All good things must come to an end, or so I’m told. And like the back up fullback who gets a visit from the Turk on the last day of NFL training camp, so it is with my ride with True/Slant. It’s been fun, difficult, frustrating, enlightening, annoying, gratifying and sometimes hilarious (in a Pinter-esque sort of way, I realize), but still. Sometimes, it was all of those things all at the same time.

What that means for now is that I’ll be blogging independently and selling my wares for other stories to the highest bidders. (Do people even pay reporters any more? And if they do, and if you know any of those people and, um, have them on speed-dial or are like ‘friends’ with them on the facebooky machine, drop a dime for me.)

Also, finally, for the love of all that is holy and right, I will be working on finishing my book on the Pittsburgh Passion, “Rough & Tumble, Pioneer Women in the World of Female, Full-Contact Football.” Look for it, um, sometime.

But before I hand in my playbook and skate-sharpener and turn off the jumbotron, I have to say, many thanks to Coates Bateman, Michael Roston and Lewis Dvorkin, for keeping True/Slant up and running, which gave me a comfy place to write, but also a place where I got to read and interact with so many great writers. To Coates and Michael personally, thanks for all of the encouragement.

You can find me here, at my regular, old-fashioned blog, Balls & Whistles.

In the words of the all-world, all-time great Pittsburgh Penguins announcer Mike Lange, Elvis has just left the building.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

So much is up in the air heading into training camp for the Pittsburgh Steelers this year. Of course, they have to deal with the whole giant f*ckmess created by Ben Roethlisberger who, justifiably, is suspended for the first four games of the season

Coach Mike Tomlin will have to deploy either Byron Leftwich or Dennis Dixon in his place (or some combination of the two), to get through the first four games, which means he has to have one of those guys ready to play quarterback, plus he has to find a balance to get Ben ready, too, for when it’s his time to step back in. That’s a tough task. Who gets the reps? How many? How much? Because Tomlin has to do two things – try to win at least two of the first four games without Roethlisberger and then pray that Roethlisberger can play like he did in 2008 and through much of 2009.  It’s a helluva task.

So Tomlin has to deal with all that is unholy coming from the #7 jersey and those offensive players left to clean up after him, plus he has to find a way to hold together a defense that was the best in the league in 2008 and looked aged and decrepit through much of 2009. There is no escaping this:  that Steelers defense is old and one of the most productive young guys is pissed off.

ProFootballTalk.com is reporting that linebacker Lamarr Woodley is unhappy with his contract. Woodley is scheduled to make $550,000.00 next year, a situation he characterizes as “all jacked up.” I kind of agree. But re-negotiating in the current CBA limbo is kind of jacked up, too. Which is to say there is a 30 percent rule, meaning that the Steelers could renegotiate and give another 30% over the $550,000 they are to pay Woodley, which would bring his salary to $715,000.

Of course, there are ways around that. Naturally, the Steelers could give Woodley a big fattie of a signing bonus (as the Eagles did with Kevin Kolb), but with the 2011 season up in the air, they might pay a lot for one year if they did that.

Still, the Steelers need to deal in good faith. Woodley is, in my estimation, the most productive player drafted in the Mike Tomlin era, which means he’s not only good, he’s young and good. This combination is invaluable.

The presumed starting defensive 11 players (as indicated by the Steelers own depth chart) are:

On the line, they’ve got Aaron Smith who is 34 and coming off a devastating shoulder injury. This guy is great and if anybody can come back from injury, it’s him; nevertheless, at 34 and playing such a physically grueling position, he does not have too many seasons in front of him. Casey Hampton is 32.  Brett Keisel is the youngest starter on the line at 31.

At linebacker, the aforementioned Woodley (25) and James Harrison (32) on the outside. Inside, there is the venerable, wily James Farrior who is 35 and who, despite his greatness, looked every bit of 35 during the Steelers dreadful five-game losing streak last year. And Lawrence Timmons, who is 24 and was selected one pick ahead of Woodley in the 2007 draft, but who hasn’t produced as consistently as Woodley. Yeah, I know he was playing on a sprained ankle (or two) last year, but the guy looked lost half the time. Still, he’s young, so we’ll give him that.

In the defensive backfield, there is the wondrous, magnificent, Troy “Better than Jesus” Polamalu, who battled injuries much of last year. He is 29 years old. Seriously, the guy is better than Jesus, if Jesus had played football, that is. When he’s healthy, he’s the best there is in the league and Dick LeBeau has constructed his defense around this sure knowledge. But without him? They are ordinary. It showed last year when they didn’t have him. The other safety is Ryan Clark who is 30 and who, like Jesus, leads with his head, which leads to a few concussions. That does not bode well for a long career.

