Remember the good old days when the Daily Dose was just an unstructured mess of rantings and ravings? This was back before the days of reality TV recaps, when every day it was just a boy and his keyboard and about 20 jokes of which two might be funny. Well, today’s old-timer’s day at the Dose.

CBS featured a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert on Friday night. Bruce never disappoints. A great hour’s worth of highlights from a show in (I think) Germany from late last year. Lots of stuff from The Rising plus can’t miss classics “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Born to Run”. My only problem with the show was that it was billed as “presented with limited commercial interruptions by Chevy.” Limited is four? How many would we have normally had, twelve?

Thanks to the wondrous invention that is DirecTV, not one, but two spring training games were available to yours truly on Saturday. It was actually two and a half. Fox Sports New York was showing both Mets split squad games at the same time. It was a little disorienting for them to go from one game to the other. But no more disorienting than those hunter orange BP jerseys they’re wearing. Mo Vaughn looks like the Great Pumpkin in his. Tom Glavine just looks a overbearing wanker in his. But then, he always looked like that. The other spring training game was a clash between the Giants and Angels on Fox Sports Bay Area. Is it bad that when I saw it on the listings it didn’t immediately register as a rematch of the World Series.

Did the Angels really win the World Series? Really?

Before the game on Fox Sports Bay Area they showed a one-hour highlight film of the Giants 2002 season. Very entertaining. Two interesting things. You’d hardly know that Dusty Baker was the manager of that team from the film, and they spent…maybe…five minutes on the World Series. I know Dusty left and they lost the World Series, but come on. I did enjoy watching the Cardinals lose the NLCS again, though.

On that same film, I noticed one thing immediately. In the game they won to clinch the wild card berth, the team gets into a big dog pile in the middle of the infield, but Jeff Kent just turns and walks away all by himself. It’s like he’s afraid he’ll get suckerpunched like Roger Dorn laid out Rick Vaughn at the end of Major League. Friends of mine who follow the Giants say that while the media protrayed Barry Bonds as the guy the rest of the Giants didn’t like, it was really Kent. Which might explain why a) the Giants let him walk, and b) the Cubs didn’t go after him harder. Just food for thought.

The Illini went to Ann Arbor and won a game I didn’t think they would win. Not that I didn’t think they were good enough to beat the Wolverines, but that game was one of the most schizophrenically officiated games, ever. For about ten minutes in the middle of the second half every call went against Illinois. Touch fouls, loose ball fouls, every time the whistle blew you knew it was going to be on Illinois. And then, down the stretch, the whistles stopped. It was like the refs decided (correctly) to cut it out.

Dee Brown made a huge shot to win the game. He might not have done enough to edge Michigan’s Daniel Horton for Freshman of the Year in the Big Ten, but I’ll take Dee any day. Brian Cook was huge in the second half, again. He took over when the Illini needed him to.

But the man of the hour again was Roger Powell. In the first half he did the scoring (12 points in the first ten minutes) an in the second half he got every big rebound. But the thing that the incredibly bad ESPN Plus announcing crew missed was that with eight minutes to go in the game Michigan’s LaVell Blanchard had 25 points and had made seven threes. Powell guarded him for each of those last eight minutes. LaVell took ONE shot and missed it.

Wednesday night the Illini head up to cheeseland to take on Wisconsin with the Big Ten title on the line. Bo Ryan has never lost a home Big Ten game in the Kohl Center. I think it’s time for a new trend.

Speaking of the Illini, ESPN Classic showed the ’89 game at Indiana yesterday. This is why I love TiVo. I watched the last two seconds about ten times. OK, let’s set the scene. The Illini, who would go on to the Final Four are in Bloomington at the end of the Big Ten season. Despite 25 wins at the time, Illinois has no shot at the Big Ten title–it’s either going to be Indiana or Michigan. (It would be Indiana). Kendall Gill is almost ready to return from his broken foot which cost him almost all of the Big Ten season. Indiana is led by Jay Edwards and Joe Hillman, and a skinny freshman named Eric Anderson. The Illini have an incredibly deep and athletic team with Nick Anderson, Kenny Battle, Stephen Bardo, Lowell Hamilton and Marcus Liberty.

