In any typical year, this would be a bad time for Chicago sports media. It’s the winter. It’s cold. Trudging to work every day sucks. But more than that, once you get to work, you only have one professional team to cover — the Bears are done, the Cubs and White Sox are remaining relatively quiet in the offseason. You have the Bulls, a team that hasn’t been all too good as of late, and that’s about it, right? In any typical year, yes.

This is no typical year. This year is the Year of the Blackhawk, in which a long-downtrodden franchise is making its push for not only respectability but for local dominance. If it seems unlikely, it is. It will take the Blackhawks more than one year to be more popular than the Bulls in Chicago … but the ball is rolling, and the media is taking notice. Ready to hop on a bandwagon? ESPN.com’s resident Chicagoan, the always-reductive Gene Wojciechowski, takes you there:

If you’re the 0-for-’08 Detroit Lions, there’s hope. The galactically dysfunctional New York Knicks and Dallas Cowboys? There’s hope. The penny-pinched Pittsburgh Pirates, once-proud U-Dub Huskies, orphaned Oklahoma City Thunder … there’s hope. Even a Donald Sterling-owned team or a roster managed by absentee exec Michael Jordan can walk a little taller today.

That’s because the perennially worst franchise in sports has performed reconstructive cosmetic surgery on itself — and it worked! Any prettier and the Chicago Blackhawks would have their own modeling deal.

Ah, yes, who would have ever thought that a perennially successful franchise like the Dallas Cowboys, managed by a billionaire owner, who had one of the great football dynasties of the last decade and whose team is as talented as any in the NFL would have — gasp — hope? If the Blackhawks can do it, so can the Cowboys! In a billion-dollar stadium, no less! Know hope, ‘Boys fans! Know hope!

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The Vikings are in the playoffs. In fact, their last-second 20-19 victory against the Giants didn’t even matter Sunday, because the Bears lost. Have you heard the Bears lost? Because the Bears lost Sunday. To the Texans. In a game that if they would have won, they would have made the playoffs. Just letting every know if they hadn’t heard yet.

Now that the Vikings are in the playoffs, you would expect the fans to be pretty exited.  Maybe even, I don’t know, want to buy tickets to the game. But so far, that’s just not that case. Not all all.

The Vikings announced Monday that approximately 20,000 tickets remain for Sunday’s game against the Eagles at the Metrodome. That daunting number shouts out a very real possibility that the Vikings’ first home playoff game in eight years will be blacked out in the Twin Cities and many secondary markets.

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The surplus of tickets for Sunday’s game, scheduled to be shown on KMSP (Ch. 9), exists because only about 55 percent of the team’s 55,000 season-ticket holders elected to buy playoff tickets.

Now, the Vikings marketing dude is pointing to the fact that with the holidays, and fans waiting to see whether or not the Vikings actually made it in or not, sales are down to start off here. But this wasn’t like the Bears who were fighting for the playoffs, the Vikings had a much easier road to the postseason; they were expected to make it.

There’s still plenty of time till Sunday, so the jury is still out. But I don’t know, there’s another holiday coming up Thursday, I fear that might derail sales once again.

Via PFT.

I was told in high school I would need mathematics in almost any profession I selected. One of my teachers even had a chart mapping out just what kind of math we’d need to know in which field. (This teacher also played bass in a band called Quagmire. Awesome.) I thought that was silly; surely, not everything you do in life involves math. But the more I peer into Ken Pomeroy’s stats and rankings, and the more sabermetrics craft the way I view the game of baseball, math, beyond just the normal stats and scores, has seeped into my sports fandom. Woe is me.

This brings us to the Hardball Times’ Drama Index. I’m going to let them explain, because all I’ll do is mess it up:

The idea is simple, but the spreadsheet is ginormous. To calculate the drama index, I assume that each team has a natural distribution of games it is likely to win in the remaining season. I do this by calculating a binomial distribution (BINOMDIST in your Excel spreadsheet) for each possible situation during the season. For instance, the binomial distribution of a .500 team with ten games to go will project the following number of wins this percent of the time.

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My recipe for the whole shebang: look at each day of the season and calculate the number of wins each team is behind the nearest postseason position (in other words, its division leader or the wild card leader, if closer) or, for division and wild card leaders, how much they are ahead; then use the binomial distribution to calculate the impact of a win or loss on its chances of reaching the postseason (assuming the competition plays .500 ball the rest of the season. Since the index is updated daily, .500 isn’t a prediction. It’s just a guideline for the index.)

