Straight out of left field | Two hundred channels and nothing on...

With the NBA All-Star game now behind us, a time has come when the average sports fans find themselves in one of the most feared times every year: the sports doldrums. Like when sailors in the days of yore would find themselves without a wind to sail on, so now do sports fans find themselves left without anything interesting to watch for the next two weeks.

Now, I’ll have to put emphasis on the word interesting, because there will be things to watch, just not exactly anything eye-catching.

Sure the Winter Olympics have started, but I just can’t seem to find anything that tickles my fancy enough to captivate me for a few hours. I’ve heard figure skating is interesting, but  (my apologies to Baxter Burbank) I’d rather watch “Blades of Glory” instead. Aside from that, there’s hockey, which could be the best part of the Olympics, but if it’s not team Canada or team USA playing either each other or some high-profile opponent such as Russia (Crosby vs. Ovechkin, international style) or Sweden (the defending Olympic champs who bring the return of Peter Forsberg), then I can’t find myself sitting down for three hours to watch as Latvia takes on Belarus in a thrilling secondary round match-up.

There are other events such as curling, luging, and bobsledding, but unless Stephen Colbert is in Vancouver with a curling broom in hand or I see the ghost of John Candy cheering on the Jamaican bobsled team, then once again, I can’t see myself sitting in front of the TV with a pizza, glued to NBC.

Of course, a case has to be made for basketball, since NHL hockey is hereby postponed until the end of the winter games. I’ll agree that basketball will be on TV, but how interesting will it be? I root for the Philadelphia 76ers, who, despite what Allen Iverson makes it look like, are a flat out bad team, and will be for the foreseeable future. They’ll be on TV every other day or so, but do I want to watch them struggle to make a run for the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference, watching as they lose an opportunity at another lottery draft pick? I mean, it’s one thing to be bad, but to be bad and be good at it is a whole new level of awful.

Then there’s college basketball. This is one of my favorite sports to watch because of how you can watch a play develop and either succeed or break down. Despite that fact, however, college standings have been more or less locked in place. Until the conference tournaments start up early in March, there isn’t much left to do except watch as your team either wraps up the end of its conference schedule with varying degrees of ease or struggles to make the conference tournament at all. Of course, there are still games such as Syracuse vs. Georgetown on Thursday, but regardless of who wins, you know that both teams are going to make the conference tournament (and the NCAA as well).

Then of course there’s golf and NASCAR. But let’s be honest, unless you were already into these sports, it’ll be tough to get captivated by it, despite Danica Patrick’s entry into NASCAR or Tiger Woods’ absence from golf.

What was the biggest recent sports news story for me, you ask? For me, it was hearing that a large tractor-trailer departed from Philadelphia the other day on its way to Clearwater, Fla., for Phillies’ spring training. That’s a sign from the heavens telling me that baseball is on its way to save sports fans across the country from the current quagmire that fans will be left in for the next two weeks.

On top of that, I am left reassured knowing that with the beginning of conference tournaments in college basketball that March Madness is steadily approaching, giving fans days of back-to-back match-ups between (usually) deserving teams fighting to make it to the championship.

It is days like those that I cannot wait for again: the days when basketball can keep me entertained for an entire month as I wait for baseball to take me away for another six; when the proverbial sails fill with wind and I (and the rest of the sports fans across the nation) can happily travel along with plenty of sports to keep me entertained.

Until then I’ll do what sailors did while waiting for an end to the doldrums: sit back and hope it ends soon.