Scarcely a day goes by lately without hearing about more layoffs, buyouts and other dire financial developments in the newspaper industry. The business is getting chewed up by the Internet and other competitors for advertising dollars, and it's only a matter of time before some of the lesser publications become at risk of folding.

But I have a short-term solution to some of their problems on the expense side of the ledger: Quit publishing sports sections, which will save a ton in salary and newsprint.

Unfathomable, you say? Well, think again.

I've been looking closely at sports sections for the last week and all they seem to do is is re-run old stories. To wit:

 

The managers in baseball's All-Star Game more or less ran out of pitchers.

The Washington Redskins acquired a player who has one year (or less) of tread left on his tires.

Michelle Wie failed to complete the full 72 holes o####olf tournament.

Danica Patrick got into a confrontation with another driver on a weekend on which she did not win.

The last five MLS games of the week ended in ties, two of them of the scoreless variety.

Chris Evert looked graceful and lovely on grass.

And, Greg Norman attempted to play the final round o####olf major with both hands around his throat.

See, nothing new ever happens in sports.

Gosh dang-it. I mutilated this entry today while fooling around with some coding for building tables.

I'll try to resurrect it ASAP.

Catching up with the best of the worst from the past week in sports:

(10) Ty Lawson: The North Carolina basketball star has declared for the draft but hasn’t ruled out a return to college next fall. Even if he elects to stay with the Tar Heels, Lawson is already making sports’ all-too-frequent transition from boxscores to the police blotter. The sophomore point guard was charged Friday with driving after consuming alcohol after being pulled over during the early-morning hours. He was also charged with violating the Chapel Hill noise ordinance and driving with a suspended or revoked license.

(9) MLB managers: Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen returns to The Bottom 10 after nearly a month away, efficiently dissing his boss and throwing his hitting coach under the bus in the same outburst. It was more than enough to fend off Seattle Mariners manager John McLaren’s rather uninspiring in a 45-second tirade that had to be bleeped 13 times. McLaren fell short of Bottom 10 honors by failing to name the players responsible for Seattle’s miserable season. On the other hand, give GM Bill Bavasi point for creativity. He removed the postgame buffet from the Mariners clubhouse and hid all the towels in the locker room, forcing players to wait around and talk to the media after another miserable performance.

(8) Continental Indoor Football League: The loop lost its best team on the eve of the playoffs when the Rochester Raiders (12-0) dropped out in response to the latest minor-league sports farce. The aptly named Flint Phantoms were nowhere to be seen on Sunday, resulting in a forfeit to Rochester in the regular-season finale. When the Raiders inquired to the CIFL about seizing the Phantoms’ $10,000 performance bond in order to pay their arena rent and make good to season ticket holders and sponsors (a $25,000 hit all together), they were told that Flint didn’t post one. In fact, it turned out Rochester was the only member of the 14-team league that had put up the money. Media reports said the Raiders asked for their money to be returned and were rebuffed by the CIFL, so the ownership withdrew from the league barely six hours after Flint’s no-show.

(7) Mike Milbury: Tiger Woods was joking (but just barely) when he said , “I don’t think anybody really watches hockey anymore.” Milbury, an NBC commentator, wasn’t amused and referred to the world’s No. 1 golfer as “Tiger Wuss.” Milbury was mocking Woods for taking two months to return from arthroscopic knee surgery, and he finished the thought off with this fine contribution : “Keep your yap shut, Tiger, or I'll send a couple wingers down there – to tidy you up a little bit, meathead.” Consider that proof that Woods is mentally tougher than any Don Cherry wannabe out there. P.S.: you gotta love a sport in which guys can make $300K a year with a stats line that reads “2 goals, 6 assists and 225 penalty minutes.”

(6) Major Indoor Soccer League: The loop announced that commissioner Steve Ryan had resigned and they were going out of business unless someone can develop a feasible financial plan this summer to justify resuming play. I consider myself to be a pretty enthusiastic fan who keeps up on a lot of what’s going on in the sports world, but I have to tell you this: God as my witness, I had no idea the MISL was still in business. I thought they had gone the way of the dinosaur around 2002. There are about 15 sports-related networks available on my cable system and I honestly can’t remember running across an indoor soccer game on TV since the Reagan Administration.

