Petrino to exit the sinking ship that is the Atlanta Falcons?

Just when you thought that it couldn't get any worse...ESPN is reporting that Falcons first-year head coach Bobby Petrino is going to leave the team to become the next head coach at the University of Arkansas. This comes one day after the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that Petrino had told university officials that he was not interested in leaving the Falcons for the Razorbacks.

Of course, question No. 1 is: how much stock should we put into ESPN's "multiple sources" - are these the same sources that Kirk Herbstreit uses? Secondly, this tells you just how bad the Falcons are - Arkansas really isn't much of a step up from the Louisville job Petrino originally left. The last time this happened was when Nick Saban bailed on the Dolphins after last season, and look where Miami is today - starting down the barrel of 0-16.

This is a good hire for Arkansas if they pull it off - Petrino's a proven winner at the college level, although recruiting in Conference USA or the Big East is a far cry from recruiting in the SEC. Still, anything is better than the circus sideshow that the last few seasons under Houston Nutt had become.

Now, someone keep Darren McFadden away from the pit bulls and convince him to come back next season, and you might be on to something!

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 3:20 PM 0 comments  

YouTubeness: The Glory Days of NASCAR on ESPN (1981-1991)

I grew up loving NASCAR. I would watch every race I could as a kid, usually on ESPN. And this might surprise you if you've watched the current coverage of NASCAR on ESPN/ABC...but it was incredible coverage. You had Bob Jenkins with the play-by-play, and some combination of Benny Parsons, Ned Jarrett and Larry Nuber on color commentary.

What made it so special? The broadcast was actually about the racing, and not the 80,000 other things that make up a NASCAR telecast these days. I promise you that ESPN didn't miss a restart or the leader taking the checkered flag back in my time.

Plus, the racing was just better. The drivers weren't media polished and fresh-scrubbed: they were racers, and even the most gentile ones weren't afraid to drive someone off the road if they needed to. Earnhardt, Waltrip, Allison, Yarborough, Petty...you could smell the tobacco and gas fumes on these guys.

If you want to know what I'm talking about, and see what NASCAR really used to be about, join me on a YouTube trip down memory lane, as we watch a special that ESPN created for its 10th anniversary of covering NASCAR races back in 1991. It's in several pieces, so I've added the videos below.

(Note: Because Blogger is ridiculous and makes it impossible to make a jump/cut without screwing up your whole blog, I've just added the videos below rather than a nice, tidy jump cut like I would have wanted...)


Part 1 (Includes: Bobby Allison's Talladega crash in 1987 that lead to restrictor plates; Bill Elliot's Winston Million in 1985)



Part 2 (Includes first career wins of Dale Jarrett, Davey Allison, Rusty Wallace, Ernie Irvan, Mark Martin and Alan Kulwicki)




Part 3 (Includes: A look at Super Speedways, Short Tracks and Road Courses; Winston Cup clinching moments of Earnhardt, Elliot and Wallace; a boring interview with Brett Bodine)



Part 4 (Includes: a look at ESPN's technical innovations in covering NASCAR; the "stolen pace car" incident from the Talladega 500 in 1986; Rusty Wallace's practice crash at Bristol in 1988; Buffet Benny)



Part 5 (A look at big crashes, including: Michael Watrip (Bristol, 1990); Darrell Waltrip (Pepsi 400, 1991); 1990 Daytona 400 (1st lap melee); Mark Martin (Sears Point 1989 and Daytona 1989)



Part 6 (Fantastic Finishes including: Talladega 1986 (B. Allison/Earnhardt); North Wilkesboro 1989 (Rudd/Earnhardt/G. Bodine); Bristol 1990 (D. Allison/Martin) and Victory Lane interviews with Lake Speed and Darrell Waltrip)

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 11:46 AM 0 comments  

Bowl Game Projections: A Brief Bit of Bragging

As you may have noticed, I've pretty much bit the bag this season with my handicapping (as has my partner in crime), to the point that I've finally waived the white flag on the whole thing. So please indulge me as I brag about some predictions that I made earlier that have now come true. Thanks for the patience in advance.

