Bits and Pieces, Week 4

Grumpy Gumbel

HBO’s Real Sports is brilliant television.

It has great reporters, great stories and an anchor in Bryant Gumbel, who has been around the broadcast block, and also contributes the occasional piece.

Gumbel also likes to wrap up the show Andy Rooney-style with a mini editorial. This is the real reason why I watch Real Sports.

I could watch Gumbel rip the ever-living hell out of the sports world weekly, and surely somebody has thought that would make for good teevee, but, alas, it hasn’t happened yet and probably never will. Best guess is because Gumbel’s a grumpy old bastard and has already made all the money he’ll ever need.

This is also setup for the most recent Real Sports where Gumbel took on the NCAA. And it wasn’t pretty.

Here’s the score, per Gumbel and anyone who pays attention, the NCAA doesn’t care about illegal activity by the various schools’ athletes, they just care about eligibility and really to the shame of the sports world.

As Gumbel noted, Urban Meyer has had 27 different players arrested while at Florida and the NCAA hasn’t said a word, while Georgia gets whacked with what essentially amounts to a multi-million dollar fine because one player — A.J. Greene — sold his jersey on eBay for less than a thousand bucks.

I’m not a Georgia apologist, but the four-game suspension of Greene meant three SEC losses and that took the Dawgs out of the SEC East title race, a possible BCS bowl bid and lots and lots of money.

Yet that is a fair punishment to the NCAA brain trust because why exactly?

It really doesn’t make any sense, not that the NCAA cares.

And this is what Gumbel said.

Check it out for yourself, HBO only shows Real Sports something 45 times in a month and you’ve always got the onDemand option as well.

Also noted by Gumbel, players have always had troubles, but here’s a fun fact courtesy of me — what do Ole Miss and Auburn have in common?

Answer: They both have starting quarterbacks who were arrested and left their first school for stealing laptops.

Collegiate games missed as a result — zero.

The vanilla thrilla
Arkansas and Alabama traded shots Saturday in Fayetteville and it was ‘Bama that came out ahead.

It wasn’t that the Hogs looked bad, they kept it competitive and had the lead for large chunks of the game.

As noted by online wag, if you need a quarterback to throw 300 and something meaningless yards, Ryan Mallett’s your guy.

And also noted by the Boston Globe’s brilliant Charlie Pierce, Mallett needs to learn some touch. Not every pitch has to be a fastball.

That being said, Arkansas looked good, even great at times and that means something. Figure two more losses (Auburn, South Carolina) and at 9-3 it is off the Cotton Bowl where they will demolish a hapless Texas team and Piggie fans will pop the finest champagne in all the land and the real good stuff, with the screw top.

The Heisman race
Ryan Mallett will have some serious numbers at the end of the year, but in a season that looks to have at least four better quarterbacks, he won’t make the trip to NYC as a finalist.

Boise’s Kellen Moore, Stanford’s Luck, Michigan’s stat machine Robinson and Ohio State’s Pryor should all be ahead of Mallett when the votes get counted as far as the quarterbacks go.