I went to the Cavs/Heat game at Quicken Loans Arena on Tuesday night, and much of the night was scripted: Fans would mercilessly boo LeBron and he would go off (and he did, recording a triple-double). Somehow, someway, the Cavaliers found a way to win the game in what was the only surprise of the night.

I’m glad the Cavs won, but as we all know the wins are few and far between. Usually the results inside Quicken Loans Arena are about as predictable as the WWE matches that are hosted inside the same arena.

If you peek at the ESPN.com power rankings from the preseason and now, 22 weeks into the season, they look the same. Of the top 10 teams from late October, eight teams still remain.

Why play the regular season?  I get that the playoffs are exciting and if I had a horse in the race, I’d watch each playoff game. Realistically, five or six teams have a shot at winning the title. If you aren’t a fan of one of those teams, there is little point in tuning in to watch the two teams go back-and-forth for 46 minutes before pressing the ‘on’ button in the final two minutes to decide the outcome.

I don’t even like hockey, but I find the Stanley Cup playoffs to be riveting. The pride and passion is obvious. I don’t see that when I watch professional hoops.

College basketball is more my cup of tea. Butler and Virginia Commonwealth doing battle Saturday night for the chance to play for the national title? Sign me up. Nobody, except for two losers that filled out hundreds of brackets on ESPN.com, saw that coming.

I get that the NBA players are the best in the world. Players like J.J. Redick and Adam Morrison dominate college basketball and then fall off the face of the Earth when they start getting paychecks. I think it is, in many ways, a completely different game.

It’s a better game. It’s a team game. We heard a lot this week about “The Butler Way,” which is a way of saying the right way. Play team defense, hustle and put the team first.

We’ve heard that the folks at CBS aren’t happy that Butler and Virginia Commonwealth will meet in one semifinal Saturday night because they’ll lose advertising dollars. Sorry for them, but I’m pumped.

Contact Tim Ertle at

I got to thinking what the coolest thing was that I’ve ever witnessed, and I realized I’ve been fortunate enough to see some pretty cool things.

While pondering, the famous quote from legendary UCLA head basketball coach John Wooden that “sports don’t build character, they reveal it” flashed across the jumbrotron.

With that in mind, I realized the coolest thing I’ve seen in sports wasn’t a walk-off shot by LeBron James or ‘Script Ohio’ at Ohio Stadium. It wasn’t the Indians clinching a playoff spot or the Browns simply finding a way to win a game.

The coolest thing I’ve seen in sports, hands down, was a friend overcoming a serious injury, one thought to be paralyzing, to walk again.

In my freshman year at Saint Ignatius High School, a kid I played summer basketball with and had known since seventh grade went down to make a tackle in a freshman football game and had his life changed forever. Doctors suggested his chances of walking again were bleak, but he never gave up.

He walked across the stage at high school graduation and onto the University of Notre Dame. He was home last week on Spring Break, and when we got together I realized just how far he has come since that terrible blow on Sept. 11, 2003.

I had back-to-back classes with him in high school and I used to carry his bookbag to our second class, and the image of him moving around campus with his walker, never once complaining, will stick with me forever.

To see where he was then and where he is now is inspiring to me and all who have known him over the years.

I loved watching the NCAA Tournament over the past couple of days, but the amount of superlatives thrown around is incredible.

The Butler/Pittsburgh game was a terrific game, but it wasn’t the “best game ever.” There were undoubtedly some bad officiating calls in the last week, but they weren’t the most catastrophic calls in the world.

I was bothered most when a commentator asked his partner if he had ever seen a kid fight so hard for something, referring to a player’s will to win a college basketball game.

I’ve seen a kid fight harder just to walk again after an injury. And that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in sports.

Contact Tim Ertle at

For me, that means the start of baseball season as pitchers and catchers reported to spring training this week.

Tim Kurkjian and the crew are back on “Baseball Tonight” and publications with fantasy baseball rankings are all over the newsstands.

I’m giddy at the thought, but I’m afraid that not too many people share in my excitement.

We can call baseball America’s pastime, but let’s face it: it’s not anymore. Football is far and away the most popular sport in this country.

According to FoxSports.com, last month’s NFL Pro Bowl exhibition reeled in 13.4 million viewers. The World Series, which was also on Fox, attracted an average of just 14.3 million viewers over five games.

Just last week, officials at the University of California-Berkeley upheld a decision to cut baseball, making it the only Division I school in the state not to field a team.

I’ll concede that there’s a lot wrong with baseball.

My beloved Cleveland Indians have next to no shot (a 100:1 shot, according to BoDog Online Sportsbook) to win the World Series. Other teams in small markets can’t realistically compete either because of the salary structure.

It should be noted that the two teams that met in the 2010 World Series, the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers, opened last season as huge underdogs to win it all. A $100 wager on either team would have profited you $3,000.

