Happy Easter from 2ndand1!

Happy Easter to everyone! Regardless of whether we celebrate Easter as a religious rite - or just a day for the kids to cover everything with food-grade dye in attempt to color eggs, we can all agree on one thing - trade and draft season are upon us once more!

But first, I figured I'd end with the bit about March Madness. If I were to start something I didn't finish, I'd be a pretty impolite person.* So Villanova Syndrome eventually grew terminal and got Villanova, UConn dropped like a rock, and for the Spartan fans out there, the championship game was positively cringe-worthy to watch. But really, for everyone else, the game just wasn't very interesting. Despite this fact, everyone is still talking about it. I was playing poker last night, and people were still commenting on why UNC wasn't fouled more.

I tied for 4th in my bracket pool, which was surprising, considering I was in first for a few days and then screwed up everything after the Elite Eight by picking Pitt to win the whole enchilada. I think when I did this I was tired, or distracted by a shiny piece of foil, or just flipping coins to try and call some of the more stochastically-determined matches, and it got me in the end, but hey; I was one of the only people to call Ohio State losing to Siena in the first round, so I got my two cents in.

***

I was playing Madden XX a couple nights ago at a friend's, teamed up with someone as, of course, the Bears, playing someone else as the Raiders. Surprisingly, a computer program did a darn good job of predicting the way I've actually seen these two teams match up:

a) Play-action fail (the commentators in the game would say "Wow, they just failed to connect on that one!");

b) Turnovers on top of turnovers, on top of turnovers, on top of Oh, Must I Continue To Watch This?

c) Being unable to move the ball over 100 yards until the end of the 4th quarter.

Of course, JaMarcus Russell is better in the game than he is in real life, even with a quarterback rating of 30, and it's very hard to simulate the Bears' offensive strategy, that consists of a) running Matt Forte into the line repeatedly, and b) hurling the ball downfield and hoping for a pass interference call, but hey, it's all a classical approximation, not unlike how problems in Physics Class are a classical approximation of how stuff behaves in real life, but without pesky things like air resistance or friction!

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Interesting trades/news of note:

-Jay Cutler is now a Bear. Overall, I'm pretty positive about this but won't editorialize now. I didn't know this until a couple of months ago, but Cutler is actually diabetic. Does he need sugar-free Gatorade? Also, I heard a rumor about the Manning Brothers stealing his blood glucose-meter at the Pro Bowl, as a prank, or something like this. Does anyone know if this is true, or something that got made up over at the likes of KSK? (warning, link is really not safe for work or little readers!)

-Giants released uber-gun-happy WR Plaxico Burress. Yup. We understand everyone from Michigan State is unpleasant during basketball season. But it's probably better for the Giants not to have him on the roster, even if that means Eli has nobody to overthrow next season.

-Byron Leftwich leaves the Steelers and signs a 2-year contract with the Buccaneers. Finally, someone will know who the QB for TB actually is! (For the past two years, when asked this question, I've had to go "Simms! No! Garcia! No! Griese! No! Mickey Mouse!" in situations where I've felt comfortable, and simply "erm, I don't know" in situations where I haven't felt as comfortable.)

-The Cleveland Browns are apparently enamored with Mark Sanchez, who comes from USC's long line of quarterbacks whose resumes tout "Running up the score on a grossly undermatched Big 10 opponent in the Rose Bowl" as a chief selling point. Of course, this begs the question of what to do with Derek Anderson. Here are my three ideas:

a) Sit him in the press booth and try and make him the color commentator.

b) Keep him as backup... to the water-boy.

c) Offload him onto the Lions. Nobody knows who their quarterback is, either!

Got any suggestions? Comment at will! 

Remember kids, if you think nickel and dime are just units of currency, you shouldn't be a defensive coordinator!

*Or my name would be Nick Saban. Take your pick.

March Madness

I've been quite delinquent at updating this thing, with business hectic at work and not much on the football radar (formally) until the scouting combine business heats up.

Wonderlic scores are out! For those not in the know, the Wonderlic Test  is a sort of intelligence test (almost like the standardized tests they give to grade-school children) that they give to prospective NFL draftees.  As with most exams, the higher you score, the better. 50 is a perfect score. 30-40 is about average for a QB. I took a variant of it last year for giggles (I wanted to prove that despite being unable to catch a football*, I am still smarter than Mario Manningham, who reportedly scored a six. I was 30-something.)

High score for the year? Georgia's Matthew Stafford, who's probably regretting that he didn't intentionally bomb the thing as Detroit likely just wants him even more now. The fools of the year? Texas Tech's Michael Crabtree and Florida's Percy Harvin. 

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I promised myself when I started this blog, that I would not write about any other sport other than football, but as it is March after all, I figured I'd do something different and write about a little basketball, because I have been watching a lot of it. Office productivity has again plummeted dramatically as people stream games and obsess neurotically about their brackets (I'm currently third in my pool). I have noticed that due to the greater speed and spontaneity of basketball than football, there are truly different kinds of matchups:

The Nail-Biter: Any game where the lead changes more than ten consecutive times, becoming especially tense in the second half. Finally, one team will pull away and eventually go on to win, but not without leaving you breathing a bit quicker than normally.

The Barn-Burner: A Barn-Burner must involve more than twenty lead changes, with the lead being no greater than five points at any given time. Barn-Burners typically end on last-second fouls and flops, ridiculous shots, sloppy executions, half-court buzzer-beaters, multiple overtimes, and lots of slobberingly angry coaches and officials. These are the games that put the "ball" into "ballistic."

The Sniper Kill: Describes when a low-seeded team (under 10) comes seemingly out of nowhere to knock off a higher-seeded favorite (over five, usually). Examples? #13 Cleveland State dropping #4 Wake Forest (which likely caused many people to burn their brackets in the spot), or how Purdue is the only 5th seed to survive the onslaught of #12s this tournament. (Leading to the expression "so and so got twelved in the first round.") (I think the football equivalent of this is Bill Simmons' Drive-by-Shooting.)

The Court-Mopping: When one team absolutely embarrasses an egregiously undermatched opponent and effortlessly scores over 90 on them whilst the opponent struggles to make 25% of their shots. 

The "Wake Up Already!": Describes when a team that should be Mopping the Court isn't making their free-throws, has got people in danger of fouling out before the half, turns the ball over, and is effectively asleep for 3/4 of the game. Often, said team wakes up and goes "Er, we're losing!" and gets it together just in time to eek out a win. If the sleeping team wakes up and then proceeds to go on a Court-Mopping rampage, it's called the Villanova Syndrome.**

The Fundamental Mismatch: The fundamental mismatch is when your team has generally playing well, comes up against an opponent that you should defeat easily, but somehow, every time, this opponent seems to have spies on the inside and really is a pain to dispatch. Sometimes it's psychological, such as a rivalry, and sometimes, nobody can explain it. 

The Acid Reflux Express: This is when your team has an early lead (usually by double digits) and then somehow gets jinxed at the half and nothing subsequently goes right for them, resulting in fans having to suffer through the remaining 20 minutes in eye-crossing, stomach-churning agony. It often ends with the game being lost on a stupid call. These are the games where people almost get chucked out of pubs and take weeks to get over, especially if they come late in tournament play.

Anyway, hope everyone's enjoying the 'madness! News to come when I get around to it!

Remember kids: Old quarterbacks never die, they simply pass away.

*I really cannot catch a football. I don't just mean I'm not in the hunt for the Biletnikoff, I mean I get beaned in the face half the time. 

**It took me forever to figure out that Villanova was a Catholic school in Pennsylvania and not, as I previously thought, a poor cousin of the Bossa Nova.