The Sporting News has produced a ranking of the Top 50 coaches of all-time. It’s the type of piece that produces discussions and perhaps arguments after a few belts in a bar. Heading the list is UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden; I’ve got no beef with him at the top, although many people might bump up some coaches just a few names down the list.

The ten are: Wooden, (2) Vince Lombardi, (3) Bear Bryant, (4) Phil Jackson, (5) Don Shula, (6) Red Auerbach, (7) Scotty Bowman, (8) Dean Smith, (9) Casey Stengel, (10) Knute Rockne. If you go one spot further, at 11th is the sole woman on the list, Pat Summitt.

Sorry to disappoint, but Cornhusker football coach Tom Osborne comes in at 34th, although he’s ahead of Amos Alonzo Stagg, the legend whose name is affixed to the annual football coaching awar.

Here are the questions — (1) who do you put as your No.1 all-time coach from all sports and (2) which tri-state coach do you rate as best? Osborne? Hayden Fry? Ralph Miller? Steve Alford? OK, maybe not that last one.

I just got back from an hour of listening to Mary Lou Retton describe her eight-year pursuit of a gold medal in gymnastics, which culminated in that very result in the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Retton spoke to about 800 women (and me) at the 2009 Women’s Power Lunch at the Sioux City Convention Center. She was a very well-received speaker, and a woman near me (OK, my wife) shed a tear after a DVD showed Retton sticking a landing to nail a 10.0 score and the gold.

Retton spoke about her upbringing as a high-energy kid in West Virginia and how she was jazzed to find an outlet for her skills after seeing Romanian Nadia Comaneci , the first gymnast to get a 10.0 score, win gold in the 1976 Olympics. Retton stayed under the national radar until late 1982, when she came to be coached by the legendary Bela Karolyi. “He said, ‘Mary Lou, you come to me, and I make you Olympic champion,’ ” she related, using Karolyi’s clipped English.

Growing up reading Sports Illustrated (and The Journal sports section that summer of 1984) I remember a bit of this stuff, but it was fascinating to hear the tales in Retton’s voice. At one point, she moved 20 yards from my table, and she flashed the smile that brought back all those pictures from Retton’s heyday. Given the status of her fitness today (especially the sculpted calves) at age 41, I thought Retton was ready to vault right there on the stage.

She said gymnasts at the time were much taller than she was, and the U.S. was not near the power of today. “Everyone in the world thought Bela had some magic potion he would give us… We trained our tails off,” Retton said.

In quest of the 1984 all-around gold, Retton earned a 10.0 on her floor exercise, the next-to-last apparatus, which put her just behind Ecaterina Szabo of Romania.  Szabo went next and got a 9.90 on the uneven bars, which meant Retton in her vault needed a 9.95 to tie and 10.0 to win. Of course, she got the 10.0.

The 4-9 Retton said she’s asked if she ever gets tired of talking about 1984. “No, I mean, come on,” she said with another broad smile. She won five medals in L.A. — a gold, two silvers and two bronzes.

If you’re jazzed about the men’s Final Four that plays out beginning tomorrow, you likely love the notion that 65 teams have a chance to run the table through a national tournament and determine a champion that no one disputes or quibbles about. If it can happen in D-I basketball, why not D-I NCAA football?

The folks at humor mag The Onion hit on that topic in a story here. The lead graph posits how much the BCS officials/cronies/hacks (pick your word) hate that March Madness firmly settles the question of “who’s best?”

Here’s the beginning: Claiming that determining an unquestioned national champion through a playoff system “went against the very idea of sporting competition,” and that the sheer exuberance of college basketball fans was “a shocking and nauseating display of everything wrong with collegiate athletics,” top BCS officials roundly condemned the NCAA Tournament Monday.

And this “quote” — ”The elegant logic of actually having teams play one another instead of having a council of their betters select which team is superior to which—that is not what sports is all about.”

Oh, those Onion wags. This one definitely bears reading, for the truth seeps through the sarcasm.

We’ve hit the period when high school basketball has ended, the Division I Final Four hoops are left to play out, NBA teams are doing final jockeying for playoff positions and high school track is just underway. It’s also a high period for national sports figures to come speak in Sioux City, apparently.

Last night, Jim Morris spoke at Briar Cliff University — he’s the guy whose unlikely arrival in the Major Leagues at age 35 was chronicled in “The Rookie” movie in 2002. Nick Hytrek had a nice piece on him for The Journal today, where Morris (played by Randy Quaid in the film) held forth on steroids in baseball and described how he made it with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for the 1998 and 1999 seasons.

On top of that, we’ll see not one, but two sports speakers on April 16. Mary Lou Retton won gold in gymastics during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and she’ll speak at an 11:30 luncheon. After that, former Yankee pitcher Jim Abbott, who threw a no-hitter in 1993, will headline the annual Goodwill Dinner.

Yeah, it’s not like the sports stars of today are rushing off to the city to hold forth, but those purchasing tickets to the Retton and Abbott evens will undoubtedly hear some great sports anecdotes along with advice on how to find some success in life.

The Sioux City Explorers today announced the hiring of a new play-by-play broadcaster, Dave Nitz, for the 2009 season. The X’s will be playing baseball for the 17th season and Nitz will call all 96 home and away games on AM 1360 KSCJ and via the X’s website (www.xsbaseball.com).

“I am thrilled to have someone with Dave’s professional baseball experience join our broadcast team this season. I am confident our fans will enjoy his play-by-play commentary,” said X’s General manager Shane Tritz.

