This NY Times article provides an excellent analysis of the prospects for recovery of Kentucky Derby champion Barbaro, who suffered a career-ending leg injury during the early stages of the Preakness Stakes this past Saturday afternoon.
The bottom line — this beautiful animal has only about a 50-50 chance of recovering from the injury.
Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro is the latest hope to become the first winner of horseracing’s Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978. If he does, this NY Sunday Times article reports that the unusual training regimen that his owners have adopted for Barbaro may harken a new standard in training 3-year-olds for the demanding trio of races:
[Barbaro trainer Michael] Matz says he thinks he can succeed where six horses in the last nine years, from Silver Charm to Smarty Jones, failed after coming so close to horse racing immortality. He has thrown out a regimen that has been regarded by trainers as commandments etched in stone, opting instead for a new schedule, forged by his own personal setback and inspired by a brilliant colt.
While most trainers organize training to maximize fitness and build race readiness, Mr. Matz has given Barbaro an unusual amount of rest between races in his budding career. Trainers usually prefer to have their horses experienced in having dirt kicked in their face, maneuvering through crowded fields and reacting to adversity before they run in the Triple Crown races, beyond being in shape.
Barbaro, though, ran only five times before winning the Derby, and started his career only when Mr. Matz decided he was ready, in October, relatively late for a horse with Triple Crown ambitions. [. . .]
The 132nd running of the Kentucky Derby takes place Saturday afternoon and this year’s race has a definite Houston flavor. Bob and John — owned by Texans owner Bob McNair and his wife, Janice — goes off as one of three horses in the race with 12-1 odds, behind only Brother Derek (3-1) and Barbaro (4-1) and Lawyer Ron (4-1). The Chronicle’s John Lopez has more on the McNairs and Bob and John.
Bob and John is the most recent product of the McNairs’ quest to to breed a Derby winner, which they coordinate out of their magnificent 1,500 acre Stonerside Stables in the heart of Bourbon County, Kentucky. Under the careful direction of their advisor John Adger, the McNairs have populated Stonerside with a band of almost 100 broodmares and built the racing stable to its current level of about 70 horses in training. Stonerside is currently the sixth leading breeder in North America and the tenth leading racing stable.
Bob and John is following the lead of another Stonerside homebred, Congaree, who ran the second fastest mile in Derby history before finishing third in the 2001 race. The Cliff’s Edge, bred and sold as a yearling at Stonerside, came in fifth after losing a shoe in the slop of 2004’s rain-drenched Derby.
Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal ($) sports columnist Allen St. John explores the bloodlines of every Kentucky Derby winner from 1940 through last year and concludes that, despite horse owners’ dependence on breeding, there is little direct correlation between a horse that wins on the track and one that produces champion offspring.
As noted in earlier posts here and here, it has been rather easy for Houstonians to ignore the NBA generally because the local team — Houston Rockets — has been mediocre over the past decade or so, although at least some recent management decisions look encouraging.
Thus, when I want to know what’s going on in the NBA, I usually just check in on ESPN Page 2 columnist Bill Simmons, whose latest column on the NBA provides about a fine overview on the season to date.
Simmons — who also penned this hilarious column on the Texas-USC National Championship football game — is one of the most entertaining and insightful sports columnists on the scene today. Check him out.
The moribund Houston Rockets — clearly the least popular of Houston’s three major professional sports franchises — announced yesterday that longtime general manager Carroll Dawson will retire as GM after next season and that he will groom 32 year-old Boston Celtics executive Daryl Morey as the Rockets’ new GM over the next year.
Morey is an interesting hire, to say the least. An MIT graduate, Morey has never been a player or a coach, and essentially has spent his entire professional life developing statistical models for analyzing various sports, most recently basketball for the Celtics. Bill James and the sabermatricians have used such statistical models in analyzing professional baseball over the past three decades, but such statistical modeling remains relatively new in professional basketball. Over the past several years, Morey has been an adjunct professor at MIT Solan in recent years, teaching “Analytical Sports Management” with Mr. James — who is currently a consultant with the Red Sox — contributing as a guest instructor.
