Football
drorzel | September 14, 2007So, Bill Belichick has been fined half a million for the incident last week in which a Patriots assistant coach was caught videotaping Jets signals. The team was also fined $250K, and will lose at least one draft pick over the incident.
Now that the punishment has been handed down, can somebody explain to me why this is such a huge deal?
I mean, maybe it's just that the sports I played regularly (basketball, rugby, soccer) are much less pattern-driven than football, but I really don't see what's so utterly terrible about this business. It's not like they sent a spy to the Jets' practice…
drorzel | September 10, 2007I don't normally pay much attention to preseason or off-season sports, and my isolation has been better than usual this year with regard to the NFL, what with being in Japan for the past three weeks. As a result, I vaguely expected my Giants to suck this year, but I was not prepared for the season to be effectively over after one game.
Hyperbole, you say? Maybe, but it's not just about the loss to the hated Cowboys, or even the injuries to key players, it's about the way they lost, and the players they have left.
Consider: what were their weaknesses last year? Well, their big problem was a…
bergman | September 2, 2007Because my team, the Forty Niners, aren't. Neither apparently is Michigan. On the other hand, my co-guest blogger is surely happy.
drorzel | July 18, 2007I've never been a big fan of Michael Vick as a football player, and his indictment for running a dog-fighting business pretty much wipes out any chance he ever had of winning me over.
Steve Verdon notes that, if convicted, Vick could be fined up to $350,000 and face as much as six years in prison, and that would be getting off easy. I think Jim Henley put it best:
A dog is a great big furry ball of trust, even a dog that has been trained into meanness and savagery. To traduce that trust is unforgiveable. It is inhuman.
It'll be interesting to see what the NFL does about this. They've been…
drorzel | February 15, 2007One of those only-on-the-Internet, adventrues-in-D-list-celebrity videos: A YouTube clip of a hair metal cover band joined onstage by one of the teachers from "Saved by the Bell" and Dallas Cowboys snap-dropper Tony Romo, singing "Somewhere in the Night" by Journey. Romo really gets into it, and Mr. Belding drops the F-bomb a few times, and, well, it's not for the faint of heart.
It's like somebody accelerated the Eighties to a good fraction of the speed of light, slammed them into a wall, and now we're looking at the spandex-and-hairspray clad particle tracks.
drorzel | February 5, 2007I watched the game at a Super Bowl party hosted by some of our senior majors, because Kate didn't want to see it. Of course, the guys who hosted the party didn't have cable, so we were watching the game through a haze of static and swirly lines that made the weather look even worse than it was.
Game comments are below the fold, for the sake of marital harmony in Chateau Steelypips:
What a dog of a game. Seven turnovers in the first half-- three fumbles by each team, and a Manning interception. Then Rex Grossman lobbed up two more interceptions down the stretch, sealing the win for the Colts.…
drorzel | February 4, 2007I'll put my prediction behind the cut, as since the Pats lost, Kate has been trying to pretend that football season is over, and I wouldn't want to upset her...
I don't really have a strong rooting interest in either team. I have some good friends who are Bears fans, but that could cut either way, and while I'd like to see Peyton Manning and Tony Dungy win one, because they're both good guys, that's not a real strong interest, either. I havent really seen enough of either team to make a solid football-based prediction, either.
Looking at the rosters, though, I see that Adam Vinatieri is on…
drorzel | January 19, 2007My Giants are done for the year, but Kate's Patriots are still in it, so there will be football-watching this weekend (well, actually, I'll be playing in an intramural basketball game for a good chunk of the Pats game, but Kate will be watching). In honor of the Pats, then, here's a video for Kate, which good taste demands that I place below the fold:
(They played a small clip of the song on a sports radio show I was listening to yesterday, so of course I had to go look up the video...)
drorzel | January 8, 2007A busy sporting weekend for Chateau Steelypips:
First, there were two NFL wild card games on Saturday, as a sort of appetizer for the real action on Sunday. The Colts borrowed a defense from somewhere, and despite Peyton Manning deciding to play like his little brother for the first half or so, Indianapolis moved on in convincing fashion. I liked Manning's offer to do Ty Law's Hall of Fame induction, after lobbing another two easy picks in his direction.
Then there was the ignominious Cowboys loss, about which all I can say is: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!!! And, really, that's all I can say, because…
drorzel | January 2, 2007So, remember a month or two back when everybody was whining about how Michigan got screwed out of a shot at the Mythical National Championship? They lost to USC last night.
USC, you'll recall, demonstrated their inferiority to Michigan by losing to UCLA, which is how they ended up in the Rose Bowl, rather than playing Ohio State for the MNC.
How about the undefeated Boise State? The knock on them has always been that they play in a weak conference, and couldn't really hang with big conference teams. They beat Oklahoma last night, in a wild game, and end the season undefeated.
