Carl Monday Is My Hero

Thanks to Deadspin I have seen two of the funniest videos on the worldwideinterweb in a while.

First up is the intrepid investigative journalist Carl Monday in Cleveland, Ohio. Carl found this Ohio State Buckeye fan masturbating in a public library and confronted the culprit along with his family with hilarious results.

The other highlight is documentation of a new sport, trampoline basketball. Watch and learn.

Blazers get the 4th pick

Despite having the worst record in the NBA and the best chance to get the #1 pick, the Blazers managed to get the lowest pick the team could possible get, the 4th pick. (I think that is the lowest the team with a worst record can get.) However, this may not be as bad as it seems because of the lack of a clear cut superstar in the draft. (Blazers Edge seems to agree with this sentiment.) Now I don't want any teams to tank its season but maybe the Blazers could get some new talent and trade the bad apples (Miles and Randolph) and have a shot at Greg Oden next year.

As far as what the Blazers should do with the pick, it all depends on whether the team can work some trades for Miles and Randolph and what the team gets in return. If Portland stays pat and makes no significant changes, the biggest need is outside shooting. This has been its most desperate need for several years and if the Blazers can get a shooter, it would take some pressure off the inside game. Martell Webster looked good at times this season but it remains to be seen whether he can be a complete player on defense and know what to do on offense. So, a shooting guard is a possibility and I think Brandon Roy would be the best option there (as I said previously) because he can slash, play defense, and has developed a consistent outside shot in the last year. Another possibility is Adam Morrison at SF, but the team has a surplus at that position with Miles, Outlaw, and Khryapa. The guy can't play defense but he can shoot. Both of those players have been projected around the 4 spot so it should work. One thing the team doesn't need is another young point guard.

Clippers Fans Must Be Upset

The Clippers squandered a 3-point lead in the first overtime with under 5 seconds left in Game 5 last night. The team went on to lose in double OT in what was by all accounts a very, very good game. I enjoyed it immensely.

Now that the Clippers have won a playoff series their fans must expect the team to win and that it is a destiny for the team to make the finals. So, this loss that puts the Clips down 3 games to 2 and that has to be heartbreaking for the fans. But, to put salt in the wound the consumate Lakers fan, Jack Nicholson, has now decided its ok for him to be a Clippers fan. And, to top it off he gets second row tickets to last night's game in Phoenix and a bunch of face time on TNT.

I had always thought that Jack was a real fan considering how he was always at the Lakers games even when things were not going well. However, it has become clear that he is truly just another fair-weather LA sports fan. Whichever team is doing well is the team he will be supporting. Although Jack will always rate high in "cool factor" this has to bring him down a half-point or so on a scale of ten. It will be interesting to see who is in the house for Game 6 in LA.

I fully expect to see Dyan Cannon with Jack in the second row cheering on their "beloved" Clippers. What would be nice to see is Billy Crystal giving both of them a beatdown with a broomstick.

Jenn Sterger Really Likes Hooters

I ran across the blog of the internet phenomenon that is Jenn Sterger. Miss Sterger has turned a 10 second appearance on TV as a spectator and fan at a Florida State football game into money and a potential modeling career. The women is quite comely and quite busty. She will be in an upcoming issue of Playboy and has appeared in Maxim Magazine as well. By most accounts she seems to have a fairly level head despite her demi-celebrity status, although she does want to attend law school. (I can't imagine anyone doing that and being completely sane.) Now that I have given her bio, the real point of this post is the following quote from her blog:

After getting her settled and forcing her to sleep it off, I went to Hooters to clear my mind.

What!!!??? How great is that? I can't believe a woman would say this. Although, I guess there are less distractions at Hooters for a female than for a male. Since Miss Sterger is still finishing college I am going to grade this portion of her resume and it gets a solid A in my book.

Ahmad Rashad is a Terrible Host

I always thought Ahmad Rashad was a decent TV Show host. I grew up watching Inside Stuff on Saturday mornings and Rashad seemed to do a decent job on that show. Maybe I was just a stupid kid but maybe not. Then, I would always see him on NBC's NBA broadcasts getting great interviews. It was at this time that I discovered that he was a worldclass brownnoser especially for Michael Jordan. But, I still thought he did well as an interviewer because he was composed, smooth, and well-spoken.

Now, the great Ahmad Rashad, nee Bobby Moore, has been filling in on ESPN's Cold Pizza sports talk show and it is an unmitigated disaster for him. Rashad is unprepared, doesn't read all the text on the teleprompter, stutters and continues to ask the softball questions. Maybe Rashad thinks he's too good for this show and has decided not to prepare. Whatever the reason he looks bad.

When I first saw him on the show I thought ESPN was trying to up the star-power on the show, which isn't very good television, but now I don't know what they are doing. Hopefully, ESPN is only having him do a fill-in.

