…if you head out to see the new Warren Miller film this season, you’ll get to see the rippin’ snow that is Bend, Central Oregon, and Mount Bachelor.

Here in Bend (and I’ve heard elsewhere as well), the Warren Miller flick at the local movie house is sort of the unofficial opening to the ski season, which if POWDR Corp. follows through on its promises, could be a good (and cheaper) one.

Another year, another professional sports league will cancel its season because of labor strife.

Baseball recovered. Hockey hasn’t.

And now lacrosse is going to find out whether…WAIT WAIT WAIT…I mean, I’m a sports fan and I didn’t know there was a professional lacrosse league.

And they canceled the season because of labor issues? Who do these people think they are?

And, now, after doing what we in the journalism biz call research I’ve discovered that there are two — yes, TWO — professional lacrosse leagues. The National Lacrosse League is the one dealing with the lockout. Major League Lacrosse (again, not to be confused with the National Lacrosse League) is fine and chugging right along. IN fact, the 2007 season is over and someone (I can’t even find it on their basement-designed website) won the national championship already.

Aside on the website. There is an interactive (INTERACTIVE — HOW WEB 2.0???!!!!!) poll on the front page asking, “Which team has the most intimidating uniforms?”

They get uniforms? Its not like little league where you have to buy your own? Boy, those pro lacrosse players are overpaid.

I meant to post this yesterday, but didn’t get around to it. The NY Times reported that an academic study has found that white refs are more likely to call fouls on black players, and black refs are more likely (though slightly less so) to call fouls on white players.

Per the Times:

“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” [the study’s author] said.

The NBA, and NBA observers and reporters, are freaking out because of the study. The NBA, and uber-commish David Stern even conducted its own study (derided by academics as less scientific) that found no such racist correlation. The one NBA person, in this case team owner, that seems to be making intellectually honest statements about this whole thing, is Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban, when he said:

“We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.” Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”

Not surprisngly, sports-analysis-author-on-speed Michael Lewis reported that Cuban employs a whole room of geeks to analyze unexpected and unknown stats just like this.

But to my untrained, biased, anecdotally-focused eyes, the study that finds bias is only logical. We all have subconscious prejudices, and this study just seems to prove that.

Decide for yourself if the draft was fixed. The actual tape of the 1985 NBA Draft lottery is online — this is the lottery that supposedly the NY Knicks envelope was frozen beforehand, so that when Commissioner David Stern put his name in the envelope, he knew which one to pick first, that being the Knicks so they could draft Patrick Ewing.

Watch Stern as he places his hand in the bowl, it does look like he moves it around to search for a specific envelope.

Per Darren Rovell on ESPN.com:

But conspiracy also surrounds the NBA draft. As the theory goes — 16 years after the moon landing — NBA commissioner David Stern gave the league’s largest market the No. 1 pick in the 1985 draft by freezing New York Knicks’ envelope and thus easily making sure not to pick the six “warmer” teams.

Every Day Should Be Saturday, which is basically the best sports blog on the Internet, gave a quick little shout out to Marketplace today.

I will be happy to accept this not only as a complement to myself, but as a complement to all public radio and specifically Marketplace. But is also a complement to EDSBS, in that the folks there aren’t listening to ESPN Radio all day.

Yes, that is Charlie Villaneuva.

I know that as a sports fan, this week I should be focused on March Madness, and nothing else.

But it still shocks me sometimes how naive these globally famous athletes can be. What, you didn’t think your Steroids and HGH receipts were going to be made public? Maybe you shouldn’t have shipped them to your house via DHL, then.

And, even worse (thanks to Deadspin via Free Darko), we now can see that there is a whole Flickr photo group of random people in photos with professional athletes in, shall we say, compromising situations. I really do think these people live in an alernate universe.

Maybe these athletes need to learn about the brave new world of the Internet — and take some lessons from job applicants, who know how dangerous cyber gossip can be.

Germans are skeptical of football (American football, that is), to say the least.

They love their Fußball, but aren’t all that excited about the american adaption. I’ve even had to defend the name; as in why is it “foot”-ball, if there are only two players on the team (punter and placekicker) who actually kick the ball. I had no argument to fight back with, except to simply say that football (the American kind) is way more fun to watch.

This past Sunday, that is Super Bowl Sunday, proved that point to the extreme. While I was up in the middle of the night watching the biggest, most lucrative sporting event in the world, most Germans were asleep, tired out from the Handball World Championships.

Yes, I said Handball World Championships, as in Olympic handball — not middle school recess handball. And on the front-page of Monday’s sports sections here? Yep, handball. Not football.

And not only was I one of the few TV viewers watching the Super Bowl, I also had to sit through the game comments, ‘auf Deutsch.’

And yes, I agree, handball does look like a bunch of grown men running around in their pajamas on the Boise State smurf turf.

Flickr thx: hammerhammer.

With Monday’s BCS national championship game already a disappointment in light of the amazing comeback Fiesta Bowl victory that gave Boise State a 14-0 record, sports reporters all over the country are again fretting about the college football bowl system, and whether we’d be better served with a playoff system at the end of the year, similar to the NCAA basketball tournament, or as we all call it, March Madness.

Normally these calls are standard, and could very well be reprinted every year at this exact time. Except this year we got two very interesting, and I must say, compelling arguments against a playoff and for the status quo.

One is a mea culpa from LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke, giving the bowl proponents some props.

Per Plaschke:

“What we saw was pure, raw emotion,” said Keith Jackson, the retired legendary announcer. “What we saw, you can only see in college football.”

And then better-argued, and certainly a tour de force argument for any sports fan is Chuck Klosterman over at ESPN. That is a must-read.

We have a new world record.

Or maybe a new “not-of-this-world” record.

Disc (frisbee to the layman) enthusiasts have long competed for the longest flight record, or Maximum Time Aloft, mark. Currently the record stands at 16.72-seconds by American Don Cain in 1984.

But Cain may have lost his record mark to a Swedish man, Christer Fuglesang, who flew his frisbee for 20 seconds. One catch — Fuglesang is an astronaut, and he was in space at the time.

Fuglesang is a former national disc champion in his home country, and brought the disc into space to attempt to break this specific record. Question is whether the World Flying Disc Federation will accept the record, considering it happened in space.

9/11 , the TSA, and the Heisman Trophy, per the Associated Press:

Troy Smith’s Heisman Trophy was shipped home because airport security would not allow the Ohio State quarterback to take it on the plane Tuesday.

Smith wore a black leather jacket with the Heisman insignia on back when he arrived at the airport from New York, where he was presented college football’s most coveted trophy.

Eddie George, the last Buckeye to win the Heisman in 1995, had his trophy get stuck in an airport X-ray machine, losing the tip of its right index finger and bending the middle finger.

“We decided to have it shipped. That’s much easier. How times have changed. Eddie carried it on the plane and put it in the seat next to him,” sports information director Steve Snapp said.