTEP, Middle Tennessee, Florida International, and Western Kentucky.

To say that Conference USA isn’t happy right now would be a gross understatement.

Let’s now examine how this happened.

For decades, the so-called Power 5 Conferences (SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, and Pac-12) have dominated the television media.  Though some universities (such as the University of Houston and Memphis, for example) have tried for years to gain admittance into one of those leagues, they were blocked and forced to form their own mid-level alliances and conferences.

Conference USA’s football members have been around since 1996.  The Sunbelt Conference started adding football for member schools beginning in 2001, while the current version of the American Athletic Conference (AAC) began football operations in 2013.

The initial idea for Conference USA was to group colleges located in larger metropolitan areas (New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, and Miami, for example) in an effort to secure a financially attractive cable television package.

Alas, these same cities within the conference were rather far flung geographically.  This made for higher than expected travel costs for the athletics programs and limited opportunities for fans to travel to some of the more distant conference destinations.

Meanwhile, the earlier years of the Sunbelt Conference saw the league take-on members which were outside of their primary geographic southern footprint.  Former conference members included the University of Idaho, Utah State, and New Mexico State.  In recent years, though, the Sunbelt’s membership has realigned with most schools located along or near the I-10 and I-20 southern corridors.   Differently from C-USA, most of the Sunbelt Conference teams are located in cities which are outside of the Top 50 US television markets.

With regard to the recent developments seeing the exit of three Conference USA teams into an expanded Sunbelt Conference, the two “T” words – television and travel – became the primary reason why these schools have chosen to make the move.

In early November, 2021, Marshall University held a gathering to announce moving from Conference USA to the Sunbelt Conference effective no later than June 30, 2023.  During this half-hour live-streamed event, Marshall University’s academic and athletics departments were quite excited about making the move to the Sunbelt Conference.

After watching the entire press conference, a few things really stood out.

It was hinted that the new Sunbelt Conference will be dividing into an Eastern and Western alignment as part of the expansion to 14 teams.  With Marshall being one of the northern-most schools, the Thundering Herd athletics department will s...

If you’ve been following my recent posts, you weren’t surprised that the winning team in Sunday’s NFL season finale football game won by only three points.

In the final seven football games of the NFL season, six were won by three points and Kansas City won by six points on an overtime touchdown scored against Buffalo.  I would think that this series of “fantastic finishes” was some sort of NFL record.

The statistical improbability of having seven consecutive razor-close finishes makes me and a few of my friends raise an eyebrow as to whether this flurry of extremely close games may have resulted from some strong suggestions coming from the league’s top brass.

Coincidence or not, mark it down.  You will never see another series of NFL playoff games with any closer outcomes than this season provided.  You just witnessed history.

The Los Angeles Rams 23-20 win over Cincinnati on Sunday night allowed the Rams (who were located in St. Louis in 1999 when they won their other Super Bowl trophy) to grab their first Super win after returning to Los Angeles.  Interestingly, the first of the Rams Super Bowl wins occurred before Tom Brady first played in the NFL and the second happened a few weeks after Tom Terrific announced his retired from the league after the Rams beat Tampa Bay.

Yes, America.  These are your “Brady Bookend” Rams!

I had several thoughts about Sunday’s big game.  In fact, there are ten which follow, so “On with the countdown!”

 

* Happiest for Andrew Whitworth! The 40-year old Whitworth (who is old enough to have played for Nick Saban – when he was coaching LSU to the 2003 national championship – is a 6’7” athletic marvel of an offensive tackle.  After spending the majority of his pro career languishing in Cincinnati when the team struggled to even reach .500 in most seasons, the big man still protects his quarterback well.  Note to fellow LSU alum Joe Burrow – see if “Whit” might be willing to come block for you in Cincy next season!

 

* Happy for Rams’ QB Mathew Stafford. Like his big blocking tackle Whitworth, Stafford languished at the bottom of the NFC Central with several lousy Lion teams in Detroit during the first dozen years of his NFL career.  In twelve years, Mathew Stafford’s Lions played in just three playoff games (losing each time).  This season, Stafford went 4-0 in his first season in Los Angeles and captured his first NFL championship.  Dreams do come true!

 

* Happy for Rams’ WR Van Jefferson. Though Jefferson’s wife attempted to watch the game, she went into labor during the middle of Sunday’s Super Bowl.  Just hours later, she gave birth to a baby boy to go along with the couple’s five-year old daughter.  What a Super day it was for the Jefferson family!

 

* Happy for Rams’ WR Odell Beckham. The talented but controversial wide receiver from LSU didn’t win a national championship with the Tigers like his Rams’ teammate Andrew Whitworth did in 2003 or Cincinnati’s LSU dynamic duo of Joe Burrow and J’marr Chase in LSU’s unbeaten 2019 season.  However, Beckham now has an NFL championship ring!  After grabbing the opening touchdown scored by the Rams, OBJ injured his knee during the second quarter Sunday and will have surgery later this week to repair his ACL.  Beckham’s addition to the Rams during mid-season (from Cleveland) was probably the most important acquisition during the team’s late-season championship run.

