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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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The Guest Star as a Marquee Act

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April 28, 2014
Hip-Hop, Music
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Schoolboy Q sans bucket hat

The line stretched for almost a full city block. Among the throngs of fans waiting to get in to see Schoolboy Q were bucket hats – a lot of bucket hats. It was almost like a show of solidarity. You couldn’t mistake the fact of who these people came to see. Yet after the headliner took the stage, you wouldn’t be faulted if you felt like he wasn’t the main attraction.

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The Unwritten Rule About Baseball’s Unwritten Rules

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April 27, 2014
MLB, Sports
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Let’s give the Boston Red Sox a round of applause for the team’s collective acting performance following Michael Pineda’s first pine tar incident. Give them all Oscars, Emmys or those little participation trophies your cousin gets for being in the school play. The entire team pretended like it was no big deal and goaded Pineda into pulling the same stunt again, making certain the second time that the New York pitcher was promptly removed from the game. Genius. Evil, but genius.

That was my assessment of the situation, as I watched the home plate umpire wipe pine tar from Pineda’s neck like a mother trying to clean a newborn child that has yet to master the art of inserting a spoon into its mouth. I’m a devout Yankees fan, but game had to recognize game, and Boston seemed to have turned its mind game up a notch when they convinced Pineda it was safe to lather his pitches with pine and let ‘em rip. But that’s not how the larger baseball community saw it.

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Dabo Swinney vs The Freedom Police(?)

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April 21, 2014
America, College Football, Religion, Sports
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“Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-19 (NLT)

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If there’s anything you can say about Dabo Swinney, I think “he’s consistent” would be appropriate. From being enthusiastic in post game interviews that happen to be on live TV, to maybe being a little too blunt, (about athlete unions, or something that another coach didn’t say, or criticizing the on campus dorms at Clemson) to coming up on the losing end of “big games”, (5 straight losses to South Carolina, two straight double digit losses to Florida State) to being at the helm of the best 5 year stretch the school has seen in at least 20 years, what you see is what you’re going to get with “that boy.”

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…Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever

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April 18, 2014
Auto Racing
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autumn-of-the-patriarch-p212-213

…I’m more than enough all alone to keep on ruling until the comet comes by again, and not just once but ten times, because the way I am I don’t intend to die again, God damn it, let other people die, he said, talking without any pauses to think, as if he were reciting by heart, because he had known ever since the war that thinking aloud was driving off the fear of the dynamite charges that were shaking the building, making plans for tomorrow in the morning and for the coming century at dusk until the last coup de grace rang out in the street…

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The Antidisestablishmentarianist

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April 15, 2014
Auto Racing
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Screen Shot 2014-04-15 at 8.13.25 PM

Colin Edwards announced his retirement from MotoGP on Friday at the Motorcycle Grand Prix of the Americas in Austin, Texas. It was unexpected in the way that inevitable ends always are – this was a long time in coming, but it’s hard to be fully prepared for the moment of hearing the speech and reading the words. Even Edwards acknowledged as much – he started the announcement tentatively: “I don’t even know how to say it, I rehearsed it so many times…”

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The Rain in Spain

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April 5, 2014
Soccer, Sports
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Courtesy of Soccerroomtoday.com

Courtesy of Soccerroomtoday.com

When anyone mentions La Liga, the top soccer division in Spain, in the United States, the most popular notion which comes to mind is the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid dichotomy which has ruled the country and succeeded in European play for decades. The last team other than these two to win La Liga was a Mista-led Valencia squad in 2003-’04, a season in which Barcelona finished second and Real Madrid finished fourth. Incredibly, Madrid (32) and Barcelona (22) have accounted for 54 out of a possible 81 La Liga championships since the inception of the league in 1929, and the two best players in the world, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Real Madrid’s Christiano Ronaldo, keep these teams at the vanguard of Spanish football thought. This season may just end the decade-long reign of those two clubs, however, as a powerful team has emerged just south of Real’s Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid.

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