Before we get started, we have some scheduling to discuss.
We are looking to twist our Friday mailbag a bit. This week it should be things we are thankful for, no?
OK, is that an easy way for me to have one true off day – no radio, no column, easy, peasy, lemon squeezey 5-at-10 with you guys doing the work for me – this Friday with a slew of family in town? Well, yes it is. But it also is a neat tradition to start I think. I get this platform all the time. Giving you guys a chance to make statements – and I am thinking about doing this on A2 as well – rather than just questions or comments on topics I raise or mumbo-jumps Rushmores I suggest is only fair.
Because, know this: This growing community of regulars and occasional readers is growing and it’s one of the favorite things about both my jobs. Believe that.
I offer one caveat, however, and it’s something that you guys are great about in general. Be creative. Friday will not work with 12 “I’m thankful for my family” entries.
We all are thankful for our families – well most of us are, I guess – and that’s not going to make fun reading, you know. Also, if you are going to mention someone by name, use first name, first initial. “I am thankful that Alejandro B. will let me have at least a tall glass of the really nice bottle of bourbon I bought after Georgia whipped Auburn.”
And, since this is your guys list, you can go in whatever direction you may wish, but if you have passive-aggressive thankfulness – “I am happy I got a new job so I don’t have to work for that jack wagon at Unum” or “I am happy I learned how big of a loser my ex was before we moved into together” – let’s stay name free on those cases, can we? I like my job and want to avoid liable/malice, you know?
You can sign them or ask to be left anonymous, it’s up to you.
Deal? Deal. (Since these will be the column on Friday – along with a mailbag question or two, as well as the Rushmores – email them to me at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com.)
As for the radio version of our daily existence, we are having Press Row Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 3-6 p.m. as regularly scheduled. No show Thursday for the Turkey-eating marathons. No show Friday for the left-over turkey with mayo and pepper on white bread marathons. (Friends, if you are not nodding your head about the majesty of the left of Thanksgiving bird on old-school Colonial white bread with mayo and pepper, then you have not lived. If Evel Kneivel himself died before having the pure joy that is the left-over turkey on old-school Colonial white bread with mayo and pepper, then he lived a dull and unsatisfied life. Trust me on this.)
We will have a 5-at-10 each day because that’s what we do. We are now beyond the 2,100-mark of consecutive Mondays-thru-Fridays with this thing, so how can we stop now?
OK, from the talk too much studios, let’s get to the good stuff.
Weekend winners
Saints offense. Holy buckets, is that group a) fast; b) relentless; c) precise; d) explosive. Side question on what will be a day filled with side questions: Which of those attributes is most beneficial for the Saints offense? New Orleans is the third team in NFL history to score 45 or more in three straight games, and in those games, on possessions other than kneel downs, the Saints have had the ball 29 times. They’ve score on 24 of them. Oh my. Sunday’s 48-7 win over the Eagles was the worst whipping a defending Super Bowl champ has ever suffered.
Notre Dame. There were a lot of folks picking the ‘Cuse to win out right. Yes, Eric Dungey, the Orange QB, getting hurt in the first half wrapped any chances SU had pulling off the upset. And Notre Dame put an exclamation point on the blowout with an overwhelming defensive effort. And know this: Notre Dame’s schedule is better than Alabama and Georgia’s. Seriously. (Does either the Tide or the Dawgs have a better win than the Irish win over Michigan? Nope.) Which means, the Irish may have a mulligan with a little help Saturday at USC. And to a lesser extent, UCF did itself a solid by putting forth its best effort of the season against its best opponent on its biggest stage.
Furman. Get a share of the SoCon football title and getting a basketball win over defending national champion Villanova certainly qualifies for a strong weekend friends.
Dallas. OK, I know I was lamenting the failings of the Cowboys earlier this year. They gave a way a No. 1 for Amari Cooper. They were 3-5 after getting waxed by the Titans on Monday night a couple of weeks ago. Now, look at the Cowboys. Back-to-back wins make them 5-5. That’s one game behind the Redskins, who lost their starting quarterbacks, one game ahead of the Eagles who are a mess, and two games ahead of the Giants. Plus, Dallas gets Washington on Thursday in a short week of prep time. Side question: Who you got, as of this morning, to win the NFC East? Exactly.