What can we…
drorzel | December 11, 2006There were several sporting events worth commenting on this weekend, none of which I saw in their entirety. Hence, the combo recap post.
Maryland-BC The Terps got beat by Boston College in a game that I didn't realize was on TV until Kate told me about it about midway through the second half. I'm still used to thinking of Sundays as football days.
Maryland was down ten when I started watching, and made a game of it for a little while, before dropping behind by double digits again in the final two minutes. The game was pretty much consistent with what I've seen previously this season-- the…
drorzel | December 4, 2006So, the participants are set for the Mythical "National Championship" of college football. It's Florida vs. Ohio State, thanks to USC's loss to UCLA, and we're going to be treated to about three weeks' worth of whining about how Michigan got jobbed.
I pretty much agree with Charles Kuffner on this one, though. I dislike the Gators intensely, but I'd rather see them in the "title" game than Michigan. If nothing else, it's probably the match-up that's most likely to hasten the introduction of a playoff system, and get the scare quotes off "championship" for college football.
The standard line…
drorzel | December 3, 2006As an avowed Giants fan, I suppose I really ought to say something about the epic meltdown they suffered in the past week, ideally before today's game with the Cowboys. The trouble is, last week was so horrendous that it's hard to say anything coherent...
I ought to say something, though, so I'll collect a few random thoughts after the cut:
Collapse Item #1: People are all over Tom Coughlin about calling for the pass play that produced the first interception, and really ignited the Tennessee comeback. I don't actually hold that one against Coughlin-- yes, they'd been running the ball well to…
drorzel | November 27, 2006I'm worried about Jay Bilas's job.
For those who aren't college basketball junkies, Jay Bilas is a former Duke player who is currently the best college basketball analyst in the business. He's smart, well-spoken, funny (listen to him banter with Bill Raftery and Sean McDonough when the three of them work games together), and extremely knowledgable about the game. Whenever he does a game, he clearly does his homework, and learns more than the token one or two facts about each team that most announcers do. When he does studio analysis, he always has his facts in line, and while he sometimes…
drorzel | November 17, 2006I am already sick of Ohio State-Michigan, and the they haven't even played yet. Can we at least get a final score before we declare this the Greatest Football Game of All Time?
I can't quite decide what I'm rooting for, here, but it's either a 0-0 tie, or a 54-0 blowout. Whichever would make the hype machine look worse.
Suggestions are welcome in the comments.
drorzel | November 14, 2006Today is the official last day of classes, though my final class meetings were yesterday. I'm also halfway through grading a big pile of lab reports, which I do electronically, so I'm trying to keep my extra-curricular typing to a minimum, lest I suffer another flare-up of muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder.
I shouldn't let this weekend's NFL games pass entirely without comment, though. The karmic blowback for slagging college football in general was the collapse of my Giants against the Bears on Sunday night. The loss was not unexpected-- the Bears are a very good team, and the Giants are…
drorzel | November 12, 2006While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing .
While there was, of course, only one actually important result yesterday, namely Williams beating amherst as is right and proper, I like seeing the chaos in the upper echelons of Division I. Personally, I'm rooting for everybody to lose except for Boise State and the University of Exit 9. Not because I particularly like either of those…
drorzel | November 6, 2006So, the Cowboys-Redskins game yesterday apparently had a wild finish. There were three field goal attempts in the final 31 seconds, one of them blocked and partially returned, with a penalty setting up the game-winning attempt with no time on the clock. Wild stuff, sure to be good highlight fodder, right?
So, I made a point to stay around for halftime in the Pats-Colts game, when the "Football Night in America" crowd on NBC talks about interesting games from earlier in the day. And sure enough, we get highlights from this game: we got to see Terrell Owens catching a touchdown pass, and…
drorzel | November 5, 2006My Giants fianlly got the chance to play a bad team today, and true to form almost honked a game to the Texans. They trailed in the fourth quarter, but rallied to win 17-14.
Their bad play was a combination of being generally banged up (the defense was without Osi Umenyiora, Brandon Short, Sam Madison, and LaVar Arrington, and Michael Strahan left early in the game with a foot injury), and the classic sports sin of "looking ahead." Next week, the Giants face the Chicago Bears, who came into this week 7-0, and have been steamrolling their opponents. The Giants-Bears game was shaping up to be…
drorzel | November 1, 2006This is a couple of days old, but I only got around to reading the story last night. The New York Times has an occasional sports magazine supplement, and this week, they published a nice article on Bill Parcells:
Bill Parcells is the only coach in N.F.L. history to take four different teams to the playoffs, but that only begins to set him apart. In 1983, in his first N.F.L. head coaching job, he took over a New York Giants team that had one winning season over the previous decade, turned it around on a dime and led it to Super Bowl titles in the 1986 and 1990 seasons. In 1993, he became head…