Ahem.

You might remember a few weeks ago, with a couple of weeks to go in the college football season, that I gave a prediction on who was going to be playing where for every bowl game this season. Now the the regular season is complete and the match-ups are set, I went back to look and see how I did. Much to my amazement, I was pretty frickin' good:

Total Bowl Games: 32
Correctly Picked Both Teams: 15
Correctly Picked One Team: 15
Correctly Picked No Teams: 2

So, I had an almost 50 percent success rate at predict the exact match-up that was going to be taking place in the bowls. Keep in mind, this was on Nov. 26, before the chaos and confusion of the final week of games.

How good was that? I decided to go back and look at the bowl projections of the "experts" that had been made around the same time. The experts I found were: CFN.com, ESPN.com (Ivan Maisel and Mark Schlabach), CNNSI.com (Stewart Mandel) and MSNBC.com (Mike Woods). CBS Sportsline hasn't made their Week-by-Week projections available as far as I can see.

How did I stack up? I'll let you be the judge:

YOUR FACE IS A SPORTS BLOG

Both: 15
One: 15
None: 2
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 70.3%

CNN/SI (Stewart Mandel)

Both: 15
One: 14
None: 3
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 68.8%

ESPN (Mark Schlabach)

Both: 9
One: 21
None: 2
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 60.9%

ESPN (Ivan Masiel)

Both: 10
One: 15
None: 7
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 54.7%


MSNBC (Mark Woods)

Both: 8
One: 18
None: 6
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 53.1%

CFN*

Both: 5
One: 15
None: 12
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 39.1%

(*CFN stopped doing a projection the week before everyone else, forcing me to use one that was a week earlier. That's what you get for not working over the Thanksgiving holiday, I guess.)

Again, let's review:

ME: No. 1. EXPERTS: Nos. 2-6

Stewart Mandel and I were very close, and Mark Schlabach was the only other person to completely miss on only two bowl games. As for the rest...even with the one-week handicap, the CFN projections are a mess. Part of this is because they insisted on placing Boise St. into a BCS game, when they basically had no shot even if they had beaten Hawaii. I'll give Ivan Maisel some credit for being the only person to predict that Kansas would go to a BCS bowl instead of Missouri, which was either a bold prediction, or a careless one that turned out to be right.

What were the two I missed out on?

The Humanitarian Bowl: The big issue here is that I assumed that the bowl would select Boise St. as a natural fit to play a bowl game in Boise in order to assure a sell-out. I didn't count on the Hawaii Bowl swooping in to steal Boise St. away, leaving Fresno St. with a consolation trip to Idaho in December instead (albeit against a higher-profile opponent).

The Emerald Bowl: Again, same concept - I assumed that the bowl game based in San Francisco would wind up with Cal. However, I didn't count on Cal losing to Stanford, and basically making it real tough for the bowl to select them at 6-6 ahead of 8-4 Oregon St.

Much like a South Florida beating an Auburn, this is the type of win that builds credibility. I figure that I can make horrible predictions for the rest of the season now and I can point back to this as proof that sometimes, I get lucky.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 10:35 AM 2 comments  

Oh My God, This is Actually Working! I'm Flyi---SPLAT!

For those of you who think that parachuting is old news, that base jumping is so not "radical", "extreme" or "cool", here's the latest trend: wing suits. As in, wearing suits that have "wings", that proponents hope will lead to one day being able to jump out of an airplane and land without a parachute.

Here's a picture of the "wing suit" worn by enthusiast Jeb Corliss:

If you are like me, you are expecting to see the words "Acme Corporation" on the suit somewhere...




More specifically, the problem isn't so much "jumping" out of an airplane and landing - gravity kind of takes care of that. As French jumper Loïc Jean-Albert told the New York Times:

"You might do it well one time and try another time and crash and die."

Which is also what one might say about having Rex Grossman as your starting quarterback. Folks! I'll be here all week.

