Twenty-four Florida Gator football players have been arrested in the four years Urban Meyer has been head coach.

Too many, say the critics.

So how many is too many?  What if it had been twelve?  Still too many?  OK, how about eight?  None?

I'm guessing most college football fans would say none is unrealistic.  Two arrests a year?  Still a little high.  One a year is tight.  Let's go with six.

Wait a minute.  We're not done.

What if all six arrests were for rape?  How come your guys get six rape arrests and ours were four marijuana arrests and two for public intoxication.  Doesn't seem quite fair.

Something more sophisticated is needed.

The CPA.

No, it's not about accounting.  Well, it is kind of about accounting.  Or being held to account. 

A crime points average.

The whole moral equivalence thing is hard to get by.  So let's put some weights on the arrests.  A murder charge will get your six points, rape four, armed robbery three, residue in the ash tray and a Glock under the car seat two, and public intoxication a single point.

Maybe we do a half point for the public drunk thing.  Sometimes players travel in groups and if you had ten guys picked up outside a bar at two a.m. you've shot your CPA.  Meanwhile, State U gets a murder charge and some sinister automatic weapons action for a mere eight points.

I ask you, is that fair?

What about convictions?  I know, nobody in college football seems to have any.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I mean getting convicted as opposed to getting charged.  How about half points for the arrest, half for the charge.

How do we administer the CPA?

I'm betting there will be lawsuits.  The ACLU would get involved.  The SEC coaches would be on TV every night talking about how this impacts "the kids".

The NCAA?  They would do what they always do.  Wait by the phone for the TV networks to tell them what to do.  College presidents?  Wait a minute, it's their day to wash the coaches car.  The networks?  Not too happy.  The sponsors?  Greatly displeased.  Boosters?  Outraged.

Check please.

This is why Urban Meyer is not concerned about twenty-four arrests.  You can't get fired for twenty-four arrests.  You can get fired for twenty-four losses.  Or at Florida eight in four years.

You call them thugs, he calls them job security.

For the sake of argument let's say the Florida Gators football team descended on an innocent town on Harley Davidsons and committed a Billy Jack movie's worth of outrages on public decency. 

Where is the NCAA rule that would strip them of a national title?

What if a school went out and recruited a budding sociopath whose offenses were sealed by the juvenile courts but well known in his home town and to the coach who recruited him.  And he then got amped up and went more than a little too far, resulting in deaths and injuries.

Who would hold the coach accountable under current rules?

If you answered nothing and nobody to the last two questions you'd be correct.  Which brings me back to my original question.

How many arrests and how much trouble are too many and too much?

My suspicion is a sliding scale exists.  You can recruit any kind of character and suffer any manor of criminal offense so long as you bring home the hardware.  Go on TV, make that face like when you have indigestion, and talk about kids and redemption.

Field a roster of that makes "The Longest Yard" look like a highlight reel and go 5-7, that's a different matter.  Righteous indignation all around, looks of grave concern, firings and "strong messages sent".

Twenty-four arrests at Florida in four years.

Big deal?

Maybe not.

Status report-23:03 EST-Orlando, Florida

NBA Commissioner David Stern-On ledge at league Headquarters.

NIKE Ad Department-Lights on in Portland.  Developing new series of ads showing a signal being beamed up into the sky of Gotham City.  Wait.  Could it be?

NBA Department of Officiating-Just remembered they had a few days vacation time.  Not a good time to be around Stern.

LeBron James Personal Equipment Manager-On way to airport with cape, crown, and scepter.  Will be returned to storage facility in Clevelend.

Mike Brown-On phone with real estate agent.

Mo Williams-Unavailable for comment.

LeBron James-On laptop computer in search of US distributor for kryptonite.

Cleveland Cavaliers Front Office-On phone with North Korean missile program managers attempting to sell 21,000 red foam fingers.

Dwight Howard-Leaping over tall buildings in downtown Orlando.

Hedo Turkoglu-Explaining to reporters-"No, no.  No 'e' at end.  Turkoglu."

Stan Van Gundy-In locker room again denying rumors he is actually former adult film star Ron Jeremy.

