By updating RealClearSports I read hundreds of articles every week but sometimes there are particularly passages that need highlighting. And to make these passages more palatable I'm doing them in award form! The awards are completely random and will change weekly.

It was recently revealed that Ohio State's Jim Tressel knew about his players selling memorabilia to a tattoo parlor months before the transgression landed those players with a five-game suspension (of course, implemented NEXT season and not during the Sugar Bowl). Ohio State has suspended Tressel for the first two games next season and fined him $250,000. This is a pretty weak penalty for hiding this information and then lying to the NCAA. There's a good chance the NCAA will hand him a bigger penalty.

Two games isn't nearly enough for this blatant disregard for the rules. So he misses Toledo and Akron. With the coach they are 25 point favorites and without him it dwindles all the way to 20. But it's not a matter of the length that bothers me. How much does it really matter if Tressel isn't around for the actual games? He's there all week implementing the game plan and he probably scripts out the first 15-20 plays. For these suspensions to truly have an impact on these teams, the coaches that get suspended shouldn't be allowed on campus and should have no contact with the assistant coaches. Not having the head coach around for a couple weeks could actually impact the team as opposed to simply missing him for a few hours. This would be a true punishment for the men that live and breath football. Taking them away from what they love might actually drive the point home. On to the awards!

Quote of the Week

Lee Jenkins of Sports Illustrated wrote a must-read profile on Derrick Rose. Aside from scaring the rest of the NBA with Rose's potential, Jenkins had this quote from Brian Scalabrine: "I'm way cockier than he is," says Scalabrine, "and I never play."

Scalabrine has the right to be cocky. Best ginger in the league. Wait, is Blake Griffin a ginger?

Wearing Rose-Colored Glasses

Documents recently surfaced that showed Oregon paid $25K for recruiting services. While apparently not illegal, it sheds light on a gray area in college sports. Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports believes the surfacing of these documents is a sign college football is being saved:  We long ago kissed college basketball's reputation goodbye. ... Football, though, still has a hint of innocence. The NCAA formed the Basketball Focus Group less than three years ago to investigate a recruiting environment described as -- its words in a Power Point presentation -- a "cesspool." It might be too late for hoops. But the NCAA is at least somewhat out front on football. It has committed seven enforcement folks to investigating football recruiting over the next several months.

The prroblem is these documents were brought to light thanks to Yahoo! and ESPN. This has constantly been the case in recent scandals. The media breaks these things open far more often than the NCAA does. So to say the NCAA has football under control is ridiculous. The NCAA doesn't have enough manpower to control sports. And the reason they don't have enough manpower is they don't care. Why mess with the moneymaker?

Craziest Idea of the Week

The Heat have some major issues. They've lost five straight and the "heat" is on coach Erik Spoelstra. Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports believes the Heat should fire Spoelstra: If Riley really doesn't want the job -- and looking at the holes in the roster and Bosh's funk, Riley shouldn't -- he should ask Larry Brown to coach the Heat the rest of the season. I'm serious.
The final 15 games of Miami's schedule are relatively easy. A veteran, established coach such as Brown might be able to use the last month of the regular season to install a strategy that would give the Heat a chance of escaping the first round of the playoffs and being a dangerous second-round opponent.

I would love for this to happen. I'd love to see Larry Brown attempt to drop the hammer on LeBron. How do you think that'd play out? You bring a coach in for the last month of the season and want him to control three superstars?? Good luck with that.

Columnists Winning With Sheen

I guess when there's a topic so huge it works its way into every aspect of the news. Columnists couldn't help but referencing Charlie Sheen and his quotables all week long. Most were awful. A few were alright. Here's just a sample of what was out there:

-"... who is more crazy? Sheen for saying "I was bangin' seven-gram rocks and finishing them because that's how I roll," or NFL owners and players crying relative poverty to a ticket-buying public actually dealing with real financial pressures?

Moammar Gaddafi called; he wants to know how to score some of that Adonis DNA.

The second-most ridiculous statement I've read this week came from Greg Aiello, the NFL's senior vice president of public relations, in the wake of Judge David S. Doty's ruling that the NFL was not, after all, entitled to collect as much as $4 billion from its television partners during a potential lockout.

-But the biggest joke brought about by a six-month investigation by Sports Illustrated and CBS News wasn't that Pitt had the most players in trouble with the law among programs in SI's 2010 preseason top 25. It's the belief that winning more games could have saved Dave Wannstedt's job and spared the school such embarrassment.

The Panthers were winning. Just like Charlie Sheen.

-It's likely we'll never know which Miami Heat players had an Oprah moment in the locker room Sunday. This we do know; there is no tiger blood or Adonis genes running through the veins of the Heatles. And the Miami Heat are definitely not 'winning'. They are crying and losing.

And then there is Rick Reilly's "column." All he does is take Sheen quotes and put a different athletes name by them. How much did ESPN pay this guy to wrestle him away from Sports Illustrated? That's a worse free agent signing than Vin Baker.

Missed Opportunity at Sheen Joke

Leave it to the New York Times to pass up on the obvious joke: "If you nap every game day, all those hours add up and it allows you to get through the season better," Nash said. "I want to improve at that, so by the end of the year, I feel better."

Nash is just trying to learn to nap like an F18.