Sports
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm feeling pretty harried this week, because I'm teaching using a new curriculum, which requires all-new lecture slides and notes and homework assignments. I'm also going away this weekend, to Williamstown for the celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of my college rugby club.
As a result, I've been losing more mental processor cycles than usual to thinking about my own college days, and remembering the lyrics to the dozens and dozens of songs I used to know. So, because it's on my mind anyway, and because the mixing of college sports and alcohol would really cheese off…
oracknows | March 13, 2008I happen to be in Chicago right now attending the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology. It's a meeting that I try to make it to almost every year, and usually it's a necessary update to my knowledge base. Consequently, I only just this morning noticed my fellow ScienceBloggers Mark Hoofnagle, Mark Chu-Carroll, and P.Z. Myers piling on the latest example of the sexist misogyny that is Vox Day, this time in (where else) WorldNetDaily, in an article entitled The real assault on science. Vox's article, in essence, views the application of Title IX to science education to increase…
oracknows | February 3, 2008It's Superbowl Sunday. Even someone who's not much of a football fan and who doesn't really care much one way or the other about either team can't help but get caught up in the hype a little bit. In any case, there seems little point to doing any serious blog posts today, given that (1) it's a weekend and traffic plummets on the weekend and (2) it's Superbowl Sunday, which leads me to expect that traffic will be even lower than a typical Sunday. Oh, and also because I just learned that Hitler was a Cowboys fan:
I've posted a parody of this particular scene from the German movie Downfall…
drorzel | January 20, 2008Brent Musberger is the single worst announcer in sports.
"That's a bold assertion," you say. "I find that hard to believe. I mean, he's famous."
Allow me to explain: Musberger generally calls games for ABC as part of a two-man announcing team. Musberger is the "play-by-play" guy, and the other member of the team, the "color commentator" is usually a former player or coach. Yesterday, for example, the color guy was former UCLA coach Steve Lavin, the Haircut Who Walks Like a Man.
The job of the ex-jock "color commentator" is to be, well, colorful. They're supposed to provide some sort of…
omnibrain | January 18, 2008Just a short note via Sports Illustrated:
Georgia football legend Herschel Walker is expected to reveal in an upcoming book that he has multiple personalities -- a revelation that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.
...
"Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, the book's publicist at Simon & Schuster.
Carr said the book will be published in August, but gave no other details and declined to provide excerpts.
I wonder whether this developed after football? I'm curious to see the book when it comes…
pontiff | January 15, 2008Quantum Hoops, a movie about the Caltech basketball team, will be playing in Berkeley at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas. Now if only we could get it up here in the Pacific Northwet.
drorzel | January 15, 2008Steroid scandals in sports, most particularly baseball, have been dominating sports media for a couple of years now. I thought that there really wasn't anything I could possibly care less about, but the New York Times proved me wrong with an article on steroid use among hip-hop artists.
Actually, the Times story is a report on an investigation by my local paper (I'm so proud), but I read the Times first in the mornings. The Albany Times Union does come through with a handy guide to hip-hop artists accused of using steroids. Look quickly before it goes behind the paywall.
What these stories…
jlynch | January 1, 2008It’s not like ASU did wonderfully against Texas (losing the Holiday Bowl 52-34), but at least they turned up to play somewhat (albeit not in the first quarter). The same can’t be said for Illinois in the Rose Bowl (49-17 to USC) and Hawai’i in the Sugar Bowl (41-10 to Georgia). Clearly neither of the teams deserved a BCS slot and Hawai’i (and Colt Brennan) showed itself to be nowhere near being able to play outside the WAC.
Those BCS games are really working out well - two down, two blowouts. Methinks something is amiss with the system.
drorzel | December 26, 2007It was sort of amusing when people started doing kitsch holiday commercials in a CGI version of those old quasi-claymation holiday specials (Rodolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the like). I'm ok with hipster irony, at least to a point.
It was a whole lot less amusing when somebody (I've forgotten who) did a commercial this year using the actual characters from the Rudolph special. If you want to ape the feel of the show, that's one thing, but keep your grubby hands off Yukon Cornelius.
But now, they've really crossed the line-- ESPN's SportsCenter has been hyping the Patriots to the skies,…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad.
The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football "championship" is so messed up. It lists the 32 bowl games that will be played over the next month, and the per-team payout for each. The five major BCS bowls pay each team $17 million, which neatly explains why the college football elite are unwilling to put in a playoff-- in any real championship system, they might end up having to share…
drorzel | December 3, 2007A handful of sports items of interest to me:
1) My Giants defied expectations, and pulled out a 21-16 win over the Bears on two late touchdown drives, after sucking for most of the game. Well, OK, the defense was good throughout, though they were aided by the Bears not having a quarterback better than Rex Grossman, but the offense was dreadful.