The Lil’ 5-at-10. Lee Greeson had a big weekend. He made his first shot in his first fifth-grade school basketball team. (He finished 1-of-2 from the field, which means his daddy’s shoot-first, shoot-always gene may have skipped a generation.) He was part of the five-person team from Nolan that won the fifth-grade county-wide Perennial Math event. Later Saturday night, he won the sportsmanship award for the 4/5-grade flag football league. (Which also may mean his daddy’s, shall-we-say ‘spirited’ attitude when it comes to sports also may have skipped a generation. Thankfully.) Cue the Ice Cube for Saturday. “Today was a good day.”
Dallas Cowboys kicker Brett Maher (2) and his teammates celebrate his game-winning 42-yard field goal as time expired in their 22-19 victory over the host Atlanta Falcons on Sunday. Atlanta’s Julio Jones lies on the ground after trying to block the kick.Weekend losers
Fab 4 picks. We went 2-4 because the over/under of 80 on the UTC-South Carolina game simply was a computer glitch. (A Vegas contact said it would be somewhere between 48-50.) We lost the total on UNLV-Hawaii when Hawaii took a knee inside the UNLV 10 to end it. We lost BC-FSU on a spectacular 72-yard TD throw in the final two minutes. We lost THE Ohio State pick because of Karma. In fact, we ‘re picking against THE Ohio State the rest of the way if for no other reason than we can at least feel good about that one. We lost Wake because we underestimated Pitt. That’s 2-4 – we won betting against Louisville because that team is as bad a Power 5 team as we’ve ever seen and hit Navy – which was our second losing weekend of the season. The .333 precent dropped us to 45-31-2, which is a smidge under 59 percent. (It’s 58.974 to be exact.)
College football viewing Saturday. OK, we have long been OK with the SEC scheduling eight conference games and having a deep-breath game the week before rivalry weekend. But that is the least amount of college football we’ve watched in a long, Long, LONG time.
West Virginia. College title hopes are done after pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. In truth, the loss hurt the entire chances of the Big 12 getting into the final four.
The paint on the home locker room walls at Bryant-Denny Stadium during halftime. We’re betting that Nick Saban’s river of screams and frustrations after a 10-10 tie with The Citadel peeled clean a few bricks. (That said, the simple fact that Alabama on its worst possible place still wins 50-17. Or the same score by which Missouri bested Tennessee. That was not the best possible look for UT friends. Hmmmmm.)
Falcons. Egad man, what was that? And to magnify the difference between the levels of truly elite QB play and very good to at times great QB play, look at the weapons around and production of Drew Brees and Matt Ryan. Here’s the simple truth, good teams with great quarterbacks find ways to win games like the Cowboys debacle on Sunday. (And the Browns botch job the week before.) And whether the Falcons are not a good team or Ryan is not a great quarterback, take your pick.
While we are here, the Titans. GUH-Ross. Man, there are few questions that intrigue me more than whether Marcus Mariota is viewed as a franchise quarterback., especially in a division in which the Colts have a decade of Andrew Luck and the Texans restarting a generation of DeShaun Watson. And I am 100 percent back to a place that if you take the Big 3 off the QB table – the Big 3 of Brady, Rodgers and Brees – I am taking Andrew Luck over every other QB in the league.
Speaking of that, every NFL team’s playoff hopes with a losing record. Math is not on their side. Less than 3 percent of teams with a losing record after 10 games have made the playoffs since the 1982 expansion. That’s 16 of the 610 and the last to do it was the 2016 Packers.
Alex Smith. Exactly 33 years to the day of Joe Theissman’s gruesome, career-ending, leg injury, Smith suffered a very similar and gruesome leg injury Sunday. It was simply one of those, “Daanngggg, that’s why those guys get paid that much money. Because that can happen.” Side note: The final score Sunday – a 23-21 loss for the Redskins, was the same score of the game 33 years ago when Theissman was injured. (Side question: This type of injury is the exact reason why Le’Veon Bell decided to sit out the last part of the season? I think so.)
Former LSU football coach Les Miles, center, will be back at Death Valley on Saturday to be honored as part of Saturday’s game against Auburn.Carousel shall spin
OK, Les Miles was announced as the new Kansas coach.
Saw this on social media, but Sunday when The Hat was announced was Nov. 18. It was 11 years to the day from the release of the 2007 AP poll in which LSU and Miles was No. 1 and Kansas was No. 2. Think about that.
We know Louisville is a dumpster fire and that jump is Jeff Brohm’s to turn down.
Now comes the conversation about the other jobs that could be open across the country.
We’ll start with THE Ohio State because watching a fair chunk of THE Buckeyes’ escape against Maryland it was apparent that Urban Liar was having no fun on the sideline.
