The Houston Astros played a game in Round Rock against the Express, their AAA farm club. Thinking about it, I believe it would actually be a good idea for each team to play a home series or two in the city of their AAA team. I suspect that attendance would probably be considerably better in a city that gets 3-6 games a year than the average game at one that gets 81. Cities that house AAA teams are generally smaller, but include a lot of cities big enough to have teams in other sports (Sacramento, Portland, Salt Lake City, Memphis, Nashville) and cities larger than some that do have teams (Austin/Round Rock and Oklahoma City). In addition to higher attendance, it would also probably increase the team's profile in some pretty significant markets.

It may make more sense for some clubs than others (Omaha won't be a big draw from the Royals, for instance), but it would make quite a bit of sense for others. Has this been tried?

Continued from the previous post...

The most immediate question is that if the Big XII South did choose to break off, what would they do? Six teams is not enough for a conference. First of all, it would probably be just five teams as cellar-dweller Baylor would not likely be part of the negotiations. In addition to dumping Baylor, they would probably consider bringing along a team or two from the North. Here are where the B12N schools would stand:

Missouri: Mizzou would probably be the best positioned of the B12N for inclusion in the new conference. They have both St. Louis and Kansas City markets on their belt and are generally one of the better of the Big 12 North teams. They are the only D-1A school in the state, so there wouldn't be other state schools to consider as there would be with Kansas. If the conference expands westward, though, they could be left out to dry without a natural home.

Colorado: Colorado is in a different time zone than the rest of the conference and is geographically the farthest out. They have the Denver market as well as some smaller ones, but it's an NFL state more than a college football one. They're in the upper echelon of B12N teams, but they're likely to be the odd-school out unless the conference expands westward. If it expands eastward, they'd still be in decent shape as one of the upper-tier teams in the Mountain West Conference

Nebraska: The breakoff conference would probably like to have Nebraska along because they do receive national attention, continually pack a large, full house for home games, and are (the last couple years notwithstanding) a cut above the rest in their division. The problem is that their inclusion would hurt the geographical integrity of the conference and they don't carry any major television markets. They would probably be the odd-man out. If left out, they would probably find a home in the Mountain West Conference.

Kansas: Kansas is a basketball powerhouse and that would be their chief selling point. Along with Missouri they would lock up the Kansas City market. They also have a rivalry with Missouri that could help them hitch their wagons to a school more likely to be included. They are, however, one of two Kansas schools and bringing them in without also bringing in K-State could present problems. If left out, they may or may not be able to find a home in the Mountain West Conference. If not, they could be in trouble.

Kansas State: K-State has had a good program in the past and may in the future, though I have my doubts that it will be any time soon. They are second-fiddle to Kansas despite their football superiority. I would expect them to be one of the losers of the breakaway. Like Missouri and Kansas, they would need to hope that the MWC expands or that a new conference is formed between B12 rejects and Mountain West schools.

Iowa State: They are likely to be the school most hurt by a breakaway. They would not be considered for invitation into the new conference and unlike their counterparts to the west they don't have any conferences that they could easily join. There is a pretty decent chance that they would end up as the far-flung school in the MAC

So if we were to include Missouri, we would have six schools in the conference: Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Missouri.

The next most obvious place to look would be the old members of the Southwest Conference, which the Texas schools were once a part of. The pickings there are pretty slim. I would love to think that this would be my alma mater University of Houston's chance at a conference upgrade, but I don't see any scenario where that is likely. The Houston media market is already dominated by Texas and A&M and even Texas Tech gets more exposure despite being a smaller school 10 hours away. Though winning the Conference USA championship this year, they have still failed to distinguish themselves against smaller caliber competiton. The most likely beneficiary would in the old SWC would probably be TCU, which has continued to thrive in the tougher Mountain West Conference and has the benefit of being a private school if the conference decides that it needs one -- but even then they don't have any major markets to deliver that the new conference wouldn't already have and as a small private school it doesn't have a very large alumni base. Rice, SMU, and their Conference USA brethren would not likely be under serious consideration.

The other former Southwest Conference school of interest would be Arkansas. Arkansas left the SWC and ensured its demise in the early nineties. They're already a member of a top-tier conference, the SEC, so they may just want to stay put. However, there has often been the sense that they would have been more at home in the Big 12 and Arkansas fans seem divided. I think that given the opportunity, the chances are probably better than not that they would be interested.

