This is an awful time to be a Los Angeles-area sports fan. It has been mostly dreary since I left the region to live and work in Abu Dhabi, in 2009, but it seems to be bottoming out, the past four or five months. Aside from hockey, which has no significant hold on Southern California […]

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I have suggested on this blog that college sports are hard to follow, overseas. They are. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the notion of “sports” affiliated with “college” does not seem ridiculous. Thus, once you leave the U.S., you are confronted with confusion and disinterest, as pertains to […]

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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Alabama 42, Notre Dame 14, in the BCS title game. For college football. I don’t know what the point spread was, but I would have taken Alabama if they were giving anything less than 17. I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere, that this would be a bad game — oh, yes, on this blog, […]

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For the first two decades of my journalism career, January 1 was the zenith of college football. The Biggest Day. The Longest Day. And we planned coverage of New Year’s Day football in great detail, and needed enormous sections to display everything that happened. Four or five or six bowl games, including all of the […]

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Notre Dame was the team I most disliked, in my youth. They won too often, their fans were smug, their sense of entitlement was off the charts. The Knute Rockne stuff, and the “win one for the Gipper” fiction, and their being good every year … all of it bugged me, especially as a SoCal […]

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Final score from the L.A. Coliseum. Oregon winning, USC losing. In football. Not basketball. A Pac-12 result that ought to leave Lane Kiffin and the Trojans reconsidering, oh, everything about how they approach the game of football. And playing against Oregon. First off? I don’t like football of this sort. The pinball/video game version, where […]

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Trying to put into context a shocking result involving a sports superpower. Al Ahli 6, Al Ain 3 … in the UAE domestic soccer league. The Crimson Tide of Bear Bryant or Nick Saban being routed by, say, South Carolina. The Man United of Alex Ferguson going down heavily to Stoke. That is like Al […]

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Among the melancholy — yet not actually dire — events that can befall a person, as the decades pass: 1. Your high school closes. Or, in my case, all but disappears. Los Angeles Lutheran first moved from the edge of Inglewood to Burbank, and then to Sylmar, where it nearly disappeared and now apparently has […]

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How many of the readers of this blog think “Securities and Exchange Commision” when they see SEC? Yeah, I figure “zero” too. Anyway, the SEC got its all-Southeastern Conference (imagine the first E in Southeastern is capitalized) BCS championship football game … and we got a horrifically dull event. Can we agree on this? When […]

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