Incredible. Just incredible. I honestly wish this confusion lasted longer, because I could watch that befuddled Asian guy stand there all day aimlessly tossing a puck on the ice like he was feeding it to an animal at the zoo. I could watch those two players share that "what just happened?" glare until the sun goes down. I am going to take it upon myself to read that poor bastard's mind. It says "what the fuck do you want ME to do with this thing?", and I know this because I have been there before. 

No, I haven't been standing at center ice prior to a Russian hockey game in China, but I have been in a position where I was asked to do something and I agreed not having a damn clue how to do it. So while I can't stop giggling at the awkwardness of this dude, but I have to admit that I feel his pain. There's not a male reading this that hasn't looked/felt like the single dumbest person on the planet trying to complete a simple task that they know is simple task while still being completely unfamiliar with how to complete it. As someone that is not the least bit handy I can say that standing there perplexed without any idea of what to do next is the most nerve-racking feeling in the world, and I say that as a person that's never had a crowd watching me as I experienced it. It's during those situations when you're at your most literal. It's those circumstances that turn even the most intelligent person into nothing more than a trained monkey. Don't ask me to blame this dude for dropping the puck as fast as humanly possible during the "ceremonial puck drop", because you'd likely see the same type of quick, thoughtless reactions out of me if you asked me to operate a power tool or play Chinese checkers. 

Say what you want about referees. No seriously, that wasn't a lead-in to anything. Say whatever the hell you want about referees, and do it directly to their face. Other than giving people that "didn't do shit" penalties, acting as a sounding board for derogatory insults is the only other reason for their entire existence. So get ALL those jokes off, but - in doing so - know that the target of them is providing a thankless public service.

Think about how many times you have been sitting at your desk daydreaming about causing a scene and finally getting your "fuck this shit, I quit" moment? Now imagine how hard it would be to refrain from doing so if every time you tried to do your job correctly you were verbally berated and/or caught a fist that wasn't intended for your face? It's actually a modern miracle that I have never seen a referee skate off the ice mid-game. As if having your entire family's well being threatened while someone else is soliciting you for non-consensual sex acts wasn't bad enough? You might ALSO have your jawline compromised as a victim of collateral damage? Referees probably suffer from the same authority complex that most cops do, but I'll be damned if they don't show the same level of resilience in their craft. So this one is for you, on-ice officials. Drink it slow, because it's the last round you'll EVER get from me, but cheers to the few...the pompous...the disrespected...the incessant whistle blowers that couldn't possibly go fuck themselves enough. 

You know how they say those with drug issues are often a product of the people they surround themselves with? Well, I think it's safe to say that Josh Gordon needs a new inner circle. The guy has been suspended for what - like 3 years? And the first time someone mentioned rehab to him was one week before attending it would actually be extremely inconvenient to his football career? Shit, I'm willing to bet that Josh Gordon has spent so much time with Johnny Manziel that he didn't think of 'REHAB' as anything other than a televised pool party in Las Vegas. He's just been sitting around his house, staring longingly at his last text exchange with his drug dealer, and thinking "if only there was a tried and true way to kick this habit". Asking all his friends what they did to get clean and the only suggestions they can muster up are names of detox agents that you hold your nose and chug 24 hours prior to a drug test. Poor guy had no idea there was such a thing as professional help. He probably desperately went online yesterday morning, typed 'how 2 stop smokin chronic' into Google, and read up on this thing called "rehabilitation". I'd venture to guess he still doesn't understand that it's actually an extension of the word "rehab". If he did he would probably avoid it like the plague after hearing "...that shit is for pussies" ever since the first time someone passed him the dutchie.

P.S. A willingness to gain full control of his life and reach his potential as a person? Hmm, probably has nothing to do with this...

P.P.S. Perfect...

And there you have it ladies and gentleman, a glimpse into the life of a prejudice, agenda driven ex-athlete that has never even bothered to educate himself on the inner workings of mass transit. Must be nice to be so famous that you can just forget things that elementary schoolers understand. Curt Schilling is a lot of things, but a train connoisseur is undoubtedly not one. I'm not saying he would be a worse conductor than the guy that decided 9AM on a Thursday was a hell of a time to forget to hit the brakes while approaching a highly crowded station on the outskirts of a city, but he probably wouldn't be much better. 

Think Curt even understands that trains run on tracks so literally the only thing it could run INTO was the station? No chance he looked at a picture or read up on the number of casualties, right? Pretty obvious from one glance that the train wasn't moving at a "high speed", but I'm assuming he didn't want to let a silly fact or two get in the way of a good old fashioned attempt at fear mongering. 