Not to say that I'm not impressed...but jump from an airplane and successfully land WHILE SLAMMING A MOUNTAIN DEW!!! and then I'll be really impressed.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 7:05 PM 0 comments  

Santa Clara Pep Band: Out-Dorking Tony Romo

You might remember recently that I posted a photo from CNNSI.com involving Tony Romo looking like a complete dork while playing Guitar Hero. I thought that it might be impossible for any photos to top that for pure geekiness. However, I underestimated CNNSI.com's abilities to find the absolute nerdiest photos possible. But if I knew that they were going to be doing a full photo spread on the Santa Clara University Pep Band's "Campus Crib", I would have known.
Somehow, they've managed to make their most prominent alum, Steve Nash, seem cool by comparison.

This is just one prime example of what I am talking about:

I don't know who at the University thought it was a good idea to let this photo shoot happen. I'm sure they thought "Hey, it's a way to get some free publicity and show off the great school spirit we have!" Apparently, this person forgot to ask for any ability to review the photos ahead of time. I'm also sure that he/she has been fired.

Unless the plan was to increase the number of pasty, nerdy, perpetually dateless, World of Warcraft-addicted geeks attending their school this year. In which case, bravo on a job well done. MTV's "Cribs" couldn't have done a better job of hitting your target audience.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 6:31 PM 5 comments  

Lenovo Stats: A total farce, or merely completely useless?

The NBA would like you to get very excited about the Lenovo Stat. They would like you to understand the Lenovo Stat as often as possible, and treat it with the same level of importance that you treat points, rebounds or assists. That's why they've created a whole special section on their Web site just for it, and are promoting the hell out of it at every opportunity.

Which would be fine, if it was a stat that meant anything, and not just some made up, BS stat with the same name as "The Official PC Partner of the NBA". Because when commerce and sports collide, the result is usually riveting statistical analysis.

So what is this "Lenovo Stat" that's going to revolutionize the concept of basketball statistics? If you guessed "a warmed-over version of the plus/minus stat that they've been using in hockey for years", you guessed right. Essentially, it's the total amount of points that your team scores while you are on the court, minus the number of points your team gives up during that time.

I don't think I need to tell you how useless this is. First off, there is no way to compare players from different teams - players on winning teams are almost always going to have higher rankings than players on losing teams, just because their teams are scoring more points than their opponents regardless of what they do. If you were comparing how many points a team scored/gave up while a certain player was on the court versus how they did when he was on the bench, or versus their overall performance, maybe you would have something.

Actually, no, you wouldn't. It would still be absolutely pointless, but at least it would be slightly more useful.

Want an example? Guess who the "Lenovo Stat" leader is for the Los Angeles Lakers? It's obvious, right - Vladimir Radmanovic. He of the 9.7 points and 2.9 rebounds per game. As for Kobe Bryant - you know, the most feared player in the game? Of course - he's fourth on the team on the Lenovo Stat, behind not only Radmanovic but Andrew Bynum and Luke Walton.

Any stat where Luke Walton is ahead of Kobe Bryant is pretty much inherently flawed and worthless.

"But," you might counter if you were a marketing person with Lenovo reading off a list of talking points proponent of the Lenovo Stat, "it isn't an individual stat - The Lenovo Stat shows the power of teamwork. It's a way of showing the best-engineered, best combination of players on the court."

"Really?," I would counter."Because it still seems like a crock of crap to me. Take at look at the Lenovo Stat for the best two-person combinations on the team. No. 1 is Radmanovic and Bynum. Kobe isn't on there until No. 4, and he's only part of five of the Top 20. Now, you want me to believe that Vladimir Radmanovic and Jordan Farmar are a better combination than Kobe Bryant and...well, anyone?"

And you would not answer, because you would run screaming and in tears back to Lenovo world headquarters rather than admit defeat. And then I would treat myself to a two-piece chicken plank basket at Long John Silver's, but really reward myself by ADDING A THIRD PLANK! And then my official LJS Stat count would be a +3 for the season.