Then there’s Ike “Swaggin” Taylor who is 30, but plays like he’s 22 and I don’t mean that in a good way. And William Gay who is only 25. He’s young, but you know, he’s just not really very good. Seriously. Not really very good.

If you’re counting at home, that’s four guys on the whole defense under the age of 30. One of those guys is God. One of them has underperformed but still has tremendous potential. One of them kinda sucks. And the last one is Woodley. Combine past performance with the fact that great players like Farrior, Smith and Harrison cannot play forever, and Woodley is, right this second, their best young defensive bet.

For the last few weeks, I’ve posted stories and updates about the University of Waterloo football steroid scandal. Everybody is weighing in on this.

Chris Cochrane with The Chronicle Herald with his thoughts about the disbanding of the football program:

The real victims in all steroid scandals, and particularly this one at Waterloo, are those student-athletes who don’t cheat. Now, at Waterloo, they’re without a football program due to the knee-jerk reaction of Waterloo administration.

The school could have moved ahead without the cheating players and allowed the clean players to play football again next year. That would have been justice. Now the clean players will have to transfer to another school if they want to play.

On the front lines, the undergraduate students paper at the University of Calgary, The Gauntlet, opines on the hypocrisy of sports culture vis-a-vis PED’s.

Scott Stinson at the National Post, on the role money plays in the management of college athletics and testing for PED’s.

Back in the good ole U.S. of A., Ken Burns, auteur of the mega-American-documentary, will be back with a coda to his 18 1/2 hour “Baseball,” which will deal with the stain of steroids, among other things, per Kevin Sherrington at the Dallas Morning News.

Ray McNulty at the TC Palms interviews former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent on the efficacy of baseball’s drug testing policy:

“I’ve had a player tell me that a drug test is an intelligence test,” said Vincent, who fired baseball’s first shot in its fight against steroids with a 1991 memo that cited federal law and made them illegal in the game, though he had no authority to punish players who used them. “There is no test for HGH. There are a number of athletes taking steroids with a doctor’s prescription. So I’m skeptical about how much drug use is still going on.”

Ever wonder where the steroids are coming from? Immigration and Customs agent, Sean Patrick Ganley plead guilty to importing steroids on Tuesday, in U.S. District Court in Seattle, Washington.

Then, there’s this pusher:

Richard Andrew Thomas of Lakeland, Fla., will serve eight months in federal prison, a plea his attorneys worked out after Thomas agreed to help investigators’ inquiry of Washington-area chiropractor Doug Nagel. Nagel was arrested by deputies from the Polk County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Department in March on seven counts of solicitation to deliver a controlled substance and a one count of conspiracy to deliver a controlled substance.

Nagel’s case is moving forward in a Polk County court and there was a pre-trial hearing on Tuesday.

Nagel’s attorney, Brian West, said his client has never supplied steroids to anyone, let alone any pro athletes. Nagel did treat a handful of Capitals players at his office located in a mall attached to the team’s training facility. The players interviewed by investigators — including Eric Fehr, Shaone Morrisonn and Matt Bradley — denied Nagel supplied them with any illicit drugs.

And finally in the NFL, Ed Gant, wide out for the Arizona Cardinals, received a four game suspension for a positive test for a banned substance.

Image via Wikipedia

I admit it. I had my first, honest to goodness, moment of pure soccer elation when Landon Donovan scored the winning goal for Team USA in extra time. It was legit. I was jumping and screaming and hugging. It was as joyous as it was unexpected.

I set myself to a task – to watch every game of World Cup action – to see if I could embrace, or at least understand what all the vuvuzela honking was about. I learned that soccer is a slow burn. I was skeptical. I was bored. I was restless. But the more I watched, the more I didn’t mind watching. It was okay, I thought. Not great, but okay.

And then a weird thing happened. I started to look forward to matches. I was reading about different teams and watching the highlights to learn what I could from the commentary. I emailed a soccer expert buddy of mine to have her explain the ever slippery soccer off-sides rule. (So much more convoluted that off-sides in hockey, let me just say.)

Last night, I was twitchy in anticipation of the game this morning. Who the hell was I? I didn’t know. I didn’t even care. It was fun. I gave into it.

Yeah, yeah. I know. New to the sport. Bandwagon jumper. Neophyte. All of those dubious honorifics probably apply to me. I’ll own that. And yet … when Donovan netted the winner, it was genuinely euphoric, ecstatic and, yes, karmic payback, you FIFA officiating beeyotches.

It’s not just us annoying Yanks who have been complaining about the officiating. It is everywhere. Try doing a google search of “world cup officiating controversies” and you get about 30 pages of hits in as many languages. Handballs have been missed, egregious fouls have been missed, seemingly good goals have been waved off without explanation, and non-existent fouls have garnered cards of both the red and yellow variety.

