Author Archives: Kent Sterling

Sports Media Revenue Bubble Is Going to Burst at Some Point

by Kent Sterling

In five years, you won’t need one of these. In fact, you don’t need one now.

Our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and dainty ladies throughout America are paying an annual tab of $60.72 for ESPN which few ever watch, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure that out and pull the plug on Comcast, UVerse, DirecTV, Brighthouse, Insight, Dish, and other carriers.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Add what they pay for Fox Sports, and the various regional sports networks on the basic tier of stations, and the outlay will be even more troubling for media consumers who have zero interest in sports.

Just as water finds its level, economic realities will be brought to bear on the business model that feeds billions to media companies whose rights deals have artificially inflated the values of major league franchises in all sports – even MLS.

Fairness is not offered by business owners, nor in this case demanded by consumers. But when the average monthly cable/satellite bill is $85 per month, and there are alternatives delivered by web based providers that cost less than half that to aid people in killing time between dinner and bedtime, the winds of change start blowing. Add over-the-air network affiliates that can be accessed forever for the cost of an antenna, and it’s only a matter of time before even the laziest Honey Boo-Boo devotee figures out the screwing she’s getting.

Confusion is the friend of the crooked, and there are few business models as confusing as that which fuels sports media and thus sport leagues, teams, and players themselves. You think that Alfonso Soriano’s bloated and idiotic deal paying him $18-million per year is covered by gate receipts – not quite.

Here is a very quick primer as to how this madness works. Media companies like Disney, CBS/Viacom, Fox, and others bundle their offerings in negotiations with cable/satellite companies, so that a company that wants to offer the Disney Channel or ABC Family on the basic tier must also accept the terms offered for the ESPN family of networks. Because of that, all consumers must pay for sports programming, and the rates are quite high – $5.06 per month. This is also why the Big Ten Network needed to partner with Fox. As a standalone, the BTN had no hammer to mandate inclusion as an offering.

Of that money, a significant amount goes straight to the leagues who sign a rights agreement with ESPN. There is a cute tool at the What You Pay for Sports website that allows you to calculate how much money of your cable/satellite bill goes directly to the NFL, MLB, NBA, and even MLS. If you only take ESPN and the TNT/TBS combo, you pay an annual subsidy to the NFL of $11. MLB gets $5.11, and the NBA gets $9.33. If it makes you feel any better, MLS gets only nine-cents.

Because of the construct of the current business model that takes advantage of the limited number of media tunnels into your home, that tab is paid whether you watch a single moment of a game. The leagues and networks hope like hell that the difficulty for people who watch the Discovery Channel, History Channel, and USA Network outweighs the financial pain inflicted by the media bill they receive each month.

ESPN makes a ton of money, and uses it to craft mutually agreeable rights deals so their programming becomes more and more indispensable.

According to an interview with ESPN President John Skipper, ESPN’s formula for success is two-thirds subscription and one-third advertising. There are comparatively insignificant amounts driven by radio, digital, and magazine advertising, but those vehicles are more about branding that dollars.

To extrapolate media economics to let’s say the grocery business, imagine going to the Kroger to buy a gallon of milk. The cashier tells you that the tab is $42 dollars because you must buy $38 worth of hotdogs, wine, ramen noodles, and aluminum foil. You explain that you don’t want that other crap. The cashier says, “Then you don’t get no milk!”

So how, why, and most importantly when will the bubble burst, and the tremendous influx of cable cash going to dry up?

It’s all about more diverse delivery systems allowing more choices that will dilute the value of the cable deals with the networks. Companies like ESPN are way ahead of this, and will adapt to the inevitable a la carte menu without much difficulty. ESPN3 has been online for a couple of years, and allows subscribers to watch damn near anything they want.

The problem with a la carte pay-per-view or an ESPN3 with direct subscriptions is that today the cable content providers are being paid by roughly nine times the number of people who actually consume their product. To maintain their current $6.5 billion in revenue from subscriber fees, ESPN users would need to need to pay $650 per year instead of $65.

