I didn’t want to have to write anything about the Notre Dame/Navy game in Dublin– it’s 40-10 in disfavor of the Midshipmen right now– but then Jungle Bird showed up, and the environment demanded a digital response. Here’s the video:
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Related
The U.S. Open golf tournament turned interesting shortly after it ended
In light of news posted earlier and the fact that it’s the Preakness, there will be no Preakness live blogging this weekend. In lieu of a full preview, please accept the below photograph of Kentucky Derby winner I’ll Have Another, taken by equine extraordinaire Kenny Mayne, along with this note that the official Preakness “mascot” apparently is a fraud.
We’re not into name calling, insult hurling, or piling on, but this thing runs two ways, Chicago ABC affiliate WLS, and where all involved demonstrate objectively poor decision making in an objectively public way, and the whole thing can be presented in a brief, photo-driven post involving Los Angeles, we’re going to include it in this series.
(HT: Deadspin)
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Previously
Hollywood (Disco) Nights: A Hero at the Forum
Hollywood Nights: A Magic Haiku
Hollywood Nights: Z-Bo and Bishop Don The Magic Juan
We do a lot here with sports and music, so an opportunity to combine the two is pretty irresistible. Such an opportunity comes today in the form of a positive externality of the NFL’s crackdown on the New Orleans Saints’ bounty program, which we’ve been covering here on a derivative level. Back in March, the league suspended Saints head coach Sean Payton for a year because of the bounties. As a Deadspin reader reports, Payton seems to be handling his time off just fine.
At least nominally, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals have been on my radar since college, when they started getting some pub and a friend got into them, but I never listened to them, and I figured my friend’s allegiance to Grace Potter was based mostly on them both being female Vermontsters. When I saw today’s Jam for the first time, though, I realized my assumptions about Potter’s sound were inaccurate, and she, Warren Haynes, and Sean Payton are welcome to rock ZZ Top anytime:
When I found the first selection for our Silent Film Series, I knew that I’d stumbled onto something special that could be the beginning of something even more special. I thought then that it would be easy to find other entries of similar quality, but after a while, I reached a point where I thought it might prove too difficult to ever find a suitable sequel. I remain happy with the second selection because I really like it and it showed me that the series could be broad in scope, encompassing different styles.
There is a certain energy in the first video, though, and I hope to recapture that in the future. While we wait (and I catch up on the past week in sports-on-the-internet), here’s an intermission in the form of a still photograph that immediately reminded me of some of the energy in the first entry.
In case you can’t tell, that’s thirty-onetwenty-three year old and new Seattle Seahawk Russell Wilson and his wife.
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Previously
Silent Film Series: Virgil “Fire” Trucks (Detroit, MI 1956)
Silent Film Series: Baron Davis (Oakland, CA 2007)
(via Deadspin)
(HT: @MitchOConnor)
We’ve been quiet here lately, though not for a lack of notable sports events, even if they are coming in the one sport that’s currently in it’s offseason. Two big NFL stories have been developing in fits and tumbles over the past week or two: 1) Peyton Manning leaving the Indianapolis Colts, and 2) Gregg Williams and Bountygate. There isn’t much to say about the first story yet, or maybe ever. He’ll go to a team. It won’t be the Titans. And we’ll get some variety of Joe Montana in Kansas City or Brett Favre in New York. He won’t have teammates like Marvin Harrison, Jeff Saturday, and Dallas Clark who are on his level, and we’ll probably see a lot of sad Manningfaces peering out of an unfamiliarly colored helmet.
As for the second story: first, a nod to Deadspin for the title tag to this post, and very quickly second, this:
That out of the way, how much can one really say about the bounties Williams and certainly other coaches paid to players for big hits on important players, and how much does one really want to say given the at least tiresome and likely nauseating cliche-laden moral hand-wringing on the part of the sports media?
Instead, we’ll offer a short, derivative series on the bounty story through the eyes of the evolving media reaction. As usual when I start a series of posts without fully mapping it out, the first post is the best (e.g., here and here), and this is likely to be no exception.
This first item is interesting because it was a profile of the New Orleans Saints’ defense under Williams published just before the bounty story broke. Untainted by the news of the bounties, the NFL’s investigation, or the media reaction to it, The Classical’s Charles Star offers up an innocent (from the writer’s perspective) take that’s telling upon retrospective re-read:
That’s one of Ricky Williams’s $2 million legs being pulled inside the tent. And that’s his tent, his home, actually, at a campground in Australia. Everybody was looking for him in the months after he bolted the NFL last summer and before he abruptly returned to America this fall. But it turns out he was never that hard to find. … Read More
With Super Bowl XLVI three days rotten, it’s time to bag and tag the 2011 NFL season. Before tossing it on the heap of sports seasons past, a quick retrospective, weighted heavily toward recent events and the gimmicky.
First, in case you missed the Super Bowl for some reason, here’s the whole thing in ninety seconds:
(HT: It’s Always Sunny in Detroit)
Second, our coverage of the Big Game®:
After the jump, an infographic, a motion graphic, snipers, and more. Read on…
Winner: The New York Giants. They scored first, with a technical safety on the Patriots’ opening drive, when Tom Brady stood in his own end zone and intentionally grounded the ball, and they scored last, when Ahmad Bradshaw carried a little more momentum than he probably expected on a largely undefended running play, to beat New England 21-17.
Loser: The New England Patriots. Despite going down 9-0 early in the game, they took a lead into halftime, thanks for a field-traversing drive on which Tom Brady was 10-10 in passing. The Pats suddenly looked like their old, domineering, mechanistic, enemy-vaporizing selves. And they got the ball to start the second half! I sent a text message to Bdoyk at halftime: “Tide has turned.” Her response: “Don’t say that.” To the hyperstitious greater Massachusetts sports community, I’m sorry if that in-game prediction of victory caused your players to develop stone hands on the final drive. Keep reading…
ALDLAND 