Starting Five
1. Your Fantasy draft should be completed by now NFL season opens tonight with the Dallas Cowboys visiting the Super Bowl champion New York Giants.
2. Oh, Bama! Crimson Tide supplant USC atop the AP poll (and Ray Ratto votes Texas State 16th after the Bobcats beat Houston).
3. Runner’s World debunks GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s claim that he once ran a “two-hour and fifty-something” marathon. Actual time: 4:01.25. Jim Ryun remains America’s greatest running Ryan/Ryun, with Ryan Hall second.
4. “TANKEES?” Not your best headline, New York Post, but certainly not your worst.
5. Yet another NFC South city hosts a major political convention.
Ratto-touille! Ray votes Texas State 16th, leaves Michigan off his ballot. Take that, centrists!
The Bench
Tyler Hamilton appears on “Today” and tells Matt Lauer, “I’ve lied to your face many times in the past.” And he wasn’t even running for office then. Hamilton recently alleged that Lance Armstrong gave him PEDs and has a book coming out, “The Secret Race.”
Memo to Florida offensive coordinator Brent Pease: It’s UF, not F.U.
Vowel check in the American League: O’s rip Toronto, 12-0, to climb into a first-place tie with the Tankees, while the A’s lose for the first time in 10 games.
Gunman kills one as Pauline Marois, first female premier of Quebec, delivers speech.
Hoping Bill Hubbell has more to say on this in “Day of Yore”, but today is the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Here’s Jim McKay’s unforgettable report.
From two nights ago, but Lionel Richie tore it up singing the Top Ten list on Letterman.
Will Muschamp has yet to announce it, but we strongly suspect that he will use Jeff Driskel in the first quarter and Erin DiMeglio in the second quarter at Texas A&M.
The European Union thinks Greece should work a six-day week. Good luck with that, EU.
By the way, quite the unusual upcoming weekend for Florida’s FBS schools: Miami travels to Manhattan, Kans., South Florida is off to Reno, Central Florida flies to Columbus, and the Gators venture to College Station. Florida has not traveled outside SEC territory for a road game in the regular season since 1991 (when the Gators were waxed at Syracuse). Technically, they will be in SEC environs on Saturday, since A&M is now an SEC member, but you understand what we mean. Florida State? The Seminoles will be home against Savannah State.
Thunderstorm rips roof off historic Needles theater. Our thoughts (and prayers, of course) are with Snoopy’s brother, Spike, a resident of the town.
No word yet on Spike’s condition
Saying you ran a sub-3 hour marathon is like answering “300” when asked what you bench, when in reality your max is 155.
The last six paragraphs of Matt Taibbi’s cover story on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital in Rolling Stone are an interesting take on the coming schism in American life. You, of course, may disagree. Taibbi hunts down Wall Street corruption with the same fervor as Darren McGavin once did chasing monsters as Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
George Michael resumes his tour in Vienna nine months after nearly dying there and donates 1,000 tickets to medical staff “who saved my life.” This is a man who first appeared on our TV screens wearing a “Choose Life” T-shirt, after all.
This piece is nearly two months old, but it’s the most recent post we’ve seen on the whereabouts of Darron Thomas, who should be the quarterback of a top five college football team right now. And to think that Tate Forcier, had he just remained at San Jose State, might have been able to engineer an upset of Stanford last Saturday.
If the Toussaint Fitz, wear it. Michigan RB speaks publicly about his arrest, suspension.
Canadian Football League update: Our man Anthony Calvillo, who turned 40 two weeks ago, leads the CFL in passing yards with 2,978.
Anchor Steam
Sarah French, Boston, ABC affiliate WHDH.
Market Size: 7
Married or Pet? Neither, we think.
Speaking, French
Sarah is a former Miss Missouri and a proud member, as her bio says, of Cherokee Nation (which is almost entirely unlike Red Sox Nation except for that Jacoby Ellbsury Navajo deal… this would provide Mr. Ellsbury a French connection, no?). This chair may be the only one that is too big for her.