And so we've seen the first six out save in the soon to be illustrious career of Jonathan Papelbon. And the fact that petty crime dropped in Boston this evening as every cutthroat, lowlife, drug pusher and total douche sat down for these last five hours to watch the game is cold comfort. So now we root for the Rockies and hope the eight day layoff wasn't enough to kill their mojo.

I am too bitter, and too depressed at the moment to comment in greater detail. So get bent, citizens of Red Sox Nation. Get bent forthwith.

Could Cris Collinsworth blink any more? Is this something that has been encouraged by his advisers/handlers so that he looks slightly less like a phallus with legs and a thousand dollar suit?

What with the way the Cleveland Indians seem desperate to save Major League Baseball from the indignity of a World Series that somehow lacks a major market team despite the fact that both Denver and Cleveland are much bigger cities than Boston, I spent a lot of time searching for something to watch. The Illinois vs. Michigan game would have been a great candidate but for three serious questions.

First, why do the Marching Illini wear capes? Are they super heroes? Even the silly helmets on the USC band (the real USC not that disco with books that stands out for its subpar academic repute in the desert of ignorance that is the SEC) look far less ridiculous than the capes.

Second, could Brent Musberger be more biased in favor of the Michigan Wolverines? Ryan Mallet fumbled two snaps, and Musberger still raved about him as though he threw for 300 yards and 5 TDs. In the drive to respond to the Illin field goal which tied it at 17, Musberger raved about Mallett as though he led a drive reminiscent of Joe Montana's game winner in Super Bowl XXII. The only differences between the two drives, Michigan gained the bulk of its yards on the ground, not through the air, and the drive ended in an interception not a TD.

Third, why is it that no one talks about Rashard Mendenhall from Illinois as a potential Heisman candidate? I know Matt Ryan has the inside track because BC plays the very best Division 1-AA has to offer and a very bad Notre Dame team. Just because Illinois will have to wait until it plays Ball State to hope for some crumbs of attention in a Jason Whitlock piece doesn't mean Mendenhall hasn't earned some consideration.

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the Red Sox game to some degree. There is some consolation for a person with my viewpoint in Curt Schilling's performance. It means that he basically can dictate his contract terms to Theo Epstein. Of course Theo lost any slight degree of leverage he had when Schilling put his house up for sale in September and started saying that he'd like to play in a place like Tampa. There is no way that Tampa is an empty threat. Schilling would definitely go to a team that will likely lost 90 games next season to pass the twilight of his career.

Of course no one can fairly blame Theo for being manipulated and outmaneuvered by a fraud who plays Everquest for hours on end. After all, getting into a bidding war with the Yankees for the services of Roger Clemens couldn't possibly hurt the club as it makes its decision to pursue or not pursue Schilling. There's no way offering a prorated $18 million to Clemens will embolden Curt Schilling.

In part, it made sense to offer Clemens that type of deal. Why not? There was a chance they could sign him. And making the Yankees go all the way up to $28 million (prorated, to be sure) was a big dent in the vast, vast, vast resources of the Bronx Bombers. After all, Boston had a lot of appeal to Clemens, with the patient, tolerant and very nearly but not quite human media and all. And Clemens really needed to break the tie with Cy Young for most wins in club history to cement his legacy right.

The question now becomes, given the humble bearing and equanimity with which Schilling approaches every situation, whether Schilling will be avaricious enough to demand certain concessions from the team. After all, it wouldn't surprise me with the way the team bent over backwards to throw money at guys who had nowhere near the track record Schilling brought with him when he signed in '04, if Schilling felt himself entitled to demand that his General Manager clean his pool or serve as human foot stool. Could it really be any more humiliating than paying JD Drew the remainder of his $70 million over the next four years, because the grand slam tonight didn't really wipe the slate clean?

