King of Central New York media ...

Greg Paulus played four seasons of basketball at Duke, but he's never been around such talent:



More after the jump!

Jusssst a bit outside: the Washington Nationals preview

Duty calls to preview the MLB season, 30 things somewhat about each of the 30 teams, even the sucky ones. At bat: the Washington Nationals.

1. How soon can he get here? Pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg is starting the season in Double-A ball, but everyone realizes it's to forestall his arbitration clock. The Nationals fanbase (it exists in theory) is basically ignoring the games to wait for updates on his minor-league starts.
   
   
2. The same goes for ... Perhaps slugging prospect Bryce Harper's draft stock will fall just before the June first-year player draft. Since with Washington is drafting No. 1 overall after posting a 59-103 record, it's already easy enough to picture Harper crushing home runs in the U.S. capital.
   
   
3. Over/under on wins: 70.5.
   
   
4. Gut feeling says? Over.
   
   
5. Zim City: Third baseman extraordinaire Ryan Zimmerman (.292-.364-.525 last season, 110 runs scored, won a Gold Glove) is among the best players most people have never heard of.
   
   
6. Useless prediction: Chien-Ming Wang wins NL Comeback Player of the Year in 2011. He was credited with 19 wins one season with the Yankees, people! Ignore that his mechanics are not what they were and the infield defence behind him is sketchy.
   
   
7. Are they really ever going to be profitable? Starting with its first season after relocation, the franchise has been eighth, 11th, 14th, 13th and 13th in attendance in a 16-team league.
   
   
8. Five years is enough: There should be no more rage over what happened to the Montreal Expos. C'est la vie! Enjoy the Capitals losing in the second round, Washington.
   
   
9. Young arms! More than half the Nats' innings (727 1/3 of 1,424 1/3) last season were hurled by pitchers age 25 or younger, including the de facto No. 1 starter, left-hander John Lannan, righty Jordan Zimmerman (who's returning from Tommy John surgery) and left-hander Ross Detwiler (who is supposed to be good).
   
   The infamously awful 2003 Detroit Tigers also had young pitchers throw more than half their innings, and made the World Series three years later. It is surely a coincidence.
   
   
10. Movin' up in the world: They jumped two spots to 28th in FanGraphs' organizational rankings. Remember, there are only 30 teams.
    
    
11. They're not completely useless: Major League Soccer bloggers use the Nats as their bad example.
    
    
12. Their park plays neutral, but you would never know: Their 5.00 staff ERA was dead last in the league in 2009.
    
    
13. Having his bat also means having his glove: The Nats were second in the NL in bases on balls, which seems odd for a 103-loss team. Then you recall it's the National League and Adam Dunn has to play a defensive position.
    
    
14. Randomness in relief: After burning through 22 relief pitchers last season and having a 5-plus bullpen ERA, they're bound to be better in that area, almost by accident.
    
    
15. Just dumb: Letting outfielder Elijah Dukes go for nothing was like "firing the dishwasher (before) the end of his shift," according to Capitol Punishment. Perhaps Dukes had to go, but there's no one to play right field, which is kind of a key offensive position.
    
    
16. Only awkward if we let it be awkward: It's kind of fitting Pudge Rodriguez is continuing his career in Washington, since his growing obsolescence rivals the republic itself for which he squats (not stands; he's a catcher).
    
    Rodriguez, 38, might play long enough to collect the 289 hits he needs to become the first catcher in the 3,000-hit club (it might take him 3-4 teams). When/if it happens, do not dwell on how everyone expected his name to be in the Mitchell Report and then it wasn't, and how he just happened to play for a team run by the then-U.S. President.
    
    
17. Future Hall of Very Gooder: It's way early in the game to predict this, but Zimmerman has comparables such as Ken Keltner, Harlond Clift, Ron Santo and Gary Sheffield, all awesome players who will probably never get in the Hall of Fame. A trade to a big-market team can't come soon enough, Zimm.
    
    
18. Just saying: Nats320 notes 20 years before Strasburg, another D.C.-area team took a can't-miss right-hander No. 1 overall. He would be Ben McDonald, who was out of baseball by age 30, having posted an average 3.91 ERA with just 78 wins.
    
    Kidding aside, Strasburg will be the real deal.
    
    
19. Cool century-old comparisons! Allen Abel pointed out that when the "great Walter Johnson was 21 years old" (same as Strasburg) "back in 1909, he won 13 games and lost 25 for a Washington team that lost 110."
    
    Our seamheadedness will not allow us to let Abel get away without pointing out the Big Train, 25 losses and all, actually had an above league-average ERA in aught-nine.
    
    Also, contrary to Abel's contention Washington "hasn't hosted a World Series -- it hasn't even come close -- since 1933," the 1945 Senators finished 1½ games behind the pennant-winning Tigers, which is pretty close to hosting a World Series.
    
    Granted, citing such evidence shows Gen Xers and millenials know nothing about history as it's selectively recalled by the entrenched older generation.
    
    
20. Since Willie Harris is on Washington, it's a good time to ask: Is it acceptable to say "super-ute" as a short form of "super utility player?"
    
    
21. Fun bet: Will Dunn outhomer the entire Nationals starting outfield, which might include Nyjer Morgan (.388 slugging last season) and Willie Harris (.393)?
    
    
22. Question: What is the #BidenThroughoutHistory version of "they f---in' suck?" In that case, do you take the F-word out?
    
    
23. Two words why Harper won't catch in the majors (if he signs with Washington): Derek Norris. He's a 21-year-old catching prospect who can hit.
    
    
24. Is not fair: Leftfielder Josh Willingham will potentially reach free agency just when the market really bottoms out in two years -- also right before the players' and owners' collective agreement expires.
    
    
25. Prospect porn: Closer Drew Storen and shortstop Danny Espinosa. Get to know these names.
    
    
26. Hate by association: It's hard to like second baseman Adam Kennedy since he's automatically associated with his former double-play partner, David Eckstein, who was plenty easy to resent even before he cost the Jays' Aaron Hill his 2008 season.
    
    
27. One of those tricks of memory: Right-hander Livan Hernandez, who eats innings and no longer looks like he'll eat about anything else after taking up racquetball, is only 35 years old. It feels like he should be at least 40. He earned a ring with the 1997 Marlins, who had a who's-who of early '90s household names such as Darren Daulton, Devon White, Bobby Bonilla and Jim Eisenreich.
    
    
28. Radio daze: The Nats' top farm club, the Syracuse Chiefs has its games broadcast on SportsRadio 620, the very same station that Bath, Ontario's own Tyler King made his AHL play-by-play debut on two months ago.
    
    If they're smart down there, Tyler will get to make his professional baseball broadcasting there this summer ... and we'll ignore the irony of a Canadian working for the Chiefs, who used to be affiliated with one Canadian MLB team and are now paired with the Nationals, who used to be a Canadian MLB team.
    
