A potpourri of miscellany...
The highlight of Game 2 of the World Series had to be the conversation between Joe Buck and Tim McCarver in the bottom of the ninth inning.
In case you're like most Americans, and are avoiding this series like the plague, Buck was asking McCarver if he agreed with the thought that the Astros should have thrown their closer Brad Lidge into Game 6 of the NLCS to "get the taste of the Pujols homer out of his mouth."
McCarver responded, "I don't think there is a taste." As he was saying that, Lidge was in the process of delivering a pitch that Scott Podsednik deposited over the right field fence for a walk-off home run.
Is it too late to legally change Lidge's first name to Byun-Hyung?
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I'm still not done seething about the idiocy of the coverage of the OSU-Indiana game on Saturday. It was on ESPN across the nation, but because of contractual issues, it was blacked out in Big Ten country. That left us with the magic of Wayne Larivee and the steaming pile of a crew that calls ESPN-Plus home. It was easily the worst telecast I've seen in years.
They threw back to the studio for an update, we heard Mike Gleason describing the action of Georgia and Arkansas, but no highlights. The "up" camera looked like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens, the same way highlights look when TV stations "stretch" the video to get rid of a crawl. Larivee was terrible (missing spots, stupid comments, talking about "getting good leverage" every time someone kicked the ball), the color guy (Kelly Stouffer) was bad and uninsightful, and they both spent most of the day calling guys by the wrong name, giving wrong spots, and doing everything they could to make it unenjoyable.
Do everyone a favor and just tell ESPN-Plus to go fuck itself next time they don't have a game to show, rather than pissing everyone off by putting a game in the hands of a D-minus team.
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I fucking hate work. I wish I had three months worth of sick days left. I can't stress this strongly enough.
7 Comments:
You were wrong in your Michigan Monday column. Contact is not required for interference to have occurred on a kick return. Interpretation VI for rule 6-4-1 says :
"On a scrimmage kick beyond the neutral zone, a Team Aplayer stands in or runs through an area close to a Team B player who is in position to catch the ball and is deemed to have impeded the Team B player. RULING:Interference with the opportunity to catch a kick. Penalty— 15 yards from the spot of the foul, which is where the Team B player was positioned to catch the kick. "
The interpretations are in the back of the rule book. You have to read the whole thing before you claim that the refs blew it.
Scott, you are 100% correct. I didn't read the back of the rule book, which (strangely) seems to contradict what's in the front. I will make the correction in this week's column.
I'm also looking through the rule book to see what it says about a team getting called for holding five times in six drives...
I'm sure it says something about how O-Linemen tend to grasp in desperation at D-Linemen that are beating them consistently. The holding calls were legit. They were all shown on replay and they all affected the defender's ability to make a play.
The issue isn't whether they're legit or not. They were all legit (I already wrote the Michigan Monday column, and beat that point into the ground). The issue is that there's holding on every play-- there was certainly holding on a couple of Michigan's big plays yesterday, but it wasn't called.
I went back through the last two years of OSU games and found that no team had been called for more than three holding penalties in an entire game, let alone 5 in 20 minutes or so.
Those holding penalties WERE legitimate calls. However, it's important to acknowledge that they also played a major role in shutting down NU in the second half.
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Bitch, bitch, whine whine. Your team won, and you're still bitching.
Yes, you finally uncovered the huge conspiracy against OSU. The officials are out to get you, and Maurice Clarett was a CIA plant set on the downfall of an otherwise spotless program.
Dude, the Big Ten officiating conspiracy is against Penn State. Where have you been?
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