Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's to blame for it all?

In honor of Rick Neuheisel's return to Husky Stadium on Saturday, we thought we would serenade him with the lyrics of the hip-hop icon whose nickname he has been bestowed.

Best believe monas a virgin
A virgin? ! honey needed a slap
She tried to tell me shes a virgin -- with her yea wide gap
I said, it dont matter, see, Im not picky (word)
Let me spell my name out for you, its ricky:
R -- ravishing
I -- impress
C -- courageous; so careless
K -- for the kangols which Ive got
That I wear everyday and
Y -- why not?

Good lord, pay your respects to Rick the Ruler!

The liberal Seattle elite media has filled its pages this week with stories about how Slick Rick is to blame for the state of UW's football team. While I have no love for Slick Rick and hope to see him fail miserably at UCLA, he's not to blame.

Let's think about this. After Slick Rick left Colorado, the program lost five scholarships for one year, and was put on two years' probation for 51 rules violations while he was the coach. It's impossible to commit that many violations in a four-year period of time without leaving fingerprints. Did someone at UW perform some due diligence on this guy? How hard would it have been to go over to Colorado and see if the players go to classes? Are the players completely out of control?

Either UW knew what it was getting in Slick Rick and looked the other way or it didn't know because it didn't check thoroughly into his background. Either way the blame rests with the people who hired him. Slick Rick only did what comes natural to him. The scorpion and the frog. As Too Short once asked, "why you tryin' to turn a ho into a house wife?"

The Final Seven

SGB hates to say I told you so, but I told you so. I won’t be eating any pizzones, because, as I predicted, the Fab Five of Lloyd McClendon, Bobby Valentine, Art Howe, Willie Randolph, and Ned Yost aren’t on the Mariners’ managerial short list. In fact, it looks like they weren’t even on the long list.

I was thoroughly wrong about which Red Sox coaches would get the call—I thought it would be John Farrell and not DeMarlo Hale and Brad Mills, but it is in fact DeMarlo Hale and Brad Mills and not John Farrell—but I will make you another wager. If Hale (DeMarlo, not Chip, another candidate) or Mills gets the job, I’ll buy a round of pizzones for the entire SGB staff.

So here is the list: DeMarlo Hale (Red Sox third base coach), Brad Mills (Red Sox bench coach), Chip Hale (Diamondbacks third base coach), Joey Cora (White Sox bench coach), Jose Oquendo (Cardinals third base coach), Don Wakamatsu (Athletics bench coach), and Randy Ready (Portland Beavers manager).

There are four noteworthy things about these candidates: They’re young, they don’t have any major league managerial experience, the majority of them aren’t white (in Barack Obama's post-racial America, there is hope that these guys aren't affirmative action interviews and are instead on the list because Jack the GM wants them on the list), and they’re affiliated with well-run organizations. According to Jack the GM, it was this final characteristic—their history of winning—that put them on the list, and it will be leadership ability (whatever that means) that puts one of them on top.

As I said last week, I like Joey Cora. He’s young, he’s Latino, and he’s a fan favorite from his playing days in Seattle. Jose Oquendo doesn’t have the Mariners pedigree, but like Cora he’s a young Latino coach who used to be a decent middle infielder. Randy Ready has the best name in the group, but some SGB staffers watched the Portland-Tacoma tilt this summer, and frankly, Ready’s Beavers didn’t look very tight. I can’t say that I know enough about Chip Hale or Wakamatsu to make a judgment, but the larger point is this: This list gives me even more hope that Jack the GM is going to straighten the M’s out. Nobody knows enough about what goes on during the interview process to determine if, say, Chip Hale can manage personalities better than DeMarlo Hale, but we do know enough to say that Jack the GM is throwing conventional wisdom out the window.

And this team has run on conventional wisdom for the last decade. See this post for my overly long explanation of the “good baseball man” mentality that keeps the Mariners from being a “good baseball team.” By next week, we’ll know which of these seven guys is at the helm, and then the real work begins: Jack the GM will put together the team for the manager to manage. Right now, I trust that he knows what he’s doing. It’s a refreshing change to get the sense that the Mariners GM might be better at his job than I would be at his job.

Be My Valentine?

Jack the GM is about ready to start interviewing managerial candidates. So far, he's not tipping his pitches. "I do think what we're looking for is the best possible person," he said. Got that?

In the absence of any hints from Jack the GM, reporters put together a list of candidates by asking him, "What about person X?" He says, "Maybe so," and then wham! Person X is on the short list.

So we're hearing a bunch of names that sounds like the list of candidates for worst manager of the year, circa 2002. Lloyd McClendon? Seriously?

Then there's the Mets trinity of failure: Bobby Valentine, Art Howe, and Willie Randolph. (Is Dallas Green still alive?) Everybody's talking up Ned Yost, because he has a relationship with Jack the GM from their Brewers days. But the Brewers shitcanned Ned Yost right before their pennant run, so I'm not buying that.

