The Georgetown Hoyas and Butler Bulldogs each have a pair of adorable bulldog mascots. Today, Georgetown Jack and Georgetown Jack Jr. welcomed Butler Blue 2 and Bulter Blue 3 (Butler Blue 1 is apparently dead. Sad face.) to their campus for a summit of adorability. That's how we got the picture above, which is just oozing with a dangerous amount of cuteness. This is like when the Ghostbusters decided to cross the streams, but with big fat bulldogs.
Photo via
We knew that a Beyoncé-themed Photoshop contest would yield hilarious results, and you guys did not disappoint us. Here are the best of your submissions.
via ak732:
via Raindog789:
via Britt_Pollack:
via PraiseBeCrom:
via Samer:
via Trapz56:
via Raindog789:
via Sonar Jose:
via Sean:
via HiLoSilver:
via cflmo:
via rguerrerojr87:
via ak732:
And here is the winner, via Roggae:
Good job, Roggae. Hit us up to claim your prize.
Nick Bond, writing for our friends at The Classical, recently went through the training program at Bleacher Report, a sort of orc pit out of which all B/R writers must climb before they write for the site. Bond's entire piece is well worth your time, but the best artifact is this horrifying paragraph, part of a lesson about "text optimization":
"Keyword-rich headlines don't by themselves guarantee search-engine visibility for published B/R articles. On the contrary, search-engine algorithms also factor the position and frequency of in-text keywords when determining an article's placement in keyword-specific search listings, which means you should optimize the text of each of your B/R submissions by...(a) including your best keyword as the first word(s) of the text; (b) including all of your primary keywords once each in the first paragraph of the text; and (c) including all of your primary keywords at least 1-2 more times in the subsequent text."
As Bond points out, if you run "search-engine algorithms also factor the position and frequency of in-text keywords when determining an article's placement in keyword-specific search listing" through an internet-buzzwordese translator, you get something like the ancient newsroom axiom of "don't bury the lede." But the above is so abstracted from the human experience of writing and reading that it might as well be a line of programming code.
Bleacher Report was recently purchased by Turner for $175 million; it just became a content partner with CNN. There's a tiny, tiny part of you that has to marvel at what the site has done, in a heighten-the-contradictions sort of way. B/R is what you get when you strip writing of the pretense of being anything other than a commodity.
Yesterday's installment of Dan Le Batard's ESPN podcast featured a segment in which Le Batard is joined by Wizards guard Jordan Crawford. The ensuing conversation isn't anything special, save for this anecdote about Crawford's experience matching up against Kobe Bryant (transcription courtesy of DC Sports Bog):
When I first played with Kobe—they call him the Black Mamba—but then he was doing like a little snake sound when he wanted the ball. It was crazy. It was crazy. It's like tsssss, tsssss. Like fishing. Tsssss, tssss. He do that. Everybody tells you he's gonna do it before you play him—like, ‘Wait till you hear him do this.' And then he [does] it, and it's like, what? He's really a mamba. It sounds like some kind of snake.
This has been your periodic reminder that Kobe Bryant is a strange and terrifying person.
Trying to figure out who is responsible for throwing a football the farthest distance in history is not an easy task. It takes one on a winding journey through message boards and YouTube clips and ends, disappointingly, at Vinny Testaverde. In this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, Josh Levin discovers that the former Jets quarterback may very well be strongest-armed passer in NFL history.
You can listen to the full podcast here or subscribe on iTunes.
The 2013 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am got underway yesterday, and ESPN's Chris Berman is a participant. We're not sure what Berman's position on the leaderboard is, but if this sequence is any indication of how he's been playing, he can't be doing too well. Come for the rage-inflected look of exasperation after the first shot, stay for the ungraceful tumbling that follows the second.
