Bob Kravitz has a column on the fact that Bob Knight is to be inducted into IU’s Hall of Fame. It’s a no-brainer. Kravitz’s column focuses on whether there will be peace between Knight and the University. Hopefully it will. I wasn’t particularly happy with Knight’s firing, but that chapter is over and done with. Though, I don’t see Knight as being the type to let bygones be bygones. Regardless, Knight is a Hall of Fame coach on any scale you care to mention.

What confuses me — things are often confusing when you don’t do any research — is why it would have taken so long for Jerry Yeagley to be inducted. Yeagley’s career as IU’s soccer coach was incredibly successful and, so far as I know, with none of Knight’s personal volatility. Yeagley coached the IU men’s soccer team from 1973 – 2003, won 6 NCAA Championships, and a Division I record 544 games.

Both Yeagley and Knight are giants in their respective sports. Halls of Fame seem mostly useless to me, but if IU is going to have one, these guys should feature prominently.

Richmond grad and Marquette star, Dominic James broke a bone in his foot in Marquette’s game against Connecticut. I didn’t follow his career at Marquette that closely so I don’t know what his NBA prospects were. Whatever they were, I hope they aren’t seriously diminished by this injury.

My principal memory of James was a high school game his senior year when Richmond played New Castle. At one point, he was buried in the lane with about four opponents surrounding him, and then he popped up, twisting and turning around them to bury the shot. Good luck Dominic.

The Evansville Courier Press has an editorial concerning the abomination that is class basketball and the role of government in high school sports. While I agree that in a perfect world, state government would not get more entwined in governing high school sports, the fact remains that class basketball is an abomination, one of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse, and Hateful in the Eyes of God. While it persists, Indiana will be forever cursed and doomed with all Hoosiers bearing the mark of Cain upon their brow.

Now, if the IHSAA could just be persuaded to reinstate the one-class basketball system, beg our forgiveness, and spend the next 91 years (7 years for each of the 13 class basketball years) wearing hair-shirts under their clothes and a scarlet “CB” over them, then I would certainly agree that state government need not take action.

You have to take your good news where you can get it. The IU Men’s Basketball team won their first Big 10 game by beating Iowa. I’ll confess, I didn’t see it. I don’t know if it was televised, but I’ve found this IU season much easier to take by just not watching. The 68-60 win snapped an 11 game losing streak.

With the Colts out of contention, I did not have strong feelings about who should win this Super Bowl. I had mild interest in both teams – with the Cardinals, I wanted to see Edgerrin James doing well. With the Steelers, it’s Ben Roethlisberger, since I am a graduate of Miami University, and we don’t get to see a lot of big time football players, let alone quarterbacks, graduate from our ranks. Big Ben pulled it out, throwing a schoolyard pass to Santonio Holmes in the back right corner of the end zone in the last seconds of what turned out to be a pretty fun game.

Plus, unless it’s the Patriots, I generally prefer to see the AFC team win, since I came of age watching football in an era when the AFC never, ever won the Super Bowl.

It’s playoff time, and we as Colts fans have gotten more than our fair share of playoff games to watch in recent years — 11 out of the past 14 seasons. For that alone we should be thankful. It means that we have gotten to watch our team win a ridiculous percentage of their regular season games. 85 wins over the past seven years versus 27 losses; a win rate of 75%. That is gaudy. Of course it will always feel a little disappointing if we don’t win that last game as we did in 2006. (I say “we” as if I had anything to do with it.) Still, we should always appreciate what we have, even if we really want more, more, more.

This season didn’t look like it was going to be a good one. Golfing with some buddies who had been at a preseason game, I was told that the team looked awful and we would be lucky to win 9 games this year. The first 7 games did not do much to disabuse me of this assessment. The Colts were 3-4 and of those 3 wins only the one against the Ravens was convincing. The one against the Vikings was last minute and the one against the Texans was positively miraculous. There had been disappointing losses to the Packers and the Titans and the Colts were looking at tough games against the Patriots and Steelers. A mostly insurmountable 3-6 hole seemed likely. But then the Colts beat both of those teams, bested the revenge-minded Texans, eked games out against the Chargers and Browns before finally steamrolling the Bengals. After that, they were running downhill, beating the lowly Lions, putting up a strong performance to clinch a playoff spot against the Jaguars, and winning a satisfying – if meaningless – game against the Titans, the only team in the NFL with a better record than the Colts.

Now the regular records are meaningless and the Colts travel to play the Chargers at 8:00 p.m. tonight. At game time, the forecast currently calls for a temperature of about 48 degrees, light winds, and a 30% chance of rain. The Chargers are in the playoffs by virtue of coming back from the dead and winning the AFC West with an 8-8 record, having won the last four in a row including a decisive pounding of the Broncos to win their division. (This game should be the Lazarus Bowl considering that both teams experienced late season resurrections.)

The Chargers scored the second most points in the NFL with a good passing attack and an average rushing attack. How good their running game is tonight might depend on how health LaDanian Tomlinson is. The eternally underestimated Phillip Rivers was their quarterback with 34 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. Their run defense was 11th in the league and their pass defense was dead last.

Meanwhile, all the Colts really did was win. Their stats weren’t gaudy this year. They had the 5th best passing game coupled with a running game that was dead last in the league. Manning’s season QB rating wasn’t as good as Rivers. He had 27 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. Our run defense has been typically bad, but our pass defense was 6th best in the league (at least in part, I suppose, because everyone ran on us as much as possible to exploit our run defense and to eat up clock to keep the ball away from Peyton.)

But, the Colts’ 2006 Super Bowl run reminds us that past performance does not guarantee future results. That year our run defense was sieve-like and our run offense was fair-to-middling. In the playoffs, however, our run defense was smothering and the Rhodes/Addai combination was punishing; grinding out first down after first down.

Hopefully the Colts will put it all together for the next four games. If the Colts only win four more games, I’ll be happy. GO COLTS!

This year’s Colts are not for the faint of heart. They came back once again, and, once again, they held off their opponent’s potentially game winning drive in the final seconds. This win puts the Colts in the playoffs as the #5 seed. There isn’t anything they can do to change their position, so game 16 against the Titans might feature a practice squad. This makes the 7th straight year the Colts have been in the playoffs. We’re spoiled.

Peyton was outstanding. The defense was terrible until it wasn’t, and then it was pretty darn good. Keiwan Ratliff’s run back of an interception for a touchdown was the critical play that turned it all around. After that, a few sacks made all the difference.

Update Also, as this column suggests, in a rational world, Manning’s performance tonight would cement his position as this year’s league MVP.