Tiger Woods has now gone five years without winning a major championship — 1,828 days to be exact — and remains stuck on No. 14 in his pursuit of equaling and passing the 18 won by Jack Nicklaus.

Dorothy Canada sat down at a table Friday afternoon for the Seniors Championship at the World Series of Poker, scanned those playing alongside her and immediately began an evaluation process.

If crafting an annual schedule to create an impressive RPI is a science, UNLV has consistently graded higher than most biology honor students. The Rebels have advanced to five of the past six NCAA Tournaments, mostly because of impressive records and yet also because their RPI has been so strong throughout the course of a season, their placement as an at-large team is often solidified weeks before Selection Sunday.

A friend tells a story: It was close to eight years ago when he coached a fall baseball team that competed in a wood bat league in Las Vegas. The team added an eighth-grader as a pickup player for one tournament, a kid who arrived with a reputation in town for being incredibly talented.

College football coaches are a strange lot, but rare is the time you can accuse them of being disloyal to one another publicly, even when their arguments are coated in hypocrisy.

The difficult part, for once, is coming down hard on Bud Selig and Major League Baseball. But before handing the sport’s top executives gold stars for drawing a line when it comes to chasing those cheaters that still exist on the base paths, know that situations like this are always defined by an underbelly of political strategy.

The summer of 2010 seems forever ago when it comes to the Miami Heat, to images of a welcome party that included dancing cheerleaders and blaring music and your typical South Beach pyrotechnics, a moment for their fans to celebrate a free-agent haul that was supposed to create a historic shift in NBA power for years to come.

Here’s the thing: The reason doesn’t matter.

In the swarm of opinion that followed a decision by Katin Reinhardt to transfer out of UNLV’s basketball program this week, an important point was lost: This is why the rule exists.

I might not have believed it a week ago, but I safely can say UNLV president(s) Neal Smatresk/Gerry Bomotti won’t run the worst athletic director search nationally this year. Rutgers and Robert Barchi are your runaway winners in this regard, and we haven’t hit June.

#rebelforlife. Yeah. That lasted two months. It was a hashtag that accompanied a tweet from Katin Reinhardt that refuted a Review-Journal article on the UNLV basketball team about rumors suggesting the freshman guard was considering a transfer.

The evidence is overwhelming that since 1985, when a certain envelope was “allegedly” knocked against a metal bar in order to create a crease and allow Patrick Ewing to amazingly land at the feet of the New York Knicks, the only thing more certain than annual NBA Draft conspiracy theories being debated is how some draft picks are fortunate and others cursed.

It was shortly after word came in July 2009 that Mike Hamrick was departing his post as UNLV athletic director — which means about the time I threw a block party celebrating the news — that I wrote it would be wise for the Rebels to hire a local as his replacement.

A prep baseball tournament around Thanksgiving ... It’s a good time to discover what you might have or realize what you don’t, the best situation for a young player to prove his worth or fail trying, all the while not damaging a team’s opportunity for yearlong success.

Damn the rule about impartial journalism.

It’s true. Those rental car drop fees of $1,000 can be a killer. Funny how a 6-iron from 192 yards away in the rain and wind can alter a guy’s perspective on things.

Jim Livengood announced his retirement as athletic director at UNLV on Wednesday in a hastily called news conference from his office, not on a dais in front of family and friends and cheering supporters.

Things are different for Wally Backman in Las Vegas. He still fills out those daily Triple-A evaluations, still informs the New York Mets organization about the progress of its top prospects, still hands out grades as to how guys are performing at this level.

And on the first matchup of a six-fight contract with CBS/Showtime that could earn Floyd Mayweather Jr. $200 million over the next 30 months, we learned a few things:

In those times over the past few years when media from all dots on a global map heard from Robert Guerrero’s people, I would think of the Inyo National Forest, which covers parts of California and Nevada and stretches some 2 million acres.

Whew. I’m sure glad Dr. Robert Voy’s prognosis that day in June 2012 proved wrong. So is boxing.

This is the way he explained it: There are two major aspects of the gay community — one that is extremely open and doesn’t care how others react to another’s sexuality and those like him who, while not completely in the closet, prefer to be identified solely on how they treat others and their contributions to society.

Jim Livengood has been in this position before, which is to say when seats for the feast are handed out, his football program is relegated to the kiddies’ table.