Smile Politely. Speak Directly. A Champaign-Urbana Culture Blog

My, look how much it costs to maintain the status quo these days: $400 million for the Yankees; the firing of the wrong sacrificial pig at Indiana U; sneaky camera trickery for the undefeated Patriots; and apparently plenty of Xs in the win column for the Bulls.

For the 3–10 Chicago Bulls, mediocrity doesn’t come cheap either, and apparently it doesn’t even know its true value. Both Luol Deng and Ben Gordon turned down phat contract extensions shortly before this season began. Taking cue, Chicago general manager John Paxson then promptly refused to trade Luol (and perhaps Little Ben) to the Lakers for Kobe Bryant. Doing so, Paxson more or less agreed with his young players’ assessments of their worth: “Yep, too good to give up.” We’ve heard that one before.

After last week’s Polite Power Rankings hit the virtual newsstands, a reader offered this advice: “Instead of profiling the top 16, you should do random teams throughout…. That way, if I’m a fan of a weaker team I can occasionally look forward to your coverage of my team.” My initial reaction was: What’s a Raiders fan doing in the middle of Illinois? But the truth is, sports fans migrate and they bring their teams with them, and in a university town full of transplants and transients, there just may be some Dolphins diehards looking for a fix. So each week, the Polite Power Rankings will profile the top five teams and a selection of 11 others from among the list.

This week marks the beginning of the 9th Annual ACC Big Ten Challenge. ESPN created it in 1999 as a promotional series in an effort to establish itself as a leader in a college-ball market traditionally monopolized by CBS. The tournament has, in fact, grown into a perennial slugfest in which one outcome is always predictable: the losers hail from the Big Ten. In fact, the only team in the Big Ten that holds a winning record in the series is Michigan State at 4–3. Duke has never lost a game in the challenge.

The University of Illinois's female basketball squad knows something
about slam dunks. To the team's chagrin, though, they've only ever
been on the receiving end. In November 2000, at the Maui Invitational in Hawaii, Tennessee
standout Michelle Snow slammed the ball through the hoop against the faltering Illini. The dunk capped off an impressive first half for a dominant Volunteers squad that went on to win the game 111–62.

The first woman in NCAA history to record a dunk was Georgeann Wells,
the West Virginia Mountaineer who threw down in 1984. This week, LSU's
Sylvia Fowles joined Wells, Snow, Charlotte Smith (North Carolina),
Sancho Lyttle (Houston) and Candace Parker (Tennessee) in a club
exclusive to women who have dunked in an NCAA game.

If you’re free on a Sunday afternoon, stop by one of the so-called sports bars in town: Jillian’s or Buffalo Wild Wings or Billy Barooz or the Esquire. You may be surprised to find that Bears jerseys don’t rein supreme. Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver — these cities and more have their representatives in Champaign–Urbana. But regardless of where they hail from, all fans want to know who’s good, who’s better and who’s best. And for these fans, we inaugurate the Polite Power Rankings.

Exhibition time is done. The game starts now. Inexplicable losses to Division II schools can end. And hoop dreams like a Big Ten sweep over the ACC in the annual “Challenge” can begin.

But right now we’re still in the pre-season. And Illinois, though severely unranked, is still a squad filled with hope.

The hope for each team is — to mix my sports metaphors — to bat .900 and enter the Big Ten season with a strong case for post-season play. The conference seems balanced enough this year that the basic notion of defending your home court and splitting on the road might be enough to take home the regular season title. That said, in order for Big Ten teams to graduate to the Big Dance, every team will need to rack up some strong non-conference wins against teams with decent RPI’s.

I took my son to his first Cubs game this year. At 6 months of age some thought this to be inadvisable. Others thought it seemed like a fine idea assuming that we sat in the upper decks of Wrigley, known as the Mezzanine. And still others urged us not only to take him, but to sit in the bleachers. We had to consider it.

Perhaps it was inevitable, a stroke of football fate: the golden-boy-turned-black-sheep Rex Grossman would get yet another shot at the helm of the Chicago Bears offense.

In week ten of a disappointing 2007 season for the Bears, veteran Brian Griese suffered a sprained left shoulder that sent him to the sidelines and opened the door for a Grossman return.