    
29. PECOTA says: 74-88, fifth NL East, 680 runs scored, 752 runs allowed.
    
    
30. In English, please: Not as bad as they used to be.
    

(All over-unders on wins from 5Dimes.)

Sports broadcasting's King and saviour

Or as they spell it south of the border, "Savior."

Tyler King is knocking people out with his exuberance, his raw power — and his punctuality.

Calling an AHL game on short notice, well, I guess that's more than most 22-year-olds can handle, but our friend Kinger literally pulled it off with aplomb on Saturday. Tyler did play-by-play of pro hockey for the first time, calling the Syracuse Crunch's 6-3 win over Albany for SportsRadio 620 WHEN. You may take aplomb as a fancy way of saying he slipped his patented "holds it ... holds it" into the broadcast at least once.

Granted, Bob Costas also called minor-league hockey in Syracuse when he was roughly the same age and look what happened to him.

Calling it a professional debut is technically right but seems like a misnomer. Tyler was born professional. Seriously, someone is not doing her/his job if Hockey Night in Canada does not have him on their radar screen.

As an added bonus, former Belleville Bulls star Mike Murphy was in goal for Albany, so Tyler finally got to cover a team which Murphy did not dominate. It's well-deserved reward after a couple frustrating seasons of following the Kingston Frontenacs.

DanyWatch: Talking about the game for a change ... but there's a time and place

How about that: On Saturday, when Ottawa Senators designated quitter Dany Heatley dominated in headlines and on sports networks, the Ottawa Citizen dedicated an editorial to sports. Only it was about Dave Smart and the Carleton Ravens!

It is freakin' sweet to see the "Eastern Ontario Ravens" get that kind of love. Carleton could not buy that kind of publicity. When else will Odessa be mentioned in the editorial page of a newspaper in Canada's capital city? Effin' A. It would not do to soak the blanket, wring it out and rant about sports being on the editorial page, or why newspapers still have editorial pages. That seems to be where this is headed. Come along, let's all be contrarian bastards!

First off, the op-ed pages are a huge space-waster. People make up their own minds rightly or wrongly. The Simpsons nailed it 10 years ago when Ned Flanders told Lisa he read everything in the newspaper, "but the opinion page. I don't need to be told what to think — by anyone living."

What Spencer Hall recently said at The Sporting Blog about the death of the general sports columnist goes triple for the op-ed pages. (Pete Toms, always an early adopter, pointed out in conversation a couple years ago there was no reason for him to read a general sports columnist.)

"... the audience is no longer captive. They can roam the internet looking for whatever they like, and if they're under 40, they're not waiting for it to come to them on their doorstep. They are still prisoner to one constant, however: the hunger for quality ... it's not because the audience lost the taste for something necessary. It is because they were making do all along with what they had, and left the instant they got a better offer.

There are practical reasons. Reporters and editors are having a tough time finding enough space for good storytelling. The high cost of paper, for instance, has meant some newspapers have reduced their paper size. The Ottawa Sun recently lost an inch.

Day after day, though, two perfectly good "opens" (newsroom argot for pages with no ads) are tossed away for no good reason other than it's always been done that way. To hell with that. First and foremost, op-ed pages do nothing for advertisers, due to the outdated view advertising and editorial must be separate. Meantime, it is inefficient use of space:

• Editorials: A media outlet's stance can be expressed by betting blending analysis and insight into the articles at the front of the paper. There is a reporter at the Simcoe (Ont.) Reformer, Monte Sonnenberg, who has always worked on that principle. Monte always had his facts together while realizing it is more fun and rewarding for all if the reporter lends a certain philosophical bent to the process (to borrow Heatley's favourite word). .
  
  Monte won a National Newspaper Award recently in the local reporting category. It was not by happenstance. It was something he built up to by refining his pitch.
  
  
• Letters to the editor: Put them on the Internet or direct users to message boards which is what newspapers should have started doing in 1995. Instead, they got started about 10 years late trying to democratize the media and even then, stopped about a quarter of the way.
  
  
• Opinion columists: 95 per cent of the time, any reader worth having knows what the opinion columnist is going to say just by the headline. Most just preach to the converted. To borrow some Flandersese, they have become that gosh-darn pre-dilly-ictable. It is the media equivalent of plain white bread with a glass of water for dippin'.
  

You see the irony. The era of the general sports columnist is over because people can get sports opinions so fast and furious. Yet newspapers, and the Citizen is not being singled out here because it happens quite often, are putting sports opinions in place of news coverage. They are chasing a percentage they cannot catch. What a waste.

Normally, what the Citizen puts in editorials would not matter much to me. It only came to attention via cishoops.ca. That kind of proves the point. As Hall says, the model now for opinion writing is "a devoted specialist ... or even a tangent-hopping single-topic writer ... or heaven forbid, writers who didn't write about sports at all."

An editorial on a sports really should be reserved for when it will affect people who don't follow sports. A good example is when politicians are mulling whether to spend taxpayers' money on a new stadium (and isn't that a going concern in Ottawa right now?)

This more about the mentality, than the Citizen's choice of topic. It was ballsy for it to break the Hockey Reflex. It was a bit of an oasis at a time when the hockey sweater Canada will wear at the Vancouver Olympics is a lead story on a CBC national newscast (take it away, TSM).

There is the argument that media outlets should be more responsive to readers' issues. The Globe & Mail's profile of thetyee.ca's founder, David Beers, mentioned how it once "posted a request for donations, with the twist that donors could vote for which political issues they would like the site to cover, with the money divided accordingly. Over $10,000 poured in."

In Ottawa's case, everyone and her/his cat allegedly wanted to hear about what's to be done with this Dany Heatley. All summer, anything Heatley-related has usually been one of the most popular stories on ottawasun.com.

It does not matter that nothing new whatsoever came out of Friday's clusterfudge. It is even more irrelevant that expecting anything of worth to come out of an athlete's conference call is absurd and anyone who tried to trade off should feel ashamed. Dany Heatley needs to ask his agents what his opinion is on toothpaste, so why are we wasting our beautiful minds hanging on his every word? There is still a far greater audience for Senators non-news than there is for Canadian university basketball. And that's fine.

It was wicked to read about the Eastern Ontario Ravens. Never mind that someone working for free coined the phrase "flinty Eastern Ontario toughness" before the Kingston trio of Rob Saunders, Stu Turnbull and Aaron Doornekamp completed their eligibility. It can also be excused that Syracuse was not included among the big-time Big East basketball schools, even though it did have NBA lottery pick Jonny Flynn playing for them last season.

This is Dave Smart's due, for certain:

"There is the sportsmanship that the team shows in its wins and rare losses. And there is also the pedigree of the players. If you look down the Ravens roster, you will see, not unlike other years, that of the 14 listed players on the program, only two are from outside Eastern Ontario. They are not the Carleton Ravens but the Eastern Ontario Ravens. They are players grown at home.