Two Savannah State Students Recorded Themselves Sneaking Into The Super Bowl | Highlights include one of the men incredulously narrating "I wonder what's going on-they should've stopped us, they should've stopped us but they didn't." Read »
"This Is The Greatest Thing I've Ever Seen": An Actual, Live Condor Gets Loose At A Hockey Game | Man may think he has control over wild beasts, but that is only because the beasts allow it to be so. Read »
Should You Storm The Court? An All-Purpose Guide | Who is a court-storming for? Why do it anyway? Is it to reflect the self-regard of the athletics department and its acolytes among fans and media? Read »
Phil Mickelson Fell Down | In the unquestionable sports highlight of this or any year, Phil Mickelson fell on his ass today while trying to find a golf ball at Pebble Beach. Read »
The Solution To Football Withdrawal: A Guide To Rugby Sevens | I am fairly certain that you have no idea what Rugby Sevens means. It's OK, just trust me: this is an intervention. Read »
How To Make A Pasta With Anchovies (And Other Stuff): A Guide For The Unafraid | Today, we're doing it with anchovies. These little guys have attained a rotten status in the common conception of foodstuffs, thanks to generations of lazy sitcom writers who plugged in the word "anchovy" as a shorthand for "yucky crap that weirdos put on pizza to the disgust of the everyman protagonist." Read »
Red Alert: Jim Nantz Compromised, Hacked E-Mails Contain The Whitest Sentence On Record | We'll never have a whiter sentence than one recounting correspondence between two WASP icons-George H.W. Bush and Jim Nantz-about making a golf trio with some guy named Hemingway and hanging out at a compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Read »
LeBron James is currently in the midst of one of the greatest hot streaks in NBA history. ESPN's Tom Haberstoh has a great breakdown of just how brilliant James has been over the last five games, but here's the short version: He has scored 30 points or more and shot at least 60 percent from the field in five straight games, making 49 of his last 65 shots. In other words, LeBron James is tearing through the league at an unimaginably efficient pace. He's in God Mode right now.
Statistically, he's dominating, but there's more to his play. Yes, numbers like 32-36 on shots from inside 15 feet and 9-14 from three-point land are jarring and sublime, but they don't speak to just how much fun it has been to watch LeBron James play basketball lately.
Each NBA season is marked by the ebb and flow of its star players' dominance. One week will belong to Kobe Bryant and his methodical post game, and the next will see Dirk Nowitzki—one-legged and falling softly away from the rim—ruling the league. But there's a difference between what James is doing and the dominant runs we've seen from other league stars. When other players get hot, their play takes on a certain exploitative quality. When Kobe Bryant posts up and hits fall-away, baseline jumpers over and over again, it doesn't feel like he is creating new possibilities, but rather zeroing in on one particular angle of the game and putting a strangle hold on it. The same can be said of Carmelo Anthony when his elbow jumper and bullying drives to the rim can't be stopped, or of James Harden when he's drawing fouls on every foray into the paint. One can't help but feel a sense of scripted inevitability when one of those guys catches the ball during a hot streak. Here it comes, that same shot that nobody can stop him from making right now. Each made basket feels like a tightening of the screws, a narrowing of the game itself.
That's not what it has felt like to watch James this week. Whenever the ball found its way to James during yesterday's win against the Lakers, it brought unlimited possibilities along with it. He's dominated not with predictability and method but with utter creativity. He hit jump shots, took over in the post, threw no-look passes with a deft flick of the wrist, converted alley-oops, led fast breaks, and twisted up his opponents with bouncing, exuberant crossovers that were followed by automatic drives to the basket. And it all worked. Everything he did brought his team closer to victory. Whereas others choose to take over a game by burrowing farther and farther into the same niche, James chooses to play with an outward sensibility, leaving his mark on the game from every possible angle.
Do yourself a favor and take the time to watch this highlight reel of James's performance during yesterday's game. It's five solid minutes of him demolishing the Lakers, and you'll never see him take the same shot twice. He is everywhere—just making it up as he goes along—his greatness filling every corner of the court.
That's what makes watching LeBron James such a satisfying experience. He's not here to beat the game into submission, but to simply play it better—and less scripted—than anyone else on the court. The NBA is LeBron's show now.
