SportsTirade

Am I the only person in the world who hates baseball, with a passion? Look, I'm not an intolerant person. I tend to be one of those people who is cool with stuff as long as nobody comes and tries to force it on me or get me to like it. And I love November, because it's the month when (a) there is no more baseball FINALLY!! and (b) it's Thanksgiving. I have become convinced that if global warming ever takes over the world, such that there is no more rain, then baseball will be played year-round -- because these guys just can't get enough of themselves, just can't play enough games, just can't have enough boring highlights on SportsCenter.

I hate watching SportsCenter during baseball season. I only watch SportsCenter to see highlights of college and pro football games, or college and pro basketball. Yet, Sportscenter is a disorganized piece of grabastic amphibian shit. They pollute their entire broadcast with all these crappy baseball highlights that they stick willy-nilly in-between the football and basketball highlights in order to fluff up the program, forcing you to watch the entire thing.

Look, football is very nice. It has its games one day a week and on that day I would like to watch all of the highlights from that day in a contiguous form, unsullied by heretical baseball bullshit. I don't want to see fat, steroided-up monsters playing baseball, I want to see them playing football. Basketball has more games, sure, but still I want to watch just the NBA highlights on a given day, rather than sit through the horrendous diarrhea of baseball clips that shittifies every SportsCenter between April and October.

To be fair, this is more SportsCenter's fault than it is baseball's. Yet I can't really bite the hand that feeds me. I mean, as biased towards USC as SC may be, as pompous as the anchors may be, and as much as they may think they are funny while in fact they are not, they still remain the purveyors of a wanted commodity. Yet if they were coke dealers they would cut their shit with ammonia powder.

This is SportsTirade, not some bullshit candy-ass blog, and I will speak my mind about the heresy that is SportsCenter. I do not suggest that it should be taken off the air, but I think that baseball should have its own section during SportsCenter such that those of us who do NOT want to EVER see another baseball highlight for the rest of our lives can not have to in order to see Vince Young demolish the Patriots next season.

-JSG

Now it's a matter of whether Texas can beat Oklahoma. In basketball. And what will happen after that.

The Horns are shooting 3's really well -- even their big man is nailing 3's. Their team is gelling. We need to keep our focus and poise on the next game. We need to work on getting to the hole from the perimeter, because once we get up against a tough D again, that needs to be where we go first before the 3's will open themselves up. I'm not suggesting we don't already have this ability, just to be prepared for it to be more difficult than it has been against weaker teams, and be ready so when it does happen, then you are ready and it does not shake you into playing their game and making bad decisions out of haste. Etc.

\m'/

I'm so tired of hearing people try to say that Vince Young has not yet proved he can pass in the pocket.

What the heck are they talking about, saying Vince Young "has yet to prove he can stay in the pocket and throw downfield"? Do you even actually watch football, or just write about it? Vince has thrown for 2,414 yards and 22 TDs, which while it's not the best in the NCAA, is awesome when you consider he also has run for 796 yards and 8 TDs. Not to mention that he did this with a receiving corps that is all freshmen and sophomores, except WR Brian Carter (212 yards, who is injured) and TE David Thomas (457 yards, 4 TDs).

People talk about his weird throwing motion, but how many Major League Baseball hitters have weird bat swings that nobody complains about as long as they keep hitting homers? Compare Vince Young's throwing to former Texas QB Chris Simms', who is now an NFL starter. Young has a beautiful soft touch and accurate, high-arcing long bomb as well as the ability to send a fastball strike when necessary. I've even seen blitzing LBs fail to strip the ball from him because they tried to swat where a QB normally holds the ball, but because VY throws slightly side-armed, the swat went through thin-air. Meanwhile Simms got stripped or blocked so many times it wasn't funny, and he only seemed to ever be able to throw bullets while if he could have thrown downfield, Texas would have been unstoppable with WR Roy Williams (now of the Detroit Lions).

So wake up, Vince can throw in the pocket, and if it collapses, he can throw on the run or just tuck it away and burn you with 4.4 speed. He can throw short or deep, and knows how to put it where only his receiver can get it. He's also a big, tough, strong athlete with a 6' 5", 225-lb. frame, significantly larger than Mike Vick, who is 6' 0", 215. That gives him better vision in the pocket, as evidenced by the fact that he usually hits about 7 different receivers per game.

Can we move on now, please?

For a long time now I have been getting pretty sick and tired about:
(A) PPL, stupid stupid PPL, bahhh-ing and neighing their gobbler-good song about Vick Vick Vick Vick Vick Vick Vick. Vick is a more accurate passer than Vince Young. Vick is so great so young, through his eighth start undefeated;
(B) Those same PPL being the blind leading the retarded;
(C) Them implying that Vince Young isn't accurate while at the same time Vince Young passes for at least 250 yards and 2 touchdowns almost every game, while usually either running for 200+ yards himself, or causing the opposing defense to focus so hard on him that it enables R.T./Prince Charles/MeltonTheClock/Young (two of whom aren't even in the EA Sports' NCAA 06 rosters) -- whoever's healthy among them -- to round it out to at least 350+ rushing yards nicely each game as well.

And I am so happy now because at least the top two things have stopped happening :-)

Oklahoma Sooners and Texas A&M Aggies can at least take refuge in the fact that they will never be as pathetic as Virginia Tech and all the East Coast biased crapola surrounding Scarface McCraw and his wiley band of Aggie-maroon-clad lunchbox bangers.

