The Weekly: On the money with Navy

Due to a day trip to Sugar Loaf, N.Y., I missed The Weekly until just now. You’ll have to take my word for it that this came in before the Army-Navy game, especially since Nick just about nailed the score on the nose. Looking forward to his bowl predictions!

In terms of “The Afternoon After/Before,” the Winter Meetings (day job) and Kyrie Irving’s toe injury torpedoed that this week. Look for it early next week after this weekend’s games.

Trust us, this guy won

The two-week hiatus was apparently just what the doctor ordered.

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The Afternoon After: Images from Black Friday, Thanksgiving football

I missed last week, and I’m going to blame Thanksgiving and Black Friday for that. Given that I watched virtually no football this week, let’s talk about the holidays.

Crowds and rain

I honestly don’t like Thanksgiving very much. I do, however, adore Black Friday. For one, I find the unmitigated chaos exciting. Everyone who’s out shopping knows it’s going to be totally berserk, and yet there they all are, flocking to discounted HD TVs like ants zeroing in on a stray piece of watermelon at a picnic.

Doorbusters aren’t my thing – I have two televisions already, and I sleep little as it is – but I like taking in the action. It’s also a good time to pad a DVD collection and such on the cheap.

After Thanksgiving dinner, I got back to my apartment at about 12:30 a.m. and was made aware that Wal-Mart had opened at midnight. In need of Kanye West’s latest CD – and wanting to witness the carnage – I put on my Black Friday Gear and ventured out into a rainy night at about 1:30.

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The Weekly: Choppin’ wood and lookin’ good

Here’s the latest installment of Nick Benvenuto’s The Weekly. I’ve enjoyed reading his picks and takes, and though I haven’t mentioned this to him yet, maybe he can offer up some thoughts on the Cam Newton situation, as I know he’s a fan.

Ramon Broadway's Razorbacks look to take down Spurrier

For those of us who’ve played sports our whole lives, you get used to hearing coach after coach give you the same clichés over and over again.  Some of them find ways to be unique, but most are pretty lame. 

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Look Closer: Clinton Place captures spirit of All Hallow’s Eve

As you may remember from last year, when we talked horror movies, Halloween is a special time around here. Honestly, it’s the only holiday I truly like. (New Year’s is okay.)

But I don’t really get into the drunken nonsense this holiday has become for most people. Most parties are just an excuse to get hammered, which to me, isn’t really what the holiday is about. I think it’s the one time of year it’s totally acceptable to enjoy the macabre and become something different from what you actually are. (Or let your true colors show. I generally transform myself into some weird vampire with a Freddy glove)

In that spirit, if you’re in the New York/New Jersey area, I highly endorse that you check out Clinton Place in Hackensack, N.J., about 10 minutes from the George Washington Bridge. Put it in your GPS and take Route 4 West over to the old Bergen Mall, it’s a few blocks from that.

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The Weekly: Duck! Trojans to face serious challenge from Oregon

Since our name kind of sounds like an offshore gambling site anyway, I love that SportsAngle has added gambling lines to its oeuvre, with my 12-6 NFL record supplemented by our new associate Nick Benvenuto providing college football picks. Nick had a solid 2-2 record his first week, so all you really would have lost would have been the vig. (I think that’s what it’s called?) Regardless, I’m glad to have him aboard, and below is this week’s installment of The Weekly.

Repeat upcoming?

As Halloween looms over this upcoming college football weekend, The Weekly is haunted by the ghosts of past losses — none more haunting than the one suffered last weekend in the Baylor-Kansas State game. 

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Sifting through the nonsense: Quick Division Series thoughts

Four guys in the playoffs

I don’t write about baseball very often here, which I admit is strange, since my day job requires me to watch what I estimate to be about 250-300 games a year. I figure, leave the analysis up to experts like Tom Tango, who have the time and energy to invent new statistics and stuff. Plus, I prefer other sports, such as high school basketball, boxing and Jay-Z.

Besides, I can’t stand the amount of nonsense analysis that goes into something like the baseball playoffs. You get stories that go position-by-position and determine who has an edge, as if it matters somehow that Alex Rodriguez is better than Danny Valencia in particular. You want a page devoted entirely to Ross Gload’s October exploits? Well, here you go.

