Did you hear that Dick Jauron is the new Bills coach?Sunday was an interesting day in sports. Kobe Bryant scored like 147 points against the second best team in the NBA D-League (the Raptors), the Indians traded a cereal box for two players, the two Jakes (Plummer and Delhomme) finally played like they were supposed to all along, and the Buffalo Bills hired Dick Jauron to be their head coach.

Huh?

As Bears fans we know several things about our former coach. Dick Jauron is a good and decent man. He still has all of his hair. He enjoys a snug pair of Sansabelt pants, likes to listen to Barry Manilow CDs in his Buick and nothing makes him more excited than being the last head coach hired any given year, allowing him to scrape the bottom of the assistant coach barrel so he ends up with an insane defensive coordinator and…well, an insane offensive coordinator. Let’s just say that if you were on the search committee with Marv Levy you should have told Jauron that the bankruptcy law firm of Blache-Crowton-Shoop would not be hired to help run the Bills.

Honestly, what is in Ralph Wilson’s pudding? Two years ago he had a team that was young, had a promising young coach and had gone on a winning streak to finish the season in which they very nearly went from last place at midseason to the playoffs.

This year didn’t go so well, but when you hand the keys over to JP Losman you have to figure your insurance rates will skyrocket as he wraps the car around a tree a few times.

So you start the offseason and the first thing you do is call your young coach into your office and make him fire his entire staff, not just the bad ones, but all of them. That’s never a good move. Then, you decide your GM is a fraud so you fire him, and you hire an 80 year old man to run your team.

Think about this. You, yourself, are a doddering old man, and you hire somebody older than you to run your business. Normally, when old, rich guys make irrational decisions like this the promise of sex with Anna Nicole Smith is involved.

It’s not that I don’t like Marv Levy or think he was a great coach and is a smart man. But honestly, when he hired Dick Jauron, well, I’m not so sure how smart a man he is.

In Chicago, we’re not sure if Lovie Smith isn’t a tanner version of Dick. In his second year in Chicago, Jauron was coach of the year, just like Lovie. Jauron was also put in the rough situation of having his boss, Jerry Angelo, hired after him. Jerry wanted Nick Saban coaching the Bears and so he was more than happy to watch Dick fall flat.

But one pock mark on Jauron’s resume will always be the way he handled his coaching staff. It was understandable that his initial staff was weak. He was the last coach hired that offseason, weeks after anybody else, thanks to Mike McCaskey’s completely botched hiring of Dave McGinness. But Jauron never upgraded his staff over the next three offseasons. His defensive coordinator was insane, but at least Greg Blache’s defenses were pretty good (though he should have been fired for the way Brett Favre used to bend him over and savage him twice a year) most of the time. The offense was always a shambles. The first goofball to run it was Gary Crowton, and his offense apparently consisted of a wide receiver screen to Marty Booker…and nothing else. That play worked for about a game and a half. The Bears then had a golden opportunity when BYU was dumb enough to give their program’s reigns over to Crowton. The problem, of course, is that they did it during the season and it gave bug eyed John Shoop on-the-job-training. Over the next three seasons everybody but Jauron wanted Shoop out. Jauron wore his loyalty like a badge of honor, and in the end, it gave Angelo what he needed to fire him.

It’s one thing to be loyal to a co-worker, it’s another to blindly stand by a guy who’s driving you to the unemployment office. I’m sure Jauron learned a lot from his time in Chicago, but if he didn’t learn when or how to pull the plug, it won’t really matter.

But let me get this straight from the Bills perspective. Their head coach resigned a few days after being told he had to axe all of his coaching staff. The guy you replaced him with ended up losing his job in Chicago because he refused to axe any of the guys on his staff. Huh?

Kobe Bryant went for 81 last night in a win over Toronto. On-Hoops’s Matt Turvey has more on it here. What strikes me about Kobe’s latest scoring barrage (he’s averaging 45.5 points per game in January) is that the Lakers need all these points. Just like Michael Jordan in the 1987 season when he averaged an absurd 37 points per game (even with Kobe going for 81 last night he’s at 35.9 for the season), the Lakers don’t score without Kobe. When he sat out a home and home with Utah (courtesy of the suspension he got for trying to give Memphis’ Mike Miller a tracheotomy), the Lakers averaged 87 points and lost both games. Kobe came back and they scored 119 and 113 points in the next two games, both wins over the Sixers and Clippers.

There are things you can’t argue about Kobe. His teammates don’t like him or like playing with him. He’s the best player in the NBA. He’s not welcome in Colorado ski resorts. Nobody is more dangerous at the end of games with the ball in their hands.

