Starting Five
1. Let’s begin Cyber Monday with the latest development in the Casey Anthony story. If you have forgotten, Casey Anthony is the O.J. Simpson of filicide. A few days ago Orlando, Fla., TV station WKMG reported that detectives only searched Anthony’s Safari search engine and not her Mozilla Firefox search engine before her trial for the murder of her two year-old daughter, Caylee. Had they searched the latter, they would have seen that someone did a Google search for “fool-proof suffication” on June 16, 2008. Which happens to be the same day that Caylee Anthony died. So, yeah, that’s kind of a big cyber FAIL.
This smile says, “I do understand the term ‘double jeopardy.'”
2. The New York Giants are up 38-10 in the waning moments of their Faith Hill Night in America contest versus the Green Bay Packers. Tight end Martellus Bennett runs a short slant-in route over the middle, but Eli Manning overthrows him. The ball has already sailed past Bennett when rookie Packer safety Jerron McMillian buries the crown of his helmet into a defenseless Bennett’s facemask. Penalty, but who cares? McMillian’s coaches are probably happy that they have an “enforcer” in the deep middle and they know that upcoming teams –and their receivers — will see that tape. If the NFL is truly serious about making the game safer — and let’s face it, the most dangerous collisions occur between the hash marks on passing routes — then both players AND their coaches must be fined for such hits. Yellow flags will not suffice. Bennett said afterward, “It just knocked the wind out of me. I got pissed off. I wanted to kick his ass.”
3. Fortunately, Martellus Bennett was not injured too badly. If he had been, he may not have been able to save a fan’s life immediately after the game.
4. Johnny Manziel or Manti Te’o? Let’s first agree that both are deserving. In Johnny Football’s favor: in his first season, and in Texas A&M’s first season in the SEC, he broke Cam Newton’s record for total offense yardage with exactly 4,600 yards. And that’s without the benefit of playing in the SEC Championship Game, which Newton (who was also in his first season as a full-time FBS QB, it should be noted) had. If you want to quibble, you can point out that Manziel faced two FCS schools (Te’o, zero) but he did not play all that many plays versus either. As for Te’o, Irish coach Brian Kelly said after Saturday night’s 22-13 win at USC, “If a guy like Manti Te’o is not going to win the Heisman, they should just make it an offensive award.” He’s the best player on the nation’s No. 2 scoring defense, which is the number one indicator of national champions. Since the award was first given to Jay Berwanger in 1935, only one exclusively non-offensive player (Charles Woodson, CB, Michigan) has won it. And even Woodson returned punts.
5. This is rich. The 1/2 man in “Two And a Half Mennnnnnn”, Jake (Angus T. Jones), appears in a video imploring viewers to stop watching the No. 1 rated sitcom on television. “‘Please stop watching ‘Two and a Half Men.’ I’m on ‘Two and a Half Men’ and I don’t wanna be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.” Not quite a “tiger blood” quip, but we bet it got Chuck Lorre’s attention. Jones earns $300,000 per episode. That surely got George Costanza’s attention.
“Filth, filth, filth, filth/ Filthy, filth, filth, filth…”
Reserves
Let’s face it: Cyborg Monday would be better.
Spencer Hall of “Every Day Should Be Saturday” tweeted aloud who Fireman Ed is this morning. Surely you j-e-s-t, jest! Jest! Jest!
Mika Brzezinski, after U.S. congressman Eric Cantor (Rep.) appeared on “Morning Joe” and dodged every fiscal cliff question tossed at him as if he were Neo in “The Matrix”: “Thank you for answering our questions 45 different ways.”
More on Casey Anthony/Caylee Anthony. This is one of the more educational scenes to have aired on “The Newsroom” and it’s the first scene in which we actually thought, “Okay, maybe Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) is a bad boyfriend, but he’s not necessarily a bad guy.”
Did you read that WKMG piece on Anthony’s defense team? They knew the entire trial about the “fool-proof suffication” search and were just waiting for the prosecution to pounce on them with it. “We thought they were going to sandbag us,” one attorney said. Imagine being a prosecutor on that case, all the man-hours you put into it, and only learning last week that the investigators failed to do something as simple as pore over multiple search engines. That said, this is a terrific ad for Safari.
Air New Zealand unveils a Hobbit-themed plane. Making twice-daily non-stops between Middle Earth and Sauron.
Plenty of leg room
Seriously, who’s the producer at NBC Sports with the leg fetish? Have you seen the opening for Football Night in America?
Does Florida have an argument? Well, the 11-1 Gators have impressive victories over Texas A&M, South Carolina, LSU and Florida State, all of whom are ranked in the top 13 in the BCS standings. Georgia, also 11-1 and like the Gators, in the SEC East, has one impressive win. Over Florida. The Gators have the more worthy overall resume, while the Dawgs have the head-to-head victory on their side. Our friend Stewart Mandel at SI.com argues that this illustrates the value of a four-team playoff, but we only see more chaos. If Notre Dame, Alabama, Georgia and Florida were involved, whither Oregon? And Kansas State? After all, both are/probably will be 11-1 as well.
Do you know who this is?
????
Hints: He rushed for a total of 744 yards, or 248 yards per game, in his final three outings. He finished the season as the nation’s leading rusher. It says something about how much college football has transformed in the past decade or two that very few people outside of the Pac-12 recognize the name Ka’Deem Carey. He’s a sophomore, a local kid from Tucson Canyon Del Oro High School, who finished the season with a 146 yard rushing average. Carey destroyed Colorado, the most putrid AQ school in the nation this season, for 366 yards rushing and five touchdowns earlier this month. Honestly, we don’t even remember hearing about that (East Coast bias!). The Buffs, by the way, finished last in the nation in two defensive categories, although rushing defense was not one of them.
Notre Dame nose tackle Louis Nix, all 340 pounds of him, after the Irish stopped USC on four plays from the one-yard line (USC joined Stanford and Washington as having first-and-goals from the 1 versus the Irish since ’09 and not scoring): “They got to earn that shit!” That belongs on a chocolate-colored T-shirt.