I should have made an exception for baseball when calling that Grizzlies deal the best in pro sports. Baseball has the best deals, which makes sense because it has the most tickets to sell -- twice as many games as basketball or hockey, with stadiums at least twice as large.

Yes, they had the dollar Wednesdays when I still lived in the Bay Area, and I was a regular customer. Once I was talking to a guy from the A's ticket office and I asked him if they ever sold out those $1 tickets and he laughed and said, "We're the Oakland A's." This was before they became playoff regulars, though I'm not sure I wouldn't get the same reaction today.

po8, it's no secret where I live. I spent my 20s and 30s living in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland (OK, also 7 months in Albany this one time). I now live in St. Louis.

I don't get the NFL blackout rule either. I don't know if anybody says, "Oh, the game's not on TV, I better buy a ticket." But I do remember, growing up in Los Angeles, when the Rams were always in danger of not selling out the ginormously-configured Coliseum, corporations stepping in and buying the last few hundred or few thousand tickets to stave off the blackout. They'd give them away, and get some publicity and probably a tax writeoff. Maybe that still happens?

Someone who knows more about business and economics would be better able to explain the reasoning. It could be that it lines up with the NFL's standard policy of always encouraging scarcity. The NFL never makes it exactly easy to see its games. But it also could be that it's just a holdover from the era when it was thought that TV broadcasts discouraged people from going to the ballpark, rather than encouraged them by getting them interested in and excited about the product. Don't know.

Sorry, folks. Capitalized the wrong team. I do that about once every other week, and usually catch it quicker than today, when I didn't. It's been fixed. Indy is the pick.

I almost took the Vikings over the Lions on that theory that teams play really well in the next game after losing their star, but the Vikings are so far gone I don't know if it applies. We'll find out.

King, you are a disgrace to the family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible.

-- Melody

Melody, how can you say that? Don't you know Everyone Says I Love You?

The Sabin/Saban misspelling, a weakness of mine for some reason, has been fixed, as has the bit about the Raiders NOT stopping opponents 65 percent of the time.

Thanks to those who pointed out the errors. I always appreciate it when readers point out mistakes, and doubly appreciate it when they do so without being jerks about it.

As for why they have to kick the extra point? Because it's the NFL. Everything must be just. so.

But I'm still trying to figure out why the clock kept running for three seconds after Johnson scored. The Chiefs should have had to kick off, it seems to me.

And speaking of the clock, no, DavidWilliam, I didn't notice that, but I'll go look at the tape right now.

I hadn't thought about it, but yes, the Jets made the same mistake, putting the game in Bollinger's hands and not Martin's.

Yeah, there was some kind of mixup.

Portis got tackled with 3:55 to go. The 40-second play clock usually starts two to three seconds after the play ends. And sure enough, in the scoreboard but, the play clock appeared with 3:35 to go, :25 seconds on it. So, about right.

It clicked down to :10, with 3:20 left, then switched to :40 for an instant, then to :25, still with 3:20 showing on the game clock. (That's how fast it was.) That allowed Washington to run the clock down to 2:55, rather than 3:10, before punting.

Now, there's no way to tell from TV whether what happened was a clock foul up, or whether ESPN just fixed its graphic to match the scoreboard clock. I don't know if the graphic is electronically tied to the scoreboard or not.

I'd say it ended up not mattering. McNabb threw the INT with 1:25 left after the play. But still weird.

nyc, the difference between the 1984 Orange Bowl and today is overtime. In '84, the choice was go for the win or go for the tie. Well, nobody likes a tie, so going for the win got more votes. A lot of coaches played it safe and went for the tie, but a lot went for the win in such situations. With overtime -- and this is the main downfall of overtime in football as well as hockey -- almost everyone plays for the tie in regulation.