" ... Smart suffers no fools, accepts no mistakes, will not countenance any bad sportsmanship on the court. He rides referees like cowboy on a bronco. He is single-willed and accepts nothing less from his players. You must be a patient man to play for Smart but the rewards are great and he garners respect from his charges. He makes his players better people."

OK, so here's a simple answer about the article that seemed to be the spur under one's fingernail: Carleton cannot buy that kind of publicity.

Of course, that's because op-ed pages don't bring in any advertisers and don't add any value. You see the artificially created dilemma.

Don McPherson, proof the good guys will win (and why you should respect the WNBA)

Be the change you want to see.

That is one thought that has spun out the the story about ESPN's Erin Andrews (you're sick of hearing about it). One can believe fully completely what happened to Ms. Andrews was simply indicative of a sick nut and a criminal act, but treat it as a jumping-off point to express hope some of the sexism in sports perpetuated on the web won't last forever. That's not the same as blaming people for what happened.

It is germane that Don McPherson (pictured) has been in the news while all this is going on. McPherson, who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame last week, has found a post-football calling as a spokesman against domestic violence. Writing a post about him would have been a bit of a stretch for this site (and to be crystal-clear, no one is trying to draw a parallel between what happened to Andrews and domestic violence). Thankfully, this country's ace football reporter, Dave Naylor, not only wrote a post about McPherson's work but re-posted a 2004 article he did on the former Syracuse QB:

"McPherson has always had a strong interest and awareness of social issues. Part of that came out of his experience as an African American quarterback at a time when the position was mostly open to whites. And part of it came from the uneasiness he felt in the role of a star athlete, everything from the special treatment he received to the impressions the public had about how star athletes were supposed to act.

"When he retired in 1994, he had difficulty moving on with his life and began exploring the reasons why, eventually focusing on the issues of masculinity as they applied to athletics and society in general."

"What came out of it was a career as one of America’s most prominent spokespersons on the issue of domestic violence and the ways in which men deal with the pressures and expectations related to masculinity. Don has spoken to U.S. Congress, been on Oprah Winfrey and crossed North America speaking to audiences of all sorts.

"And with the profile of a retired football player, he is able to reach new audiences with these kinds of talks. He is also the founder and former executive director of the Sports Leadership Institute at Adelphi University on Long Island."

McPherson is not the first person nor the last player who was ambivalent about certain aspects of pro football. It was a big theme in North Dallas Forty. There was a quarterback around the same age as McPherson named Timm Rosenbach, who walked away from the NFL in the early 1990s because "he began to 'despise,' as he said, the dehumanizing aspects of football that 'can turn you into an animal.' " (Ira Berkow, The New York Times, Oct. 3, 1993.) One of McPherson's teammates at Syracuse, defensive end-turned-author Tim Green, also wrote a book called The Dark Side of the Game.

That is relatable. Everyone is ambivalent about certain things in their professions. Typically, one just learns to go along to get along.

There is a lesson in reading about McPherson's work. Here is a person who is trying to engage people and make it clear individual acts of idiocy (and a man striking a woman is idiotic) don't happen in a vacuum. Oftentimes, it is a reflection of a society which will look the other way about such behaviour. As Naylor related in 2004, the gist of McPherson's message includes:

"The good guys must meet the challenge. Male silence is unacceptable.

"All men have women in their lives they care about. Yet male language often casts them as lesser beings. Telling a boy that 'you throw like a girl' insults both him and girls. The impression can last a lifetime."

Eradicating domestic violence, of course, is way more important than changing how women are represented in sports media. However, the "silence is unacceptable" part should strike a note with anyone who has ever wanted to change anything about her/his profession.

As you can guess, on this end that would entail how the sports media in North America depicts women. This is coming from a male feminist, but one who is also a What Is guy.

There was little arguing when Bruce Arthur wrote in The National Post, "This is an industry of men, writing and talking about the exploits of men. Women's sports don't sell, not really, unless sex appeal is involved. Outside of women's tennis — where Anna Kournikova was the biggest thing in the sport, and not for her play — women are largely destined to be cheerleaders, or sideline reporters, or ignored."

Arthur, who's a fine writer, was just stating What Is. It's a minor point to note Women's Professional Soccer has had a successful launch or that the WNBA might add another stand-alone franchise (one that doesn't share an arena with the NBA) and that its has increased sponsorships and stayed lean and mean, much like the CFL, another niche league (an entire WNBA team's payroll is less than $1 million for an 11-player roster). If you believe betting action signifies a groundswell of support for a sport, it's noteworthy that Covers.com, a sports betting site, offers advice on WNBA games, which is proof the league is getting more respect or that gamblers will bet on anything.

It's not clear how one brings about change. On a personal level, while writing features for Sun Media on high school and university-aged athletes the past two years, there has always been an effort to give the young females and males equal space. Write a feature about a girl from the west end one week, then try to find a boy from the east end the next. Similarly, on cisblog.ca, Rob Pettapiece came up with the idea of eschewing the label women's basketball on posts and just using basketball.

Those are small moves, but maybe it's better than directly challenging people. Local actions have universal repercussions, right?

In a sense, the person who violated Erin Andrews was a grotesque. That's a literary term for a reprehensible being who points out a society's hypocrisies. No one is to blame for what happened save for the perpetrator ). Perhaps wanting to believe it ends with the perpetrator is because people don't want to challenge their beliefs. And that is fine. You're not required to use sports for introspection.

However, to some extent, it does "lay bare the Internet culture ... that preaches everything is designed for entertainment." (Chris Zelkovich, Sports Media Watch.) We also know that in Arthur's "industry of men," many conversations take place about women that leave people "mortified," in Jeff Pearlman's phrasing. Perhaps that has to change, little by little.

Maybe if you're a guy, you don't see why you should have to care. Think of Don McPherson, though, who saw something he couldn't abide and has spoken up. There's someone being the change he wants to see. It's probably not easy.

(McPherson's work had come to attention before Naylor wrote about him, but it seemed like a stretch for this site. McPherson played at Syracuse, but that 1987 season was ahead of my time and I am an Orange basketball fan who never paid much attention to the football team even when Donovan McNabb was leading them to the Orange Bowl. You know that was a long time ago.)

Update: Oddly enough, a few hours after this post went up, Ben York wrote a piece for Dime magazine, "Why You Need To Pay Attention To The WNBA."

"The general knock against the WNBA (usually from people who haven’t spent a single minute watching it) is that it’s less fun or enjoyable to watch; the players are faster, better, and flashier in the NBA. To that I have to pull the 'true fan; card. Yes, there is probably more flash, showmanship, and dunking in the NBA … but does that really make it a better league to watch? On the contrary, too often it becomes solely about that and the basic foundations of the game are lost. Hey, I enjoy seeing an amazing dunk or athletic play as much as the next person, but I also love to see good, team basketball. If you’re honest with yourself, this has been lacking in the NBA collectively for years. However, the WNBA is built upon damn near perfect fundamentals and structured (but no less fun) team basketball. Plus, there is so much competition for minutes and a recurring roster spot that no player can afford to take a night off."