 

* Happy for Ram’s Super Bowl MVP Cooper Kupp. For a guy who didn’t have a single college scholarship offer after playing his final high school football game, Kupp has been proving everyone wrong ever since.

It finally happened.  It dawned on me this weekend that the entire advertising world has finally flushed my generation away and doesn’t care what I happen to think anymore!

I can’t help it that I was born smack-dab in the middle of the deservedly-despised Baby Boom generation.   Being born into the age group which is responsible for many of today’s financial and social troubles rankles the younger generations who will bear the cost of our gluttonous excesses.

I get it, but please don’t blame all of us!

Yes, my age bracket is officially over the hill, and some of us are getting just as cranky as Clint Eastwood’s character in the movie Gran Torino.  Once the average age for your demographic starts with the number six or higher, you may not be a real ghost yet, but your demo surely is to the national advertising gurus.

Though I personally disagree with the logic of major ad executives, many of us oldsters are, indeed, less likely to go out and buy new homes, cars, furniture, appliances, tools, along with fast food and snack foods which we were once able to gleefully consume without having to visit our GI specialist.

To actually find our target advertising market, turn on the TV and watch two different shows.

First, turn on MeTV any weeknight and watch a classic half-hour comedy show.   You’ll find ads targeting seniors about Medicare (incessantly), the latest drugs which may cure your lumbago and other common maladies, and those discount cellphone companies which feature cell phones with gigantic numbers on the phone.

For the different segment of my advanced age bracket, watch a televised PGA golf event next week.  You’ll see ads targeting wealthy oldsters featuring luxury cars, investment firms to help you manage your massive portfolio, and even more new drugs which try to resolve the myriad of other medical problems associated with being wealthy during your advancing age.

Yes, I’m in the ghost generation now, and it’s a crying shame.

Prior to the football game kick-off on Super Bowl Sunday, I watched the PGA golf event from Phoenix.  Though I enjoy the now-famous 16th hole at the TPC in Scottsdale, this year’s golf tournament finally may have crossed my old age line.

The Par-3 16th hole has become quite popular over the years as grandstands surround the entire hole.  They are annually filled to capacity with beer-swilling fans loudly cheering the good shots and jeering the bad ones.  The usually stoic PGA professionals generally go along with the gag and try to quickly get finished so that they can move ahead to the next hole.

This year, the 16th hole went from a fun golf hole with a loud obnoxious crowd to “We might need to rethink this idea!”

On Saturday and again on Sunday, a golfer scored a rare hole-in-one on the 16th hole in Phoenix.  As you might expect, the cheers were thunderous.  As no one expected, though, the gleeful assemblage of 40,000 alcohol consuming golf fans decided to throw their cups of liquid courage onto the golf course in celebration of the golfer’s hole-in-one!

Fortunately, the sponsor of the event was a waste management company.  They were able to clean-up the mess within five or ten minutes so the golfers could finish the hole and get away from all of the madness.

I guess this should have been expected when you’re hoping that the adults will behave all afternoon as they consume more and more alcohol in the Arizona sunshine.

Though the golf tournament concluded late with a playoff (won by Scottie Scheffler for his first PGA win), I turned over to watch the Big Football Game on NBC right at kick-off time.

Though I definitely was pulling for underdog Cincinnati and former LSU quarterback, Joe Burrow, I also knew that the Los Angeles Rams featured 40-year old LSU offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth.  No matter which team won, Louisiana was going to be proud.

With this being the week of the Super Bowl, I really wasn’t thinking very much about college football.

I do not pay much attention to college football’s annual recruiting stats.  Everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line already knows that Alabama head football coach Nick Saban will come ashore every year with a boat full of big fish.  Alas, even Coach Saban doesn’t really knows how these highly touted so-called 5-star high school football players will perform once they enter a college football program.

Auburn University is that “other” state university in the state of Alabama.

Located about 30 miles west of the Georgia state line on I-85, the city of Auburn also features a lovely historic downtown district.  The city’s population has exploded from 33,000 in 1990 to over 76,000 in 2020.  The city of Auburn must be doing something right.

While the athletic supporters of Auburn University should be beaming with pride for the recent #1 ranking for the men’s basketball team (first time in school history), Auburn has been making the news for another reason this week.

Auburn’s football coach Bryan Harsin was hired one year ago after posting several 10-win seasons as the head coach for Boise State.  He replaced long-time (by Auburn standards) coach Gus Malzahn who was fired after seven years on the job after posting a 66% winning record for the Tigers.

