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It’s Draft Day: TIME TO DRANK

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May 8, 2014
NFL, Pop Culture, Sports, Television
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Young and Beautiful Tom Brady

Looking for a way to definitely guarantee that you’ll enjoy the NFL Draft tonight? You’re going to need some alcohol. Please be over 21, though.

The NFL really has us wrapped around its finger. They make puny settlements with former players (while never admitting that football is, you know, dangerous). They take away any and all instances of players having fun. They treat the cheerleaders like second class citizens. They push the date of the draft back, and are even thinking about making the draft last longer. But hey, it’s not like anyone is going to stop being an NFL fan because of THAT STUFF, right?

Truth be told, the draft itself is awful. None. Of. This. Means. Anything. Yet. Don’t kid yourself—-you have no idea how any of these players are going to pan out. So why not have some real fun tonight?

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GM For A Day: The 2014 NFL Draft (Part 3)

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May 7, 2014
College Football, NFL
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goodell424hug

I’ve grown tired of Mock Drafts, so instead I’ve made myself the hypothetical GM of every NFL team and simulated the first round of this year’s draft (If Kevin Costner can be a fictional GM, why can’t I?). Anyway, I wrote about the first 10 picks in Part 1 and covered 11 more in Part 2. Here’s the final part of the trilogy.

We’ve nearly survived the first round of the NFL Draft! Now it starts to get interesting, as we reach the part of the draft in which the best teams of last year try to improve upon their already stellar rosters. It’s the final eleven picks of the first round. Let’s get drafting!

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GM For A Day: The 2014 NFL Draft (Part 2)

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May 6, 2014
College Football, NFL
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Eric Fisher, Roger Goodell

I’ve grown tired of Mock Drafts, so instead I’ve made myself the hypothetical GM of every NFL team and simulated the first round of this year’s draft (If Kevin Costner can be a fictional GM, why can’t I?). Anyway, I wrote about the first 10 picks in Part 1. Check back tomorrow for Part 3.

We’re now entering the middle of the first round. You still with me? Good. Most of the big players may be off the board, but the following names are worth learning, as you’ll be hearing them on Sundays for a long time to come. Without further ado, here are the next eleven picks (Sorry, 32 is a weird number and isn’t divided by three evenly).

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GM For A Day: The 2014 NFL Draft

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May 5, 2014
College Football, NFL
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NFL Draft Football

The NFL Draft is the biggest football event of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. Since its inception, the Draft has grown from a collection of anonymous dudes in a room picking college players to a television ratings bonanza that is broadcast in primetime and spans three days. The NFL Network now provides coverage from the early NFL Combine, and you can now catch footage live from the Pro Days of the Draft’s biggest stars.

But undeniably, the worst bi-product of the NFL Draft’s ascension from non-event to the blockbuster of the NFL’s offseason is the endless cycle of mock drafts and marginally updated mock drafts. The NFL Draft keeps Draft experts in business the same way Game of Thrones has single-handedly kept the fake blood industry alive. Every few weeks, Draft experts produce articles that drum up the hype train of certain players while decrying the follies of others, who ran 40-times slightly slower than expected or failed to prance around their Pro Day with just the proper flair.

I’m not interested in mock drafts. I don’t want to read Mel Kiper’s predictions on how the NFL Draft will play out, like he’s Professor Trelawney trying to read tea leaves. I don’t want to know who these teams will draft, but who they should be drafting.

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When Two Worlds Collide

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February 10, 2014
College Basketball, College Football, NFL
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marcussmart

Sports are so arbitrary when you really think about it. It’s just a collection of athletes, exhibiting an arbitrary set of skills, governed by an arbitrary set of rules. You can throw a ball through a hoop? Good. You can throw it through a hoop behind this line? Even better.

It’s the arbitrary nature of sports which leave me finding them rather meaningless at times. When a man throws an oblong ball and another man catches it, the action doesn’t directly affect anything in the outside world. Wars are still fought. Diseases still kill. A ball passing through space doesn’t alter race relations or alter prejudices. It’s just an object traveling through space.

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Hypothetical Gambling – Let’s Get Real

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January 31, 2014
NFL, Sports
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I have been hypothetically gambling my way around the world throughout the course of the 2013 NFL season. I have hypothetically picked RUSSELL HUSTLE BUSTLE WILSON from London, Paris, New York, Barcelona, Santa Barbara, and my home town of West Chester, Pennsylvania.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a hybrid gambling/travel blog, but it sort of did, and it sort of worked.

I decided that the only way this column could properly conclude would be to bring it to the only city in the world where hypothetical gambling makes even less since than it does already:

We’re going to Vegas. Read More

My Humbly Biased Rookie of the Year Vote for Giovani Bernard

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January 30, 2014
NFL
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175878795AL00010_Green_Bay_

The inherent problem with awards season is taking the abstract and making it concrete. Voters take works of art, whether they are feature films or albums, and attempt to crown one of them as “the year’s best.” There’s no quantifiable way of achieving these decisions. Every vote is nothing more than opinion and perception being funneled through humans with biases and agendas, all culminating in the distribution of a few golden statues that are rarely awarded without controversy.

Awards for professional athletes are quite the opposite. There are ample statistical measures for every athlete in every sport. In the modern era, we have more numbers and analytics than John Nash could shake a stick at. Yet, when we attempt to award a player an honor such as “Most Valuable,” we’re then forced to take these concrete qualifiers and apply them to the abstract.

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America Gets Sherminated

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January 20, 2014
America, NFL, Sports
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RichardShermanWWELast night, in the second game of a conference championship weekend for the ages, the Seattle Seahawks defeated the San Francisco 49ers, 23-17, to send themselves to the Super Bowl for the second time in franchise history and, for what it’s worth, the second time in the last decade. Seattle has been an undeniably fun team to watch in the last two years, and particularly this season. The Seahawks have lost at home only once in the Russell HUSTLE BUSTLE Wilson era, in a Week 16 matchup earlier this season to a surprisingly good Arizona Cardinals team, and some fans have even taken to adopting a Phish song as Wilson’s personal entrance music. It is only right that a fun team from the Pacific Northwest, from the city without an NBA franchise, should represent the NFC in the Super Bowl.

Then, Richard Sherman happened.

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