Including Arkansas, as well as Missouri, would be part of an eastward expansion. The real coup de'tat of eastward expansion would be SEC powerhouse LSU. LSU is on the wrong side of Louisiana and has been a member of the SEC for a very long time. It would be rather difficult to tear them away from their conference.

The selling point for LSU (and Arkansas) would be based on a four things:

1) Money, money, money. The SEC is a very strong conference, but it doesn't dominate very many large markets and it shares most of those it has. It has Nashville, Memphis, Lexington, part of Louisville maybe, and Birmingham all to itself, but the bigger markets are shared. It has one of two BCS schools in Georgia and one of four in Florida. It has New Orleans, of course, but that would be leaving with LSU. It would also be a part of a conference splitting its loot eight or nine ways rather than twelve.

2) They would have increased access to the Texas recruiting pool, which right now is helping greatly to keep the Big XII North above water. LSU and Arkansas already recruit from Texas, but they would have a lot easier a time of it if they were regularly playing bigtime Texas schools. LSU is one of the few big schools willing to play in Houston, and I doubt it's to help their BCS standings. Their profile in Texas would be greatly helped by being conference-mate of its three highest-profile schools.

3) For all of its football excellence, the SEC is often underappreciated. Undefeated Auburn was left out of the national championship a few years ago in favor of Big XII champ Oklahoma. Florida was almost left out this year and probably would have been if Michigan hadn't already played and lost to #1 Ohio State. SEC teams have to fight one another hard week in and week out and even when they do come out on top, they don't get their just reward. The proposed breakaway conference may not be a whole lot better in that regard, but they'd be getting paid better for it and by-and-large the Big XII seems to have better luck with national profile even when it has weaker teams.

4) Rivalries! Arkansas and Texas have a longstanding rivalry dating back to the SWC and I think both schools would enjoy that being renewed. LSU doesn't have any rivalries in Texas, but it seems to me that A&M would be a natural rival for the Tigers (honestly, both schools should consider scheduling each other year in and year out regardless of conference). LSU would lose its rivalry with Ole Miss, but from what I understand that rivalry is not what it once was and has been replaced by LSU's rivalry with Arkansas. An LSU-Texas or LSU-A&M rivalry would likely be a lot higher profile than any rivalry with a Mississippi school.

If LSU and Arkansas were to join up, they would probably want a ninth team. The most logical candidates would be Kansas or TCU. One of the theories behind Baylor's inclusion in the Big XII was that if they didn't have a private school they'd be subject to all kinds of transparency-in-government laws. If this was really the reason that Baylor was included, then TCU would be in like Flynn. TCU would also provide schools an opportunity to play in the DFW area at least once every couple of years, which isn't bad for recruiting. However, if it was really a matter of Texas Gov. Ann Richards and Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, both Baylor alums, chiming in, then Kansas would help make up for what the conference would be losing in basketball. Missouri might also insist that Kansas be included.

I think that the chances are better than not that Arkasas would go for it. it's almost certain that they would if LSU was willing to go along. I discussed it with my father-in-law, an LSU grad, and he said that the LSU moneymen would be intrigued, but that the state legislature may put a stop to it.

If eastward expansion didn't pan out, the remaining option would be to look westward. That would mean keeping Colorado and perhaps losing Missouri. The five remaining Big 12 South teams plus Colorado and Nebraska could join up with Colorado State and New Mexico to make an nine-team conference or could include Utah, BYU, Nebraska, and UNLV or TCU to form a 12-conference league with a championship.

The problem is that the 9-team configuration would be a marginal improvement (if that) because it doesn't include the Utah schools and they would be losing the Missouri markets.

The top of the crop from the MWC would probably be superior to the Big 12 North as it is now, but I'm not sure it would be enough to compensate for the geographic disparity. The good news for the old B12 teams (except Colorado) is that they would be in a division that doesn't have to travel westward but once or twice a year. I just don't know that this would be enough of a change to make it worth the while of half the Big 12 schools to stab the other half in the back.