Tritz thanked Chris Varney for his years of serving as the Voice of the X’s. About six years ago, Varney succeeded Paul Guiggenheimer, the previous Voice of the X’s.

Nitz brings a wealth of broadcast experience to the X’s radio booth. The 2009 season will mark his 47th year in broadcasting. Nitz served as the play-by-play announcer at Louisiana Tech sports for the past 34 years. He has also called minor league games for the Bluefield Orioles, Oklahoma City 89ers and Shreveport Captains.

You’ve heard of high school athletes who run afoul of their school’s good conduct policies, yet don’t want to miss their favorite sports, right? So they transfer to a nearby school district, where their punishment/suspension has no force.

Well, a change in Iowa law could lessen the ability for “student”-athletes to undertake such transfers. What you might call the Benchwarmer Bill (House File 191) has been approved by the Iowa House Education Committee. It would require students open enrolling in a district other than their residence to sit out varsity contests for 180 days rather than 90 days.

Is this a step in the right direction?

Shopping at Fareway, a product I’d never seen caught the eye. Stacked high and wide were a bunch of boxes of breakfast cereal Cyclone Crunch. The picture on the front shows the cereal is essentially like King Vitaman or Cap’n Crunch, which I like as much as the next person, so I bought the sweetened multi-grain cereal (apparently corn flour and oat flour count).

On the back of the box we learn some key stats about Jack Trice Stadium, the origin of the Cyclone nickname, the origin of mascot Cy and the Cyclone Cannon, which is shot by a frat after every Cyclone touchdown or field goal. It wasn’t shot much in the 2008 season that was a major downer for ISU fans, when a 2-10 season ended with 10 consecutive losses, including an 0-8 Big 12 mark.

Cyclone Crunch is sole exclusively at Fareway. I didn’t see any Cornhusker Crunch or, for that matter, Hawkeye Heartiness. I suppose fans of those teams would say a better cereal name might be Cyclone Crud.

There’s an interesting article this afternoon that popped on the Baltimore Sun Web site. Today being Friday the 13th, a Sun reporter laid out 13 of the unluckiest moments in sports histories. Give it a read, and here are a few on the list I definitely remember.

1. In 1986 World Series, the Red Sox led the Mets three games to two and late in Game Six had a lead too. Then of course Met Mookie Wilson hit a routine grounder to first baseman Bill Buckner — which went through his wickets. The Sox lost that game as a couple guys round the bases, then choked away the title in the next game.

5. U.S. distance runner Mary Decker had a lot of success, but never got a gold medal. In the 1984 Olympics 3,000 meter race, she got tangled up with Zola Budd and fell, another gold denied. I can still see the Sports Illustrated photo of Decker on the ground, crying.

8. In the 1979 Super Bowl (yeah, I don’t know the Roman numeral for it) Dallas Cowboy tight end Jackie Smith, typically a sure-handed guy, is wide open in the end zone. Pass delivered, on the mark. Pass dropped. Cowboys lose.

9. Cubs futility in earning a championship lengthens in 2003, when star-crossed fan Steve Bartman reaches out from stands and catches a fly left fielder Moises Alou looks ready to catch. The Cubs led that Game 6 3-0 at the time, but lose the game. They also lose Game 7. No title.

Between a busy schedule and a much-enjoyed vacation, I’ve fallen behind on my blogging chores. Sorry about that!

As a communications company rather than simply a newspaper, we’re trying to bring you a wide range of information and insight, hoping more and more people avail themselves of our efforts. One of our newer ventures in this modern communications world is our weekly sportscast, which is generally posted on our Web site every Thursday morning. We have a little fun with this little meeting of the minds and hash over what’s been going on and what’s to come on the Siouxland and national sports scene. So, I hope you’ll give it a try.

Just around the corner, we’ll be heading into post-season tournament play in Northwest Iowa prep softball. That’ll all be getting cranked up next week, which is two weeks earlier than usual due to a flip-flop in the schedule, sliding the state softball tournament in front of state baseball. I don’t recall the reason for all of this and it’s of no particular consequence now, but it means our summer will be a little different than it’s been in the past few decades, when the softball championships followed baseball and crept into the first week of August.

Fingers crossed, I’m hoping this scheduling adjustment gives our sports department a little more time to prepare our annual pre-season football package, which has been one of our proudest traditions for many years.

Please, stay tuned!

We get through these Iowa winters the best we can, I guess. Practice, though, certainly doesn’t “make perfect” because I’ve known plenty of people who’ve reached a certain age and lost much of their tolerance for bitter cold and scooping snow. I’m one of them.

Still, as that bright orange ball popped up in the sky Thursday morning and I did reconnaissance on another Sioux City Journal sports section, I felt warmth as I read the contribution from newsroom colleague Tim Gallagher, writing about winter in other terms.

With Minnesota Twins Manager Ron Gardenhire popping into town on a busy Wednesday for our sports department, I was lucky enough to have Tim, a talented writer, agree to take this assignment off our hands. Meanwhile, our readers were lucky to have him ask a terrific question about how the Twins approach the disparity between their modest payroll and high-dollar clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox.

I would take issue with one statement Tim made about the Twins’ success being comparable to him winning writing awards over journalists from the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times. The only thing those people have on Tim Gallagher is a longer drive home every day.

The true parallel here is that Twins fans have an organization that manages to do things well in spite of whatever. And, our very own Sioux City Journal has people like Tim, who not only want to give you as many winners as possible, they roll up their sleeves and get it done.