Related:
McPherson gets his due (Naylor's Sideline View, July 20)

College football: Just here for the jokes

Coming of age in a Canadian border town, and being a fan for all seasons, nurtured a deep and abiding reverence for U.S. college football's old Eastern powerhouses.

These days, it takes the form of:

• Being a Michigan and Syracuse sympathizer, which should not be confused for "supporter."
  
• Never passing up a chance to make sport of that team with gold helmets in South Bend, Indiana.
• Wondering how long Penn State will have to wait to join the 21st century. Joe Paterno just might coach until he's 130 years old.

In the spirit of that, the past 24 hours would have to rate as particularly outstanding. There's a story in The New York Times that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish want to play a game against Army at the new Yankee Stadium, just like they did in the days when wide receivers were called "offensive ends" and those offensive ends were usually all white guys. Far be it to point out appealing to nostalgia can sometimes be the worst kind of cynicism, since the past is a place where, hey-hey, things cannot get any worse after going 10-15 the past two seasons under Charlie Weis.

You can respect what happened in the past and realize it was past. It's odd and off-putting to want to harken back to a thankfully bygone era that predates good things in college football, like integration, the two-platoon system and New York City being less important to the grand scheme of things than places Sinatra never sung about, like Lubbock, Texas and and Gainesville, Florida.

One impulse is to let the blue-and-gold babies have their bottle. Notre Dame wanting to play Army at the Yankees' monument to malfeasance isn't about honouring the Four Horsemen or Johnny Lujack.

Notre Dame is simply trying to ensure it never has to play more thanfour games a season (out of 12) in an opposing team's stadium. Their tentative schedule through 2014 is loaded with neutral site games:

• vs. Washington State in San Antonio this season;
• vs. Army at Chicago;
• vs. Navy in Dublin, Ireland;
• vs. Arizona State at Arlington, Texas;

A modest suggestion is Notre Dame should schedule a game against Turner Gill's Buffalo Bulls at Rogers Centre in Toronto. Of course, they'd probably lose.

Deadspin was on this:

"Great news! The most obnoxiously self-indulgent team in college football wants to join forces with the most obnoxiously self-indulgent team in baseball. Yes, folks: Notre Dame wants to play football in shiny new Yankee Stadium.

"The guy goes on to yammer incontinently about the "great historical significance" of a mediocre college football program playing tackle football in a brand new, boondoggling slot machine of a ballpark — excuse me, stadium. I'll grant him that such an event would be "historically significant," but only to the extent that it would very likely create a vast sucking vortex of televised insufferability such as the world has never known. At least, not since the last time Michael Kay called a baseball game.

Meantime, as for Syracuse, The Times' college football countdown has ranked Kinger's new favourite team No. 103 in the country. That's kind of bad for a school which has had so many great football players that Marvin Harrison isn't even included in the old grey lady's top five (Harrison is the fourth-leading receiver in NFL history).

There is the residual hope that comes with a coaching change. The new head football coach, Doug Marrone, was successful in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints and he played for the 'Cuse. At the same time, when someone is saying a home game against the University of Maine (a lower-division team) is a must-win, there's a long way to go.

Granted, there is some appeal to becoming an Orange fan for sports other than basketball just for the jokes, but what would that make me?*

(* An even bigger A-hole than usual?)

CIS Corner: Coolidge crosses canal to coach Carleton

Notes on our athletes and teams of interest from The 613 ... incidentally, it's possible former Duke basketball player Greg Paulus could be the second-most famous student in Syracuse's Newhouse School of Communications, after Kinger.

Ravens: Veteran coach Shelley Coolidge crossing the canal to lead the Carleton women's hockey team after being behind the bench at Ottawa for many seasons. It's a pretty good score for Carleton and if memory serves, Coolidge will be the first woman to be head coach of the team since it moved up to varsity. It could be taken as a sign Carleton is really trying to push women's hockey.

There have been others who coached at both schools, most notably Andy Sparks in basketball, and probably a few in football too.

Golden Gaels: Queen's put out a formal announcement Wednesday (someone was wiped after covering a high school track meet on a humid day) announcing offensive linemen Josh Prinsen (6-foot-7, 290 lbs.) from Bayridge in Kingston and Matt Lapointe (6-foot-4, 270 lbs.) from St. Peter in Ottawa are coming. (This was noted a few months back.)

Meantime, Google alerts turn up the strangest stuff, like an article out of Michigan about a scholar-athlete named Jamie McDevitt-Irvin who plans to skate for the women's hockey Gaels. In the absence of an educated guess about her hockey skill, there was this curious quote:

" 'There's not a lot of difference between Canadian schools and American schools,' McDevitt-Irwin said. 'They speak English, although I did take a French class at Central Michigan just in case.' "

That shouldn't come up too often in Kingston.

Hoops: Two players from the 613 will play for Canada at this summer's FIBA Americas qualifiers. Kellie Ring, a guard for Louis-Riel and the Ottawa Shock club team, is on the cadette team. Jory McDonald, a 6-foot-1 post player from Kingston, was the subject of a great feature in today's Kingston Whig-Standard by Mike Koreen.

The cadet team is bringing in Ryan Evan, a 6-foot-10 (!) post from Earl of March in Kanata, for a final look. They have six players vying for the final two roster spots.

(It's been a while since a Kingston-area lady baller went down to a NCAA Division 1 school. At one point a decade ago, there were three at one time. Major points if you can remember.)

CIS Corner; GGs part ways with former Syracuse guard

Saying Josh Wright went wrong for the Ottawa Gee-Gees was a bit much. At the end of the day, Ottawa coach Dave DeAveiro took a high-reward move on a legit NCAA D-1 point guard. The just-the-facts-ma'am is that the Gee-Gees were ranked high as No. 2 in the country and ended up bowing out of the Final 8 hunt with a 20-some-point loss to Western in the first round. There's no getting past that, really, although granted, Western was probably good enough to win the national championship.

"Guard Josh Wright will not return to the Gee-Gees men's basketball team next season.

"The six-foot-one transfer from Utica, New York who played half a season in the CIS is hoping to secure a professional contract in Europe.

" 'It's something we thought would happen,' said Gee-Gees men's head basketball coach Dave DeAveiro. 'It was his goal to play pro somewhere.'

"Wright, 22, scored just under 17 points per game over 12 regular season games with uOttawa after joining the Gee-Gees in December, 2008 following three seasons at Syracuse.

"It is not known where Wright intends to play. A call to his home in New York State was not returned." — school release

Wright was a treat to watch, but there were a few along press row at the Final 8 who felt he did not make Gee-Gees combo guard Josh Gibson-Bascombe a better player.