There are questions about the integrity of the game and performance-enhancing drugs, but many of those questions seem to have gone away since Major League Baseball introduced stricter penalties back in 2006.

Some find baseball to be boring, dating back to their playing days as a kid when they had to watch pitchers that couldn’t throw strikes walk people around the bases.

I don’t often sit down to watch a random baseball game, but I would watch grade school football if it was on television. Football translates better to TV. I get it.

There’s something special about baseball – something that’s hard to put into words. Maybe I’ve watched “Field of Dreams” too many times, but I can’t wait. Play ball!

Contact Tim Ertle at

Auburn was led by Heisman Trophy winner Cameron Newton, the do-it-all quarterback who was ruled ineligible for a day after NCAA investigators looked into claims that Newton lost his amateur status when his father initiated a pay-for-play scheme.

Newton was re-instated after it was ruled he had no knowledge of his father’s wrongdoing, but there’s still the (small) chance down the road the NCAA could discover that Newton knew of the violations. In that case, Oregon would be the national champion.

There’s precedence for that happening, as the NCAA has stripped teams of wins retroactively after finding rules violations. In many cases, it has been years after the violations occurred when the penalty was finally handed down. It makes no sense.

More than a year after the University of Memphis lost to the University of Kansas in the 2008 men’s basketball national championship, the NCAA stripped the Tigers of all 38 wins they earned in 2007-08 because they used an ineligible player, believed to be Derrick Rose.

The official record book says Kansas won the national championship, but has no mention of Memphis being in the championship game. The NCAA can say that Memphis wasn’t in the Final Four, but we all know they were. We saw them. 

John Calipari, who coached that Memphis team in 2007-08, also had his Final Four run in 1995-96 with the University of Massachusetts vacated after their star player, Marcus Camby, was ruled ineligible for accepting money and gifts from an agent.

The same thing happened with former University of Southern California star Reggie Bush. The Trojans vacated wins from his time there because he broke NCAA rules. Bush was removed from record books, and it’s just a silly, worthless punishment.

He went there and played. He won a ton of games and we all watched. To say otherwise is just untrue. 

The NCAA can put an asterisk next to records if they want, but to me, vacating wins and saying things didn’t happen when we all saw them serves little purpose.

Once the season ends, what’s done is done. Let’s let it be.

If I decide to go look for employment, I often wonder what kind of money I have the potential to make. According to the unscientific survey that was conducted by studentsreview.com, communications majors enter the workforce with an average salary of $42,300. 

The site didn’t disclose much, other than the fact that $42,300 was the average starting salary for the 516 recent graduates with communications degrees they polled.

For you accounting majors, the hard work in the Boler School may pay off as the 377 accounting majors reported an average starting salary of $53,838.

I wished, for a second at least, that I had considered a degree in business. But later that night when watching ESPN, I heard an analyst say that Sam Bradford, the top overall pick in last year’s NFL Draft, was celebrating his 23rd birthday.

Bradford’s working his first job and his salary is a wee bit higher than most of ours will be – to the tune of $86 million over six years.

He’s a 6-foot-4 gifted athlete that has a rocket for an arm and a skill set that is in extremely high demand. But $86 million for what he’s done in college?

So far Bradford has impressed and looks like five years from now, he could be in the conversation to be the best quarterback in the NFL.

But five years from now, couldn’t an accountant be the best CPA in his entire firm? Couldn’t an education major be the best teacher in America? 

They certainly could be … but they also could fall flat on their faces and be a failure. That’s why you start with a bottom salary and work your way up.

The NFL has it all backwards in paying kids straight out of college more than the best in the business. For Bradford to make more than $14 million while Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees makes $10 million is insane.

A lockout in the near future may be inevitable, and a rookie pay scale has to be one of the first things discussed. Nowhere else in the world would a kid out of college make more than someone at the top of their craft. That needs to be changed.

Contact Tim Ertle at 

Tomorrow will be the three-month anniversary (but who’s counting?) of that fateful day when he made his decision on national television to join the Heat. 

But just when I was starting to move on, LeBron James dropped the next bombshell, claiming that he received so much backlash because he was an African-American.

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. 

LeBron: people don’t hate you because you’re black. They hate you, that’s for sure, but it’s not because you’re black.

Race had nothing to do with it whatsoever. You promised a championship, didn’t deliver, and then quit when it got too hard.

The same people that allegedly hate you for being black were the same people that spent their hard-earned money to buy a #23 jersey. 

They’re the same people that broke open the piggy bank to buy the newest LeBron shoes from Nike and proudly boasted to be a “witness” to seeing you play. You were loved … and you were black.

There are people out there that hate people based on the color of their skin, and that’s unfortunate. But that’s a small percentage of people, and I think the race card gets played too often in sports. 

Rev. Jesse Jackson said Cavs owner Dan Gilbert treated LeBron James like a “runaway slave,” this after Gilbert paid James more than $62 million to play basketball for seven seasons. Nice pay rate.