(5) Marshawn ####: His first-year stats now total 1,115 yards a one hellacious scramble to elude questioning by the police. It’s understandable that the Bills running back has lawyered up for more than a week following a hit-and-run accident in Buffalo involving a vehicle registered in his name. Do the math, and you realize it’s likely #### was the driver, but we won’t know for sure until he finally makes himself available for questioning. In the meantime, can’t he show some public regard for the victim, making a statement of some sorts expressing relief that the injuries in the incident involving his vehicle were minor?

(4) Cedric Benson: So much for having the court of public opinion tilt in favor of the Chicago Bears running back as he contests a charge of boating while intoxicated stemming from an incident last month in Texas. Over the weekend, Benson was hit with new charges &$151; DWI and running a red light — in Austin. Police say he failed a field sobriety test and refused to take a Breathalyzer test. On the plus side — listen up, Marshawn #### — he was reported to be cooperative with authorities following the arrest. And he’ll be classy and understanding when the Bears fire his butt in about an hour.

(3) Nicholas Kaczur: Staying with the Bottom 10’s NFL theme awhile longer, the New England Partiots offensive lineman gets sympathy for being the first driver in recent memory to get pulled over for doing 76 mph in a 65 zone on the New York State Thruway, where 80 in the right-hand lane often qualifies as Sunday driving. The ticket led to the discovery of the prescription painkiller OxyContin inside his truck, and Kaczur eventually ended up wearing a wire to help police take down his alleged supplier. Based on price and quantity info supplied by police, Kaczur may have dropped six figures on the drug over the last six months. Read my lips Nick: “This is your brain. And this is your brain on drugs . . .”

(2) Rick Dutrow Jr.: The outspoken trainer of Big Brown was having a pretty good spring right up to the point where he projected that winning the Belmont Stakes was a “foregone conclusion.” His other nugget for the week was, “These horses just cannot run with Big Brown.” And we now know that’s a good thing, or else the homestretch portion of the Belmont would have lasted longer than the Chicago Bulls’ search for a new coach.

(1) Pitcher Cody Martin and catcher Matt Hill: These guys aren’t a battery as much as they are an assault and battery. Playing in the Georgia state high school finals, they combined for a boneheaded moment last weekend in Stephens County’s 13-1 loss. Apparently upset with the plate umpire’s balls and strikes calls in the game against Cartersville, Martin threw high and Hill ducked low, resulting in Jeff Scott being struck in the mask. The Georgia High School Association responded swiftly with sanctions. Scott was uninjured but apparently was so stunned that he missed the obvious response of ejecting one or both players. Better still, would anyone have blamed Scott if he had charged the mound?

 

Catching up with the best of the worst from the past week in sports:

(10) Brett Favre: I figured I’d get this one out of the way so that the Brett-backers could commence leaving comments suggesting there hasn’t been a marriage in my family in three generations. But the fact of the matter is the man is saying things that make it sound as though he wants to play football again despite his teary-eyed retirement announcement last month, It was tedious enough the previous two offseasons waiting on his decisions about whether to return to the Packers. Now it’s aggravating to think he might play again and I may have had to sit through all the fawning farewells for nothing.

(9) Detroit Tigers: It’s getting late early for the can’t-miss team of ’08. The Tigers are hitting an anemic .240 and posted a 5.43 ERA during a 2-10 start. Being 5½ games out of first place in the division isn’t a big deal, but the slow start is evidence that the Tigers could be vulnerable to a most untimely swoon down the road.

(8) Marion Jones’ relay teammates: The IOC decided earlier that the disgraced sprinter had to return her Olympic medals and ruled last week that the medals of her Sydney Games relay teammates also will be taken away. The runners contend that’s unfair, but I can’t figure out how. It’s not as though Marion Jones was Ringo Starr while Jearl-Miles Clark and Chryste Gaines were Lennon and McCartney. Jones was the reason those eight other women were collecting hardware instead of standing at the drive-thru window asking customers if they wanted fries with their burgers.