Up four with a minute to go, Anderson and Battle both miss the front ends of one-and-ones. Down two and with the ball, Indiana runs a play for Edwards and he pushes off Hamilton with a forearm and makes an incredible fadeaway to tie the game at 67. Dick Vitale goes nuts and gushes that “That’s why Edwards is the player of the year, baby!” Alertly, Bardo calls time out as the shot goes in, giving Illinois one more possession with two seconds to go.

Lou Henson draws up a play, as the Hoosier lunatics scream and celebrate and get ready for overtime. A win clinches the Big Ten for Indiana.

Illinois’ only real shot would seem to be a baseball pass towards the basket, with the hope that Battle can somehow get the ball turn and tip it towards the basket. So Indiana puts about three guys in the lane. They don’t bother to guard Bardo as he throws the inbounds pass. Bardo doesn’t throw the ball to the basket, instead he finds Nick Anderson on the right side about 30 feet from the basket. Anderson catches, dribbles, turns and elevates high over his defender (if memory serves, Freeport star Jamal Meeks) and absolutely buries a 30 foot jumper at the buzzer. Nothing but net. 70-67 Illinois. Dick Vitale nearly wets his pants. Keith Jackson, who had been bitching about missing his flight earlier, says something his heart not being able to take it. Bobby Knight stands and looks like he wants to find a chair with somebody in it to throw. You have to remember that Knight absolutely hated Henson. He probably still does. Muahahahahahahahaha!

I also spent a little time on Sunday in the car listening to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo brodcast another Cubs loss. Ron seems to be hiding his Hall of Fame disappointment, but you just know that all summer long those ridiculous guest in the booth segments will rehash it. I’ve had enough. When I was writing that piece on Tuesday where I “scientifically” broke down who’d vote for Ron I knew he wouldn’t get in. No way can 75 percent of those morons agree on anything.

But something during the Cubs game did fire me up. For once, it had nothing to do with Kyle Farnsworth, either. Interim Commissioner of Baseball for Life Bud Selig dropped by the booth. He got to talking about his ridiculous proposal to have home field advantage in the World Series decided by which league wins that year’s All-Star Game. When asked by Ron why the team with the best record doesn’t just get home field, Bud had an answer.

A very bad answer.

A good answer would have been, “It’s hard to reward home field advantage in the World Series to the team with the best overall record because unlike the NHL or NBA our teams don’t all play each other. If one league is tougher one year than the other it puts the team from that league at a disadvantage.”

Here was Bud’s answer. “Let’s say the World Series is between the Cubs and Red Sox (as if),” he said. “If we don’t know which league is going to host the series, we don’t know which city to make our arrangements in. How are we going to get 6,000 or 8,000 hotel rooms at the last minute?”

That’s the reason? Hotel rooms?

Answer me this, Bud. Last year when you knew that the World Series would open in the American League city, how did you know whether to book rooms in Minneapolis or Anaheim? You didn’t. So what’s the difference? Is it really that hard to look at the records of the four remaining teams in the LCS’s and make contingency plans? Try again, Bud.

Besides, what the hell do they need 6,000 hotel rooms for? That sounds more like the NBA All-Star Game (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

I know that most of you don’t get BBC America, but that’s just too damn bad. Three of the funniest shows on TV right now are on that channel. I suppose you could all move to England and see them on the regular BBC, but that seems a little more inconvienient than getting DirecTV. Anyway, let’s run down the three.

1) Coupling It’s like Friends only funnier and dirtier. In fact, Friends from time to time steals plots from this show. You have to watch this show, if for no other reason than Jeff, maybe the funniest character on TV (non-Homer Simpson division) right now.

2) The Office Unfortunately, the first season ended last night (after only seven episodes) but it’ll be re-run to death until summer. No show has ever captured the absurdity of working in an office better than this show, and it features a slimy, wanna be cool boss named David Brent. Whoever the guy is who plays David deserves an Emmy, or a Nobel Prize or something.

3) Father Ted More in the tradition of British comedy is this show about a Catholic priest, trapped in a place called Craggy Island, Ireland, and surrounded by some of the strangest and funniest people ever. The two best characters are Ted’s fellow priests, Father Dougal and Father Jack. Father Dougal is hoplessly daft. He knows absolutely nothing about religion, in fact, on Thursday night his rendition of the last rites included, “Well, off you go, then.” Father Jack is a hopeless drunk who can hardly speak. He, in fact, was the person being given his last rites after drinking a bottle of floor polish. Thankfully, he pulled through. Unfortunately, the man who played Father Ted, Dermot Morgan, was not so lucky. According to www.bbcamerica.com he passed away after last season. No word on whether they’ll pull a Bewitched and recast Ted or just end the show. Let’s hope they don’t end it. Graham Norton guest starred on one of the episodes they showed Thursday, and played a hilarious and fairly typically overeager young priest on “holiday” with a horrified group of high school Sunday school students.