Maybe Lil Wayne should just stop going to live sporting events. First, there was that whole kerfuffle about him not being able to attend a Thunder game, which brought accusations of racism. Then he had a strange meltdown at the DirectTV Celebrity Beach Bowl, and now it appears that he was kicked out of yesterday's Lakers-Heat game.
Weezy can certainly be obnoxious, but it's hard to believe that the staff at the arena would have made him leave just because he was rooting for the visiting Lakers. As USA Today points out, one fan who claims to have been sitting near Lil Wayne says that there is more to the story:
The plot thickens! But what say you, Miami Heat spokeswoman?
Heat spokeswoman Lorrie-Ann Diaz told USA TODAY Sports in an e-mail that Lil Wayne was not kicked out but instead chose to leave.
Notice how that's not exactly a denial that an incident took place. "Instead chose to leave" is just double speak for, "We sent some security guards to tell Lil Wayne to get a grip and he got angry and stormed out of the arena." Regardless of what happened, our advice to Lil Wayne is simply this: just chill out, man.
Word just came down that Michael Vick, who was previously pegged as a prime candidate to be released by the Philadelphia Eagles due to the $15 million left on his contract, will in fact be staying in Philly for at least one more season. Vick and the Eagles restructured his deal, and he now has a one-year, $10 million contract.
Reaction to Vick's re-upping with the Eagles has been understandably mixed. He's two years removed from his last truly productive season, he's 32 years old, and he's just as injury prone as he has ever been. Some even seem to think that Vick is nothing more than a place holder until new coach Chip Kelly can find himself a suitable quarterback.
But to write off Vick's potential to make a positive impact on this upcoming Eagles season is to forget what we know about Vick. He has always been at his best when bouncing back from adversity. Vick's career has been anything but smooth or predictable, but he's always shown a knack for resurrection. His winningest season in Atlanta followed an injury-shortened campaign in which he missed 11 games due to a broken leg. Four years and one prison sentence later, Vick transformed into the most dynamic quarterback in the league, starting the Eagles' last 11 games and setting career highs in completion percentage and TD passes.
And now, Vick finds himself once again out of favor, walking into a unknown situation. But Kelly's presence should make us hopeful for Vick's potential this season. It was hard to watch quarterbacks like Colin Kaepernick, Russell Wilson, and Robert Griffin III flourish while running pistol and option systems and not wonder what Vick and the Eagles could do in a more creative offensive system. Vick can still run faster and throw farther than most quarterbacks in the league, and he's still surrounded by a dynamic set of skill players in LeSean McCoy, Jeremy Maclin, and DeSean Jackson. If there's anyone who can squeeze out one more drop of magic from Michael Vick's fading career, it's Chip Kelly.
So take heart, Eagles fans. You may have to wait one more season for the Nick Foles era to begin, but it could be a memorable one.
Last year, Bill Murray showed up at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am wearing a ghillie suit and ready to punt some footballs, so it was hard to imagine how he could possibly one-up himself at this year's tournament. And yet, that's exactly what he did.
There are almost too many things to love about Murray's 2013 performance. He showed up looking like this:
He hobnobbed with some servicemen and women. He fucked with Harris Barton's Super Bowl rings. He signed a lady's forehead and threw free hats into the gallery.
But my favorite moment comes from the fan-shot video at the top of this post, in which Bill Murray strikes a wonderful approach shot, and then casually feeds his divot to one of the fans in the gallery. Bill Murray is an American hero.
Kobe Bryant hasn't had a Twitter account for very long, but he's quickly becoming one of the most interesting follows in the NBA. Yesterday, that trend continued when Bryant called out one Twitter user for using "gay" as a pejorative. Here's the tweet that set everything off:
Just a few minutes later, Bryant responded to @PacSmoove and @pooke09, letting them know that using "gay" as a put down was #notcool:
Of course, a certain amount of image consciousness was likely the impetus behind this tweet. You may recall that Bryant himself got into hot water not long ago for calling a referee a "fucking faggot," so this was a great opportunity for Bryant to do some image rehabilitation. Still, it's nice to see an athlete of Bryant's stature take a stance like this. He even responded to criticism that cited his previous use of a homophobic slur:
So yeah, follow Kobe Bryant on Twitter.