(7) Mario Leguizamon: The Uruguayan striker was released by Peruvian soccer champion Deportivo San Martin for insulting a female referee, complete with sexual references, who red-carded him duing a game last weekend. While he didn’t fall back on the two favorite tools of false contrition — “I was quoted out of context” or “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” — in his apology, Leguizamon did resort to flimsy option No. 3: “My conscience is clear because I said it in the heat of the moment.” Nice try, but he made the comments in a TV interview, well after the ejection.

(6) Speedo LZR Race swimsuit: The new-fangled swimsuit took some of the suspense out of the short-course world swimming championships in England last week by contributing to 18 world records being set just two months after another 18 records fell at the long-course championships. The space-age suit purportedly shaves 2 percent off of swimmers’ times. Make ‘em swim naked, I say.

(5) T. Boone Pickens: The billionaire oil tycoon and hedge-fund manager offered Kansas basketball coach Bill Self a 10-year, $35 million contract to try to lure him to Oklahoma State. I think a man who has donated as generously to a school as Pickens has is probably entitled to meddle a little — it happens that way all the time in the real world — but it’s a bad idea to completely blow up the salary structure of major-college sports. If Self got that kind of money after his first NCAA championship, Pete Carroll’s next contract would have had more zeros that the crowd at Wrestlemania.

(4) Skip Bayless: Proving once again that Bayless should say less, the ESPN2 staff contrarian outdid himself by suggesting Wednesday that Tiger Woods was “pompous” for even discussing the idea of pulling of####olf grand slam. Skip has apparently never heard the phrase “It isn’t bragging if you can do it.” With 13 major championships plus 11 more top-fives since 1998 (facts that Skip chose to skip, I guess), Woods has dominated the sport for a decade. You would have gotten short odds in Las Vegas on a Tiger grand slam right up until 7 p.m. Saturday. Go back to sleep, Skip.

(3) The fascination with Tiger : I picked up the local paper Sunday, and the headline on the golf story said “Immelman leads at Masters as Tiger Lurks.” Um, earth to copy desk: Mr. Woods may have been in fifth place, but he was six shots behind. In a tournament in which every winner from 1991 to 2006 came from the final group of the day that’s not lurking, that’s called playing for a second. Though I’m a Nicklaus guy, I consider Tiger Woods the greatest golfer ever regardless of how many majors he needs to catch Jack. But let’s dial down the Tiger-centric obsession a tad, fellas.

(2) The Yankee Stadium curse: Oh, it was a cute story for about 15 minutes. And then somebody decided to spend five hours with a jackhammer, tearing up concrete to find and remove the offending Red Sox jersey from the under-construction stadium. I know it amounts to deck chairs on the Queen Mary when you’re talking about a zillion-dollar construction project, but a better use of the money would have been to put it toward finding a real first baseman.

(1) Hall of Fame voters: I don’t mind Dick Vitale entering the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but make him come up with the same $16.99 that the rest of us pay. Vitale was entertaining for most of his first 10 years doing color commentary on ESPN college games, but it was Bill rather than Hillary running for the White House the last time he had anything remotely insightful to say. His act now consists almost exclusively of shilling for certain coaches and schools.

 

(10) Al Davis: Darth Raider’s commitment to chaos continued with the signing of DeAngelo Hall to a seven-year deal with $24.5 million guaranteed that also required sending draft picks to the Falcons. As talented as he is, Hall’s name and “emotional stability” are found in the same sentence less often than “Hillary Clinton” and “warmth.” Tack on an $11 million signing bonus for Javon Walker and $18 million in guaranteed cash to wounded defensive tackle Tommy Kelly and Davis is spending like Eliot Spitzer on a visit to the Chicken Ranch. Preoccupied with going through coaches like Amy Winehouse goes though pharmaceuticals, Davis has failed to notice that recent Super Bowl champions have been built from the draft.

(9) Women’s college basketball : Hey, ladies, your sport is in trouble. Need proof? You’re in the midst of your marquee event, the NCAA Division I tournament, and the network broadcasting your event does two Sunday morning segments about the sport. But rather than talking up top players, top upcoming games or even top fashion accessories to dress up a pair of Chuck Taylors, ESPN’s “Between The Lines” chose to highlight (1) the catfight between Geno and Pat and (2) parents’ fear of lesbian coaches. Yeah, that’s the sort of pub that will help grow the sport. On the plus side, maybe the lesbian thing will distract viewers from the fact that there are never more than four teams in a given season capable of winning the women’s tourney.

