NFL, NBA need fairer playoff systems

How can the 11-5 New England Patriots miss the playoffs this year, while the 8-8 San Diego Chargers host a playoff game?

The same way two teams with losing records – Atlanta and Philadelphia - made the NBA playoffs last season, while the 48-34 Golden State Warriors missed out.

Divisions and dinosaurs running those leagues.

The NFL is locked into divisions that make no sense. Questionable teams like Arizona play their way to a divisional title by beating up patsies San Francisco, Seattle and St. Louis, while San Diego can lose 8 of its first 12 games and still make the playoffs. [Yes, Arizona and San Diego won wildcard playoff games AT HOME, but they should not have been playing at home since they did not possess the better records and would not have beaten Atlanta and Indianapolis on the road.]

We should have each team in the NFC play each other during the regular season, while each team in the AFC plays each other. That makes 15 games. Then, each team plays one other team from the other conference, based on how well they did the previous season. For example, next year, the top seed in the NFC, the New York Giants, would play the top AFC seed, the Tennessee Titans, in the regular season. And the winless Detroit Lions would play the AFC’s doormat, Kansas City.

Besides making for a fairer and more interesting schedule, you wouldn’t have 8-8 teams hosting playoff games when there are 11-5 teams sitting at home.

As for the NBA, league bigwigs either should cut the playoff field from eight to six teams like the NFL does, or pass a rule that no team with a losing record can make the playoffs if there are still winning teams left. If one conference doesn’t have eight teams that won at least half of their games, then a winning team from the other conference that is left out makes the weaker conference’s playoffs. If there is not a winning team left from either conference, then the loser in that conference can go.

The schedules can be managed so each team plays one another about the same number of times during the regular season. Purists say that doing away with divisions takes away from historic rivalries. So what? Do you want to see a fair playoff system that rewards teams based on performance on the field, or do you want to continue with the system in place that favors teams based on their luck of being in a weak division? Rivalries such as Dallas-Washington and Green Bay-Chicago will remain intense, as they will still play each other once a year and perhaps another time in the playoffs.

Signs of the holiday times

Even greeting card companies are having to downsize these days. American Greetings plans to cut 275 workers and close as many as 30 stores after profits fell. Hallmark is slashing 335 jobs and closing three greeting card plants.

But some have found a niche, taking advantage of the dour economic times by offering cards with somewhat humorous messages. The Order of St. Nick, a greeting card company in Iowa, has a line of Great Depression greeting cards, including one with a 1930s era woman cutting some fabric on the front. The message: "I made you a Christmas present!"

And inside: "But I had to burn it in a trashcan to stay warm.....Have a Great Depression and a Happy New Year!"

Uh, yes, thank you. It's good some can see the humor here.

As I've said before, I don't think we're near a depression. Sure, unemployment has risen to 6.7 percent nationally from 4.7 percent a year ago. Sure, the stock market is still well below what it was last year, though it's better than it was in October.

But we have a long way to go to hit 30 percent unemployment. Let's not get carried away, yet. I would just say, "Have a Merry Recession and a Happy New Year!"

Dodging shoes and worse

George Bush got rave reviews recently for his ability to duck some shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist while giving a speech.

The journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, also was regarded by some as a hero for daring to hurl the shoes, which is apparently a rather strong sign of contempt in Iraq. Iraqi security guards did not think so, beating Zaidi in prison, according to the shoe thrower's brother. Sounds like the work of Dick Cheney.

The shoe-throwing incident has threatened to derail the career of the Iraqi prime minister, who claims Zaidi conspired with a terrorist to throw the shoe. Zaidi's family said he did it out of frustration towards the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Bush is not the only speaker who has dodged items.

Last April, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman ducked green-colored pies thrown at him, avoiding "the brunt of the contents," according to reports. Friedman returned to finish his speech.

Now we know why Terrell Owens was dressed as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Dallas Cowboys wide receiver and sometimes instigator Terrell Owens was sporting a red nose and giving holiday cheer this week during interviews.

Owens has worn some, um, interesting outfits before. This one threw a few people, though it really wasn't as outlandish as some.

On First Take Friday, Skip Bayless, author and ESPN sports analyst, gave his theory on why Owens dressed like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: He is sending a message of "poor me, QB Tony Romo and tight end Jason Witten are drawing up secret plays and won't let me play in their reindeer games."

I guess it makes as much sense as any theory about why TO does the things he does.