Even other African-American athletes thought James’ race card was far off.

“It’s like watching a movie,” former NBA great Charles Barkley said during a radio interview last week. “Just when you think it couldn’t get any stupider, it gets more stupid.”

Skin color doesn’t matter. Fans care too much about winning to care about something as insignificant as that. 

Fans in Philadelphia have embraced an African-American that participated in a dog-fighting ring as their new quarterback. Fans have forgiven and now adore African-American Kobe Bryant who had a highly-publicized extramarital affair.

The point is, people don’t care about race. I’m not even sure we really care about behavior. Sins are forgiven the second a fantastic play is made. Michael Vick had seven touchdowns in his first three games, and now black and white people are buying #7 jerseys for their kids. 

We don’t care what color your skin is, we just want to win.

Rainey was charged with aggravated stalking after he sent a girlfriend a text message that, when cleaned up for print, read “Time to die.”

When police arrived, he told his girlfriend that she should just wait and see what happens to her after the police left.

Rainey was booted from the team by Gators head coach Urban Meyer, but the fact that he’s the 27th played arrested should raise concerns. 

Of those 27 arrests, not all were “huge deals.” Many players were arrested for underage possession of alcohol and received a slap on the wrist. Still, a handful of players were arrested on charges of battery and assault. In a few cases, their victims were women.

And still, the NCAA does nothing. 

The University of Southern California, on the other hand, is banned from postseason play because of illegal (by rule, not legal standards) benefits that former Trojan running back Reggie Bush received back in 2004.

I don’t think Florida should be banned from postseason play. That would be punishing the whole group for the actions of a few. But perhaps the governing body that is the NCAA could take away a few scholarships for Florida, as they did to USC, and encourage the Gators to clean up their program that way.

I think it’s unfair to the current players at USC to be punished for what one player (and maybe a coach and athletic director that have both since left the school) did before the current athletes stepped on campus. I also think that what the Florida players are doing as a collective unit seems much worse than what Bush did. 

Bush allegedly accepted cash and his parents were given a home by an agent. It’s against the rules, sure, but nobody was greatly hurt in the process. At Florida, news of players getting DUI’s and assault charges has become old hat, and that’s where people really get hurt.

Bush ultimately returned his Heisman Trophy and USC was stripped of their 2004 national title by the Football Writers Association of America. The school had to pay that way, as well as losing 30 football scholarships over a three-year span.

The NCAA has to keep things fair and they can’t have schools like USC getting better players by cheating. But to me, there are programs with worse things happening that need to be corrected first.

I love them. I love them. I love them. You get the point.

But it’s getting to be quite clear that they don’t love me back and it’s getting old.

Every Sunday it’s the same thing. Home games have become a ritual that, when I look at it mapped out on paper, seems tortuous to go through:

Wake up. 

Go downtown to tailgate. 

Convince myself we can win. 

The game starts. 

Opponent scores.

Opponents scores again.

I realize we can’t win. 

Game ends.

We officially don’t win. 

Then I get mad and go home.

In life, when we do something we don’t enjoy, we typically don’t do it ever again. At least if we can help it.

As Browns fans, and Bills fans are included here too, we do it to ourselves week after week, year after year. 

Heck, we’re going on decade after decade.

We never learn, or our love is too strong that we’re blinded by the facts.

If you speak up in protest or stop watching, you’re then labeled a bandwagon fan.

However, professional football is a business and we, the fans, are consumers. In no other business in the world would a company sell a bad product, and consumers continue to buy, buy and buy.

After Sunday’s game, the Browns second loss (of many – I’ll go with 13 or 14) of the season, a gentleman I was tailgating with brought up a good point.

He said how he respected people of my generation for our patience. In our lifetime, the Browns (and Bills) have been miserable. Yet, we continue to show support and buy the product that they’re putting out on the field.

I thought about that long and hard. Maybe fans should stop going altogether. Some people would say you’re a bandwagoner and you aren’t a real fan if you don’t support your team through thick and thin. But at the current pace, we’re acting as stupid consumers.

I’ve been fortunate enough to bum tickets off friends for quite a few Browns games in a row, but would I buy tickets now? Probably not. I don’t want to pay top dollar for a bargain-bin product.

When the product is good, people will come back to watch. That’s not being a bandwagoner, that’s being smart.  If the teams build it, the fans will come.

On paper the Browns should win. That’s on paper though, and as I know quite well as a Cleveland fan, things don’t always go as planned.

We could lose to the lowly Bucs, and even if we do, 72,000-plus people will file into the orange seats at Cleveland Browns Stadium the following week to watch the Browns battle the Kansas City Chiefs.

That’s because this is a football town. It’s like Buffalo and it’s like Pittsburgh in that no matter what, on Sunday afternoons everything stops to watch the gridiron gangs for a few hours.