In the above example, the highest drama index goes to the team that has to win five or six of its remaining ten games, because the impact of a win or loss in those two situations gives them the same result (25 points). I’m not going to show you the math. Trust me.

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There are hundreds of reasons to carry an iPod. Music is awesome and people — who you would talk to instead of having earphones in — are horrible, to name two.

Also, to ski with. While skiers and snowboarders normally have MP3 players on hand in order to jam out while shredding, you can now add “It will save you from freezing to death” to that list. No, seriously. Two ski-brahs in Switzerland were near death when their MP3 player bailed them out.

They were able to alert the authorities using a mobile phone, but it when it ran out of battery power all they had left was an MP3 player, which the snowboarder had been using to listen to music.

Airborne rescuers were eventually able to reach the pair high on a wooded slope after being guided by the light of the digital music player.

It seems incredulous that people on a helicopter were able to see the light of an iPod from the sky, but remember: cold, dark, cold as hell, dark as hell. In other words, there wasn’t much other light hanging around for anyone to see.

So yeah, if you ski or snowboard in any sort of remote area, make sure and bring an iPod. (Or a flare gun, which is just so impractical and just too easy to deal with.) I might also add that this is a pretty good time to go ahead and invest in a Power Monkey or some sort of ridiculously awesome iPod charger. Or, again, a flare gun.

A fantastic film I recommend you check out is 2001’s “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” which is a documentary chronically a group of skateboarders in the 70s who hailed from the Santa Monica area, and were pretty much the pioneers of the sport and what it has evolved into today.

Part of the fun of the film, and sort of the stereotypical hangout for ruffian skateboarders, was the abandoned, dried-out pool. (Other fun uses for abandoned pools: the episode of “That 70’s Show” where they try to have a keg party in one.) In the 70s, California residents had no water in their pools because of a large drought. And now, some 30 years later, a similar phenomenon is happening again in Southern California. But this time it has nothing to do with a drought, and everything to do with the economy and houses foreclosing. The New York Times has some interesting details on dudes hitting the pools again, including this:

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Lost Time Is Not Found Again is what the MPS blog crew has been reading today.

+ Is an offensive coordinator to praise for the Cavs’ great leap in efficiency with the ball this season? {The Sporting Blog.}

+ Tony Romo collapsed in the shower after the Cowboys got worked by the Eagles. {Pro Football Talk.}

+ Mike Singletary will be back as the 49ers head coach. This is not a sentence I planned on typing after he dropped his pants. {Niners Nation.}

+ LeBron James, doing it again. {NESW Sports.}

+ Non-sports: Gizmodo’s best gadgets of the year. {Gizmodo.} Study: facial expressions of emotion are innate, not learned. {esciencenews.com.}

Quotable:

“That’s all we talked about. I went to his house, spent some time with his mom and his grandmother. He wants to come back. And if he wants to come back, I want him back.” – Stephen Jackson, speaking about Baron Davis’ desire to return to the Golden State Warriors

It’s amazing to me that certain teams wait until today — the official end of the NFL regular season — to start firing coaches. What good reason was there to let Romeo Crennel hang around in Cleveland? Or Rod Marinelli in Detroit? Sure, Mike Singletary — after leading the 49ers to respectability only a few short weeks after dropping his drawers in front of the team — proves the exception to the rule, but for the most part it seems odd to let coaches hang around.

Of course, all of that is for naught now that Marinelli, Crennel and Eric Mangini of the Jets have been canned. Briefly, why:

• Marinelli — The Lions went 0-16, which is, um, not “good.” He might not have completely deserved to get fired (the totality of blame lies on Matt Millen) but a full house cleaning is what’s best for a franchise in this kind of despair. See: Dolphins, Miami or Falcons, Atlanta.
• Crennel — The Browns became the Seattle Mariners of the NFL, falling back to Urf in the most speedy of fashions. Crennel stuck with Derek Anderson too long, Braylon Edwards can’t catch the ball, but mostly, he’s a very, very bad game manager. That’s not a trait you want in your head coach.
• Mangini — An inexplicable love for Brett Favre by Woody Johnson. Sure, he’s a grizzled, Wrangler-ensconced gunslinger. We get that.  And sure, Mangini spent the last month coaching with two hands around his neck, but it’s just ridiculous to fire him while taking Favre’s side.

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