COLUMN Zigs' Picks

Author: Zachariah Allen

And so, the NFL season is behind us, just like that. It is difficult now, sitting here on a frigid Tuesday night listening to George Bush spew lame jinogistic gibberish from the house floor, to think of anything interesting or substantial to say about the NFL season. I was told to write about the Superbowl, but, quite frankly, there is not much to say about the it. The Raiders were cooked early on, and before anyone realized it the game was hoiplessly out of reach, another hideous spectacle that didn't really bear watching -- unless you had money at stake -- which I did, convenmiantly enough, and this panned out well for me. The Raiders had no business throwing the ball with 10 seconds left in the game, especially not after their MVP quarterback had thrown 4 picks; but they did, for some reason, and one of those wily Buccaneer defensive backs snatched it up and returned it for 6 points. I benefitted substantially from this last-second nonsense, but for reasons that aren't worth going into here. And so now, I think I would like to turn my intensive creative labor away from football, at the risk of drawing the ire of the Campus' editorial staff. I don't really know who any of them are, but last week I was stripped of my prestitious title of "Staff Writer," and instead dubbed "Contributing Columnist." I'm not sure if this means anything tangible, but I am going to go ahead and take it to mean that I can "contrbute" whatever i see fit from week to week. It could be cockfighting one week, or curling the next, who knows? The only guideline is that I refuse to do research of any kind; it's not like I am getting paid.



Let's start with the horrible boondoggle that is the NBA. I saw a statistic today: the amount of money paid to NBA players who aren't playing this season for whatever reason (high ankle sprain, drug rehab, too many paternity suits) equals the GDP of Tonga. Nevermind that some cheap, worthless goon like Vin Baker gets 9 million dollars a year, traveling is not really a foul, or that the general play of the game is boring to the point of being unwatchable.



Charles Oakley once claimed that 60 percent of NBA players refused to go on the court without getting high on the marijuana beofre the game. And why not? If I was getting paid 5 million dollars a year to go scamper about in front of a half-empty American Airlines Arena every night. I would want to get high too. The nut of the problem with the NBA is that they put out a bad product. The whole league should be given away to South America as a gesture of America's goodwill.



Some people there are rumored to actually care about basketball.