Hey, I guess I can't blame the guy. The Presidential election is rapidly approaching. How else do you expect Curt Schilling do to his campaigning for Donald Trump? He's not gonna not prematurely blame every fatality on a nameless, faceless Muslim. That would be a huge missed opportunity to gain the votes of people that use Twitter as their primary news source. Somewhere out there is at least one Curt Schilling follower that thinks some suspiciously brown man with a scraggly beard and a turban ran up to the front of the train with a box cutter and made the conductor ease off the brake as he "veered" straight into building at a 30MPH. That guy is definitely voting for Trump, and it's all thanks to someonnnne's completely unsubstantiated speculation that a crash that killed three was an act of terrorism.

To the rest of us with eyes and a brain? No big deal, he said it's cool if he was wrong. Can't fault a man that admits he might be incorrect when he casually refers to an accident as a religiously motivated attack on our country and it's freedoms. 

TheComeback- As Justin Rose was putting, a heckler was giving the Ireland native grief for missing a putt. Henrik Stenson decided to challenge the heckler, and Rose offered up $100 for the heckler to try and make the same putt. 


And that's how it's done ladies and gentleman. If you really want to be "that guy" yelling at professional golfers mid-practice then you better have the stones to get in front of the onlooking crowd and sink the relatively long putt you're criticizing them for missing. Generally the loud mouth that's enough of a distraction to get singled out isn't remotely skilled in the sport he happens to be critiquing, but I guess we just learned that upsets are even awesome when the winner is an insufferable douche.

Don't say that guy didn't have anything on the line. He misses that shot by even an inch and they are booing his ass off the course. Instead he's high-fiving the guys he paid money to harass with a crisp $100 bill in his pocket. +1 for the obnoxious assholes of America, I guess. Make enough noise and you too could be given a chance to take an Olympic Gold Medalist's lunch money in front of the crowd that came to watch him! I'd imagine that Justin Rose didn't expect that kind of kickback when he pulled the trigger on that bet.

TheSportingNews- The NCAA is facing another courtroom battle for its restrictive policies against paying student-athletes.

Former USC linebacker Lamar Dawson has filed a class-action suit against the NCAA and the Pac-12 for violation of employment laws, according to The Los Angeles Times. Dawson is suing the NCAA for "permitting, encouraging and/or requiring student-athletes to work more than 40 hours and six days a week without compensation."

Dawson alleges the Pac-12 violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and California law. The Pac-12 and NCAA are mentioned as "joint employers" in the suit. 

His suit requests the Pac-12 and its member schools to pay damages for unpaid overtime and minimum wage, including interest. 


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Wait...what? Lamar Dawson got Milton'd? Just working long, hard hours without realizing that he wasn't receiving a paycheck? Staying late to put in that overtime and not even being reimbursed with time and a half? I bet those greedy assholes in the Pac-12 offices even stole the red stapler out of his locker. They are lucky that all he is doing is suing a billion dollar organization for the unpaid wages he practiced so hard for. He should have taken a lesson from the most famous, fictional, trivialized worker in late 90's cinema and burnt NCAA headquarters to the ground. That's how you truly let people know that you feel taken advantage of.

Honestly, it's just a damn shame that it took this long for Lamar Dawson to figure out that he was being exploited all those years. Poor guy had to make his way to the non-collegiate workforce to see how employees are supposed to be compensated before understanding he never got fair value for all those tackles-for-loss. Had to get out from under the thumb of the persecutive powers of the Pac-12 to realize he was basically giving away his sacks at 90% off. He was just innocently going to school for free only to graduate and finally have the revelation that being a student-athlete is a demanding occupation that requires more man hours per week than the average 9-5.

Talk about shitty timing! Now overly suspicious people are going to think that this is just a money grab by a former player that never benefited from the fruits of his labor in the NFL. He's not rummaging through labor laws trying to find loopholes that will pay him for games already played. He's just trying to get properly recouped for all that time spent in the gym. Too bad he wasn't at USC a couple years earlier or this almost certainly would have been negotiated under the table prior to his enrollment.

P.S. All jokes aside, the more law suits the NCAA receives the better. Even if they are only aimed at padding the pockets of former athletes that didn't think they were being mistreated until after the NFL Draft came and went. Rather that money go to the kids that worked tirelessly to play college football than the rich assholes in charge of it. 

CNN- An 8-year-old boy named Jaxon was sent home from his elementary school in Midland, Texas, Tuesday after he took a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Jaxon said he did it "because it was justice for black people getting murdered," he told CNN affiliate KOSA.

Stephanie Cook, Jaxon's grandmother, told KOSA that a teacher told him to get up when he kneeled down for the pledge. Cook is proud of him for taking a stand, by kneeling.

"I would have liked the teacher to do what was right," Cook said. "He has the right to kneel, why make a big deal out of it? If you feel like the other students in class don't understand. Take that time, right there was her window, to teach."



