Slaughterhouse Monday

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While I was in Chicago, I got into a discussion with a reader about whether high school was too early to read Vonnegut. While the results of that conversation were inconclusive, this post is unequivocally too late. So it goes.

Week three of college football and week two of the NFL definitely stand as prime territory for some on-field slaughters, and this past weekend did not disappoint in that regard. First, Vandy took the Presbyterian Blue Hose to the woodshed in Nashville, where the Commodores claimed their first win of the season by a 58-0 mark behind new starter Austyn Carta-Samuels. It was the Vanderbilt running game, nonexistent last week against Northwestern, that shone this Saturday, when Zac Stacy took the first Vanderbilt play from scrimmage 86 yards to the house and never slowed down.

There was no shortage of lopsided scores around the country Saturday, including Clemson’s 41-7 takedown of in-state team Furman, the expected Arkansas defeat at the hands of Alabama, 52-0, and other top five blowouts, including LSU’s (63-14 over Idaho), Oregon’s (same score, over Tennessee Tech), and Florida State’s (52-0 over Wake Forest). Not all of said slaughters were so favorable for teams this space likes to track, particularly including Notre Dame’s 20-3 takedown of Michigan State in East Lansing, for which there is no excuse. I’m glad I couldn’t watch it.

The NFL wasn’t especially compelling this weekend, even though a number of games on Sunday afternoon came down to the wire, technically speaking. The main NFL topic this week is likely to be the Monday night game, which has already seen its share of storylines, including multiple Peyton Manning interceptions early and an apparent lack of control by the scab referees.

To round out the slaughter theme, of course, we go to the Motor City, where the Tigers continue to lose, first on a blown save by Jose Valverde against the mighty Cleveland Indians, and then in a make-up game this afternoon against the inexplicably division-leading White Sox.

Friday Jams: MAKE PLAYS!

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Some readers out there might not know that the annual Michigan State-Notre Dame game is a big rivalry game.  In fact, it is probably the biggest game on Sparty’s schedule each year aside from Michigan, and the Domers take it pretty seriously too.  They even play for a megaphone.  How fun is that?  Anyway, the point of this intro is that since it is such a big rivalry, emotions often run high postgame.  That was the case in 2006, when Notre Dame came back to win after trailing by 16 entering the fourth quarter.  This inspired Detroit-area radio host and Michigan State alum Mike Valenti to go on a tirade that will undoubtedly stand for years to come as the greatest approximately 18 minutes in radio history.  Give this one a listen, I can promise you will not regret it.

Also, since I likely won’t write anything else before Sunday, I just want to say that Jim Harbaugh still sucks.  In fact, I think this calls for another Friday Jam.  So go ahead and press play on Gridiron Heroes and weep after you realize that your favorite NFL team will never have a fight song that comes close to being this awesome (unless your favorite team is the Lions, like it should be).

The DET Offensive: Get perspective

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As the Tigers, clear preseason favorites to run away with the division, continue to stumble and struggle in early September, it’s been difficult for Detroit fans to reconcile what they’re seeing with their expectations. At this point, even a winning streak seems out of reach, much less a playoff berth.

Other teams have been here before, though, and whether this team’s fall will be more like last year’s Cardinals or Red Sox (or some twisted, Detroit-misery-special fusion of the two), at least there’s a model; I do not yearn for the historical recognition for which I yearned in 2003. I was about to go cry to Jonah Keri for another explanation of what’s happening when I found that Shaun Powell had, in concise and mostly soothing fashion, reminded me of what I already knew. Of the AL Central race between the Tigers and Chicago White Sox he wrote:

Neither team looks fabulous here in the late summer, and neither is dropping hints that it can rip through September and October and steal someone else’s World Series trophy. The Tigers are just seven games over .500 and the biggest underachievers west of Philly. Meanwhile, the White Sox may have beaten their rivals 6-1 on Monday night, but they still have bruises from a weekend beatdown at the hands of the Royals, who’ve taken 10 of 15 against the current division leader. Which says plenty about the division, the worst in the majors.

But none of that says anything about baseball and the wonderfully weird magic of September. Both the sport and the month are utterly unpredictable.
…
[I]t’s also possible that we’re in the midst of a stirring four-game series at The Cell [Series currently tied 1-1. -ed.] that allows either the Sox or Tigers to finally press the accelerator and distance themselves from their murky status once and for all. All it takes for any team within striking distance is a stretch where the switch flips on, and the same team that spent the first half of September mumbling to itself will spend the last half of October pinching itself.

