PSoTD

Here's your chance to vote for who should be in the Hall of Fame. It won't count for anything, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Terrell Owens speaks about Parcells' retirement.

I think the New Orleans Saints season was probably the best feel-good stories of 2006, and it looks to me that the team only has upside. They have a good coach, a very good offense, and just need to improve pass coverage defense to take the next step. If you take a look at the Louisiana papers on Monday, they are full of coverage of the Saints, and despite the loss, are generally happy stories, full of photos and quotes from relatively-satisfied fans.

But will it be like this again? Or will Saints fans and Louisiana news media have higher expectations next year in what may be the toughest conference in the NFC, and reporting of satisfaction and enjoyment will disappear?

One of the things about the Saints coverage that stood out this year over any other sports coverage was the impact of the team on the fans, and the fans relationships with the team. I think this is good for sports to cover this dynamic more, because it is a crucial part of professional sports, in both value and concept - to bring entertainment to a community that also makes them feel good. Good teams do that. And good fans reciprocate the good feeling. So much of sports reporting is based on numbers - performance statistics, money, years of contract - that we're taking the humanity out of professional sports. The Saints coverage this year returned humanity in sports it to where it belonged - in newspapers, on television - and maybe there's a chance that a bit of that will rub off on the rest of the sports reporting world now. We can hope.

Makes about as much sense...

If office work has taken a back seat to football chatter, it must be the annual Super Bowl slowdown.

Excitement over what has become the biggest single sporting event of the year in the United States may actually end up costing employers some $800 million in lost productivity the week before the big game, a report said on Monday.

In Chicago and Indianapolis, the two cities whose National Football League teams will face off on February 4 in Miami, losses could reach $85 million in the run-up to the game, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Assuming employees, for example, spend 10 minutes a day talking about the game, making bets, surfing the Internet or shopping for a new television, their bosses will lose some $162 million per day. In a five-day workweek, that adds up to $810 million, based on average earnings and expected viewership.

Then there is the day after the championship when people discuss the game's plays, the TV commercials, or simply call in sick, resulting in more money lost, the outplacement consultant reported.

I hope nobody is paying these people to make this guess. I know lots of people who don't care about the Super Bowl one bit, and the likelihood they spend 10 minutes each workday involved in Super Bowl discussion above and beyond the time they normally spend talking about whatever personal interest they have is incredibly slight. Then there's that whole part of the question - is this supposed ten minutes per day spent on the Super Bowl in addition to the time spent discussing and doing more personal stuff at work, or just replacing something else as a priority for that week? Is this a daily ten minutes they'd normally be talking about their house or their kids' sports or the next doctor appointment or how drunk Sheila in accounting was last weekend?

But my biggest annoyance in this PR exercise committed annually by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. is that this somehow costs "the bosses". Really. Like the bosses take home less money because of this. No, if it costs anyone, and that is a big if, it costs the marketplace, because costs are transferred eventually. So let's cut out the "this is costing the employers" talk, because that's not the way companies operate in reality. And let's quit reporting the ballooning the supposed cost into such ridiculous numbers, because there's the only point of it is to get this firm in the newspaper in the first place.

What is up with the idea of Donkey Basketball? We had that as a fundraiser at my highschool as well. Who first came up with the great idea of playing basketball while riding a donkey? Was it the owner of the donkeys, looking for some way to rent them out? Was it the donkeys - were they always sneaking off and walking around the court?

But I'm sorry, something is obligatory...

Apparently everyone's snagging them for Super Bowl Sunday.

Prince is the Super Bowl Half Time Entertainment...

In entertainment news, Prince will perform at halftime of the Super Bowl. This breaks the string of aging Brit acts, though sustaining the string of Super Bowl halftime performers whose best work was done before many current spectators were born. During the period he used a glyph as a name, the singer in question was called The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Now that he once again goes by Prince, this makes him The Artist Formerly Known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

Yeah, I'm not a Prince fan.

It's pretty clear that if you accept the gig for playing at halftime at the Super Bowl, you're admitting that your creative career is over and you're really a replay artist at this point. Take a look at this roster of performers during the SB Halftime show. Prince is the Carol Channing of 2007, or the Up With People (THEY PERFORMED THREE DIFFERENT TIMES!?!?!?), or the New Kids on the Block, or the Blues Brothers with James Belushi, or whatever.

Whatever happened to the former Yankee?

According to Wikipedia, he washed out of Japanese baseball last year. The clip is his final at bat in Japan.

What a great story.

Playing basketball isn't ladylike. That's what Jewell Chapman's high school principal told her in 1961 when he banned the girls basketball program.

"We were very frustrated," said Chapman, a forward for her high school team in Des Moines.

Nearly 50 years later, Chapman is back on the court. She's 62 and plays for the Hot Pink Grannies, joining about 10 other women on a team whose uniforms are black bloomers and hot pink socks. They play in the Iowa Granny Basketball League.

It's one of dozens of basketball leagues for women over 50 that have sprung up across the country. For some, it's an opportunity to exercise and socialize; for others, it's a once-denied chance to compete.

"You see more and more senior women's teams participating in state and national competitions and more recreational leagues," said Michael Rogers (news, bio, voting record), an associate professor in sports studies at Wichita State University. "In the future it will be commonplace to have leagues like this."

Annual surveys by the National Sporting Goods Association indicate the number of women 55 and older who play basketball at least 50 times a year has grown from 16,000 in 1995 to nearly 131,000 a decade later.

Play stuff until you're dead. That's my plan.

I watched the Bears-Seahawks game, and I would ridicule Rex Grossman's performance if it deserved it. But it doesn't. Don Banks is a goober. Plays that Grossman succeeded on are marked as lucky. Plays on passes he made that should have been caught by a receiver are either ignored (Berrian) or ballyhooed for the interception result (clearly the fault of Muhammad).

There was an entity that almost cost the Bears the game, and it was the defense. First there was little pass defense, then there was little run defense. Late 4th quarter and the overtime, the defense seemed to settle down and play properly, but it took too long to happen. If there's anything the Bears should be worried about for next week, it's their defense, particularly the secondary.

Oh, and Devin Hester needs to quit fumbling those punts, too.

Don Banks needs to watch the game before he decides on the theme he plans to infuse on writing about the game. That's been the case for him for quite a while now.

So he's no longer a Sixer. I bet the Sacramento Kings suspected this might happen.

One of the classic "outcoached" games in recent playoff history. Wonder if KC feels so good about the money they spent on Herm Edwards now?

Concurring: Depressed Fan, Don't Be a H8er, Yo, Fed Up!, A Different Perspective

Are there any current, real life, real time Oakland Raider fans anymore? If so, why?

Monday may have been the most depressing day in the history of "first day after the end of the regular season" for the NFL. Two head coaches fired, Vikings WR Travis Taylor arrested, and Broncos' Darrent Williams shot to death.