​Wait, that's all it takes to get sent home from school these days? Kneeling during the 'Pledge of Allegiance'? You don't even have to pretend you're sick and convince some oblivious nurse to call your mom to pick you up? You just have to not stand up during a chant that literally signifies the start of the school day? Where were the Colin Kaepernick's of the world when I was in 2nd grade? You know how much of my childhood was wasted learning single digit addition when I could have been home watching cartoons?  If I knew that all I had to do was put my support behind a social movement to get out of class I would have showed up to school in a leather jacket and a side sitting beret with my fist raised in the air. Fuck kneeling. Sit-ins are old hat. I would have laid flat on my back and started reciting Martin Luther King Jr. quotes if I knew it would get me a one way ticket to my couch. You know how little of a fuck 8 year old me would have gave about "respecting our country" if a failure to do so got me out of class before it even began?

And that's real the point here. Just temporarily ignore how goddamn stupid this elementary school is for dismissing an 8 year old for supporting a cause he is in no way old enough to truly understand. All due respect to Jaxon, but something tells me he doesn't quite grasp the intricacies of oppression when he's still baffled by the concept of times tables.  If anything, this kid just saw a bunch of football players doing it and tried to be like them. That whole "because it was justice for black people getting murdered" line is not the thought of even the most consciously "woke" 8 year old. I don't care if his parents are Rosa Parks and Malcolm X, Jaxon isn't extremely schooled on racial profiling and police brutality as a 2nd grader.  More than likely he's just a kid with a sponge-like brain that decided to parrot something he's heard on TV 100x a day for the last month.. Call me crazy, but I don't think someone that can't read a book without pictures has been truly introduced to all the evils of the world. That means sending him home from school for frivolously acknowledging one of them does nothing but give him a full proof way to get out of class without faking a cough. Hell of a lesson to learn, but not sure the school should be the one teaching it.

Look, I am all for wide receivers going out of their way to defend their quarterback's failures. I just happen to think this is the worst defense of all time. Seriously, Terrell Owens responding to critics of Tony Romo by sitting at a podium with crocodile tears running out from from underneath his sunglasses is basically an impenetrable shield by comparison. I know it's matter of context, but DeAndre Hopkins using the word "best" in reference to a ZERO point effort against a 3rd string quarterback? Probably not the greatest association. Maybe, just maybe, he should have literally went with any other cliche. What's wrong with "we're all working to get better"? Was "he's still getting  comfortable with the system" taken? There's approximately hundred different ways to say that you are still developing chemistry with your quarterback, and Brock's Osweiler's most reliable target went with something that roughly translates to "nah, that's just what you can expect". I'm sure that will make Texans fans feel a lot better about that 72 million dollar investment. Don't worry guys, he's trying his hardest...just like the kid that used to strike out in tee-ball.

What offensive struggles? Houston is running on all cylinders! Improvement? Impossible. Progress? Halted. Potential? Reached. Brock Osweiler is what he is and that's a guy that can win you football games...as long as the opposition is only putting up 14-16 points. Sadly, that's probably not all that untrue, but you still don't want to hear it from the dude that could put 21 points himself with a halfway decent talent throwing him the ball. 

Okay fine, so I'm not entirely sure that Kyle Quincey and David Schlemko have all that much in common as hockey players. I simply haven't watched the former play enough hockey to make that proclamation. I do know that they both have great beards and at the time of their addition they were both had for relatively cheap. David Schlemko upped his stock by turning out to be a steadying, middle pairing presence on the left side of the blueline, and I see no reason why Kyle Quincey can't come close to replicating that success. Especially since Red Wings fans seem pretty convinced that he should have received more than the 1 year, 1.25 million dollar contract he got from the Devils.

Everything I have seen said about Quincey is that he's much more stay-at-home defenseman than he was earlier in his career. With Hynes trying to give Greene and Severson more of an opportunity to produce offense, I can't see how adding an experienced veteran that can be trusted in his own zone and play on the penalty kill does anything but create additional ways for him to do so. Obviously a guy that was scooped off the scrap heap after training camp was already underway isn't winning the Norris Trophy, but he does give the Devils the depth that they were in desperate need of after trading away a player that was essentially half their defense last year. So maybe Schlemko and Quincey don't play the same game, but one will be filling the other's role as a reliable minutes eater that can contribute offensively from time to time, and - more importantly - give the roster a little more flexibility. 

Whew, I was pretty glad when I got to the end of that letter and there was no mention of J.J. Watt committing suicide or developing a terminal illness. Never heard of the practice of crafting overly dramatic messages just to notify your fans that you got hurt. I thought that's what the Injury Report was for, but I guess it's pretty difficult to determine which players are suffering more than others without looking at the extensiveness of the compassionate comments their Instagram posts receive. At first this seemed like a completely unnecessary move that didn't really tell anyone anything that they didn't already know. Good thing I took a closer look to see that closing promise. Can you imagine how worried Texans fans would have been if they weren't 100% positive that J.J. Watt was doing everything in his power to make them proud? Probably wouldn't have been able to sleep at night without reading this reassuring post that wasn't at all designed to drum up sympathy. 