Even if the Red Sox come all the way back to go to the World Series, is it going to change the fact that Julio Lugo was paid $8.3 to be 1/2 of a baseball player? Will their be no repercussions for that little anomaly? Will Jacoby Ellsbury pushing Coco Crisp out of the lineup be sloughed off as a curious but not unpleasant quirk of the game? I understand that Red Sox fans are hypocrites, but Red Sox Nation might want to think twice about ripping the Yankee spending machine, even if it might be more intellectual activity than would kill a Red Sox fan or two million.

And speaking of hypocrites, it's been too long since I ripped Jay Mariotti. There is something very sickening about this recent column Mariotti wrote ripping the Bears for the Adrian Peterson performance last week. It seemed to me as though Mariotti was implying that the Bears somehow passed on Peterson despite Mariotti's urging and giggling while he did it. Perhaps I'm not as intelligent as Mariotti is, but I just don't see how the Bears could have drafted Adrian Peterson.

In a sense, it's possible to say that the Bears passed on Peterson by not taking a trade with the Washington Redskins which would have given the Bears the sixth overall pick in return for Lance Briggs. Mariotti did call for the Bears to trade for that pick, but he called for the Bears to acquire that pick with the express purpose of drafting Ohio State wide receiver/kick returner Ted Ginn Jr.

Ted Ginn is not playing particularly well right now, to be charitable. Moreover, he would provide the Bears with an adequate player whose skills might overlap with Devin Hester and Bernard Berrian without providing an upgrade on either player. Perhaps Adrian Peterson would do a better job running behind this offensive line than Cedric Benson, but there is no way to prove that. However, given the fact that Mariotti is a douche and universally loathed, perhaps it would serve his ends better to praise Cedric Benson than to bury him. Then, perhaps Benson would be benched.

In the past, I have found a few occasions to be delighted by strange, but pleasant events where the programming schedule of Turner Classic Movies presented neat parallels with a big defeat for the Boston Red Sox or the Cletics getting a bad draw in the NBA Draft Lottery. I guess sooner or later, I was bound to see an event like that shaping up and have it blow up in my face. I just wish it weren't tonight.

Turner Classic Movies showed the vastly underrated Cliff Robertson Michael Caine film Too Late the Hero. It looked like that would fit very nicely with Josh Beckett taking the hill and the Red Sox facing very long odds in this ALCS. However, Turner Classic Movies has been letting me down lately, with a month of biopics that haven't been all that good and a retrospective on star of the month Henry Fonda featuring Jane Fonda Peter Fonda used as a space filler between movies. I understand that they couldn't really do something like that and leave his kid's out of it, but I really hate Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda.

I also should have known something funny would happen, since In Harm's Way was on deck with Too Late the Hero on the air. In Harm's Way is a very vexing movie for me, since it has John Wayne and Kirk Douglas but also kind of sucks. It's a soap opera masquerading as a war movie. The scenes that dealt with the Solomon Islands campaign have the names of the islands replaced with fugazis as though it were one of those bad made for TV movie of the month "true crime" bits.

Come to think of it, that may have been the case since Admiral Ghormley may have been still alive and the incompetent admiral in In Harm's Way has a lot of his moves, and maybe a little of Admiral Fletcher who lost a lot more cruisers to Japanese forces than I would have thought possible without a court martial or at least a court of inquiry proceeding. But the two main problems with the film are these. First, Patricia Neal, John Wayne's love interest, was not a good looking woman. And most important of all, the movie is literally one hour too long.

I think Turner Classic Movies might have broken that curious, pleasant little power they had by showing the Jazz Singer. It's very rare that it's ever shown, and I always thought it was because of the black face scene. Now I am Caucasian and not as sensitive to that issue as some others might be. But I found one scene where there was a teenager dancing on a stage as though his feet were trapped in drying cement while he was being electrocuted and a piano player who looked as he had been unwittingly part of some half-assed undertaker's half-assed efforts at embalming played a piano with the most macabre attempt at a smile ever far more disturbing. Yikes.