Eli Manning gets most of the blame for that, somewhat unfairly. Some of the blame has to go on injuries-- the second INT he threw wasn't a terrible throw, if Plaxico Burress was healthy-- and some on the coaching staff, who as usual reacted to Manning'…
oracknows | December 2, 2007Apparently Jack Dempsey was his generation's Chuck Norris, who, as we know, doesn't read books but stares them down until he gets the information that he wants. Here he is in a 1934 Modern Mechanix article boasting how he can "whip any mechanical robot":
Of course, I still think it would hurt like hell to try to punch steel, regardless of how good a boxer you are.
drorzel | November 28, 2007I generally listen to ESPN radio in my office in the morning, because I like the Mike & Mike show. Unfortunately, they're followed by Colin Cowherd, who is a world-class pinhead.
He's currently holding forth on the death of Sean Taylor, with his basic position being that Taylor had it coming because he had a checkered past. If you were reading back in April, you can probably guess how happy I am to be hearing this line of argument.
In support of this brilliant insight, he's just touted his track record in correctly assessing high-profile public legal cases by noting that he didn't believe…
evolgen | November 26, 2007
So, I missed the three year anniversary of evolgen (it was last Wednesday for those of you keeping score). What does that have to do with police dogs and civil rights protesters in Alabama in the 1960s? Absolutely nothing. But I'm combining two unrelated topics into a single post -- neither of which have anything to do with the American civil rights movement. Or do they?
Police dogs attacking black people are as big a part of Alabama culture as nooses hanging from trees in Louisiana. Too soon? Whether it's at a protest march or on a football field, there's not denying it. Anyway, here's a…
jlynch | November 25, 2007The qualifying draw from World Cup 2010 in South Africa was made today. Europe’s Group 8 looks like a challenge for the Irish (current rankings in brackets):
Italy (3)
Bulgaria (18)
Republic of Ireland (35)
Cyprus (65)
Georgia (77)
Montenegro (172)
drorzel | November 21, 2007I generally like Gregg Easterbrook's writing about football (though he's kind of gone off the deep end regarding the Patriots this year), but everything else he turns his hand to is a disaster. In particular, he tends to pad his columns out with references to science and technology issues. I'm not quite sure what the point of these is supposed to be, other than to demonstrate that he, Gregg Easterbrook, is so much smarter than the average football fan that he knows, like, rocket science and stuff. The problem with that is that his knowledge of rocket science seems to owe more to Star Trek…
pontiff | November 13, 2007Last night I went to the Seahawks/49ers game at Seattle's spectacular Qwest field. While the field was spectacular, my SF 49ers were less than spectacular, losing the game 24-0. In fact they down right stunk. Ouch. Qwest field really is a rocking venue: I attended a game last year right after the league started investigating the Seahawks for pumping in noise over the speakers (which the team denied, and as far as I know no one has ever shown.) That game had the loudest crowd I have ever heard. Walking to the game from downtown Seattle you could hear the crowd from a huge distance away.…
omnibrain | November 7, 2007If you had control of the crowd behind a free throw shooter at a basketball game and you wanted him to miss what would you do?
Here's one highly entertaining way:
Help us come up with some others!
drorzel | November 1, 2007The inescapable sports story of the week has been Alex Rodriguez's decision to opt out of his contract with the Yankees and pursue more money on the free-agent market. While it amuses me to see an off-season story about the Yankees eclipsing the Red Sox winning the World Series, I find this incredibly tedious.
It's tedious not just because it's about baseball, but because the discussion is so ridiculously overheated. To listen to your average sports radio jackass tell it, Rodriguez's decision is emblematic of everything that's wrong with American culture. It's a greedy "me-first" move that's…
drorzel | October 26, 2007As part of the "Buy This Blog" incentive for the DonorsChoose fundraiser, Ewan McNay asks for a post on
the superiority of Commonwealth sports (cricket, football) over the
US-favoured kind (baseball, american football) ;-). Oh, OK, then; I'll
setle for cricket.
Cricket? You want me to talk up cricket?
The best I can do is this: If you've ever been watching a baseball game, and said to yourself "Boy, I wish this could go on all week," well, then, have I got a game for you...
I can, however, make a case for the superiority of rugby to American football:
Now, don't get me wrong-- I'm a big fan…