Sunday’s college basketball games were entertaining to say the least. CBS outdid itself with a tripleheader that included St. John’s scoring the last 13 points in a one point win over Duke, Wisconsin’s win over Minnesota (boo!) and Kentucky’s win over Georgia. The point I enjoyed the most in the Kentucky-Georgia game was at halftime when Greg Gumbel interviewed Georgia AD Vince Dooley and Vince tried to act surprised that his coach, Jim Harrick would ever be accused of cheating. Jim Harrick? Cheat? You don’t say? What, you mean he misused his credit card? Not Jim. I don’t believe it. I’ve seen grown ups playing peek a boo who were more convincing than Vince.

North Carolina pulled out a home win over Georgia Tech, though they trailed for most of the game. But does anybody really think that Matt Doherty’s job is safe? These Carolina fans are the same ones who ran off Bill Gutheridge for only getting them to the Final Four. Two years in a row near the bottom of the ACC ought to be enough incentive to get some of those Carolinians motivated enough to send the U-Hauls over to casa Doherty.

I never saw this coming. When he spent his one (successful) season at Notre Dame, Doherty looked like the real deal. My only red flag was that when he left the Irish players seemed relieved. Troy Murphy openly talked about how manic Doherty was…all the time. I figured it was just laid back Troy’s reaction to a rah-rah coach. But you watch Doherty on the sidelines night in and night out and you expect to see his heart burst through his chest. I can only imagine the roller coaster those freshmen he recruited are on.

Even if he gets fired (which is unlikely–but not impossible–this year, and very likely next year if the Heels aren’t in the top ten) there will always be two memorable moments from his UNC tenure.

1) When Dean Smith got word that Doherty was going to try and talk Chris Thomas and Jordan Cornette into decommitting to ND and follow him to Carolina, Dean called Matt and said, “We don’t do that here.”

2) That moment in his first season at UNC when he told his players, “Duke still has the ugliest cheerleaders in the ACC.”

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This is the kind of crap that gets tired, fast. Michael Jordan claims he fouled Jalen Rose on purpose because, “He was advocating the trash talking and trying to dirty up the game,” Jordan said. “They didn’t have any other purpose than to dirty up the game and get our heads out of the game. I felt that was inappropriate, especially when you have young guys. You’re trying to teach them the right way. He’s a leader for their ballclub. If I want to tell my guys the same thing, that doesn’t serve a purpose in terms of us getting after it as a team.” Should be all defer to Jordan, the man who’s “developing” young players for the Wizards by playing 40 minutes a game instead of letting them get any experience? Just shut up and mind your own business, Mike.

Groucho with good stuff on the NBA–even if this column does start with “Kobe and T-Mac are good!”

The Cubs signed their number one draft pick from last June. Hey, way to get on that.

Dusty is already tired of not scoring any runs. Get used to it.

Why does everybody love Jose Valentin? I think I could hit .230 with 36 errors at short.

Has there ever been an Illinois-Wisconsin game this important? Not since the 30s.

Mariotti puts down the doughnut to rip Jim Miller for playing hurt. Nice.

Good stuff on the NCAA Tournament here.

Sammy’s quad is sore.

Tom Noie is in panic mode about Notre Dame’s two game losing streak.

Hey, Coach Harrick, I’d like a new TV, too.

Peter Gammons’ Sunday best.

Jayson Stark with a more rational column today.

Stewey on Pitt. I don’t see it. Sorry. When your point guard can’t make free throws, it makes you an early out in the NCAAs, see Duke 2002.

This week’s Larry King is so hilarious, you’d think Karry Ling wrote it.

Ken Rosenthal with some good baseball stuff.

Madonna is going to write children’s books? Uh-oh, here come the nightmares!

The Washington Times says that Al Qaeda is targeting Pearl Harbor. The movie? Have at it. What a pile of crap.

Another good reason not to be “Married By America.”

Set your VCRs, the war starts next Thursday.

Another reason why joggers are dopes.

The world’s greatest newspaper says that a New Jersey homemaker found Hitler’s head in a bowling ball bag.