J.J. Redick-Wondering why a win this early in the tournament is anything to be excited about.

Kobe Bryant-Has summoned jeweler to house for championship ring fitting.  Making sure he has Shaq's number on speed dial for week after next.

Charles Barkley-Starting to regret the latest TV ads already.

And sometimes you get good news....

The NFL has announced it will continue it's TV blackout policy in 2009.  No sell out 72 hours before the game equals no televised game on stations within 75 miles.

Three cheers!  With a little luck and no sign of economic recovery at hand it is possible the Carolina Panthers might not sell out their home games this season.  If enough unemployed bankers in Charlotte turn in their season tickets I might never have to see the Black and Blue again.

Happy days!

Call me a hater, but I can't stand the Panthers and have long resented having to watch all their sold out home games.  Don't like the cheesy uniforms, don't like the concrete toilet bowl of a stadium, don't like the team managment which invented the shakedown known as the PSL.  And I haven't been all that excited about Panther rosters dotted with steroid users, petty and not so petty criminals, and moody malcontents.

The NFL power structure being to hypocrisy what Hugo Chavez is to despotism, you can count on the league carrying through even if the economy gets worse and attendance drops. 

Here is the fun part.  The blackout policy is the NFL's way of punishing fans for not supporting a franchise.  But the league also mandates networks carry regional teams on the one o'clock games each Sunday to build up local support and increase attendance.

Which means year after year I'm stuck watching the Panthers and whatever NFC South swill they happen to be hosting.  Before the Panthers came along North Carolina was Washington Redskins country.  We got the NFC East with Cowboys, Giants, and Eagles.  Now it's whatever Southern Swill Division team happens to be in Charlotte on a given Sunday.

Nobody wants to see the economy tank.  But if there is any justice the Panthers will be stuck with unsold season tickets owing to the burden of paying for a PSL in addition to the annual ticket charge.  The Panthers took $29 million in public financing for their stadium and then put a good portion of the rest of the debt service on the backs of their own fans. 

The owners got an NFL franchise, which is pretty much a liscense of print money, and the fans got stuck.

We are entering into uncharted economic waters.  The stimulus package has had virtually no effect on employment or the housing market.  Ultimately, the unprecedented size of the package will rachet up inflation, crowd out private spending, and put even more people out of work.

Once the government has solved our limp by shooting off our foot, the landscape of pro sports will change.  Corporate support of luxury suites will plummet, and Joe Average will be at home watching some team other than the local because the NFL in its infinite wisdom will have blacked out increasingly empty stadiums.

Which is bad news for the fans here in North Carolina who, for reasons known only to them and competent psychiatric professionals, like the Panathers.

For the rest of us, it is a brave new world of Vikings, Bears, Giants, Eagles, and Cowboys.

Which is fine by me.

Is LeBron James the best ever?

Anytime the question is asked, one of the answers is "Come see me when he's got a ring".  Championships don't make a player great, but they make a great player more noticeable.

Fair enough.  Except.....

There are thirty teams.  Put another way, more than three times the number Bill Russell was competing against back in the early 1960's.  Russell deserves every accolade bestowed on him, but does anyone seriously believe the Celtics would have won year after year in a bigger league with deeper playoffs?

Bill Russell had a great supporting staff.  He almost had to.  Consider that of all the players in the known basketball universe in 1965, only 108 had NBA roster spots.  Today that number would be 360.  Put another way, that's 250 plus players in the league now who wouldn't have had jobs then.

This is where one becomes a lonely number.

In Russell's time you saw Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, and Elgin Baylor on the same roster.  With 30 teams you would never see that much talent on one roster.  Even if everything fell exactly in place through the draft and trades, the salary cap would prevent it.

LeBron James not only doesn't have a Wilt or Elgin as his wingmen, he doesn't even have one player of that caliber to pick up the slack.  In the cap era teams build around one scorer and seldom have a significant number two.  No knock on Mo Williams, but he would have been a third option at best on a team like the Magic Johnson Lakers.

