DocMcG posted a dominant 13-3 record to take the AYRFSF pool for week fifteen. DocMcG won on the road--nine of his twelve road picks came through. This included the road-dog Jets, Eagles, Browns, Niners, and Chargers. Both visitors and favorites went 9-7 on the week. Saturday is this week's Sunday, as all but three NFL games will be played on Saturday. This means get your picks in early. Week sixteen spreads will be posted tomorrow. For now: congratulations for the champion and a proclamation from the champion.

William bows with deep humility, eyes lowered, awed by the greatness of DocMcg. He will not, however, grovel. We save that for later.. LOL

I thought I was nuts picking twelve road teams this late in the season. Maybe nuts works. The first week I won I had no time to look at the sports pages. Now nuts works. Maybe rationality isn't all its cracked up to be. I think I'll write a book on that theme.

I was thinking along the same lines. The book that is. Now that the Packers have quit, I'll have plenty of time. I just hope they don't get blown out by the Bears, I go to Chicago every day.

Well done, Doctor.

What b@lls you have! Who would have thunk road dogs rule! Congrats.

congrats to doc on a fine week!

and daniel how come you havent spoken a word about the ruiz fix? don king may just be the biggest scumbag ever to breathe fresh air, how is that guy not in jail?

sorry to post that here but i didnt know where else to speak on it.

Morris: I didn't see the Ruiz fight, as it was not aired on U.S. television anywhere. I did follow round-by-round on an Internet message board, and it was described as a close fight. Ruiz fights are tough to score, as there are a lot of clinching and grappling. I saw him fight Hasim Rahman live in AC, and I scored it for Ruiz but I was surprised the judges did too because many rounds didn't have a clear-cut victor. So, I know Ruiz and Stone are saying they got robbed. But I don't know that anyone else is (although there are people saying they thought he won a close fight).

Anyhow, more interesting things are happening in the heavyweight division. Joe Mesi, dubbed another "great white hope" but IMO the real deal, won in federal court to get his medical suspension lifted. He's 29-0, has fought several legit contenders, and I think he has a shot against any current title-holder. And Rahman and Toney, who will be fighting in March, had a non-televised fight in a hotel lobby on Monday. Toney, whose speech is noticably different IMO from what it was ten years ago, still has awesome boxing skills. Rahman's got power. We'll see who wins.

Morris it has been 15 years since you first bought that pocket pussy. Hopefully you will purchase another one this year. The other one, as one could imagine has been pretty well used up.

if you havent seen the fight then it is difficult to judge it, I agree but to compare a guy who is seven feet tall to Rahman is stretchin it. Even so my problem isnt with the fighting style of Ruiz, who as you said fights a boring style, it's with a guy who cuts a deal with the Russian's to get a fifty-fifty cut on his next four fights! King is running a monopoly as far as I'm concerned and he should be taking care of some guy named Bubba in the clink. If u don't think that King paid off those judges then u don't know as much about boxing as i give u credit for!
Ubiquity if you knew anything about me you would know that i wasnt the buyer of the sleeve i was the giftee, dumbass. Come up with a better screen name by the way, maybe omniimpotent would fit better for you?

I think the bottom line with Ruiz-Valuev is that it's hard to get a decision in a competitive fight on another guy's turf. I think this had more to do with it than King, who seems to be the whipping-boy for whatever is wrong in boxing. I realize Valuev is Russian, but he's been fighting in Germany and it's basically his adopted homeland. Any sport where third parties determine the winners and losers is going to endure charges of fixes. That's always the first impulse when we see a horribly judged fight. But there are other possibilities, such as people scoring a fight differently. Next time you watch a fight with friends, ask them to score the fight. Reveal the scores at the end of the fight. If they differ greatly, will you blame Don King?

P.S. Some shady-judged fights that King has promoted include: Trinidad-DeLaHoya and Lewis-Holyfield 1. King's guys got the better end of the deal both times. Other, more obscure fights that King promoted featured questionable decisions going to King's fighters. So maybe you're on to something. But what King usually does is only offer a guy a shot at his title-holder if the challenger agrees to give King a piece of his promotion should he win. Under this arrangement--the arrangement King had for the Ruiz-Valuev fight--it doesn't make sense to fix the fight.