Rotoworld: Oregon RB LaMichael James and Oklahoma State WR Justin Blackmon among top 10 players who are being overhyped for the 2012 draft.
SportsTalk: Albert Pujols signs with the Angels and Prince Fielder joins the Tigers. Which team is better now?
The Detroit Red Wings equaled an NHL record with their 20th straight win at home, beating the Philadelphia Flyers 4-3 Sunday night on the strength of Johan Franzen's tiebreaking goal early in the third period.
PBT: Boston's Rajon Rondo continues to be named in trade talks, which is madness. The Celtics guard creates offense and makes everyone around him better, which was evident in Sunday's win over the Bulls.
Arc: Syracuse is among a solid group of No. 1 seeds in our latest tournament projections, but the middle of the pack is much more murky.
Miami coach Al Golden says the worst is behind him, but his headaches figure to continue now that former booster Nevin Shapiro, now in jail, says his involvement with the Hurricanes program will result in stiff penalties.
Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods greeted their Sunday pairing at Pebble Beach with optimism. But the day would end happily only for one.
The United States completed a 5-0 rout of Switzerland in the Davis Cup on Sunday, with 19-year-old Ryan Harrison and John Isner winning closing singles matches.
Zambia has won the African Cup of Nations, beating pre-tournament favorite Ivory Coast 8-7 on penalties in a dramatic final at Stade de l'Amitie.
Tessa Worley of France fought off gusting winds to win a second consecutive World Cup giant slalom Sunday in the Andorran Pyrenees. Overall leader Lindsey Vonn was more than a second behind and finished eighth.
Robins: It’s the Year of the Dragon on the Lunar calendar, and this Chinese influence could extend to it also being the year of the Pekingese on the green carpet at the 136th Westminster Dog Show on Tuesday.
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This one was not about a torch being passed, though some people will assume it was handed off to Billy Donovan by Rick Pitino, just like they believe Pitino handed Donovan almost everything else.
No, this story is about a coach building a bonfire entirely on his own.
Florida burned UCLA about as thoroughly as a team can while still holding the final score down to 73-57. The Gators were quicker, fiercer, better prepared and — in a development that surely caused UCLA coach Ben Howland heartburn — they even played tougher defense.
Oh, and they were much, much better coached.
And all of that was apparent in the first five minutes.
“He coached a perfect game tonight, offense and defense,” said Pitino, wearing an orange tie and spending his 30th wedding anniversary sitting with his wife, Joanne, in the first row of the Florida cheering section. “It was one of the best coached games I’ve seen in some time.”
Donovan did it with only so much help.
“Our faculty rep said to me before the game that when you start with something from scratch and you build it up to win a championship, that’s something special,” he recalled.
Donovan was barely two months on the job and plodding along with a 7-5 mark in January, 1997, when Florida won its first-ever national championship — in football. Passion for that game runs so deep in the Swamp, the Gators’ stadium, that when Lon Kruger left the job to go to Illinois en route to the NBA, Pitino counseled his disciple to stay as far away from the place as possible.
“I said, ‘Billy, they don’t have any players. If the AD (athletic director) isn’t patient, it’ll be a death trap for you,” Pitino recalled. “The AD called me five minutes later and said, ‘Can you guarantee me that in two or three years, Billy will be one of the best coaches in the country?’
“I said, ‘You’re 100 percent right.’ He said, ‘Then why wouldn’t I suffer for two or three years if I have one of the best coaches in the country?”’
Pitino, though, was still skeptical that Florida would ever commit enough money and resources to grow basketball at what was a football school through and through — and Lord knows he had been right about everything else.
On Pitino’s advice, Donovan transformed himself from a chubby kid into a lean 3-point specialist and the two of them led tiny Providence College on an improbable Final Four run in 1987. On his advice, Donovan became an assistant on Pitino’s staff at Kentucky, and after a five-year apprenticeship, took a head-coaching job at Marshall that Pitino helped arrange.
And when Donovan left the Herd behind after two seasons for Florida against Pitino’s advice, plenty of his peers still saw his patron’s fingerprints everywhere.
Donovan’s nickname, “Billy The Kid,” was a holdover from his sharpshooting days at Providence. But it was spit out sarcastically, on occasion, by jealous members of the coaching fraternity who felt Donovan had been handed too much too soon.
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North Carolina’s Roy Williams, who was coaching Kansas at the time, was furious about the methods Donovan used to pluck a recruit named Mike Miller out of Williams’ backyard. Former South Carolina coach Eddie Fogler used the Southeastern Conference preseason media session one year to rip Donovan for shoddy recruiting practices. The strange thing is that whatever Donovan was doing to collect players, it was only doing him so much good.
Miller took the Gators to their first-ever Final Four, in 2000, but left for the pros after his sophomore year. Donnell Harvey lasted one year. Kwame Brown signed a letter of intent to play for Florida, but hot-footed it to the NBA straight from high school.
Arc: Syracuse is among a solid group of No. 1 seeds in our latest tournament projections, but the middle of the pack is much more murky.
Arc's five up, five down: After No. 11 Michigan State's 58-48 upset of No. 3 Ohio State, you'd be a fool to discount the Spartans' national title chances now.
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Zambia has won the African Cup of Nations, beating pre-tournament favorite Ivory Coast 8-7 on penalties in a dramatic final at Stade de l'Amitie.
Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