The Gee-Gees will be a bit of a X-factor in the OUA in 2009-10. Carleton has the automatic entry into the Final 8, so once again an OUA East team will have two shots to qualify for nationals, either be winning the division or a third-place game. Ottawa will have new starters at the 4 and 5 spots, since David Labentowicz and Dax Dessureault have graduated. Forward Nemanja Baletic and centre Louis Gauthier each started to come on at the end of last season.

Sophomore swingman Warren "Worldwide" Ward is going to have nights where he takes your breath away, while third-year man Jacob Gibson-Bascombe and fifth-year senior Donnie Gibson are still in the backcourt picture.

Cross-posted to cisblog.ca.

Hoops: Six overtimes, seriously

The best way to put Syracuse's six-overtime win over UConn last night is that the No. 2 team in the NCAA, Pittsburgh, lost earlier in the night. Almost no one noticed.

Toronto's Andy Rautins had no small part, hitting a buzzer-beating, contested three to force the fourth overtime and hitting another to put the 'Cuse ahead to stay in the sixth.



The greatest game ever played (according to the weird guy at the end of the clip, language NSFW)? Not likely. This wasn't N.C. State over Maryland in 1974. But it was a hell of a game.

One Shining Moment originator dies; but our wasted youth is eternal

Doug Towey, the man behind making One Shining Moment into the anthem of CBS' NCAA Tournament coverage, died earlier this week. It would be remiss to not acknowledge his passing.

"Folk singer David Barrett penned the song in 1986 and gave it to his high school friend CBS News Chief Investigative Correspondent, and then Sports Illustrated staff writer, Armen Keteyian. He passed it along to Towey who planned to use it to accompany the network's closing highlights of Super Bowl XXI in January 1987. But due to long-running interviews the song never made it to air.

A couple of months later, Towey was looking for a way to bring CBS Sports' NCAA Tournament coverage to a close and decided to use it. One Shining Moment made its Final Four debut on March 30, 1987, following Keith Smart's baseline jumper in the final seconds that gave Indiana a 74-73 victory over Syracuse.

It's schmaltzy as all hell, but you'd defy anyone not to get a little misty.

Two personal favourites always stick out: One was 1997, Arizona's overtime win over Kentucky (the Wildcats beating the Wildcats), just for the shared experience of a bunch of guys sitting in the TV room at a university residence, living and dying with every basket, every foul. There was so pent-up emotion in that room that once it was over, the only way to let it out was to throw on some sweats and running shoes and go out and play touch football on the lawn outside, even though it was midnight out and snowing heavily. Of course, we waited for One Shining Moment.



Last, but not least, Syracuse in 2003.



There was room full of yelling, screaming 19-year-olds that night, at least not with that mid-20-something who watching on a TV in a newspaper office's boardroom. Times change and you learn to put away childish things, but not all of them.

Related:
Strange karma: CBS' "One Shining Moment" guy dies (Los Angeles Daily News; via The Quad)

Hoops: Joseph maturing, and that's half the Battle

Toronto baller Devoe Joseph got the equivalent of a freshman paddling.

Joseph had a season-high 23 points, all in the second half (he made 7-of-8 three-point shots), for the Minnesota Golden Gophers in a loss to Penn State that really put a crimp in their NCAA Tournament ambitions. He also had the ball ripped in the backcourt when his team was down by one in the final minute. Penn State's Talor Battle ended up getting a three-point play out of it, which iced the game.

A feature story on Joseph in today's Minny Star-Tribune that mentioned that he's had issues with turnovers (he has more giveaways than assists, never good for a guard), but he's been blossoming for Minnesota. The 23 points he scored across the final 20 minutes today was more than double his season high in any game this season and he's been pushing Gophers starting point guard Al Nolen for playing time.

Andy Rautins chipped in with 13 points in Syracuse's slump-snapping overtime win over Georgetown, so it was a pretty good day for Canadian ballers. The obvious hope would be that a few will be playing in the NCAA Tournament, which would give the national media more of a hook.

Related:
Settling into role part of U freshman's education (Myron P. Medcalf, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

Seeing red over the land of the Orange

One tries to maintain some privacy and a stiff upper lip ... but readers are owed an explanation if something happens that affects your ability to provide a service to them.

Last week, I wrote an article about Ottawa Gee-Gees basketball guard Josh Wright for the Ottawa Sun's Jan. 8 edition. It appears that around 3:22 p.m. Eastern time that day, it was posted verbatim by WTVH, the CBS affiliate in Syracuse, N.Y., where Wright previously played for the Syracuse Orange. They tried to cover their tracks by saying "Reprinted from Ottawa Sun," but it was not authorized. At best, it's not fair use and at worst it is out and out plagiarism. The fact it is was the third most popular story as of midnight Sunday (more than their story about the Orange's win Saturday over Rutgers) is cold comfort, especially when it's your work and you're not getting any of the revenues. Not to get on the high-horse, but the facts are on my side.

(Update, Jan. 12, 5:20 p.m. — the story has been taken down from WTVH-5's website and its sports director apologized "wholeheartedly" over the phone.)

I wrote posts earlier on the night before teasing the article for this site and for cisblog.ca, lest anyone dispute the timeline. The Kingston Whig-Standard, a sister paper of the Sun's, also ran the article ("Former NCAA player joins Ottawa," Jan. 9).

It is true that blogs do use other media to provide context for their posts. However, we all take pains to make sure that we are not representing someone else's work as our own. That did not happen in this instance.



Since when do American TV reporters use phrases such as "non-puck-headed Canadians?" Is that WTVH's target demographic all of a sudden?



The individuals responsible at WTVH might think they did by saying, "Reprinted from Ottawa Sun," but that is insufficient. At this time, there is not a lot of collaboration and content-sharing between metropolitan newspapers in Canada and network affiliates in upstate New York. Our beats seldom overlap.

Hopefully my ant overlords will talk to their ant overlords, and this will be smoothed out to everyone's satisfaction. I'm pissed off and don't know when that will not be the case.

Thanks for listening. Every effort will be made to carry on and keep on keepin' on at Out of Left Field, but it's going to be tough for the next few days.

(Rob Pettapiece has a put a companion post up at cisblog.ca. Thanks so much, Rob.)

Snark break ... new meaning to 'football mum'

As you readied for Trafficageddon, Day 2 ... and Bryan McCabe's much-anticipated return to the Air Canada Centre.

A good friend became a parent the other day (congratulations!), but suffice to say it probably wasn't like this:

"A football-mad mother stunned hospital midwives by demanding to give birth wearing the strip of her favourite team. Jennifer Peaty astounded staff at Falkirk Royal Infirmary with her unusual request to get changed shortly after going into labour. Husband Kevan was on hand to help his wife into his favourite Falkirk Football Club shirt shortly before the birth of the couple's first son."

Country star Carrie Underwood and the Senators' Mike Fisher are an item. She already recorded a fight song for Ottawa's playoff run. It's called Just A Dream.