Serious question, do you think J.J. Watt is more distraught by the fact that he can't play football or by the fact that people aren't going to be talking about him for a few months? I want to believe it's football, but I genuinely think we don't truly understand just how much a lack of attention distresses him. For instance, would you be at all surprised if we got weekly Instagram updates on the state of his health? Honestly, I'll be disappointed if we don't. If not for the sheer comedy of it all then so I know that he's continuing to fight the insecure fight in the never-ending pursuit of the perfect public image.

Off hand, I think we would have to go back to before the creation of the smartphone to find a Devils player that was too fast to be caught on camera. I mean, whoever taped this was literally making it a point to focus on Taylor Hall and their motor skills still weren't quick enough to keep up with Taylor Hall. You say Ilya Kovalchuk? I say moving in slow motion compared to the guy that is FINALLY slotting into his spot in the lineup as the dangerously talented winger that can take over a game at a moment's notice. Obviously it was fun to watch old highlights and start to picture what a blindingly fast playmaker would look like in red and black, but those wet dreams are starting to become a reality now that training camp is upon us. I didn't even get to see the entirety of (what I imagine was) Hallsy's inside-outside-inside deke on a hapless defender, and the all-too-swift conclusion to it still had my jeans tightening. We're not exactly back to the glory days quite yet, but adding a player that's basically built of the same cloth from which the 'fast, attacking, supportive' mantra was founded has literally and figuratively accelerated that process. There's actually high end skill back within the organization. Let's just hope the person who has it doesn't kill his own defensemen's confidence before the season starts. Is it October yet!?!

Say what you want about Rex Ryan, but - as long as he is nowhere near your football team - he is one entertaining son of a bitch. Shit, the fact that he has a sense of humor and a personality might be his biggest downfall as a Head Coach. There's simply not enough hours in the week to prepare for Sunday AND get these jokes off. If there was then is there any doubt that Bill Belichick would have the media in stitches with a weekly string of knee-slappers?

This is Rexy we are talking about though. You can't expect him to let a little game-planning get in the way of his 'Crank Yankers' comedy routine. In case you weren't paying attention, the Bills just beat the Cardinals so their coach deserves to take a little break from strategizing and start prank calling upcoming opponents. Plus, what good is winning if you can't get your 'Walt Patulski' on and remind everyone that you're generally a pretty lovable guy away from the sidelines? What's the point of even coaching football if you don't come off as someone that would be a hell of a time after 8-12 beers?
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​The irony is that Rex Ryan would probably be better off if his name were Walt Patulski. Sure, him and his brother have been EATING off the reputation their late, great father Buddy, but it all goes downhill once they are put in charge and people realize they didn't get the entirety of the defensive wizardry gene. If Rex's last name wasn't Ryan then he would just be any other sub-par NFL head coach, instead of having to carry-on the family legacy for a legend. Much better spot for a fun-loving  player's coach with little-to-no command of how to run an offense to be in.  

The content of this guy's rant might not seem to make all that much sense given the outcome of the game he just left. Of all the things to be infuriated by throughout the course of a game in which the Saints scored 32 points, the run/pass ratio seems like an extremely odd place to start. Plus, his animosity towards Sean Payton's play calling is inherently misguided given the fact that those duties were turned over to the offensive coordinator prior to the start of the season. Technically his beef would be with Pete Carmichael Jr., but that's neither here nor there.

The truth is, I sympathize with this man's frustrations. Not just because I can relate to being so frustrated by this damn team that I just start unjustly cursing every aspect of their play, but because I know the phenomenon that is taking place in this video.

The Saints defense has been so bad for so long that it's not even worth bitching about anymore. I bet that same dude has walked out of the Dome for the last two years screaming about a pass rush that's less effective than an angsty boyfriend trying to hurry his high maintenance girlfriend out of the house. No doubt his primary source of resentment has been a secondary that can't blanket a paraplegic. He's just FINALLY accepted that the next time he'll see proper tackling is during his company fishing trip. It's not that he wanted to criticize the offense for not being able to put FORTY-FIVE points, it's that they are the only unit left that he can feel comfortable expecting more out of. The defense - for as historically bad as they have been - is predictable. It's a known entity. A nearly non-existent known entity, but a known entity nonetheless. Yelling into a live television camera about how inept the Saints are defensively is like yelling into a live television camera about death and taxes - the only other two things that are just as certain in this life. 

You can say he's avoiding the obvious, but don't say he didn't learn to do so from his quarterback...

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​h/t BustedCoverage