And of course, Joe Torre rejected a one year $5 million contract offer from the New York Yankees today. To be sure, there were incentives in the deal which would, among other things, have triggered another year of employment had Torre accepted the deal and managed the team to a World Series appearance. So our long national nightmare is finally over, as is the 12 year run which saw 12 straight playoff appearances. Or perhaps, as a media frenzy the likes of which one rarely sees outside of election night in a Presidential year and a papal conclave will begin while the search for the next Yankee manager begins.

I am not sure how I feel about this situation. Not the end of the Torre era, per se, for once I was very clear about something when I wanted him fired. But I'm not sure this was the right way to do it. Plenty of people, I am sure are convinced that this was not the right way to do it. Buster Olney is one among many Torre apologists with a premise so nice he wrote it thrice, and while I know I ought to believe what he believes without reservation, I don't. Not even when Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports concurs.

Kevin Kennedy dazzled me by saying something perceptive about this situation. His take was that this deal let Joe Torre go out his way, with some measure of dignity. And in Kennedy's mind it was better than retaining Torre only to fire him unceremoniously should the Yankees stumble out of the gate next season. There is a strange method to his madness, or perhaps a even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time.

The problem is that there really was no way for the Yankees to resolve this situation whilst managing to be all things to all people. Based on his track record, as described by Buster Olney in a stunningly good piece for a change, of managing a very difficult assignment with quiet dignity, Joe Torre had so many friends and admirers in the media, particularly the national media, that the Yanks were going to catch hell for severing ties with Torre. Whether they fired him outright, or twisted his arm behind closed doors until Torre reached the point where he came out and quit, no one would believe that Steinbrenner didn't pull the trigger.

And as to whether the offer was disrespectful, how else could it have been done? This was as close to a win-win deal as could have been worked. If the deal had been good enough to accept and Torre took it, then the team would have been stuck with a nightmare situation of having to fire a very well-liked guy and changing horses in midstream next year. And they couldn't just call him in the office and boot him out the door, not after 12 years. But if he did take the deal, maybe it might have lit a fire under him and the team, which could have worked well in the end.

Torre had to go. Not to get any more biblical than I absolutely have to, but he was the guy from the Gospel parable of the talents (the ancient unit for measuring weight, particularly precious metals and not some ephemeral or ethereal skill for Red Sox fans). In the Gospel, a wealthy man gives three of his servants three different sums of money (talents of gold).

As the story goes, one guy invests and doubles his money. He gets to keep it when the master returns because he's so happy his servant did the right thing. The second guy doesn't generate quite as much in return for his initial sum, but he is also rewarded. The third guy digs a hole and buries his sum, so he presents it intact when the master returns. But he's also a jerk about it, so he complains about the master trying to reap where he didn't sow. The master gives him nothing.

To make a long story short, Joe Torre was given $1.2 billion dollars in talent (our sense, not the ancient sense) over the last seven seasons, and he might as well have buried it. A great many things happened, and some were beyond his control, to be fair. But at the end of the day, when George Steinbrenner opens his wallet, he wants a return on his investment. 12 straight playoff appearances isn't enough when the ultimate prizes eludes you for so long. To put it in perspective, Bill Clinton was the last President to host the Yankees at the White House. That's ancient history, if you're George Steinbrenner and it's your money.

Finally, I will conclude tonight with another installment of my impromptu series on the lower order organism that is the Cleveland Indians fan. Tonight, as I watched the game, I spotted a fat dude sporting a rally cap that stood out from the crowd for his vacuous appearance, which is in itself a feat I wouldn't have believed had I not seen it, what with the dismal view I have of the Clevelander's intelligence.

This tool wore a rally cap precariously perched on his massive noggin, which almost, but not quite drew attention away from his double chin. He also wore a terrible pair of glasses, which I initially mistook for Drew Carey glasses, probably because FOX insists on playing that shitty Cleveland Rocks song, which was a Drew Carey Show theme for a while. My friend the Cubs fan, however, shocked the world by noticing something I didn't for the first time in the last 5 years, and correctly identified the hideous glasses on his foolish fat face as Wild Thing glasses from Major League.

