LeBron James and Chris Bosh chat on the bench during a USA men's basketball game during the 2008 Summer Olympics. LeBron will join Bosh and Dwayne Wade with the Miami Heat next season. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

Paul the Octopus put his perfect record on the line and chose Spain to win the World Cup Final. Paul didn’t have much to say on the subject, but Bill will get the predictions from some others (including the “Dutch Prophet”) and he will offer his own thoughts on Sunday’s match.

In the course of one hour, LeBron James turned from likeable star to NBA super-villain to everyone except Miami Heat fans. Kevin Hench of FoxSports.com shares his thoughts with Bill about the death of loyalty and competitive balance in basketball.

ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian speaks with Bill about the “year of the pitcher” and how the rest of the MLB season will play out. Although the first half has changed some of Tim’s preseason predictions, you probably won’t be surprised by the team he picks to win the World Series.

NCAA basketball coaches can scout high school freshmen in 14 and under AAU leagues. Tennis ranks its players even before they even reach their teens. Coaches say the early scouting is necessary to get an advantage over the competition, but are they recruiting players too young? Only A Game’s Scott Graff reports from a middle school football combine in North Carolina, where 7th and 8th graders can show off their skills for NCAA scouts and vie to become future college football stars.

Bill responds to listener’s questions from the Only A Game electronic mailbag.

Charlie Pierce joins Bill to discuss the aftermath of the LeBron saga, Peruvians finding a new (and possibly more practical) use for vuvuzelas, and more from an exceptionally strange week in sports.

In his new book and on his wildly popular blog, Bike Snob Eben Weiss cleverly attacks New York bikers, pedestrians, drivers and anyone else unlucky and pretentious enough to end up in his crosshairs. Bill speaks with the author about biking in the big city.

But Yost includes specific material to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the NCAA, which he calls a cartel and compares to the mafia. He demonstrates that when colleges and universities have invited boosters to pay the salaries of coaches, they have made athletic directors and college presidents junior partners at best in running the sports enterprises at their own schools. He convincingly maintains that “the real winners” are the men who draw enormous salaries for serving on football’s bowl committees, while the real losers, much more often than not, are the athletes who’ve been seduced into believing that signing on as “the entertainment product” at a division one school will necessarily lead to lucrative employment in the NFL or the NBA.

Mark Yost’s book is unlikely to change anything about the way the major college football and basketball programs operate. The NCAA, the television networks that broadcast the bowl games and the basketball tournaments, the shoe companies, the boosters, and college sports fans are too happy with the status quo. The same can be said of officials at lots of the colleges and universities involved in the sports industry, since successful teams do sometimes increase alumni giving and applications. But Varsity Green explains that the entertainment and the benefits come at the cost of integrity, just in case anybody still thinks that’s a viable concern in big time college sports.

The Stanley Cup’s Frequent Flier Miles

The Stanley Cup, the National Hockey League’s Championship Trophy, failed to make a scheduled appearance in Vancouver this week.

According to Mike Bolt, whose job it is to travel the world with the chippy chalice, the coveted cup flew to Toronto instead…a goof airport officials thought might be attributable to the presence of two contradictory baggage stickers on the package containing the vaunted vase.

Since it was first presented in 1892, the bedazzling bucket has been left in a roadside ditch, dunked in a swimming pool, and dropkicked into a canal, though it has never before decided to fly somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go.

An “Honor” for Kiffin?

Though Lane Kiffin has moved on from his job as head football coach at Tennessee to his job as head football coach at U.S.C., some of the football fans in Tennessee have not. Moved on, that is.

One of them, Knoxville attorney Drew McElroy, is attempting to get the sewage treatment plant in Knoxville named for the coach who fled town just fourteen months after pledging to rebuild the program at Tennessee. 

“Lane Kiffin told us he hoped the fans would understand,” Mr. McElroy said. “Naming the waste water plant after him would let him know we do understand, and it would memorialize his stay here appropriately.”

Having committed himself to rebuilding football at Tennessee and made various promises to various recruits, Lane Kiffen skips out on his contract after just over a year for the more high profile gig at U.S.C…a program which, like Tennessee, faces various NCAA sanctions, which may have something to do with former Coach Pete Carrol’s sudden departure. 

But the good ones can be better than you might expect.

I remember a collection of pre-adolescent girls – much too large a collection to make up a basketball team – sitting quietly at one end of a gym. Travel team tryouts are over, and the kids are all looking up at their coach, who is about to announce the composition of the team.

In the bleachers at the other end of the gym sit the fathers of the aspiring players. They cannot hear what the coach is saying to the youngsters, several of whom are sure to be told they have been cut. The fathers pretend to be relaxed.

Suddenly the girls are cheering. Some of them are hugging each other.

One of the fathers turns to the man beside him, smiles, and says, “He didn’t cut anybody.”

