Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Or is it more like General Douglas MacArthur’s  “I shall return”?  The Sports Guru has been away for a long time.  I promise you no jail time was invovled.  Just life, the economy and the 2008 Presidential election got in the way of the Sports Guru and When You Need to Know About Sports.  One of my New Years Resolutions was to restart this blog.  So for the first time in 2009, lets learn about sports the Sports Guru’s way.

Tomorrow night January 8th, The 2008 College Football season will come to an end with the  BCS (Bowl Championship Series) National Championship game between #1 ranked Oklahoma and #2 ranked Florida.  The college football season began on August 28th.  That makes the season 133 days long.  19 weeks to crown a National Champion.  The NFL takes 17 weeks to play the regular season and another 5 weeks including the Super Bowl.  19 weeks and the guys who run the BCS will crown a National Champion and it will not be the best team who played college football in 2008.  I know you are now saying “maybe the Sports Guru has been away too long”.  You see, the BCS is a really complicated way to pick a college football champion (check this out http://www.bcsfootball.org/bcsfb/eligibility.  I’ll try not to bore you with details.  The process includes two polls, one with writers and one with coaches, six computer programs and a lot of upset coaches, players and fans.

So who is the best college football in the land if it is not the number one or second ranked team? It is the sixth ranked University of Utah. The Utes finished their season at 13-0. The only BCS eligible team in the country that finished the season undefeated. So why is the sixth ranked team better than the number one or two team? I think the real question is why Utah is only ranked number six. Thanks to our friends at Fox sports here is an answer to the question http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/polls

The real problem here is that the 119 teams that make up the BCS are the only sport that does not have a playoff system. Just this goofy computer system and a bunch of coaches and writers who never get to see all of the teams play. Even Miss America and American Idol have a system to eliminate contestants. So until the idiots who run college football (no I’m not taking back the word idiot) see the light and establish a football playoff season, teams like the Utes will continue to get the short end of the stick.

Talking about sticks. Last night in the NHL (National Hockey League) the Buffalo Sabres had a game against the Ottawa Senators. Buffalo beat Ottawa 4-2. The interesting part of the game came in the first period when Ottawa’s Jarkko (Yar-ko) Ruutu bit the thumb of Andrew Peters while the two were pushing shoving each other.

I guess Mr. Ruutu did not like the taste of Mr. Peters glove as he wiped his face with it. In hockey that is called a face wash. Just two friends getting together to say hello to each other. My favorite part of the video is at the end when the announcer says that Andrew Peters has been punched in the face a thousand times. Peters received a two minute penalty for starting the whole mess and Ruutu was suspended by the NHL two games for getting hungry during the game.

So that’s it for the first blog of 2009. It looks to be a year full of teaching material for the Sports Guru. So check back often as we continue our journey towards your PhD degree in Sports.

Your friend in Sports,

Dave the Sports Guru