Oh yeah, the Red Sox managed to stave off elimination. I didn't want to say it, but I have to I guess.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an intriguing question to pose to you all. At what point in this evening's game did Kevin Youkilis look most ridiculous? Was it the foul ball down the first base line that he turned into a Keystone Kops moment? Or was it when he struggled through the introduction of the lineup, making Rocky's struggles in the commercial taping in Rocky II look like Olivier doing Hamlet on stage in London?

According to Joe Buck, Youkilis manages to look intimidating even when he introduces a lineup. Of course, I think that if you are Joe Buck, even my five year old niece looks intimidating, but that's neither here nor there. I think Youkilis is far from intimidating. Rather, he looks like the type of guy that desperately wanted to be a biker all his life, who gets the bike and the clothes and the look, but still can't make himself look mean. Perhaps Youkilis would have looked meaner in my eyes had he not waited until the team trailed by 7 in the 6th inning to notch his first HR and RBI of the ALCS.

The Youkilis bobble reminded me of a quote from George Orwell which I first applied to Mark Cuban. Orwell described one of England's peers as "looking rather more like a monkey on a stick than I would have thought possible for some one who wasn't actually trying." That sums up how pathetic Youkilis looked in misplaying that ball.

Over the course of the offseason, which now looks like it just might start a lot sooner than Red Sox Nation might desire, a great deal of ink will be spilled on the fact that Francona elected not to start Josh Beckett on three days rest. For my part, I have attacked Francona continually over the 18 months this blog has existed. But I don't think he made the wrong call. And it's not because I wanted the Sox to lose, for a change.

People love to point out that Beckett was lethal on three days rest in the 2003 playoffs. That was then, however, and this is now. Josh Beckett is the cornerstone of this team going forward. Is it, then, better to risk his arm for the sake of tying an ALCS or is it better to take your chances with Wakefield and keep Beckett as healthy as possible to extend the window for this team?

I took a great deal of grim staisfaction in seeing Wakefield, who was so good so long ago in the regular season, fall apart in the fifth inning of this evening's game. But up until this evening, he had never lost an LCS game. And it mattered little that he was pitching on 18 days rest. After all, were you really worried that his arm would be too live in tonight's game if you happen to be a Red Sox fan?

And while we're talking history, if we can remember what Josh Beckett did in 2003 on three days rest, why can't we remember what he did in the last LCS start with his team trailing 3-1 in an elimination game? That was Game 5 of the NLCS in 2003, and I hate to do this to my friend the Cubs fan, but Beckett shut down the Cubs as though it were a moral imperative that the Cubs should score no runs.

He threw a 2 hitter in that game. Not much attention is paid to it, partly because stifling the Dusty Baker-era Cubs wasn't exactly a miracle. And of course being on the wrong end of a 2 hitter in a game where you could have elimated the opponent isn't anywhere near as picturesque as some loser in glasses interfering with a fly ball down the left field line with 5 outs to go and a three run lead.

If Red Sox fans were honest (and let's face it, they aren't), they'd admit that starting Wake over Beckett wasn't exactly reminiscent of Joe McCarthy going with Denny Galehouse in the one game playoff against the Indians in 1948. Of course that presumes Red Sox fans know half as much as they pretend to about their team's history. Perhaps if the CHB gets off his posterior and has his interns burn the midnight oil, then the Nation might remember it as though it were yesterday the day after the column appears. But that's another story.

Before today's game, I got to thinking about that play where Ortiz managed to get in the way of Ramirez grounding out to shortstop. Seeing him run into that out in such surprising fashion reminded me of something at the time. I'm sure all of you good Red Sox fans who worry so much about what might happen to John Henry's ill-gotten gains in his pending divorce own the 2004 postseason DVD, so you can check it out for yourselves.