Team Brazil is without their best player – Kaka – because of a phantom foul when Kader Keita of the Ivory Coast kinda brushed up against Kaka and then went down like Amy Winehouse after a long night full of jagerbombs.  This phantom infraction earned Kaka a second yellow card for the match and thus, he is DQ’ed from playing against Portugal on Saturday.

To pour salt on the myriad officiating wounds, the refs themselves are shrouded in secrecy, protected from the media, and insulated from the real world. In short, they operate a lot like the Roman Catholic Church, or the International Olympic Committee, for that matter, with zero transparency and just as much accountability. The only group more getting worse press than the officials is Team France and you don’t need to be a lifelong fan of the English Premiere League to know that something is rotten in South Africa — the officiating.

But let’s not linger over what is wrong, but rather what is right. What is right is the American Cardiac Kids for the 21st century. Up against the wall because of the debatable draw versus Slovenia, and certainly well aware that England was hanging on to a 1-0 lead over Slovenia, the U.S. knew that a draw versus Algeria would not be enough to propel them past the round of group play. A win was essential. (Advancing on a draw would have been so less than satisfying anyway.)

They dug in and mounted scoring opportunity after scoring opportunity, but it seemed the goal, the one elusive goal, just would not come. Donovan was very quiet for much of the game. Herculez Gomzez missed the goal. Jozy Altidore missed the goal. Edson Buddle missed the goal. Clint Dempsey missed the goal. Michael Bradley hit a beauty, but right into the belly of the Algerian keeper, M’Bolhi. Hell, it seemed like the entire team missed the goal at one point or another.

But they kept coming. And coming. Tim Howard and Carlos Bocanegra held down the fort, making every necessary defensive play and save to keep the hope alive. These guys love to score late. In 18 qualifying games, they scored 10 goals in the last 10 minutes of regulation play and in their game against Slovenia, Bradley netted the tying goal in the 82nd minute.

It was fitting that it wasn’t until the extra time that their relentless pursuit paid off. Howard made a garden variety save, looked up the pitch, spied Donovan and winged the ball up to him. Donovan, the face of American soccer, streaked down field, fed the ball to Altidore, and then moved across the goal to be in position to blast in the rebound of Dempsey’s shot for the game winner.

Is this time —  the 91st minute of play in the final game of group play — the exact moment when the USA crashed the rest of the world’s party?

Time will tell, but this is a team hitting every soft spot that we as a nation have. Americans love come backs. We love underdogs. While as a nation, we are rarely underdogs, but if ever we are, it’s on the soccer pitch.

An underdog team staging improbable victory against all odds in the waning moments — how much more American can you get?

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Somehow, I neglected to update This Week in Doping last week. Must have been all the excitement of the World Cup and the confusion of the college conference do-si-do. Or maybe I was incapacitated by the vuvuzelas buzzing my head. Be that as it may, neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor scoreless soccer matches will keep performance enhancing drugs out of the headlines.

First, with the most familiar faces — major league baseball players. According to this story in the AP, Roger Clemens’ former trainer and alleged dealer, Brian McNamee, says that he was paid for performance enhancing drugs by the Roger Clemens Foundation. (I am not responsible if you have Elton John’s “Rocket Man” stuck in your head for days if you click on that link. Consider yourself duly warned.)

Does this open a can of IRS- style whup-ass on the Rocket? I really don’t know, but if it does, aren’t those guys the ones who got Al Capone?

In other disgraced former major leaguer news, the ginormous coconut-sized head of Barry Bond’s reared itself this week. As  the San Francisco Chronicle reports, a federal appeals court tossed out key evidence in his perjury case, so Barry could get away cleanly, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Jon Pessah makes his case to let both of these cases drop and it’s pretty compelling. Maybe I’m a more short-sighted, pettier person than Pessah, but it would feel wrong to let Bonds and Clemens fade comfortably into the woodwork when Marion Jones had to go to the slam. What a couple of peaches Bonds and Clemens are, huh?

In the fighting world, after years of dismissing allegations that he used steroids, Mixed Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting Pioneer, Ken ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Man’ Shamrock, admitted that he doped this week. Ben Cohen had a comprehensive post about Shamrock:

… in some cases it doesn’t require too much imagination to see that an athlete is artificially enhancing their physique. And in Shamrock’s case, you just need to look at him.