That’s baseball. That’s also the ’03 Marlins, who settled for the wild card after finishing 10 games behind the Braves, then beat three favored teams in the postseason. That’s the ’06 Cardinals, who lost ace Mark Mulder, finished the season 83-78, then sucker-punched the Mets in seven games to win the NL and shocked the Tigers to sip champagne. And that’s the ’11 Cardinals, who wiped out a 10½-game deficit to steal the wild card, and you know what happened next. Craziness happened. Magic happened.

Whatever happened to the White Sox and Tigers from April until now has very little to do with what comes next. Because this stage of the season isn’t about the best team, it’s about the hottest. It’s about who can find a pitcher or two, and a manager who knows the right buttons and strings to push and pull, and a hitter who doesn’t shrivel in the clutch. If this comes together in the final eight weeks in the fall, it can make the previous 20 weeks seem an insignificant speck in the rear-view mirror.

Even if the Tigers can’t get rhythm, at least they can get some perspective. They’ll take anything they can get at this point.

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Previously
Everybody knows this is nowhere – 8/31
Now it’s just offensive – 8/29
Explode! – 7/23
Halfway at the Half-way – 7/9
Interleague Play – 6/26
Call the Experts! – 5/26
Recipe for a Slumpbuster – 5/2
Delmon Young Swings and Misses – 4/30
Brennan Boesch’s Birthday – 4/12
Tigers open 2012 season with Sawks sweep – 4/9

The NFL Lawsuit That Could Be Bigger Than The Bounty Scandal (via Deadspin)

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Preliminary arguments began Thursday in Minneapolis in a lawsuit against the league that harks back to the worst sports scandals of the last generation: unrestrained collusion among the owners to keep payrolls down.

The facts in the White case are straightforward and damning, and largely agreed upon by both sides. In 2010, the last year of an expiring labor deal, there was no salary cap. Teams were ostensibly free to carry whatever payroll they could afford, but in their summer meetings the owners came to a secret agreement. No one would cross the $123 million boundary, because if some teams spent freely, that would drive up prices for teams that would rather not spend at all.

The imaginary salary cap “came up several times in our meetings,” said John Mara, Giants owner and chairman of the NFL’s management committee. Still, four teams took the gentlemen’s agreement as something less than binding, because after all: There was no actual rule. The Redskins, Cowboys, Raiders, and Saints all spent more than $123 million, despite being warned “at least six times” that serious consequences would follow. And sure enough, the gavel came down. This season and next, Washington and Dallas (the two biggest spenders) will forfeit a combined $46 million in salary cap space, to be distributed among the other teams.

In other words: Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones are being punished for failing to collude with their fellow owners in a secret deal to keep hundreds of millions of dollars out of the hands of NFL players. … Read More

(via Deadspin)

Memphis to accept guns in exchange for Grizzlies tickets

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The Commercial Appeal reports:

The city of Memphis will trade gas cards and Grizzlies tickets for guns in a “judgement-free” program designed to reduce the number of weapons on the streets.

During the event from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Bloomfield Baptist Church, the city and its partners plan to hand over a $50 Mapco gas card for each gun a person turns in, for a maximum of $150 worth of gas cards, per person. Those who surrender guns will also receive two free tickets to a preseason Memphis Grizzlies game.

Agent Zero approves of this basketball/guns program.

ALDLAND Podcast

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Last weekend was exciting, with some upsets in college football and the beginning of the NFL season, and ALDLAND is here to talk about it.  Plug in your headphones, turn up the volume, and give this robust podcast a listen.

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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:

Jeff Backus is transparently terrible

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Goodness gracious he’s the worst. Once the pride of the Wolverines, he no longer can block opposing defenders from destroying Matthew Stafford and, apparently, cannot even block the general public from seeing his hindquarters. (Semi-NSFW.) He should be fired for wardrobe malfunction or football-playing malfunction. Either way is fine with me.

(HT: Laura)

RGIII continues to flip the script

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Yes, he’s only played one professional football game, and yes, the cases for his extraordinariness and ordinariness have been made and made and made, and yes, I’m a fan of his, but still, Robert Griffin III continues to impress.

