The two biggest markets in California are a lost cause to the NFL. In the Bay Area, the Raiders and 49ers are hopelessly mismanaged basket cases. The last time either team won a playoff game was 2002, when the Raiders beat Tennessee to win the AFC championship and then followed it up with the most disgraceful Super Bowl appearance of all-time. There is no prospect for a team in Los Angeles.

Denver, Chicago and The Peyton Manning Show are on track to make the post-season, but all three are having down years and none have inspired enthusiasm among their home fans, let alone anyone else in the country.

The playoffs will instead feature teams from Nashville, Charlotte, Tampa and Phoenix, none of which are likely to move the needle on the Casual Fan-o-Meter.

You can be sure network executives are thinking about this and wondering if the structure of the league and the bad economy are going to force them to downsize their financial contribution to the NFL. Fox executives told the New York Times this week that just such considerations are why they let the BCS college football package go to ESPN.

Fox and CBS, who are televising the first rounds of the NFL playoffs, do get one break: both New York teams will probably be involved. However, the talk of an all-New York Super Bowl is premature in the extreme. Football appears to be going the way of major league baseball, where the post-season is essentially a crapshoot. Wild cards, visiting teams, teams that struggled during the regular season — everybody who's in it can win it. Four wild card teams have made the Super Bowl in the last eight years, and three of them have won it — the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers and last year's New York Giants. That is to say, the "best team in football" in each of those years couldn't even manage to win a four-team division. There are no dominant teams like the '80s 49ers or early '90s Cowboys, who went into the playoffs as prohibitive favorites to get to, if not win, the Super Bowl.

If the Jets and the Giants do end up facing each other in Tampa — how appropriate that the game will be held at a stadium named after Raymond James, a financial services company that has lost more than half it's value in the last year — then the real loser will be NBC, which is broadcasting the game. One of the things that pushes Super Bowl ratings is essentially universal viewership in two large metropolitan areas.

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving, a showpiece for the NFL, has turned bleak for football fans. The day will feature two brutal mismatches — 10-1 Tennessee Titans at 0-11 Detroit Lions; 3-8 Seattle Seahawks at 7-4 Dallas Cowboys — and another game, 7-4 Arizona at 5-5-1 Philadelphia, that has some drama but will be blacked out in much of the country. (The game is on the NFL Network, unavailable to those who watch broadcast television, except in Philly and Phoenix, and unavailable to cable customers on Comcast and the like who don't pay a premium for the NFL Network.)

The only real upside for NFL fans is that reports have begun to surface that the NFL may finally be considering dumping the Lions from their annual Turkey Day appearance, where they've been stinking it up since 1934. Traditionalists have shuddered in horror, but hey, I've got three words for them: the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds, the oldest professional sports team in North America, played the first game of the baseball season for over 100 years, but in 1990, MLB, tired of chronic mismanagement in the Queen City and lured by the bucks from a Sunday night package on ESPN, told the Reds to take a hike. The Lions aren't nearly in that category, folks, and NFL management makes Bud Selig look like an innocent schoolgirl.

Pitchers, Catchers, Lawyers Reporting for Spring Training

Pitchers and catchers put on their uniforms, oil up their gloves and report in Arizona, Florida and the Far East on Feb. 14, 2009, but the real spring reporting date that matters this baseball season is March 2. That's the day lawyers put on their wingtips, oil up their throats and report in San Francisco to the trial of Barry Lamar Bonds, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

Bonds's presumably last attempt to avoid prosecution was scuttled this week when federal judge Susan Illston ruled that most of the counts of the indictment against the truculent, cartoonishly bulbous left fielder and erstwhile DH were good enough to warrant a trial.

Lawyers for Bonds had argued that some questions posed in the grand jury were so vague that Bonds couldn't have lied in responding to them.

(Bond's testimony can be found here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/graphics/pdf/022908bondsunseal.pdf)

The key evidence against Bonds will be steroid tests Bonds took in 2004. As per a union/management deal that year to determine how pervasive the steroids problem was, every major league player was anonymously tested. One hundred and four, including Bonds, came back positive. Unfortunately for Bonds, neither the samples nor the identity key were destroyed, and they were subsequently subpoenaed by the feds.

Bond's life will go in one of two interesting directions depending on the outcome of the trial: if he's acquitted, the union is going to go forward with collusion charges against MLB owners who, the union alleges, conspired to deny Bonds employment as a player in 2008. If Bonds is convicted, whether he does jail time and how it effects his Hall of Fame chances will dominate the news for weeks.

That wasn't the only news Bonds made this week. It turns out that Bonds has an endorsement deal with a company called Christensen Arms, which manufactures high-powered rifles. (These guns bear about the same relationship to the thing Chuck Conners toted in The Rifleman as a tank does to a bicycle.) The company released a promotional video this week of the ever-sporting, always good-natured, camoflouge-clad Bonds stalking and shooting a deer.

http://youbeenblinded.com/video-barry-bonds-hunting-deer-in-canada/2365

Slaughtering Bambi: every defense lawyer's dream.

Interestingly, the ad actually omits the money shot: the moment when the bullet actually enters the deer. But not to worry. It's promised at a later date.