Things I missed while fiddling with my Netflix

So the trouble with NASCAR isn't that the sport is unexciting. The trouble is that the the excitement is spread out over three days of pageantry and buildup followed by four to six hours of somewhat redundant racing. For the love of god, shorten the races. I know the advertisers pay the bills but would you rather pay for six hours worth of ads on an event no one watches or three hours worth of ads with a nice consistent Nielson rating. As a matter of fact here's three tips to improve your sport;

shorten the races, I swear I've turned off races after five hours, who watches anything for five hours.

single elimination chase (12 in the first race, 11 in the second, etc. down to three drives in the chase for the final race),and finally

work on your scheduling in two ways: start all of the races at two times (Saturday night at 8 or Sunday afternoon at 3). Everyone in the English speaking world knows when NFL games are on. The second way that you can fix your scheduling is to dust off the wipers and rain tires, I'll bet the ratings were just fine for that race in Montreal a couple of years back. Racing at 70 instead of 170 is still racing. Does anyone ever watch the race on Monday afternoon?

But whatever you do make sure you let guys keep doing idiotic stuff like this, it's funny and it's ratings gold.

In the heat of college football season and no TV!

So we didn't really ask the boy but my wife and I agreed to give up cable. We had a package that included about 6 million channels, our house phone, and digital internet through our local cable company. Very luxurious, hi-def, VS Sports, Speed Channel, our bill was also about $175 per month. When recently looking for ways to save many we came up with the radical (and possibly communist) idea of getting rid of cable. While I am slightly concerned that by eliminating cable I will miss the opportunity to see the latest products to purchase and I will be letting down the economy by eliminating the house phone and cable we will save about $120 per month ($1,440 per year).

So the gentlemen came on Wednesday and removed the box and frankly I didn't really miss TV until Saturday. I am a huge college football fan. I improvised but it isn't quite the same. Both Yahoo and ESPN have game center type features where you can find live scoring and updates (I am sure there are many others as well) and with a little effort there are many free radio stations available on the internet. I discovered googling team name, football, radio was pretty effective. I tried several different teams and was able to get a free live radio feed on all. Nebraska made me sign up for something (also free but tedious) but again I googled "Nebraska football radio" and spent about ten minutes signing up and I was in. I also discovered that Nebraska has an all online MBA program, but calculus is a prerequisite. Seriously, where are all these business people using calculus? I must be really low on the food chain because the subject is never even mentioned at my level. I am actually more intrigued with this which I also found last night.

A sloppy 17-3 win over South Dakota State ensued. In making our decision I really thought about it and half the time I don't really watch the games anyway, I mostly listen and half pay attention anyway. For $120 a month I'll improvise.

Top Ten Running Backs of All-Time, says me.

So any top ten lists are going to inherently include the bias of the author. As it relates to running backs are you a power guy, or a speed guy? Short burst of brilliance or do you reward longevity? Where do you put guys like Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson who helped define their era but don’t measure up statistically? In short there are a lot of different ways in which one could go. So I cheated. In a top five list you essentially end up arguing which statistical measure is the most important. In a top ten there is a little more room for deviation from the standard stats.

Yards per game and yards per carry can support your argument for Jim Brown while total yards and touchdowns lend credence to Emmitt Smith. Popular sentiment to the contrary Barry Sanders is third when you look at a broad cross section of rushing statistics, which of course, is where Sanders’ fans jump in with how terrible his team was. So here's my completely unbiased list.

10 Adrian Peterson. Ah potential, every few years some young stud comes in with the potential to rewrite the record book, feed the hungry, and solve the problem of repeatable cold fusion. A glimpse to the future, Peterson is simply the latest, in fairness he is currently fourth all-time in yards per carry and he does have as many rushing titles as Walter Payton (1).

9 Bo Jackson. Perhaps the most talented athlete ever, Bo Jackson is a perfect example of why Mr. Peterson is unlikely to end up at number one. Of a hundred guys who could be in the top ten something usually goes wrong with 90 of them. Amazingly talented in two sports Bo never quite reached his potential when some idiot on the Bengals basically ended two hall of fame careers.

8 Marion Motley. If Peterson is wink to the future, Motley is a nod to the past. Called the Jackie Robinson of football, Motley was also a damned fine running back. One rushing title and the all-time top yards per carry among running backs solidify Motley’s place in history.

7 LaDanian Tomlinson. Easy to lose in the shuffle Tomlinson is second all-time in touchdowns, and also appears in the top eight all-time in yards and yards per game measures of both longevity and talent.

6 Eric Dickerson. Caught between the likes of OJ and Payton who shown brightest before and Emmitt and Barry who came after Dickerson is often left off of top five lists. Dickerson is fifth in yards per game, sixth in yards, and he won four rushing titles in his prime. If you are going to haggle over “the best,” rushing titles demonstrate that you were at least the best during you prime.

5 Walter Payton. Payton is the only back above Dickerson on my list who didn’t win at least four rushing titles (1). A workhorse who mostly played on mediocre teams, Payton is fourth all-time in touchdowns and second in career yards.

4 OJ Simpson. Forget all of the ridiculous drama for a second, OK are you ready…Orenthal James Simpson was a really, really good running back. Perhaps the greatest five-year stretch in NFL history from 1972 through 1976 OJ won an MVP award, was a five time first team all-pro, five time pro bowler, ran for an eye popping 7,699 yards, won four rushing titles, and averaged 5.1 yards every time he ran the ball. OK and he’s a lunatic alleged murderer.