In case you lived under a rock for the summer: LeBron James left Cleveland.

Gone. Forever. And he’s not welcome back.

He took his talents to South Beach to play for the Miami Heat and left the city in his dust.

But the minute he did that – 9:28 p.m. on July 8, 2010 – people in Cleveland started counting down until the start of Browns training camp.

LeBron James broke the heart of nearly everyone in northeast Ohio – and yet we feel better because our football team that has won 59 games in the last 11 seasons is starting their season shortly.

We already forgot that the Browns went 5-11 a season ago. We do remember, however, that they are riding the wave of a four-game winning streak, the longest in the league.

It’s sad, but it’s true.

I’m sure people from Buffalo and Pittsburgh started counting down to Latrobe and Rochester, respectively, right after the Sabres and Penguins were eliminated from the playoffs.

I love baseball. But let’s face it, it’s no longer the American pastime. Football is what we all look forward too, and thank God it’s finally here.

In the National Football League, optimism is always at an extreme high. There’s so much parody in professional football that every offseason we, as fans, trick ourselves into thinking that this could potentially be ‘‘the” year.

Football has a healing effect that helps you when your megastar, and cash cow for the city’s economy, bolts. It helps you when your pursuit of Lord Stanley’s Cup abruptly comes to an end. It helps you in the dog days of summer when your baseball team is 25 games below the .500 mark.

And it’s finally here. Enjoy.

As I was painting, I had the television on in the background and they interrupted regularly scheduled programming to broadcast LeBron James receiving his second consecutive Most Valuable Player trophy. 

I stopped painting to watch for a moment, and I heard James talk about the MVP being a nice award, but it’s not the trophy he is after. 

 He talked about his goal being the Larry O’Brien Trophy, the prize awarded to the NBA champion. Repeatedly, he said he realized how much it would mean to the city of Cleveland.

Everything. Everything is what it would mean.

For those of you from Pittsburgh, you can proudly talk about the six Super Bowl rings and the recent capture of Lord Stanley’s Cup. 

Students from the Windy City were young, but they got a chance to see Michael Jordan’s greatness that included six championships and some got to celebrate in 2005 when the White Sox took home the ultimate prize.

But for the JCU students from Buffalo and Cleveland, it’s been a lifetime of “close, but no cigar.”

People that don’t watch sports don’t get it. They point out it’s the team that wins or loses, not the fans. But in a way, I have this delusion that if the city of Cleveland were to win a title, it would validate me as a fan. 

As I sat there with a paintbrush in hand, I kind of made a connection between the house I was leaving and being a Cleveland sports fan.

I thought about all the times I sat there in that living room I was painting and watched a Cleveland team lose. 

I remembered being a nine-year-old boy staying up late on a Sunday night in 1997 to watch Edgar Renteria hit a liner off Charles Nagy’s glove in game seven of the 1997 World Series to give the Marlins a title. I thought about all the times I came home to that house not being able to feel a limb after the Browns got grounded into the ground for 60 minutes.

Somehow, I feel like if the Cavs win the title, it will feel so good that it will cancel out all the bad things I’ve felt as a sports fan. It seems moronic, but sports fans are willing to endure decades of losing and tough times for a one-day parade and the memories that come with it.

I think a lot of people feel like me. Here’s hoping that when we return in September, Cleveland fans can feel validated, and LeBron’s still a Cavalier.

He’s a heck of a football player and yeah, I wish he played for the Browns. He’s probably a tiny bit better than Jake Delhomme, fresh off his eight touchdowns and 18 interceptions last season.

The point is, I’m not a guy that is rooting for Roethlisberger  … ever. 

However, with “Big Ben” constantly in the news lately for an alleged indiscretion with a college student in Georgia – his second alleged offense with women in the past two years – I’m not ready to put him in the slammer just yet.

In no way is Roethlisberger a victim. Should he be hanging around with 20-year-old college students? There probably is no need for a big celebrity to be hanging out with co-eds from Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.

But at the same time, he is a 28-year-old male with millions of dollars at his disposal. From the time his season ended last January 3, until mid-July when training camp starts, there isn’t an awful lot for Roethlisberger to do except lift weights and stay in relatively decent football shape.

Sure, Steelers fans are going to hope he watches film all offseason and dedicates himself to getting better and winning the seventh Super Bowl in franchise history, but that’s not too realistic.

Roethlisberger, and all athletes, are going to go out and have fun with friends. They have the funds to do whatever it is they want to do. When they do choose to go out, they’re subject to unwanted attention from media and fans … and even from female fans. That’s the price they pay for getting those boatloads of money.

The fact is many women want to be with Ben Roethlisberger because he’s Ben Roethlisberger. 

We saw it with Kobe Bryant in the summer of 2003 in Eagle, Colorado. Women throw themselves at athletes, and then make allegations about what happened.

