TwH‘s NBA preview continues with a look at the Southeast Division; or, the Miami Heat and a group of allegedly professional basketball teams. Also featuring the ballad of the Charlotte Horncats.
So I’m in Paris right now.
It is dope for many reasons. The Eiffel Tower is dope. The food is dope. The wine is off the chain.
But one thing that is not dope: The French keyboard on which I am currently typing.
Welcome to a better late than never edition of Drop Picks On ‘Em where Jacory Harris Stephen Morris almost lost this week’s picks by way of a helmet deflected interception. Hey, that ACC is a spunky little league, man. If you’re not careful, you can find yourself playing a team wearing alternate jerseys named after a play on words of a successful Navy Seals operation. Zero Dark Thursday? More like Bay of Pigs, AMIRITE?!
In honor of the conference that stretches itself from South Beach to the shores of Plymouth Rock, this intro will be designed to highlight all things ACC not named Clemson or Florida State. Yeah, I get it – it’s the biggest game the conference has going for it so far this year. That’s great! Good for them. #goacc and all that jazz but this conference still has Paul Johnson and the slow, R.Kelly grind of the triple option. This is a place where the adjective spunky applies to three teams and the rest have varying self-confidence and identity issues. Let’s break it down, shall we?
Syracuse and Georgia Tech play each other which means you get to see two of the most horrifying color schemes and uniforms (we see you, Russell Athletic) face off against each other in Atlanta. Virginia still plays football and they do so against Bear Bryant protege, David Cutcliffe, in a battle of the privileged East Coast fan bases. Wine and cheese, indeed! If you want something a little bit more blue collar, Pittsburgh is right up your alley. They play Old Dominion this week and I’m sure there will be a lot of Schlitz and Primanti Bros. sandwiches consumed as a topper to a great win and a fatality free day at the steel mill.
Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on Maryland and Wake Forest. This is going to be a tough road test for the Terps as they take on a feisty Wake Forest team, who in recent years has played heart breaker to multiple teams. Wait, that’s not right. Sounds like a basketball preview. How about this? Have fun trying to stop anything, Demon Deacs!
And there you have it – the ACC Week 8 preview you’ve been clamoring for. No fancy pants Jameis Winston or Tajh Boyd here. Just some good ole fashioned Mid-Atlantic to barely into the southern most tip of America football. Now that that is out of the way – let us discuss the ranked teams playing, shall we?
In sports, metaphors are used to playfully describe the action witnessed at a sporting venue. The use of metaphors keeps the reader entertained and provides the reader a laugh every now and again. Sometimes they turn sportswriting into an exercise in which people like Rick Reilly are allowed to flourish and continue a career despite making pop culture references to things that have long lost their cultural currency. And there are also moments when metaphors are met with confusion and, in the case of Les Miles, anger.
After a reporter attempted to ask the Mad Hatter a question that involved a “hammer and nail” comparison with the LSU – Florida relationship in the last year, this happened:
Miles has a point. There are no hammers and nails on the field. There is a football, 22 players on the field and an officiating crew. No signs of anything you could pick up at a TrueValue. But could you argue in the figurative that there were hammers and nails? Yes, you could, though you would be arguing against a man whose brain seems as if it is wired like a Roomba designed to spin in circles.
Nevertheless, I enjoy the virtue of what Miles was getting at here. There were plenty of “hammer and nail” relationships that happened this weekend that I think we can safely talk about without the head man down in Baton Rouge unleashing Mike the Tiger on my apartment (I think).
We continue our exploration of the wild, the innocent and the Broad Street kerfuffle in the NBA. This installment focuses on #thereturn, Roy Hibbert’s quasi-homophobia and the transcendence of Kyrie Irving.
Sigh.
We had a rough one last week folks. A brutal 1-4, my worst week yet as a hypothetical gambler. Shout out to the Saints for saving me from my one true fear coming into this process, the dreaded 0-5 week.
