Since last week, Temple University has decided to up John Chaney’s self-imposed one game suspension, and turn it into a regular season suspension. Temple made the decision after it was learned that the St. Joe’s player broke his arm. Chaney’s also getting hammered in the press.

First, Temple. I don’t understand upping the suspension only after a guy’s medical tests come back. It’s either wrong, or it isn’t. There’s no gray area here. It doesn’t all-the-sudden become wrong when a guy breaks his arm. The issue when suspending a coach is the measure of right vs. wrong in what he did. That’s pretty spineless of Temple to turn their head one second, and then to make what amounts to a public relations move when it’s learned that a guy is hurt.

I still maintain that Chaney should not be punished for this, certainly not anymore because it’s learned that a player is injured.

I can’t say that every coach does this… but I can say that a lot of coaches do this. They just talk about it differently. If John Chaney could’ve just said something like, “He gives us a physical presence,” or “We had to let them know we weren’t going to be pushed around,” none of this happens.

Games are won and lost because of how willing teams are to push the other team around, or refuse to be pushed around. That’s a fact. I know it’s college basketball, I know it’s just kids, but do not think for a second that there aren’t a lot of coaches out there who encourage their team to physically intimidate the other team, to take hard fouls, to “send a message.” It’s part of basketball, like it or not.

I feel like the people who are calling for Chaney to be fired don’t understand that. If you’re going to fire every coach who’s ever told his team to play more physically, and not shy away from any contact… you can go ahead and fire of the coaches in the country, and probably more.

John Chaney didn’t want anyone to suffer a broken arm. I’m sure of that. As it turns out, the guy he sent in to send a message was pretty bad at it. And I feel bad for the injured player, and I wish he was still playing, but at the end of the day, it’s a sports injury. And while I feel bad, I don’t feel any worse for him than I do Travis Deiner or DJ Strawberry.

I’ve been on Maurice Clarett’s side. He’s probably something of a douchebag, and he’s dome some pretty dumb things, but… if Clarett is on one side, and on the other side is Andy Geiger, Jim Tressel and the Ohio State athletic administration… I’m going with Clarett. I feel like they used him and cut him loose when things didn’t go their way. Ohio State did him dirty, and they’ve probably done the same to a lot of other players.

So I’ve been hoping that Clarett would come on the good side of this thing. Apparently, that will not be the case.

At the combine this weekend, Maurice Clarett ran a 4.72 and a 4.82 in the 40-yard-dash. There’s a name for running backs who run 4.7s and 4.8s… Canadian Football Leaguers.

Basically, if his name wasn’t Maurice Clarett, and he was Ulysses Schankenberg of Foreskin State University, he wouldn’t be getting drafted. Scouts apparently think he might be a 7th rounder now.

There’s still a chance he could turn it around at his own private workout on in March. Best of luck.

ESPN was responsible for the following three things:

– E.J. Hradek said a deal between the union and NHL owners was imment.

– They reported that Shaq was out for the year, after seeing it on a fake website.

– Stephen A. Smith reported the Chris Webber trade, prefacing it with “sources tell me,” despite the fact that the 76ers previously announced it to all the media through an e-mail.

And they’ve owned up to all three, which is cool. Now, if I could just get an apology for the existence of Stuart Scott, we’d be set.

In addition, Billy Packer comes through with some logical common sense. Speaking of the halftime show at the NBA All-Star Game:

“It would be like NASCAR (news – web sites) having a rap group at the Daytona 500. It had nothing to do with the culture of the people who were playing the game.”

Billy Packer, a humorless guy who hates the NBA, apparently knows the NBA audience better than people in charge of the halftime show.

I get that David Stern wants to expand his audience, and see if he can get rednecks, country music lovers, and 6’5″, black, rapping, cowboys to like his product… but the people in the building got screwed that night. People who paid a lot of money for All-Star tickets got a fucking rodeo at halftime.

I was at home. I could’ve changed the channel, if I was able to avert my eyes from the gruesome train wreck. A lot of people were able to, however, as the All-Star game pulled down a 4.9 rating, the lowest ever rating for the event.

He beat Chris DiMarco in the finals of the Accenture Match Play Championship yesterday, and it wasn’t as close as the final tally would indicate.

No one was beating David Toms today. He was up by 9 holes at one point. If he was playing against a best-ball tandem of Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods, I’d still put my money on David Toms. This was the very definition of being “in the zone.”

Toms’ first two matches of the tournament went 18 holes. After that… David Toms was like Clubber Lang… y’know, before the rematch with Rocky. He just mowed through people, including Phil Mickelson and Adam Scott.

I still say this should be a major. Match play golf is deserving of its own major… it’s a different kind of competition, but no less valid. Every match is like a final pairing going head-to-head.

A big part of sports is standing across from a guy, looking him in the eye and believing that you are going to whoop his ass. That doesn’t really happen that often in golf. It needs more of it.