KCRW The Score

This year's NFL Draft holds the promise of teams licking their chops at mining a wealth of quarterback prospects. No matter how deep that list runs, one 6'6", 250-pound monster-armed talent stands head and shoulders above the rest. Auburn's quarterback Cam Newton was this year's stand-out college player. There was no debate. Scouts, coaches, pro players current and past resoundingly weighed in with kudos on the order of not having seen a monumental talent like Newton in quite some time...

Let's call this Ladies Day here on The Score. First, in Iowa, where wrestling is to the state as football is to Texas, a high school girl last week became the first in the 86-year history of the State tournament to win a match. The downside to Cassy Herkelman's victory is that it came on a default by a boy, the fifth-ranked wrestler in the state in the 112-pound division. Joel Northrop, home-schooled, his father a minister, cited the tenets of his faith, not believing boys should engage girls in the violent manner necessary in this sport, as the reason for his defaulting the match. His father, the pastor, had this comment: "We believe in the elevation and respect of women."

With the end of the NFL season comes a collective American depression. Millions of us are football junkies and the withdrawal, post Super Bowl, can be cruel.

Christina Aguilera’s flubbing of the National Anthem has drawn equal billing to any football news, post Super Bowl. OK, “the twilight’s last ‘reaming’” was perhaps egregious botching, compared to other Anthem gaffes, such as Robert Goulet, before a Muhammed Ali-Sonny Liston fight, singing “by the dawn’s early night”.

To paraphrase a feminist concept of male resistance to the growing power of women in our society, it has been said "the stronger women get, the more men love football." This to be interpreted that men love football, revere football, because it's seemingly the last all-male frontier...