Newscoma

You have to watch the whole thing. The reaction of the news anchors is really a lot of fun when the Cavs win the last second.

As I said, watch it all. It’s worth it.

My dear friends at Sports Information at UT Martin, (Trudy, Chris, I’m talking to you), please book these people for the next home Skyhawk football game.

Please, I’m begging you.

H/T to Paul Chenowith via a Twitter update.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hockey. I love hockey, and due to some financial constraints (when you don’t live in Nashville, you have to stay the night, get a room, eat, drink beer, etc.), I haven’t been able to go for a couple of years. And there is always the issue of timing as SQ covers high school and college basketball which interferes with the Predators schedule more than it doesn’t.

Man, sometimes my life has to be planned to the second. I digress.

Now, with that said, I think one of the finest sporting events of my short time on this planet was seeing Mark Messier play.

Man, he was vicious. Yeah, I have a bit of a skate crush on him.

But I do love me some Nashville hockey, if I haven’t told you.  So, I’ve been reading Paul quite a bit and sort of swooning over my beloved Preds. When I lived in Nashville, you could find me many winter nights watching, ironically, the Nashville Knights.

On January 1, 2000, my whole objective was being at the Preds game for the new century. Yeah, it was great.

I’m working with an IT guy right now who is coaching a youth hockey team in Jackson. Recently, he realized that he could communicate with his team by starting a blog. I thought that was pretty damned smart. His comment was that it was free, he could communicate with his parents and players easily and they can talk back and forth with each other.

I love it when people figure that out.

And I love writing like this:

A sprinter writes his legacy in contrary moments, trying to mix desperate athletic passion with the calm required to sustain perfect running technique. The body wants to thrash like a child on the playground, flailing toward the finish line. The mind must make it chill, for thrashing is slow and inefficient and leads to defeat. In fractions of a second, champions are divided from the merely swift.

snip

Gay, 25, is the latest in a long line of brilliant U.S. sprinters, filling the gap left by Justin Gatlin’s drug suspension a year ago.

It’s from Sports Illustrated about Tyson Gay, a sprinter that won what the writer called a “showstopper.”

And I’m humbled by the words that made me feel something more than I thought I could.

Of the good.

Barry Bonds just broke the record.

I’m going to bed.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is coming on, I think.

Incidentally, for 33 years, Hank held the record and he was very wonderful and gracious in offering Bonds his congratulations.

Man, I love me some Hank Aaron.

As I did one of my infamous waking up in the middle of the night doozies, I decided to peruse the blogosphere as I’m known to do.

I found out that Coach Ray Mears had died.

Mears was at the University of Tennessee at Martin for awhile as the Athletic Director and I was fortunate to get to know him a bit. He was one of the saltiest guys I ever met. I enjoyed him immensely. He was funny, saucy and could spin a tale better than anyone. When he left UTM, I was sad because he brightened up the joint.

He was the guy that came up with “Big Orange Country.” And if you were lucky, he would tell you so many stories it would make your head spin.

Coach Mears, you will be missed and you made me smile during my brief time of knowing you.

Tennessee Vol and hometown boy Justin Harrell was just named 16th in the NFL draft to Green Bay. Squirrel Queen said he was taken at a prime spot that was at his draft peak.

This, my friends, is of the good.

The Packers, as Chad Clifton (who is also on the team, and from here) just became the most beloved football franchise in our little burg in Northwest Tennessee.

Patrick Willis of Ole Miss who is from Bruceton went 11th.

UPDATE: I forgot to edit this earlier, but Harrell went 16th. My bad. And I was watching the dang thing. So, yeah, edited.

Not a bad day at all.

ESPN Colin Cowherd really went and did it this time, didn’t he? On his show last week, he went on a rant about a blog and challenged his readers to fake hit the site to overwhelm it’s bandwidth and to bring it down.

And they did.

This is probably every blogger’s worst nightmare.

The blog, called The Big Lead, which in all honesty I had never heard of before, was down for more than 96 hours. I bet Cowherd felt all powerful with his little stunt, which was an asshat move if you ask me.

And some of the big time blogs are not happy. Deadspin said this:

Today, upset with something The Big Lead had written about him (or someone, or something, imagined or otherwise), Cowherd told his listeners to unleash a DNS attack on the site. One of the tech people here at Gawker Media tells us: “When someone floods a website with so many fake hits that the servers get overloaded, the site, essentially, goes down. A programmer could write a script to load the website once a second.”

SQ was reading me this story this morning and it apparently has caused a storm because other blogs are backing the blog up. It was so bad that the new ombudsman, LeAnne Shcrieber wrote an article condemning Cowherd’s behavior on his show citing it was distasteful however he will not receive any disciplinary action from ESPN. There will be a policy put in place, however, he apparently won’t be affected by it.

Cowherd, for whatever reason, went over the line. He’s had trouble with blogs before having to apparently (I did not know this) using material about the University of Michigan from a blog called The M Zone retrieved from a blog and not giving attribution. When they asked for credit, he called them a bunch of whiners but later apologized. (source Deadspin article and Wikipedia)

I think it would be safe to say one of two things. A.) Cowherd doesn’t like blogs. and B.) Cowherd uses blogs for his radio show for material but doesn’t value them and apparently The Big Lead pissed him off for some reason (my opinion of course.)

Now let me say this. I don’t give two chicken craps (heh) about Cowherd one way or the other. I have listened to him before because I live with a Sports Editor and she gets all surly if she doesn’t get to listen to sports radio. On the other hand, I’ve always thought Cowherd was a bit condescending.

But to intentionally crash a blogger’s site on purpose was a power trip proving he could. And, alas, he did.

It was jerk move.

Hat Tip To Squirrel Queen 

‘Cause that’s the mood I’m in.

• Bowie Kuhn is dead. I don’t know how to say it any kinder than that.

• Bobby Knight is out and as I don’t like him AT ALL. I’m not upset.
• Vanderbilt 77 – George Washington 44. Woot.
  
• On-Demand hoops during March Madness at CBS.

After generating $4 million in online advertising last year, CBS SportsLine says that it will likely double that figure for 2007 with its nearly 30 advertisers, which include Dell, Marriot, State Farm, Pontiac and its newest sponsor, Cingular Wireless.In terms of projecting the amount of visitor traffic it will receive, Mark Kortekaas, chief technical officer for CBS Interactive, says that it is anyone’s guess.

Photo from here and I still don’t like him.

So there you go.

UPDATE: DUKE is upset by Virginal Commenwealth University. Holy Crap!!!