2 Jeter, Derek $ 20,600,000 New York Yankees

So much for the old adage that Jeters never prosper.

smileyy said:

Given that the NFL and NFLPA constitute a monopoly on the highest level of professional football, could an athlete argue he was being discriminated against based on age by that monopoly?

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) prohibits discrimination based on age only against those 40 and older. It doesn't prohibit discrimination because people are too young.

One of the problems in both football and basketball is that there is no minor league system to help groom younger players, so the college versions of those two sports has acted as their minor leagues. Unlike with baseball, though, movement from the minors to the majors is strictly a one-way street.

Because of that, there is value in encouraging athletes in those sports to hold off attempting to join the major leagues until they are somewhat older and have some college education under their belt.

Unfortunately, the rules have been written in such a way that they punish those who choose incorrectly and go undrafted. Why should an athlete lose all eligibility just because they made themselves available to be drafted? Those who go undrafted are in a bad situation.

Any of the organizational bodies involved could solve that. The NCAA could decide that making one's self eligible for the draft doesn't strip a player of eligibility if they go undrafted. The leagues could say that all players above a certain age are eligible to be drafted--it's then the teams that take a risk in drafting a player who may or may not decide that they want to leave school that year.

The teaser says the author was strutting poolside while wearing a Speedo.

I get to the end of the article, and it turns out the author was suffering all of his angst over wearing a Speedo while swimming laps.

I don't think of Portland, Oregon as a hotbed of the fashion avant garde, but when I started lap swimming in 1989 the vast majority of male lap-swimmers wore Speedos, including me, the scrawny runner. This wasn't in the trendy athletic clubs, either, this was in a public pool in the basement of a local grade school.

What this article really needed was Graham Chapman, as The Commander, to come in halfway through and say "Allright, Mr. Broudy, stop this article, it's much too silly!" and stop the article.

Pretty funny that Bill O'Reilly doesn't know that Tao is pronounced "Dow".

I'm just picturing him seeing posters for the band Tao Jones and scratching his head.

I know King is big on Proposed Rule Changes That Will Never Happen, so here's one more: Limit the number of punts allowed to each team--perhaps one per half--that would limit all teams in most games (I looked at last year's stats, and the league averaged 4.7 punts per game, with a low of 3.1 per game (St. Louis) and a high of 6.7 per game (San Francisco)).

This would add a strategic element, and would also lead to more scoring, yet it would not totallly take away the punt. I suspect that both third and fourth down conversion rates would go up--third down conversions because there would be less pressure on third down, and fourth down conversions because it would be less of a novelty, and there would also be less pressure--in the current situation there is more pressure on the offense in fourth down situations, because it is such an unusual situation.

We'd probably also see, at least in the short-term, an increase in the number of fake punts. I suspect that could be a short-lived phenomenon, as its effectiveness would likely decrease quickly.

As I understand it, it's only intentional grounding when the ball is thrown in order to avoid an imminent sack. Spiking is not done to avoid a sack, it's done to stop the clock. Similarly, if all of the receivers are covered, the quarterback can also throw the ball away if there's not a defender draped over him.

As for onside kicks, the receiving team doesn't need to touch the ball. I suppose it's not impossible that the kicking team's players could run under the ball and catch it, but it would likely have to be a very high kick, and the kicking team's players still need to avoid being blocked running downfield.

My recollection is that onside kicks used to always be on the ground, but in the past few years I've seen some pop-up onside kicks.

I know this is off-topic (but, hey, at least it's about football), but it's as good a time as any to bring up my pet peeve. Why did the descriptive term "wide receiver" get replaced by the non-descriptive, redundant "wide out"?

Wide receiver was a perfectly good term--it describes where the player lines up, wide, and what he does, receives. Wide out describes where the player lines up, wide, and where he lines up, out. If we have wide outs, shouldn't we also have narrow outs, or perhaps wide ins?

Perhaps the term wide out would be okay if it described a player who is normally a tight end lining up as a wide receiver, in which case it would describe his body type, wide, and where he lines up, out.

Some of the other nomenclature changes, though they took a little getting useful, are actually improvements--"false start" actually describes the event that just took place, whereas "illegal procedure" sounds more like standard Bush administration policy. "Illegal block in the back" says what happened, while "clipping" sounds like a haircut (and the old signal, a chopping motion toward the back of the leg, always seemed to suggest the player had thrown himself at back the players legs).

We return you now to the regularly scheduled King Kaufman discussion.

Foreman spent ages 28-38 eating cheeseburgers, preaching and building a church.

...and producing sons named George.