That price point would drive a significant number of people out of the ESPN audience, which would cause advertising rates to drop and completely replate the scale upon which rights fees are derived. As rights fees drop, so would team revenue, and those losses would require a downward adjustment of player salaries.

This recalibration of the business model won’t be fatal, but by eliminating non-sports fans from the subsidizing pool for televised sports programming, the axis of the media planet will shift and the climate will change – not for the better for anyone but consumers.

Add to that the slow but steadily rising number of people who are unplugging in favor of internet delivery systems like Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu, and others who are syphoning consumers at the rate of one million per year and another source of trouble is coming at a snail’s pace. It will take a few years for that level of loss to matter, but with the plethora of products offered via the web by any nut with a couple of grand for the stuff needed to execute his or her vision of creative content, every viewer lost represents lost cash that won’t be recovered.

The key to the survival of networks and cable satellite providers, just as is the case for television, radio, and print is the ability to create unique content.

Let’s take the Big Ten Network for example. The unique products that make the Big Ten Network a viable platform are the football and men’s basketball games. The rest of the programming is a useless hodge-podge of non-revenue sports watched only by family and friends and historically entertaining games from previous seasons.

With the Big Ten expanding to include Maryland and Rutgers, the Big Ten Network could be a basic tier entry in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York at $1.25 per household. That’s not a whole bunch of money to individual homes, but if people pay for use, the pro rata cost of watching a game would be more than the price of a ticket to the game.

At some point, consumers are going to figure all this out. Prompted by an outraged friend, I re-attached the HD antenna we’ve had in the attic for ten years, and the picture and sound are much clearer than the best of what UVerse offers. With a Smart TV, I won’t have a lot of use for UVerse at all.

Three years ago, I invited some guys from the sports staff of Indiana University’s newspaper out for a beer to talk about how they consumed media. When they told me that they didn’t subscribe to cable, I thought they were crazy. They explained that they are able to watch whatever they like through their laptops. As usual, college students had the game figured out long before the typical adult consumer.

As with conference realignment, the evolution from what is to what will be is going to take a long time, but the immutable rules of consumer economics will continue to close the gap between the cash printing media revenue model of 2013 and people paying a fair price to not watch channels in which they are not interested.

Johnny Manziel Is Forfeiting Millions with Every Bad Decision

by Kent Sterling

Manziel (left) in an instagram picture from spring break.

Spending cash before it’s earned is how families wind up renting TV’s, toasters, and recliners. Texas A&M Heisman Trophy winner Johnny “Football” Manziel is corrupting his ability to earn millions in the NFL and through endorsement deals on a weekly basis by acting like an idiot.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Manziel was reportedly asked to leave the Manning Passing Academy, where he was serving as a counselor until Saturday. Online reports assert that Manziel went on a Bobby Layne-esque bender, and was too hungover to function.

The Manziel camp claimed dehydration and illness, but there were pictures of him enjoying himself in College Station on Saturday night.

This episode come only a couple of weeks after Manziel tweeted that he could not wait to leave Texas A&M, and then this morning pleaded guilty to failing to properly identify himself to police after a fight on June 29, 2012.

Four weeks ago, Manziel found himself in hot water after some irresponsible tweetage “Bulls— like tonight is a reason why I can’t wait to leave college station…whenever it may be.” Yikes. Don’t press send is the advice Herm Edwards gives NFL rookies, and Manziel should have heeded it.

Manziel then tried his hand at apologizing with results that were more inflammatory than the original, “Don’t ever forget that I love A&M with all of my heart, but please please walk a day in my shoes.”

Yeah, tough gig as a freshman Heisman winner. I can’t imagine the level of strife that has

As repellent as character as Bobby Bittman was on SCTV, I somehow made him less likable and repelled women in droves.

made Manziel’s life so miserable. I’m guessing a Heisman is a pretty good prop with which to impress co-eds, but I wouldn’t know. My efforts to impress girls included a killer impression of SCTV’s Eugene Levy, which led to a series of epic failures that left me wondering if Eugene himself ever had a girlfriend.

How about Manziel spends a day walking in someone else’s shoes? Go to the computer science lab at A&M and swap spots for an hour.

