Sunday Morning Coming Down

 Coach K, the great Duke Basketball Coach has announced his retirement at the end of the coming NCAA Men's Basketball season.  He's coached 40 years and I'm hoping he has a good retirement.  At his mid 70's he and the school have done a good job of picking a new coach early, sending the new coach out to recruit his own players and let Coach K have the good bye tour he deserves. The NCAA is in a state of flux. NIL (name, image, and likeness) is being implemented in a half assed manner that may hinder recruiting somewhat.  There will be more litigation regarding paying players something and the Supreme Court seems to have some interest in the anti-trust issues that exist in an amateur sports concept that is a fiction for schools, coaches, players and media and gamblers.  Blue chip players leaving early, the G League, the transfer portal and COVID 19 are making aspects of college coaching an increasingly difficult. He has little to gain by staying on.   T...

If  Bob Baffert of horse racing fame  had spent more time supervising his workers, his legal bills might have been avoided entirely.  He is not blameless. I liked Bob Baffert, he has trained some really good horses and won more than his share of Triple Crown races. However, a Washington Post article pointed to a fact that is hard to explain, refute or deny.  74 of his horses in California have died while he was their trainer since 2000.  The Washington Post story lists several other California trainers. “He’ll do anything to win, and he’s got all his bases covered politically,” Barry Irwin, owner of 2011 Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom, said of Baffert. “And because of that, he has become arrogant as hell. He’s Mr. Teflon.”     Winning a race when you are an owner or a fan of the sport is fun.   If I am watching a race I almost always kind of close my eyes and hope every horse and jockey comes home in one piece.  I'm almost sure eve...

Three folks that shoulda, coulda, and woulda retired, if they had known then what they know now. Mike Flynn The general probably would have been fine if he had just done what most retired military folks have done.  Working in the military industrial complex for and industrial giant isn't a bad second career.  It's possible the plum jobs are reserved for academy graduates who are comfortable on Capitol hill. I recall watching an RT(Russia Today) broadcast on my cable system.  It mentioned General Flynn's attendance at a gala dinner being held by the Russian media outlet.  I really thought it was strange that he had a seat next to Vladimir Putin given his previous job in the Obama Administration.  On December 10, 2015, Flynn attended a gala dinner in  Moscow  in honor of  RT  (formerly "Russia Today"), a Russian government-owned English-language media outlet, on which he made semi-regular appearances as an analyst after he retired from U.S. gov...