(Note: in the time it took me to finish this post, the Lenovo Stat section on NBA.com appears to have imploded. I'll take the credit for it - I'm sure they were so scared about the power of my upcoming post that they panicked and removed the site entirely.)

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 2:10 PM 2 comments  

Yahoo! Sports Reports Reggie Bush Owes More Than $59 in Library Late Fees

SAN DIEGO - In yet another chapter in their on-going investigation into New Orleans Saints RB Reggie Bush, Yahoo! Sports today published a report that the former Heisman Trophy winner racked up more than $59 in late fees from the USC library system while a student there - a sum which has never been repaid.

"Clearly, this sort of shocking revelation blows the lid off of our entire investigation," said Jason Cole, who has been investigating various aspects of Bush's life for more than 18 months. "Bush's startling disregard for the library jurisprudence system is just another example of how he shamelessly abused the system, and how USC is a renegade, out-of-control program."

Cole said that Yahoo! Sports has made other "explosive" recent breakthroughs in their continuing investigation of Bush. Among the new charges:

• Bush frequently "helped himself" to mints, butterscotches and other hard candies in the loose bin at the Ralph's near USC during his time in school, without ever paying.
• On several occasions, Bush "took a penny" from a bin at an off-campus 7-11, but was never documented to "leave a penny".
• Bush received meals, apparel, athletic coaching and academic tutoring from the University while a student at USC.

Despite waning public interest and a lack of action from the NCAA, the Heisman Trophy committee, the FBI and other organizations, Cole said that he plans to continue his investigation until "justice is served".

"I mean, at some point, people are going to realize the truth - that Yahoo! Sports is a reputable news source," said Cole. "If it takes running Reggie Bush's name into the ground and destroying the reputations and lives of him, his family, and everyone he loves in order for my snooty college classmates now working at "The New York Times" and "ESPN" to see that just because I work for a company with an exclamation point in its name doesn mean that I screwed up my career, then that's what I'll do. The truth needs to come out."

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 11:33 AM 0 comments  

Meyer Says Player "Totally Justified" in Alleged Beating of Restaurant Employee with Sandwich

GAINESVILLE, FL - Florida Gators head coach Urban Meyer today said that starting defensive end Jermaine Cunningham was "totally justified" in his actions that led to his arrest with a former teammate after allegedly assaulting a sandwich shop employee with a sandwich and empty soda cup.

"I mean, if you buy a sandwich, you should get the chips for free, right?" said Meyer. "Then, they tried to make the sandwich with one of those 'wedge cuts', where a wedge is cut out of the top of the loaf of bread instead of slicing it in half. Everyone knows that's a complete rip-off - you get like half as much filling that way. I normally condone any member of the team that gets involved in an off-the-field incident. But it this case, the jerk at the sandwich shop totally deserved it."

Meyer said that outside circumstances also need to be taken in consideration.

"He hit that guy with a turkey and avocado on white," he said. "I don't think anyone - even a football player - is going to cause that much damage with that sandwich. If it was a Cold Cut Trio on rye, maybe it's a different story."

Sources close to the investigation report that the unnamed employee may have caused the already tense situation to reach a breaking point by adding vinegar and oil to the sandwich without asking Cunningham.

This is not the first time that Florida players have had a restaurant-related incident. Four players were suspended for one game after causing more than $20,000 to a Gainesville-area Shakey's Pizza after being told that it would be 15 to 20 minutes before the pepperoni pizza would be ready as part of the Bunch-A-Lunch buffet.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 3:46 PM 3 comments  

My Christmas Gift to the UCLA Bruins

Now, you might expect me to be the last person to give UCLA advice on how to conduct a head coaching search. You would think that as a loyal USC alum, the last thing I would do is help out my rival. That I would just chuckle at the fact that the head coach of Boise St. would rather stay there than come to coach at UCLA, meaning that somehow the Broncos job is now more prestigious than the Bruins job.