So here are the scenarios:

Eastward Expansion:
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Tech
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Missouri
Arkansas
LSU
Kansas or TCU

Westward Expansion (12)
East
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Tech
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Nebraska or TCU
West
Colorado
Colorado State
New Mexico
BYU
Utah
Nebraska or UNLV

Westward Expansion (9)
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Tech
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Nebraska
Colorado
Colorado State
New Mexico

The Big XII football conference has seen better days. Oklahoma has had an impressive season, but it has as much to do with low expectations rather than a truly dominant team. Texas was looking good for a while, but they were really never of national championship caliber even when they had only lost to #1 Ohio State. But Texas and Oklahoma are the top teams in the conference, and besides that they are in the stronger South division. The bigger problem with the Big XII is the north division.

Nebraska lost unimpressively to Oklahoma in the conference's championship game and in the last four championship games the teams from the South have outscored the teams from the north by a whopping 163-16 margin. The champions of the lowly Sun Belt Conference could hardly do worse than the champions of the Big XII North. There is a natural ebb and flow to the strength of the teams of some schools and conferences and divisions. It's possible that a few years from now we will be lamenting the weakness of the Big XII South relative to that of its northern counterpart.

However, I don't believe that this is the case. I believe that the Big XII North has structural disadvantages that will likely keep it from dominance. Football teams aren't made of corn-fed midwestern or rural kids that are aching to get the chance to go to college in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Ames, Iowa. Rural schools are a tough sell, as are predominantly white, midwestern states. That creates a problem for Nebraska, Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State. Colorado and Missouri avoid that particular fate, but the former is in a state more focused on professional football and the latter is a basketball school.

None of these problems are insurmountable. NU football is about the only thing going on in Nebraska so they continue to draw 80,000 fans a game. Missouri and Colorado are in populous and demographically varied states. Kansas State has beaten the odds before and they could do it again. My thoughts here are under the assumption that the Big XII North schools do not rebound and that the disparity continues to be a problem.

There has been talk in some circles about doing away with the divisions and the conference championship game. The most vocal proponent is OU coach Bob Stoops, who nearly lost his chance at the national championship game because they slipped up and lost decisively against K-State in 2002. A lot of coaches in the Big XII South believe that the conference game hurts more than helps because it's a game that doesn't reward them when they win but punishes them when they lose. I don't particularly agree with this point-of-view (The Big XII North is weak and when you win it does help in the human polls), but doing away with divisions is the natural precursor to a much larger development: the dissolution of the Big XII.

Getting rid of the championship games would solve none of the problems of the Big XII North and would in fact exacerbate them. Right now each team only plays half the teams of the opposing conference, so the schedule of the South division would likely weaken and the north teams will start losing more games and at least three or four will be huddled around the bottom of the conference standings in any given year. Eventually, the Big XII South schools will start to ask why they are separating their money 12 ways when it's only half of those schools generating the national exposure and revenue.

Worse yet, five of the name schools are located in neighboring states (Texas and Oklahoma) and in an especially good position to consider other options. Worse yet, three of those schools (Texas, A&M, and Tech) have a very short history with the north division and along with Oklahoma schools carry the conference's largest and most passionate markets (though Missouri and Colorado do have large markets and Nebraska has a couple passionate ones, neither has both). The more I examine it, the less sure I am that even having a conference championship compensates for the North's deficiencies.

So the question is... what can they do about it? Where can they go?

To be continued...

Flying out to a relative's wedding last week, I happened to wind up reading American Way Magazine. That's right, an airline magazine - the boring stuff they pack into the little seat pouch in front of you in case you (like me) happen to forget to bring a book, and happen to forget that you can't turn on your gameboy/psp/ipod/laptop/whatever until the plane's well off the ground.

So I read up on an article regarding the NHL's television woes this year.

Well, yeah. Because the NHL's actually having a season this year, that's good, but after their cancelled 2004/2005 season, they switched TV networks. And ratings have, well, pretty much sucked, not that they were very good before either.

The article's got a priceless quote:

Bradley says the speed of the game entices a live audience but that on television, the game is actually less appealing than the other three sports. With pucks traveling at speeds of up to 100 mph and bouncing all over the rink, the game is difficult to follow within the confines of a living room.

“What can you do about that?” Bradley asks. “You’re talking about something that’s good for attendance and not so good for television. It’s not something that can be changed.”

The followup to this is that the NHL, unlike most major sports groups otherwise (even professional futbol/soccer), has a revenue plan that doesn't rely on TV revenues.

