Posting Up a Storm

As we all know, the mainstream media is biased against Notre Dame. Why else do you think we have to play on NBC when every other team gets to play on ABC, ESPN, or some awesome regional network? Instead we are stuck with the guy who announces the Triple Crown. Our football players are not horses, Tom Hammond (except for our fullback, who is a horse. The Genius saved him from the glue factory, and he was the reason our rushing offense did not finish last in the nation last year).

The latest round of bias is ESPN’s ranking of our current recruiting class. These fellows at “Scouts, Inc.” have Notre Dame ranked ninth in the country. Ninth! That’s not even in the top two, which is where we should be. Apparently 10 “ESPN Top 150” prospects wasn’t good enough for ESPN, since they ranked Alabama six spots higher than us with three few “ESPN Top 150” prospects. The bias is staring me right in the face! Georgia, USC, Ohio State, and Oklahoma are all ranked above us yet have few “quality” prospects. It just doesn’t add up!

Now, I am already a little suspicious of this ESPN Top 150 list to begin with, since all of our incoming freshmen should be ranked in the top 30. I mean, we’ve got Mike Golic Jr. coming in this fall. His dad works for ESPN. How could they not rank him higher than a 79? It just goes to show you how far the bias goes when ESPN is willing to purposefully misrank one of its own employee’s kids just to smear our school.

Now, all objective recruiting ranking sites have Notre Dame listed much higher than ninth. Rivals.com has us at number two behind Alabama, but this ranking is also a bit suspect. We have the highest star average in the country. Why shouldn’t we be number one? I’m not even going to go over the rest of the sites because my blood pressure is pretty high already. I’ll just let our performance this season speak for itself when we got 24-0 (we are playing the equivalent of a 1-A and 1-AA schedule combined) and top it off with a spot in the BCS Title Game at the Orange Bowl. You heard it here first.

Summer in Revew: No Football = Terrible

Welcome new readers! This promises to be an exciting fall as both Notre Dame and Brady Quinn (and that team he plays for) continue their march of success. But before I get to the glory of the upcoming months, I would like to reminisce about the summer.

In a word, horrendous. Post NFL-draft euphoria only lasts about 36 days, so I have been quite miserable since the end of May, the only things keeping me alive and sane being Arena Football and ESPN's Who's Now? Just kidding, Arena Football is a travesty and ESPN is going to collapse under its own crapulence in the next few weeks.

First of all, football is played outside, not inside. I mean really, you are only going to fool so many people for so long before they notice this major difference. Also, people like low-scoring defensive battles (similar to what Notre Dame plays every week before we start trying and score on five straight possessions), which I'm told are curiously absent in Arena Football. Finally, until Journey buys its own team, I can't stand to watch a league where Bon Jovi is the biggest celebrity owner.

On to the abortion of ESPN's Who's Now. I had heard rumblings about this on the internets earlier in the summer, but only managed to stumble across this monstrosity during the finals. The ever articulate Stuart Scott presided over an esteemed panel that included Erin Andrews, one of ESPN's awful basketball announcers, and some other guy I can't remember. The topic of debate was who was more "Now": Tiger Woods or Lebron James. Apparently, there was some sort of bracket with some other people with various levels of "Nowness", but Woods and James were heads and shoulders above these other less now athletes.

The debate that followed was not something I could honestly call intelligent human discussion. There was some babbling about Lebron getting to the NBA Finals and Tiger being very good at golf, but it mostly sounded like a bunch of idiots trying to accomplish the age-old fallacy of comparing apples to oranges. What the hell does it even mean to be "now" and why do I care? This all seemed like a way for ESPN to get rid of Stuart Scott on the regular SportsCenter broadcasts for a couple of months. After the panel had definitely decided that Tiger Woods was more "now", Stuart Scott informed me, that I, the loyal ESPN viewer, had the final say. Words cannot express what I felt at that moment. Just before I was about to kneel down and pray in the direction of my television, I heard the dulcet tones of TI, who had altered the words of one of his popular songs to be the Who's Now? theme song. After I regained consciousness, I went online to vote for Brady Quinn, but sadly found that he did not make the finals of this prestigious bracket.

Sigh. Only two more weeks til football.