Larry Brown Sports

LeBron James finally played his long-anticipated flag football game against Kevin Durant. You may recall that the idea for the game came when LeBron challenged Durant after being jealous that the Thunder star played in an intramural flag football game at Oklahoma State in October.

LeBron’s team won Wednesday, and the highlight was when James imitated the Stevie Johnson touchdown dance. You know, the one where Stevie pretended like he shot himself in the leg to mock Plaxico Burress. Here’s a video:

Stevie suffered some backlash for the poor decision. Plaxico told Stevie he wasn’t offended, but you could tell he was. It’s just hard to imagine that someone would repeat the same dance a few days later. Then again, LeBron has been known to make plenty of poor premeditated decisions over the years, so this shouldn’t surprise us.

The new NBA CBA hasn’t been officially signed, but many of the details from the agreement are in place. Most of the changes should help teams field more competitive teams. For instance, teams must now spend 85% of the salary cap, rather than 75%. There is also an updated amnesty clause that allows teams to shed one bad contract per season without taking a salary cap or luxury tax hit. Lastly, there is a new stretch provision that allows teams to spread the money owed on bad contracts of players they’ve waived over several years.

The one area where the NBA’s new CBA can have an impact is on competitive balance because of its luxury tax rules. In the past, teams paid $1 for every dollar they went over the luxury tax. Now it will be much more expensive. Here is how the new luxury tax rules look, according to ESPN’s Larry Coon:

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I’m sitting here watching UCLA at 6-6, and likely to end up 6-7 in a few days. The program has had one really good season in the past decade — a 10-2 year in 2005 when they were paced by future Pro Bowlers Maurice Jones-Drew and Marcedes Lewis. The Bruins have been an average team the past nine years, all of which were under the guidance of Karl Dorrell or Rick Neuheisel. Both hires were made by current athletic director Dan Guerrero, who reportedly had no interest in hiring Mike Leach to fill the head coaching vacancy in 2008.

Now, four years later, UCLA had a chance hire Leach, but they let someone else get him. While the Bruins are sitting here without a coach, Arizona snatched Rich Rodriguez and Washington State landed Leach.

Dread pirate Leach agreed to a five-year deal worth a reported $11 million to rebuild the program in the Palouse. It’s a great hire for Washington State, and one I wish UCLA would have made.

Leach’s teams at Texas Tech averaged more than 33 points per game in nine of his 10 years as head coach. They never had a losing season, and they went to a bowl every year. He’s used to recruiting players to Lubbock, Texas, so convincing players to play in Pullman shouldn’t be a problem. It won’t take long for Leach to turn Washington State, which had three 10-win seasons under Mike Price, into a winning program again.

For the record, in 2007, I said that Leach was not the answer for UCLA. I complained that he constantly topped out at 8 wins a year, and that his teams never could stop anyone. His lack of attention to defense is a fault, but had I been told the alternative was Rick Neuheisel, I would have begged for Leach.

Washington State likely won’t dominate the Pac-12 each year the way USC and Oregon have been, but just having an exciting offense and winning 7-8 games a season should please their fans. Things have become so bad at UCLA, that’s really all I’m asking for.

Aaron Rodgers is the latest NFL quarterback to discuss the way Tim Tebow integrates his religion with football.

The Packers MVP quarterback is a religious man who has pondered how much of his beliefs he would invoke on the field or in interviews. He says he decided a long time ago that he would separate the two and let his actions speak for his character.

“Well I started playing before Tim, so these are things I’ve thought about for a long time,” Rodgers told Jason Wilde during his weekly radio appearance on WAUK. “I think one thing that I tried to look at when I was a younger player, I was always interested in seeing how guys talked in their interviews, talked about their faith, or didn’t talk about their faith.

“I know Bob Costas at one point was critical about a player thanking Jesus Christ after a win, questioning what would happen if that player had lost, or do you really think God cares about winning and losing. I feel like my stance and my desire has always been to follow a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, who said, ‘Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.’

“So basically, I’m not an over-the-top, or an in-your-face kind of guy with my faith. I would rather people have questions about why I act the way I act, whether they view it as positive or not. Given an opportunity at some point, then you can talk about your faith a little bit. I firmly believe, just personally, what works for me, and what I enjoy doing is letting my actions speak about the kind of character that I want to have, and following that quote from St. Francis.”

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Giants fans may have given up on 2011 and turned against their team, but within the locker room the expectation is still to make the playoffs. After back-to-back embarrassing performances in which the Gaints lost to the injury-plagued Eagles and were dominated by the Saints, impatience has set in. However, a 6-5 record and poor play as of late were not enough to keep Antrel Rolle from guaranteeing a postseason berth is still in order during a recent interview with WFAN.

“Absolutely. Absolutely,” Rolle said when asked about the Giants making the playoffs according Sports Radio Interview. “Let me tell you something, man — we’re going to fight. I don’t care how we fight, I don’t care what corner we’re going to back ourselves up to, and you know what, everyone might be off the Giants bandwagon which is fine, which is fine. We’ve only had us anyways and only need us to get to where we need to get to. If the fans want to be there, then be there. We would love to have you, we’ll be happy you’re there and appreciate you. But if you’re not there, if you jump off the bandwagon, that’s fine too.”

