JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

My New Year’s resolution (actually, it just occurred to me) was to be calm and composed in 2012, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Maybe next year.

I apologize to you non-sports fans, but I’ve got to get these outrages out of my system. Then, no more sports for a while…unless The Star does a 180 and hires Jason Whitlock back.    

So, here goes:

:: What is with these bowl games? Will they ever end?

Used to be, all the attention was focused on four big New Year’s Day games — Cotton, Sugar, Rose and Orange bowls and you could sit around and eat your Hoppin’ John, enjoy a nice beverage and then the football season was over.

But not anymore. Oh, no! Now, there are 35 bowl games, which start a week before Christmas and go until it’s time for that clarion call, “Pitchers and catchers report.” Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the national championship game, Auburn vs. Oregon, doesn’t take place until next week.

The bowl season has become so diluted and strung out that the games have become about as riveting as a flatlined electrocardiogram. I watched a total of about 10 minutes of football on New Year’s Day. Just couldn’t get excited about any of the games. 

And you know what? I’m not even sure that a playoff system, which many people advocate, would be an improvement. It might end up as a big, long slog extending into the pro football playoffs.   

On top of the bowl bog, the Rose Bowl Stadium is going to be renovated. And suites –what else? — will be added. Now that’s a double outrage!

:: On Tuesday, I was reading Sam Mellinger’s KC Star story on new KU athletic director Sheahon Zenger when I came across a passage that had me spluttering over my oatmeal.

Mellinger’s story revolved around the true face of KU athletics, basketball coach Bill Self. It seems that Mellinger had been able to get some up-close and personal  time with Self, so Mellinger found himself driving around campus with Self. He wrote: “His Lincoln Navigator cuts through campus one night, and even in the twilight, at least a few students point and smile.”

What??!! Bill Self driving a Navigator — one of the biggest road and gas hogs of all — in Lawrence, Kansas, one of the greenest cities in America?

Un-believable. The Navigator is a vehicle I would expect to see Lew Perkins driving, or Mark Mangino. And we all know where they ended up driving.

But Self? He seems like a perfect fit for humble, laid-back, non-ostentatious Lawrence.

He’d be much better off driving a hybrid. In fact, he should have the first Volt in Lawrence.

:: Tom Cable is out as head coach of the Oakland Raiders.

Raiders’ owner Al Davis has lost his mind…Well, he lost it a long time ago, he’s just showing it more these days.

Cable

I certainly haven’t been a big fan of Cable, especially when allegations surfaced in 2009, a year after Cable was named head coach, that he had broken an assistant coach’s jaw in an altercation and that he had physically abused a former girlfriend and at least one former wife.

I thought he should have been fired then. But I guess those allegations didn’t bother Boss Davis; he probably thought he’d hired a really tough guy. 

So, Cable managed to weather that storm, and the Raiders have been on the upswing the last two years. This year, they went 8-8, which isn’t great, but a big improvement over last year’s 5-11 record. The main thing, though, is that this year the Raiders won every AFC West Conference game that they played. They beat the Chargers twice, the Broncos twice and the Chiefs twice, including Sunday’s 31-10 demolition of the Chiefs. (I was there, and the Raiders had the distinct look of a team on the rise.)

His firing would be the equivalent, in my eyes, of Turner Gill’s Kansas Jayhawks beating both Missouri and K-State in back-to-back years and Gill getting handed the pink slip.

It’s an outrage, that’s all you can say.