(8) George Mason’s marketing geniuses: They apparently missed class the day the history professor explained the origin of “Remember the Alamo(dome).” It seems the school had T-shirts printed to celebrate the basketball team’s return to the NCAA tourney. Trouble is, they used a picture of the Superdome in New Orleans rather than San Antonio’s Alamodome, site of the 2008 Final Four.

(7) Trent Johnson: The soft-spoken Cardinal coach picked a horrible time to go for a stroll, getting himself T’d and tossed late in the first half of Saturday’s NCAA tournament win over Marquette. "The bottom line was, the responsibility was on me, and I was out of line," he said. "Just leave it at that if you would, please." Oh, if only life were that simple, fella. It’s in dispute whether the timeout during which Johnson got in trouble had officially started, but any coach who walks deep onto the court and toward an official is just begging to be treated like a man wearing pork-chop underwear at a kennel.

(6) Seattle SuperSonics: Never mind the four-minute-mile barrier, the Denver Nuggets nearly challenged the four-points-a-minute barrier by tacking 168 on the board last Sunday night. Carmelo went for 26, A.I. 24, K-Mart 23, Dan Issel 20, David Thompson 19 and Alex English 18. My suggestion to the SuperSaps: Draft Kevin Durant again in June. Based on what I’ve seen so far — 41.8 percent shooting, 3 turnovers and 4 rebounds a game — you didn’t get all of him the first time around.

(5) College basketball announcers: Not all of them, mind you, just the ones who refer to breaks in the game not requested by coaches as “media timeouts” rather than what they actually are — “TV timeouts.” I don’t see courtside newspaper columnists or Web site reporters signaling to the refs that they need 90 seconds or so to insert ads into their stories. So it’s pretty clearly the TV network that needs the timeout to jam more beer, tires and erectile dysfunction commercials down our throats.

(4) Major League Baseball: By my math they cost themselves about half a million bucks by trying to stiff the coaching staffs of the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A’s on their trip to Japan. They could have probably gotten away with compensating them $10,000 apiece, a quarter of what the players got, right from the start. But backed into a corner by a late player revolt, MLB and the teams ended up having to ante up $40,000 per man. And in the process they made the millionaire players look like heroes to the public for standing up for their colleagues.

(3) Indiana University: Dan Dakich was already carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders in the form of a three-game losing streak. So it was unconscionable for the school to announce the formation of a search committee to find a permanent replacement for Kelvin “Cingular Sensation” Sampson as the Hoosiers were preparing for their first-round game in the NCAA tournament. Many potential candidates were still busy coaching last week, and serious talks with candidates for a job of this stature generally happen during Final Four week when every coach in America is in town. The bottom line is that Indiana could have and should have waited.

(2) Arlen Specter: Apparently inspired by the Pennsylvania senator’s meddling into Spygate, a New Jersey state senator now wants the NCAA to investigate the ending of the Tennessee-Rutgers women’s basketball game. Sen. Robert Singer thinks (probably rightfully so, by the way) time had already expired before Nicky Anosike made two free throws with two-tenths of a second to play to pull out a 59-58 Vols win. Yo, senator, you can’t drive more than 12 miles in any direction in your state without having to pay a toll. Try fixing that before you start fiddling with basketball games — and women’s basketball games, at that.

(1) Billy Donovan: You can’t fault the University of Florida coach for wanting to motivate his troops for their NIT opener, but Billy the Kid must have been Billy the Kidder when he said of his players, "I think probably in some respects the confetti is still falling down around them." Last time I looked, the roster of players he kicked out of the Gators’ $11 million practice complex included seven freshmen who weren’t around for the two national championship ticker-tape parades. Anyway, doing without practicing in the new building and not being allowed to wear school garb shouldn’t have been too tough for the players. After all, they got by just fine without a coach last May while Donovan was stroking his ego by sipping a cup of coffee with the Orlando Magic. Must be killing him that Stan Van Gundy got the Magic refocused this month with a well-timed airing out of Dwight Howard. That, sir, is how they do it in the big leagues.