Tuesday, the North American Soccer League introduced new commissioner Bill Peterson, a veteran of several different facets of the sports industry. I had a chance to participate in the conference call to ask about a few things, including Peterson’s plans for the league going forward, and the split season – and what that might mean for Stars fans.

Monday, the Twins signed minor-league first baseman Jeff Clement, who has spent most of the past four years in the Pittsburgh minor-league system.

With Clement on his way to the Twins minor-league system, let’s find out: who is Jeff Clement, anyway?

NOTE: This also appears at RandBall.

The state high school hockey tournament is Minnesota’s most famous prep event, the only one that draws national attention unless Blake Hoffarber is involved.The thing is, though, that the Prep Bowl is better – and here are five reasons why.

1. The Prep Bowl actually involves teams from around Minnesota – Caledonia and Moose Lake-Willow River and Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley and so on – rather than being the Suburbs, Private Schools, and Warroad/Roseau State Championship like the hockey tournament.

2. Watch the Prep Bowl, you’ll see every kind of football; spread offense and offenses that throw twice a year, quarterbacks that can sling the ball seventy yards and quarterbacks that appear to be throwing with the wrong hand, teams that kick field goals and teams that can’t hardly kick off. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of football. Unless you’re a particular student of the one-man vs. two-man forecheck, the hockey tournament is more or less a lot of the same thing all day.

3. The Prep Bowl gets the benefit of being played on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, the best possible dates on the calendar, when days off and leftover turkey combine with high school football to make the best possible sports viewing experience. Half the hockey tournament is played while you’re at work.

4. Chris Dilks at the Western College Hockey Blog wrote a convincing column this week that suggests that it’s time to stop pretending there’s any basis for community-based prep hockey, since most players gravitate towards the all-star teams that tend to be created at that level. You’ll never read a similar column about prep football in Minnesota.

5. The best high school hockey players in Minnesota play Elite League hockey and junior hockey and summer hockey and go to the USHL and go to the National Team Development program in Ann Arbor. The best high school football players in Minnesota play high school football in Minnesota.

*On with the links:

*The Twins need a ton of pitching, which isn’t a secret. John Bonnes thinks that Josh Willingham is worth basically nothing on the trade market, which leads into Nick Nelson’s home truth: if the Twins aren’t going to be terrible next year, they’re going to have to spend an enormous amount of money this off-season.

*With John Gagliardi’s retirement at St. John’s, SJU grad Shawn Fury takes a look back at the legendary coach.

*Hamilton Nolan writes about Adrien Broner, boxing’s next, unbeatable, unpunchable thing.

*The Economist takes a scientific look at Formula One’s successful return to the United States.

*And finally: I will never fail to be entertained by this kind of thing.

Everybody who was out short-term for the Timberwolves is back in the lineup now. Ricky Rubio is on his way back, but won’t be much of a factor until the new year. As I look back on the third week of the Wolves’ season at SB Nation Minnesota, it’s striking to me that the team that lost to Denver on Wednesday is, effectively, the Wolves’ team for most of 2012-13.

Last Thursday, I looked back at the week that was for the Timberwolves, a week in which everybody got hurt. This was depressing.

Since then, the Wolves have lost to Golden State at home, and now it’s come out this morning that Brandon Roy needs more knee surgery. This is doubly depressing.

I need Ricky Rubio and his sense of wonder and his dreamy eyes to come back soon.

Today, the Gophers take on Nebraska, a team ranked either 14th or 16th in the nation, depending on which poll you happen to read. The question I have is this: in this age, does anyone really care who the nation’s 16th-best team is? Nebraska is ranked above Oregon State in the BCS, but behind the Beavers in the AP poll – and for the life of me, I cannot think of a reason that it would matter to fans of either school. Perhaps there are some OSU-Nebraska marriages that are split over the topic.

With a four-team playoff set to begin in the 2014 season, I imagine this will only get worse. No one will have a reason to pay attention to any portion of a poll that isn’t about the playoff teams. Everything beyond the eighth spot will be completely ignored, as well it should be. In fact, I think it’s time for the AP – for one – to cut its poll down. There’s historical precedent; until 1989, the poll never ranked more than the top 20, and for much of the 1960s only the top ten were acknowledged.

That’s the direction I’d like to head in. Let’s get all of the polls – AP, Coaches, BCS – down to the top 10. Let the voters focus on the best ten teams in the nation; maybe then they can put some thought into their ballots, rather than spend their time agonizing over whether Louisville or Louisiana Tech really deserves that #19 ranking.

Ideally, I’d get it down farther, maybe to six or eight teams. And in a perfect world, no polls would be released until mid-October at the earliest, to stop voters voting based on “not moving a team up/down” even though that team’s previous ranking was ultimately based on nothing more than a pre-season guess. But ten is a round number, and I suspect the folks at the AP and at all of the other poll organizations won’t be able to help releasing polls as soon as they possibly can, so one step at a time here.

And if you think that ten is too few teams for a poll, consider this. There are 349 teams in division 1 college basketball, 25 of which – just over 7% – are ranked. Even with a ten-team ranking, football would still have a higher percentage of its 124 teams appearing in the poll.

