by John Walters

They Went To Jaret*

*The judges will also accept “JP More Gains” and “Right, Patterson!”

Buffalo running back Jaret Patterson had a game for the ages on Saturday. In a game between two 3-0 MAC squads, Patterson rushed for an astounding 409 yards and scored EIGHT touchdowns on runs of…. wait a minute here while I look it up… 3, 31, 42, 49, 1, 7, 11 and 58 yards.

On his TD runs alone, Patterson gained 202 yards.

Patterson’s eight TDs tie former Illinois running back Howard Griffith for the most ever in an FBS game (Sept. 22, 1990).

Patterson’s 409 yards (on 36 carries) fell 18 short of the 427 gained by Samaje Perine (Oklahoma) in 2014, and his mark is now in second place.

Patterson’s teammate, Kevin Marks, Jr., had a decent game with 97 yards and two touchdowns, but few will ever remember it.

Notre Dame’s center is named Jarrett Patterson (broke foot versus Boston College, out for rest of season). He’s considered the best player at his position in college football. But he’s not the best Jarrett/Jaret Patterson in college football.

Patterson now leads the FBS in rushing at 230 yards per game.

Nate Crime*

*The judges will also accept “Dunked On”

Is there a more 2020 headline than “Former NBA Dunk Contest Champ Knocked Cold By 23 Year-Old YouTube Sensation?” Probably, but this is certainly bizarre enough to make the annals. Nate Robinson, who is 36, 5’9″ and during an unlikely 13-year NBA career became the league’s first three-time slam dunk champ, was knocked out and cold by Jake “The Problem Child” Paul. Who is a YouTube millionaire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJoAW0r9XQU

It wasn’t pretty.

One Small Kick For Womenkind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8DGRHN4YZs

In Columbia, Missouri, Sarah Fuller became the first female to play in an SEC and/or Power 5 football contest. The full-time keeper on Vanderbilt’s women’s soccer team, Fuller stepped in to assume kicking duties for the Commodores due to Covid-19.

Vandy being Vandy, it never scored and thus only kicked off once during the contest: a designed squib kick. The next day, Vanderbilt head coach Derek Mason was fired. Not because of this, but I’m sure Clay and Jason will find a way to correlate the two events.

Tantrump

Diaper Don is on Fox News this morning talking about “big massive dumps”. #DiaperDon https://t.co/KkZmUnNEKs

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 29, 2020

We don’t want to spend too much time on the lame duck, only to note this “interview” (diatribe) with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo Sunday morning (oh, now she’s bemused). We watched this and thought of a comment from a CNN or MSNBC guest a couple weeks back who noted that Trump was in the early stages of DABDA (Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance) that all terminally ill folk go through.

Munster 2024 https://t.co/VvU6ZEVdOF

— John Walters (@jdubs1966) November 29, 2020

But then we had a thought. We don’t believe the president will ever cycle through all five stages of DABDA. Denial and Anger, certainly, and to an extent even Bargaining (bits of all three in this rant). But Depression? Perhaps. Acceptance? Never.

That’s what makes him different. It’s also why so many people admire him, but this is not a virtue. It’s a flaw. Not a feature, but a bug. Not sure why so many people admire someone who can never admit they lost or they’re wrong, when they’ve clearly lost or are clearly wrong. That’s not heroic; it’s immature.

In An Instant

This is William “Rowdy” Harrell, who was living a dream life up until the moment it was all taken away. The Moundville, Ala., native was killed in a car crash last week while honeymooning in the Florida Keys. His wife, Blakley, also died in the accident. Harrell’s vehicle, a Toyota Corolla, apparently crossed the center line of a two-lane highway and struck a pickup truck. The other driver was treated for minor injuries.

Harrell was 30. He’d attended college, in Tuscaloosa, just up the road from his hometown. Walked on to the football team and was a part of THREE national championship squads for the University of Alabama (2009, 2011, 2012). Then he got a job with Hendrick Motor Sports as part of the pit crew. If you are a good ol’ boy, particularly one from Alabama, you’ve checked two of the three boxes (all that was missing was a stint on the Pro Bass Fishing Tour).

An incredible adventure. Cut tragically short.

Gone-olith

Remember the Utah desert monolith? It’s disappeared. Kudos to whoever pulled this stunt, be they terrestrial or extra-terrestrial.

What needs to happen next is for it to keep making surprise cameos in unlikely places. Maybe at the next College GameDay?

by John Walters

.@realDonaldTrump annual turkey pardoning at the White House. pic.twitter.com/6O6uCCOM92

— Erin Schaff (@erinschaff) November 25, 2020

Turkey-Based

We searched for this photo the other day, taken by Erin Schaff of The New York Times, but were unable to locate it in our usual haunts. This should be remembered as one of the lasting and great photographs of 2020. To see the angle as Schaff did and seize the opportunity, well, lens caps off to her.