There is no quicker way to engage the judgmental side of American sports fans than to ask for their empathy.

Because we are here to help, we have some advice for Johnny Football that will aid him in developing the perspective needed to allow Americans to see him as something other than an adolescent, petulant, and self-immersed ass hat:

Visit a children’s hospital. Watch the bravery of those little kids as they deal with mortality 80 years before they should have any need to.
Stop trying to live like a normal college student, unless you really want to be one.
Get off Twitter until you have the maturity to communicate without whining.
Don’t drink where smart phones can record your every word and movement.
Call Ryan Leaf, and ask him what he might have done differently.
Talk to Peyton Manning, who was far more gracious in explaining your absence from the academy than you deserved, and find out how he maintained a pretty damn zany lifestyle out of the public eye while the most recognizable person in Indianapolis.
Surround yourself with people you can trust who will tell you “No” once in a while. You don’t seem to be able to build reasonable boundaries for yourself, so find someone who will.
Don’t go shopping for hats in the same place where the Pouncey twins get theirs.

Living life as a Heisman Trophy winner is only hard if you are doing things you shouldn’t be doing if you weren’t.

Chicago White Sox Should Still Regret Letting Harry Caray Walk to the Cubs 32 Years Later

by Kent Sterling

On the North Side of Chicago, there is a statue of Harry Caray, and on the south side there is an owner who refers to Harry and “scum.”

The Chicago Cubs are a bad baseball team without a compelling player or hope of contending for the postseason in the foreseeable future, and they will still draw 2.5 million fans this year.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Through 48 home dates, the Cubs have averaged 33,000 tickets sold, and the reason tracks all the way back to a decision White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn – that Harry Caray needed to go. Caray also decided that with the launch of Sportsvision – an Einhorn owned cable channel that would have charged a pay-per-view fee for each game if not for fan backlash – Caray decided that broadcasting to 22,000,000 homes across America on WGN – one of America’s first superstations on cable – was a hell of a lot better that 50,000 in Chicago on Sportsvision.

For fans in attendance, Cubs games are less about what happens on the field than the benchmarks that make going to the game fun, and chief among those continues to be the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch – a tradition that Caray brought with him from the Sox when hired prior to the 1982 season.

Caray’s broadcasts were filled with errors, but his passion and understanding of how to bond with fans made him incredibly popular wherever he worked, and there is no statue outside Wrigley Field better earned than Caray’s. No matter the level of baseball being played, the traditional and joyful rendition of baseball’s anthem is a centerpiece to each game for fans.

The White Sox lack of understanding about what engages fans continues to cost them at the gate 32 years after deciding that they were better off without Caray. Prior to Caray coming to Wrigley, the Cubs had never drawn 1.7 million of more fans. From Caray’s third year with the Cubs (1984) through 2012, the Cubs have drawn more than that every single season, and have been below 2M only three times. Caray didn’t do it alone. Without the exceptional reach provided by WGN – one of America’s first superstations on cable – Caray would not have had the profound impact he did. But without Caray, WGN wouldn’t have had its first national star.

The importance of earning a spot in the postseason in 1984 for the first time since 1945 also played a huge role in the in the explosion of popularity for the Cubs, but without Caray, Wrigley would still be full or empty depending the quality of baseball.

The tradition of Caray leading “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” reportedly started when then White Sox owner Bill Veeck noticed Caray privately singing along with Nancy Faust’s organ rendition of the song during the seventh inning stretch, thought Caray’s voice was just bad enough to make fans comfortable as they sang. Caray didn’t know the mic was on the first time, but quickly embraced the notion of being Comiskey Park’s choir director.

Fifteen years after Carays death, regardless of what else goes on at Wrigley, or how inept the baseball might be – Cubs fans know they will be able to sing along with 30,000-plus brothers and sisters in misery after the top of the seventh, led by a celebrity.

That makes a trip to the ballpark fun. Harry did that for the Cubs, instead of the Sox, and changed the course of baseball on the northside. Despite the Cubs and Sox both being terrible in 2013, the Cubs have sold over 10,000 more tickets per game than the Sox.

