4B SPORTS
THE UNIVERSITY BADY KANSAN
THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2006
NFL FOOTBALL
Chiefs coach returns to New York tonight to face Giants
New York Giants quarterback Rob Johnson will return to the field after a more than two-year abscence due to injury
BY TOM CANAVAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
ALBANY, N.Y. — More than two years after appearing in his last game and 18 months after having a tendon transplanted in his elbow, Rob Johnson will try to show the New York Giants he still can play quarterback.
Chiefs coach Herm Edwards also will be making his return to Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., tonight, but he has a lot less to prove.
Johnson will continue his comeback from Tommy Johnstyle elbow surgery when the Giants (1-0) play host to Kansas City (0-1) in a preseason game that marks the return of Edwards to the New York-metropolitan area after five up-and-
down seasons with the Jets.
"Oh, I am going to be nervous," said the 33-year-old Johnson. "If you are not nervous, it's not important."
This is a very important game for the 10-year veteran who last played on Dec. 22, 2003, appearing in relief for Oakland in a Monday night game. That was the game Brett Favre threw four touchdowns a day after his father died.
Johnson's career was in doubt at that point. A severely frayed elbow tendon left him with little feeling in his right hand. It was so bad he couldn't pump gas. He needed rehabilitation, surgery and more rehab to get back into football.
The Giants signed him in May.
"I'll go in there and play like I used to play, try to make some plays, try to make big plays," Johnson said. "That's what I like to do. I am not going to go in there with a negative mindset that I can't do this and can't do that."
Johnson has been inconsistent battling Tim Hasselbeck and Jared Lorenzen for the No. 2 spot behind Eli Manning. Johnson has made quick decisions, but the two-a-day workouts have tested his arm. His long passes have been wobbly.
"He's rusty, obviously, because he hasn't had an entire couple of years of being at this," said Giants coach Tom Coughlin, who also had Johnson in Jacksonville in the mid 1990s. "He's very hard on himself, very impatient. He does some good things, and then, of course, he does some things that are not so hot. He's getting there."
Manning will start the game. Johnson will replace him in what might be his only chance to impress the Giants, since Manning will see the majority of action against the Jets next week.
Edwards has a lot less riding on the game.
"I'm going to enjoy going back," he said. "I've got a lot of friends that are still there. I had a great stay there and enjoyed it there, but things changed."
While Edwards led the Jets to three playoff appearances, he was ushered out after a 4-12 mark last season. Kansas City
gave New York a fourth-round draft pick to get him released from the final two years of his contract.
Edwards is trying to lead the Chiefs to the playoffs for the first time since 2003. They missed last year under Dick Vermell despite 10 wins.
Kansas City did not play well in a 24-14 loss to Houston last weekend. The defense, which Edwards has sworn to improve, allowed the Texans to hold the ball for nearly 36 minutes.
The Giants expect halfback Tiki Barber and tight end Jeremy Shockey to play this week, putting all 11 starters from last year back in the lineup.
That should test Kansas City's pass defense, which supposedly was upgraded with the addition
of cornerback Ty Law.
Both teams need help at defensive tackle.
Baltimore averaged 5.3 yards rushing last weekend against the Giants, which means the Chiefs' Larry Johnson might have a big night, even with Pro Bowl left tackle Willie Roaf retired and Pro Bowl guard Brian Waters hurt. Barber could be a headache for Kansas City.
Whatever happens, Edwards intends to enjoy the game, like he did coaching in New York.
"It's not hard. It's fun. It's New York," Edwards said. "I think if you're honest with people, forthright with people and do things your way, you're fine. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot being the head coach up there."
COLLEGE SPORTS
Watching games away from home The Internet allows small colleges to televise their games nationwide
BY PAT EATON-ROBB ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
"They always want to know, 'Are you on TV? Can I get the games?' Siedlecki said.
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — When Yale football coach Jack Siedlecki goes on a national recruiting trip, he hears the same questions over and over from parents.
With the exception of the game against rival Harvard, the answer is usually, "No."
The big TV networks simply aren't interested in the little tv League.
But the Ivy League and other small conferences may have found a way around that — the Internet.
Many schools, and now some conferences, have begun showing football and other sports on their Web sites.
"We can produce our own television and reach, literally, the entire world on the Web, without having to go through the issues of, is there cable availability? Is there satellite availability? Is there advertising support?" said Jeff Orleans, commissioner of the Ivy League.
He expects most of the league's sporting events will be online within seven years.
Big Sky Conference's Northern Arizona offered webcasts of home football games last year. Using the four cameras already set up to provide replays on the stadium scoreboard, the school added audio from its radio broadcasts along with continually updated statistics.
"Our fans love it," said Steven Shaff, a spokesman for the school's athletic department. "We had people in Alaska, parents of students in Canada, watching our games last year."
This season, the entire nine-school Big Sky Conference will webcast all football, basketball and volleyball games, using technology from Salt Lake City-based SportsCast Network LLC.
Fans will be able to choose which team's audio feed to which to listen. Games will be archived and can be downloaded to portable devices like Apple Computer Inc's iPod.
"This is the future," Big Sky Commissoner Doug Fullerton said. "The fan will decide what they are going to watch and when they are going to watch it."
Contrast that with television, where only a handful of games each week are chosen for national broadcast, primarily featuring Top 25 Division I-A teams.
The financial setup is different from traditional television contracts, in which networks pay a flat fee for broadcast rights. In the Big Sky contract, the schools keep the rights and provide feeds to SportsCast, which processes the video for viewing online.
The schools sell advertising and charge a subscription fee — it's $60 to follow one Big Sky school all year. The schools share profits with
SportsCast.
Until recently putting sports online had not been practical. Not enough people had high-speed Internet connections.
That's changed. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 62 percent of U.S. Internet users now have broadband at home, compared with 21 percent just four years ago.
SportsCast isn't alone.
Online video technology also has improved, allowing for bigger, sharper pictures that take up much less bandwidth, said Michael Begley, the CEO and founder of SportsCast.
The NCAA last year contracted with Charleston, S.C.-based Penn Atlantic LLC to help show some of its Division II and III basketball championships. The Division III semifinal games last March had 49,000 people log on, said Jack Pennington, the chief executive of Penn Atlantic.
Fans of larger schools will see more games as well.
His company will be webcasting 39 Western Athletic Conference football games this year.
This fall, ESPN's new online channel, ESPN 360, will show 30 football games, 10 of them, involving teams such as Virginia Tech, Purdue, Miami and Minnesota, exclusively on that Web site. The site, available to about 6 million homes, will also have such features as chat rooms, statistics and online polls.
"It truly is interactive television," said Tanya Van Court, ESPN's vice president and general manager of Broadband and Interactive Television. "It really gives you all the best things about the Internet, with all the best things about television."
For several years, ESPN also has offered games that are televised only regionally to cable and Internet viewers on a pay-per-view basis.
"Even with the number of networks that we have on television, we still don't have the capacity to put on every sporting event that we think our fans want to see," she said.
She said schools' willingness to show their own games online indicates demand not only for the games but also for the new platform.
The schools also don't see the Web replacing television. Major conferences make millions of dollars from their football and basketball television contracts, but many also plan to webcast other sports, such as volleyball or swimming.
The Big Ten Conference announced plans this summer create its own cable channel for minor sports. The Big Ten Channel also will be available through the Internet, iPods, cell phones and other technologies, the league said.
"There's still nothing like sitting in your chair and watching high-definition football on TV," said Jon Kasper, a spokesman for the Big Sky Conference. Conference. "But for our fans that don't have that option, this is the wave of the future."
---
1