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[Author’s note: it’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted anything college football related and I would like apologize to the .01% of dedicated readers of my weekly posts. Sometimes day jobs get hectic and sometimes you tend to put your hobbies on the shelf for awhile. There. That’s my excuse]

The last Thursday in November is usually reserved for the gluttonous holiday known as Thanksgiving. It’s a time of year where extended families gather around a table and pretend to tolerate each other long enough to clean off their plate of pumpkin pie. But this shortened work week dedicated to mass tryptophan consumption, hectic Black Holiday shopping and drunken diatribes about Miley Cyrus from your crazy uncle would not be complete without the catharsis found in hating the hell out of your rival college’s football team.

The last Saturday in November has become the showcase for the most bitter rivalries in college football. A lot of the storied match-ups are here: Auburn-Alabama, Clemson-South Carolina, Ohio State-Michigan, UCLA-USC. The whole week is a build up of antagonizing opposing fan bases with Thanksgiving serving as a (sometimes) temporary muzzle on baseless accusations about other fan bases and the players that represent the university. Once all of the leftovers have been stored away, it’s an echo chamber of disapproval and disgust. To lose to the other side will mean 365 days of eating the crow you let loose with every jab at the opposing team. To win means laughing endlessly at your opponent with all the joy of a sick child as he burns ants using the rays of a summer sun and a magnifying glass.

Rivalry week taps into the petulant child in every fan base and it would be unjust for us at TwH to not feed into the fervor that this week brings. That’s why I bring you a biased look at each rivalry as well as how I view their fans.

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Hey, these guys haven't played a minute together this season!

Hey, these guys haven’t played a minute together this season!

My church had a potluck (Make something that could possibly be tasty and bring it so you can eat things that are definitely tasty—I’m sure somebody needed that explanation) Sunday night. I wore my Lakers t-shirt. I think I wore it because they played Sacramento that evening (Yes, that’s true–they even won!). Anyway, people kept asking me “OMG Jordy are you a Lakers fan?!!?!!? Each time, it took me a minute or so to realize that I WAS WEARING A LAKERS SHIRT. Of course they’d ask me if I was a fan of the team!

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outkastWith news breaking this week that OutKast will embark on a tour starting at Coachella in 2014 for the first time in a decade, the music community, hip-hop in particular, is already trembling with excitement. These bastions of southern rap have done enough separately to keep things interesting since the 2003 release of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (or the 2006 release of Idlewild, depending on who you ask), but even if they hadn’t it would still be a monumental reunion by any standards. We at Tuesdays With Horry are just as excited as everyone else, so a few of us discussed what this means from a personal or macro standpoint.

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ESPN Retweet

It’s been a big week for me. OutKast is reuniting. The video for “Bound 2” was released. And, as you can see above, I got a retweet from ESPN. It was amazingly exciting, with RTs and favorites pouring into my feed like never before. There were 7.5 million strangers out there in the world following ESPN who could potentially be reading a joke I had carefully groomed to come in at less than 140 characters. I gained 32 new followers and have only lost one of them since. I even got some replies from Giants fans who wanted to yell at me. I decided that I might try to capitalize on this moment of attention, sending one more tweet to ESPN. Read More

I couldn’t believe it. I stared at my television screen trying to digest what just happened as the ESPN generated scoreboard displayed ’20 Patriots 24 Panthers Final’. I watched as Luke Kuechly pumped his fist and Cam Newton flashed his signature smile. My mouth gaped open as Tom Brady yelled at an official and then proceeded to head to the locker room. I could hear all of Bank of America Stadium scream jubilantly in a moment of much needed catharsis.

I have not seen Charlotte like this since 2008 when John Fox was still the head coach. There was electricity in the city again. I could hear it two doors down as my neighbors entered into the night to vocalize their joy with bursts of “WHEWWWWWWWW” and “YESSSSSSSS.” Their gleeful expressions soundtracked the immediate press conference that followed where a frustrated Bill Belichick had to describe what went wrong in New England’s loss to the Carolina Panthers in the year 2013.