3 Barry Sanders. I say he’s third, write your own damned list and put him at number one. Sanders finished his career second in yards per game and third in yards. Sanders also finished in the top 10 in touchdowns and won four rushing titles running head to head against Emmitt Smith.

2 Emmitt Smith. See above. Every football fan of my generation will debate who was better but the more you look at the numbers of these two the less impressive the numbers of anyone else tend to look. Smith is first all-time in yards, touchdowns, and won four rushing titles. Then why not number one?

1 Jim Brown. Here is where you need to put career statistics aside. Jim Brown played just nine seasons, won eight rushing titles, and never missed a game. Interestingly enough if you project Brown’s 104.3 yards per game over eleven 16-game NFL seasons you would 18,356 yards, one more than Emmitt Smith.

Little League Baseball

The Sports Calendar in August

So as we close the book on July and say goodbye to France for another year we set our sights on August and one of my favorite events in amateur sports, the regional finals followed by the Little League World Series. The tournament is held annually in Williamsport, Pennsylvania and features 11 and 12 year-olds from around the world in one of the few sports that can truly claim a world champion.

Locally Portsmouth, NH trounced their way through their district tournament, dispatching Laconia along the way. After the districts they went on to win the state tournament to represent New Hampshire in the regional tournament to be held from August 6^th through the 16^th in Bristol, CT. Six of the sixteen tickets to the World Series have been punched (see chart below) and Portsmouth will fight to join the ranks of the world elite. Good competition, good times, and refreshingly, good attitudes rule the day.

Pool A		Pool B
Mid-Atlantic	TBD August 16	New England	TBD August 16
West	TBD August 15	Midwest	TBD August 14
Southeast	TBD August 13	Southwest	TBD August 12
Great Lakes	TBD August 14	Northwest	TBD August 15

Pool C		Pool D
Japan	Edogawa Minami LL	MEA	Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Caribbean	Manati, Puerto Rico	Latin America	Chitre, Panama
Mexico	Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas	Canada	TBD August 14
Europe	Ramstein AB, Germany	Asia-Pacific	Kaohsiung, Chinese Taipei

The Old Course at Saint Andrews

If you are just getting out of bed at ten a.m. on this lovely Sunday morning you are probably a. not a fisherman and b. not interested in the Open Championship (commonly mislabeled the British Open). For our first ever installment of Super Sports Sunday I thought I would throw in my two cents on the state of Tiger Woods and the Open Championship. This year the tournament is being held at The Old Course at Saint Andrews one of the most stunning gems in all of golf. If you had to make a list of five course to play before you die St. Andrews, Pebble Beach, and Augusta National would probably all make most people's lists. You can quibble over the other two until the end of time but any of those three would be tough to exclude. Click here for a stunning interactive map of the course being played today for the championship.

Like anyone who claims to know anything about golf, I too will sit down to a perfectly delightful telecast in high definition and be completely distracted by the performance of the great Tiger Woods. Of course, there was a time when we were collectively awe struck by his innate ability to steamroll through any tournament field, wearing his bright red shirts on Sunday and his opponents wilting away like flowers in the desert sun. Currently the winner of 14 major championships sits in 29th place a completely irrelevant 13 shots behind the leader. Jack Nicklaus is the all-time major tournament champion leader with 18 titles and there was also a time when people expected tiger woods to blow through that number en route to a final destination in the neighborhood of 30. Sitting on 14 titles at 34 years old, and going through significant personal, financial, and marital problems Tiger is looking remarkably human. At 34 let me tell you, you start to feel remarkably human.

Maybe Tiger Woods doesn't deserve to make a comeback. Maybe golf like every other sport is starting to pass this particular athlete by. The vast majority of majors are won by golfers under 40. Tiger is of course a special sort of athlete, but an aging special athlete with a gimpy left knee (so I guess we have that in common as well as our age) who is a lot closer to sunset than he is to sunrise. There was definitely a crowd coming into this tournament who was rooting for the man who carries the sport to make a comeback, to win a major on a course on which he excels. Sadly after of Tiger Woods appear to be an automaton who demolished all comers Tiger Woods looks strangely human. Perhaps more amazing than the young robot who won 14 majors will be a curtain call by an aging legend who wins five more. Whatever else I see in sports in my life, I lived through the eras of Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky and I lived through the era of Tiger Woods.

The Best Laid Plans...

So I have thought out an agenda for the blog. I doesn't necessarily mean that I will start writing every day and I reserve the right to break my own self imposed rules. In the interest of sparking a higher quality of creativity I will try to post on different topics on different days. That way over the course of a week a thought can be more refined on a given topic.

Monday- Motion Picture Monday's will be for discussing or reviewing movies, either the family movie of the week, a new movie coming out, or perhaps a classic favorite. Another possibility is secondary topics related to movies such as who's the best Bond or the Jedi Religion.

Tuesday- Fish Stories will be reserved for Tuesdays. I do most of my fishing over the weekend so this is a good day to spin some new yarns or share some photos.

Wednesday- World Wide Wednesday is the day to explore unusual articles and websites from the web. A link to a link can lead you to some interesting places, and there's always YouTube.

Thursday- A picture is worth A Thousand Words. Picture, link as appropriate, and credit only no words on Thursday.

Friday- Family Friday will cover our adventures in parenting, what the boy is up to, etc.

Saturday- Jumble covers loose odds and ends Muskrat scores, politics, crazy drivers with cell phones, whatever.

Sunday- Super Sports Sunday covers topics near and dear to my heart in the world of sports. The Tour de France, the Little League World Series...whatever as long as it's sports related.