Newsyawn: Politician tried to sell office to highest bidder

Yes, Rod Blagojevich sounds like a politician. The stereotypical Chicago politician. He reportedly tried to sell the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Obama to the highest bidder, the person who would do the most favors for him.

That's unethical, but......why are so many people shocked? That's politics. It happens everywhere, from the smallest town council to the highest office.

Most are merely not so open and honest about being unethical as Blagojevich. Give him some credit for that, at least, while you are throwing him under the bus.

In Virginia, they threaten Justice with jail merely for speeding

On a recent drive around the Beltway - that parking lot posing as a highway that encircles Washington, D.C. - a friend of mine named Justice confronted someone most of us have: Slow Fast-Lane Driver. My friend didn’t want to tailgate so Justice cut over two lanes to make the pass.

To Justice’s bad luck, a state trooper in an unmarked vehicle happened to witness the pass. To compound Justice’s bad luck, Justice did the deed on the Virginia side, rather than Maryland side. I recently learned that in Virginia, unlike in Maryland, speeding can be a criminal offense punishable by as much as a year in jail.

The trooper stopped Justice, and rather than issue a standard speeding ticket as in most states, Justice received a summons to court. Justice appeared in a Fairfax court this past week and was horrified to learn that Justice was being charged with the criminal offense of reckless driving. Justice observed other people with the same charge who pled guilty and only had to pay a fine and leave. Some of them had caused accidents and didn't have licenses, unlike Justice. So Justice thought that was the procedure.

Justice was wrong. The judge said to get an attorney and threatened to jail Justice when my friend asked a few questions about the situation. Justice had never had to get a lawyer before and only had a few prior speeding tickets on the record. Justice recently started a business and makes about $200 a week, but the judge denied Justice the right to a court-appointed attorney. The Judge said Justice had to spend Justice's kids' college fund and retirement money on lawyers' fees.

Welcome to Virginia, where Justice is threatened with jail time simply for speeding.

Welcome to Virginia, where the system steals kids' college money and retirees' savings.

Welcome to Virginia, where Justice is denied.

Spam market heats up

We may be officially in a recession, but you can’t tell that by the smoke being spewed at the Spam manufacturing plant in Austin, Minn.

The demand is so great for the canned meat “product” that some call Something Posing As Meat that two shifts of workers are making Spam nonstop seven days a week.

Spam “seems to do well when hard times hit,” Dan Bartel, a union rep, told the New York Times. “We’ll probably see Spam lines instead of soup lines.”

Hormel Foods Corp. makes Spam by combining ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, a “little” potato starch and a “mere hint” of sodium nitrite “to help Spam keep its [pink] color,” according to an Internet site on Spam by Hormel.

“Sounds delicious, and it is!” booms a Hormel spokesman. Without the sodium nitrite, all pork products would turn gray, and “no one wants that,” he claims.

Uh, yes, sounds, um, appetizing. But thanks, anyway. I think I’ll stick to tuna fish for my canned product fix.

How I Hacked into the BCS Computers and Put Oklahoma into the Big 12 Title Game

Ever since I was sports editor of the Richland Chronicle junior college newspaper way back in 1978, I have lobbied for a college football playoff. In the mid-1980s, I even walked some 5,000 miles across the U.S. and Europe to raise awareness for this playoff system. On the surface, I was part of a group raising awareness for an end to the Cold War, but down deep, I was walking to help give us college gridiron playoffs.

The NCAA bigwigs have ignored such pleas and actions while turning every college football season into a farce. Arguments between undefeated and one-loss teams about who really was the best team that year have been more fierce than this year’s Democratic primary battle between Barack and Hillary.

The wigs thought they had an answer with this Bowl Championship Series and their computers that supposedly choose the best two college teams in the land to play for the title. But there have always been one or more other teams with a legitimate argument that they should have played for the title.

Some years, it has not been so obvious a farce. This is not one of those years.

The eyes of Texas are popping out in anger today. And that, my friend, as John McCain would say, is how me and Joe the Plumber would want it. But then, look what happened to McCain.

Before Sunday, Texas held the coveted second spot in the BCS computer standings over Oklahoma. But even though Texas trounced Texas A&M by 40 points on Thursday and defeated Oklahoma by 10 points almost two months ago, Oklahoma surged ahead of Texas in today’s BCS standings. Oklahoma has only to beat Missouri on Saturday to cement its spot in the title game on Jan. 8 against either Alabama or Florida.