While what the men are doing may not be morally right, it’s not illegal. I don’t feel bad for Roethlisberger in any way. He just signed an eight-year, $102 million contract in 2008.

You can have all the money in the world, but with those perks comes this type of attention. Athletes need to remember that.

 Contact Tim Ertle at 

The 50-year-old Nantz is going to be extremely busy these next couple of weeks. He just finished broadcasting the Big Ten tournament on Sunday, and he will have little time to rest over the next couple of weeks.

Before you start to feel too bad for Nantz and his workload, know that the man known around the country as the lead play-by-play man for CBS, will have one of the best seats in the house for the Final Four and the Masters. 

After calling the final 18 holes on the second Sunday in April, Nantz will have called the Super Bowl, NCAA men’s basketball championship game and the Masters for CBS in a nine-week span. Not bad, huh? For all that work, he is reportedly compensated $3.2 million for his services. It must be nice.

And well it must be nice to be Nantz, it’s nice to be us and be able to listen to him and others in his profession that are so good at their craft. Nantz’s salary is borderline outrageous, but play-by-play men provide the soundtrack to a lot of sports fan’s memories.

Whether it was Myron Cope in Pittsburgh, Van Miller in Buffalo, Harry Carey in Chicago, or Joe Tait right here in Cleveland, their catchphrases and descriptions stick with us forever.

Read the words: “Do you believe in miracles?” and you can’t help but hear Al Michaels’ famous question, and the “Yes!” answer that followed. Same with Howard Cosell proclaiming “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”

Sports are all about moments, and men like Nantz and the other good ones of our era, Joe Buck, Doc Emrick and Brent Musburger are a joy to listen to on the big networks. Closer to home, we all have a favorite. 

For me, it’s Indians play-by-play man Tom Hamilton. For the rest of my life, whenever the Indians record the final out to pull out a victory, I’ll hear Hamilton’s signature “Ballgame!” call in my head. Even when the Tribe is a few dozen games out of contention in late September, you know you can count on “Hammy” to still provide the same energy and excitement that he did on Opening Day. He makes the games fun, regardless of their meaning.

So yeah, Nantz is lucky to get to witness these incredible sports events up close and personal. But at the same time, we are lucky as well to be able to hear him and others that bring the sports we love to life.

 Contact Tim Ertle at 

My hometown Cleveland Cavaliers have two picks in the first round of the NBA Draft this year, having acquired the Washington Bullets’ first round selection in exchange for Mark Price. The Cavs are in rebuilding mode, but they own both the 12th and the 20th overall selections. It’s a great opportunity to get two building blocks to shape the franchise’s future.

I’m just an eight-year-old at this time, so all I know about the Draft is that NBA teams get to take college players and add them to their roster. Price was everyone’s favorite player, so as a young kid I’m sitting there hoping the Cavs get someone like Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury or Ray Allen. I needed a new guy to follow.

Well, those guys all went in the top five picks, and when it came time for my team to pick, they stayed in-state and took center Vitaly Potapenko from Wright State University.

Sidenote: With the next pick, the Charlotte Hornets selected a high school kid from Philadelphia named Kobe Bryant. The rest, as they say, is history.

After Bryant, Peja Stojakovic and Steve Nash, among others, came off the board, the Cavs were on the clock again for the 20th selection. Already having drafted a foreign-born center, they decided, much to the chagrin of Cleveland fans, to take another one: 21-year-old big man Zydrunas Ilgauskas from Lithuania.

Potapenko and Ilgauskas weren’t going to be able to replace Price as my favorite player, and my little eight-year-old heart was crushed.

It’s hard to root for someone when you have trouble pronouncing their name, and it’s even harder to root for someone when they’re always on the sidelines because of injury. That was the case with Ilgauskas who played in just 111 of a possible 378 games in his first five years with the Cavs.

Finally in 2001, Ilgauskas, after numerous foot surgeries, started to play injury-free. And whenever he played, he produced. He was the best player on a bad team, which obviously all changed when LeBron James came to town.

In the summer of 2005, fresh off a season in which he averaged 16.9 points and 8.6 rebounds per game, Ilgauskas could have left via free agency, but elected to stay and try to win a championship with a team that stuck by him early in his career.

It looks like the team that stuck by Ilgauskas has a chance to end the title drought this season … only that team may do it without Ilgauskas after dealing him last week in a trade that brought Antawn Jamison to Cleveland.

There’s still a chance that the Washington Wizards can waive Ilgauskas, thus making him free to sign with any team he so chooses. NBA rules would not allow the Cavaliers to re-sign Ilgauskas until March 21, but I hope and pray that he’s here.

Many have said that a championship for the Cavaliers wouldn’t mean as much without “Z” around, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Aside from James, it could be argued that no other player has meant as much to the franchise as Ilgauskas did. He holds the team record for blocks and rebounds with the Cavaliers, and most shockingly, games played. 