I could make excuses here. I could be mad at Detroit for leading us to believe Calvin Johnson would play against the Packers even though he hadn’t practiced all week, only to scratch him right before kickoff. I could blame the Broncos defense for not being able to hold the Cowboys under 42 points. I could be frustrated with RUSSELL WIL… no, I could never do that. Read More
It’s easy to see Kanye West as a caricature of himself. He’s arrogant, abrasive, married to not only a Kardashian but the Kardashian… basically, he makes it pretty simple. But people who only see Kanye on this level are missing out. It’s hard to take someone who’s always calling himself a genius seriously, but if you listen… Kanye actually is a genius. He’s musically brilliant and maybe a bit of a ridiculous person, but he’s also fucking smart too. Case in point: his interview on Jimmy Kimmel. If you missed out on the epic twitter battle, here’s the rundown: Kimmel spoofed an interview Kanye did in the UK, using a couple of kids and a couple of milkshakes to recreate it. For whatever reason, Kanye really did not take kindly to this, and went on a hilarious and insane twitter rant insulting Kimmel. A few weeks later, Kimmel had Kanye on the show so they could prove they’d kissed and made up. What resulted was basically a giant therapy session and it was fucking brilliant:
I love the game of basketball for its subtle artistry and the supreme level of skill necessary to exceed at it, not unlike being a musician, a physician or an astronaut. In no other basketball league in the world is the competition greater, obviously, than in the National Basketball Association. These people are the absolute best of the best, and the webs they weave nightly, from Kyrie Irving’s magisterial through-the-legs assists to Ray Allen’s legendarily perfect follow-through on a jump shot, can drive a fan up the wall with wonder, reducing him or her to an adolescent curiosity in which questions become essentially rhetorical. With the NBA preseason right around the corner, the time has come for everyone with a voice to chime in with predictions and perspectives. We at TwH are no different.
We (I) will break down each division, listing the teams in the order in which I believe they will finish the regular season. There will be plenty of room for dispute, as there always is, and from the start I must concede that this is an imperfect art. There are far too many variables involved in an 82-game season to know everything, but we will do the best we can with what we know now. Sometimes it may only take a gut feeling to push one team over another. Prepare for anything. And so we begin, in the Atlantic Division.
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This week’s College Gameday is heading to the University of Washington for the first time ever since the show’s first broadcast in 1987. This is huge news for the Huskies, who find themselves in the middle of a period of resurgence as of late. But if you’re an individual on the East Coast (such as myself), you probably know very little about Seattle, the city that houses UDub. In fact, the only thing you probably know is that Seattle is the home of Starbucks, rain and grunge. And that’s fine. Be prepared to face the unknown. Seattle is strange to you, but don’t fret, it’s not Portland weird.
Also – I am not really sure what the Washington fan base is like. I’ve seen them pop on random message boards from time to time recalling the Don James era, but I am really unfamiliar with how these people operate or how they tail- WAIT, WHAT? THEY TAILGATE ON BOATS? CAN WE GO TO THE GAME NOW? PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASEEEEEEEEEEE.
Enough of this wishful thinking about boatgating – LET’S GET IT.
If Paul Rhoads is one thing, he’s proud. He’s in a perpetual state of pride. He is your dad whenever you make honor roll or change your own oil. The Iowa State Cyclones put up a damn good effort in running their own small business; it’s not their fault that big corpo is pulling the strings and has all that lobbying money to monopolize the market. Rhoads is still proud, dammit.
In the game of life, you win some, and you lose some. And sometimes you are screwed over by the officials at the one-yard line. You lose some because you are not Texas, but hey, I’m just making excuses. These are hard truths learned by all. Especially by a Cyclones team that, no matter if it’s their first 1-3 start since 2007, you should be proud of. Why? Because Mack Brown is on thin ice, regardless.
So, what else did we learn in a weekend full of near whiffs, alternate uniforms and late night football?
Tuesdays With Horry 