Domo and D.J. Day

If you haven't browsed the Daily News today, do yourself a favor and check out the articles by Paul Domowitch and Dick Jerardi. They are well worth a read.

Domo lays down the law on the NFL owners for laying off more than 150 people and really pulls not punches:

THE NFL owners should be ashamed of themselves. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Jeff Lurie. You and all of the other greedy SOBs who hold the deeds to the league's 32 franchises.

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These are lousy times in America right now. Thousands of companies, including the one I happen to work for, are laying people off left and right. But most of them at least have a decent excuse. They're losing money. Lots of it.

The NFL? Not hardly. Oh, the number of marketing deals might drop a little as the recession worsens, and team sales reps might have to say "pretty please" a couple of extra times before companies renew the leases on their luxury suites. And some owners with new or relatively new stadiums have seen the adjustable rate on their construction loans jump. But the league still is making lots and lots of money.

Last time I looked, the checks coming in from Fox and CBS and NBC and ESPN still had as many zeros on them as ever. Which is why it's unconscionable that these silver-spooned billionaires are about to put people who live paycheck-to-paycheck out of work simply to brace for the winds of a worsening economic storm.

For the record, I put in a request to talk to Lurie about the job cuts. Through a spokesman, he declined. Next time he wants to talk about his football team or his "Go Green" initiative, he'll get the same answer from me.

And D.J. has a great recap of the Holy War last night:

THIS FELT right. Favorite in trouble. Underdog playing great. Fans silent.

Favorite digging in. Underdog holding on. Fans ready to blow the roof off. Bodies flying. Timeouts being called on every dead ball.

A missed free throw. A block/charge call. Made free throws. A steal. More made free throws. Buzzer goes off.

That is the Holy War, not these blowouts where the favorite gets the lead, the underdog collapses and everybody wonders what this Villanova-Saint Joseph's thing really is about.

This was what it is about. St. Joe's, a double-digit underdog at the Ski Lodge, led for 29 minutes, led by nine at halftime, led for every television timeout but the last one, still led with 16 seconds left. Then, Darrin Govens, a 78 percent foul shooter who had made six threes, missed a free throw.

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"St. Joe played great,'' Villanova coach Jay Wright said. "To come into this building, they played better than us tonight. They did. They played a better game. They deserved it, but we just gutted it out.''

The Wildcats did exactly that. This group is far more tough than pretty. Tough, however, wins a lot.

When the game's co-leading scorer was reminded that one miss doesn't negate everything positive that went down and doesn't mean that there won't be more basketball games, Govens said: "It's like a fight. You box and you win every round. You get to the last round and get knocked out. It's painful.''

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This game is never supposed to be one team getting 100 one year and the other getting a 40-9 lead the next. This is a game you are supposed to feel for 40 minutes. Fourteen nights before Christmas, this was a Holy War that could be felt from the floor to the benches to the stands, right through the television to the audience watching on ESPN2. This was Villanova-St. Joe's.

Couldn't agree with both men more.