In case you don't remember, Cardinals pitcher and all-around loser Jeff Suppan managed to get himself trapped in a rundown at third base thanks to indecision on the base paths. I remember being livid with him at the time, not only because it was a momentum killing play that benefited the Red Sox, but because a National League pitcher has to run the bases from time to time and ought to have had better sense than that. To make a long story short, I think Papi might have killed the Sox momentum in this series with that play.

So the Red Sox are now poised on the brink of elimination. I cannot summon up a proper level of excitement about that, though. First, there is, as I keep saying, the lingering memory of 2004's comeback against the Yankees. And as I've said, I still don't like this Indians team. I do find myself wondering whether the layoff while the Rockies await the winner of this series might be the only thing that will kill the roll Colorado is on at the moment.

The home half of the fifth inning of tonight's game did reinforce an impression I've had of the Indians in this postseason. With the way they keep grinding out runs in all kinds of different ways with two outs, they remind me of a football team that simply can't get an opponent off the field on third down, like Notre Dame, or the teams that have fallen victim to Belichick's corrupt legion of minions.

And while I'm on the topic of things that have suddenly become clear to me over the last few days, I have one more this evening thanks to Bill Simmons. For a long time now, basically since the travesty of 2004, or maybe since he went to work for Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Simmons has been evoking an impression of something I couldn't quite explain. Calling him an aggressive sycophant summed up his persona, but it didn't resolve the question of that nagging impression.

Then Bill Simmons wrote this brilliant piece comparing being a Boston fan right now to waking up every day being George Clooney. And it hit me like a thousand of brick, to quote Rooster Cogburn. Bill Simmons reminds me of George Clooney. Not the looks, or the talent, but that vague, smarmy smugness that is all over the Gospel According to Clooney.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, the writers of South Park did an excellent job of satirizing this particular aspect of Clooney's character in the smug epsiode. They got after Clooney for his inexplicable Oscar acceptance speech after he won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana.

In that speech, Clooney gave credit to Hollywood for bringing issues like civil rights and AIDS to public attention when the rest of America was silent. Now, I might be alone in not remembering all those movie and TV stars sprayed by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs in the South in the 50s and 60s, but I am that sort of guy. And it was a blow against racism when Hattie McDaniel won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Gone With the Wind, right up there with the I Have a Dream speech, right?

But that's a long digression to come back to Bill Simmons. He's a fraud, like Clooney. He sets himself up as the voice of the young sports fan from Gen X and beyond, and I wish it weren't true. After all, if he's the voice of that slice of sportsfandom, then sportsfandom must be even dumber than I want to admit.

In other matters, the Yankees brain trust convened in Tampa today to discuss the future of Joe Torre. No announcement was made, so I have tomorrow afternoon to try to squeeze in the analysis of the Yankee management situation before the decision is made.

I know that you who read this aren't tremendously interested in what books I read and when I read them. But tonight, I feel compelled to tell you, as it seems to dovetail very nicely with this travesty of a sports weekend. The book is The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is appropriate because that's what I'm going through as both sports fan and blogger.

As a kid, I never thought I'd live to see the day where BC would be ranked #3 overall, and Notre Dame would be a sinking ship grasping at minor trivialities to see signs of hope going forward. And yet that is where we stand right now. Before they start popping champagne corks, or perhaps buying all the Natty Light in Cleveland Circle, BC fans might want to remember that ND was a lot closer to pulling an upset than they should have been.

If the left guard weren't flagged for holding (and God knows, BC has gotten away with a million holds building a mysterious reputation as Lineman U these past 15 years or so), it's a seven point game. Half of BC's points came on drives that started in fantastic field position thanks to a botched snap on a punt and a kickoff from the Notre Dame 15 yard line following the excessive celebration penalty. I hope the Heisman voters weren't watching those sequences.

