What’s the buzz from the world of sports? Here are some items that will have people talking:
1
Tired of the heat wave? Here’s some news to cool off by:
The Portland Winterhawks are the top-ranked team in the Western Hockey League.
The Winterhawks are ranked third in the season’s first BMO Canadian Hockey League MasterCard Top 10 Rankings. The rankings are selected by a panel of National Hockey League scouts.
The Winterhawks have a league-high 15 players attending NHL training camps. Whether the Winterhawks live up to their preseason ranking will depend upon how many of their NHL-drafted players come back to Portland this season. That won’t be determined for a while.
But hockey fans don’t have long to wait. The Winterhawks open the season in two weeks, and they will raise a couple of championship banners at their home opener.
Pretty cool.
2
Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports on Thursday wrote a fine column about college football’s headstrong rush toward mega-conferences. Among the casualties of conference expansion, Wetzel notes, could be traditional rivalries such as Texas A&M vs. Texas, which dates to 1894.
Wrote Wetzel:
College football’s enduring appeal includes history, tradition and regional rivalries, all of which are currently being spit on by the warring conference commissioners and duped university presidents, a group that likes to refer to itself as the “guardians of the game.”
He concludes with this blunt statement: “There’s one chief question on the table. Can anyone still claim the NCAA deserves to maintain its tax-free status because it isn’t a business — a big, cutthroat, shark-eat-shark business?”
For more Talking Points, follow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/talkpoints360