Attendance has dropped on both sides of town for the past few years – the Cubs peaked in 2008 by a 40,743 average, and have dropped to 39,610, 37,814, 37,259, 35,589, and now in 2013 33,000, so Cubs fans aren’t only there for expensive Old Style and a song.

The Sox hit their all-time high in the season after their 2005 World Series championship with an average of 36,511 fans per home game in 2006. Since then, the number of tickets sold has fallen to 33,140, 30,877. 28,199, 27,091m 24,705, 24,271, and so far this season 22,499 – which ranks 24th, right between Oakland and Kansas City.

What might have happened with the White Sox had Reinsdorf and Einhorn hung onto Caray while the Cubs maintained the status quo with the unlistenable tedium of Milo Hamilton we will never know, but the case can be made that the migration of Caray from Chicago’s south side to the north side might be the most important shift of an asset in the history of Chicago baseball.

Stephen Zimmerman Talks About What Makes Summer Basketball Fun

by Kent Sterling

The one player who will intrigue college coaches and fans at the NY2LA Super Jam in north suburban Milwaukee more than any other is Dream Vision’s Stephen Zimmerman, a seven-footer from Las Vegas Bishop Gorman.

Zimmerman just finished playing in Indianapolis at the Adidas Invitational where Indiana offered the 2015 recruit ranked in everyone’s top ten, which is appropriate because Zimmerman is a very similar player to the Hoosiers’ Cody Zeller.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Both run the floor exceptionally well, are generous teammates, and are very well grounded. And Zeller also played up a class to join Indiana Elite at the same event three years ago.

There are some differences – Zeller was a more polished shooter four years ago, Zimmerman is a little bit more difficult to move around, and Zimmerman has brown hair while Zeller is blond. Other than that, not many things obviously separate them.

Zimmerman knows he needs to work on being more aggressive, and that was always a challenge for Zeller too.

I spoke to Stephen for a couple of minutes yesterday as he and teammates Noah Robotham and Jamal Aytes watched the championship game they had hoped to be play in when the week started.

Where he stands with recruiting is anyone’s guess, as I don’t ask kids about college. Where Stephen or anyone else chooses to study and play is none of my business, so I don’t ask about it. As weird as it is to shove a microphone into the face of a high school kid, it’s downright creepy to ask about lists of schools and his decision about a collegiate destination.

What you’ll hear in the interview is a mature kid who cares for his teammates and is very centered about the insanity that surrounds the recruitment of tall people to play basketball for free while coaches make millions.

He’s a smart guy, and he’s going to make one coach very happy, while disappointing many, many others. That’s not on Stephen – the coaches who push, pull, and prod these kids into choosing them are responsible for their own misery.

Stephen talks about his teammates, and what he needs to work on in the interview below.

Noah Robotham Talks About Adidas Invitational and His Summer Experience

by Kent Sterling

Point guard Noah Robotham of Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas is playing with Dream Vision, and last week at the Adidas Invitational, a lot of eyes were on him because his high school and summer teammate Stephen Zimmerman is being recruited by everyone.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Point guards are hard to project because the measurables aren’t always as easy to read for them. For Zimmerman, life is different. He’s a seven-footer who runs the floor very well and has good hands. No brainer that everyone wants Stephen. Noah needs to impress with speed, court vision, shooting ability, and defense this month to earn his opportunities with elite college programs.

He’s right about six-feet tall, and unless you pay attention, his best traits are tough to see. I watched Dream Vision play five games last weekend at the Adidas Invitational, and Noah impressed more and more with each game.

Great point guards are separated from the ordinary is what separates a good one by the ability to read the defense and make accurate, timely passes. If a point guard can hit the right teammate on time and on target, that’s a guy who can lead an offense to a lot of wins.

Noah is as good a point guard at making timely and accurate passes as there is in the 2014 class. That he showed himself in the Adidas to be a very good shooter with a soft touch is a bonus.

