The Top Four - 1/26/07

I'm all for second chances, but Miami was the college team that gave Willie Williams a second chance. It didn't work out at Miami and no other university should have picked him up to play football. If he is good enough to play pro football, he should enter the NFL when he's able to. If he's not and wants to go to college, more power to him. However, he doesn't seem committed to playing football, doing classwork and staying out of trouble.

While we're on the topic of people who have lapses in judgement, let's move on to the finish of the Clemson v. Duke game. The clock is sacred at the end of games. That's why the officials review the plays and change the time on the clock. But, they need to get it right. Sometimes, clock operators screw up. They don't start the clock on time or start it too soon for whatever reason. The review process is in place to control these errors. The officials determined that 0.6 seconds is all it took for the Clemson player to catch the ball off the awful McRoberts pass, shoot a 3-pointer and have the ball go in. Don't you need at least 0.3 seconds to catch and shoot the ball? The ball is definitely in the air for more than 0.3 seconds. There is no way Duke should have had 4.4 seconds when they inbounded the ball. The game was tied and Clemson did a horrible job of defending on the last play. But, that's not the point. The point is that the refs did an awful job in a very cut and dry situation. All they had to do was determine how long it took from when the Clemson player touched the ball to when it went through the basket. A 10-year-old can operate a stop watch!

Even with Duke getting help from the officials once in a while, many people believe college basketball is better than pro basketball. Personally, they are both less than optimal, for different reasons. The NBA has the best athletes and the most skilled players in the world. One problem is only a few of the players combine the best of both worlds. The officials too loosely apply some of the rules (the commentators praised Nets PG Marcus Williams for his quickness with the ball on a play where he gained an advantage not with his quickness but with his prolific ability to carry the ball) and night to night a lot of players lack intensity. Generally, there is better team play and a better atmosphere in college basketball. I like the NCAA tourney, but I'd like the NBA playoffs just as much if they didn't have so many off days.

And, finally, Tiger is playing in his first tournament of the year this weekend. Roger Federer is in the finals of the Aussie Open ... again. Who's more dominant? I'm opting for Tiger because I think it's harder to dominate at golf than tennis. Thus, while Federer may win more majors this year than Tiger, Tiger winning 2 consistently is more dominating than Federer winning 3 consistently. A wishy-washy justification is that Tiger has to beat everyone in the field in every tournament, while Federer only has to beat a portion of the field. Imagine a 64 player field for the US Open in golf the US Open in tennis. Tiger has to beat 63 players to win. Federer just has to beat 6 players to win. Maybe it's not that wishy-washy. It's also easier to beat someone at tennis then to beat someone at golf if you are the same amount better than your opponent. A round of golf, for the pros, consists of about 70 shots. In tennis, you have at least 3 sets of at least 6 games with at least 4 points in each game. That's just a 72 point minimum, but when Federer does lose, there are probably going to be 5*10*6 = 300 points, at least. Plus, in each point, there are multiple chances for each player to contact the ball and gain an advantage. If golf tournaments involved 2000+ strokes, I'd take Tiger Woods every time!