Often, we are able to view an athlete’s greatness directly. Such has been the case for Griffin, who previously played major-conference college football and now plays in the NFL. Other times, we are able to detect evidence of an athlete’s greatness indirectly. Those times may be tougher to identify, but they also may be more illuminating and demonstrative of greatness.

If you just pulled your head out of your old pile of Sports Illustrated for Kids and haven’t really paid attention to the NFL over the last ten years, you might not realize that Griffin’s current head coach, Mike Shanahan, doesn’t really have a great reputation these days. In particular, he’s got a bad one for ruining quarterbacks. Just ask Donovan McNabb.

That’s why one of the most amazing results of RG3’s stellar debut on Sunday has been the evaporation of anti-Shanahan sentiment in the media. Far from destroying the great potential Griffin represents, Shanahan installed a plan that is being called “brilliant” and “beaut[iful]” and a lot of other nice things around the web.

Should things continue along the path Griffin started down on Sunday, the redemption of Mike Shanahan won’t be RG3’s greatest accomplishment, but it might be one of his most telling. At the very least, it will tell us what we knew all along: it’s the players who ultimately make the coach, not the other way around.

Mistake by the Lake: Northwestern rains on Vanderbilt, 23-13

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As announced, ALDLAND was in Evanston, IL on Saturday for live coverage of week two’s only SEC/Big Ten matchup. I could use this space to talk about how systematically unprepared Evanston is for big time football on a socio-infrastructural level– be it the lack of parking, tailgate space and supplies, and uniformly green playing surface or the general irritability of the fan base– but we easily overcame all of those would-be hurdles on our way to an enjoyable afternoon on Lake Michigan’s southwestern shore, and, more to the point, you might think I was trying to distract you from what happened once the sun went down and the lights came on at Ryan Field. (Just don’t ask anyone in Evanston for directions to Ryan Field on gameday and expect a helpful answer.)

The Commodore offense could’ve used some better directions to Ryan Field on Saturday as well. The not-so-mild ‘Cats effectively shut down a running unit that’s supposed to be one of the SEC’s best, and the passing attack was mostly ineffective all by itself, particularly in the second half, during which the Black & Gold donned snapback Honolulu Blue costumes and threw bubble screen after useless bubble screen on their way to three big points.  On the other side of the ball, NW’s no-huddle approach to offense, coupled with an extremely mobile quarterback, shredded the Vandy defense with ease.

Looking ahead to the meat of the in-conference schedule, the Commodore faithful may need to revise their optimistic outlook in light of a uniformly weak showing against a comparatively weak opponent.

New season Monday

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Football is underway at all levels, which means that this weekly roundup/preview post is back.

College football’s second week portended less excitement than its opening week, and yet there seemed to be more surprising results this week than last. In particular, two teams with a lot of preseason promise took big hits on Saturday. The Wisconsin Badgers fell out of the Top 25 and fired their offensive line coach after a loss to Oregon State in which the traditional running power generated only thirty-five yards on the ground. Arkansas’ drop from the rankings was even more precipitous, as the Razorbacks lost to Louisiana-Monroe. Michigan, fresh off a no-show against Alabama, nearly lost their home-opener to Air Force, while Clemson nearly doubled up Ball State to stay undefeated, a status they’re likely to carry into their meeting with #5 Florida State in two weeks after facing in-state lightweight Furman this weekend. Michigan State also stayed undefeated with an easy win over Central Michigan, while Vanderbilt fell to 0-2 at Northwestern in a game I attended and more about which I will writehave written.

Robert Griffin III was the star of the NFL’s first Sunday of 2012, while Andrew Luck found himself grouped with more pedestrian rookie QB starters Brandon Weeden and Ryan Tannehill. The always-overhyped Jets turned in the surprise team performance of the day, a 48-28 win over Buffalo. The Lions, who have an official drum line, came from behind to beat the Rams in the last ten seconds of the game, and Peyton Manning returned to form in an ultimately convincing win over Pittsburgh.

Outside of the football world, Serena Williams gutted out a win at the U.S. Open, her fifteenth Grand Slam title, and Jeff Gordon announced that his “absurdly comical mustache” for the NASCAR Chase (i.e., playoffs), which begins this weekend in Chicago.