Entries in the “Sports” category

Basketball is not one of my favorite sports. Generally speaking, the season is too long, teams don’t really play defense, scoring is too easy, and, when games are close at the end, the losing team constantly fouls the winning team to try and preserve clock time — what could be the most exciting part of the game is reduced to abject drudgery.

The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, also known as ”March Madness”, can be very exciting due to it’s single-elimination format, however, the way they play the last few minutes of close games mars an otherwise enjoyable experience.

I know it works once in a while, but that doesn’t make it fun to watch.

As the NCAA tournament got closer this year, I began to wonder just how long, on average, the last two minutes of a game actually takes to play, and if the closeness of the score matters. So, during the tournament, I got out my trusty stopwatch (last seen during Super Bowl XLIV) and timed the last two minutes of as many games as I could.

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Seen on a recently closed Boston sports bar located about three blocks from my apartment:

While I agree with the sentiment, I just wish whoever wrote it could spell.

When I walk by it almost every morning, I get a little embarrassed, and my OCD makes me twitch and begs me to stop and correct them. However, I know that as soon as I whip out a Sharpie and begin the correction I’d hear the “bwoop bwoop” from an NYPD cruiser, and then I’d have to explain/convince them that I was just correcting a fellow Yankees’ or Jets’ fan’s horrible spelling. They’d probably let me off with a warning out of loyalty to the teams or, more likely, because they’d think I was crazy.

I can’t be the only one who really wants to correct them, can I?

I guess this is what I have to look forward to seeing every time I open my door for the next two weeks:

Good thing I’m not a Jets fan.

If the Steelers win the Super Bowl, do you think he’ll leave it up for a while afterwards?

In mid-January, the Wall Street Journal analyzed the actual amount of play time of the average football game.  They added up the amount of time the ball was actually alive and in play in four different games, and it averaged out to about 11 minutes.  They concluded that the average game broadcast on TV shows 17 minutes of replays and 67 minutes of players standing around.  With the biggest game of the year coming up, I decided to do my own analysis of the actual play time.  Here are the results:

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According to Newsday’s Neil Best (who has been following this for some time), the Tiger Woods story has graced the cover of the New York Post for 20 consecutive days.  That’s one more than the old record held by 9/11.

To commemorate this historic event, I’ve compiled the 20 consecutive covers below.  Enjoy.

For the past several weeks, ESPN has been holding a “contest” to find the greatest sports highlight of all time.  It concluded last night with Mike Eruzione’s “Miracle on Ice” goal winning the prize.  The problem, in my opinion, is that it shouldn’t have been in the running in the first place.

My problem is in the definition of a highlight, or more specifically, a sports highlight.  Typically, each game or sporting event will have one or two moments that define the game.  In this year’s Super Bowl, that moment was clearly the play where Eli Manning escaped a sack and threw the ball to David Tyree, who somehow managed to catch the ball with his helmet.  What makes that play a great highlight is that if you take that play out of the Super Bowl, and put it into any game, even a pre-season game, it’s still a great play and a great highlight.  A great highlight should be able to stand on it’s own without the urgency or need of the back story of the game it occurs in.

Eruzione’s goal was a nice play, but had it happened in any other game, it would be have been forgotten as just another goal.  Take away the socio-political plot lines of a USA vs. Soviet hockey game, and that goal is just a goal.

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Just a quick note to say that everyone at JMDC headquarters couldn’t be happier.

One of the fish in the tank seems to be a New England fan.  The other fish are leaving him alone right now.  He might die of disappointment.

Looks like the cafeteria at work made Super Bowl cookies with the logos of the Giants and Patriots. Is it a big surprise that most of the Giants cookies were bought, while a lot of the Patriots weren’t?

I find it interesting because, due to the sizes of the logos, the Patriots cookies are a better value since you get more cookie goodness for the same price.

There are about 32 college football bowl games, and they’re all sponsored by corporations.  I’ve always felt that the corporate sponsorship missed the boat on them by not tying in more closely with the name and themes of the game.  Below are a list of bowl games I’d like to see:

