There's Smoke. Now Let's See Some Fire.

Oh, please, let this be true! According to ESPN's report of a potential investigation into Bruce Pearl's Tennessee basketball program:

With its football program already under an NCAA probe, the University of Tennessee is facing an investigation into its men's basketball program.

NCAA representatives are checking, in part, excessive telephone calls and the use of unauthorized phones to contact recruits, sources told ESPN.com Thursday.

It would be perfect retribution if Bruce Pearl would get into hot water with the NCAA over telephone calls, considering that his illegal recording of a phone conversation with Illini recruit Deon Thomas helped set the Illini basketball program back for a decade and unfairly tarnished the reputations of Jimmy Collins and Lou Henson (this may be a reason why Henson has not yet been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame). Let's hope there's something to this story.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. - Gettin' Some From Fox TV

Good news, fellow Bears fans - Fox Sports doesn't think our team sucks! Well, maybe they do, but at least they think our season-opening clash against the similarly putrid Lions isn't the most unappetizing matchup this Sunday.

As proof, they'll be sending Thom Brennaman and Brian Billick to cover Sunday's game. As you can see from this chart, there are three crews below Thommy and Billick in their pecking order. The #7 crew is off this week (there are only six games on Fox this Sunday), and the #5 and #6 crews are both covering the NFC West intra-division matchups. So we have that going for us for now, but I have a feeling we'll be getting a steady diet of Kurt Warner with Chris Myers or Chris Rose by the end of the season.

Oh, and some sympathy is in order for poor Thommy. Instead of enjoying his beloved Reds battling for their first division title in 15 years, he'll be stuck with this stink-bomb of a football game. I suspect he'll at least be keeping an eye on the baseball scoreboard and trying to work in references to the Reds game as often as he can. If there's an over-under on how many times he mentions the Reds during this game, take the over.

At Least They Beat the Spread

Not much needs to be said about the specifics of Saturday's 23-13 Illini loss. In summary - Illinois executes well in the first half, Missouri adjusts in the second half, forcing the freshman QB to make big plays to win, which he was unable to do. However, the game was competitive throughout, which is more than I (and the oddsmakers) expected. It's difficult for me to find fault with the players or coaches for their effort. Against a team like Youngstown State (Penn State's opener), Eastern Illinois (Iowa's opener), Middle Tennessee St. (Minnesota's opener), or Towson (Indiana's opener), it would have been enough for a victory. But instead, Ron Guenther's insistence that his rebuilding team needed to open against the superior Tigers on a "neutral" field, year after year, has left the team 0-1 for the fourth straight year.

The best thing about Saturday's game is that it means this series has come to an end. Good news is on the horizon for the Illini's next head coach, however - after 18 years Guenther has finally figured out the knack of scheduling. Check out the 2011 schedule, which features eight home games, including five straight to start the year, with the first two against Arkansas St. and South Dakota St. That schedule will certainly help the new regime get off to a quick start next year and maybe even (gasp) make it to a bowl game, which is (almost) enough to make you feel sorry for Ron Zook, who's probably wondering why he never got to have such an advantageous schedule.

Mr. Bright Side

Today I'm choosing to look at the bright side of things.

Let's start with the Cubs (3rd highest MLB payroll), who beat the Mets (5th highest MLB payroll) in the battle of "teams who are getting the least bang for their buck". Thanks to winning seven of Mike Quade's first ten games as manager, the Cubs now have 58 wins. With 27 games left, they only need to go 5-22 to avoid losing 100 games, and 9-18 to exceed the win total of the putrid 2006 Cubs (which was looking doubtful not too long ago). Hey, why stop there? If the Cubs can go 15-12 the rest of the way, they wouldn't even lose 90 games! Go for it, Cubbies!

On to the Bears. Instead of panicking about a winless preseason, consider this - in 2008, the Detroit Lions went 4-0 in the preseason, then proceeded to go 0-16 in the regular season. Therefore, it's only logical to expect that a team that goes 0-4 in the preseason will go 16-0 in the regular season! It's official - you can book your tickets to Arlington Texas for Super Bowl XLV!

And to top it all off, college football starts tomorrow too! All this good fortune at once!

Snowball, this is Satan. Satan, this is...hey, where'd Snowball go?

Last December, the Missouri basketball team snapped a nine-game losing streak against the Illini in the Braggin' Rights basketball game. Does this mean that there's a chance that, for the sake of balance, the Illini football team is about to break their five-game losing streak in the Arch Rivalry on Saturday?

Nah, that won't happen. Prediction - Missouri 34, Illini 10.

More Sports Schadenfreude

On August 11, in this very blog, I stated flat out that I'd be rooting for the Reds - or more accurately, rooting against the Cardinals - to win the NL Central this year. Also on August 11, the Cardinals finished a three-game sweep of the Reds in Cincinnati and moved into first place by one full game (two games in the loss column). It looked like I had planted the kiss of death on Cincinnati by throwing my support behind their team.

However, in the last three weeks since that "telling sweep", an amazing turnaround has happened - the Reds have won 14 of their last 18 games, and the Cardinals have lost 13 of their last 18 games, so that the Reds have gone from a one-game deficit to a commanding eight-game lead in the division race. Oh - and the Cardinals' poor stretch started with losing 2 of 3 in St. Louis to the Cubs. Yay, Cubs!

Even better - the Cardinals now find themselves five games behind the wild-card leading Phillies. And enjoyable as it was to see Matt Holliday play a fly ball off his nuts last October, it's obviously much better if the Cardinals miss the postseason, which is looking more likely every day.

It's Football Season!

Now that the calendar has turned to September, I get to turn my attention away from the train-wreck that is the Cubs and focus on football. I'm glad to see that Phil Steele is not the only one predicting "big" things for the Illini this year (if you consider the Little Caesar's Pizza Bowl "big"). Yahoo! Sports college football expert Tom Dinehart predicts that Illinois will upset Missouri on Saturday, going so far as to say that the stars are lining up for the Orange-and-Blue this year. I guess in Tom's world, having a lame-duck coach who's had one winning season in five years and is starting a freshman QB and breaking in coordinators on both sides of the ball constitutes "stars lining up".

But good news is on the horizon for the Illini football team - the Big Ten announced its realignment plans for football once Nebraska joins the conference in 2011. The Illini's division will include Ohio State, Indiana, Purdue, Wisconsin, and Penn State. This is good news for our yet-to-be-named coach next year - with fellow doormats Indiana and Purdue, around, there might be a couple of easy wins to be had every year. And if our knucklehead AD could figure out that we are trying to rebuild our program and not worry about strength of schedule as if we were competing for a national championship, I can see a scenario where Illinois at least starts becoming bowl-eligible on a regular basis - a marked improvement over the last 15 years of Illini football.

There's more good news out of the realignment announcement - the new divisions won't affect the basketball team. That's good, because having Ohio State, Purdue, and Wisconsin in a basketball division would make things awfully tough on the Illini every year, while Michigan State would have a cakewalk every year with Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, and Northwestern in their division. But since there is a conference tournament, there will be no divisional alignments in basketball, so after the Illini get back to where they should be this year, they shouldn't have any trouble sustaining it.