Dennis Dodd

(Note: We sat down with Georgia coach Mark Richt last week at the College World Series. It has been an eventful offseason for the Bulldogs coach. He has been to Honduras with approximately 25 players on a Christian goodwill mission. He also joined Yale coach Jack Siedlecki, Miami's Randy Shannon, Notre Dame's Charlie Weis and Auburn's Tommy Tuberville on a tour of Iraq and the Middle East.

At the end he was most moved by a letter handed to him by a soldier. Richt quoted the soldier as writing, "Tell your team and anybody in American that will listen that we believe in our cause and we are not doing this in vain.") 

Dodds and Ends: Is it possible for the momentum from winning the Sugar Bowl to carry over to this season?

Richt: "Like I've been saying, all the momentum that was built, people build it, players, leaders. I like to describe last year that we somehow found the heartbeat of our team. We somehow rode it out the rest of the year. The culture is very healthy when it comes to work ethic, attitude.

We have a bunch of guys who want to be great. This year's guys will have a job of maintenance. It's not like they have to start this train from a stop. Keep it rolling. The juniors and seniors we got are just super hard workers.

We don't even have a senior lineman in the program, just a bunch of guys who love the grind. We know the SEC East is difficult every year. Our West opponents are Auburn, Alabama, LSU and we always play Georgia Tech. Decided to go to Tempe, Ariz. and play a preseason top 10 (Arizona State). Those coaches we're facing are responsible for nine national championships. No matter how good we might be, everybody is else is just as good."

D&E: What's harder to win a national championship in football or baseball? (Georgia, the SEC champion, lost the best-of-three championship series in baseball to Fresno State)

Richt: "I think it would be pretty comparable. Baseball seems like you've got to get hot at the right time. You look at Fresno State what were they the regular season (33-27)? If you have that regular season in football it's over. In football, the margin of error all season long is much smaller.

"My comments were a year ago were: as the season goes on we're going to be a very good team. I just hope we win enough in the beginning to be in the race at the end. As it was happening we were fighting for our lives until everybody else started losing and we kept winning. All we needed was Tennessee to lose one more time."

D&E: You've been on two fairly significant trips this offseason.

Richt: "This was my second trip to Honduras. Both of them were no brainers. You go. When they asked me to go the Middle East, I said, 'I'll go. I'll make it work.'

"They (soldiers) knew who we were. They just loved the fact we came. They were fired up. I didn't know how we'd be received to be honest with you. I thought we'd cheer them up. They cheered me up.  It was like going to a Touchdown Club. We'd get into an auditorium, there'd be a section of Bulldog fans.

"Coach Tuberville coached a flag team against Coach Shannon and Coach Siedlecki. Charlie, he wanted to have the whistle. He was officiating. That was the thrill of a lifetime. One girlfriend of one the players on my team said it was like Christmas when we showed up. He said it was the very best day since they'd been there. They just loved it.

She wrote me a long letter to say thank you."

It's disgusting in this corporate-speak world how utter failings can be spun into gold.

In the end, Rick Greenspan said he didn't want to be a "distraction" at Indiana. That distraction for the Hoosiers' 
AD who resigned on Thursday, would be how he incredibly mismanaged a proud athletic department. How this clown hung 
on this long is incredible.

Under his watch, Indiana has suffered its most embarrassing NCAA moments. First, Greenspan hired Kelvin Sampson 
fresh off his 577 illegal phone calls at Oklahoma. That was so bad T-Mobile was laughing. At the time, Sampson 
to New Mexico State? Sure. Sampson to one of the most decorated college basketball programs in the country? IU could

 
have had its pick. It chose a convicted NCAA felon.

 Hey, Bob Knight was a son-of-a-b but he was a clean son-of-a-b.

Greenspan hired a heck of a coach but one with more baggage than Zsa Zsa Gabor leaving on a two-week cruise to 
Cannes. There were plenty of good coaches available at the time. And if you operate on the theory -- it's only a 
theory, mind you -- that most of them were clean, then Greenspan really screwed up. He compromised the school's 
values and dignity for a guy who had hocked a loogie on the NCAA Manual.

True, Greenspan might have been backed into a corner by a fawning president Adam Herbert and the trustees in having 
to hire Sampson. But Greenie should have seen the situation for what it was: In the end, it was his ass on the line.

 
He could either resign then in protest over Sampson's hiring or wait until the ethically-challenged former National 
Association of Basketball Coaches president (that still makes me laugh) opened his cell phone again.

