Starting Five
1. The theme thus far for the 2013 BCS bowls: Simply Red. On Tuesday the Cardinal of Stanford won the Rose Bowl. Last night the Cardinals of Louisville upset Florida in the Sugar, and tonight Kansas State meets Oregon in the stadium in which the Arizona Cardinals play in the Fiesta Bowl. The garnet and gold of Florida State won the Orange Bowl. Crimson up next?
2. So Andy Reid spent nine hours talking to the Kansas City Chiefs? David Frost and Richard Nixon are impressed.
3. Ray Lewis to retire. “The greatest linebacker of all time” is, at best, a specious argument. There is simply no fair way to evaluate players — at any position, in any sport — against one another across the pages of time. No fair way to assess Ray Lewis versus Dick Butkus versus Mike Singletary versus Ray Nitschke versus Jack Lambert versus Junior Seau. We will say two things: 1. Lewis was easily the greatest linebacker of his era and 2. Former Pittsburgh Steeler Jack Ham is probably the most overlooked great linebacker in history, but he just happened to play alongside arguably the scariest player of the 1970s, Lambert.
Jack: Both a Ham and a cheese…
4. Flori-Duh: This vignette may be the embodiment of all that is Flori-duh. It has the four elements that every solid Flori-duh tale should have at least two of: 1. Strip Clubs, 2. Horrible parents, 3. Alcohol and 4. Mug Shot. Kudos to you, Kenneth Rowe, for hitting the jackpot. In the words of Stan Verrett and Neil Everett (the best SportsCenter duo since Olberman and Patrick), “Is that bad?” “It’s not good.”
5. Notre Dame football verbal commitment Torii Hunter, Jr. (yes, that’s his dad) broke his femur (watch closely at about the 0:40 mark) during a practice for the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. The injury was non-contact and, well, freakish. How can we be so sure that Hunter, a wide receiver, broke the longest bone in the human body? Just check out this photo of the X-ray that he tweeted.
Reserves
Our pal Richard “e before i” Deitsch tweets out that “multiple sources” (um, Pablo Torre and who else?) inform him that guests on “Around the Horn” earn $1,000 to $2,000 per episode. It would only seem right that the guys who bow out early each day earn less, no? Then again, once you tell us that Tim Cowlishaw is earning $1,000 per episode of ATH, all arguments about what “seems right” fly out the proverbial aperture.
Did Master of the House John Boehner really tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, “Go f___ yourself!” outside the Oval Office? Honestly, the only way to solve this debt crisis is to fly Suge Knight to Washington, have him dangle each of those two by a leg from atop the Capitol Rotunda and threaten to release them unless they meet one another halfway. Ask Vanilla Ice. It’s an effective tactic.
“Are you kidding?” Heather Cox is as nice and genuine as sideline reporters come, and yet even she had to vent when a Rose Bowl stooge official pulled Stanford coach David Shaw away in the midst of her post-game interview. Much of the interview, in fact, looked as if Shaw and Cox were line dancing.
Here’s why Notre Dame should be, if not afraid of Alabama, at least respectful. Check out the size of this feral pig that was shot there just six years ago and of this gator that was caught there just last year. And then there’s D.J. Fluker…
“Mommy’s on fire!” was an even more unexpected quote from an ESPN babe that could be heard on New Year’s Day in Pasadena. That’s Hannah Storm talking to the Gyllenhaalianly handsome David Muir about her propane grilling accident. Navel-gazing? A public service? Exploitation? We wish Storm a full recovery, but we just wonder why this is a story on World News Tonight.
The true Walking Dead? Crystal meth addicts. Here’s the visual evidence.
Simple thought on The Tebow: Rex Ryan, who is still the coach of the New York Jets, is a risk taker and a renegade. So it stands to reason that given the circumstances late in the season, and given the earnest and team-first attiude of Young Mr. Tebow, and given Rex’s “Why the hell not?” attitude when it comes to most zany ideas involving sports and life in general, that he would have at least given Tebow a few snaps. You’d think that, wouldn’t you, particularly since Ryan watched Tebow lead Denver one year ago on an amazing fourth-quarter comeback that resulted in a win against his own Jets team. That loss was the difference between the Jets missing out on the playoffs and the Broncos earning a berth.
So, given all of the above, assuming you agree with my reasons, Ryan would have at least rolled the dice with Tebow for a few series. Which leads me to deduce that Ryan was always dead-set against the Jets acquiring Tebow and that he was furious when those above him went ahead and did it anyway. Rex’s refusal to play Tebow was about more than Tebow not being an NFL-caliber quarterback. It was a show of potency by Rex (which, by the way, is the Latin word for “king”) to remind Jet management that they may be able to tell him who will be on his roster, but they cannot tell him whom to play. And, of course, Tebow became the martyr.
If you want to give your child some freak-ass hippy name , do NOT move to Iceland, where the government actually keeps a list of acceptable names. This may explain why there are no great Icelandic football players in the SEC (Barkevious? Jadeveon?)
This is the story I wrote on Vontaze Burfict, the rookie Cincinnati Bengal who some teammates have hailed as the team’s MVP (and the tiger are playoff-bound), last March. Obviously, he the Cincinnati Bengal rookie showed me and a lot of other doubters. Still, he was both inconsistent and impertinent in his final season as a Sun Devil. The folks who evaluated him at the NFL combine and off his junior year tape were not wrong. People who knew him very well were telling me that he wouldn’t even talk to them, that they had no idea what was going on with him. At the time they were right. Burfict got his act together. Good for him.