(Yes, linking to the song to explain the joke is hacky, but someone'e ego could not handle having a overlap with Carrie Underwood's fanbase. Like Hank III said, the Grand Ole Opry ain't so grand any more.

The World Juniors finally ended. Those of us who like focusing on the 5% that's wrong with it instead of the 95% that's right feel strangely bereft. Talk about a Canadian conundrum. The International Ice Hockey Federation wants the tournament here every year and Canada doesn't.
This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting

• One is more inclined to hope Dan Boyle, the San Jose Sharks d-man, can get another a Stanley Cup ring after hearing him talk about what he left behind in Tampa Bay:

  "I remember back to 2004, to our championship run. An amazing time for all of us. People were excited in Tampa. Hockey mattered. That building really rocked. Now most nights it's half full. We were just a couple years removed from a Stanley Cup, and they blew it up. It's turned into a revolving door there.
  
  "I guess it's only human nature to watch what's going on there, but it's not anything to gloat about. Nothing to take pleasure in.
  
  "It's sad."

  Tampa Bay Lightning owners Oren Koules and Len Barrie: Two more people Gary Bettman would rather deal with than Jim Balsillie.
• As you know, I do support Syracuse in college basketball, and Hoops Addict has them ranked No. 6 in the NCAA. Andy Rautins (Leo's son) is blossoming into a big-time scorer.
  
• Rod Marinelli, the same guy who presided over the Detroit Lions' 0-16 season, might end up becoming the defensive line coach with the Chicago Bears.
• TSN pretty much kicked CBC Sports around the block in the hockey ratings wars.
• Ottawa's Tyler Holmes starts for Tulsa vs. Ball State in tonight's GMAC Bowl (8 p.m. Eastern, The Score).

CIS Corner: Wright on, we have a controversy

The questions about former Syracuse point guard Josh Wright (pictured) playing for Ottawa are swirling like snowflakes.

One can only wonder what led to Wright, who's a year out from an unceremonious departure from The 'Cuse and four months removed from an arrest in connection with a theft, playing for Ottawa. The former starter for the Orange played for the Gee-Gees for the first time today, scoring 20 points in 21 minutes in an 82-67 win over Saskatchewan at the Wesmen Classic in Winnipeg.

Ottawa coach Dave DeAveiro presumably knows what he's doing though, and is savvy enough to know bringing in a NCAA transfer who's got some baggage is bound to start some squawking, especially when you share a city with the Carleton Ravens, who are deified not just for winning, but how they win — solid, team basketball — and with whom — players mostly from Eastern Ontario.

Wright, who played three seasons at Syracuse, was a much-ballyhooed recruit out of Utica, a city which has seen better days. Long story short, he never lived up to the massive expectations that were placed on him and with the 'Cuse in its post-Carmelo Anthony malaise, he became a bit of a whipping boy among the fans and media.

The fair way to handle this is to reserve judgment and presume it's all on the up and up. There is something to be said for second chances. Division 1 basketball players in the NCAA are among the most exploited athletes in North America. A lot of them are coming from a very far-off place that most of us should be glad we can't relate to, so heaping scorn on them when they screw up is a bit high-handed.

DeAveiro has worked with Canada Basketball the past few summers and, as you know, national team coach Leo Rautins' son, Andy, is a guard at Syracuse. There might have been some connection there. From a pure basketball standpoint, Wright makes a youngish, thinnish Gee-Gees team significantly better and he provides a second scoring guard to play off Josh Gibson-Bascombe.

(Cross-posted to cisblog.ca.)

Orange they glad Andy Rautins missed that 3 from the corner...

Every 23 seasons, Cleveland State pulls off a stunner at the Carrier Dome. It's the first loss all season for the Orange.

Snark break...

It's not clear what the Boston Red Sox are thinking by introducing new uniforms. New Englanders aren't the type to jump on the bandwagon and snap up officially licensed merchandise willy-nilly.

Will Leitch has suggested that instead of saying you're going to "scalp" an extra ticket to a sports event, you should say you're going to "Blago" it.

Disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich should have been indicted long ago just for what he told ESPN.com's Gene Wojciechowski during a 2004 interview, "Baseball is a metaphor for life, and it's very much a metaphor for politics. Politics is very competitive. The campaigns are long, just like baseball seasons. Like innings in a ballgame, you have a certain game plan. You have tactics and strategies." Enjoying baseball is hard enough without the George Will-type dilettante drudges who are always looking for meaning between the white lines.

It's owners such as the Tampa Bay Lightning's who are responsible for leading the Frank D'Angelos of the world to believe they could own a NHL team. Investigate Barry Melrose all you want, fellas.

The Philadelphia Phillies ace Cole Hamels called the New York Mets "choke artists" yesterday. You'd think he'd just led his team to the World Series title or something.

A day in the life for a Minnesota Vikings fans: Interior linemen kick butt in court, team courts disaster by going with Tarvaris Jackson as its starting quarterback.

(Seriously, T-Jack is gonna be OK. He just needs a receiver like the Chicago Bears' Devin Hester, who can draw a pass interference flag whenever the QB underthrows him or overthrows him by 10 yards, which happens a fair bit with Kyle Orton.)

A happy 58th birthday to Battlin' Billy Smith. It seems like yesterday that the last welt he left on a crease-crashing NHL forward's leg healed. Actually, it probably was yesterday.

The Columbus Blue Jackets are letting Nikita Filatov play in the World Junior Hockey Championship for Russia, which is training in Kingston. This will be the first time any Frontenacs fans have seen a good European player up close since Larry Mavety's been GM.

(OK, Radek Smolenak. That's one in 11 seasons.)

You know what's great as a Toronto sports media consumer? Hearing Howard Berger do a fluff piece on Lee Stempniak being from Buffalo in the afternoon and then reading the same damn story in the paper the next day. Isn't pack reporting great?

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting

• Vancouver basketball phenom Bol Kong, who's been barred from entering the U.S. due to his Sudanese citizenship, is practising with the NEDA program in Hamilton. This is such an underreported story that's it not even funny.
• Doug Marrone, the next coach of the Syracuse Orange football team.
  
• It was nice of the Globe & Mail to pick up on the story about the Chicago Blackhawks busing up to Gravenhurst, Ont., to visit GM Dale Tallon after his father's death. It would have been even nicer to credit Deadspin for the scoop (the Chicago Sun-Times did)
  
• The score in last night's potential preview of the OHL final: Mike Murphy 4, Windsor 0.
• Baseball Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, now a U.S. senator, is ballsy, give him that much.
• Jason Clermont is apparently a Saskatchewan Roughrider.
  

That's all for now. Posting, will be light on this second-to-last Friday before Christmas, since plans are to head to an OHL game out-of-town, the Barrie Colts at the Kingston Frontenacs. No one will Blago tickets outside that one.

(Listen to Offsides, Kingston's most-listened-to sports talk show, 4 p.m. ET with Kinger, cfrc.ca).

Curb your enthusiasm...

