Archive

Sports

The Hypothetical SuperContest – Week 5

By
October 4, 2013
NFL, Sports
4 Comments

Peyton Manning

Last Sunday was beautifully horrifying.

I sat staring into the 8-bit stream of NFL RedZone that my computer is capable of hijacking overseas, worrying. Not because everything was going awfully, but because everything was going great. After a miraculous comeback cover in overtime by RUSSELL HUSTLE BUSTLE WILSON and company, my drunk picks were looking like they might go 5-0, which would mean another night of Sambuca and misery come this weekend. Thankfully, my Philadelphia Eagles couldn’t come close to covering +10.5 against the Broncos, and my picks settled at an absolutely brilliant 4-1.

I am not bad at this, folks.

Read More

Drop Picks On ‘Em: Week 6

By
October 4, 2013
College Football, Sports
Leave a comment

You’ve been furloughed Ha Ha. Sorry – *you’ve been furloughed, Ha Ha.

It’s shutdown week and at TwH we are all about keeping you informed about how this fiscal crisis will affect your Saturday afternoon:

  • Army, Navy, and Air Force games are were at the risk of not occurring 
  • If you’re a member of our nation’s armed forces overseas, you may not be able to see a game
  • You will not be able to visit any national parks or monuments so you might as well be a shut-in for one weekend, you outdoorsy, patriotic weirdo
  • You will not be able to see Ha Ha Clinton-Dix play because he has been furloughed by the University of Alabama
  • The Department of Defense has been forced to cancel their experiment in Boulder against the Oregon Ducks where the real Colorado Buffaloes were replaced by Buffalo androids to see if they could stop the Oregon offense
  • Lil’ Red will not be in attendance at the Illinois – Nebraska game because of the halt in agricultural subsidies to pay for two Cornhuskers within Memorial Stadium
  • “THE GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN MY OTHER SIGN” at College Gameday (YOU CAN DO BETTER, NORTHWESTERN)

Now that I’ve given you a small run-down on the reach of the federal government into your college football Saturdays, let’s get down to business (that’s non-profit business with little to no federal contracts, government. Please don’t shut down Saturday).

Read More

Fire(d) Lane (Kiffin): Lessons from Week 5

By
October 1, 2013
College Football, Sports
Leave a comment

If getting fired after being pulled off the team bus from LAX to campus isn’t the most Hollywood thing ever, please give me another example. This felt like a seedy termination. A scene, not unlike the one in Dog Day Afternoon, where the main character fails, and the repercussions involve a swift execution. Lane Kiffin didn’t even step foot on the USC’s campus before Haden uttered the words that put Kiffin out of job and Ed Orgeron in control of a faltering program. Now, the hunt begins anew for the Trojans, who have slowly started to slide into irrelevancy as the Pac-12 has started to gain notoriety as the second-best conference in America. Gone are the days of USC and everybody else. USC can’t compete with Arizona State, or even downtrodden Washington State. The whole country says “adieu” to Kiffykins, the man responsible for Tennessee fever dreams and the underdevelopment of all-around awesome Marqise Lee.

While your favorite team’s coach may not have been fired as soon as he exited the plane, his days as head man may be numbered. Look at UConn. Now Earl Campbell’s taking shots at Mack Brown? The coaching carousel may be fired up sooner than expected.

Aside from learning that, yes, the world of college football is on fiiiiiireeeeee, what else did we take away from this marvelous weekend?

Read More

A Tale of Two Quarterbacks

By
September 29, 2013
College Football, Sports
1 Comment

Aaron Murray jumped around excitedly with his teammates as Zach Mettenberger’s last-ditch attempt to convert on 4th and 10 ended in an incompletion. Mettenberger looked over across the field dejected. There was a little less than a minute left on the clock; the game was all but over. Murray put his head gear on and headed out onto the field to execute the victory formation. Meanwhile, Mettenberger sat on the bench, staring into an endless sea of red shirts, dresses, and poms poms. He wanted a chance to play in Sanford again. He wanted a chance to beat his old team. Instead, he’d have to settle for watching Murray flip the helmet off of his head, flash a winning smile and embrace his coach.

As the clock wound down to 0:00, the score stood at 44-41 Georgia. It was over. And it was one of the best football games I have ever watched.

Read More

What is and Never Could Be

By
September 28, 2013
Auto Racing
2 Comments

PedrosaCOTA1It’s been four months, I know, but we should go back over some groundwork together. As a reader of this experiment, good for you: You know your limits. You embrace hypothetical supercontests. You have time to read the legalese between EA Sports and the NCAA. You snagged Yeezus the hour after the hour it leaked to ensure you got a decent rip. You know Messi’s first name. You see baseball as a New York-everything else binary. You follow the important Tumblrs. You care about The Roots on Fallon. You get it.

