While We’re Waiting…Delonte’s Thousand-yard Stare, Lee Corso’s F-bomb, Baseball’s new CBA and Deifying College Coaches: Bad Idea?

While We’re Waiting serves as the early morning gathering of WFNY-esque information for your viewing pleasure. Have something you think we should see? Send it to our tips email at tips@waitingfornextyear.com.

Like most Cavs fans, Shaq loves him some Delonte West. ”On the Cavs’ Media Day a few weeks later, West sloughed off the arrest as no big thing. Not long after that, in the locker room before a preseason game, he verbally assaulted a reporter after the reporter asked him how he was doing. “Step the **** off,” he snarled. “M*********** f*****. F*** you.” The team’s media relations people cleared the room and denied that any such incident had occurred. The journalists covering the team agreed among themselves to ignore what had happened.

What had happened was no mystery. West had revealed the season before that he suffers from severe bipolar disorder. And now he was off his meds.

It wasn’t treated by the organization or reported by the media like any other illness or injury. It was as if a large dysfunctional family had agreed that Uncle Delonte and his illness were a horrible, inexplicable embarrassment, and the entire family was better off pretending that he was [freaking] invisible. Never mind that West’s illness had a profound negative impact on the Cavs; Anthony Parker replaced West as the starting two-guard instead of playing the backup role he was signed for, and while Parker is a stable, steady vet, he brought none of Delonte’s lightning on either side of the ball.

Nobody on the Cavs talked about it. Nobody in the press covered it. West never spoke of it—hell, he never spoke at all if the media was present. All season long, West was catatonic before and after games. He sat in silence in the middle of a loud locker room, staring into space, focused on nothing. Teammates, music, food, the pack of media hounds: West sat through all of it with a thousand-yard stare trained upon nothing visible.

Delonte’s living image has stayed with me longer than LeBron’s. I profiled Shaq during the course of the year, and Shaq talked about West with more admiration and respect than any other member of the team, including James.

“I don’t know what bipolar means,” Shaq said. “But basketball-wise, I want him in there. If I’m going to war, I’m taking him with me. Two minutes left, I want him in the game with me. He’s got that dog in him.” [Scott Raab/Deadspin]

Lee Corso dropped an F-bomb on college game day and everybody laughed. Then he had to apologize. ”During the final segment of the program, Corso went to pick SMU over Houston in the featured game of the day. Corso held a megaphone to his mouth that had the SMU logo on it as if he was about to pick them as his winner.

But instead, Corso called an audible, playing to the crowd. He said, “Ah, (bleep) it” and then put on the Cougar head of Shasta, Houston’s plush mascot, before playing it up to the hometown crowd.

His fellow broadcasters seemed surprised by the whole thing as did the fans.

Following the incident, ESPN had Corso tape a segment in which he apologized for the error and also said it would never happen again to the camera.

In this case, it seems as though ESPN would have been better off just letting it go and issuing a press release, instead of drawing more attention to it on the college game broadcasts.

Now, more and more people have probably found the clip online and seen it, which is not what the network intended.

It is a good thing that Corso apologized, but at the same time they did themselves a disservice by drawing more attention to the slip-up. It’s not as if Corso said something malicious about someone, it was merely an expression and a mistake. Granted, there’s no place for such a word on a sports broadcast, but it’s something fans are actually used to hearing from sideline microphones as well.” [Nick Meyer/Yahoo Sports Network]

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Raise your hand if you even knew the MLB was working on a new labor deal. Anyone? “Commissioner Bud Selig and some owners wanted hard slotting for draft bonuses. While they didn’t get that, the union eventually agreed to a system that will penalize teams for overspending on draft bonuses, including taking away future picks for teams that “overspend.”

Really bad idea, and here are two reasons why:

First, under the current system, the draft is the best way for mid- and low-revenue teams to keep up with the big spenders. The Rays built a contender by smart drafting and smart spending, and the Nationals, Pirates and Royals are now doing the same.

Second, bigger draft bonuses help baseball as an overall business attract the best athletes available. Curbs on bonuses (combined with a lack of full scholarships given out by college baseball) push good athletes towards football and basketball, and that’s bad for baseball.

More on that in a bit, but the worst part of the new system is the potential effect on mid- and low-revenue teams that have come to understand that draft spending is more cost-efficient and productive than free-agent spending.

General managers and scouting directors understand that, and it’s why they’re near-unanimous in behind-the-scenes opposition to the new rules. Owners who say that they want to build teams on scouting and player development (which is most of them) should understand that, but obviously don’t.

Maybe they need to go and run teams themselves.” [Danny Knobler/CBS Sports]

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College coaches sometimes lie? Interesting. “Somewhere along the way just being a coach that was capable of drawing up plays and figuring out opponent’s weakness wasn’t enough.

Now they’re held up as infallible. In fact, they aren’t even coaches, they’re “teachers.”

There is a Cult of the Coach in college athletics that isn’t healthy. I’m as guilty as anyone in the sports media of following this narrative.

These guys shouldn’t be categorized as beacons of morality and ethics. They aren’t better people than anyone else. They shouldn’t be expected to show players not simply how to run the spread offense, but how to live their lives as perfect beings. In some sections of the country, they even have to be super Christians.

For this to be true you’d have to assume that the 200 or 300 best people on the face of the earth all decided to become major college football and basketball coaches.

You’d have to pretend this isn’t a cutthroat business that only the most competitive survive in. You’d have to ignore the hours the job consumes and the likelihood they are lousy fathers, husbands and friends.

You’d have to believe they aren’t human, full of the usual frailties.” [Dan Wetzel/Yahoo]