ONE: Bill Belichick
Big news on the football coaching front is that Bill Belichick, arguably the greatest coach in NFL history, will be returning to the sidelines in 2025, not in the NFL, but at the University of North Carolina. "Can you imagine crusty, curmudgeonly Bill Belichick kissing the asses of 17 year old high school kids on the college recruiting circuit?" seemed to be the most common theme among pundits. True, although the landscape of college football has changed so drastically in recent years, that it has been speculated that a football "general manager" may be hired at UNC (as has been done at many other schools) to deal with the unseemly details of recruiting, transfer portal issues, and NIL money, and Bill would be left to do what he does best: coach football. We'll see how it turns out.
A bigger question would be why has no NFL team turned to Belichick to become their HC? He interviewed in Atlanta last year, and he reportedly wanted that job, but Arthur Blank choice otherwise. There will also be bunch of openings after this season concludes, and don't you think that Coach Bill would be a better option than any of the various OC's, DC'c and others who will be hired to fill those openings?
Belichick is 72 years old, and perhaps no team wants to commit long term to a guy of that age, but North Carolina is willing to go for five years at $10 million per. It is going to be interesting to follow how things transpire in Chapel Hill over the ext several years.
TWO: Baseball Hall of Fame
Whatever they are calling the "Veterans Committee" in Cooperstown these days righted a couple of wrongs when it was announced this week that it has elected Dave Parker and Richie Allen into the Hall of Fame.
I'm not going to go into a recitation of the stats and numbers that Parker and Allen posted over long careers. You can look those up. If you followed baseball during the time that they played, you know just exactly how great they were. Parker was a driving force and best player on Pirates teams in the late '70s/early 80s that always competed for division titles and won the World Series in 1979. He was the National League MVP in 1978. The Cobra has fallen into ill health in his senior years, and I am glad that he got to know that he is a Hall of Famer while he can still smell the roses.
Not so Richie Allen, who left us in 2020. A star with the Phillies, Cardinals, and White Sox (Al MVP in1972), Allen is surely one of the greatest players to ever come from Western Pennsylvania (Wampum, Beaver County), and I judge him by one totally subjective metric: If the Pirates are clinging to a one run lead in the ninth inning and the other team has men on base, who do I LEAST want to see come to the plate in that situation? Richie Allen was high, very high, on such a lot.
You can read what I wrote about Allen in 2020 when he died HERE, but I would like to add one paragraph from that post for y9our immediate reading:
He had his enemies and his defenders.
"At two different SABR meetings in Pittsburgh over the years, I heard both sides. Chuck Tanner, who managed him in Chicago, defended him to the highest, and said he was one of the best players, on and off the field, that he ever managed, a great guy. On the other hand, Nellie Briles, who played with him on the Cardinals, said he was one of the worst teammates that he ever had, and almost shuddered when he even mentioned his name."
Both Parker and Allen were iconoclasts of sorts and I include these two photos proof:
Major League Baseball's annual winter meetings concluded this week and, lo and behold, the Pirates made a trade. They acquired first baseman Spencer Horowitz from the Blue Jays via the Guardians. Until the day of the trade, I had never heard of Spencer Horowitz.
Other teams over the years have shown that you don't have to spend THAT kind of money to compete and win, but the Pirates won't even do that.
Anyway, welcome to Pittsburgh, Spencer Horowitz!
It ain't easy being a Pirates fan.
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