Dan Snyder Is Michael Scott, Part 2
By Chris Mottram | October 6, 2008
Well, this pretty much speaks for itself. Here’s Mr. Snyder after the win yesterday enjoying his team’s success on the road. Warning: It’s even more painful than last week’s Snyder Gone Wild clip, so brace yourself:
PS. Winners & Losers still to come today, just as soon as I get a moment away from TSB duties …
(Via This Is an Adventure)
Topics: Mr. Snyder, Philly Sucks, Redskins | 2 Comments »
Skins Winners & Losers, Early Edition
By Chris Mottram | October 5, 2008
Jamie is back in NoVA, enjoying (hopefully) the game with our good friend Andy (better known here as Putts From the Rough), so he’ll be unable to do a post-game Winners & Losers thang. And I’m forced to the bar to see the game (stupid fucking Panthers hogging the TV), so I’ll be drunk post-game. So, in our absence, please use the comments section below to post your own winners and losers, or just to vent your frustrations. I’ll join you as soon as I return from the watering hole down the street.
We’ll be back with the real deal Winners & Losers post tomorrow, when we’ve sobered up. HTTR.
Topics: Winners & Losers, Redskins | 17 Comments »
Manny Ramirez Is a Clean-Cut Young Man
By Jamie Mottram | October 3, 2008
After a torrid two months to close the regular season in L.A., Manny has a homer in each of the first two games of Dodgers-Cubs. And as bad as I feel about that for Cubs fans, I can’t help but be happy for the guy who has been knocking the cover off the ball and entertaining us for 15 seasons. So let’s take it back to the salad days in Cleveland, as we did with slim Jim Thome, via ‘93 Upper Deck Manny, sans dreadlocks but irrepressible as ever.
(Note the similarities between Manny’s portrait and Dave Morgan’s. Birds of a feather, those two.)
Topics: Cardboard Icons, MLB | 5 Comments »
Dave Morgan Didn’t Make Me Write This
By Jamie Mottram | October 3, 2008
Three cheers for Yahoo! Sports executive editor and my boss Dave Morgan for making Business Week’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in Sports. Read the profile if you like, and know that, yeah, he does look kinda like Jon Stewart, but with a bit of Pete Carroll thrown in. He also doesn’t usually carry the lumber or sit on a purple throne, but it’d be a lot cooler if he did.
In other PR-type news, I’m reprising my role as an amateur talking head on tonight’s Washington Post Live from 5-6 p.m. ET on Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic (DirecTV channel 642). Bog is my co-pilot, and LaVar Arrington will be the in-studio guest, so chances of a Chris Farley Show-esque moment are high to quite high.
Topics: Personal PR, Yahoo! Sports, Comcast SportsNet | 2 Comments »
Football Players Are Smart
By Chris Mottram | October 2, 2008
The future of Eastern Motors commercials: Less Shaggy-inspired theme music and more, well, more of whatever the hell this is:
(Thanks to Steinz. And he says I never read the Bog. Pshhh.)
Topics: Clinton Portis, Absurd Video, Redskins | 3 Comments »
My Old Professor Is Slangin’ Mason Rings
By Chris Mottram | October 2, 2008
A few years ago, while struggling through my sixth year of college, I took a sports ethics course at Mason. It was a requirement for my Sport Management major, an area of study limited to athletes and people who couldn’t hack it anywhere else within the University, like me. The only thing I remember about the class is sitting next to Jai Lewis all three or four times that I actually went.
But when I saw this post on the Mason Blog, the name attached to it — Maurice Scherrens — rang a bell. Turns out that, yep, that was my sports ethics professor. Which makes this all the more ironic:
Two “George Mason Final Four 2006 Championship” rings are listed on eBay currently. One here and another here. In the description the seller claims to have gotten them from a pawn shop in Virginia and that they are both from the same player. So naturally I’m thinking Tony Skinn. Yet if you look at the engravings the name on each ring reads “Scherrens”.
The rings are currently going for a few hundred bucks each, which is significantly more than the zero dollars I’d pay for them. Although it is odd that a man making 230 grand a year needed some extra pocket change by pawning his rings. This has the makings of the biggest scandal Old Town Fairfax has seen since the changing of Ned Devine’s to the Auld Shebeen rocked the town to its core. The 22030’s douchie nightclubs posing as Irish pubs industry hasn’t been the same since.
Also, if you’d like to hear a really cool story(!) about the day Mason made it to the Final Four, check out The Big Lead. That man is the greatest story teller of our generation.
Topics: George Mason | 7 Comments »
Pithily Ranking All 8 MLB Playoff Teams
By Jamie Mottram | October 1, 2008
This list is excerpted as part of a group effort over at Yahoo!’s Big League Stew, and the others in the group actually know shit about baseball, so you should just go there now.
1. Red Sox: Kevin Youkilis’ batting stance bothers me so much, as does every fiber of Jonathan Papelbon’s being. Still, they score more runs than anyone else in the AL quartet, and their pitching is near the top.
2. Cubs: Not sure the city of St. Louis could survive a Jim Edmonds-powered Cubs championship. And by “city of St. Louis,” I mean Will Leitch.
3. Phillies: Jamie Moyer’s continued success is beyond my realm of comprehension, but I refuse to question it. After him and Cole though, that rotation is more suspect than Jayson Werth’s landing strip.
4. Rays: One must be leery of any playoff club with a team MVP who sports a sub-.700 OPS. Conversely, one must always root for teams that swill beer from banana cups.
5. Angels: Most boring team in the field? Most boring team in the field.
6. Dodgers: Is there enough magic in the moonlight for Torre and Manny to make it a Boston-L.A. World Series? No.
7. Brewers: As much as I love CC, Prince, Braun and the idea of the Brew Crew, they have all the makings of a one-and-done.
8. White Sox: Advancement to the ALCS would be a shot to two things: a) the merits of the current playoff system and b) my interest in the ALCS.
Topics: Yahoo! Sports, MLB | 4 Comments »
Zorn Goes Old School With Three Cheers
By Chris Mottram | October 1, 2008
I saw this following the game on Sunday shortly after they showed Snyder going all Michael Scott, but was already nose-deep in a celebratory bowl of chili and couldn’t grab it. Priorities and shit.
Luckily, The Zone Blitz saw it too, and did some television photography of their own. They were also clever enough to travel back to the 70s and grab video of George Allen doing the same cheer. It wasn’t cool then and it’s not cool now, which by the Law of Ironic Coolness, makes this totally awesome:
While we’re here, it should be mentioned that The Zone Blitz also called Allen the “Redskins’ greatest coach ever.” That’s interesting considering Allen never won a Super Bowl, but this other Skins coach named Joe Gibbs won three. Wait, maybe they were being sarcastic? No, that wouldn’t make sense either seeing as Allen was actually successful.
(Found via Terl at the Skins Blog. Thanks, brah.)
Topics: Zorn Star, Redskins | 5 Comments »