Could Coach Liar leave? We think that has to be a consideration right now.
Then there is USC, which lost to to a brutally bad – and young – 3-8 UCLA team on Saturday. Now comes a whipping from Notre Dame at home to end the season at 5-7 for Clay Helton.
We think he may survive the season, but there will be no hotter seat than Helton’s in SoCal next fall. But if you want to strike, strike now. It’s not like USC is hurting for coin.
It will be interesting to see what others come open and who may be called.
And while we are here, if I’m prominently involved at USC, I am making some suggestions about what Mike Leach could possibly do with the QBs and athletic WRs that line up to come to USC every year.
This and that
– OK, this story stinks. Seriously. The round of 16 of the Grand Slam of Darts was marred by allegations of ‘rotten’ farts. The loser of the match – man Wesley Harms – said it will take two days to get the smell out of his nose and the distraction threw him off his game in a 10-2 loss to world’s NO. 4-ranked Gary Anderson. Anderson used a version of the age-old, smelt-it-dealt-it defense, which is universally accepted from the world’s highest courts to the playground. Here’s Anderson’s quote from the Guardian: “It definitely came from table-side and it was eggs, rotten eggs, but not from me. Every time I walked past there was a waft of rotten eggs so that’s why I was thinking it was him. It definitely wasn’t me. It was bad. It was a stink, then he started to play better and I thought he must have needed to get some wind out. If somebody has done that they need to see a doctor. Seemingly he says it was me but I would admit it.” Also of note here is that Anderson has admitted to farting on stage before but “never used it as an advantage.” https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/nov/17/stink-hits-darts-grand-slam-as-match-features-flatulent-end
– NASCAR had its championship this weekend. No seriously, it did. Joey Logano won.
– OK, we had a mailbag question about it last week, and it popped up against over the weekend when Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins got his jock in a bunch after the Saints hung half a hundo on Philadelphia and threw the bird at the Saints bench. Uh, Mal, if you don’t want the other team ‘running the score up’ then the first place that can stop is, I don’t know, the defense. Thoughts?
– And if that was a violation of unwritten rules hey, those ‘unwritten rules’ were written in what, 1832, by whom, Emily Post? Hey, we as adults are super quick to point out about the spoiled, everybody-gets-a-trophy age of kids today, right? Well, when football players and coaches who are grown-A men are worried about the feelings and appearances of an opponent throwing on fourth-and-7 up 31, well, everyone pick up a trophy in the locker room. And a juice box and a snack.
– We are more in on this Monday Night Football game than any we can remember. Chiefs-Rams with the highest NFL over on record at 64. Predictions? Hopes? And in expectation of the huge lift of eyeballs, the league has moved five of the best refs from other staffs to the crew working this game. Smart move.
– This was cool. A three-year manager for the Virginia basketball team is dressing for home games. As expected, the top-10 Cavs will blowout a lot of folks before the ACC season starts. He got into a game over the weekend, and the crowd reaction to this three was awesome in its awesomeness. https://twitter.com/SInow/status/1063665673031860226?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1063665673031860226&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs.yimg.com%2Fos%2Fyc%2Fhtml%2Fembed-iframe-min.2d7621e2.html
– LeBron dropped a 50-burger on the Heat.
– Auburn plays at 2:30 in the Maui Invitational today and a win would set up a date with Duke on Tuesday. Count me in. (Kind of, since Press Row and all.)
Today’s questions
Weekend winners and losers. Go.
Slew of side questions above. Enjoy.
As for Nov. 19, well it’s Have a Bad Day Day. Who came up with that one, The Grinch?
It’s also Equal Opportunity Day, which again, should be a daily one, right? It’s also Play Monopoly Day, which means tomorrow is National Finish Your Game of Monopoly Day.
On this day in 1493 Christopher Columbus found Puerto Rico. Never knew he lost it in the first place.
The Mayflower hit Cape Cod on this day in 1620.
In a fact of almost equal importance, Milli Vanilli was stripped of their Grammy for lip-syncing on this day in 1990.
Jodie Foster is 56 today, and yes, I thought she was older than that.
The Gettysburg Address was delivered on this day 155 years ago.
Rushmore of famous numbers in history, because “Four Score and seven years ago” is up there?
Be creative gang, and be grateful. (Also, I will post last week’s Rushmore – apparently they were deleted/covered from Friday’s mailbag – around lunch. Mornings can get quite busy.)