Of all the American sports … the one that really doesn’t translate well outside the country … the one that suffers most, that I miss most in a sort of sneaky, “oh, yeah, I really like that and miss it” sort of way is … College football.

[Read more →]

Here is the headline on the media release put up by USC this morning. KEVIN O’NEILL NAMED USC MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH Kevin O’Neill. Sure. Everybody had been talking about him. The alumni were all fired up about the chance to bring him in. Which, of course, is fiction. Kevin O’Neill arrives at USC directly […]

[Read more →]

This may be the slowest-moving train wreck in NCAA history. But it appears as if we are … finally … at long, long last … about to see some action pertaining to USC and the NCAA’s enforcement arm. That was my first thought when I heard that USC basketball coach Tim Floyd had up and […]

[Read more →]

Yes, I ranted about the NFL draft a year ago, and I am just so grateful I don’t have to pay any attention to this thing. That wasn’t the case for the first 17, 18 years of my journalism career, when Los Angeles had at least one NFL franchise (the Rams), and sometimes two (the […]

[Read more →]

President Obama did an NCAA bracket for ESPN. A bad idea, really. No possible political gain can come from it. Because eventually he’s predicting 64 teams will lose, and there will be fans and players at all those schools who will wonder why the president didn’t have enough faith in them. I imagine this is […]

[Read more →]

The Bruins and Trojans are in, as we knew they would be. UCLA for its body of work and USC for winning the Pac-10 tournament title, which we didn’t quite see coming. Nice. For Los Angeles-area college basketball (which also has Cal State Northridge in the tourney). But don’t expect any L.A. team to last […]

[Read more →]

It will take a while for the surviving media pundits in downtown Los Angeles to notice … but the last serious player in Inland Empire sports journalism — and one of the final 3-4 in the entire Greater L.A. market — has given up its claim of “major league” status in the past 24 hours. […]

[Read more →]

CSI without William Petersen. College basketball. I anticipated the former. I am a bit surprised by the latter.

[Read more →]

My ear isn’t exactly close to the ground on this one. Not while living on Hong Kong Island where college football is well behind badminton on the list of popular sports. But I have the Internet, and I can read blogs and news stories, and from what I’m seeing, something odd is going on out […]

[Read more →]

Oregon State 3, Pitt 0. That makes the formerly feeble Pac-10 a perfect 4-0 in bowl games this year. Including three victories over ranked teams. And three came over teams from three BCS conferences. Only USC is still out there, and the Trojans are favored to defeat Penn State in the Rose Bowl in about […]

[Read more →]