Compliments of Four Seasons Total Office Furniture.

“I AM big, it’s the desks that got small.”

Amazon Vs America

Approximately 260,000 American lives have been lost since the first official COVID-19 death on February 29th (of course…on an outlier day comes this outlier year). And we’ll likely be north of 300,000 by Christmas.

But as fast as Americans are dying, Amazon is adding employees even faster. The Seattle-based on-line shopping goliath has added, according to The New York Times, approximately 430,000. Amazon’s full staff is now about equal to the population of Dallas.

So look at it this way: You’re either going to die or wind up working for Jeff Bezos.

Valley Of Fire

About an hour’s drive northeast of Las Vegas sits Valley Of Fire state park (and how has the road above never been used in a film…or if it has, who’s seen it?). There are some fantastic hikes here and the most you’ll lose is $10 (the park’s entrance fee) while there aren’t many $10 tables left on the Strip, so think about that the next time you visit Sin City and need a respite.

Katie McCollow, Artist At Large

Gus Johnson likes to refer to Jenny Taft as “The All-American Girl,” but we think the same applies to fellow southwest Minneapolis native Katie McCollow. This site’s top writer is also an accomplished painter (and improv actress and voiceover maven, etc.) and is probably too busy to paint you something to give as a Christmas present, but you may still reach out to her and request a print. KatieMccollow.com

Tell her Medium Happy sent you and you’ll receive a 0% discount.

“Roasted The Father”

An oldie but a goodie. Andy Samberg’s set at the Comedy Central Roast of James Franco. This is so original. Right up there with Norm MacDonald intentionally bombing his set a few years earlier. The look on Seth Rogen’s face at about :38 says it all.

by John Walters

Maradona!

Few athletes ever enjoyed a better day than Argentine striker Diego Maradona did in June of 1986. Maradona, who died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 60 (his liver had lived 180 years by then), scored two memorable goals in leading Argentina past England in the quarterfinals. One was the controversial Hand of God goal (above), the other was this…

The mid-1980s. What a time to be alive! The days were ruled by Madonna and Maradona.

Remember, not only did England/Argentina at Mexico '86 feature the greatest goal of all-time, it also produced this photo: pic.twitter.com/vwSXjgPxol

— Prescott Rossi (@PrescottRossi) November 25, 2020

And then there’s this from Oasis’ Liam Gallagher about the band’s brush with greatness. You may need to listen a time or three to decipher, but it’s worth it. Be careful of the “fooks.”

Check out Liam Gallagher talking about meeting Maradona in Argentina.

Legendary…https://t.co/Wpj3Ry5hsz

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 25, 2020

A Collinsworth Thanksgiving

Cris Collinsworth previews thanksgiving dinner pic.twitter.com/BADjHCOUeZ

— Joey (@JoeyMulinaro) November 25, 2020

Dyed On The Battlefield

President Trump and Rudy Giuliani were scheduled to appear at Gettysburg yesterday, but something innate in 45 reminded him that it was a battlefield where U.S. soldiers died and those old bone spurs flared up again. The visit was canceled.

Happy Thanksgiving, all! We’re off to work…

by John Walters

That’s Cold, Turkey

This turkey’s name is Michael Flynn.

One of these creatures deserves to be pardoned (because it is innocent), the other merits a DOJ investigation.

Someone wondered aloud on Twitter whether President Trump was going to pardon the entire turkey or only the white meat.

Did Trump pardon the whole turkey or just the white meat?

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) November 24, 2020

These are the jokes.

Now ME can walk out the door. pic.twitter.com/W9t835cyQZ

— Jeff Pearlman (@jeffpearlman) November 25, 2020

And here’s a fella who’s been doing some terrific impersonations on TikTok lately. This one of Tucker Carlson is spot-on:

https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1331418537391513600?s=20

A Team On A Remission

BYU, the only school in college football whose acronym also fits “Bob’s Your Uncle,” will not be playing this weekend. Not that they ever really were. But yeah, Washington reached out about a Saturday date and BYU knew that depended on Utah-Arizona State not working out and BYU said, “No sloppy seconds, thanks much,” but the problem is they should’ve said yes, anyway. That way even if the Utah-Arizona State did fall through (it did), at least the Cougars could’ve said they wanted the game. Now they look like posers.

Anyway, the worse team from Utah will be headed to Seattle Saturday (the Utes), due only to Pac-12 affiliations. Which is the game no one wants to see. Meanwhile, BYU was ranked 14th in the initial playoff poll which, we’re burying the lede, is an abomination.

Meanwhile, Minnesota and Wisconsin, whose streak of playing every year for 113 years is the nation’s in FBS, will not play this weekend due to Covid-19. The Badgers and Gophers will burrow into the Earth and remain in their holes. This is also the most played game between two schools in FBS (129 times), beginning in 1890.