That said, Charlie Weis has some difficult questions to answer. In no particular order, here are some that have been vexing me. Why wasn't Evan Sharpley the starting quarterback from jump street in this nightmare season? Why, when Demetrius Jones showed no capacity to move the team or hold the football wasn't Evan Sharpley the second option? Why after Jimmy Clausen couldn't move the ball against any team at any time this season was Evan Sharpley not the starting quarterback? I guess you can probably notice a trend here, unless of course you happen to be a BC fan, and anything short of a meat hammer upside your head is far too subtle.

Evan Sharpley has consistently moved the football when he has been called upon to spell Jimmy Clausen. Jimmy Clausen has not moved the football consistently. He hasn't moved the football at all, really. I understand that he's only a freshman, and yanking him now could ruin his confidence. Unfortunately, I am not even remotely sensitive. So yank him. Send him to Northern Illinois to room with Demetrius Jones, or to the North Pole. Just don't let him start another game for a very long time. And send Ron Powlus with him.

Gerry Faust, by all accounts, was a very nice man. He was a great man for considering his players' feelings and trying not to hurt them. He was also a spectacular failure as coach at Notre Dame. The one incident from his tenure I remember most vividly is Jimmy Johnson's response to Faust complaining that the convicts had run up the score on the Catholics. Johnson said: "If you don't want to get blown out, recruit better players."

I said all that to say this: Charlie Weis isn't paid to be sensitive. He is paid to win football games. And paid very well at that. At the end of the day, protecting Jimmy Clausen's ego is right up there with buying the director's cut of the Astronaut Farmer, getting a pedicure and giving up red meat on the list of things to do posted on my wall.

And for those people who would say that coaching is, at least in part, about teaching life lessons, I have this to say. What if you produced as well Jimmy Clausen has in your professional capacities? Would your boss string you along as projects stalled around you, or would you be out on your ass? That's a real life lesson. So what if he's only 20. As John Fogerty said: "You better learn it fast and you better learn it young."

I demand the firing of Ron Powlus. I never liked him as a player. I thought he was in no way, shape or form qualified for the job. He underachieved and failed to handle the pressure of playing QB at ND, and what has Jimmy Clausen done under his tutelage? And I remember that when Lou Holtz retired as coach at ND, Ron Powlus threw a party and came back for one more season at Notre Dame. That was a bad day, and the University should left him where they found him.

But back to Charlie Weis. I don't think the school should fire him. There are signs of hope on this team. The freshman OLBs are great. They get better each week. James Aldridge gets better each week at tailback, and Robert Hughes the freshman shows promise as a big back.

There are some other unpleasant questions one must ask about this team. The most important, other than the quarterback issue, is why weren't the wide receivers that have played well of late playing sooner? I think, and I'm not thrilled to say it, that Weis is finally learning to coach college players. He inherited a veteran team from Ty Willingham, one that could be coached in much the same fashion as the pros he worked with in New England. Now he finally has to learn how to coach a college team, even though he should have after the two bowl blowouts. I'm not ready to see him fired until he shows that he can't learn to coach college kids.

In other Notre Dame related matters, two players probably passed each other in the upcoming draft ratings. Trevor Laws has shown over the last two years that he will in all likelihood be a very good defensive tackle in the NFL for some time to come. He's blocked three kicks this season, he leads college linemen in tackles and he's playing end in a 3-4, when he's naturally suited to play tackle in a 4-3. I'm rooting for the Bears to draft him in the second round.

And the player who passed him is on the way down. I know who's responsible and I assume Charlie Weis will take appropriate steps to ensure that he's punished. The player responsible is Kery Neal, the rising star at rush end for Notre Dame. And the player who is plummeting down draft lists as we speak is Gosder Cherilus, the heir to the mantle of overrated fraud from the offensive line tradition dating back to Pete Kendall.

