Morning Buzz

Elsewhere you’ll find coverage and discussion and dissection of Jim Harbaugh’s future as Stanford’s coach. But I’m going to give it a thumbs-up for another reason: The man is a hell of an interview. I covered the Raiders during Harbaugh’s stint as their quarterbacks coach and got to know him a little bit, but in the middle of that season the Raiders instituted their policy that assistants couldn’t speak to reporters. (It wasn’t for a few years that they instituted the policy that assistants couldn’t coach.)

But there’s another anecdote that tells something about him: In 1995, Harbaugh was the Colts’ quarterback, leading them to the AFC championship. Before playing the Raiders, he was the subject of the weekly conference call by an opposing player. Now, normally players look at that responsibility in about the same way they’d look at being Terrell Owens’ personal spittoon, but not Harbaugh. On that call, he recounted being dumped by the Bears, breaking up with his girlfriend and his dog nearly dying all at the same time. “I’m a big country-music fan,” he said. “Have you ever heard this song? I think the title is ‘There May Be a Little Dust On the Bottle.’ How does it go?”

Nobody knew. Harbaugh thought for a while but couldn’t come up with it, then everybody said their goodbyes — until five minutes later, when he called back to the pressroom and sang the song. “There may be a little dust on the bottle/But don’t let it fool you what’s inside.”

Not sure exactly what that says about his future — for one thing, if he’s going to be at Stanford, he’ll probably need to learn some Pavarotti — but I think we can safely say he’ll generate a little more interest than Buddy or Walt.

To the morning recap …

• Now that we know the next generation of Stanford football, meet the Lopez twins, the next generation of Stanford basketball. 
• Re Warriors: They’re on the road. Do I really need to tell you what happened?
• Turns out while we were all asking what Aaron Brooks was getting into, he was asking the same thing — although I have to wonder about his perceptiveness if he said that before his radio outburst (I guess his first one, you never know), Randy Moss was “the perfect model citizen team player.” (Fun game: Try to guess what Brooks said in the parentheses.)
• The benefits of bowling for San Jose State.
• Ann Killion: thumbs down on Big Mac.

ELSEWHERE

• This is as close as anyone has come to a decent explanation of why Isiah Thomas wasn’t punished for the Nuggets-Knicks brawl. And, George Karl is awesome. “He’s a jerk for what he’s trying to do,” Karl says, in the clean part I can use.
• They played an outdoor basketball game and it got rained out. Maybe the Warriors can play at the coliseum instead of the arena.
• After Indy knocked Cincy back into the pack last night, good luck trying to figure out playoff scenarios.
• This Vernon Wells fellow apparently feels a lot better about the Blue Jays’ chances now that he has $126 million of their money. (But I think it’s Canadian money, so boy, did he get screwed.)
• Finally … if Barry Zito were a mutual fund, he’d be showing 97 percent return in the past three weeks. Could he be ready to cash in with the Mets?