December 24, 2006
OTSS
I wrote the following at the same time as the last entry, in a marathon-frenzy of pseudo sports blogging and shameful self involvement. But to continue the theme of not caring and making myself feel important, I'm putting the bball section into it's own entry in order to "maximize readership", here we go.....
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Lost in the insanity of the gridiron was the start of the '06-'07 NBA Season! New synthetic balls that cut players' fingers get the axe for the ole Leather standby, the Knicks get booed at home, then instigate some fisticuffs that get the league's leading scorer suspended for 15 games. And the Sixers saddle themselves with so much bad basketball karma they might as well mail it in for the next 50 years. All in less than two months, Good times!
The Mavs' chance at redemption after letting a championship slip through their fingers got off to a bumpy start, but things are looking okay. We're still right up there with the Spurs and the Suns (now with Amare) and this years' playoffs should be just as riveting as last years' was........................................................................................
uuuuuuuuuuuuuntil the Sixers shipped off one of the 10 best guards to ever play the game to the Denver Nuggets. Now the Mavs' road to redemption just got a giant tattooed and corn-rowed obstacle thrown in its path. Not only that, but my rooting for my all time favorite non-Dallas athlete and my bleeding Maverick blue (or green or whatever) are now thrown into direct conflict. Sports used to be so easy...
Of course the whole trade drama allowed the media to pick sides and rehash everything that's right or wrong with AI again. And I must say I'm pretty disappointed in the doubters. These people remind me of Richard Dreyfuss's character in The American President . To paraphrase Annette Bening, they claim to love basketball, but clearly hate basketball players. Have they learned nothing in the past 5 years? I can't say anything that I haven't already said , or that the Sports Guy (and his readers ) hasn't already written 100x more eloquently, but I must say it is truly sad how poorly the Sixers, and other AI haters, treated one of the greatest athletes and one of the most resonant icons of our time.
I must also admit I'm ecstatic for AI. He finally gets to play with a real supporting cast in an up-tempo attack. He said he felt like "a newborn" after his first game as a Nugget, and he really did look happy. He was playing with an extra abandon, and all bets are off for his ceiling this year. So in tribute to the rebirth of The Answer here are a couple super sweet YouTube compilations of his best plays.
This one is the most bang for the buck. A simple top ten featuring a great look at the infamous Ty Lue step-over.
This one is a little long, but I think it has the most production value with the perfect Tupac soundtrack and the "Jordan crossover" intro. (Although skilled with the matching of video to audio, our guy doesn't have complete command of the English language. Only the Strong Survive....no 's').
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Note: since his first game, AI has been just as good as expected. He hit 40 the other night and has kept up an increased pace in assists (although the Nuggets did falter a bit the next night on the road, I think the new offense and high altitude will suit him just fine, good for me the AI fan, bad for me the Mav fan).
December 23, 2006
This entry is long and possibly incoherent, and all about sports...
Hey! Look at that, I went an entire season without updating the Pizzle. (That's slightly ironic, because I live in a place where's not much difference between the seasons.) Wow that parenthetical was severely obnoxious. But what the hell, it's almost the new year, I'm typing this on a new laptop, let's leave that shit in. So what brings me back? Well, ESPN recently declared that Vince Young and the Horns beating USC was the top story of 2006. Brilliant! That game (followed by the Mavs, followed by the World Cup) merely whetted my already voracious appetite for football, and that's pretty much what's been occupying my time for the past 4+ months, FOOTBALL! (That, and a big implementation project at work, and my re-entry into the student world with a once a week foray into Intermediate Accounting, but mostly it was football)
I'm a nut, a ridiculous lunatic when it comes to the Great Game, and when it comes to the fantasy version of said game, I decided to throw all caution into the wind, and really test my limits. This past season, I decided to not say no and joined a total of three and a half leagues. I did this only a year after very reluctantly and with much trepidation joining a second league. After all, I thought, I should focus on one team, and I've got a title to defend. But of course money lured me in, and I ended up successfully defending that title, so when this season rolled around I thought, hey multiple leagues is easy! And I won money last time! Let's go all the freakin' way this year!
So I reconvened the traditional UT Austin/Moore-Hill friends and family league, re-upped with the Steve Cox yahoo money league, and even joined the Russ Abdullah total clusterfuck (way too many teams, way too many starting positions) league just for kicks. THEN, my boy Steve Cox made me another offer I couldn't refuse. A Cardinal Health office league on CBS Sportsline with an entry fee of $163 and featuring a number of middle to upper managers. More money and a chance to stick it to the man? Sign me up. So Steve and I split the entry fee and now find ourselves in the championship game on the brink of a pretty big payout. I'm not gonna jinx anything by naming the figure, but on the whole, this fantasy season will turn out pretty decently. I made the playoffs in all the leagues, and after a total initial investment of $155, my worst case scenario is a 167% net return. Beat that Wall Street!
