Football Done, NCAA Tourney Approaching

With the Super Bowl Champions crowned, and with the ticker tape parade already completed in New Orleans, it's not time to turn focus to the Diamond and the Court.

First off, I must say, I feel superstitiously responsible for the Super Bowl outcome. The last 4 or 5 championship games/series predictions I've made have been off. I thought the Colts would have been professional enough and prepared enough to handle the Saints, but the Colts didn't look like they were as prepared as the Saints and certainly didn't play with the urgency New Orleans did. I don't want to write too much about a game that's already been dissected in-and-out (sorry, no Hank Basket comments) throughout the week. I just wanted say my piece on it. I blame the Colts lack of aggression on their coach and I blame their lack of run game on their offensive line. The reason I give the portion of the blame to coach Caldwell is because of the way he allowed the Indy offense to run in the 2nd half. He's got the all-world QB in Peyton Manning, and wasn't allowing him to do what he does best. He kind of put Peyton on a leash in the second half. Not to take anything away from the Saints, but if Manning came out throwing like he normally does in the 2nd half, and that if that one special teams play would have transpired as it should have, the Colts would have won. Still though, hat's off to coach Peyton and Drew Brees for truly going above and beyond to bring their city home a title! They outplayed, out-coached and out-exicuted Indy and deserved to win.

With the Super Bowl now behind us though, it's time we can turn the focus to the upcoming NCAA Tournament and really start to get into some baseball talk. On the NCAA hoops front, the Cal Bears have been rolling of late and are atop the Pac 10. and have a big time match-up coming up Thursday night with the Huskies who happen to be right on their heels for the Pac's top spot. Cal has been led by their two top seniors, guards Jerome Randle (19.1 ppg, 4.7 apg) and Patrick Christopher (16.3 ppg, 5.7 rpg) who are 4th and 7th respectively in Pac 10 scoring. Those two have the talent to carry the Bears deep into the March tourney, but like I said when I was previewing the Cal/Stanford season, Cal needs to get contributions from their front-court. 7'3" center Max Zhang has continued to disappoint, and Cal's top rebounder, Jamal Boykin, is bringing down just 6.2 boards per night. Cal will have to contain Washington's all-around stud, Quincy Pondexter who's averaged over 25 points and 10 boards over his last 8 games.