THE ITHACAN

If a lockout happens in the middle of an NFL season and no one cares, is it still a lockout?

By Alex Holt • September 24, 2011

This past week, the NBA announced that it's postponing the start of training camp and cancelling every single preseason game scheduled between October 9 and October 15. As I pointed out in my last post, this probably doesn't mean all that much to the average sports fan. It's only when actual regular-season games start getting…

It’s only the preseason

By Alex Holt • September 22, 2011

The NHL preseason started Monday night. There are probably less than a hundred people on this campus who even care about this and I might not even be one of them, depending on what you mean by the word "care." I mean as a fan of the Buffalo Sabres and the NHL, I'm certainly excited…

Panic

By Alex Holt • September 20, 2011

Panic. That's the one word that best describes what's going on in college sports. I suppose "greed" also works as well but that's not exactly an unusual concept in college sports. When Texas A&M announced it was leaving the Big 12 for the SEC and Baylor announced its plans to block the move, it was…

The Great Mariano

By Alex Holt • September 14, 2011

Last night, Mariano Rivera earned his 600th save. But as Kevin Kaduk of the Yahoo! Sports baseball blog "Big League Stew" points out, Rivera, his teammates and even the media didn't make as big a deal out of the milestone as might have been expected. Sure, Rivera did embrace his teammates and shake hands with…

Pay for play?

By Alex Holt • September 13, 2011

If you're like me, ESPN's probably near the top of your list of most visited sites, if not at the top. But what you might not have noticed on the Worldwide Leader's website yesterday was an article about a report commissioned by the National College Players Association on the financial value of major college athletes.…

Not just any given Sunday

By Alex Holt • September 11, 2011

Today is opening day for the National Football League. More importantly, it's also the 1oth anniversary of 9/11. Of those two things, I only feel comfortable talking about the less important of the two. But today is not a day to write about what's more comfortable. Don't get me wrong, I think one of the…

The Unthinkable

By Alex Holt • September 8, 2011

For my next post on this blog, I was going to wait a day or two and then write a bit about the recent college sports scandals and their relevance for Ithaca College. That can wait now. Early Wednesday EDT , a plane carrying several players and coaches for the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team of the…

Iron Men

By Alex Holt • September 7, 2011

About two and a half weeks ago, Paul Maholm of the Pittsburgh Pirates landed on the disabled list for the first time in his six-year major league career when he suffered a left shoulder strain. Now I know most people aren't up to date on the rosters of teams who haven't made the playoffs or…

While we were away

By Alex Holt • September 6, 2011

Summer is one of those times of the year where it can seem like there isn't an awful lot going on in sports, at least compared to other seasons. The NFL season is already long over and by Independence Day, so are the the NBA and NHL seasons. MLB is a couple months away from…

Farewell for the summer

By Alex Holt • May 7, 2011

Well here we are at the end of the year, classes officially over and exams less than a week from being done as well. Of course there's still plenty of sports to watch this summer. The heart of the baseball season, the NBA and Stanley Cup Finals and the last two legs of horse racing's…

A No-Hitter!

By Alex Holt • May 4, 2011

One of the most common jokes about baseball is that it's a sport so boring that the most exciting thing that can happen in it is a game where nobody gets a hit. The Reduced Shakespeare Company included that joke in their recent show The Complete World of Sports (abridged), or at least they did…

Where were you?

By Alex Holt • May 2, 2011

This past December 8th marked the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination. Back then, there was no World Wide Web, no Internet, no Twitter, no Facebook, no crawls on the bottom of the screen on ESPN and CNN that draw your attention almost as much as what's actually being broadcast. Which is why when Howard…