However, here's one that baffled me:

“One thing hockey deals with is that a lot of its fans have never played the game, so many of them aren’t as knowledgeable [about] the game as, say, a basketball fan,” he explains.

Now, there is an interesting challenge. In the deeper South, sure, hockey isn't played much. But growing up in the more northern regions, hockey was something to do for fun. In summer months or not much snow? Grab your rollerskates/rollerblades, play street hockey. I didn't know many people from my hometown who didn't have some level of understanding of the game, even if only on that basic level - and that's still about the same level that you have for people playing football, because not everyone can be on their high school team, and "fun leagues" for that don't exist in the way that basketball and baseball do. Yet football is popular, even when many fans are admittedly just watching for the next injury to happen.

And Hockey? Might not be as popular as football, but even during the NHL strike, it seemed like the sport was doing well, and going to Aeros games was still fun.

Note: You can certainly disagree with any of my individual picks, but I could write an equally bitchy and moany case for any of the teams that I included in the tournament.

Pick your NCAA Division I-A Football Playoff Paradise:

Elseworld 1
Configuration: 11 Conference winners + 5 at-large bids
Teams: USC, Boise State, BYU, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Central Michigan, Florida, Troy, Wake Forest, Louisville, Michigan, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, LSU, and Cal

One can only imagine the anger felt by TCU, West Virginia, Rutgers, Arkansas, and Auburn at being left out of the only NCAA Division 1-A post-season games that matter.

In fact, the Big East only got one invite (Louisville) while the Big Ten got three (Ohio State, Michigan, and Wisconsin). The Big East got precisely as many invites as the Sun Belt Conference, who will be represented by the Troy Trojans, whose only out-of-conference victory was against I-AA Alabama State. WVU and Rutgers also turned in equal or better records against BYU (10-2) and Houston (10-3).

Auburn, meanwhile, points out that they not only have the same record as LSU (10-2), but beat them 7-3 during the regular season. Arkansas (10-3) points out that they beat Auburn decisively and that they have not lost a single game against a team not in the tournament. This is to be contrasted with Houston, who lost to the Louisiana-Lafayette, Miami, and Southern Miss, none of whom were invited to the tournament and only one of whom even turned in a winning record for the year.

Virginia Tech (10-2), the highest ranking team in the ACC, was also denied an invitation.

Defenders of the playoffs point out that BYU and California could have secured a bid into the tournament had they managed to avoid losing the games that they did. How this differs from the the plight of either Florida or Michigan, either of whom would have been in the national championship if they'd have avoided losing the game that they did, in the much-maligned BCS system that used to determine the national championship is unclear.


Elseworld 2
6 "Power" Conference winners and 11 at-large bids
Teams: USC, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Florida, Wake Forest, Louisville, LSU, Wisconsin, Boise State, Auburn, Notre Dame, Arkansas, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Rutgers

Conference winners California and BYU are apparently very upset that they didn't get an invite to the only NCAA Division 1-A post-season games that matter. California, the Pac 10 co-champion, believes that they were the odd man out because they scheduled SEC powerhouse Tennessee. Had they instead scheduled creampuff I-AA Tennessee State, they almost certainly would have ended the season 10-2 and could have captured the spot taken by 10-2 Virginia Tech, who squeaked through in what has generally been considered a "down" year for the ACC.

BYU, like fellow non-invitees Houston, Troy, and Central Michigan, won their conference. Unlike the others, however, they played a difficult out-of-conference schedule and believed that they were punished for doing so. Boise State went undefeated, they pointed out, but half of their conference games were against teams in the Mountain West, where BYU went undefeated, and another included I-AA Sacramento State. The bottom four teams in the WAC conference went a staggering 1-13 in out-of-conference games against I-A teams. Boise State aside, the main point that BYU continues to stress is that they won their conference, while over half of the invitees did not.

Defenders of the playoffs point out that BYU and California could have secured a bid into the tournament had they managed to avoid losing the games that they did. How this differs from the the plight of either Florida or Michigan, either of whom would have been in the national championship if they'd have avoided losing the game that they did, in the much-maligned BCS system that used to determine the national championship is unclear.