The fun of watching summer tournaments is discovering a player you had not heard of before the event starts. While watching Zimmerman, it was impossible not to notice Noah’s ability to make the team go. Next stop for Noah, Stephen and Dream Vision will be Mequan, Wisconsin, for the NY2LA Super Jam that begins Wednesday.

Talking to him, I learned exactly what I assumed – he’s a thoughtful kid with a good head on his shoulders.

The Great Parts of Summer Basketball Tournaments Have Little to Do with the Games and Evaluation

by Kent Sterling

There are a lot of coaches who aren’t very happy with how they spend their Julys, but as long as the kids are, I love it.

The kids playing basketball on a relentless schedule this weekend in Indianapolis at the Adidas Invitational, in Atlanta at the Nike Peach Jam, and in Milwaukee and other cities next week are having a great time. The big time college coaches who are out in force evaluating them might not like it, and their high school coaches definitely don’t like it.

But the kids love it, and how can that be a bad thing. Even at the highest level, very few of the kids are going to making a living playing in the NBA, so what could be wrong with a bunch of kids bouncing from hotel to hotel in strange cities they would never see otherwise with their friends. Once basketball players get to college, the game becomes a 40-50 hour per week job in addition to their academic course load.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

College coaches will be calling every shot for some of these kids soon enough. Having a good time with friends while also playing some basketball against some of the best in the country is a great way to spend a couple of weeks in July.

I’m a big fan of summer basketball, and feel like it is a great way to learn a few things about players, even if it’s not perfect.. If you follow one team as I did with Dream Vision (with Stephen Zimmerman, Jamal Aytes, and Noah Robotham ), you generally get to see kids at their best and worst once, and closer to the mean during the rest of the games. You get to see how they respond to success and failure, and how much they love the game.

Zimmerman (a 2015 recruit playing up a year) wasn’t great every game, but he showed all of the stuff that has made the seven-footer a target for every major program in America. He reportedly picked up an offer from Indiana this weekend, and rightly so.

If a kid doesn’t absolutely adore playing basketball, by the end of the July tournaments, you’ll see it.

There are a few things you don’t see – good coaching is near the top of the list. There are a few guys who know what they are doing, but that’s the exception, not the norm. It’s hard to keep the attention of 16 year-olds during that ninth game, and equally difficult for the coaches to not have a few lapses themselves as they lead teams in games against different competition every six waking hours while in town.

Speaking of the coaches, the coaches for the big programs like Tom Crean, Coach K, Larry Brown, and Steve Alford were long gone before this mess today. They aren’t trying to figure out whether a kid can play well during his fifth straight day of playing one or two games. They need a kid to play well twice per week.

There is a lot of debate as to whether the summer schedule is beneficial for the players, and from a basketball perspective, there is no way that it improves their level of play as much as a good month of well run workouts. There is more to life than excelling at basketball though, and the travel and friendships emulate the positive aspects of the kind of summer camp experience in which future collegiate basketball players cannot indulge.

Lifelong friendships are born at the Drury Inns near where these events are held. The result of the tournament is not the point, and neither is the development of the players. The coaches who use the Adidas Invitational as evaluatory tools are likely not too pleased with the format either, but kids get to play ball and hangout together. That makes it valuable to them, and with the number of things in their lives that are just for them, and just for fun about to be shaved to zero when they play in college, there is nothing wrong with a little frivolous hooping and hours of nothing to do with friends to keep them occupied.

ESPN Needs to Rethink Games It Telecasts from High School Summer Tournaments as Spiece Indy Ice Wins 91-46

by Kent Sterling

Nine games in five days is a lot of basketball for anybody, much less high school age kids, and thatwear and tear showed in the championship game of the Adidas Invitational at North Central High school today. ESPNU viewers deserve better.

Spiece Indy Ice got off to a quick 17-2 start this afternoon and never looked back against Team Loaded from Virginia in a 91-46 victory. It was easily the worst game I saw during the tournament – both stylistically and competitively. That takes nothing away from the Ice, who get a trophy while everyone else is off to their next stop without hardware.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Better to win than not, and there was no doubt about the outcome from the tip, but I’m sure it wasn’t the best the Ice players looked in Indianapolis since the event began Wednesday night.