For many, it was redemption for the loss to the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVIII. For me, it was a point of great civic pride in a city that has been plagued by the perception that it is an unexceptional town with unexceptional sports teams.

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The ROC

Last Sunday I did not think about football.

After packing for my trip and writing my Week 10 column, I had caught a bus, a train, and a flight to Barcelona, Spain. There were beaches. There were beers. There were pictures of me and my friends throwing up the ROC for my tumblr and plenty of general debauchery. I was living in the moment and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, and gambling could not have been further from my mind.

Was this due to temporary transcendence? Had my soul gotten in tune with the universe and freed me from my absurd weekly devotion to following point spreads and fantasy production?

Maybe, but I think it had more to do with the lack of Wifi. There was no Wifi anywhere in Barcelona. Read More

Barcelona Skyscape

Allow me to paint a picture for you.

I am sitting at my desk, slightly drunk on Jameson and completely plastered on life. My workspace is littered with old assignments, empty water bottles and Kit Kat wrappers, old receipts, and a pair of fingerless gloves. It is one in the morning. In 5 hours, I will have to be awake and conscious enough to navigate public transit from London to a tiny airport so I can hop on a plane to Barcelona for the weekend.

Barcelona is that place in the picture at the top of this article.

I am living a blessed life and I am very aware of it. Read More

bstrong

A lot of people have already said a lot of things regarding the meaning of this strange, scrappy, magical, bearded band of men we call the 2013 Boston Red Sox. After two years that included fried chicken, beers, and the worst season in recent memory, these guys took advantage of the period between the heartbreaking end of the Bruins Cup run and the beginning of Patriots season to bring Boston back to its roots: baseball.

It was awesome to have a baseball team that was not only winning, but also likeable, on the diamond at Fenway again. But if you say you picked the Sox to win the Series this season, you are (probably, most likely) lying. That’s what made October so fun: it was totally unexpected.

Every championship win is special (something that can be kind of hard to remember when your teams have won eight in twelve years), but at the risk of being cliché and repeating something you’ve heard over and over again: this one was more.

The Marathon Bombings shook everyone in the Greater Boston area to their cores. As someone who grew up a mere fifteen minutes from the race’s starting line, who has friends and family who volunteer along the route and at the finish line, never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined a tragedy like this happening on Patriot’s Day. But—as tends to happen in these situations, far too many of which we’ve seen the past few years—the good in humanity outshone the bad. Not only did Bostonians and marathon runners band together to help one another, so did people from across the country and the world.

Where do the Sox play into all of this?

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Ashamed

This is getting ugly.

I mean, things have been worse, but to give you an idea of how I feel about my picks recently, I google image searched “ashamed” to find this picture to lead off the column.

Last week as I attempted to bring my hypothetical picks back to hypothetical glory, I instead dug myself deeper into the pits of poor pickdom. Has my time in London finally caught up with me? Is my removal from American culture seeping through? Would I be better serving the world if I started hypothetically picking the Premiere League?

No.

This is just a bad stretch. All gamblers go through them, and I must pass this God-given test to prove my hypothetical worthiness.

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Clips

The final installment of the TwH NBA preview brings us way out west, to the Pacific Division. Standing in the shadow of Kobe’s territory, the Clippers look to win over the Staples Center fans with one of the most appealing one-two combos in recent memory. The Warriors will be looking to firebomb opponents with 3-pointers from every angle, but will that reliance doom them come playoff time? Also, what about Steph Curry’s ankles? Boogie Cousins is one of the most polarizing figures in a basketball town with a history of polarizing figures (and some pretty good basketball). Can he keep a cool enough head to flash the Kings back a decade? And finally, will anyone willingly watch a Suns game who does not live in the greater Phoenix market?

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