• The Home Depot Toilet Bowl
• The Kellogg’s Cereal Bowl (how is this not a real bowl already?)
• The Apple iBowl
• The Hershey’s Squirt Bowl
• The Starbucks Soy Latte bowl (only Starbucks drinks served at the game = the most wired, and poor, audience ever)
• The FedEx Overnight Bowl (it’s guaranteed to end by 10:30am)
• The Pfizer Viagra Bowl (it automatically ends if the game lasts more than 4 hours)
• The Google Beta Bowl (the game works perfectly, but it never comes out of beta)
• The Poland Springs Water Bowl
• The Domino’s 30-Minutes-or-Less Bowl (6-minute quarters + 6-minute halftime = shortest bowl game)
• The Microsoft Windows Blue Screen Bowl (game play has to stop at least once a quarter while they reboot the computers)
• The KFC Famous Bowl
• The IKEA Ünferter Bowl (no one knows what it means, but it takes 30 minutes to set up and everyone in attendance gets an Allen wrench)
• The eBay Bowl (if there’s a disputed call, it takes 30 days to get it resolved)
• The MTV Music Bowl (at least there’d be one thing musically related to MTV)
• The Kleenex Snot Bowl
• The Motorola RAZR BWL
• The Alamo Rent-A-Car Alamo Bowl
• The Morton Salt Bowl
• The Grey Poupon Mustard Bowl
• The Cuisinart Mixing Bowl
• The Jell-O Shots Bowl
• The Playboy Party Bowl (everyone wears pajamas; and the cheerleaders…whoa!)
• The Coca-Cola Flavored-Sugar Bowl
• The Zagat Review Bowl (the recap of the game is, at most, five sentences, and pithy)
• The Play-Doh! Rose Bowl (everyone in attendance gets enough Play-Doh! and instructions to make roses which are thrown on to the field after every touchdown—the grounds crew has five minutes to clean them all up otherwise they will get hard and be useless to make anything else)
• The Body Shop Cocoa-Butter Bowl
• The Olive Garden Never-Ending Bowl (the teams keep playing till they ask for the check)
• The Las Vegas What-Happens-In-Vegas-Stays-In-Vegas Bowl (there are no recaps or clips about the game—it’s like it never happened)
• The Toyota Supra Bowl
• The ESPN SportsCenter Bowl (the two teams don’t play, they just watch clips from all the other bowls)
• The Greenpeace Mr-Splashy-Pants Bowl (can’t be played because it’s not dolphin safe and has a negative carbon footprint)
• The Sony PlayStation 3 Madden Bowl (the two teams just play Madden Football on a PS3)
• The Trojan Rubber Bowl
• The Heineken Keg Bowl (biggest kegger ever—second only to The Playboy Party Bowl as the most “fun” bowl to go to)

When interviewing an ass, would you kindly make sure there isn’t another one in the frame? Thanks.

I love ESPN, especially SportsCenter, and I love most of the commercials in the “This Is SportsCenter” campaign.  They are often funny, irreverent, and do a good job of incorporating, and poking fun at, sports stars.

One of my favorites from the last few years is The Manning Family Tour in which the entire Manning family (mother, father, three brothers) are given a tour of, what is probably, a small section of ESPN’s production offices.  During the tour, Peyton and Eli, each wearing their respective team’s t-shirts, are “getting on each other’s nerves” by flicking ears, giving wet willies, and even a behind the back kick.  While your focus is on the brothers and their antics, the tour guide talks about the various areas.  The best part of the commercial is when Archie Manning looks back at the brothers and Peyton points to Eli like it’s all his fault.  You can see the commercial on YouTube.

So, for the public’s benefit, I present the transcript of the tour.  I love how the hallway plays a prominent roll.

Anyway, that’s the control room.  Lotta chaos there, but it all looks good when it comes out on the show, actually thanks to those people.  Then over here in the digital center is our highlight screening area.  So that’s where we get all the games that are played that night down into ninety-second or two-minute clips or whatever you see on SportsCenter.  This hallway, it runs between, you know, between both rooms, you know.  If you want to get from the control room to the screening, then this is the hallway you take.  Questions or anything?  I can answer whatever you want about the place.  No?  Nothing?

How come neither of the two professional sports teams from Buffalo, NY are named the “Wings”?

Today’s been an apartment straighten-out day.  I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought a new Dust Buster and then used it until the battery ran out.  I also started reorganizing my kitchen.

During this whole time, I had the Daytona 500 on the TV, partly because it’s “The Great American Race”, and partly because there’s nothing else on.  I’ve never really watched a NASCAR race from start to finish before, but so far I have to say that I don’t get it.

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Went bowling after work today.  Had a good time, but bowled well under my average.  Usually my first game is around 90, but I pick it up after the warm up and generally finish somewhere between 110 and 130.  Tonight, my first game was in the 60’s, and my second was 94.  I didn’t even break 100!  Ugh.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I didn’t drink a lot.  Perhaps the alcohol allows me to relax and “be one with the ball”.