Charlie Weis should have made sure that Kerry Neal read the scouting reports and paeans in the Boston media prior to the game, then Neal would have thought twice before he destroyed Cherilus' livelihood. He probably cost Cherilus $20 million or so by beating him the way he did. Kerry Neal should have been told that BC is now Lineman U. Look at the way guys like Chris Snee and Jeremy Trueblood rule the NFL landscape, who is better than a BC lineman? At least NFL scouts now have warning when guys like Freeney and DeMarcus Ware feast on him.

And then there is the other thing that happened this weekend. I won't admit that I was wrong in my prediction. To say that wouldn't come close to doing it justice. I was spectacularly wrong. I'm still not sure that the Patriots are as awesome as people seem determined to tell me. But they had one hell of a plan when Dallas hit them, taking the first second half lead against the Pats this season.

Maybe the Cowboys were like one of those basketball teams that comes back from a huge deficit, but just runs out of gas. But I still say that Terrell Owens is better than Randy Moss. I'd still take him over any day of the week. I am deeply disappointed that Wade Philips kicked a field goal on 4th and 5, down the way they were in the game. Like it mattered down two TDs. Go for it, and make the Pats go 95 yards. They won by 21 any way.

But the most surprising thing about the game from my point of view is the Bum Philips is still alive. I may sound callous, mean, cruel and insensitive, but you were thinking the same thing, if you even knew who he was (and I'm sure a lot of young fans would believe me if I said Bum Philips was the crazy homeless guy who rode that strange three wheeled bike and screamed like a siren down Comm Ave). So in the privacy of your cubicle, office or home, feel free to raise your hand if you thought Bum Philips was dead until they showed him in the crowd in Dallas.

What disappointed me most about the Cowboys was the performance of DeMarcus Ware. He had one great series in the second quarter and a few flashes in other spots. But he has the talent to take over a game, not quite the way the real LT used to, but as close as any one playing today can, but he didn't show up the way I had hoped.

I don't have a lot to say about the Red Sox going down 2-1 in the ALCS. As I've said, I don't have much enthusiasm for the Indians. Plus I won't believe that the Red Sox are down and out until it's over for good. The ALCS nightmare of 2004 taught me to be cautious. But it was pretty damn funny to see David Prtiz run himself into a big out in the 4th. Especially since Little Leaguers usually know enough not to get hit by a ball running from second to third. I wouldn't have expected a player of his caliber and his talent to waste his own leadoff double in such a silly way. But there is a lot of time left in this series.

I know I promised my take on the Joe Torre situation with the Yankees, but a few things have come up to interfere with my blogging. Not the least of which is that I recently checked Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut out of the local library. I realize I just 86ed my street cred, since no one who is any one between the ages of 18 and 65 checks books out of the library. And if they do, it's certainly not to read them for edification. That said, if you get a chance and you are in the habit of reading, I highly recommend this book. It's short, it's funny and it offers some chilling insights into the way people act.

But Joe Torre will have to wait, because this afternoon, a more pressing concern is on my mind. This Sunday, two undefeated teams square off on the field beneath the half-assed open roof at Texas Stadium. They are the loathsome New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys. And, as you might expect, only one of these teams can emerge with a victory.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the Patriots will win the game. Rodney Harrison is back from his little slap on the wrist for taking illicit performance enhancing substances. Tom Brady is something like 29-2 on artificial playing surfaces in his illustrious career. The Patriots have steamrolled over every opponent they have encountered this season, and the pasting the Chargers put on the Broncos suddenly makes it look as though the Pats have faced a half-decent team. And on top of that, the Patriots have the second best player to wear number 81 on the field at Texas Stadium in recent memory on their side. No one can stand in the way of this juggernaut, and only a fool would believe that any team has a chance against them.

Call me a fool, but I think Dallas will win this game. Any reasonably competent high school algebra student can tell you that in accordance with the transitive property, since New England destroyed the Bills and Dallas barely escaped Buffalo with an improbable win, New England will beat Dallas handily. Alas, the transitive property works much better in a math book than it does in the real, honest to goodness, no fooling three dimensional world of pro football.

