Random Sports Thoughts 3/9/06

• Which is more important – the regular season Big 12 championship or the Big 12 Tournament championship? Texas and Kansas share the former but Texas will be ranked first this week. Since the regular season determines the seeding for the Big 12 Tournament, giving advantage to the better teams, I feel the outcome of the tournament, which is on a neutral site, should be the final word on who's champion.
• The grotesquely muscular Barry Bonds reportedly took an astronomical amount of steroids and performance enhancing drugs to increase his homerun hitting ability. A new book is out about him and Sports Illustrated is running an article on the issue. Yet he still claims his innocence. Good grief, does anyone even doubt it?
• I've got a feeling that the NFL will finally work out its issues before 7:00 tonight. There's just too many negatives for the owners not to give in. But it still surprises me that the players union will come out on top. They're playing Russian Roulette here and if the deal does not get done tonight, the union has catestrophically failed the players they represented – as I said before, it's the average player who will suffer the most.
• Did you catch the latest changes to the Royals' uniforms? Minor changes mostly, just variations on earlier themes. But you can see them here.
• Will the Royals and Chiefs get their old stadiums renovated? At a mere BILLION dollars, it'll be the most expensive renovation ever… anywhere… for anything. We could build new, better, and more attractive stadiums for that kind of money. I'd like to see them build a downtown baseball stadium, implode Kaufman, and build a new and improved Arrowhead stadium with a retractable roof at Truman Sports Complex. Will the teams leave? No, that's an empty threat. Would you lose the chance to host a SuperBowl? No, not if the new stadium is ready by 2015. And if we do lose it, that's ok. Kansas City in February is not the kind of city that would make money on a Super Bowl anyway. And what happens if the voters pass this corporate welfare? We don't get new stadiums in our lifetime, we go to ballgames amidst a construction zone for several years, and we end up with a big, ugly, quonset hut-ish, bi-state eyesore – which we'll see in all it's televised glory as we watch the Super Bowl at home just like every other year. Look at it here at the website for those who actually want this thing. It's a big hideous hangar!