And normally yes, I would. But in the car this evening, I had a flash about who would be the perfect hire for UCLA. The head coaching candidate that would send some shock waves through college football and actually scare the living crap out of USC. It's such a good idea that I have to share it, even if it means that I am betraying my school.

UCLA should go after and hire Jim Harbaugh.

Think about it. If you want to send a message to USC that you mean business, what better way than to bring in the guy who beat them this season at Stanford and pulled off one of the biggest upsets in sports history. Pete Carroll might seem unflappable, but if UCLA were to hire Jim Harbaugh, I promise you that even Coach Carroll would have his pulse rate go up a few ticks immediately.

It's not going to happen. But it should. And it would be AWESOME if it did.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 1:08 AM 1 comments  

Diet Pepsi Machine Cut by Atlanta Falcons

Atlanta – Despite being cut by the Atlanta Falcons today, former first-round draft pick and rookie sensation Diet Pepsi Machine vowed that his playing career is not over.

“I still feel like I can contribute to a team that needs a talented playmaker, or a zero calorie alternative to regular soda,” said Machine as he cleaned out his locker at the Falcons’ training facilities.

















Atlanta, desperate for offensive talent, brought in Diet Pepsi Machine after he had been cut by the New Orleans Saints at the start of training camp. However, he had contributed little since joining the team, mainly playing on special teams.

Diet Pepsi Machine first burst on the NFL scene in 2005, when the New England Patriots shocked the sports world by taking him late in the first round of the NFL draft. The unconventional move appeared to pay huge dividends immediately, when he caught 14 passes for 809 yards and 14 touchdowns in his first six NFL games as a tight end.

The success of Diet Pepsi Machine in his rookie season caused other teams to try to emulate the Patriot’s success, said NFL draft guru Mel Kiper Jr.

“Of course, none of them were successful,” Kiper said. “There was the Lions using a No. 8 pick on a Snickers Ice Cream bar machine and the Jets taking an old cigarette machine. And I think the league would like to forget the Raiders going to Japan to bring in a machine that appeared to sell cans of beer and used schoolgirls’ underwear as their new starting QB.”

However, Diet Pepsi Machine was plagued by a series of drops that left the Patriots shaken in their confidence in him. ESPN NFL analyst Ron Jaworski said that it was one of the most precipitous falls from grace in recent pro football history.

“Diet Pepsi Machine has always been almost unstoppable once he gets into space – his Yards After Catch is amazing,” Jaworski said. “The problem is simple – his lack of hands. And I don’t mean that in a figurative sense, I mean that he literally doesn’t have hands. The only way he can catch a ball is if it is thrown directly into the slot where Diet Pepsis usually come out. Once teams realized this and directed their defenders to expect low passes, even a quarterback as accurate as Tom Brady couldn’t get the ball to him.”

Diet Pepsi Machine’s progress was further stalled by a series of injuries suffered in the 2007 season, including: a ruptured dollar bill acceptor, a broken coin return, and clogged gears caused by leaky soda.

The personal life of Diet Pepsi Machine also caught up to him. While in New England, he was frequently spotted at 24-hour grocery stores and liquor marts the night before game time. Patriots coach Bill Belichik released Diet Pepsi Machine late in the 2006 season after an incident where he reported was seen sneaking massive quantities of rum into his dispenser in the locker room minutes before kick-off.

Diet Pepsi Machine attempted to make a comeback before the start of this season, signing a free agent contract with the New Orleans Saints. However, he only played into exhibition games, leaving the team over a dispute over his role with the team.

“If he would have accepted his role as a fullback, he could have been something special for this team,” said Saints head coach Sean Payton at the time when Machine left the team. “However, he refused to block. Every time we asked him to open a hole for Reggie (Bush), he would claim that the motion from making a block might ‘cause him to overcarbonate’ and explode. We can’t have that on our team.”

Talking to reporters after his release today, Diet Pepsi Machine said that he would attempt to catch on with an Arena Football League team this season, or possibly look for work outside a local Piggly Wiggly.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 1:02 AM 0 comments