No wait, I got that backwards. What I really meant was, at least Virginia Tech can take refuge in the fact that they will never be as pathetic as Texas A&M, which is the most preposterous cult of hicks that ever has existed, replete with a fake army of shorn-noggined ugly guys playing bad choppy march music, and a legion of mainly Republican fans who holler like stuck pigs throughout the game (you have to hear it in real life to truly understand, it's not a natural sounding human noise... it is a specially passed down traditional yet inhuman cheer of Aggie fans that defies reason and would more well-suit a team whose mascot was Cthulhu rather than a dog who looks exactly like Lassie). And Virginia Tech can take refuge in the fact that, hey, at least they're not fans of the same Oklahoma will more than likely end up playing in the Alamo Bowl against the only team who beat Penn State, Michigan.

JSG

Ah, Shakespeare could not have scripted a better end to the season than the #1 and #2 teams going undefeated while everyone else conveniently loses. Ah, the niceties of not having a messy playoff system for losers like Miami and Penn State, not to mention potential "Stinkerella's" like Notre Dame and Alabama. Oh wait, I forgot, Shakespeare's plays usually had at least four major characters, if not eight or more; often times, a battle for supremacy was involved and an unexpected victor vanquished a bevy of top-end foes to achieve their position. Of course, they would often wield sabres; they often killed each other; and racial slurs and sexual insults were accepted as funny, politically correct jokes. Were they Aggies? No, but they seemed scripted, rather than seeming like actors within a fair competitive structure, such as a playoff system, where whatever the playwright intended does not always happen. The producers of the play would not want the actors being unregulated in such a way since their company's plays would lack good stories that nobody would want go to see, so they're sacred and pool all their money in an effort to save their Shakespeare, the BCS system.

Which, of course, relies on a bunch of gambling computers "garbage-out" lists. Mark Twain said, "There are lies, there are damn lies, and then there statistics." Of course, EBCSneizer Scrooge says "Humbug! There will NEVER be a playoff within 364 days of Christmas, not on my watch! Yarrr!!!" And all the University Presidents and network executives cackle and caw while stirring their cauldrons of molten gold, chomping on ACL cigars, shooting up concentrated cognac, and betting on all the games (which happens to be a sport itself, you see, which is why it's OK... I mean, hey, POKER is a sport right, which I think Pete Rose invented? Or were they just on right after each other on ESPN one time? I don't remember).

I think I'm gonna go play some more NCAA 06 now, and in protest of the fact that Jamaal Charles is not in EA's roster I'm going to play Texas A&M against Texas A&M. That's my favorite thing to do, because it reminds me so much of my other favorite XBOX game, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

BTW, speaking of that Cthulhu game, J. Edgar Hoover is a wuss who only gives you a .45 Auto to go up against giant hecatontapus-blobs with. That means they have more tentacles than just eight, like as in the eight tentacles of an octopus, or the eight wins of Virgina Tech. In fact they have 100 tentacles. Isn't that badass?

JSG

# posted by J. S. Gilbert @ 9:38 PM 0 comments

What makes SportsTirade different from ESPN columnists or whoever in the mainstream media?

Well, for one thing, I don't bet on games. Not that all those guys do, but I'm about sports for sports' sake, and I think gambling is boring. I want to also say that it's stupid, but I know that a lot of intelligence goes into gambling. So I do respect the gambling industry -- it is what it is. But it just doesn't interest me... sorry.

For another thing, I wear my team affiliations on my sleeve. Unlike the talking heads of corporate sports radio and TV, I don't pretend to not root for anyone. I'm more like your local paper's columnist who obviously is a fan of the local team, except for unlike those guys, I will not limit my scope to just that team. I regularly watch SportsCenter and whatever else, and I will feel free to sound off on whatever the topic du jour is, without hesitation. But you'll always know basically where I'm coming from, because I won't pretend to be unbiased while having an obvious tacit bias. If anything, I'll be striving to be very candid about my biases and (except in the case of hated rivals) be willing to give the benefit of the doubt where it is deserved.

Another thing that makes SportsTirade different is that here at SportsTirade, we celebrate November as the best sports month in America. Why? Because November is when there are no more baseball highlights cluttering up SportsCenter EVERY STUPID DAY. You know, if baseball just kept to itself, had its own SportsCenter, had its own channel, or at the very least, had its own day of the week, then I would be fine. I would be okay! But no, baseball has to invade every day, has to have more games than everybody else, and these games have to be longer and more boring than any other sport. What was considered the "best" baseball game of the 2005 post-season, for example, was a 5+ hour yawner between Houston and somebody. The World Series the past two years has been a z-fest. So at SportsTirade, we celebrate November because THERE IS NO MORE BASEBALL!

Here at SportsTirade, you will never have to read a post about baseball, and rarely about the NFL. Here we focus on the three decent sports that still remain: College Football, College and NBA Basketball, and International Soccer (mainly just the World Cup). I won't talk about hockey, golf, tennis, swimming or anything else. That said, I do occasionally watch these other sports, even lacrosse, and maybe the occasional NCAA Women's Volleyball or Softball game. But you can come here reliably for interesting discussion of College Football (both real life and computer game) as well as, to a lesser extent, basketball, and even less, soccer and NFL.

Lastly, SportsTirade is different because unlike the corporate guys, I'm not under any rules about what I can say and how I can say it. So I'll freely vent my spleen about the things in college football and the rest of the sporting world that most aggrivate me and drive me insane. Oh yes, I will not hold back conspiracy theory allegations or lambasting bad ref calls. I will not be afraid to insult large groups of people, like Texas A&M fans.

Hope you all enjoy it.

JSG