Prior to Malzahn, Auburn’s list of fired football coaches included Gene Chizik (3 years but included a national championship in 2010), Tommy Tuberville (9 years and now a member of the United States Senate), Terry Bowden (5 years), and Pat Dye (11 years).

Upon further review, I learned that each of those former Auburn football coaches had won the Associated Press SEC Coach of the Year honors at some point while at the school.

At least the new football coach, Bryan Harsin, doesn’t have that stigma just yet.

So, what IS the problem with Auburn Coach Bryan Harsin?

Once the 2021 season ended, all I remembered about Auburn’s football program was that they had posted a 6-6 in the regular season and took arch-rival Alabama into double overtime before losing 24-22.  The team’s bowl loss to a solid University of Houston team in the Birmingham Bowl seems to have irked the Auburn faithful, too.

They will gladly recite that the Tigers lost their last five football games of the season.  When I looked at those losses, they came by 17 (at Texas A&M), 9 (at Mississippi State), 4 (at South Carolina), 2 (double-overtime home loss to Alabama) and 5 (vs. Univ. of Houston in the bowl game).  That equates to an average of 7.4 points per game in those five losses.  The team had a disappointing finish, but nobody seriously expected Auburn to be a national contender this season, did they?

Auburn had just fired their long-term coach Gus “We can’t wait to get rid of” Malzahn.  That normally means the new coach (Harsin) should be given a few years to build his coaching staff and find recruits best suited to his style of football before passing final judgment.

Apparently not at “Anxious Auburn”.

After the 2021 football season ended, the Auburn football faithful has felt uneasy following some recent drama within the program.  These jittery fans now believe that next season’s Auburn football season is all but lost.  Some think their football team will be lucky to defeat one of the three “payday” teams on the team’s 2022 home schedule (Mercer, San Jose State, and Western Kentucky).  Heaven forbid, the SEC schedule could spell doom for their team.

Maybe or maybe not.  We won’t know until the games are played this fall.

A 6-6 regular season football record may be disappointing to many Auburn football fans, but the record itself doesn’t warrant all the whining which occurred the past week.

My favorite Broadway musical has always been “The Music Man”.

The show (set in the year 1912) features the lead character, Professor Harold Hill.  This somewhat shady-but-interesting musical instrument salesman creates his own demand for his band instruments by getting the townspeople to believe that their youth are being corrupted by a local billiards parlor.  Though Professor Hill is a super salesman, he doesn’t know a thing about teaching the kids how to play music.

His goal?  Just keep finding new people to make sales and then move along to the next town.

What does this have to do with today’s topic?  Plenty.

Many local radio stations (mostly on the AM band) around the country have been converting from a traditional sports talk format into sports talk featuring a big emphasis on sports betting.  Though most of us understand that “Cincinnati is a 4-point underdog in this week’s Super Bowl”, I was a little confused to hear, “Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp is +600 to win the Super Bowl MVP”.

So, what does +600 mean?  I’ll explain later.

Way back in the early 1980’s (before children), I worked as a talk show host on weekend mornings at New Orleans radio station WSMB (1350 AM).

WSMB is a 5,000 watt AM signal which covers New Orleans and areas to the east along the Gulf Coast to Biloxi, Mississippi.  The station was eventually sold in the 1990’s to the same company (Entercom) which owns New Orleans’ clear channel 50,000 powerhouse signal WWL-870AM.

WSMB’s name was changed to WWWL-AM.  The format has morphed from Sports-Food-and Fun to All Sports-ESPN Network to R&B Blues.  As radio’s consolidation trend continues, “The Thrifty 1350” (as we jokingly referred to it back then) struggled to make a dent in the local radio ratings book ever since the 1980’s.

Last night, I learned that the radio station was now featuring a new sports-talk sports betting format.  The radio station became known as “The Bet New Orleans” last summer.

In many metropolitan areas around the United States, a quiet trend has been occurring with traditional sports talk radio stations.  Entercom (now rebranded as “Audacy”) started to convert several of its traditional sports talk stations into a new sports betting-oriented format beginning in 2021.

Jeff Sottolano, EVP for Audacy’s radio group said, “When we launched the ‘BetQL Network’ in January, 2021, we committed to giving our national audience a home for compelling sports betting content as this new landscape was rapidly growing.”

Seemingly overnight, the sports betting business has morphed from a taboo subject just a few decades ago to almost mainstream today.

What is driving this dramatic change?  Money, of course!

In May, 2018, the United States Supreme Court ruled that each of America’s fifty states could decide for themselves whether to allow legal sports gambling (which had been limited to Nevada before that decision came down).  Many states already offered casino gambling (especially in Louisiana), so the familiarity of professional and college sports teams was seen as a lucrative new revenue stream which cash-starved state governments could grab a piece of, too.

Since the 2018 landmark ruling,  Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia have all entered the sports betting business and have taken at least $1 billion in sports bets.  Louisiana just joined the sports betting parade a few weeks ago in late January, 2022.