In these situations the school president always skates. There's always a limo waiting to take him to the airport for

 
the next job or that tax-shelter haven in the Caribbean. It's a great racket. I'm convinced that Enron trained these

 
people. They can screw up a one-man parade and then resurface in some other cushy president's job. In Herbert's 
case, he extended Greenspan to 2013 then stepped down in 2007.

With all the roaches running for dark corners, Greenspan is the last comic standings. His position became untenable 
when the NCAA added a "failure to monitor" charge against the school in the Sampson case. In the 108 previous years 
of Indiana basketball the program had never had a major charge against it. Since Greenspan hired Sampson, there have

 
now been five. That's some damning math.

You just had to gag reading an Indianapolis Star Q&A with the nude king (the emperor, you may have concluded, has no

 
clothes):

Greenspan said, "I just don't think this place should be about me."

Reaction: Don't worry, Rick, it isn't, it wasn't and it never should have been.

More Greenie: "I don't think it's appropriate for me to be the guy that it seems like every three months is having 
some major press conference."

Reaction: Ya think?

Greenspan: "I need a certain degree of visibility to be effective in fund-raising."

Reaction: You won't have to worry about visibility anymore. Please, feel free to hide out.

Greenspan: "Time will tell," if he gets back into athletics.

Reaction: How do I put this delicately? I hear the 7-11 is hiring.

OMAHA, Neb. -- NCAA Managing Director of Football and Baseball Dennis Poppe confirmed for me Monday what I've been wondering about the proliferation of bowl games.

When it comes to new bowls, it's promoter beware.

The NCAA in April approved two more bowl games, the Congressional Bowl in Washington D.C. and the St. Petersburg  Bowl in -- guess where? -- St. Petersburg, Fla.. That brings the total to 34 bowls. Do the quick math and that means 68 bowl slots. There were only 71 bowl-eligible teams last season.

Poppe, here for the College World Series, calls that a safe "margin of error." Three teams? (Actually, the number  varies from year to year but it's still close. In 2006, there were 73 bowl-eligible teams.)

 The pressure is not on the NCAA, which does little more than certify new bowls, but on the bowls themselves. If there aren't enough bowl eligible teams, there simply won't be bowls.

"The only option right now is that the bowl wouldn't have a game," said Poppe, a former lineman for Missouri's 1970 Orange Bowl team. "That's what it always has been (but) we reaffirmed that. The association's position is that granting a license doesn't necessarily guarantee a game."

If there was a possible shortage, why did the NCAA certify the two new bowls? Legally, it doesn't have much choice.  It might be surprising to know that the NCAA has little to do with the postseason. It certifies bowls, assigns officials and sets rules. Other than that, cities, promoters, schools and conferences stage the games.

If there is a glut of games, the public loves it. Average attendance at the 32 bowl games in 2007-08 was the highest in eight years. That would suggest that although seven bowl eligible teams didn't make the postseason last year, there are fans out there willing to watch the likes of Troy, Ohio and Louisiana-Monroe. (The other four bowl eligible teams that did it get invites were South Carolina, Northwestern, Iowa and Louisville.)

The next hurdle for bowl executives could be the dreaded Academic Progress Rate. Beginning in 2009, teams that have posted a sub-900 APR three consecutive season could be banned from postseason competition.

"We are in an area where the margin is pretty thin," Poppe said. "I still think we should have enough teams ... The theory is to provide as much opportunity as possible."

• You might have noticed that the newspaper industry is in shambles. This is not gloating. While we Internet hacks seem to be the lucky ones, our hearts go out to colleagues who are being downsized because of corporate mismanagement.

Two good friends left their jobs recently. Wendell Barnhouse of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram took a buyout after more than three decades in the business. The Star-Telegram has decided to do away with its national college football beat as part of its downsizing.  Also, Howard Richman was let go at the Kansas City Star after a quarter century with the paper. He was covering Kansas State, nailing every breaking story on the beat.

These guys are two examples of how the reader is losing. Newspapers still haven't figured out to make their product  work in a changing media environment. Sure, the Internet is a threat but you would have thought by now that someone would have figured how to reconfigure newspapers.

The major problem is papers being run by corporations instead of journalists. This guy Zell who owns Tribune Co. literally scares me.

It used to be about putting out a good product. Now it's more about profit margin. This bastardization of a vocation causes good people like Wendell and Howard to leave the profession. Courage, guys. We're thinking about you.