Elseworld 3
32 team playoffs
Teams: Just about everybody that matters, minus the Miami Hurricanes

Hey, you can start paying attention now. Now the games that actually matter are being played! This is in stark contrast to the most of the regular season (including but not limited to Florida-FSU, Arkansas-Florida, Arkansas-LSU, USC-UCLA, USC-ND, OSU-Michigan, and Louisville-Rutgers), which we will in the future refer to as "glorified scrimmages" because they only really matter for seeding purposes and have no bearing at all on which of the 32 teams gets to be champion.

Just in case, remember that a 9-4 regular season team that wins its last five games (ie the tournament) ought to be considered superior to a 12-0 team that has an off-day and loses in the second round of the tournament.

1. UTEP travels extremely well. We were pretty amazed at how much orange was in the crowd. I would say that they made up 30-40% of the crowd. I recall this being one of the reasons that they were given the Conference USA invite over Louisiana Tech and North Texas. It seemed unlikely considering that El Paso is closer to San Diego than Houston, but there you go. I assume that many were already in the Houston area as I cannot imagine that many making the 700+ mile trip.

2. I almost felt bad for the passionate UTEP fans when the tide turned in UH's direction. At least for the ones that did make the trip from El Paso.

3. The Cougar secondary is just dreadful. It seemed like there was always at least one UTEP reciever wide open.

4. It's been said before, but it's worth saying again. Kevin Kolb is a really impressive athlete. He's not a Heisman QB, but he may well be a pro QB someday. At the least, I would imagine his versitility would make him a real asset in the Arena League.

5. It's funny. I rarely remember yelling that loud at football games, but my voicebox always hurts the next day.

6. The Cougars ended both their 3-game losing streak and UTEP's 3-game winning streak.

7. Though I wish that UH games were televised, when you're there it's much more fun to watch an untelevised game. It's not nearly as broken up without the TV timeouts. I noticed the same during the last quarter of the Texas-Iowa State game, which wasn't televised due to a 1-hour rain delay and Texas's insurmountable lead.

8. I really enjoy games at Robertson Stadium, though I wish that UH could mend fences with Texas by agreeing to play in Reliant as Rice does.

9. It was multi-cultural day or somesuch. They had ten different people say something in ten different languages before saying "Go Coogs!" Subtitles on the video monitor would have been helpful, but probably hard to pull off.

10. I'm definitely glad I went to this game instead of the Louisiana-Lafayette one. It's more fun when your team wins and very not-fun to watch a team slowly give the game away in the last quarter.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Randy Galloway has an... interesting... take on the proliferation of NCAA powerhouse football programs scheduling impossibly weak opponents. It, like everything else, is the BCS's fault -- one suspects from reading it that he would blame athletes getting pulled over with pot and guns in their car on the BCS.

Included within the article is this tidbit:

"As a coach, my theory was that a tough schedule in September made you double tough in November," [Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association and former Baylor coach] added. "But those were different times. I remember one season in the '80s when we had one loss but went into our last game having to win to get the Southwest Conference bid to the Cotton Bowl.

"If we lose it, we don't go to a bowl at all. Now, there are six-win teams eligible for bowls."

Accurate, but so what?

If the above hypercompetitive atmosphere in the way things used to be is good, then the BCS is much better than a playoff system. In the old system, if you didn't win a conference you didn't get into the desired (or maybe any) bowl game. In the BCS system, if you don't win a conference you probably don't get into the desire bowl game. Yes, you get to go to the Cheese & Ham Bowl or whatever, but if the existence of small bowls is the problem, that can easily be addressed within the current system. It has very little to do with a playoff structure at all. In fact, the move comprehensive the playoff structure (ie the more teams included), the less each game matters. The less comprehensive the playoff structure, the less it alleviates the problem that Galloway supposedly devoted the column to solving: if the choice is between an 8-game bowl system or an 8-game playoff system, the main issue with both is how those teams are chosen, and each game will continue to matter quite a bit and coaches will be less inclined to schedule tough games.

If, on the other hand, Galloway was attempting to present the way things were as something undesirable, then why did he use the same guy as a hammer on the subject of a 12th game?

And in either case, there really is no reason to bring it up except to try to suggest that any system, which requires more than two paragraphs to establish.

And then he proceeds to write something that is patently false:

Go 4-0, then plow through eight foes in a weak, weak Big 12, and no matter how many other undefeated teams in the land, the 'Horns would have been 12-0 and back in the "title" game in January.