Baseball, more than other sports, seems to lend itself to throwing loads of information out there indiscriminately. Why take the time to decide what’s actually important when you can lump it in with a bunch of other junk? I have no idea who’s reading all this stuff, but if you checked out the Gload page before I linked it here, you need to get out even more than I do. You’re officially invited to join me at a St. Patrick-St. Benedict’s game at Kean College.

One relevant statistic I saw out there, by the way, came from Tom Verducci, who points out that the winner of Game 1 in the Division Series is 12-0 in the last three postseasons, and 21-3 since 2004. Which, well, does make sense in a five-game series.

Regardless, here are some quick – emphasis on quick – thoughts on the division series:

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Look Closer: Images from the House that Jay-Z built

Press Box

I never used to understood why Jay-Z was always in “best rapper alive” conversations, since I didn’t think his skills were on that level. I thought that maybe it was like Lil’ Wayne, where he said it so much himself over the years that people eventually just assumed it was true.

Then on Monday, after all these years, I saw him live for the first time at Yankee Stadium, the show he co-headlined with Eminem, which I had the opportunity to write about for my day job.

To paraphrase Yuri Foreman two days before he fought there, Yankee Stadium is really big.

But Jay-Z has made himself even bigger.

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Nine years later

I wrote a few things on this day last year – it was the first year SportsAngle had been back in about five years, so I had some things to say about 9/11. I think I’ll let those speak for me again. My voice has changed a bit over the past year, but these are probably still okay. I ended up meeting Jay Fiedler and Ed Kowalczyk of Live this year, and they both vividly remember their roles in such an indescribable time in American history.

I feel like as time goes on, the memories of that day fade a little, as they become just a picture in a history book instead of a vivid memory. We must never forget, or risk being lulled into a false sense of security. And I feel for the people affected on that day, and ever since. I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like.

*****

— Remembering Mike Piazza’s post-9/11 home run – the greatest sporting event I’ve attended in person – and the role of Live’s “Overcome.”

— Remembering unlikely hero Jay Fiedler’s 9/11 moment.

— Why Novak Djokovic – who has to go through Roger Federer again today – deserves your support.

Forget Revis Island — Paying a visit to Revis Diner

 My dad pushing a Rav4. Kanye would not approve

Honestly, not much about the summer-long Darrelle Revis saga that ended late Sunday was fascinating to me. It seemed like your basic contract dispute that we’ve seen a million times.

You had a terrific player in Revis who wouldn’t play for $21 million guaranteed over three years, and apparently held out seven months to get $32 million guaranteed over four. You had the Jets attempting to hold on to as much hard-earned PSL money as they could.

Two heartwarming storylines if I ever heard any.

But I’ll tell you what I did find intriguing: The Roscoe Diner’s involvement in the proceedings.

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Addendum

A little while ago, one of the guys from Deadspin reached out to me to check on the status of the editor referenced in a post I had made about a proofreading error gone wrong. They expressed genuine concern about his situation, which I very much appreciate, leading me to believe that some of the more harsh opinions I stated about their character may not have been warranted.

Given their inquiry as to the well being of the affected party, I’ve decided to take down my previous post, which was driven mainly by anger I was feeling at the time over second-hand information I had found. Essentially, after communicating with Deadspin, I’m not sure I was entirely fair, and that’s not really the tone I like to project here anyway.

I’d like to repeat that I don’t actually know for a fact that any particular site was what cost the person in question here. In an instant news environment, information spreads like wildfire; the error and subsequent fallout was easily found by a Google or Twitter search. It was simply my opinion given their widespread reach and the fact that mainstream outlets have come to view them as opinion-shapers.

Perhaps it’s simply that this is one of my pet peeves. It would be naive for me to expect this sort of thing not to happen, it’s just that in an ideal world, I don’t think it would have a place.

They also took some issue with the opinions expressed in my post, which I understand and respect. My point was more in a broad sense, that spreading errors of that nature could have repercussions that might not be considered ahead of time, especially when a large audience is involved.

In fact, my issue is maybe not so much with Deadspin itself, which I probably should have expressed more properly, but my opinions of a culture in which even what is obviously a human error is splashed all over the map Dewey-Truman style. Deadspin may be merely keeping up with the times in this case, in fact doing it better than anyone else given their success and finances.

I’ll reiterate one final time that perhaps some of my harsher opinions were a bit excessive, as shown by their concern about the affected party.