Father Time is catching up with Ilgauskas, but even if it is just for pomp and circumstance, he deserves to be on this team. Ilgauskas demonstrated tremendous loyalty to the Cavaliers by working to overcome the injuries, and then re-singing in 2005. 

The NBA is a business, and the bottom line is wins and losses, so the Cavs have to trade Ilgauskas for Jamison every day of the week, and twice on Sunday, to improve the team. 

Part of running a good business, though, is treating people right. If Ilgauskas does become a free agent, the Cavs should throw all $2 million they have left at Ilgauskas and bring him home – and this literally is his home now.

Win or lose come playoff time, and whether or not Ilgauskas is on the team, he’ll always have a special place in the heart of many Clevelanders. 

Many of whom now, shockingly, hold Z in higher regards than even Mark Price.

Contact Tim Ertle at: 

We were treated to video flashbacks of all the great meetings between these two teams – and there have been dozens. Dick Vitale told us over and over that even though the Tar Heels are having a down season, a year removed from winning the national title, this rivalry has not lost its luster.

And it hasn’t. It’s the best rivalry in college basketball and you won’t find many people that disagree.

My college basketball allegiance is to Duke and it has been since the mid-1990s, but even as a wannabe Cameron Crazy, I have to admit that because they play twice a year, it detracts from the sizzle of the rivalry.

For my dollar, a college football rivalry has to take the cake.

Duke and North Carolina have campuses that are separated by just eight miles, and proximity is necessary for any good rivalry.

People talk up USC and Notre Dame as a great football rivalry, and it’s rooted in tradition, but fans from South Bend and Los Angeles rarely come into contact with each other. One quick glance at each team and it doesn’t look like they’re out there battling for the same type of recruits.

I have lived in Ohio my whole life, but I don’t claim to be a die-hard Buckeye football fan so I think I can withhold some bias. I’m leaning towards Ohio State and Michigan as the best rivalry in sports. When those two met in 2006 with the right to play for the BCS Championship on the line, the whole country tuned in.

Kids from Michigan play for the Scarlet and Gray and Ohio kids like Desmond Howard and Charles Woodson have gone to Ann Arbor and won the Heisman Trophy. They play once a year, and a loss in college football, especially one in the regular season finale, means a heck of a lot more than a loss in February in college hoops.

You have to give consideration to Oklahoma and Texas, a rivalry that features two teams who have combined to play in the BCS Title Game six times this decade.

The SEC is far and away the best conference in college football, so you have to consider Alabama and Auburn, as well as Florida against Georgia.

Florida is a hotbed for rivalries, with the ‘State Championship’ – the winner of the Florida, Florida State and Miami series – having full bragging rights.

So I enjoyed Duke and Carolina like always. It’s hard to go against Yankees/Red Sox, but when you meet once a year, it means more.

We call them catastrophes, but really they’re sports catastrophes. There are certainly people that would argue that there are few things that happen in sports that are truly catastrophes, and they’re probably right. Others may be offended that I put the words sports and catastrophes next to each other because they feel those two words have no relation to each other. To those people, I present the city of New Orleans.

Obviously, their one-word catastrophe, Katrina, far outweighs any athletic setback. Some 1,800 people lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands of people had their lives altered in August of 2005. What their football team is doing certainly doesn’t make everything return to normal, but it can’t hurt.

In Cleveland, we had an owner that moved the team because our stadium was in such bad shape. I wonder what he would have thought of the Louisiana Superdome after the roof was torn off by the forceful winds. 

Luckily for the people of New Orleans, Saints owner Tom Benson was patient and the team stayed. In their first season returning to the newly-renovated Superdome post-Katrina, they made it all the way to the 2007 NFC Championship Game.

This time, the Saints won the NFC Championship Game, and they’ll get their chance to take on the Colts in the Super Bowl. The city has something to celebrate. 

There were undoubtedly fans rooting for the Minnesota Vikings to knock off the Saints last Sunday, catapulting the legendary Brett Favre into another Super Bowl. People thought it would be such an incredible story to see the 40-year-old Favre come out of semi-retirement to lead his team to the title game against Peyton Manning, arguably the NFL’s biggest star – and it would have been.

But how about a team that had nowhere to play just a few seasons ago coming all the way back to win the sport’s most coveted prize. That’s not too shabby of a storyline either. Of course, it’s not going to be easy to knock off mighty Manning and the Colts, the designated favorite by the bookmakers in Las Vegas. 

New Orleans, however, is used to defeating the odds.

First and foremost, I wish we had a playoff system in place for college football.

The BCS dodged a major bullet on Saturday when Texas knocked off Nebraska in the final seconds to clinch a spot in the national title game.

Are Alabama and Texas the two best teams? Tough to say. Boise State, Cincinnati and TCU beat everyone on their schedule. Shouldn’t they at least get a chance to win a championship?

I want to see, on the field, who the best team really is. Let’s play it out and discover the answer once and for all.