Texas very likely would have been the odd man out if there had been even just a third undefeated (BCS) team. There was talk about this mid-season, in fact. And that was with Ohio State and Arkansas. Replace those two with Ohio and Arkansas State and it would have been hopeless indeed. They certainly would have been allowed into a playoff system, though.

Overhauling the system wouldn't do a lick of good if the same teams left out of the BCS bowls are also left out of the playoffs (in the case of an 8-team playoff) and in fact it would exacerbate them. The degree to which a team would be upset to be left out of the playoffs would dwarf the degree to which they are upset to be going to the Sun Bowl instead of the Fiesta Bowl. Which would drive coaches to be more cautious and not less. Which would mean more rollover opponents scheduled.

Of course, a 16 or 32-team playoff system could remedy the problem by telling a team that they can schedule a big game and afford to lose it because so many teams are included. But that also makes every other game somewhat less important, too. There's a big difference between playing week in and week out to keep your national championship hopes alive and playing week in and week out for seeding. There is a tradeoff involved here. I personally don't believe so, but maybe it's a tradeoff worth making. Maybe not. But even if it is, it is a very imprecise solution.

Whether it's a playoff system or a bowl system like the BCS, the issue at hand is how teams are ranked. The precise solution would be to change that. This is, ironically, something within the control of the people complaining about it in the article: Mack Brown, Bob Stoops, and Mike Leach. If they want teams to stop being rewarded for baking cupcake teams, then they should penalize those teams in the polls. In fact, collectively they have more control over this than anyone (tied with those that do the other poll that goes in to the formula).

Though imperfect, I prefer the BCS system to any of the proposed bowl systems I have heard thus far. I am, however, willing to entertain the idea of a playoff system if it is well done. I have at least one idea in mind that I would accept quite gracefully. But if Galloway wants to convince me that the BCS system is bad, bad, bad and that it causes this problem and a playoff system would fix it he's going to have to do better than this bad, bad, bad column.

I got a wonderful gift certificate from Best Buy from my folks for Christmas. The first portion of which I spent on a Divx-playing DVD player. I still had $40 left over so I decided to get the special DVD version of Quake 4 because it has Quake II attached to it. I have a copy of Quake II, but unfortunately for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, it doesn't work on Winston, my newest computer. Since Winston is the first computer I've had that could play Q2 to its fullest potential (max resolution and so on), I found that to be quite a shame. I figured that whatever problem they had with it (like it being DOS-based, for instance) they would fix for the re-release. On top of that, I would get Quake 4. Even though I wouldn't be able to play that at full potential, I specifically eyed the requirements when I bought the components for my computer to make sure that it would play comfortably. Even if there was a problem with one Quake or the other, it would still be bad-ass worth it.

Unfortunately, there were problems with both.

Quake II exhibited most of the same problems as before. Though it would at least install (the previous one I had to move the files off the file-server), it had the same problem of randomly closing. Whatever problem it has with newer components were not apparently addressed for the new release as I might have figured. Nothing on the computer is off-brand or cheap. AMD and ATI chips in both. It does seem to crash less frequently, but random crashes are random crashes.

Quake 4 is apparently not compatible with my sound card. If Q4 were more like Q2 then this would not be an issue. This is particularly true since I don't even know what Q2 sounds like. I've always listened to music while playing. In fact, there are certain Cowboy Mouth and Robert Earl Keen songs I will always associate Quake 2. And if you have never tried it, playing Erasure's "Always" while blasting the heads off aliens is an unexpectedly beautiful experience. Unfortunately, in Quake 4 there are various characters that are talking to you and telling you what to do. Unfortunately, I cannot read CG lips. Unbelievably, there is no subtitle option. Seriously, how hard would that be to add? Are there no deaf people anywhere wanting to play this game? Do the game developers even care?

The other, slightly more surprising problem with Quake 4 is the speed of play. It feels like my character is walking through molasses. To "run" in Quake 4 is the same speed as "walking" in Quake 2. I would contribute this to hardware limitations, but (a) the resolution and quality of video seem to make little difference, so it's unlikely the computer is overwhelmed, and (b) everything except me is moving really quickly. In fact, even I can move quickly as long as I am not walking forwards or backwards.