Try not to get too excited: It will be the Buffalo Bulls (8-5) vs. the Connecticut Huskies (7-5) in the International Bowl at Rogers Centre on Jan. 3.

Buffalo coach Turner Gill not only played in the CFL with the old Montreal Concordes in the '80s, but a lot of people in Central New York see him a possible saviour of Syracuse Orange football. There's something. Does that whet the appetite or what? There's is theorizing that getting an extra two weeks of practice to prepare for a game on Jan. 3 that really should be on Dec. 20 will pay off for the teams next season (it didn't hurt Ball State, up until last Friday; it didn't help Rutgers much, going by their record).

So, come on, International Bowl fever. What else are you doing on January 3?

Snark break ...

As you were figuring out how to get by without that extra $5 a year.

Anyone who makes a joke about Michael Vick being this much closer to playing for the Oakland Raiders deserves to be cuffed about the head and shoulders.

A politician in Alberta wants to make rodeo the province's official sport. There's actual rodeo events at the Calgary Stampede? Since when? A lot of people might get a mental image that includes cowboy hats and boots (and not much else) when they hear "Calgary Stampede," but they aren't thinking of barrel racing and calf roping.

Why do we even play the games anymore? Notre Dame beat Texas in a big college basketball game last night, but the outcome had already been predicted by EA Sports Basketball 09.

Cox Bloc has a few choice words for anyone who didn't like Leafs GM Brian Burke Cliff Fletcher making a trade for Lee Stempniak.

The weakness in the human heart. Bob Knight left Indiana Univerisity eight years ago, had nothing to do with the shenanigans that have landed the Hoosiers on NCAA probation, and still it pleases you to see that happen.

(Also pleasing, college basketball-wise: Syracuse knocking off Kansas in overtime last night in front of 16,000 fans in Kansas City, with Jonny Flynn making a tying three-pointer late to force the overtime.)

This above is of dubious worth, but this is worth noting:

• Stephen Brunt's Searching For Bobby Orr is available for $10. If you mentioned you read Out of Left Field, the price goes up to $15.
• Sixteen seasons after the fact, Joe Posnanski is pointing out that Roberto Alomar got jobbed in the 1992 MVP balloting, which means I am not crazy:

  "Then the best choice for MVP league-wide was probably Toronto second baseman Roberto Alomar who was fourth in on-base percentage, third in runs scored, fifth in triples, fifth in stolen bases and an absolute revelation as a defensive second baseman. This is a topic for another time, but it’s so strange to me how OVERRATED scrappy middle infielders can be and how UNDERRATED great middle infielders can be. One of the weirdest parts of the game."

• Former Kingston Frontenac Kyle Paige is the newest member of the Gatineau Olympiques.

Charlie's headset was broken, clearly...

On Saturday, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish lost to a bad, bad Syracuse team which has already fired its coach, Greg Robinson.

So what movie was playing on the Canadian version of The History Channel today? Rudy. Apparently, historically minded types are in fear our generation might might forget Notre Dame once had a good football team.

(This line actually came to mind in the office yesterday, when Charlie Weis' Golden Domers' were up by six over the Orange early in the fourth quarter and there was an Irish fan in the office. Then a sober second thought kicked in -- "nah, it'll never happen!")

Related:

Is Weis done at Notre Dame? (SI Truth & Rumors)

The Worst Football Coach in the Universe (Jonathan Chait, Slate, Oct. 25, 2007)

Bleeding Tricolour: Role reversal on rivalry week

Not having a lot to say might say it all about Ottawa-Queen's.

The Golden Gaels and Gee-Gees have completely changed roles from this time two years ago. At Thanksgiving weekend, 2006, Denis Piché had Ottawa pointed toward a playoff run that fell a couple minutes short of going to the Vanier Cup. Pat Sheahan's Gaels were a .500 team that played like it was unsure of what football team it wanted to become.

That's all changed. This lot of Gaels, led by the likes of Jim Allin, Dan Brannagan, Thaine Carter, Mike Giffin, Dee Sterling, Osie Ukwuoma and Scott Valberg, et al., are the darlings of the OUA. Thirty-three of 36 participants in a cisfootball.org's weekly pool have taken the Gaels to win on Saturday (1 p.m., The Score, cfrc.ca) at Richardson Stadium, which has been named the toughest place to play in the OUA.

Ottawa seems to be reeling. I've overheard people saying that injuries – what is it, six receivers who have gone down? – have reduced their offence to a "one-man team." Still, they came into the year touted as a talented team, and are certainly physical and fast. One never presumes to know what goes on within a football team, but between the knack for losing close games and the penalty troubles, one wonders what's going on. Anyway, here's a quick breakdown on all three phases of the game.

Gee-Gees O vs. Gaels D

Ottawa cannot be written off so long as Josh Sacobie under centre (and his backup Brad Sinopoli is no slouch). He's just scary good. Queen's, led by the Gold Rush II up front, has given up only 34 points in three home games. Given Ottawa's struggles on the road this season and their injuries, Queen's should be able to contain Sacobie, especially with so many new receivers.

Gaels O vs. Gee-Gees D

Ottawa can still play the run, having held foes to just less than 4.5 yards per carry (although it hasn't faced Guelph, the OUA's most prolific running team). The real test is whether Queen's can run the ball on a good Ottawa run after Mike Giffin was held to less than 3.5 yards per carry in the Western game.

Saturday will also provide a first look at shutdown cornerback Chayce Elliott, who has been ballyhooed big-time after transferring in from Western Washington in the NCAA.

Special teams/intangibles

This is probably the area that tips the game to the Gaels. Ottawa hasn't had a standout return or kicking game (they're 14th in the CIS in kickoff distance after being fourth last year with the now-graduated Ara Tchobanian). The Gee-Gees are also the third-most penalized team in the CIS (122.5 yards per game), while Queen's is 20th (71 yards).

It's telling that Queen's can be 6-0, Ottawa is 3-3 and still it doesn't feel like a sure thing. The Gee-Gees still have two games to get straightened out before the playoffs. More to the point, though, the Gaels have shown that they can play a full 60 minutes. There's a difference between being capable and showing that you're capable.

Queen's wins by a field goal (that was the prediction for the Western game, too).

Other business

• Please read our own Tyler King's post at CFRC Sports about ultimate act of cutting your nose off to spite your face that is Queen's administration considering putting the new arena on West Campus.

  "They'll have to spend less on this West Campus rink than on the one they were going to put at Union and University -- a really cool design that involved a rink below street level, so that passersby on the street could actually see games in progress from outside. Do you think this West Campus rink will be as impressive if it’s considered a cost-saving measure? They might as well stay at the Memorial Centre. I'm officially dubbing this new arena the 'Queen’s Cardboard Box' until someone proves to me it’ll be of any higher quality."

  It's not known if the king of Kings is a drinking man, so forgive me for saying there's a mental picture of Tyler draining an entire bottle of Jack Daniel's while he wrote that post -- and then reading it over and bashing himself over the head with the empty bottle.
  
