My wish list for sports in 2009

Apart from the University of Cincinnati football team’s historic season, 2008 was not a good year to be a sports fan in Cincinnati.

The University of Cincinnati men’s basketball team didn’t make the tournament, the Reds continued their streak of missing the playoffs, Chad Ocho Cinco turned into TO and the Bengals reverted back to the Dave Shula era Bungles.

So I’m hoping this year is going to be a lot better and there are 15 things I’d like to see happen that could turn things around for 2009.

15. Brett Favre retires. Enough is enough; he’s washed up. And I can’t deal with another summer of 24/7 will Favre stay or go coverage on ESPN.

14. Oscar De La Hoya retires before suffering massive brain damage. At this point, the “Golden Boy” is nothing more than a Rocky Balboa-like punching bag and I think another fight would take a serious toll.

13. The NFL adopts college football’s overtime and college football adopts the NFL’s playoffs. How much longer are we going to allow a coin toss to determine a team’s fate in overtime? And the way Utah smoked Alabama, they deserve a shot at the national title.

12. Drew Rosenhaus and Scott Boras go away. I hate both of these men with a passion. Boras ruined baseball and Rosenhaus ruined the playmaker formerly known as
Chad Johnson.

11. The Yankees miss the playoffs.  If the Yankees miss the playoffs after spending $423.5 million on three players in the offseason, and after constructing a new $1.3 billion stadium, there is justice in this world.

10. Every NFL pregame show eliminates one or two analysts. Do we really need five former players or coaches making asinine comments and laughing hysterically at nothing? I think three would suffice. How they choose who gets the boot is up to them but I would advocate an old school WWE steel cage single elimination tournament.

9. Emmitt Smith is given his own show. They can call it the Emmitt Zone. I think Emmitt has earned the “rites of patches” or “rice of passage,” as he would say, to make this happen. I see it as a potential resurrection of Magic Johnson’s unintentionally hilarious talk show, “The Magic Hour.”

8. The WNBA lowers their rims to eight and a half feet. I’m not trying to be sexist here. It’s just a fact, Women aren’t as tall as men and their inability to play above the rim makes the game boring. Think about it, they lower the rim and Candice Parker becomes
LeBron James.

7. LeBron makes the leap. The public craves another Jordan. The few of us true NBA fans left deserve to witness greatness again. All it would take is for LeBron to develop a killer mid-range game, and he’s running off six straight championships.

6. Ohio State and Kentucky decide to grow a pair and schedule UC for basketball. Sure, Thad Matta agreed to play UC when he had Greg Oden going up against Connor Barwin, but after the game he said there is no rivalry and that he didn’t plan on playing UC again when the playing field evened up a bit. After the beating West Virginia gave OSU that might be a wise choice by Matta.

5. Tim Higgins is demoted to the grade school level and never referees another college basketball game. I’ve had just about all I can take of the short, stocky, red-faced Irishman over the past few years and the six-technical Crosstown Shootout this year nearly gave me a heart attack.

4. Chris Welch retires off his J.T.M. commercial royalties and someone pays George Grande to just stop talking. That would pave the way for a potentially great Dan Hoard/Jeff Brantley announcing team.

3. Gus Johnson is hired to announce every major sporting event. Johnson just signed up to announce boxing for Showtime and that’s a start, but I want to see him doing the World Series. “And Santana makes the pitch. IT’S A STRIKE! HELL, YES!”

2. Floyd Mayweather comes out of retirement and fights Manny Pacquiao. It would easily be the fight of the decade, pitting the unanimous pound-for-pound King versus the man who retired as the undefeated No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter in boxing. I say Mayweather wins by a decision.

1. Mike Brown gets a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, then decides to atone for his atrocities by giving the Bengals to the city of Cincinnati.