The physical toll of the playoffs also makes comparing players from different eras difficult.  Today's best players are getting an extra month's worth of playoff action every year.  Unspoken in discussions about James is the high probability that all those extra games (not even counting coming out early for four additional years of pounding) translate into a higher risk of a major injury before he reaches thirty.

Put it all together and winning a championship isn't as easy as the critics say.  And it isn't a knock on LeBron James if it takes a few years before he gets one. 

Which puts us back where we started.  Is LeBron the best ever?

Not in my book.  Then again, I'm 52.  There are pages in my book with names on them like Julius Erving, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, David Thompson, and George Gervin.

LeBron may be, MAY be, better than Kobe. 

It's going to take ten more years and more than a single championship to say that.  But look at it this way.  You have to be a special player for anyone to even ask the question.

Ring or no ring.

Talk about biting the hand that fed you.

Babe Ruth sold a lot of copies of the New York Times in his day.  And the thanks he gets is being held up as an example in a writer's blooper reel of base running blunders.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/sports/baseball/20blunders.html?_r=1

The historical record.

In the 1926 World Series the Yankees trailed St. Louis 3-2 in game seven.  Bottom of the 9th, Ruth walks with two out.  Bob Meusel (.315 regular season average according to the Times) is up.  The Babe sees an opportunity and tries to steal second.  Bob O'Farrell throws him out.  Series over.

The Times assumes Ruth screwed up by taking the bat out of Meusel's hands.  Hindsight will do that for you.  But consider.....

Meusel was hitting .238 in the series with just two extra base hits.  Pete Alexander, the Cardinals pitcher, had blown away the Yankees in two complete game victories and was working on a hitless two inning relief job. 

So you ask yourself (as Ruth no doubt did):

What if he stays on first?  (A question the Times didn't ask).

Meusel's odds of an extra base hit against Alexander aren't good.  He was a right hander against a right hander and had just two extra base hits in the series.  That meant two hits were likely needed, one by Meusel and another by the on deck hitter Lou Gehrig.  Gehrig was a very good second year player, but not yet Lou Gehrig.

Then there is the matter of the force play at second on a ground ball to the left side of the infield.  A steal takes that off. 

Which leaves us with this.  Could the big, lumbering Babe Ruth steal second?  Looks to me from this photo of the play that he got pretty darn close.



In point of fact, Ruth already had one steal during the 26' Series and finished his career with over 100 steals and four in the World Series.  He went on his own, it's true, but that was not unusual in the 1920's.

Ruth's reputation is a victim of his image.  I have a theory people only remember three things about a person and shape everything else around these three early established facts.  Say the name Babe Ruth and you get:

Home Runs.........Physically big.........Oversized character off the field.

Sitting here in 2009 the Times writer probably looked at the bare fact of Ruth being thrown out, pullled from his memory those three facts and assumed the big galoot made a really dumb play.

I won't argue with the idea Ruth didn't spend time arguing the theories of Plato and Socrates.  His orphanage education was basic and he hardly took to it.  At a young age it was evident his maker had put Babe Ruth on this earth to play baseball.  His other activities were adjusted accordingly.

But that didn't mean Ruth was unintelligent.  Just unread.  Among his peers he had a reputation as an outfielder who threw to the right base, a runner who took the extra base and seldom was thrown out advancing, and someone who worked a count at the plate. 

Ruth wanted to be a manager when he retired but his oversized reputation and history as an uncontrollable superstar denied him the chance.  He went on to be a coach with the Brooklyn Dodgers and by all accounts was a good one.

What does it matter if the New York Times takes a shot at a larger than life figure from a long gone era?

Very little and alot.

The name Babe Ruth spreaks for itself and stands alone.  Willie Mays was probably the best ever, but he wasn't Babe Ruth.  Ruth is a bright shining light on the timeline of history.  An athlete, but also the living embodiment of an era.  Nothing written about him now will add to or take away from the legend.

But Ruth gave alot to this country.  To the poor kids who grew up thrilling to his exploits in a time when there was little else to cheer.  To the game he revolutionized.  To the franchise he made into the New York Yankees.

Gehrig was the Pride.  Ruth was the heart.

And that was one smart baseball play back in twenty-six.