The only negative for the Ice and their fans is that they had to wade through a meaningless second half after building a 44-22 lead before collecting their hardware.

The game will air tonight on ESPNU at 9p – one of the least spirited games of the tournament to people who might have been hoping to see top ranked preps like Stephen Zimmerman and Kevon Looney, but as an event like this progresses, the predictability of any player or team’s performance become more difficult.

For people hoping to find out a little something about where Zimmerman will play in college, they spoke to him for a few minutes

Spiece Indy Ice Overwhelmed Team Loaded 91-46.

during the game. I understand why fans want a glimpse into the future of their programs, but I can’t bring myself to the level of interest needed to ask kids to talk about it.

They’re teenagers trying to figure out where they will go to school, and the process of making that decision is none of my business.

If ESPN wants to bring a summer game into the homes of people who people who want to see players that will be on collegiate rosters in 16 months, and perhaps in the NBA in just over two years, they should do it during pool play – the only time that the schedule is known more than a few hours in advance.

Summer basketball events aren’t built for fan consumption, so the choice to televise them is curious. There is a tremendous thirst for recruiting information, but with very few exceptions, the basketball at the end of one of these marathons degrades to almost unwatchable.

In a 2006 tournament in Bloomington, Derrick Rose’s Meanstreets team played the Spiece Central Stars for the championship. It was the seventh game in three days for both teams, and the Stars were eager to play the highly ranked Rose. They led 49-19 at the half, and scored the first 12 points of the second before Rose’s brother/coach said “No mas,” and had his guys hold the ball at midcourt for the final 12 minutes.

In the previous game – a matchup against Eric Gordon, Rose was virtually unstoppable. Had ESPN telecast the finals, then ESPN President George Bodenheimer would have had a heart attack, and the only people watching would have been family and friends of the Stars.

No player can be at his best after playing such a relentless schedule, and players at less than their best is not must-see-TV.

Eric Gordon All-Stars Knock out Dream Vision by Playing Letter perfect Indiana Basketball

by Kent Sterling

Bryant McIntosh gets ready to knock down a free throw late in the EG All-Stars 73-65 win over Dream Vision.

In a game like so many through the years, a team from Indiana took on another group with higher ranked players from another area and beat them by hitting open shots, and frustrating them defensively.

The EG All-Stars 73-65 win over Dream Vision was impressive given the rout Dream Vision put on a highly touted New York RENNS team this morning in the round of 32 of the Adidas Invitational. That’s part of the fun of these tournaments, which will continue through the finals at North Central High School tomorrow. Teams can’t play to their potential every game, and sometimes a matchup provides an opportunity to beat a more heralded group.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

Indiana teams almost always do two things exceptionally well – shoot and execute fundamentals correctly. They set good screens, work the ball unselfishly to exploit the right matchup, and block out like the rebound of every missed shot by an opponent means the difference in the game – and collectively they do.

Dream Vision was the team I enjoyed watching most to this point in the tourney, but they looked a step slower and less focused than they did in their previous five games. Top five recruit Stephen Zimmerman appeared to have worn down just a bit, and the shots that fell earlier in the event for others didn’t find the net.

The opposite was true for the All-Stars. Bryant McIntosh from Greensburg knocked in 26 points in a diverse offensive performance that validated his decision to walk away from his commitment to Indiana State – a decision that will keep ISU coach Greg Lansing up nights if McIntosh decides to go elsewhere.

He wasn’t alone in carrying the offensive load, as another Greensburg player, Sean Sellers, chipped in 11, and Sam Logwood added 10. If defending 3A state champion Greensburg High School loses a game in 2013-2014, it won’t be because of their talent. Not only do they have McIntosh and Sellers, in the 2015 class they have 6’8″ Ryan Welage, who is playing for Pat Mullin’s EG Central Stars.

Dream Vision took what appeared to be control of the game in the first half with a 35-27 lead, but McIntosh scored the last three baskets of the half to cut the lead to 35-33. They had another run in the second half to build the lead to ten with 4:30 to play, and then it was take care of the ball, and don’t allow second chance points, which is on page one of the Indiana Way to Play Basketball Handbook.