*On with the links

*If you think that Christian Ponder proved anything with his performance last Sunday, the Vikes Geek reminds you that you really shouldn’t.

*In Twins news, we’ve got the transcript of Ron Gardenhire’s conversation with Torii Hunter after the latter signed with the Tigers, as well as the team raising money on Kickstarter to buy some starting pitching. Are either of these links serious? No! Are both of them great? Yes!

*Will Leitch asks an important question: what the heck happened to Rick Reilly?

*You should really read Chris Brown at Grantland, writing about how despite Oregon’s vaunted high-speed offense, they’re really not doing anything but finding a new way to pound the football.

*Deadspin has the story of how ESPN quit with the journalism and chased Tim Tebow to the bottom of the barrell.

*And finally: here’s a representation of how all Blue Jays fans feel right now.

A while back, I got a request to write a few hundred words about the Twins offseason for Big League Monthly, an online baseball magazine. My writeup on this season’s edition of Hot Stove is in the November issue, out today – and it’s all about the one thing that the Twins are focusing on this winter: the starting rotation.

The first comment on today’s Twinkie Town post, which is a sort of sci-fi fiction post about Joe Blanton because why not, asks if Douglas Adams wrote the post from beyond the grave.

I can exclusively reveal that the whole thing has an obvious Adams tone and I’m glad somebody recognized it and I hope I didn’t actually unconsciously plagiarize any of it.

I hope you’re ready, because next weekend, the Super Bowl is coming to America! By this I mean that Formula One is returning to the USA for the first time since 2007, with a race at the new Red McCombs-built Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. And by “Super Bowl,” I mean that Formula One is just like the Super Bowl, in the sense that the spectacle of the event is much bigger and more interesting than the event itself.

Yeah, I know, Formula One is a little slow, and it’s all European and stuff. Nevertheless, it’s back in America this year, and home pride and all that, so here’s your guide to the 2012 US Grand Prix:

1. If you want to know who’s actually going to win the race, follow the practice sessions (Friday 10am and 2pm, Saturday 10am) and watch qualifying (Saturday 1pm.) Car setup is everything in F1, so if somebody’s fastest on Friday and Saturday, they’ll win on Sunday unless their car dies for no reason. (For a sport that likes to present itself as the pinnacle of engineering, this happens more often than you’d think.)
2. Make sure to watch the start of the race itself (Sunday, 1pm), as there’s always a crash at the first corner. After that, the action slows down a bit, unless one of the Ferrari cars leaves the pits with the fuel hose still attached to the car again, or something like that.
3. It’ll be hard to find a rooting interest, as there are no American drivers or teams in the field. If you want to stick with North America, there’s Sergio Perez of Mexico, who will have a huge contingent backing him in Texas. If not, there’s always the Finnish Kimi Raikkonen, who likes to yell at his team to leave him alone when they try to give him advice during the race.
4. Sebastian Vettel, driving for Red Bull, leads the standings. He usually has a very fast car. The only guy who has a hope of catching him is Fernando Alonso of Ferrari, who does not usually have the fastest car but finds a way to somehow finish in the top three every week.
5. Yes, Michael Schumacher is still around. But now he drives for a crappy team instead of Ferrari, and he usually finishes about 13th.

Really, that about sums it up. Just remember that Formula One is not like NASCAR or IndyCar, in that the race itself isn’t about racing, so much as waiting to see what goes wrong. Remember that, and you’ll be fine – and keep an eye out for Red McCombs. I’m hoping he tries to move the race to San Antonio at the last minute.

*On with the links:

*Nick Nelson at Twins Daily notes that the Rays’ Jeremy Hellickson is drawing trade interest from teams looking for a starting pitcher. Nelson also thinks that the young hurler is just pitching over his head.

*Apparently, Minnesota is the world capital of bar video game “Big Buck Hunter.” I had no idea, but – again – home pride and all that, so I’m demanding you read this story from Deadspin about competitive Big Buck Hunter players.

*The Vikes Geek’s denunciation of the team’s decision to stick with Christian Ponder instead of Joe Webb uses words like “nauseating,” “alarming,” and “myopia,” so you know it’s going to be fun.

*Ben Austen visits Buffalo for Grantland, to explore the possibly-ending relationship between the declining city and the Bills.

*At The Classical, Ben Polk explains the greatness of Nikola Pekovic.

*And finally: we never ran the shotgun when I played center for the high school football team, but if we had, this would have been my nightmare.

The first week of the Timberwolves season is in the books, and it’s been a good week for the optimists. At the time I wrote about the first week for SBN Minnesota, the Wolves were 3-1 and had impressed most.

Last night, the Wolves went one better, beating Indiana 96-94 at home on a buzzer-beating Chase Budinger layup. The Pacers were missing Danny Granger, out until February, but are still a good team – and the Wolves’ injury problems are much worse. Brandon Roy did not return in the second half after one of his “knees” got sore (quotations because Roy’s “knees” are not really knees, anymore), and J.J. Barea – who drives the second unit – was missing with a foot injury. Add in Kevin Love and Ricky Rubio, and that’s nearly an entire potential lineup missing for the Wolves.

And despite all that they still won, and deserved to win.

Yep, it’s been a good week – now week and a half – for the optimists.