ESPN seriously needs some new material

I watched a Detroit Pistons games on ABC recently, watched Sportscenter regularly, and today I watched NBA Coast-to-Coast on ESPN. The one thing they all have in common...each show has played a story about why Rip Hamilton of the Pistons still wears the mask, as seen above. Now this might ruin the story for those of you that haven't heard it, but he does it because he thinks he has played well with it since the Pistons won the championship in 2004. Unfortunately, ESPN and ABC think that we need a 3 minute segment to tell us this AND the networks must beat this into our brains by repeatedly showing the story. It would be nice if the networks would do new stories that are current and important rather than this drivel. If you haven't seen the clip, Need4Sheed.com has it posted here.

Why Baseball Sucks

It’s been a while since I posted and I attribute that to the fact that this is the worst time of the year for American sports (and that I was basking in the glory of my 295th place finish in the ESPN Bracket Challenge). College basketball just finished, there is no football except for the off-season transactions, the only important yet extremely drawn out part of the NBA—the playoffs—is still a couple weeks away, tennis and golf seasons are just starting up, and the most boring sport of them all has just started—baseball.

Now, the fact that I find baseball tedious doesn’t mean I won’t follow it. In fact, the American sports media almost requires any sports addict, such as myself, to follow it because it’s the sport the media will cover the most extensively. Because of this sad state of affairs I am in the mid-spring sports doldrums that I suffer each year and I will offer up my top ten reasons why baseball sucks.

10. Roger Clemens—This guy is a major league pain in the ass and I think Brett Favre is trying to emulate Clemens. I’m not against a player trying to get everything he can out of a team as far as salary and benefits go, but I think it’s getting a little ridiculous. Will he or won’t he play? I don’t care. Go home and throw BP at your kids’ heads for all I care.
9. 162-game season!—Baseball doesn’t need 162 games to determine who should make the playoffs. Schedule length is the second biggest reason why baseball is so boring (see #4 below). As it is there are many meaningless games during the season. With forty less games a team can play all its league opponents 7 times and several interleague series. This would increase the importance of each game and shorten the impossibly long 7 month season by about a month and a half.
8. Fantasy Baseball—is one of the worst developments in baseball in recent history. It also shows that the game itself isn’t interesting enough for fans to follow and they need a contrived “game” to continue to follow baseball. Although the other sports have fantasy leagues they aren’t as central to most fans that follow the sport. Moreover, these fantasy teams create the odd situations where fans rooting allegiances are altered based on who they have on their teams. A Yankee fan may root for David Ortiz to play well because it helps his fantasy team and that is sacrilegious in the realm of sports fandom.
7. David Wells, Bartolo Colon, etc.—Although the likes of David Wells may attract people to baseball as an everyman sport just like John Daly does for golf, it is unfathomable to have a sport where players are routinely not in top physical shape, especially when the athletes get millions of dollars.
6. Bud Selig—What’s not to like? Stuck his head in the sand on steroid issue; almost destroyed baseball with the labor dispute in ’94; has allowed the chasm between the haves and have-nots to widen; allowed the All-Star game to end tied; etc. Some say he has been visionary because he created the wild-card and inter-league play, which both existed in all the other major sports. Oh yeah, he was also the owner of an MLB team while he was the commissioner. Can anybody say “conflict of interest.” Under Bud’s watch, MLB has become number 3 in the minds of American sports fan.
5. The Florida Marlins—The Marlins have a $15 million dollar payroll!!! 15!!! A-Rod makes 25 mil a year!!! How can you call it a sport when a team has mailed it in before the season even start? The fact that a team can do this is redonkulous!
4. The Game is SLOOOOOW—I’ve had more fun watching paint dry. A pitch takes less than a second to get to the plate and 75% of the time nothing happens. The other 25% a player may get a hit which adds an extra 5-7 seconds of action and then we wait to rinse and repeat.
3. Steroids—It says a lot about baseball that the most intriguing thing about the sport in the last 15 years has been its ties to steroids. It should be that the teams and the competition are compelling but it isn’t. It took these performance enhancers to make baseball relevant again after the strike in ’94 and the fact that it has become public knowledge now makes steroids the biggest story in baseball. This is over all of the supposedly great competition and teams and everything else that actually has to do with the actual play of the game.
2. The Yankees—A lot of people hate the Yankees just because the team is a consistent winner. But, the thing about the Yankees that makes baseball suck is that they (primarily George Steinbrenner) embody all that is bad with baseball, which is that only the rich, profligate spenders can win and contend. What makes the NFL great is that there is a lot of parity in the spending of teams which means many teams have a shot to win. However, baseball doesn’t have that because the league can have a $200 mil payroll for the Yanks and a $15 mil one for the Marlins. That just isn’t conducive to producing a good, competitive league.
1. Boston Red Sox Fans—Quite simply, these people are the most annoying fans in the world. Their world revolves around their team, so much so, that they all think they know better than the manager or the GM. And then, the minute anything goes awry they start whining and crying about the sky falling. There is nothing more annoying than know-it-all, whiny, cry-baby fans. This includes Bill Simmons.

