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Chicago Bears Youth Camps

This summer, the Chicago Bears will offer week-long, day camps for kids ages 6 to 14 years old. Campers -- through non-contact football instruction -- will learn to run, throw, catch and defend. Teamwork, sportsmanship, self-esteem and nutrition are components.

Camps are led by professional instructors, with supplemental teaching by former Chicago Bears such as Bobby Douglass, Robin Earl, Allan Ellis, Kris Haines, Jim Morrissey and Revie Sorey.

Register online at www.BearsCamps.com or call (312) 226-7776.

Dates and sites include: June 22-26 in Barrington, Evanston and Lake Forest; July 6-10 in Oak Brook and Winnetka; July 13-17 in Lincolnshire; July 20-24 in Barrington, Burr Ridge, Elmhurst, Libertyville and Northfield; and July 27-31 in Deerfield and Lincolnshire.

Tony Stewart's New 2009 Office Depot/Old Spice #14 Car

Tony Stewart's New 2009 Office Depot/Old Spice #14 Car Gear is now available!

Tim Brown and Dave Casper Finalists for College Football Hall of Fame

Tim Brown of Notre Dame and Gino Torretta of Miami are among 13 players eligible for induction into the College Football Hall of Fame for the first time.

The National Football Foundation announced Tuesday the 76 players and six coaches on this year's ballot. Inductees into the Hall in South Bend, Ind., will be announced April 30.

Torretta, who starred at quarterback at Pinole Valley High, won the Heisman Trophy in 1992. Brown, the Raiders' all-time leading receiver, took the Heisman in 1987. Former Raiders and Irish star Dave Casper also is a first-time finalist.

Opponents Following Blue Print to Smother the Irish on the Court

It’s been easy to pile on Mike Brey during this lost basketball season about coaching mistakes, missed opportunities and a stubbornness that kept the Irish coach from moving toward any progressive ideas when things were going bad.

Much of the criticism is well deserved. To me, this has been Brey’s worst season in his nine as the coach at Notre Dame. But as I think through it, Brey has been in the coaching biz for about 30 years and had a lot of success, so he has to know a thing or two when it comes to evaluating his product.

So when he warned us early this season that his team didn't belong in the top 10 rankings, and 9-9 in this league this season was going to be powerful for this team, he might have known something that all these folks that put ND in the top 10 didn't. Maybe he realized that his team wasn't actually that good, and all these expectations were overblown.

The blueprint on how to beat ND – smother Kyle McAlarney, let Luke Harangody get his, crash the boards – began to surface last season. And when Ohio State used that formula to beat ND back in early December, I titled the game story “Blueprint For Success” because they worked the plan to perfection. And the gist of the story was that with so much talent and athleticism in the conference this season, ND could get swallowed up by teams that followed this simple formula, and that’s exactly what happened.

Think back, and the signs of how serious a problem this blueprint could be were there all along. Similar to how San Diego State exposed the Irish football team in the opener last season, one game after Ohio State, Boston University exposed the basketball team. Harangody scored 23 points on 8 of 14 shooting. The rest of the Irish shot 39 percent, the team gave up 17 offensive rebounds, and darn near got beat at home by a Terrier team that is 17-12 and has an RPI of 144.

You can try to screen and run and move and fake and jostle all you want, but when your defender is bigger, more athletic and committed like a hungry dog to stay in McAlarney’s jersey, the Irish didn’t have many answers to freeing up their sharpshooter, and the results were a significant drop in offensive production both for the player and the team this season.

The secret was out in December, and Villanova became the latest to use it last night in early March.

To me, the way the league schedule played out this season proves that 10th place is exactly where Notre Dame belongs. It has only two wins against the nine teams above, while it has five wins against the six teams below it, so it slides neatly into that No. 10 slot, right where it belongs.

To steal a Charlie Weis line, “You are what you are,” and this really was a tenth-place Big East team this season.

Is it disappointing? Absolutely.

But the talent in this league, the weight of overblown expectations, and frankly, the talent deficiencies on Notre Dame were all too much to overcome. The Irish were exposed for what they are – a pretty good team in some other conferences, not even remotely a player in the Big East.

It appears the No. 10 Irish will open Big East Tourney play at 7 p.m. Tuesday against No. 15 Rutgers. Notre Dame should win that game – note the word “should” because Notre Dame is 4 -13 all-time in this tournament, so nothing is a gimme.

That will feed into the No. 7 seed at 7 p.m. Wednesday, which is where Notre Dame’s tournament run will likely end. The Irish have been to this tournament 13 times and have never won two games in it.

Then it’s onto the NIT, where I predict a quick and rather unceremonious end to this season, similar to 2004-05, when the Irish were ousted by Holy Cross in the first round at the Joyce Center. Teams that don’t want to be in the NIT don’t do well in the NIT, and Notre Dame fits that profile perfectly.

When Dick Vitale said in the preseason that Notre Dame was the No. 4 team and Andy Katz had them at No. 5, we all bought in – at least to some extent – that this team should be at least in contention for an Elite Eight appearance. But after watching Ohio State, St. John’s, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, West Virginia, Villanova and even Boston University demonstrate how easy it is to defend this team, we need to step back and wonder.

Should all this disappointment fall at the feet of Mike Brey? Or is this exactly the product he expected, and maybe what all of us should have expected?

Thanks to Todd D. Burlage

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Who is Biba Golic?

Featured on a recent ESPN television commercial, many have wondered, "Who is Biba Golic?"

Biljana "Biba" Golic (born November 9, 1977, Senta, Serbia) is a Serbian table tennis player. She has become one of the game's top players and known around the world for her intense play and beautiful looks.

At the age of 12, just three years after her start in table tennis, Biba became a member of the Serbian National Cadet Team, and continued to climb the ranks to the senior Serbian National Teams during the next 10 years. Biba came to be a dominating force in women’s table tennis, becoming the Balkan Champion in Mixed Doubles, a 2x Yugoslavian Singles Champion and the Mediterranean Doubles Champion.

In 2002 she joined Europe’s most prestigious table tennis league, the Bundes League in Germany, where she played for 1 year. It was here that she connected with Killerspin and became a sponsored player in Killerspin’s ‘Krew’.

Since becoming one of the anchors of the “Killerspin Krew”, Biba has combined her talents to play competitively, as well as to serve as a spokesperson and heighten the popularity and awareness of the sport. Often called the “Anna Kournikova of table tennis”, Biba definitely exudes a graceful charm, and was even named as one of the ‘Sexiest Women in Sports” by ESPN in 2005.