Category: Sports

is 71 today. Back-to-back NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco, 1955-1956 — 55 consecutive wins. Eleven NBA championships with the Celtics in 13 years, 1957-1969 — Russell was the only player there for all 11.

Simply the greatest winner in basketball history.

From the Los Angeles Times:

USC offensive coordinator Norm Chow said Tuesday night that he is taking a similar job with the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, thus ending one of the most successful coaching partnerships in college football history.

“I’m fired up — it’s an exciting opportunity to get into the highest level of football,” Chow said. “But my family is very, very sad to leave USC because it’s been such a great run.”

Chow, 58, accepted an offer from Titan Coach Jeff Fisher that will pay him nearly $1 million annually plus incentives. It will be Chow’s first job in pro football after 32 seasons at Brigham Young, North Carolina State and USC.

the man who brought a dwarf (Eddie Gaedel) to bat in the major leagues, was born on this date in 1914.

Read about Gaedel’s time at the plate, told as the first chapter of Veeck’s autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck: “When Eddie went into that crouch, his strike zone was just about visible to the naked eye. I picked up a ruler and measured it for posterity. It was 1-1/2 inches. Marvelous.”

Veeck (it rhymes with wreck) died in 1986. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.

This from Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times:

Frank Gifford says in an A&E “Biography” that in 1990, when he was already a grandfather, Don Meredith was the first person he called after learning wife Kathie Lee was pregnant.

“There was this long pause,” Gifford says before Meredith is shown saying, “I told him not to worry, I’d find out who did it.”

Gifford says that when Kathie Lee became pregnant with their second child three years later, Meredith again was the first person he called.

This time Meredith is shown saying that he told his friend, “Oh no, I killed the wrong guy.”

Super Bowl XL Tickets available now for just $2275 to $4750 each. Take the family! Visit exciting Detroit in February.

From Ananova:

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out.

But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through.

He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

He saPOSTID: “I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I’m glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there.”

Parts of Europe have this week been hit by the heaviest snowfalls since 1941, with some places registering more than ten feet of snow in 24 hours.

The first players were named to the Baseball Hall of Fame on this date in 1936. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America selected:

Ty Cobb
Babe Ruth
Honus Wagner
Christy Mathewson
and Walter Johnson

Brotherly love — I don’t think so. From The Seattle Times: Sideline Chatter:

Three takes on Philadelphia’s hard-boiled fans:

• Red Sox manager Terry Francona, as quoted by the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News: “Hey, I spent four years managing in Philadelphia. On Fan Appreciation Day, someone slashed my tires in the parking lot.”

• Slogan on the official Eagles Fan Club Web site, www.eaglesfanclub.com: “Where the fans are tougher than the players!”

• Ian O’Connor of the Journal News of Westchester, N.Y., on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters”: “The Eagles are the only team in the sport who actually want to score early to take their own fans out of the game.”

In case you wondered, that really is Donovan McNabb’s mother in the Campbell’s Soup commercials. From the The New York Times —

That was Wilma McNabb, the true mother of Donovan. But in 2001, her son’s first year as part of Chunky’s “mama’s boys” campaign, an actress portrayed her. It was at that commercial shoot that Wilma, a former nurse, had an epiphany.

“I said: ‘I can do that. I can do what she’s doing,’ ” she said by telephone yesterday. “I knew all the lines. I’d seen the script.” (And, she said, she had always served Campbell’s soup at home. “Was there any other?” she said.)

Jack Nicklaus is 65 today.

More from Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

TMQ gets a lot of email about network announcers, but rarely critiques them; my feeling is these gentlemen are not expected to be Roman orators. I accept that the bobbleheads will contradict themselves. But not in the same minute! Point one: St. Louis 7, Seattle 3, Les Mouflons faced third-and-3. The Dropped Passes Group came out in the dime. Paul Maguire, who had been urging Seattle to blitz, intoned, “With six defensive backs on the field, they have got to bring at least one!” Seattle blitzed two defensive backs, leaving the wide receivers single-covered; easy slant to Torry Holt for the first down. Maguire then huffed, “Any time you leave Holt one-on-one like that, the Rams are going to go to him.” Point two: Minnesota 24, Green Bay 17 in the fourth quarter. Randy Moss was hobbling to the huddle — but Moss is smart, he knows people saw him hobbling and assumed this meant he could not run. How hobbled was Randy, really? Cris Collinsworth declared, “The Packers have got to recognize that Moss cannot go deep. Al Harris can cover Moss one-on-one. He doesn’t need safety help.” Two plays later, Moss was covered one-on-one by Harris during a safety blitz, and caught a 34-yard touchdown pass that iced the game. “Harris really bit on that move,” Collinsworth deadpanned.

NewMexiKen generally has to use the mute when there are three announcers in the booth.

From the Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

Since the current playoff formation was adopted in 1990, home teams in the divisionals are 45-11, an .803 winning figure. The home teams have just finished a bye week and relaxing in hot tubs as their opponents are out in the cold while being pounded. Usually the reason the home teams had byes in the first place is that they are better than the wild-card round teams. Home teams dominate the NFL divisionals, so check-mark them in your office pool. You don’t even need to know which team is playing! Just go for the home team in the divisional round.

A week later at the championship round, the home advantage dissipates. Since 1990, home teams in conference championships are 16-12, a .571 winning figure. That is nearly identical to the rate at which home teams win all games: During the 2004 regular season, home teams went 145-111, a .566 winning figure. At the championship round, nobody’s had the previous week off and the Super Bowl is just one “W” away. Players leave everything on the field at championship contests.

From Sideline Chatter —

The NFL’s haves and have-nots, wrote Greg Cote of the Miami Herald, fit nicely into an airplane analogy.

“The 12 playoff teams will be seated in first class, sipping champagne,” Cote wrote. “The 20 eliminated teams will trudge ashamedly past them into coach, carrying a bawling infant and rolling a suitcase that won’t fit into the overhead bin, and headed for an assigned middle seat between an old lady complaining of nausea and a snoring 473-pound man in a tank-top.”

NewMexiKen assumes no responsibility for money lost as a result of any recommendations or predictions made on this website.

Report from the Los Angeles Times: Team Name to Be ‘Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim’

Texas by 7½ over Michigan
Utah by 16 over Pittsburgh
Auburn by 7 over Virginia Tech
USC by 3 over Oklahoma