I am fond of quoting the Michael Douglas character from the Ghost and the Darkness who said that in prize fighting, everybody has a plan until they get hit. Dallas has been hit, and hit hard. They have shown that they can overcome adversity, silly mistakes and a hostile crowd in a strange environment and survive. New England has shown that they can get a lead and front-run with the best of them. No one has hit the Pats yet. And that is in large part due to the fact that the Pats have been great so far, but what will this version of the Pats do should the breaks start beating the boys?

Recently, a good friend sent me a cold analysis of the Notre Dame game vs. UCLA which pointed out that when the UCLA starting QB went down, they were forced to play a walk on with no game experience. Although the author's intent was to caution fans like me from getting to happy about ND's first win, it had the unintended effect of reminding me that New England knocked JP Losman out of their game against Buffalo and got to face the untested rookie Trent Edwards. Edwards had a few games to adjust before he faced the Cowboys. And yet Buffalo managed to score precisely zero offensive TDs against the Cowboys.

What worries me about the Cowboys is how their pass protection will hold up against the Patriots, or any team for that matter. I am not overly concerned with their ability to run the ball. The Patriots have a big defensive line and they have been able to push around lighter offensive lines to this point. However, Vince Wilfork will encounter a creature nearly as rare as the Loch Ness Monster in the form of Dallas guard Leonard Davis - a man actually bigger than Vince Wilfork and not on one of those TLC shows about an enormously fat shut-in who is moved from point to point by a piece of construction machinery. Dallas is much bigger on the offensive line than any team NE will face this season, and I'm not sure the Pats can handle it.

I think barring holding penalties or some sort of deal with the devil, Matt Light will be made to look ridiculous (at least in a professional capacity, he does his own work making himself look ridiculous off the field) by DeMarcus Ware and Anthony Spencer. No matter what Shawne Merriman and the pharmaceutical industry tell you, Ware is the best OLB in the game right now. And the Pats o-line just isn't ready for him.

And make no mistake about it, take any combination of three Patriots you want, and you'll still be a man and a half short of covering Terrell Owens. And for all the highlight reel TDs Randy Moss has caught this season, show me one play where he threw one block 1/3 as good as any TO threw to spring Creighton for the long TD in St. Louis. That's why TO is that much better than Moss, he's not as fast, but he's tougher, smarter and braver about going over the middle. He may drop a pass here and there on account of a lack of concentration, but I'd much rather have him than Moss any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

Dallas is a better team than New England. And unless Belichick has some sort of trick up his sleeve involving compromising photos of Tony Romo or illicitly obtained video of the Dallas coaching staff's signals, I'm confident that for once, right will prevail.

In other news, the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians face one another for the right to represent the AL in the World Series. I really tried the last day or so to generate any interest, any hope of rooting for the Indians, and I can't. My hatred for the Red Sox is in no way diminished, and I still want them to lose every game by 100 runs, but I never wanted Cleveland to be the team facing them. As Victor Frankenstein said, it wasn't supposed to be this way. It wasn't supposed to be this way at all. It was supposed to be a thing of beauty.

And I run a risk doing this, as I try to avoid political matters in this space, but I have to rip some one for this. Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize? How is that possible? Maybe he has done some nice work on global warming whoring himself out to the Day after Tomorrow's promotional campaign and appearing in an Inconvenient Truth. But has that made the world a more peaceful place in any way, shape or form?

For instance, when Teddy Roosevelt won it, he got it for brokering the treaty that stopped the Russo-Japanese War. That is making the world more peaceful for his efforts. Al Gore and his UN group have gotten emerging economic powers like China and India to reduce what percentage of their greenhouse emissions? They've increased liberal guilt in the G8, but that's not Nobel worthy. Even if it were, how is it worth a peace prize? It might be worth an eighth grade environmental science bee prize, but not the Nobel Peace Prize.