How did the Okies do it? Some say because they beat common opponents such as Texas Tech and Oklahoma State by larger margins than Texas, which actually lost to Tech. Some say because Oklahoma had a more difficult nonconference schedule than the Longhorns.

I can give you the real reason: computer hacking.

The computer systems that help decide who goes to the mythical national championship game – provided by Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Massey, Jeff Sagarin and Peter Wolfe – are not that hard to hack. Granted, they are more difficult to break into than the presidential election computers.

It took me a couple hours Saturday evening to hack into just one of the football rankings. But my giving Oklahoma some more points to move the Sooners past Texas was enough to swing the total rankings to Oklahoma.

Sure, the USA Today coaches’ poll and Harris survey of media and former players, which actually put Texas ahead of Oklahoma, also played a part. But the computer system is so important to the final results that a few points altered by a novice hacker in just one of the six computer rankings can swing the outcome. And it did, to Oklahoma.

It’s that easy.

So I sit back today, proud of my work, as more people in Texas and elsewhere scream for a college football playoff series. Obama even said he would lobby to bring about a playoff system, between figuring out what to do with Wall Street and Iran.

I can feel the tide changing already. If I had known it would have been this easy, I’d have saved my legs some miles in the mid-1980s.

Did Dick Cheney really shoot New York Giants football player?

New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress claimed on Saturday that he "accidently" shot himself with a gun that he carried into a New York night club on Friday night.

Burress faces the possibility of charges of illegally carrying a gun in New York without a permit, according to news reports.

Burress' story of accidentally shooting himself is about as believable as VP Dick Cheney's story of not being drunk when he "accidentally" shot a friend while hunting.

I suspect Cheney was at the same club as Burress and thought he was our next president, Barack Obama, since all those "black guys" look alike to Cheney. In another drunken fit, Cheney pulled out his shotgun and did the deed, then left as Cheney's Secret Service people convinced Burress it was an "accident."

At least that sounds more believable than what Burress said.

Signs of the Recession: Wealthy cutting back on gifts to mistresses

I write a lot about the economy these days. And to tell the truth, I don't think things are all that bad for most of us. Or at least I don't think we have it near as bad as my parents did in the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 30 percent.

Unemployment has risen, but at 6.5 percent in the U.S., that's nothing compared to the 1930s. Hell, it's nothing compared to the 1980s. If you're not in finance or retail or real estate or manufacturing or construction, you should be doing OK, even with a smaller 401k or mutual fund. Long-term investors say the market will rise again - the S&P is coming off its best week in 34 years! It's on a roll! And look how low gasoline prices have sunk - you can go out and buy a Hummer to feel better.....Um, yes, I'm joking. I cram my 6-7 frame into a Honda CRV that gets almost 30 mpg because I care more about the environment and saving gas than I do about my own temporary comfort.

But this item did make me pause: Maybe it is getting pretty bad when wealthy folks have to cut back on gifts to their mistresses, and even ditch them altogether. Hmmm....that's hitting us - or them - where it really hurts.

More than 80% of multimillionaires who have extra-marital lovers plan to cut back on their holiday gifts to them, according to a new survey by Prince & Associates, a Connecticut research firm. About 12% of the men and women questioned planned to dump their lovers due to their weakening stock portfolios.

Must be rough - not that I would know.

The infidelity questions were asked as part of a larger wealth study. About two thirds of the respondents were men and one third women. All were married and owned private jets. Again, that's not me. I don't even own a private toy jet.

As a professional interviewer myself, it must have been an interesting line of questioning. Interviewer: Oh yeah, one more thing, sir, uh, if you have a mistress, um....do you plan to cut back on your holiday gift to her this year?

Market research company owner Russ Prince told the Times of London that the 191 multimillionaires who admitted to cheating were "surprisingly open, even boastful, about their amorous habits." They were mostly executives in their 50s and 60s who paid between $200,000 and $1 million annually for the um, company, of a younger woman or man. Added Prince:

“These people are largely workaholics who see their lovers about
once a month, and pay a fortune in rent, spa treatments and maybe five weeks of
vacations a year for the privilege. At a time when the average American family
income is $48,000 a year, they are questioning the value of such investments.”

Well, isn't that special? Wealthy folks actually think about the rest of us when they are cheating on their spouses? Kinda makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over, huh? If this recession thing can make a few wealthy adulterers rethink their lives, maybe there will be some positive benefits to it. Then again, the cynic in me says these rich cheats are just worried about their portfolios, not about making life changes.