There are, of course, things you don’t know or get. You don’t know about Rodan live in their prime, say, or life writing poetry under Pol Pot. You don’t get motorsports. Again: Good for you, you know your limits. A delusional Dale Earnhardt Jr. commercial? Sordid tales of French all-nighters three months ago? If you click on the Categories sidebar to the right long enough, any Chipotle pitstop can eventually seem effortless.

You know it’s easy to visualize experiencing “The Everyday World of Bodies” in person with the help of a VHS rip to YouTube. You know it’s easy to compartmentalize the struggle of a ruthless dictatorship when you parse out the prison lit. You get guiding a 160kg piece of machinery at 200+mph when you’re doing it from the comfort of your wireless Xbox controller. You’re also smart enough to know these are approximations. You don’t really know Rodan. You don’t know Pol Pot.

And you don’t get having to guide a 160kg piece of machinery at 200+mph year after year, on the best piece of engineering available, with the highest and darkest forces of sports and politics backing you, for millions of dollars, and losing. Dani Pedrosa does. And it’s about to happen again.

Read More

The Hypothetical SuperContest – Week 4

By
September 28, 2013
NFL, Sports
2 Comments

Russell Wilson Looks Good

It had to happen.

I was not going to go the whole season without a losing week. To be honest, I eked out a 2-3 last week; I pick every game in a semi-legal picks-against-the-spread contest with some friends and went a dismal 5-11 overall. I was lucky to go 2-3.

But I will persevere. I have made it through worse than this. I sat through Transformers 3 in its entirety in theaters. I survived both the Bronx and North Philadelphia. Hell, I was dumped at an amusement park once. I have lived through pain; 2-3 won’t bring me down.

I am looking at this in the same way that I try to look at those previous struggles. I need to learn from my mistakes, bad sequels and cruel women. So what can I learn from last week’s 2-3?

Read More

Mariano Rivera’s Final Home Game at Yankee Stadium

By
September 28, 2013
America, Baseball, Sports
Leave a comment

IMG_1860

“And then? And then, when I walked down the street, people would’ve looked, and they would’ve said, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game.'” – The Natural

Exceedingly rare in sports is the career in which a player maintains a world-class level of dominance through a retirement on his or her own terms. Only a handful of players can even lay any valid claim to that. Wayne Gretzky scored 90 points in his second-to-last NHL season only to fall down to 62, a perfectly formidable number for a 38-year-old center in professional hockey, in his final season, 1998-’99. In the same sport, legendary Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretiak retired at the age of 32 in 1984 after accumulating dozens of accolades and medals with the Soviet national team and CSKA Moscow and also without ever playing a minute in the NHL. Michael Jordan managed to average 20 points per game in the 2002-’03 season during his second and final comeback, with the Washington Wizards. He even scored 43 points as a 40-year-old, a task suburban dads in driveways everywhere wish to check off the Saturday morning to-do list. Depending on how the next half-decade or so shakes out, Kobe Bryant could be there too. John Elway finished his career at the very peak of the mountain, with two straight Super Bowl victories in 1998 and ’99. A few European footballers, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Xavi Hernandez among them, also had or are having satisfyingly lengthy careers in which they maintain high competitive levels.

Read More

Is Cleveland Even Trying Anymore?

By
September 26, 2013
America, NFL, Pop Culture, Sports
1 Comment

cleveland-20browns-20suck-jpg

“To tell the truth, I’m not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to. If I ever saw myself saying I’m excited going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’m lying.” – Ichiro Suzuki

We have gotten to a point as a nation at which I feel inclined to pose the question undoubtedly on the minds of everyone paying attention to the progression of this nation as it rollicks forward toward an uncertain fate: with the utmost respect and least offense possible to its residents, is the city of Cleveland even trying anymore? I’m not even focusing on sports, although in the wake of last week’s Trent Richardson trade by the city’s supposed professional football team, it is certainly a focal point.

Read More

We’ve Lost Them: Lessons from Week 4

By
September 24, 2013
College Football, Sports
1 Comment

20130924-074105.jpg
It was around the second quarter when the hemorrhaging really started picking up. At the half, Miami had scored an unanswered 49 points. Savannah State had seen this before. After all, they are a cat with nine lives that keeps getting paid to get run over by people that don’t like felines. The bleeding only continued into the third quarter with the carnage getting worse as time ticked away. In the end, a mangled, battered, and beaten football team was before the savage masses within Sun Life Stadium. The primal fringe of the Miami fan base stayed to watch as the Tigers received the ten count and then whisked away to seek medical attention. But it was too late – the Hurricanes had done their damage. “Dammit,” a doctor in a nearby Miami hospital screamed. “We’ve lost them!”

The pummeling of Savannah State for the third straight year in a row by an FBS team (they’ve lost by a combined score of 216-7 for three years) was pretty much a microcosm for this weekend, in general. It was also a reminder that programs who schedule teams like Savannah State are pretty much sadists. So, what else did we learn in a week whose one highlight included Michigan almost losing to a perceived lesser opponent? Quite a bit, actually.

Read More