It turns out he’s right, and the coach, who will never be forgotten by the fathers of some of the less accomplished players, manages over the next several months to juggle his much-too-large roster so effectively that none of the players feels ignored. And they win. They go 16-0 and make it to the semi-finals of a post-season tournament. When they get their picture taken, the photographer has to keep backing up so he can get everybody in. 

And they all keep playing basketball until after freshman year in high school, when a j.v. coach without enough imagination to figure out how to accommodate a roster made up of too many enthusiastic players cuts a bunch of them. 

None of this is to suggest that the coaches recently hired at places like Notre Dame, Texas Tech, and Florida State don’t matter. They do. They make the money that proves it. 

But don’t try to convince any of the fathers who were sitting in that gym when that too big group of basketball players broke into a cheer that the millionaire coaches matter more than the volunteer who cut nobody.

The Dallas Cowboys really need a playoff win. Saturday night America’s Team will be hosting Philadelphia and trying for their first playoff victory since 1996 and the first one in their brand-new stadium. Bill and Todd Archer of the Dallas Morning News will discuss Dallas’s chances.

Faisal Faisal is a man competing in an unusual sport (skeleton), which is even more unusual in his home country (Iraq). Brian Mann reports on Faisal’s long quest to qualify for the Winter Olympics and the motivation behind it.

The National Hockey League is fresh off another successful Winter Classic and teams have settled into midseason form. Only A Game hockey maven and Los Angeles Times writer Helene Elliott joins Bill for an update on the league’s best and worst, plus a look at the NHL players heading to the Winter Olympics.

Ice dancers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto won silver for the US in Turin in 2006. Now the pair is one of Team USA’s best hopes for capturing Olympic gold.  Only A Game’s Ron Schachter caught up with Belbin and Agosto during their preparations for the upcoming 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

The Gilbert Arenas / Javaris Crittenton incident has fueled a lot of a headlines … and opinions. In addition to the legal troubles both men might face, the NBA and the Washington Wizards are still sorting out the on-court ramifications for the players.  After a wild week of news, Bill looks at the locker room dispute in a larger context.

There will be plenty to discuss when Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce convene for their weekly round, uh … make that linear, table: Alabama’s BCS victory over Texas; Gilbert Arenas’s future; the NFL playoffs; and much more.

Twelve and Counting is a new book about the history of Alabama’s football championships. And it just might set a record for the shortest amount of time in bookstores before needing a new title. The Crimson Tide beat Texas for number 13 on Thursday night. The book’s editor, Kenneth Gaddy, and Bill will talk the rich history of ‘Bama football.

Each chapter discusses in loving detail an Alabama football team that won a national championship.

Fans of Alabama football will enjoy it no little and quite some, especially if they are descendants of one or more of the uniformed demigods responsible for the gridiron glory.

Fans of overwrought sports writing will also get a kick out of at least one paragraph of this book. A Nashville newspaperman named Blinky Horn was somewhat inclined to gush over Alabama after the Crimson Tide drowned Vanderbilt in 1930. According to Mr. Horn, his guys were “pulverized by power, struck down by strength, swept aside by speed and crushed by cohesion.”

“Crushed by cohesion” is especially dandy, don’t you think?  A lesser scribe might have stumbled into “smashed into submission by stickiness.”

“These Redmen are roguish people,” Mr. Horn went on to say. “They strike with venom.” (Which would suggest that they are, in fact, roguish snakes.)

Anyway, Alabama has won a lot of football games, though at one point in this book, there is a quiet admission that some of their seasons have been disappointing. Several of those came when the team was coached by J.B. “Ears” Whitworth.

I wonder if “Ears” ever encountered Blinky?

Alabama QB Greg McElroy will lead the Crimson Tide against Texas in the BCS championship game on Jan. 7.

This year the college football bowl schedule boasts 34 games, far too many for one man to handle.  Unless that man is Greg Doyel of CBS Sports.com.  Bill Littlefield checks in with Doyel to find out which of the remaining bowls are worth watching.

In the past decade, the game of ice hockey has gone back to its roots, and outdoor games have become a phenomenon in the professional and college ranks.  Only A Game’s Doug Tribou attends the sport’s latest al fresco offering, the NHL’s 3rd Annual Winter Classic at Boston’s Fenway Park.

The NFL season has entered its 17th week, when the winners sit their starters and the less fortunate scramble for playoff spots.  Bill is joined by Yahoo Sports columnist Dan Wetzel for a league round-up.

From the time she was in grade school, Elena Delle Donne was expected to do great things on the basketball court.  But, after earning a full-ride to one of the nation’s top basketball programs, Delle Donne abruptly took a year off from her chosen sport.  Now she’s back playing basketball for her hometown team, and Joel Rose has the story.

Only A Game listeners are an observant bunch.  Bill responds to a few comments from the Only A Game mailbox.

