Someday, and it shouldn't be long now, the question will change.  It won't be the big question, the one related to 1948, 1964, and all of eternity, but we're going back to baby steps.  Any mention of championship or bust is really misguided in Cleveland, given the current landscape.  The question is, when will one of these teams make the playoffs?

The ship has long since sailed on that viable discussion about winning a championship, but the post-season and nothing more than a seat at the table is in sight.  It's in sight for all three of the organizations that call Cleveland home, even if it may not necessarily be likely for any of them.  We know the Browns have the most work to do, the Indians need to catch some breaks, and the Cavs appear to have evolved far enough from the bottom of the Eastern Conference that bonus basketball might be in the cards.  Soon, the question becomes, who will be the next one to miss?

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On a day that the world seemed focused on the story of fictional man's life after cancer diagnosis, the reality of it hit close to home for me, here in Phoenix.  Jim Gintonio passed away on Sunday, and the news actually stung a bit, but the immediate social media eulogy only confirmed what I already knew; Jim is a great man that won't soon be forgotten.  Officially, he covered the Phoenix Coyotes for the Arizona Republic, Phoenix's flagship paper, until he retired after the 2012 season.  Unofficially, he was a guy like me, a guy who enjoyed life in Arizona very much, but his heart was always in the Cleveland sports mindset.

The fact that he was a sportswriter is almost secondary to who he was as a human being; I follow the Coyotes, but it was never the words he wrote on paper about sports that intrigued me about the guy.  It was his roots in Lorain, his love for the Tribe and the Browns, and the way we clicked in dialogue, even if it was only of the online variety.  Perhaps it's this, this friendship that complete strangers could have with one another, that make sports so great. 

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It's hard to know whether to be more surprised by the NCAA's hypocrisy or its ability to be shamed into doing the right thing, at least when pressure gets to them. I guess I'll go with the latter since the former isn't really much of a surprise.

A mere days after the Jay Bilas of ESPN exposed the NCAA's abject hypocrisy in using its own web site to profit off the players it would simultaneously punish for trying to do the same, the NCAA actually succumbed to the shame of it all and shut down the site, though not necessarily its profit churning possibilities.

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One of the abiding questions of recent times about what's happening with the business side of the Cleveland Indians revolves around the Dolans' recent sale of SportsTime Ohio.

The Dolans went to some difficulty and expense to first cancel its television broadcast contract with Fox Sports Ohio and then launch their own cable venture m 2006 with Indians games as the centerpiece. Yet just a handful of years later they abandoned the project and sold STO, ironically to Fox Sports. Did the Dolans cash in? Is that what funded this past season's free agent splurge? Hard to know in either case, but perhaps they sold for a more mundane reason: it may not have been generating the profits they thought.

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