The best scorers have no conscience. Every missed shot to them just makes them feel like they’re that much closer to getting hot. They’re easy to play with at times (when they’re hot) and impossible to play with others (when they’re not).

When Phil Jackson was coaching the Bulls, he inherited a team on the cusp of winning. Every year they’d gotten closer and closer. He had to convince his star to get everyone else involved, because it would give the Bulls a more consistent offense and eventually get Michael easier shots.

The team Phil has re-inherited in LA has no such potential. When you’re starting Smush Parker you have no chance. So Phil is doing the opposite. He’s not just tolerating Kobe’s offensive barrages, he’s encouraging them. He claimed last night to be unaware of how many points Kobe had. Late in the fourth quarter he told an assistant it was time to take Kobe out. The assistant said, “Uh, not right now, coach. He’s got 77 points.”

Phil’s not trying to mold the Lakers into a champion. If they ever win again it won’t be with 88 percent of their current roster. Phil’s just trying to avoid the lottery. So Kobe has a license to hoist away. Must be fun.

For Kobe.

At halftime of the Seahawks-Panthers game a frustrated Steve Smith implored anybody else on his team to make a play saying, “If they’ve got four guys on me, somebody else has to be open.” I hope Ron Rivera and Lovie Smith were around to hear that. What the Bears did last Sunday with whatever that strategy was that allowed Smith to catch the ball like he was taking handoffs from Jake Delhomme, the Seahawks’ strategy of making anybody else make a play seemed more prudent, didn’t it? It was interesting to see what happened to Delhomme when he couldn’t just throw the ball near Smith to get some yards. Guh.

The big baseball news of the weekend was the officially re-Theoed Red Sox front office filling a gaping hole in their outfield by trading Andy Marte and Guillermo Mota to the Indians for Coco Crisp. In a trade directly related to this one, the Indians got Phillies’ outfielder Jason Michaels for lefty reliever Arthur Rhodes.

Immediate reaction to this was that Theo’s still a boy genius and that the Red Sox made out like bandits.

The truth is that if anybody left the scene with a ski mask on it was Mark Shapiro of the Indians.

Consider that the Indians were a team whose second half run was fueled by improved play at the top of the order from leadoff man Grady Sizemore and Crisp, but moreso by their pitching, which took two big hits in the offseason with the defections of Kevin Millwood and Bob Howry. They signed Paul Byrd to replace Millwood and Mota will now fill Howry’s eighth inning set up role.

Crisp had been miscast in 2004 as a leadoff man/centerfielder. When he was moved to left and the two spot in 2005 he had a much better season.

Consider that for his career Crisp’s on base average leading off is .312, in nearly the same number of at bats it’s .357 batting second.

Defensively center was a challenge for him. The Indians were happy to upgrade considerably to Sizemore. Crisp acquitted himself well in left.

Where’s Coco going to be playing and batting in Boston? Center and leadoff.

The reason the deal makes sense for Cleveland is in picking up Michaels. He’ll be playing left and batting second. What’s his career on base average batting second? Glad you asked. How about .423?

That’s not to say that Boston didn’t fare well in this deal. You can argue (and I will listen, though probably not believe you) that Crisp’s improvement from 2004 to 2005 had little to do with his batting order spot and more on the fact that he’s just getting better. If Johnny Damon can handle center defensively in Boston, Coco can, too. But the really attractive part of the trade for Boston is how they got the two guys they traded. Andy Marte is by all accounts going to be a fine major league third baseman. But he’s still a prospect and the world is littered with prospects who just didn’t quite pan out. They got Marte in exchange for the botched free agent signing of Edgar Renteria last year and their desire to make Edgar go away. They got Guillermo Mota for nothing. Literally they had the Josh Beckett deal finalized with Florida, took a good look at Beckett’s physical examination results and cried foul. The Marlins just threw in Mota to keep the deal from dying. Would they have traded Edgar even up for Coco? Sure they would have. So trading him and Mota for Coco wasn’t much of a stretch.

What are the Phillies doing? If it’s true that all they get is Arthur Rhodes, they’re doing what Pat Gillick did all the time in Seattle. Trade for old guys like Arthur Rhodes (in fact, he did just that once before.)

Then again, if you want to taunt an Indians’ fan, remind him that Mota hasn’t ever demonstrated much in the way of Governor Rod’s famed testicular virility, Michaels is rumored to be a boozebag and Marte was a prospect tossed aside by the Braves and when the Braves send you away…there’s usually a reason.