I finished number 295

• Florida won last night in a rather boring game, unless you're a Florida fan. I can't say that I'm a Gator supporter, but I'm not a Gator Hater (except in football). However, I was glad to see them win because it put my ESPN bracket into the number 295 position. Not bad, but I must confess I did fill out multiple brackets and I only had these two in one other final four. Too bad I didn't put any money on this bracket in a pool.
• In other news, Anna Benson apparently wants to reconcile with her husband after filing for divorce and saying their marriage was "irretrievably broken." I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. Or, it was a PR stunt.

I'm number 648!

Heading into the NCAA championship game, I am currently ranked number 648 on ESPN's bracket challenge. I picked Florida over UCLA in a high scoring game. Right now the high scoring part seems far fetched because both teams play good defense. But, both teams can score a lot as well. Screencap of my standing below:

Final Four Recap

Not much to say other than the losing teams got their asses handed to them. It was kinda sad to see George Mason and its Cinderella story go by the wayside, but Florida was clearly the better team. As for UCLA, their guard play and deep bench was too much for LSU.

One really annoying thing was that CBS would replay each dunk three times from different angles even if the dunk was rather pedestrian. A few times this led to CBS missing some realtime action.

Anna Benson Prepares to Sleep with the Entire Orioles Team

Anna Benson filed for divorce from her husband Kris, a newly acquired pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles. Ordinarily, the divorce a MLB player wouldn't be big news but Anna Benson is a larger than life character in more ways than one. She's a former stripper who loves guns. She has big fake boobs. And, in 2004, she told Howard Stern that if Kris ever cheated on her she would sleep with his entire team to get back at him. At that point many of his teammates may have tried to set him up so that she would have to carry through on her promise.

It is now being reported in the NY Post that Kris did in fact cheat on Anna. I wonder if she will do like she promised? Could be interesting.

Maybe It's That Time of the Month for Marcos Senna

As I mentioned yesterday, Marcos Senna had seriously bloody shorts and I, being a man, certainly wouldn't want to bleeding from where he was in the Champions League match against Inter Milan. Here is an actual picture from the game that I've finally found.

Maybe there is a real scandal here and Marcos Senna is actually a woman.

The Fighting Irish and the Catching, Dunking, and Sprinting Duck

Today it was announced that Notre Dame safety Tom Zbikowski is going fight his first professional box match in Madison Square Garden. This development will make the Notre Dame nickname far more appropriate for Zbikowski since he will be fighting. Although, I imagine he's not Irish.


Not to be outdone is the Oregon Duck Jordan Kent, who is the son of the Duck basketball coach, Ernie Kent. Jordan is on football scholarship at Oregon, where he is a backup wide receiver entering his sophomore season. He never played football until last season. Kent is also a sub on the basketball team and is a star sprinter on the Oregon track team. It's amazing that Kent is able to do all three sports and start taking graduate courses next year. Kent plans on focusing on the football because of his size and speed. The Portland Tribune did a nice write-up of this three-sport athlete.

Not a Good Place to be Bleeding

In the first leg of Villareal and FC Internazionale, Inter won 2-1. The game itself wasn't very impressive but there was an odd occurrence with one of the Villareal players. Marcos Senna, a midfielder, appeared to be bleeding from his crotch area. The entire inseam of his yellow shorts had turned red. I'm not a medical expert but that doesn't sound like a good thing. I can't find a picture yet, but the one on the right is a fair recreation of the actual image.

Memo to Bandwagon: This is me jumping on.

After watching most of the sixty games played so far in the NCAA tournament there have been several bandwagons people have started jumping on deservedly. Glen Davis and Tyrus Thomas of LSU, Joachim Noah of Florida are the most notable bandwagons still competing. I’m not saying these three haven’t been impressive, but the one I’m jumping on is the Brandon Roy bandwagon. I watched two of the three games the Huskies played, Illinois and UConn, and Roy was easily the most impressive player on the floor and this includes Rudy Gay, who some think will be the first player selected if he enters the draft this year.

Brandon Roy was the Pac-10 player of the year. He led his team with 19.9 points per game (27th in the nation), averaged 5.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists, and 1.4 steals per game. Beyond his numbers, Roy was also the leader of his team. He played great team defense, distributed the ball well, and made crucial plays. He is one of the most complete players in the NCAA this year and should be one of the best players to come out of this year’s NBA draft.

Roy can slash to the basket and finish well. He also can nail the mid-range jumper and has improved his three-point shooting to 40 percent. He is a very tough on the ball defender and his length can make things very difficult for 1s, 2s, and 3s. Moreover, he can even play some point guard because he handles the ball so well. Obviously, he is a well-rounded baller and will help a team out immediately.

If you had to make comparisons for Roy with current NBA players, you would have to look to some of the best out there like Kobe Bryant because they both are very aggressive defensively and can finish well, although, Roy will not have the same baggage as Kobe. Roy is already a polished player and will be a star in the League.