  This and other topics will be covered on Tyler's CFRC show Offsides on Friday at 4 p.m.
• According to uOttawa sports information, the Gee-Gees guard Sean O'Donnell and his brother Matt, Queen's right tackle, have a bet on the game -- loser wears the winner's jersey on Saturday.
  
  Matt O'Donnell wears No. 66 -- which was Sean's number when he played for Queen's.
• Former Gee-Gees receiver Adam Nicolson, now with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, has a hairline fracture in his fibula.
• The Hec Crighton Trophy could well come down to Queen's Mike Giffin against the Laval QB Benoît Groulx.
• Remember, after football, there's basketball, and Queen's is going to be pretty decent this winter. Mitch Leger and Dan Bannister combined for a 45 points in an exhibition win over Bishop's on Thursday.
• One hopes that the Kingston-over-Ottawa karma wasn't all used up on Wednesday when the Frontenacs pasted the 67's 5-1.
• There's a write-up of Thursday night's action over at The CIS Blog.
• There will be a liveblog on Saturday. Send your comments to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

Rivalry Week

This grew out of a post at The Axeman pertaining to Syracuse's lack of true football rival -- who are Queen's and Ottawa true rivals?

Most Queen's fans would probably say that the Western game is the rivalry game. They began played each other in 1929. The Mustangs are viewed as old guard in the OUA. Having Kingston in your blood, being way out yonder in Eastern Ontario, is to always feel like a bit of an outsider in Ontario. Beating Western, especially since it's a bigger school, matters.

Ottawa and Queen's have a rich history of playing each other. There has been bad blood, bitter memories -- Paul Greenhow's 115-yard punt-return touchdown that would have won the 1995 Dunsmore Cup being nullified by a penalty -- and close games over the years. They are the only two universities between Toronto and the Quebec border who play football. Queen's and Ottawa have also played each other continuously since 1970s, unlike with Western.

It's still never seemed like a true rivalry, though. If you did what The Axeman calls the "Family Feud test" on Ottawa fans, it's not clear whom they would name as their main rival, even though there's been a decade to adopt one since Carleton dropped the sport early in 1999.

This could be a commentary on Ottawa proper's tendency toward isolationism (read the chapter about Ottawa in Andrew Cohen's The Unfinished Canadian for a further explanation). Ottawa has no problem being the small city going up against the big city (see Leafs-Senators, 2000-04), but doesn't play the other role so well, even though it's a capital city of nearly one million people. Kingstonians also don't look at Ottawa as the big city -- that would be Toronto.

That being said, with a glove tap to Merv Daub's Gael Force, here are five significant Ottawa-Queen's games from down through the years (not necessarily the five best). Here's hoping there will be more feeling of rivalry.

1. Sept. 7, 2002: Queen's 29, Ottawa 28 -- This was the night that Tommy Denison era really began. Queen's had gone 6-4 in 2001, the first season for Denison and the team's first back in the OUA, but that year had ended with a ninth consecutive loss to Ottawa, 47-12 in a playoff game.
   
   Queen's struggled through the first three quarters -- "You almost had to be there to see how bad the Gaels were playing," Claude Scilley wrote in the Kingston Whig-Standard -- and trailed 28-13 with eight minutes left. Denison, however, authored two touchdown drives, setting up the first score with a 75-yard pass-and-run play to Brad Smith and taking the Gaels 70 yards in the final 1:40 to before hitting John Northcote on a corner route for the game-winning TD with 17 seconds left.
   
   It had the quality of ships passing the night ... Queen's went on to win seven straight and reach the Yates Cup. Ottawa's season ended with a playoff loss to York (ya, you had to be here) and it did not really contend again until 2005.
   
2. Nov. 8, 1997, Dunsmore Cup: Ottawa 24, Queen's 7 -- The Gaels had managed to wrest away home-field advantage through to the Vanier Cup by winning the regular-season meeting in Ottawa. In the rematch, though, the Gee-Gees left nothing but bitterness behind in Kingston, shutting down Queen's offence and pulling away with a long TD catch by Chris Evraire on the second play of the second half.
   
   Ottawa ended up forfeiting the entire season and vacating its Dunsmore Cup and Churchill Bowl titles due to the use of an ineligible player, which one can only assume made it harder for the Queen's coaches and players to get closure.
   
   That was not the case for The Queen's Journal. Two weeks after the loss, sports ed. Keith Gerein exercised his droit du editor to travel up to Toronto for the Vanier Cup, which produced the immortal headline, "Ottawa got stomped -- and I loved it" after the Gee-Gees lost the title game to the UBC Thunderbirds.
   
3. Oct. 29, 1988, O-QIFC semi-final: Queen's 16, Ottawa 13 (overtime) -- In the final minute, Ottawa was in range to punt the ball through the end zone for the single point and win. Instead, it tried the field goal, which it missed and Queen's ran it out of the end zone to preserve the tie.
   
   The story, as Daub relates via Mike Lewis, a one-time student manager who was there that day, is that before the overtime, the coach emeritus Frank Tindall was asked by an acquaintance, "Why in hell would they do such a dumb thing, Frank?" and Tindall, true to form, replied, "Because God goes to Queen's!"
   
   Jamie Galloway, who was a rookie kicker that season, won it in overtime with a field goal, touching off a huge celebration among the veterans, who had lost in the O-Q semi the three previous seasons. Queen's would go on to win the conference three of the next four seasons, capped off with the Vanier win in 1992.
   
4. Nov. 8, 1980: Ottawa 13, Queen's 12, Dunsmore Cup -- The Gee-Gees, with Hec Crighton Trophy-winning quarterback Rick Zmich, were clearly the superior team and deserved to go the Vanier Cup that year.
   
   Nevertheless, a typical fall day in Ottawa helped save their beavertails in the Dunsmore Cup. On an icy field, Queen's failed to score three times from inside the Gee-Gees 25-yard line in the final seven minutes, as it lost to Ottawa by one point for the second time that season.
   
   As Daub notes in his book, that was an era of unbelievably tight Queen's-Ottawa games. From 1979-83, Queen's and Ottawa played 11 times. Nine of those games were decided by three points or less -- including five one-pointers and consecutive ties in 1983.
   
   Over that period, Queen's was 2-7-2 against Ottawa and 27-10 against the rest of the world.
   
5. Nov. 1, 1975: Ottawa 57, Queen's 26 -- Notable for being Frank Tindall's final game on Queen's sideline after 29 seasons. The fabled '75 Gee-Gees, on their way to the Vanier Cup, ran up what was then highest point total ever recorded against a Queen's team. Oddly enough, that mark stood until 2000, the next time Ottawa won the national title (but it wasn't the Gee-Gees who did the deed, it was another school).
   
   "I would have liked to have gone out in a blaze of glory," Tindall remarked, "but it didn't do Joan of Arc any good!"