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posted 03-10-2010 23:13
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Nothing more impressive than captain of Manhattan High School. He went into the Navy, got his G.I. Bill and enrolled at Kansas State. He was offered a scholarship to play football, but KSU at the time was usually a 0-11 or maybe 1-10 team and my dad would have been a 195 lb. lineman going up against Oklahoma, Missouri, and Nebraska. He got a Civil Engineering degree instead.
good decision.
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Femme Folle
as stubborn as a cat and twice as lazy
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posted 04-10-2010 00:28
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Did anyone see the end of that LSU game yesterday? That was my Dad, reaching out from beyond his grave to make sure the Vols didn't win and cause him to have to turn over in it.
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posted 04-10-2010 15:08
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I had earlier forgotten about the schedule conflict, but I was a delegate to my union's general assembly this weekend, so I was in a university caucus debating additions to a political program instead of watching Texas-OU, and considering how the game turned out, that was probably a good thing for me!
Anyway, congratulations to OU. After watching the recap, I agree with Cal, though, that Texas is playing in a very un-Texas-like manner. (Which is not sour grapes from me—UCLA and OU both deserved to win, and I don't expect Texas to beat Oklahoma every time.) The players seem out of it at times, discombobulated. They're not lacking in talent, so I'm not really sure what the problem is.
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posted 04-10-2010 15:25
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I think I'm going to have to shift my attention and interest to women's volleyball, even though I don't really understand the rules. All of this football losing and general crapness is getting me down.
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posted 04-10-2010 15:37
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What's plan C if WVB doesn't deliver Reed?
Oregon is a bit of a juggernaut system, they're crushing good teams with a new QB. I wonder how long it will be before an NFL team adopts the spread/pistol offense. That would be a very smart approach. I would guess sometimes in the next 2-3 years a smart owner/manager will pick it up.
The main knock on it is that a QB wouldn't be able to take the punishment from 16/18 games, but you could easily platoon 2 or 3 QBs in a system like this given that there are plenty of cheap option/spread QBs coming out of college every year. The other thing is that unlike in college, you could have a pro team practice year round with several QBs to get the players used to every QB.
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posted 04-10-2010 15:49
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What's plan C if WVB doesn't deliver Reed?
They usually do deliver. Penn State is three-peat national champions and won 108 matches in a row. This year's team has already lost twice (to Stanford and Illinois) but will likely return to the top within in a year or two. It's a marvel to behold. One wouldn't think there are that many 6'5" teenage girls on the planet, let alone that many who are eligible to go to university in the USA and have agility and grace and burning desire to win.
And wrestling here appears to be poised for a return greatness. They're preseason number 6 with only two seniors on the team and Cael Sanderson is the coach. But again, I don't really know the rules.
Penn State fencing has won lots of championships, but fencing is unwatchable.
Women's rugby, perhaps. National champions.
And we've got minor league baseball and down the road we've got the Hershey Bears, the most successful minor league hockey organization ever and one of the most successful North American professional sports clubs of any kind.
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posted 04-10-2010 15:58
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How can fencing possibly be unwatchable?
American football is unwatchable.
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posted 04-10-2010 16:04
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ursus arctos wrote:
How can fencing possibly be unwatchable?
American football is unwatchable.
I tried to watch a little of the Bears-Giants game last night, and based on that, I think you might be right!
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posted 04-10-2010 16:09
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I'm not saying it's a crappy sport, just that it's not spectator-friendly. You would think a sport that is essentially sword fighting would be awesome, but whenever I've tried to watch it in the olympics it makes no sense. A bunch of noisy stuff happens very quickly and then either somebody gets a point undetectable to the naked eye, or they call an equally inscrutable fault that destroys the flow of the competition.
And there's no witty banter or swinging from chandeliers.
To be fair, I've never seen it live. A good friend of mine from high school was ranked in the top 20 in the world for juniors and fenced for Yale, and I went to watch her practice once. That was sort of interesting. But mainly because I fancied her, I think.
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posted 04-10-2010 16:15
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This illustrates a fundamental problem with the US attitude towards sports.
"Watchable" and "popular" have become equivalencies for "good for commercial television", which is crap of the highest order.
NFL Films are intensely watchable; live NFL football is deathly dull.
On another note, is 100 miles really "down the road" in Central Pennsylvanian terms? We consider 100 blocks to be "other side of the planet".
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posted 04-10-2010 16:27
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I am going to second Reed's suggestion to add more witty banter and chandelier-swinging to fencing. Plumed musketeer hats worn at a rakish tilt also.
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posted 04-10-2010 16:39
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100 miles for an occasional evening's entertainment is considered reasonable. And it's pretty much all on one road, 322. A friend of mine's husband travels to work in Harrisburg (he's like the number 3 guy for all of Pennsylvania's forests) three or four times a week. A pain in the ass, but well worth it to live here instead of there. Some people have dual lives between here and Philadelphia. That's too much.
But in general, what is "far" or what is "near" is actually a lot smaller here than in a city. A five mile drive in the DC area would be considered "close." Here, that's "Oh wow, that's all the way on the other side of town, we'd better plan ahead to get there on time." Thinking in terms of relative distance has a way of making people here believe things are further away than they really are so they drive a lot more than they really need to. I always have to keep in mind absolute distances when deciding to drive or walk or bike somewhere.
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posted 04-10-2010 18:08
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Femme Folle wrote:
Did anyone see the end of that LSU game yesterday? That was my Dad, reaching out from beyond his grave to make sure the Vols didn't win and cause him to have to turn over in it.
Congrats, FF. And welcome back. Hope you stay around.
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posted 04-10-2010 18:09
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Reed John wrote:
I think I'm going to have to shift my attention and interest to women's volleyball, even though I don't really understand the rules.
Me neither. I do understand the shorts, though.
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posted 04-10-2010 18:19
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I used to know the rules, but then they changed them when I wasn't paying attention and now there's all this complexity about the "attack line" and the libero (the player in the opposite color shirt who is sometimes, but not always on the floor) and the rotation and all of that. I've tried to read the NCAA rules online but it only helped a bit. They need more pictures and videos.
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posted 05-10-2010 11:10
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ursus arctos wrote:
This illustrates a fundamental problem with the US attitude towards sports.
"Watchable" and "popular" have become equivalencies for "good for commercial television", which is crap of the highest order.
This.
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posted 05-10-2010 14:44
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"Watchable" and "popular" have become equivalencies for "good for commercial television", which is crap of the highest order
That's not why fencing is unwatchable.
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posted 05-10-2010 16:06
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Sorry, but you have only watched it on television, not live, and only with vapid American commentators who don't know the rules (or anything else about the sport).
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posted 05-10-2010 16:23
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That's true. But the commentary didn't seem to be the problem so much as the lighting. I simply couldn't see what was happening. And some of the rules, even when explained, didn't make sense. Like there are certain circumstances when you can't score if the opponent is attacking, or something like that.
Of course, it occurs to me that people say the same thing about hockey - that they can't see the puck - and they're wrong. So I'm willing to be proven wrong.
But I stand by my suggestion that making it more like an Errol Flynn film and less like an activity reserved primarily for poncey East Coast prep school kids (yes, I know there are inner city programs and all of that) would benefit the sport in many ways.
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posted 05-10-2010 16:35
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Because you want it to be a sport better suited for American commercial television . . .
You really should go see Penn State at least once. I'm pretty sure that you would like it (though I don't know what the setup is there). When I was at Columbia, you could walk around the floor, with bouts going on to all sides of you.
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