NCAA and Opening Day

Greetings and welcome back to The Un-Zone, the only known site on the Internet devoted to all things related to Un. OK, so I haven't exactly checked, but at last count, there was only one site and this is it. Deal with it or make up one.

It's the championship game for Men's March Madness and it's between UCLA and Florida. Both teams are very talented, but I'm thinking that UCLA will win a close one. By close, I mean three points or less. Yes, UCLA isn't the most offensive-minded team, but they have a very good defense. They shut down LSU's Big Baby. Then again, Florida's Noah, in my opinion, is a totally different animal. UCLA, I think, with their perimiter defense will push Florida's guards way past the three-point line and might force Florida to take a couple forced shots. What bothers me about UCLA is their propensity for turnovers. That might hurt them if the game gets into trading-shots mode.
I'm thinking the following score:
UCLA: 63
Florida: 61

The Royals begin their season with a game against Detroit. Interestingly enough, the big (and I mean big--$500 million dollars at stake) stadium improvement vote is coming up tomorrow. As much as I like watching Chiefs football and Royals baseball, I doubt that the new sliding roof will make Kansas City a "big league" city by any stretch of the imagination.
The only thing that is "big league" about the Royals is the number of losses they've had. It's like seeing a Kansas weather forecast in the middle of July. Several years of triple digits and we aren't talking about the win column. And the Chiefs aren't exactly "big league" either. Their defense is aggressive but it has more holes than a Dick Cheney hunting victim. They have great potential, but aren't exactly living up to it. They don't make it to the playoffs due to clutching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
The Chiefs were nearly 20 million over the salary cap and they still can't make it to the playoffs. Their defense still sucks, despite having a few moments of brilliance. The Royals won't spend serious money to get players with proven talent. When they do get great players like Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, and a list of others, they trade them off since someone doesn't want to pay more money. What happens? They play for teams that win World Series(Damon and the Red Sox, now with the Yankees) or teams that can legitimately compete in the postseason. The Royals, quite possibly, is the best place in the league to develop talent and sell it off for cut-rate prices.
If the Chiefs can pay that much for that much mediocre talent and the Royals have saves millions by selling off real talent, one would think that they would have enough money to chip in a little more for the stadiums. And the owners use scare tactics(if you don't pay up, we'll leave to a richer city) to drum up support for a roof that looks like a giant Pringles potato chip on wheels.
The incentives for this new rolling roof are what? KC might get to host the All-Star Game, a possible Super Bowl, and if the Sprint Center and the improvements are made, a possible Final Four in 2013. That's assuming the city sewers are still working by 2013, as it will cost nearly $1 billion to fix that little problem and that will most likely be another tax increase.
So, cheers to Kansas City, a place with ill-placed priorities. Heres to a city that is willing to shoulder over $600 million dollars for an upside-down punch bowl Sprint Arena and stadium improvements for two exceptionally mediocre teams that use scare tactics to drum up support for a sales tax. And a final hurrah for a city that considers sports more important than minor details like a working sewer system instead of the current one using pipes laid down in the US Civil War. Not that a functioning sewer syster really matters anyways. Who doesn't like ruptured pipes shooting out geysers of filthy water?
When Kansas City host these events (assuming they do), let's hope the event aren't marred by stories of ruptured pipes spewing out geysers of filthy waste water or even clean water for that matter. Then again, it would be fitting, as Kansas City is the self-proclaimed City of Fountains.

That's all for now.