The Pittsburgh Pirates have gotten more TV coverage in the last three weeks than in the entire last twenty years combined. With justification of course, since is the first time the Buccos have been relevant since 1992, but it still seems strange to be regularly noting that a Pittsburgh baseball game is the highlight of TV’s daily sports options.
Sophomores are the order of the day in the Pac-12 this football season. UCLA, Stanford and Oregon all broke in freshman quarterbacks in 2012 with great results, and now Brett Hundley, Kevin Hogan and Marcus Mariota are back for more. Then we add USC to that list, where soph Max Witten started in place of Matt Barkley at the end of last year when Barkley was hurt, and is the heir apparent this year.
The Pac-12 South was supposed to be a walk in the park for USC in 2012. Instead, the Trojans stumbled, lost the division to crosstown rival UCLA, nearly got head coach Lane Kiffin fired and now look at a balanced landscape for the 2013 season.
The Pac-12 North breaks down pretty neatly into three clear segments. Stanford and Oregon have emerged as the clear powers of this division, with the race essentially boiling down to their head-to-head meeting.
Washington and Oregon State are solid bowl teams, maybe capable of throwing a scare into one of the Big Two, maybe even beating them…but not likely to actually win the division. Then there’s Cal and Washington State that have to hope better days are around the corner. TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage hones in on the Pac-12 North…
The Big Ten has had a rough go of it in bowl games and non-conference play in general of late. The league’s problems started at the top, back in 2006. That was the year Ohio State and Michigan were 1-2 in the country going into their annual season-ending game, but each was destroyed in postseason play. Ohio State again lost the national championship game a year later in decisive fashion.
The Big Ten Legends Division is clearly the stronger within the conference, even if you grant that the Leaders likely has the best team in Ohio State. All six teams in the Legends have reasonable expectations of a bowl game and four can make a legitimate case for themselves to be the representative at the league title game in Indianapolis on December 7. TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage breaks down the Big Four and the two challengers.
It didn’t take Urban Meyer long to put Ohio State football back on the map, going 12-0 in his first year, even while being hindered by NCAA probation incurred during the Jim Tressel era. Now the Buckeyes are free and clear and come into the 2013 season as the heavy favorite to win the Big Ten title.
TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage will look at whether Ohio State is set to run away with at least a berth in the Big Ten Championship Game on December 7 in Indianapolis.
The St. Louis Cardinals get a second chance at this whole notion of going head-to-head with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Last time the two NL Central rivals met head-up, the Pirates took four of five games in the Steel City. Now the Cards get to invite the Buccos to meet them in St. Louis for a big three-game set that starts tonight and keynotes Tuesday’s daily sports agenda.
Oakland A’s outfielder Josh Reddick has been splashed all over the news this weekend, including on the home page at MLB.com, and with good reason. Reddick went on a power binge this weekend in Toronto, homering five times in two games. But the focus on Reddick’s long-overdue home run surge has obscured the fact that the A’s have fallen hard in the AL West and coughed up a six-game lead in two weeks.
The American League playoff race has the same eight teams in realistic contention that there were when we covered this topic in last Monday’s MLB coverage, but the cards were shuffled a bit, thanks in no small part to the devastation the Detroit Tigers wreaked on the city of Cleveland.
I don’t know how long ago these Monday Night Baseball matchups for ESPN had to be settled on, but when you look at tonight’s game between the Los Angeles Angels and New York Yankees, I hope it was picked a long time ago—like, oh, I don’t know, maybe March.
If there’s a word that characterizes the NFC West in the years since the realignment of 2002 it would be “balance.” This division has been balanced in that all four teams have taken their turns winning it and reaching the Super Bowl. It’s been balanced in mediocrity—as in the ridiculous year of 2010 when the Seattle Seahawks won it at 7-9. And it’s been balanced in excellence, as is the case today.
