Quick Hits

-I just realized something about Lebron James bringing his talent to South Beach. It took me a few weeks to see this, but I think it's quite obvious. Lebron brought the Cavaliers gameplan along with him.

Lebron has never been a guy that has played with a pointguard. It's always been him and get the hell out of my way. The Cleveland Cavaliers were built specifically for Lebron's game. They had a bunch of role players who could hit spot-up jumpers. The Lebron Cavs always had one guy, and one guy only, who could create shots on his own. The Miami Heat aren't built that way. The have three Alpha Dogs who can create at anytime on their own. The problem is that the three of them haven't compromised and found a way to play together. Lebron is trying to get them to adapt to his style. The quicker the Heat get these guys playing to complement each other then the quicker they can get thru those growing pains and play the way we think they can.

They're heading down the wrong path right now and they need to reverse this trend and start to head down the right path. Lebron needs to learn to play with his new teammates and stop treating them like they're the Cavs.

-I'm convinced that Marvin Lewis would have been fired this week if they weren't playing Thanksgiving night. Marvin has had long enough to imprint his style on this team and organization, but it just isn't working. I'm tired of Marvin. This hurts to say this but the Bengals need to start over. Bring in Holmgren and let's rebuild this thing. I love Chad but he has to go. I hope the owner cares enough to see that this is going nowhere fast and his team has given up on a once promising head-coach.

-The Pats-Colts played another great regular season game. This turned into one of the great rivalries in the history of the game. We'll miss this matchup in five years when these QB's are gone or are no longer at the top of their games. The only other rivalry that might be close is New England-Pittsburgh. There's really nothing in the NFC that comes close.

-I think Melo gets traded in the next month or so. In fact, I think that whole team gets blown up. Chauncey might end up with a possible contender. As far as Melo, just put the guy out of his misery and trade him to New York. He wants to go play Amare and have a coach that doesn't care if he shows up on the defensive end.

-I think Coach Rick has convinced his team that they aren't good enough to win on talent alone. This team is playing harder than they have in quite some time. Tyson Chandler is a beast in the middle. I saw him get in Marion's grill on a defensive lapse. That's exactly what this team needs.

Tiger's new swing

I checked out a bit of the King Bhumibol (that might be right) Skins game the other nite. Let me just say that I haven't seen Tiger swing the club since the Ryder Cup over a month ago. Wow. His power is back.

Tiger seems to be gaining a huge amount of confidence in his new swing. There are some who will classify the Sean Foley swing as Stack & Tilt. There are certainly some similarities. This is what I think is the difference. Traditional Stack & Tilt gives your swing a certain style. Almost all Stack & Tilt players swing a certain way. It's very recognizable. I think Sean Foley allows his players to add their style to Stack & Tilt. None of the Foley players swing the same way, but they all have characteristics in their swings that are similar.

But back to Tiger. I saw some changes in his swing that were impressive. He seems to be much more on top of the ball going back. This leads to a stronger position at the top. His shift to his left side and release thru the ball are nite and day from four months ago. There wasn't a semblance of him getting stuck on they way down and thru. He was hitting driver on holes where he didn't need driver and he looked confident. He made a bad swing and the ball was about three yards off the fairway.

Tiger was always dominate when he could hit it out there with the long hitters. He toned it down the last few years and tried to become a control player with numerous shots in his bag. What if Tiger can become a hybrid of the two players he used to be? What if he can combine his raw power with a bit more accuracy and the ability to shape shots?

I don't know what 2011 holds for Tiger. A lot of it will depend on his putting. He'll play one more time this year at Chevron and then we won't see him until probably February. I wonder what that swing will look like then.

It's time for this to go

Well, it finally happened. Tiger lost his world number one ranking this past week. The new number one is Lee Westwood. It got me thinking about these rankings. Do we really need them?

Who do the world rankings benefit? I guess the players feel some sense of pride by being a highly ranked player. Maybe sponsors can gloat that they have ten of the top thirty players in the world at their tournament. But, seriously, does anyone know who the 30th ranked player in the world is. Does anyone care? Westwood proved that you don't even have to win that frequently to overtake the spot. Just be in contention a lot and that's good enough.

Golf is all about name recognition. There are certain names that you just know. Tiger, Phil, Ernie, and Vijay to name a few. These guys are noticed because of who they are and what they've done. We don't need a ranking system to verify that. We didn't have a world ranking system before 1985 and things got along just fine.

Also, I think the rankings might affect a guys play. Fred Couples never looked comfortable when he was tabbed as the worlds #1. David Duval carries around the distinction of a player who has fallen so far from his #1 ranking. Does he really need to answer questions about that? Phil Mickelson has fallen flat on his face in weeks where he could have overtaken the spot had he played slightly above average.

The best players in the game are always judged by how many majors they win. It's that simple.

I know we need some sort of ranking system in order to know who to invite to these big tournaments. It just seems that these rankings adds more of a drama than their really needs to be.