Starting Five
1. Kent State’s Andre Joseph got the college football season off to an…. interesting start Thursday night. Kent State punted the ball away to Towson, whose return man mistakenly touched the ball as it bounded by him. Joseph was heads up in realizing that it was a live ball, but was just a little turned around when he grabbed it up and began running the wrong way with it. Fifty-eight yards later, two Towson players shove Joseph out of bounds. Brain-lock gripped quite a few players on the field as the video shows several Towson players on the chase and some Golden Flashes blocking for Joseph. It was all for naught, as a muffed punt can be recovered, just not moved forward or backward. It’s a good thing NFL replacement refs weren’t involved or it might have been ruled a rouge.
2. With apologies to nominee elect Mitt Romney, and Florida senator Marco Rubio, the talking point from the final night of the Republican Convention looked like a late-in-the-show SNL skit. Clint Eastwood carried on a conversation with an empty chair, with the pretense that it was Obama in the chair. After a few moments where the watching world tried to figure out what exactly was going on, the reactions were rather predictable. Democrats made fun of it and Republicans made fun of it a little less. Invisible Obama had its own twitter feed moments later.
3. Floyd Mayweather has reportedly bet $3 million dollars on Michigan, who’s getting 14 points in their game against Alabama on Saturday night. Mayweather spent the last two months in jail, so he must have liked what he read about the Wolverines in Street and Smith. Unfortunately for Floyd, he laid his bet down before Michigan suspended starting running back Fitzgerald Toussaint for Saturday’s game. Toussaint was suspended after pleading guilty to a drunk driving charge on Tuesday.
4. Too bad for the Republicans that NFL cut down day comes one day after they wrapped things up in Tampa, because roughly 320 more people are going to be out of jobs by this evening. There are bound to be some surprises, there always are, but the biggest news of the day so far is that John Skelton has been named the week one starter for Arizona. It turns out the Cardinals $63 million bet on Kevin Kolb was even stupider than Mayweather’s bet. (Win or lose, betting $3 million on a college football game is stupid. Especially on a neutral field in week one. You should cap it at $2 million.)
5. It was this day in 1997 that Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. Her death came roughly a year after getting divorced from Prince Charles and conspiracy theories have followed the story ever since. And as if on cue, the young offspring of a dead mother was found stripping in Las Vegas 15 years later.
– Bill Hubbell