The game will not be rescheduled. Paul Bunyan’s Axe will remain in mothballs. Sad!

Think of all the other events the game has overcome: the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the Lend-Lease Act, disco, the Dane Cook phenomenon. And this kills it? Wow.

Big Numbers

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits a record high and briefly eclipses 30,000. President Trump calls an impromptu presser to take a victory lap (maybe it had something to do with yesterday being the day the GSA acknowledged Biden as president-elect?). Also yesterday more than 2,100 Americans died of COVID-19 while it marked the first two-week period since the pandemic began that America recorded 2 million new cases in a fortnight.

President Trump was right: More testing, more bad news!

The More You Noah

This is Noah Harris. He’s 20 and was just elected student body president at Harvard. Harris, a native of Hattiesburg, Miss., becomes the nation’s oldest school’s first black student body president.

But is he really from Mississippi?

A Semi-Regular Reminder That China Is Fine With People Dying Any Way Possible

We were going to post a photo of the stairs Tianmen Shen (pro tip: follow
Hiking The Globe on Instagram) but then came across this photo, also from China. We love that this pathway exists and that some do-gooder group has not outlawed it on some sort of public safety basis. Let people have their adventures. And if they happen to die, so be it.

The staircase at Tianmen Shen.

This List, While Not Quite Garbage, Is Not Very Good

The New York Times, whose Arts & Leisure section was a little short of fresh ideas, ran a list “The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century (So Far)” Here are some of the people who did not make the list (movie actors only): Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon (criminally under-appreciated), Paul Giamatti, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson, Christian Bale, Jake Gyllenhaal, PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFMAN (I don’t care that he’s dead), Ed Norton, Michele Williams, Casey Affleck, Don Cheadle, Leo or Brad, Ethan Hawke, Sam Rockwell…

Should we go on? Joaquin Phoenix made it. Good. Tilda Swinton. Yes. Sairse Ronan. Of course. Of course. But the list is entirely TOO WOKE. Thanks a lot, Biden!

by John Walters

It’s Joe Time

While still playing both ends against the middle, Donald Trump has instructed Emily Murphy, the General Services Administrator, to begin making sets of keys for Joe Biden and his staff. It’s O-vuh.

Sure, Trump will continue to sow seeds of conspiracy on Twitter while retweeting the likes of Randy Quaid, but he’ll be leaving. Even Laura Ingraham is wise to it.

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1331077065475493894?s=20

It’ll take about 43 seconds for the far-right wing to go from “HE DID NOT LOSE THE ELECTION!” to “WHY ARE SO MANY AMERICANS DYING UNDER JOE BIDEN’S WATCH!?!?” You wait and see.

A Kubric Rubric

In the Utah desert, an elaborate hoax or the talisman from 2001: A Space Odyssey turning out to be real? On November 18 a helicopter crew from the Utah Dept. of Public Safety discovered the 10-12 foot object while surveilling bighorn sheep in the remote red rock country.

“One of the biologists is the one who spotted it and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it,” helicopter pilot Bret Hutchings told local news station KSL-TV. “He was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn around, turn around!’ And I was like, ‘what.’ And he’s like, ‘There’s this thing back there – we’ve got to go look at it!’”

Utah DPS is not disclosing the exact location so that visitors will not flock to it and endanger themselves. Also, so as to protect the ape-like creatures who are gathered around it.

Abilene It When I See It

Here's the entire segment for the thread pic.twitter.com/Kew6HsZctK

— CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) November 24, 2020

This still doesn’t top my 2014 Bahamas Bowl bad beat—35-point faves Western Kentucky gives up 34 in the fourth quarter, the last six on a 75-yard Hail Mary pass—but it’s awful close. You’ve got a two-pass play from the team up 34 in the final minute (the coach read from the wrong line on the call sheet) and then a pick-six to steal the win away from those who took the 39.5-dogs on a play that began with :07 on the clock.

Van Pelt: “Who bet on this game??? They’re goin’ straight to heaven.”

Today’s Thought

You spend your adulthood chasing enough money to have the life you want. Once you have that, you spend it chasing enough time to do enjoy your money. That’s the game. That’s pretty much the entire game.

You can always make more money. You can never make more time.

Love, Honor, Oubre

A week or two ago the Phoenix Suns traded their glue guy, 25 year-old Kelly Oubre, for one of my least favorite NBA players, Chris Paul. Within a week the OKC Thunder had shopped Oubre to Golden State, putting a smile on Steph Curry’s (and Steve Kerr’s) face for the first time since early in the first quarter of Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals.

Oubre, asked about the difference in franchises, pointed to what an absolute phony Suns owner Robert Sarver is. But we already knew that. Then the Suns let popular big man Aron Baynes go. It’s like they’re trying to make themselves awful.

You watch: Oubre will go for at least 40 the first time Phoenix plays Golden State this season.