Apparently the Giants being booed at the end of November is an annual tradition.  Exactly one year ago, Rolle appeared on WFAN and called out New York fans for booing after the first half of a game.  As Brandon Jacobs would tell you, Giants fans have been up to the same old antics again this year whenever they don’t like what they see on the field.

As for the G-Men making the playoffs, that will require some serious work.  They can probably afford one more loss, but with a game against the Packers, Jets, Redskins, and two against the Cowboys remaining on their schedule that is no easy task.  As Brandon Marshall could tell Antrel, the playoff guarantee isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Helmet bash to Pro Football Talk for passing the story along.

There are certain things you know you’re getting into when you make the conscious decision to date a Kardashian. As a result, we have a tough time being sympathetic towards Kris Humphries for any of his complaints.

The dude was dumped 72 days into his “marriage” with Kim Kardashian. Now he’s filed for an annulment saying he was defrauded in his marriage.

TMZ reports that Kris was not in on the fraud and that he wanted it to be a genuine marriage. Kim has already filed for a divorce, and now they’re arguing over community property.

Like we said, it’s hard to feel badly for Kris here. The guy dated Kim and became famous for it. Nobody knew who he was before all this. Humphries probably was anticipating that their marriage would last longer, and now that it’s already over, he wants more than his 15 minutes of fame (and money). He’s doing whatever he can to get it. But when you read stories like this one about Kim’s boyfriends, it’s hard to feel badly for any guy who associates with her.

Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin confirmed Wednesday that he is dating tennis player Maria Kirilenko. The hockey superstar sent the following tweet from his Ovi8 account: “Me and my girlfriend Maria….she is my queen!!!!”

Kirilenko, the No. 27 ranked player in the world, reportedly recently broke up with boyfriend Igor Andreev, who is also a tennis player. The Montreal Gazette speculated two days ago about a possible relationship between Ovie and Maria. They noted that Kirilenko was practicing tennis in Arlington, Va. of all places, and that she had been to a recent Caps game.

We’re just wondering what happened to Valeria Sokolova, a Russian model who was very popular here at LBS. She and Ovechkin supposedly were dating as of last August. I guess he’s gone the Rory McIlroy route and moved on to dating a fellow athlete.

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The marriage between Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari is back on after the two had broken off their engagement earlier in the summer.

Cavallari tweeted the news to her fans Wednesday, saying “This time it’s official..Jay and I are engaged again :)”

Jay Cutler’s Twitter account has been silent on the matter, but the fake Jay Cutler account said “Engaged again? What am I, a Kardashian?” if that matters.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, When asked about the engagement at a Bears new conference, Cutler jokingly said: “Yeah, I just heard about that.” He said no date has been set.

Cutler reportedly had dumped Cavallari in July, but the two continued to flirt over Twitter and expressed support for one another. Now they’re back engaged again. Congratulations to the couple.

Hopefully this time, Augusta will be accommodating.  By now even the most casual golf fans have heard of Jason Day.  Having only turned 24 this month, Day is one of the best young golfers in the world.  His father, Alvyn, got him interested in golf when Day was only a young boy.  By the time he was 12 and his father had lost a battle with cancer, Jason was already a relatively well-known golfer.  Now, he hopes to be able to fulfill one of Alvyn’s dying wishes by spreading his ashes at Augusta National this year.

“It’s a plan but obviously if I don’t get clearance from Augusta, I am not going to do it,” Day said according to an AP report that Devil Ball Golf passed along. “That was one of my dad’s wishes and if I was allowed to do it, that would be great. Obviously, I know how the rules are at Augusta, it would be probably very unlikely, but we will see how it goes.”

As you may remember, Augusta made national headlines back in April for more than just The Masters when a female reporter was denied access to the locker room.  Women are typically not allowed to be members at Augusta and thus are not allowed in the clubhouse, but a security staff member quickly learned that those rules do not apply to reporters.  Augusta officials apologized for the incident, but many people were offended and are still unhappy about it.

With that in mind, I sincerely hope they do not throw some sort of crazy policy at Day when he asks if he can fulfill his father’s wish.  Even if there is some sort of rule that would prevent him from being able to spread the ashes, situations like this remind us that rules are meant to be broken.

The New York Giants do not need Tiki Barber, and that kills him. Anyone who follows football knows that. Since his abrupt retirement from the NFL in 2006 after a falling out with Tom Coughlin and the Giants organization, very few in New York have missed Tiki. Why should they?  One season after he left, they became the team that put a stop to the Patriots undefeated season.  It was the greatest moment in Giants history and Barber was not a part of it.  Still, Tiki feels the need to kick Coughlin and company while they’re down.

After an embarrassing loss to the Saints, New York’s season is on the verge of disarray.  They are in danger of missing the playoffs and Barber wanted to be one of the first to highlight what has gone wrong in his latest column on The X Log.

After the Giants put on a particularly poor performance against the Philadelphia Eagles two weekends ago, coach Coughlin came up to the press lectern and said, “We had 29 yards rushing, which is about as pathetic as you can get,” clearly placing the arrow directly at Brandon Jacobs and the Giants’ starting offensive line, as if they either aren’t good enough or weren’t trying hard enough. Now, he may have been right, but for someone who is prone to saying, “we have to keep our sh-t in-house,” it sounded a little outside the corps talking point.

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