Financial Troubles Continue to Plague Kansas City Knights

The Kansas City Knights have crept back into the habit of sending out bad checks (earlier in the season players complained of this to the Kansas City Star). The Knights were eliminated from the ABA playoffs last week.

Developing...

KC Star Fixes Prices for Ticket Scalpers

Friday morning, the KC Star noted that Big 12 tournament tickets were expected to jump from $35 (face value) to somewhere in the neighborhood of $100.......

Sure enough, multiple parties reported to me that they encountered hordes of tickets scalpers Friday outside of Kemper seeking nothing lower than $100. The Star had helped set the basement price in the ticket scalping market. Local news organizations have made no mention of the Star's successful foreshadowing of the ticket scalping market via the front page of their Friday paper................

The Star's Howard Richtman (author of the front page piece in question) has responded by saying:

"I talked to a couple people that were selling tickets, and they both said they thought tix would go for at least $100. Whether I feel the piece helped establish a minimum wage....I have no idea. My guess is the scalpers try to get as much as they can.”

The Big 12 tournament was said to be 'sold out' before games commenced Thursday. So why were so many empty seats seen during Thursday and Friday telecasts? Global Spectrum, who has been managing Kemper Arena for the past 16 months, promised the city a true sell out to the '05 tournament. The tickets are sold in the attendance friendly packages to enable Global Spectrum to declare the event a sellout (and at the same time assuring that the arena could still be half empty during the tournament's early games).

Bill O'Reilly - The Best Punter You've Never Seen?

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann says Bill O'Reilly better stick to his day job (and night job, for that matter).

At the 2005 Super Bowl, O'Reilly penned an article on the back page for the game day program sold at the concessions and distributed to the media. It is not uncommon for the NFL to have a celebrity of some sort include a back page piece about how football has affected their life. O'Reilly took the opportunity to discuss his own football career at Marist College.

Olbermann notes how O'Reilly claims in the piece that: "I won the national punting title for my division as a senior" and concludes by saying that "I guess you could say the end zone was the beginning of the no-spin zone."

O'Reilly seems to be fudging the facts once again.

Marist College did not even have football as a varsity sport until 1978. O'Reilly graduated in 1971. What O'Reilly played on was a 'club' team (meaning players paid all their own expenses, and recording exact statistics was not exactly a high priority).

O'Reilly's statement seems to imply that he was the top...the best....the #1 punter.... in his division in the COUNTRY in 1970. This division was in fact not Division I or II NCAA athletics (not even a small college NAIA program). What Marist College participated in was the "National Club Football Association."

Still.....I think it’d be more entertaining to see O'Reilly lining up in punt formation, rather than Steve Cheeks or these other jokers the Chiefs manage to dig up. According to Marist's historical records of their 1970 club football team, O'Reilly averaged 41.4 yds/punt. Not too shabby. If Vermeil can give Kurt Warner a chance to make it in the league as a 28-year-old rookie, why can't he give a 58-year-old talk show host the same opportunity?

Quote of the Year from an "Anti-Tax" Socialist

Sports radio 810am WHB's Kevin Kietzman provided what might be the first great quote of 2005 last week.

Kietzman was appearing on 1510 AM to discuss the stadium/arena issues in KC.

After being instrumental in the passage of last August's tax that will provide public funding for the construction of the downtown Sprint Center (a large size arena that hopes to lure a NBA or NHL franchise), Kietzman announced that he was in fact usually opposed to such measures.

"I'm kinda an anti-tax guy myself," Kietzman said.

For the record, Kietzman also acknowledged that local car rental companies have been entered into a bad deal via his efforts to push through the arena question on last fall's ballot.

"It sounds like a bad deal," Kietzman said after the program's host read him paperwork on the deal stating that car rental companies will be forced to pony up the money up front to fund the arena.

Local hotels are also having the Kietzman-campaigned tax forced upon them.

City officials continue to state that the Sprint Center will be up and running for the 2008 Big 12 tournament.