Round the Razorback Horn

Arkansas Baseball Into Last Half-Dozen

Losing two of three to LSU last weekend wasn't enough to diminish Razorback fans' enthusiasm for their baseball team right now. With six games left, the Hogs are likely to win the SEC West outright, barring a collapse in the final road series against Alabama or the last home series against Ole Miss.

Dave Van Horn's team is well-balanced: offensively, defensively and especially in the pitching staff, this team has very few kinks in the armor.

Still, the big question has to be: when this team needs a big hit, who's the guy who comes through with it? I believe Danny Hamblin is the guy most Arkansas fans want to offer up as the answer, but he needs to up his game to an even higher level down the stretch to make that a reality.

Ahmad Carroll on the Ropes

I'll close with the boxing stuff, but Ahmad Carroll's NFL career is now officially knocked out. Arrested in Atlanta on Saturday morning for carrying a concealed weapon, police officers search Carroll's car and reportedly found eleven pills of ecstasy, a potent designer drug.

For a guy who was already fortunate enough just to get a second chance with the Jaguars, you've got to wonder what was going through Ahmad Carroll's mind with this one. Jacksonville quickly released the former Razorback cover man, citing NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's new zero tolerance policy. (I still prefer to call it the "Guilty Until Proven Innocent Rule.")

With Ahmad Carroll, NFL life just didn't work out. He was torched on a regular basis for the Packers, then barely made the field with Jacksonville. The ecstasy incident brings a likely conclusion to Ahmad's NFL career, but fret not, Batman faithful, but look on the bright side: Carroll could still probably get a job starting for someone in the Arena Football League.

Boxing All But Finished

The Floyd Mayweather/Oscar De La Hoya fight was a decent one on Saturday night, but not nearly enough to "save the sport" as so many pre-bout promos would've had you believe. The fact of the matter is the sport of boxing has been dead for a while now.

Too much mismanagement and greedy, unfocused non-work by promoters like Don King and Bob Arum left the average boxing fan without the big fights for most of the past twenty years, and it's far too late to fix it all now.

More importantly, the once great sport---arguably the most popular in America at several points---is now nothing more than an afterthought. You're telling me if Muhammad Ali were 17 years old again, in this day and age, that he'd want to be a heavyweight fighter? Yeah, right. He'd be angling for a scholarship to go play tight end at a place like USC or Miami.

The youth of today has no appreciation for boxing, because the people in charge of the sport have helped to kill it off. Sad, but utterly true.

-JAB