I'm not sure, but I think this is the first PC game that I have ever actually purchased. The previous Quake was a gift and I don't play much in the way of computer games (save abandonware). I guess it figures that once I take the initiative to buy something, it'd suck.

Though my father is a UT grad, he also attended East Texas State University in Commerce, not far from the even smaller town in which he grew up. ETSU has since become a Texas A&M franchise school and its old identity largely forgotten.

Except that it makes an appearance in the new Disney movie Glory Road:

In the movie, East Texas fans are shown throwing drinks and popcorn and yelling racial slurs at Texas Western, now known as the University of Texas at El Paso, during a regular-season game in Commerce, Texas. A scene after the game shows a vandalized hotel room, with racial slurs written on the walls in red.

"It was just too awful for words," Pace said.

It never happened, Pace said.

According to UTEP athletic department archives, the Miners played the Lions in El Paso on Dec. 9, 1965. The Miners won 73-51. The Miners won the game in the movie, but the margin was much closer.

I can certainly see why the folks in Commerce are so upset. I'd be interested to know whether the fabrication came from the movie or the autobiography it was based on. Presumably if it was from the autobiography we can attribute it at least somewhat to faulty memory (maybe it was West Texas State or North Texas State or East Tennessee State), though something like that seems easy enough to check. If it wasn't in the book and the whole thing was a fabrication by the makers of the movie, it gets a little more problematic. If you're going to set a school up as an exemplar of racism in Texas at the time, you need to just go ahead and make up a school rather than malign one that already exist. Perhaps they didn't know that East Texas State still existed and thought that it was safe.

In any case, bad move.

The University of Kentucky, who are the "big team" the Miners play in the championship game, have also complained. I'm not sure whether those complaints are the portrayal of UK as the big, bad, white school or if there are particular inaccuracies at the time. From what I've read UK's basketball program was particularly ivory even for its time and I recall hearing somewhere that blacks in Kentucky were not sorry their state school lost. But that could be circular -- from the movie itself, which has already demonstrated itself to be not-entirely-reliable.

Dustbury's CG Hill points me to Salon's King Kaufman's thoughtful (if lefty) piece on how sports is managing to move even further out of the hands of the poor:

So what's happening here is that the NFL, like other major sports entities, is sliding toward more and more games being on pay TV. The league has a policy of showing all cable games on free, over-the-air TV in the home markets of the two teams involved, but that bone doesn't mean much if you're, say, a cableless Cowboys fan in San Antonio, which is Cowboys country but not part of the home market.

Too bad. The reality is if you're a sports fan without cable, the world is passing you by. Cable is where the money is because cable is where teams and leagues can control their own programming, and cable networks like ESPN can pay higher prices for programming than broadcast networks because they collect income from two sources, advertising and subscriber fees.

This is a sad thing because, with very few exceptions, the people who don't have cable -- and there aren't many of them in the scheme of things -- don't have cable because they're too poor to afford it. Sports have long since left poor people behind in the arena by pricing tickets beyond their means, and now they're in the early stages of leaving them behind on television and radio too.

Pensioners who have loved the Boston Red Sox through decades of futility were recently informed by the 2004 World Series champs that the number of games on free TV starting next year will be a convenient, easy-to-remember zero, except for the odd late-season Saturday game on Fox.

The St. Louis Cardinals this winter announced that their games are moving from the clear-channel behemoth KMOX to a smaller station the team bought an interest in, a move influenced by the rise of satellite radio, which figures to lessen the need for teams to broadcast on huge stations or cobble together a team network over a wide area.

My initial response is to roll my eyes because, among other things, an obscene number of poor people who reportedly "can barely afford to put food on the table" can nonetheless afford the no-longer-luxury of cable.

But... he's got a point.

Either professional sports are a community-oriented affair or they are not. If they're not then the owners need to stop using the community as an ATM. If it's not a community service, then they need to stop trotting that out as a reason to keep building trendy new stadia. But if they are a part of a city's civic identity, then there are obligations that need to be met. Ticket prices need to go down and meet the the supply-demand curve (which does not include half-empty stadia). And games -- or at least away games -- ought to be on free television.

Because there are only thirty or so professional teams in a given sport out there when there are probably forty markets big enough to hold pro teams, they use the false scarcity as leverage to play both sides of the coin: Public investment, private profit.