Jamal Aytes of Dream Vision was a beast throughout, scoring 27 points, and cementing his status as a kid capable of helping a big time program right now. He’s a 2013 kid with offers to San Diego, San Diego State, and UC Irvine, according to ESPN. If I ran a program short a power forward, I would call Aytes today. Unfortunately for a lot of schools, I don’t run their program, but Aytes can flat play a man’s game of basketball.

Noah Robotham added 11, and Zimmerman added four.

It’s as hard for a team like Dream Vision to prepare for an Indiana group like the All-Stars as it is for the All-Stars to prepare for the height of Zimmerman. A fundamentally sound team that looks eminently beatable in warm-ups, but can stroke it and keep their bodies between the spot where opponents are and where they want to go is going to have to grind to manage a win in a one-game shoot out.

And it’s not that the All-Stars aren’t talented, they are, but that was not the reason they won today. They won by playing winning basketball, rather than just playing basketball.

I wish I could see the Dream Vision team play a little deeper, but thrilled for McIntosh and his group.

Next up for the All-Stars tonight at 8:30p in the NCHS auxiliary gym will be top ten 2014 recruit Kevon Looney and the Milwaukee Rebels, but the key to beating Milwaukee won’t have much to do with Looney. This game will be won or lost based upon the play of diminutive point guard Demontrae Jefferson, who is a tenacious player on both ends. If he can be controlled or put into positions where he forces up bad shots, the All-Stars will win. If not, tough game.

Can’t wait for tomorrow’s semis and finals.

Hagan & Sterling Ahead of the Fastball at Victory Field

by Kent Sterling

The Indianapolis Indians are very gracious hosts, and today they allowed by Fox 59 sports director Chris Hagan and I to take some whacks at Victory Field to determine “Ahead of the Curve” athletic supremacy.

Hagan took hopped in the cage first, and then I followed.

Click here to follow Kent on Twitter

I haven’t swung at a baseball since my son last played youth ball ten years ago, as you hear me explain to a couple of the Indians as I’m stroking line drive after line drive.

There was residue that I noticed during our show from the grip on Hagan’s bat as he either took shadow swings or went to a cage to get loose early this morning.

Check the video, and then vote for the better hitter in the survey below. Don’t be swayed by Hagan actually bunting one of the pitches. Thanks to the Indians for making this bit of fun possible on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

[polldaddy poll=7248078]

Indiana Pacers – Chris Copeland Signing Brings Another Good Guy Into Culture

by Kent Sterling

The Indiana Pacers are all about culture. Everyone involved with the team uses that word early and often, and I would mock it if I didn’t absolutely agree with the way they use it to describe what the team has become.

Chris Copeland fits what the Pacers are trying to build perfectly. The six years Copeland spent in the NBDL and Europe continuing to fight for his dream have given him a perspective that is rare. This is not some self-impressed, me-first mope who expects to be treated like he should be thanked for farting.

He’s a guy who knows his role, prepares and behaves like a pro, and is happy contributing to the whole. And he can flat-out score. In his rookie season as a 28 and 29 year-old, Copeland averaged more than 20 points per 36 minutes of playing time.

Pacers fans got to know him – almost too well – as he brought nothing but positives to the Knicks every time he reported to the scorer’s table in the six game series that Indiana won. Pacers fans held their breath every time #14 with the dreads came into the game.

Copeland says the #14 will be gone when he plays for the Pacers, so any hopes of his being a second incarnation of “Big Smooth” Sam Perkins will not come to pass, but his game is similar even if his number won’t be.

Coaches say, “If you can shoot, you can play,” and Copeland can absolutely stroke it.

Plus, he fits. Listen to the “Ahead of the Curve” interview below – the first he has done with Indianapolis media – that aired Saturday on 1070 the Fan (“Ahead of the Curve” with Fox 59 news director Chris Hagan and me airs every Saturday from 11a-1p) and listen to yet another really good guy.