The only reason we're talking about these also-rans as candidates is that we have to talk about somebody and they're the names we know. If it's any one of the five people mentioned above, I'll eat two Pizza Hut Pizzones in one sitting for free.

There was some buzz in the Times this morning about a few members of the Red Sox staff (John Farrell, DeMarlo Hale, and Brad Mills), but that's probably because somebody got interviews with Theo Epstein and Terry Francona. Of the three, Farrell's the most likely possibility. DeMarlo Hale is too intense, and intense is out since Joe Madden the baseball Buddhist meditated his way to the World Series. Brad Mills is just Francona's buddy from college.

Right now, the name I've heard that makes the most sense is Joey Cora. He's a legend in Seattle, and that helps when the Mariners brand is taking a beating. He's young, and that helps when the Mariners are rebuilding with young guys. (Bobby Valentine may be famous, but I don't see Yuniesky buying into his antics.) He's Latino, and that helps when many of the Mariners young guys are Latino, too.

In the end, whomever they pick, what matters is not who it is but what it says about the way Jack the GM wants to run the team. The manager will be like Palin in that way. She was an awful pick, which was bad in its own right, but even worse because it showed that McCain wasn't serious about governing.

Here's hoping that Jack the GM names a manager who shows he's serious about rebuilding smart.

Beavers in 2012

This isn't really Seattle-related, but it'll be interesting to see how the President-elect's brother-in-law does at the Pac-10's basketball doormat.

Ease our pain

SGB, along with the rest of the country, is still in awe of what happened last night with the election of Barack Obama. The problems of Seattle sports fans seem insignificant by comparison. That said, we still have to feed the beast so I will pass along this link.

Chris Ballard from Sports Illustrated synthesized what we have been saying for months. It's a bad time to be a Seattle sports fan or as Ballard puts it, "once-in-a-lifetime badness."

Enjoy

Nothing to do with Seattle, but this is too good to pass up.

A Winning UW Team?!

We know the Sonics are gone and the Seahawks and Huskies are awful. What we could find out, however, is that a UW team might be good this season. The Huskies basketball team has some arrows in its quiver and should finish in the top half of the Pac-10.

UW looks to rebound from last year's losing record because head coach Lorenzo Romar is much better than football coach Ty Willingham in one key area: recruiting. As Stanklin recently noted, Lute Olson's retirement allowed UW to persuade Abdul Gaddy to stay home. That's luck more than anything else. But Romar has convinced more local talent to come to UW than his predecessors. And he's done it at a place that's historically a football school.

New to the team this year is Isaiah Thomas (not the suicide-attempting one, although the younger version got his name because his dad lost a bet during 1989 NBA Finals between the Pistons and Lakers). The 5'8" Tacoma product is a guard in the Nate Robinson mold: he averaged 31 points his junior year, before spending two years at a prep school in Connecticut. He's ranked as the #23 shooting guard by Scout.com, although he'll probably play the point at UW. Either way, he should be able to contribute immediately.

The big gun returning is All-America candidate Jon Brockman. The senior from Snohomish averaged nearly 18 points and 12 rebounds last year and, as they say, leaves it all on the floor. And according to his bio, Jay Bilas considers him the best rebounder in the nation. That should count for something, no?

Junior guard Quincy Pondexter should also be a solid contributor, as he moves back into the starting lineup after coming off the bench most of last year. He is the last vestige of UW's version of a Fab Five recruiting class. Led by Seattle product Spencer Hawes, that group was expected to anchor the team for years. But Hawes inadvisedly jumped to the NBA after one year (he would be a junior this year if he'd stayed), and others transferred, but that's hardly Romar's fault. Such is life in college basketball these days.

The Huskies have reached unprecedented heights under Romar. They were a #1 seed in the '05 NCAA Tournament, and that was the first of two straight trips to the Sweet 16. Those squads were led by Nate Robinson and then Brandon Roy, two Seattle studs who chose to stay home. Romar could easily have jumped to a higher-profile program after that, but the UW alum also chose to stay home. If Hawes had wisely chosen to hone his game here rather than languish on the end of the Sacramento Kings' bench, we might be talking about a top-15 team.

As it is, the Huskies are being picked to finish fifth in the Pac-10, but that was before Olson bolted from Arizona. UW has gotten some Top-25 votes, and they could make some hay in conference. UCLA is still stout, even after losing Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love, and Arizona State and USC are also expected to be strong. But Washington State should be down after losing most of last year's starting lineup and there's flux elswhere: four Pac-10 schools have new coaches.

UW's out-of-conference schedule ranges from brutal (Kansas) to cupcake-esque (Portland and Portland State, Cleveland State and Lehigh among others). But it definitely tends more toward more tomato cans than bullies.

Continuity at the coaching position and solid recruiting give UW basketball fans hope for the future. But the present doesn't look so bad either. 20 wins and a run at an NCAA berth are realistic goals for this year's team. And at least we know this basketball team isn't leaving town.