Although an unusual hire, Rockets owner Les Alexander should be applauded for taking a flyer on Morey. As noted in earlier posts here and here, the Rockets have been mismanaged for the better part of a decade now and have essentially wasted all of the goodwill that the club had established as a result of their back-to-back NBA titles in the mid-1990’s.
Once the toughest ticket in town, the Rockets now play to small and unenthusiastic crowds in the club’s new, gleaming downtown arena and rarely are even a topic on the city’s multiple sports-talk radio shows. Inasmuch as the team has not even been particularly competitive over the past several years with either of its Texas counterparts — the San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks — this is an organization that desperately needs new blood and life. Here’s hoping that Morey can provide it.
While the Lord of Regulation engages in one of his more dubious forms of business regulation, this NY Times article reports on a study that could really get people’s attention as the NCAA Basketball Tournament cranks up next week:
College basketball is a big business today, and betting on it is not merely a sideline for mobsters. It is a national pastime.
One thing about the sport, however, has not really changed since Henry Hill’s day. Of all the major forms of betting ó lotteries, poker, craps, slots, football ó college basketball is almost certainly the easiest to fix.
It is played by young men who don’t usually have a lot of money. With just five players on the court, one person can determine the outcome. And the point-spread system, in which bets are based on the margin of victory rather than wins and losses, allows players to fix a game without losing it.
“There’s every reason to think this is as bad as it gets,” Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
Mr. Wolfers, a blond pony-tailed Australian, calls himself part of a new generation of forensic economists ó researchers who sift through data to look for patterns of cheating that otherwise go unnoticed. . .
You can probably guess where this is going. Mr. Wolfers has collected the results of nearly every college basketball game over the last 16 years. In a surprisingly large number of them, it turns out that heavy favorites just miss covering the spread. He considered a number of other explanations, but he thinks there is only one that can explain the pattern. Point shaving appears to be occurring in about 5 percent of all games with large spreads. . .
Read the entire article. The bottom line — be careful in betting the favorite in games with big point spreads.
Southlake Carroll High School is a suburban Metroplex high school that, over the past decade or so, turned into a proverbial Texas high school football powerhouse. This past season, the Dragons won their second straight Texas 5A-Div. II championship and were named the mythical no. 1 high school football team in the country by USA Today.
However, according to this Ft. Worth Star Telegraph article, as tough as competition is in the Southlake football program, it’s nothing compared to the competition in the cheerleading program:
SOUTHLAKE — The Carroll school district has been consumed for weeks about how to handle the selection of cheerleaders for Carroll Senior High School’s varsity squad.
Investigations have been conducted, grievances filed and several meetings held between administrators and parents. Tonight, the school board will convene behind closed doors to consider a request by parents of 12 cheerleaders to cut more than half the squad members, who the parents say don’t deserve to be on the team. . .
Read the entire sordid tale, which does not mention the possible solution of forming a parent-cheerleader team at Southlake to mollify the demands of several of the mothers involved.
The University of Texas – Texas A&M game that most folks in these parts normally care about occurs on the day after Thanksgiving, but a capacity crowd will be whooping it up this evening in College Station (televised on ESPN2) as the A&M basketball team attempts to derail league-leading UT’s attempt to add a Big 12 Conference basketball title to its Big 12 Football Championship.
Basketball — which is normally a diversion in College Station between football season and spring football practice — is generating more interest in Aggieland this season because A&M has a legitimate shot at making the NCAA Tournament for the first time since, well, this year’s freshman class of A&M students was waiting to be born. The Ags really need a win to keep their NCAA Tournament hopes alive because, despite winning their last five and sporting an 18-7 record (8-6 in the Big 12), the Aggies have only a 1-4 record against top 50 RPI teams and padded its overall record by playing an absurdly weak non-conference schedule.