That's not to say I'm not a little burned out (wow another obnoxious and crappy sentence, fuck it!, I'm pushing ahead and not looking back). By the time week 15 rolled around, I wasn't checking and re-checking my stat tracker as obsessively as I had been the first 14 weeks, and it actually felt pretty good. It was a relief not to be living and dying with every play in every game. Which, in a way, is a bad sign. It means I wasn't having as much fun anymore. So it's a good thing that the fantasy season has reached it's end, I'm going to need as much time as possible to recover until next August when the whirlwind will surely suck me back in.
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Real life football has also been pretty taxing. The acquisition of TO made the Cowboys relevant again, but we were still watching each game with the Bledsoe butterflies in our stomachs. We were supposed to be good, SUPPOSED to compete for the division, but our QB was so anti-clutch that we still didn't feel safe. We were still where we've been for the past 10 years. Rooting hard, loving the Star, but not truly believing. Thinking, yeah, maybe we sorta kinda had a small chance, but not really hoping, expecting the worst. Not really feeling the mojo.....and then.....
Ladies and Gentlemen, the magnificent TONY ROMO! A young, charismatic undrafted QB from division I-AA Eastern Illinois. He has worked his way up the depth chart, perfecting his mechanics and patiently awaiting his turn at the helm of America's Team!
Seriously, did this kid flip the script or what? He has exactly what the 'Boys needed, not just the mobility or the physical gifts, but the coolness and confidence (the, dare I say it, "Vince"-ness) to do the right thing with the game on the line and to elicit total trust from his teammates. There were some hiccups, the freaky loss in Washington, the beating from the Saints, but Tony's got us all feeling like anything is possible again. Man what a great feeling, he could go on to be a pretty mediocre QB over the next few years and, God forbid, he might not take us to the promised land, but Cowboy fans the world over will forever remember that he gave us that swagger and that excitement back. We are all Romosexuals, baby, and there is NOTHING wrong with that.
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Speaking of Vince, glad to see him start tearing it up way ahead of the schedule even his most ardent man-crushers like myself had laid out for him. All the doubters can take the "questionable delivery" and shove it and then they can Wonderlic(k) his balls, because he's a football player who is going to win games, pure and simple. His mojo did carry over to the pros and the rest of the league better start preparing for it. I'd be remiss as a trash talker not to take this opportunity to pour some salt on the Texan fans' wounds. Oh how you Houstonians loved talking shit about the 'Boys. Even when you didn't have a pro team you still had your inferiority complex and loved shitting on the Star when they were limping along in the post Triplet years.
And then, I had to endure all the barbs about how you beat us in your inaugural game, a full THREE years after it happened. Your team sucked, but you always feebly clung to the, "hey remember when we beat you" card. Well now it's my turn. Your team still sucks. And we got another chance, and we handed your asses to you on a silver fucking platter (with Bledsoe no less). Not only that, your team fucked up the first pick in one of the best drafts in recent memory. You could've had Reggie Bush and actually opened up your offense a little, or you could've had hometown hero Vince Young, but you decided to roll with David freakin' Carr and the short-pass-to-Andre-Johnson offense, with Ron Dayne and Samkon Gado as your running backs. It's perfectly fitting that Vince not only went to the old Houston team that you didn't even care enough about to keep, but that in his first game back, he did exactly what Vince Young does, and what the Texans could and never will be able to do. Win games. Now sit down, shut up and watch a real Texas pro football team go to work.
("Boy, that escalated quickly... I mean, that really got out of hand fast.")
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Speaking of great players (WEAK transition! AND this entry's already about 1,000 words too long, but I don't care, I'm gonna keep on truckin' baby), alot has been made of LDT's assault on the record books, but let me heap a little more praise on the already gleaming pile. I always hear that speed, power and vision are the keys to any running backs' success, and that LDT has them all in unfair amounts. But I've spent the last three seasons watching the Chargers more than any other team, and I'd like to submit an alternate theory.
What makes LDT great is precision. And with that, timing and efficiency. When LDT runs, he is precise with each and every movement of his body. There is not a single wasted step or muscle twitch. He knows exactly when to hit a hole or break it outside, when to accelerate or slow down, when to juke, when to head-fake, when to stiff arm. He makes it look easy not because of his physical gifts, because there are other backs that are faster and stronger, but because he knows exactly when and where to use each gift.
A corollary to this is that in addition to not wasting energy making unnecessary moves, he never wastes energy fighting through tackles and creating extraneous collisions. If he knows he's about to go down, he shifts his body and falls forward. It's simple, and not always pretty (you'll never see him pop a DB and drag a few defenders) but it creates two very positive outcomes. One, he rarely gets stopped for negative yards, if the defense penetrates, he simply falls forward to get a yard or two. Secondly, it keeps him fresh and injury free for the next play, the next game and really the rest of his career. (see the difference in the career lengths of Emmitt Smith or Jerome Bettis vs. that of upright bruisers like Eddie George or Earl Campbell) It's part of the reason he can reel off 85 yard touchdown runs in week 15.
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That concludes the football portion of our program, stay tuned for the bball entry and more sporty good-ness...
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Priest: ...ask yourself if that corpse of a slut is worth dying for.
Marv: Worth dying for.
[shoots priest]
Marv: Worth killing for.
[shoots him again]
Marv: Worth going to hell for.
[shoots him again]
Marv: Amen.