Staying in the college ranks, I wish basketball players had to stay for three years – like they do in football –  before entering the NBA.

There’s nothing quite like college basketball and, in my opinion, it would only get better if players stuck around for a few more years. People are going to tune in every March regardless, but I think the tournament would have an extra spark with established superstars playing.

In baseball, I wish the steroid users would just go away. As fans, we can’t help but wonder whether guys like Albert Pujols and Ryan Howard are using performance enhancers, or if they really are this good.

I hope baseball can soon test players for every drug under the sun and punish users severely. I mean a lifetime ban – that severely. When fans are paying such high prices to attend games, they deserve to know whether or not the product they are seeing is genuine, or a result of some work done in a lab.

While we are on the topic, I wouldn’t mind seeing that 2003 list of steroid users in Major League Baseball.

Some of the names have leaked, but I would love to see who else is on the list. I’m very curious to see if some of my childhood heroes are on there.

I wish that we heard more about the “good guys” in sports. For all the guys that get D.U.I.’s and hit their live-in girlfriends, there have to be a few that do things the right away. Let’s give them some ink too.

Finally, I hope that 2010 is a better sports year than 2009 was. There weren’t too many memorable moments from this year, but luckily, there is always next year.

It’s tough to believe that ‘The Kid’ is going to be 40, and that the once unstoppable force was relegated to hitting just .221 last season. Some fans think he’s ruining his legacy by sticking around and showing just a shadow of his old self.

Not me.

Griffey was the one guy who made baseball look fun. He always had a swagger about him and everything he did, even if it was just chewing gum, looked cool. I think most young boys tried to duplicate that famous batting stance of his.

On the field, he did it all. He hit balls that went a country mile, ran the bases with blazing speed and tracked down balls in the outfield that nobody else could have made a play on.

And sadly, he can’t do those things anymore. But he’s 40, so he isn’t supposed to be able to physically do what he did when he was 25. I think that’s the best part about him.

In 2004, the season in which Barry Bonds turned 40, he hit .362 with 45 home runs and 101 RBI. Maybe he had great genetics, but there’s something a little fishy about that.

Griffey’s body looks 40. His name has never really come up in the steroid conversation. If it ever surfaces that he did use performance enhancing drugs, that might be the final straw for a lot of baseball fans.

From the days of our childhood that were dominated by Bonds, Griffey, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Griffey is the only one that we have reason to believe was clean.

So with Junior coming back for another year, probably his one last go-round, it will be bittersweet. We’ll get another opportunity to see a player that so many of us idolized as kids.

He will be just a shell of his old self, but that’s not what we are going to remember.

When we are old and gray and look back at all the athletes we had the chance to see over our lifetime, he’s probably going to be one we will talk about.

We got to see his rise and fall, but what a ride it was in between.

I hope he stays. I pray he stays. But I don’t think he knows what he is going to do yet.

So all we can do is sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. It’s been a great ride so far. 

James came to Cleveland six years ago, dubbed “The Chosen One” by Sports Illustrated. He was added to a team that went 17-65 during the 2002-03 season and drafted to a franchise that didn’t receive any attention in its own city, less yet nationally. 

He came here saying he would light Cleveland up “like Las Vegas.” Now you out-of-towners may mock the downtown area, but he unquestionably brought buckets of excitement to the city. I’ll consider that a promise fulfilled, and what more can you ask for?

There were countless times when James provided one of those “I remember where I was when …” moments that will be remembered in these parts long after he hangs up the Nikes. 

Ask a Cleveland sports fan where they were for the “48 Special” when LeBron scored 29 of the Cavs’ last 30 points to knock off the Detroit Pistons in game five of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals. Or ask where they were when he hit the desperation three-pointer as time expired to beat the Magic in this past May’s Eastern Conference Finals.

The goal of professional sports is to win championships – and LeBron’s critics will point out that he hasn’t done that yet. He has (at least) one more shot at it here in Cleveland, and nothing LeBron James does amazes anybody anymore. 

Even if he doesn’t bring a title to Cleveland, it was still a treat to watch him for the past six years, and I couldn’t be more excited about this upcoming season. 

If he goes to New York or New Jersey or whatever city he is rumored to want to play in today, it won’t be for money. The Cavs have the ability to offer him more money than any other team in the league. James will only leave if he thinks he is joining a team that has a better shot of winning an NBA title than the Cavs, and it’s hard not to respect that.

He’s one of those guys you can tell your grandkids that you watched play. It really is a treat to watch him play every night.

Here’s hoping for a great run this year … and many, many more.

I’ve never really bought into that, seeing as the last two years the Super Bowl has been won on a game-winning catch by wide receivers Plaxico Burress and Santonio Holmes, two guys you are unlikely to find helping an old lady across the street.

Both those guys have extensive rap sheets… but they also have Super Bowl rings. This year, my beloved Cleveland Browns drafted guys that were good football players, but also guys that performed well in the classroom.

