Editor's note: Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel followed Seton Hall as it tried to win five games in five days in the Big East tournament. The Pirates fell short as Wetzel reports.

NEW YORK – Bobby Gonzalez had asked his team to do one thing against the more talented, deeper and well-rested Syracuse Orange – fight.

When the teams met in December, Syracuse ran Seton Hall out of the Carrier Dome, scoring 100 points on it in what was as much a layup drill as a basketball game. "They embarrassed us," Gonzo said.

Since then though, the Pirates, thin with just eight scholarship players and painfully young with just one senior, had turned their season around with a commitment to toughness.

So as he paced in front of his team before the game Wednesday in a Madison Square Garden locker room, he talked about how they had to show the Orange times had changed.

"They're going to realize they're in a street fight," he said, his team of mostly New York City players eating it up.

Less than four

NEW YORK – Syracuse has launched an internal investigation into the recruitment of former player Donte Greene by professional sports agents, according to a team spokesman. A team source said the school spoke to Greene about the situation Wednesday.

"We're looking into," said Syracuse's Pete Moore. "It's going to take some time."

Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said he didn't know anything about the Manhattan sports agency that helped Greene's uncle get a line of credit at a bank, an action that could be a violation of NCAA amateurism rules. He added he believes Greene was also unaware of the loan.

"I know he never listened to his uncle about anything," Boeheim said Wednesday. "So I don't know if somebody went to his uncle or not. I don't think Donte knew anything about it from what I know."

Ceruzzi Sports and Entertainment told Yahoo! Sports it helped Greene's uncle, Derrick Marcano, secure a $50,000 line of credit during the 2007-08 season in an effort to recruit Greene.

"It was done

Editor's note: Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel will follow Seton Hall as it tries to put together a run in the Big East tournament. Return for Wetzel's reports on the Pirates' progress.

NEW YORK – Pacing in front of a whiteboard in a small Madison Square Garden locker room, Bobby Gonzalez's pregame speech was as much about where his Seton Hall Pirates were about to play as how he wanted them to play.

"Michael Jordan's been in here," he shouted to his 10-man team seated in front of him, getting more worked up by the sentence. "Kobe Bryant's been in here. LeBron's been in here. We're in the Garden. We're on Broadway. It's an honor to play here.

"But we have to understand what this building does. Guys get nervous. Guys get Garden-itis. It's tough to get the game into the 70s in the Garden. We can't, we can't, rely on the jump shot.

"We have to pass the ball. We can't worry about some guy in the stands from 155th Street yelling, 'Take it to the hole. Take it to the hole.'

"We run every

Editor’s note: Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel will follow Seton Hall as it tries to put together a run in the Big East tournament. Return for Wetzel’s reports on the Pirates’ progress.

NEW YORK – The Big East decided to make March a little madder this year by inviting all 16 of its teams to the conference tournament in Madison Square Garden.

Never before has this been attempted by any league. Previously the Big East invited just its top 12 finishers, the same formula the once 16-team WAC employed during the 1990s.

By providing byes for top teams, going 16 strong means the bottom half of the conference has to win five games in five days to capture the championship.

It’s a gonzo challenge. So who better to follow all access this week as he attempts to run the gauntlet than Coach Gonzo himself, Seton Hall's always full-throttle, occasionally unhinged Bobby Gonzalez?

"Five game in five days," Gonzalez said Monday to no one in particular as the team bus crept through midtown traffic.

The New England Patriots traded quarterback Matt Cassel to the Kansas City Chiefs for an early, second-round draft pick this weekend. If you listen to some of the chattering class of reporters/analysts, this is apparently because Bill Belichick became a non-competitive idiot overnight and wouldn't accept better trade offers.

There are a lot of people around the NFL who speak with such certainty on subjects that they can make anything sound believable. Pull it off long enough and you can make a good buck doing it.

Then there's logic, reason and common sense.

In this case you can believe one of two scenarios:

1. Someone's anonymous source alleging that Belichick, for inexplicable reasons, turned down superior deals. (It might be worth considering someone's track record with anonymous sources when considering this scenario.)

2. Belchick's decade-in-the-making reputation as the best personnel man in football.

Is anyone out there buying No. 1?

There's no question the news Cassel and veteran

Barry Bonds' prime was like no other. This is because, in part, he had performance-enhancing drugs pumping through him. He's admitted as much under oath.

Drugs helped him club a record 73 home runs in 2001, his most famous offensive number. Yet that's no more mind-boggling than the 232 bases on balls he drew in 2004, 31 percent more than the highest non-Bonds total in history (Babe Ruth's 170 in 1923).

Back then, Bonds was a base-on-balls machine. On Friday, 16 months since his last game, he drew one more walk.

Government prosecutors said Friday they would appeal a damaging pretrial evidence ruling, indefinitely delaying Bonds' trial on federal perjury charges. Jury selection was scheduled to begin Monday in San Francisco. Now that won't happen until the California 9th Circuit Court hears the appeal on whether the trial judge's ruling to exclude steroid tests and doping calendars allegedly belonging to Bonds stands.

It's the latest sign that, after five years, millions of dollars and

In the movie "The Departed," Arnold French, the mass-murdering mob henchman, commiserated with his boss, Frank Costello, about the lack of honor among thieves.

"It's a nation," French said, "of [expletive] rats."

Costello agreed of course. How couldn't he? The Jack Nicholson character wasn't just a Southie crime boss but himself an informant for the FBI.

Even American cinema has figured out what the federal government has long understood – these days everyone flips. The era of "The Godfather," where Frank Pentangeli took prison time, and then suicide, to spare Michael Corleone, is long gone. And not just in the movies.

Federal prosecutors win more than 95 percent of their cases, in part because of the rush of witnesses willing to cooperate in exchange for leniency.

Michael Vick's "Bad Newz Kennels" crew rolled on the NFL quarterback in a heartbeat even though none faced extensive prison time. Instead they stuck their money train with a 23-month sentence and $100 million in lost income.

Five of the world's top 10 golfers teed it up Thursday at the Northern Trust Open at Los Angeles' Riviera Country Club. Phil Mickelson finished atop the first-round leader board.

That's a strong field and a famous leader on a historic course in the nation's second biggest media market, yet there's a pretty good chance no one outside of the die-hard golf fans even noticed.

Tiger Woods has always cast a huge presence over the game, generally in the form of intimidating opponents on Sunday's back nine. The last eight months he's exceeded even that without swinging a club in earnest. The entire tour has stalled in his shadow.

Woods will return from a knee injury next week in Arizona at the Accenture Match Play Championship. The PGA Tour, at last, returns to relevance.

"I'm now ready to play again," Woods wrote on his website.

The PGA Tour saw its future in the days since Tiger hobbled off the 91st hole of the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines last June.

That was arguably his most dramatic victory,