To prepare for an MMA bout, fighters need to go through intensive conditioning and sports specific training. You rarely see bulging body builder type muscles because they serve no purpose in real combat situations. Fighters simply don’t have the time to put on extra muscle because it would eat into the precious hours they use to prepare themselves for fighting. To attain an extraordinary physique like Shamrock’s naturally (carrying probably an extra 50lbs of muscle over his natural fighting weight), one would need serious amounts of food, supplements and time dedicated to achieving that level of muscularity. And while Shamrock was most certainly a good athlete, he wasn’t anything special so would never have had the time to train properly for a fight and look like a professional body builder 20 years his junior.

I wonder if MMA athletes would see other benefits from steroid use? Not to get big like Ken Shamrock, but just to come back from injury quicker. Which is not to say that steroid use is rampant in fighting. But wouldn’t there be benefits in the form of a quicker post-fight/post-injury recuperation periods, just like any other sport? MMA Torch did a nice job of covering the Shamrock, too.

Seems like the Shamrock story lead to a bunch of MMA/UFC coverage and, per MMAJunkie, the UFC released the results from the May 29th event in which all 13 fighters who were tested came back clean. Which is good news, of course, but for a really comprehensive look at drug testing and where it’s headed in professional fighting, check out John Morgan’s story at MMA Junkie.

Two weeks ago, I linked to a couple of stories about a steroid scandal in Canadian College Football.

On Monday, according to the USA Today, the University of Waterloo suspended it’s entire football team for a year as a result of the scandal.

Jeremy Grimaldi at the Hamilton Spectator has some good thoughts on why players do it.

And Bruce Arthur at the National Post has some interesting thoughts about the scandal, which would seem to be just the tip of the iceberg for the CIS (the Canadian Interuniversity Sport.)

And, last but not least, Tennessee Titans second year linebacker, Gerald McRath received a four game suspension for violating the league’s drug policy, per NFL’s Fanhouse.

June 3rd, This Week in Doping.

May 27th, This Week in Doping.

May 20th, This Week in Doping.

Image via Wikipedia

Alternately titled, the BCS conference commissioners and the boosters who love them. This story changes every 15 minutes so it’s worth updating my last post about it. I’m exhausted just following the movements.

Looks like the Big 12, in the form of 10 teams, is going to survive. All this because the Texas Longhorns agreed to stay, and, thus, A&M and Oklahoma are staying. We’re not dead yet! says the Big 12. According to the USA Today, Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebe will speak about the new peace, but here’s how the television money appears to break down:

He is expected to address reports by operators of Texas fans website Orangebloods.com, which cited people familiar with the decision, and other outlets that the schools were induced to stay by projections of increased TV revenue — $20 million a year for Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma and $14 million-$17 million for the other seven Big 12 members, a substantial rise from the $8 million-$13 million distributed this year. Beebe did not return a request for comment.

Texas also is free to continue pursuing its own TV network.

Which they no doubt, will do. I wonder, if Texas does establish it’s own network – UTTV or something versus a Big 12 Network (modeled on the Big 10 Network)  - how will that affect the balance of power within the Big 12?

But, for the foreseeable future (i.e., the next seven hours or so), the Big 12 conference looks like this:  Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, Baylor, Missouri and Iowa State.

I don’t expect them to sit still. Once feeding time at the zoo was announced, all the conferences got ants in their pants.

In the rest of the midwest, the Big 10 now has a dozen teams and they have said that they’re going to remain that way For at least another dozen months.

Here’s the Big 10 lineup:  Michigan, Michigan State, THE Ohio State, Penn State, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Northwestern, Purdue and Nebraska.

Bear in mind that the Big 10 has never hidden the fact that they very much covet Notre Dame. Who knows how much longer the Golden Domers can hold out with power conferences gathering so much, well, power.

And, in the area of publicly declared lust, the Pac-10 made no secret of it’s desire to poach the Texas-Oklahoma axis from the Big 12 and has a bit of egg on it’s face now that the Big 12 retained the Texas-Oklahoma axis and has resolved to stand firm. But, with the addition Colorado (who they did manage to lure from the Big 12) the Pac-10 is sitting on 11 teams, but are probably not done maneuvering yet. For now, the Pac-10 looks like this:  USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, Arizona, Arizona State, and Colorado.

It is speculated that the West Coasters will continue to try to put together at least a dozen teams, if not the super conference of 16 teams originally envisioned. Word is that the 12th potential team is Utah, currently of the Mountain West Conference, which conference just poached Boise State from the WAC conference. Of course, by the time I hit the “publish” button, no doubt there will have been even more changes.

Why the push for super conferences? Money. Championship game money. Which is to say, football championship game money. With enough teams, a conference can split into two divisions, a’la the SEC, and then have a conference championship game. That one game can mean kaboodely millions on TV revenue for a conference. The Detroit Free Press estimates that a Big 10 championship game could mean about $15 mil in revenue just for one game, which is a whole lot of motivation for ADs and conference commissioners everywhere.