Reading over the biographies of our draft picks, all of them seem to have been selected to their conferences “All-Academic” teams, and then they were named something like third-team all conference for their work on the field.

I’m glad they’re smart and ideally, I hope they’re good citizens, but as a fan, I just want to win. We’re already 0-2, and it’s not looking like were going to get in the win column in the near future.

On Sunday, people are going to see Michael Vick back in action for the first time since he went to jail for his involvement in a dog fighting scandal. Some Philadelphia Eagles fans are unhappy that Vick is on their team and, fearing that he will only bring trouble with him and doesn’t deserve a second chance.

I think someone that enjoys watching dogs maul each other isn’t all there in the head. At the same time, as shallow as it sounds, if he were on my team, I’d cheer just as loud for him as everybody else when he scores six points.

Ideally, athletes all act something like Derek Jeter. They go out and perform at an all-star level year after year and do great charity work, stay off the police blotter and always say the right thing to the media. That’s a dream.

The reality is, a lot of these athletes go from rags to riches, get wealthy at a young age and they don’t know how to handle their sudden fame and fortune.

I feel bad when I read about athletes doing stupid stuff off the field, but I also feel bad when the Browns lose 27-6 and don’t even come remotely close to scoring a touchdown. As shallow as it sounds, I just want to win.

Those were the days! Not a care in the world.

Now, kids that age that happen to be gifted in the game of basketball have something to worry about, something a bit more important than pimples: Where are they going to go to college?

In January of this year, the NCAA put a guideline in place that declares seventh graders are now classified as “prospective student-athletes,” allowing college coaches to recruit them under the same rules as they would a high school player.

Because of this, we have kids like Allonzo Trier, the feature of a recent New York Times article. Trier is labeled as the best high school player in the class of 2014.

Yes, high school class of 2014.

The article followed the seventh-grader in Seattle during his daily basketball workout. His mom, who works an early shift to ensure that she can watch her son workout after school, demands that the youngster makes at least 450 shots per day.

After he makes his 450 shots, Trier’s mother, Marcie, takes him to a basketball tutor for a private session, and after that it is off to practice for his summer team, which traveled as far as New York.

That was about as far as I got in the article. I just couldn’t stomach anymore.

For a college coach to sit in a living room and recruit a 16-year-old is one thing. That 16-year-old can at least drive to practice.

But trying to get a commitment for six years down the road from a 13-year-old just seems ridiculous to me. A kid that age thinks a big commitment is the relationship he has with his “girlfriend.”

I am not really sure who is at fault here. Some would say college coaches, but if they don’t recruit this kid, one of their rivals will. It seems as though recruiting these days is all about establishing a relationship early and then maintaining it.

I think it falls with the parents. Sure, they want what’s best for their kids. Does Marcie Trier want what’s best for her son? After reading the article, I wasn’t sure.

Above all, I guess I just feel bad for the kid. When you’re 13, you shouldn’t have to worry about people who want to be your friends having an agenda.

What if he gets hurt? What if he doesn’t make it? Then what?

For the sake of little Allonzo, let’s hope we never find out.

At the time, Anthony had just finished single-handedly leading his Syracuse University team to a national championship. James had won a national title the year before as well, only his was won in the polls and not on the court.

I figured that Anthony’s title run, which included victories over numerous NCAA powerhouses, showed how great he could be. LeBron was playing against a bunch of pimple-faced teenagers. Surely, Carmelo was the right choice for the Cavs.

Well, the Cavaliers disagreed with my 14-year-old eye for talent and went ahead and drafted the local product James anyway.

Boy, are they lucky they did.

LeBron James changed the Cavaliers franchise overnight, literally.
In Cleveland, it seems like we have this mental problem where we always expect the worse to happen to our sports franchises. I don’t want to say that we expect to lose, but let’s just say we don’t expect to win. With good reason, I suppose, seeing as how this town has not won a major sports championship since 1964.

But James expected to win. Slowly, but surely, fans expected to win. Fast forward to this year, James’ fifth in the NBA, and the Cavaliers sit atop the league with the best record.

As we wind up the NBA regular season and approach the playoffs, there’s just a different feel around the city. We expect to win, and James is to be thanked for that.

In all seriousness, I expect LeBron and the James Gang to finish what they have started. I think the whole city does. If there isn’t a parade down Euclid Avenue in mid-June, I would be stunned.

I don’t want to get all dramatic and say that LeBron has entirely turned the city around. What he’s doing, in the big scheme of things, really isn’t all that important. But in a city that is hit especially hard by the tough economy, it doesn’t hurt to have something to hang your hat on, like being home to the best team in the NBA.

Currently, Anthony’s Denver Nuggets were leading the Northwest division, and he has certainly turned out to be a terrific pro player. But few, if any, players are able to do what LeBron does.

I’m sorry for ever doubting him.