Five Quick Hits
* There hasn't been a bigger shock in tennis this year than Nadia Petrova's first-round loss to Akiko Morigami in the French Open. I know injury was involved, but this was a rout (6-2, 6-2), not a withdrawal.
* Attention casual tennis fans: Andy Roddick has been decidedly mediocre for months now. James Blake is by far the best North American tennis player in the world. Even on clay.
* I know Barry Bonds has a good eye, and no one wants to give up a historic home run, but it's pretty ridiculous for a guy hitting .258 to have a .484 on-base percentage.
* The American League all-star voting is a farce. The top vote-getter at every position plays for Boston or New York, except outfield, where Manny Ramirez (Boston) is second and Johnny Damon (New York) is third. Which is so much better.
* How the hell is Johnny Damon ahead of Jermaine Dye and Vernon Wells?
***
On December 17, 2005, the Indianapolis Colts clinched homefield advantage throughout the AFC playoffs. They were 13-0, had more than doubled their opponents' scores (392-185), were winning by an average of 16 points per game, and looked unstoppable. A pair of late-season defeats were mildly troubling, but ultimately didn't worry many people; the Colts had already done what they came to do — secure the AFC's top seed in the postseason.
On January 15, 2006, the Colts lost their first playoff game, eliminated by the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Halfway through the NFL's regular season, analysts were anointing the Colts as a perfect team, even discussing whether they might be the best team in history. It's natural to get excited about a team making a run at history, but the last year has seen more than its share of premature excitement about a historic team.
Besides the NFL's Colts, consider the NHL's Ottawa Senators, who didn't lose their fourth game until December and were a prohibitive Stanley Cup favorite before the season was halfway over. The Sens slowed down later in the season, but still earned the top seed in the Eastern Conference. They lost to the Buffalo Sabres in the second round of the playoffs.
In college football, the USC Trojans had an undefeated regular season some people found so impressive, it inspired ESPN to declare them the greatest team in the history of the sport — before they had even played their bowl game! The problem, of course, is that USC lost the Rose Bowl. They had been declared the greatest of all champions before they were even champions.
Most recently, the NBA's Detroit Pistons have been favored to win the Eastern Conference crown, if not the outright championship, since before the season started. Their 64-18 regular-season record was among the best in history, and a 37-5 start had people talking about Detroit as one of the greatest teams ever assembled.
The Pistons easily won the top playoff seed in the Eastern Conference, and they had little difficulty in a 4-1 series victory over Milwaukee in the first round of the playoffs. However, the second round offered an unexpectedly difficult series against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and in the third round, Detroit was eliminated by the Miami Heat.
Of these prematurely anointed teams, only USC even reached the championship game before suffering elimination. In the last 12 months, nothing has been worse for sports teams than to do extraordinarily — even historically — well before the start of the postseason. It's impossible to say exactly why they've failed to live up to expectations in the playoffs; any number of possible explanations have merit, and even bad luck isn't out of the question.
The Colts, in particular, have been accused of choking. The Senators were clearly not the same dominating force at the end of the regular season that they were for the first two months. USC probably was never quite as good as the hype. The Pistons may have run out of gas.
One factor that unites all four teams is hype. The sports media love a shot at history, and they don't mind talking about it months before history-making is actually possible. The pressure and attention that come with being at the top, being constantly monitored, are tremendous. Enough to make a group of professionals (yes, USC counts) choke in the postseason? Maybe not. But in recent months, there hasn't been anything worse than being the best.
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