Nevertheless, a win over the sixth-ranked Horns (24-4 overall record, 12-2 in Big 12) would be a feather in A&M’s hat and, coupled with a couple of Aggie wins to close out the season, might be enough to push the Ags into the tournament. Forward P.J. Tucker (16.4 ppg, 9.2 rpg) and center LaMarcus Aldridge (16.0/9.3) are UT’s top players, while the Ags are led by guard A.C. Law (16.5 ppg, 3.8 apg) and center Joseph Jones (15.8 ppg, 6.7 rpg).
Update: Aggies win on a buzzer-beater, 46-43!
Don’t you love it when wealthy, grown men get upset with each other over basketball?
In this corner, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. And in the other corner, L.A. Lakers’ coach, Phil Jackson.
I think Jackson needs to start his own blog. ;^)
One of the perceptions that the University of Houston athletic teams have fought since the demise of the Southwest Conference a decade ago is that they compete in a “Mickey Mouse” conference — that is, Conference USA.
A conference in D-I athletics these days is defined as a “major” conference by whether the conference has a tie-in to the Bowl Championship Football Series that sponsors the richest bowl games and the annual National Championship game, which Texas won this past season. Thus, institutions in conferences such as the Big 10, the Big 12, the Pac-10, the Atlantic Coast and the Big East all reap more money and prestige because of their conference’s automatic berth in the BCS bowl games. On the other hand, conferences such as CUSA that have no tie-in to the BCS struggle financially and with membership, as institutions in such conferences continually seek to migrate into a more lucrative membership in a BCS conference.
So, with that backdrop, it’s not as if CUSA needs any further reinforcement that it’s not among the “major leagues” of major college athletics. Therefore, CUSA officials were in full-blown, public relations-crisis mode earlier this month when a CUSA football officiating crew was ridiculed by the announcers on national television during the Outback Bowl game in Orlando between the Florida Gators and the Iowa Hawkeyes. The officiating crew made at least half-a-dozen clearly wrong calls in the game, mostly against Iowa, including a game-deciding offsides call that nullified a Hawkeye recovery of an onside kick during a furious comeback in the closing minutes of the game.
After that call allowed Florida to hang on to a 31-24 victory, CUSA’s official in charge of officiating attempted to stem the public relations debacle by publicly apologizing and announcing that he was launching an investigation into the officiating crew’s performance. Nonetheless, the CUSA crew’s performance in the Outback Bowl will probably prompt BCS conference schools to decide not to use non-BCS conference referees in future bowl games between teams from BCS conferences. In short, yet another slap in the face for CUSA.
But it turns out that the CUSA referees’ performance in the Outback Bowl was hardly an aberration. As this Michael Murphy/Houston Chronicle article reports (SportsPageMagazine.com report here), a CUSA officiating crew was generally horrible during the UH-University of Alabama-Birmingham basketball game last night in Birmingham. However, one bad call topped all others — the officiating crew called a technical foul against University of Houston basketball coach Tom Penders just before halftime for collapsing on the sideline!:
With 52.6 seconds to play in the first half, Penders rose to his feet, staggered and then crumpled to his hands and knees on the sideline. After a few moments, Penders went flat as medical personnel rushed to attend to him.
[CUSA referee John] Hampton strolled by, paused and called a technical foul on Penders, apparently thinking the coach was reacting to a questionable intentional foul call on Smith.
Even when Penders was taken off the court on a stretcher, Hampton refused to rescind the technical. UAB’s Carldell Johnson made both free throws for a 48-44 lead.
UAB won by three points. Kevin Whited has more here.
Inasmuch as the only real justification for UH to subsidize the not insubstantial operating deficit each year for its athletic program is the public relations benefit that the university reaps from its athletic teams, are those millions being wisely-spent when the UH teams are effectively forced to compete in a Mickey-Mouse conference such as CUSA?