It’s time for our annual “Turkey Awards”; that time of year when we recognize the biggest “turkeys” from the world of sports. Gobble. Gobble. Gobble!
Toss a frozen turkey at those four and five-person panels that are used in pre-game and halftime telecasts of college and professional football. Former players and coaches all dressed up in expensive suits spouting their produced “sound bites” are overbearing. Half of them pick one team, and half of them pick the other. One criticizes one team and one the other. Pour a little gravy on all of them!
A drumstick for former major league baseball player Jose Canseco who’s finger fell off this last week while he was playing poker. Really! He was playing in a poker tournament (this guy will do anything to get on television) and his finger fell off. It was a finger that had been reattached following a self-inflicted gun shot while cleaning his gun. Dunno if it was his trigger finger.
Let’s give the turkey wing to Josh Shaw, the former Southern California football star and captain who showed up with two injured ankles and reported that he injured himself because he had to jump off of a balcony to save his nephew from drowning in a pool below. The truth finally came out that he had fallen off of the balcony. Why? Probably doing what college kids do when they shouldn’t!
How about just a turkey carcass for the University of North Carolina. Their bones have been picked clean by the rest of the media for their exposure of cheating in academics to make it easier for athletes to make good grades. More and more revelations are exposing that many athletes didn’t even attend classes yet got passing grades. Aw shucks, “Ole Roy” sounded a lot like Barack Obama when he said, “I didn’t know anything about it.”
On that same menu, let’s pass out a turkey to the NCAA who seem to only investigate and penalize certain schools. There has long been a joke in collegiate sports that when some big-time school is exposed for cheating, you can bet your drumstick that pretty quickly some small school will get put on probation for something. Sure enough, this week Weber State got put on probation by the NCAA. North Carolina? They are still checking on that!
A turkey neck to the Pittsburgh Steelers for those awful “throwback uniforms”. It has become a fad for professional football teams to occasionally play a game in old-time uniforms. The Steelers recently  played a game in  ugly, striped uniforms. They looked like a bunch of escaped prisoners from an old-time prison. Come to think of it, they played that way too!
For the Kansas University football and basketball teams we’ve got only turkey tail feathers left to give  out. It is a rare week indeed when both the men’s football and basketball teams suffer a blowout loss in the same week. Football? We’ve come to expect it, but not in basketball. The beatdown by Kentucky left Jayhawk fans wondering if there would be a Thanksgiving!
Finally, instead of passing out another “Turkey”, let’s pass the dessert. Can there be a better small-school football league in the state of Kansas than the Central Prairie League? Central Plains captured the 8-Man Div I championship and fellow league member Victoria won the Div II championship this past weekend. Toss in LaCrosse who finished 9-2 and advanced deep into the 2-A bracket and 9-3 Ness City and you have a “monster” football league. With St. John added to the mix there just might be multiple state championships coming up in basketball as well!
Certainly no turkeys there!