Bill Littlefield and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce discuss:  bowl games they wish they’d seen, equipment best left out of the locker room, and the telling of tall tales.

Each year, series editor Glenn Stout scours the sports pages for entries worthy of inclusion in the Best American Sports Writing anthology.  This year, Glenn was joined by guest editor and author Leigh Montville.  Bill chats with Glenn and Leigh about this year’s edition.

Alabama looks to tackle rival Auburn in this weeken's Iron Bowl

Tailgating season is in high gear as fans across the country get ready for one of the biggest weekends in college football.  Bill talks with CBSSports.com’s Gregg Doyel about rivalry weekend, the much maligned BCS, and a certain straight-armed gold statue.

In today’s tough economic climate everyone is cutting back on spending, including athletic directors at Division I schools.  This week, Boston’s Northeastern University joined a number of colleges that have opted to cut their underperforming football programs in an effort to save funds.

Often in sports the team becomes family.  But what happens when family becomes the team?  Kellie Harper, the head women’s basketball coach at N.C. State, and her husband Jon, one of her assistants, work together on the hardwood every day.  Only A Game’s Dave DeWitt reports on the family-style rebuilding project at N.C. State.

One of the most famous athletes of the early 20th century, Sugar Ray Robinson is also one of the most complex.  Bill talks with author Wil Haygood about his new book on the champ, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.

Want to get the news?  Go to WBUR.org.  Want to talk sports? Get caught up on all of the week’s important sports stories with Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce, right here on Only A Game.

Sent some mail? Bill opens up the Only A Game mailbox to check in with listeners from across the country.

A new craze is sweeping football fans from Miami to Seattle.  No, it’s not the spread-option offense or the Wildcat formation.  Only A Game’s Charlie Schroeder reports on the Lingerie Football League—a sport that gives a new meaning to fantasy football.

Midway through college football’s season, Bill and Los Angeles Times football writer Chris Dufresne discuss the recently released Bowl Championship Series rankings, which teams are living up to their preseason hype, and which campus will be celebrating come January. 

This year the University of Wisconsin celebrates the 100th birthday of “On Wisconsin,” the university’s fight song.  Only A Game’s Kirk Carapezza has the story of one of the nation’s most storied school ballads.

Perhaps the most talked-about story in baseball’s postseason has been the astonishing number of bad calls made by umpires.  Bill talks with former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent and Bryce Miller of the Des Moines Register about the state of baseball’s umpires.

Until his son grew too old, Jesse Katz was a Little League dad.  He coached his son’s teams and was even the all-powerful baseball commissioner of the Monterey Park Sports Club in Southern California.  But while Katz’s memoir, The Opposite Field, is set against the backdrop of Little League dreams, the book is really about Katz’s own growth as a parent.

From Marcus Jordan’s footwear to Mark Cuban’s view on steroids and the Mets’ financial windfall, Bill and Only A Game commentator Charlie Pierce discuss all of the week’s top sports stories.

Unless you’re an avid huntsman, you probably don’t know much about the sport of beagling.  Reporter Sarah Montague spent weekends with beagling enthusiasts and found more than tweed hats, Wellies, and Snoopy.

The Pirate Parrot, plays with a large bat before the baseball game against the Cincinnati Reds in Pittsburgh, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

The college football season began with a brawl…after the game between Oregon and Boise State.  Will that be the highlight of the first real week of competition?  SI.com Senior Writer Stewart Mandel hopes it’s not.  He gives Bill Littlefield a College Football Preview.

The Pittsburgh Pirates aren’t having a good year.  To be fair, they’re not having a good decade.  And the decade before this wasn’t exactly hot stuff either.  Michael Bartley of WQED in Pittsburgh reports.

Bill Parcells has been declared the 300 Million Dollar Man by Forbes magazine, but how have folks in Miami welcomed the Big Tuna?  Bill Littlefield talks with Jeff Darlington, who covers the Dolphins for the Miami Herald.

Mike Oriard retired from the NFL at age 26.  Eight years later, after earning a PhD at Stanford University, he authored a book on the subject.  And nearly 30 years after that, Oriard has written a new foreword to that book, The End of Autumn.  Bill talks with Oriard about his book and his life.

On Tuesday, ESPN turns 30.  Only A Game’s media analyst John Carroll looks back.

Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce discuss:  keeping an eye on Roger Goodell, electing the Honorable Curt Schilling, and drinking tea while flying loop-the-loops.

Most of our mail comes via the internet these days, so Bill Littlefield opens the Only A Game inbox.

If you’re a fan of baseball and an avid knitter, we’ve got the event for you.  At more than 150 minor league and 20 major league games this season, fans of America’s Pastime can while away the breaks in play with Stitch N’ Pitch.  From a recent LA Dodgers game, Only A Game’s Charlie Schroeder has our story.