Since being released by the Atlanta Falcons in November, defensive end Ray Edwards has embarked on a fledgling boxing career. The video above comes from a recent bout that Edwards had in West Fargo, North Dakota. I don't know why Edwards is fighting a short, pudgy man who looks more like an accountant than he does a boxer, and I don't know why there are so many spectators at this low-rent boxing match. What I do know is that Edwards's portly opponent takes one of the most egregious dives you will ever see. This is probably the most scandalous thing that has ever happened in West Fargo.
Mike Bibby no longer has a home in the NBA, which means that he has plenty of time to attend his son's high school basketball games. Last Friday, Bibby was kicked out of one of his son's games for arguing with the referees, and was escorted out of the gym by a police officer. Thanks to Arizona's ABC affiliate, we have video of the incident.
That's the shit-eating grin of a man who has a long career as an insufferable basketball dad in front of him. Good luck with that, Mike Bibby Jr.
[Cowbell Kingdom via ABC 15]
Yesterday, members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) convened in order to decide which of the 26 core Olympic sports would be dropped from the 2020 summer games in order to make room for the inclusion of a new sport. Everybody thought that the IOC was going to bring the axe down on modern pentathlon, because modern pentathlon is kind of dumb. Instead, the committee decided to kill wrestling, a sport that has been part of the Olympics since 1896 and has given us some of the most memorable Olympic moments.
So, what gives? Why would the IOC abandon one of the best sports the Olympics has to offer? Perhaps they had some insight that the rest of us don't, or access to metrics that showed them that wrestling's time as an Olympic sport had to come to an end.
The board voted after reviewing a report by the IOC program commission report that analyzed 39 criteria, including television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity. With no official rankings or recommendations contained in the report, the final decision by the 15-member board was also subject to political, emotional and sentimental factors.
Right. So the IOC had access to a report that contained all kinds of important data that was never actually distilled into anything useful and then voted with sentimental, political, and emotional factors in mind. Seems like a good way to run an international sporting event.
And what of modern pentathlon? What did the boosters behind that sport do to ensure that it stayed in the Olympics?
Klaus Schormann, president of governing body UIPM, lobbied hard to protect his sport's Olympic status and it paid off in the end.
"We have promised things and we have delivered," he said after Tuesday's decision. "That gives me a great feeling. It also gives me new energy to develop our sport further and never give up."
Bribes. He's probably talking about bribes.
[AP]
Connor Bird, the 21-year-old son of NBA legend Larry Bird, was arrested on Sunday by the Indiana University police department after allegedly trying to hit his ex-girlfriend with his car. According to police, Bird and his ex-girlfriend got into an argument in his apartment, which ended with him throwing his cell phone at the woman. Later, police say the argument continued in a parking lot where Bird made two attempts to run down his ex-girlfriend with his car. From the Indianapolis Star Tribune:
Later, police said, Bird waited at his ex-girlfriend's home and took her to a parking lot to talk things over. There, however, they got into another fight, police said, and the girl got out of Bird's car with the intent of walking back to her home. That's when, police said, Bird twice tried to hit the woman with his car. Another IU student witnessed the incident, police said, and took the female to the Indiana University Police Department.
Bird is being charged with battery with injury, criminal mischief, intimidation with a deadly weapon, and possession of marijuana.
[IndyStar]
Welcome to your Sad Derrick Rose update. Previously, we shared a collection of soul-crushing headlines about the progress of Sad Derrick Rose's rehab. Then, we found this GIF-like thing (it's called a vine) of Sad Derrick Rose executing a spin move and a layup with all the explosiveness of a dad getting in some post-work run at the YMCA.
Today's Sad Derrick Rose update comes courtesy of an interview that Rose gave to USA Today. Take it away, Sad Derrick Rose:
"I don't have a set date," Rose told USA TODAY Sports on Monday in his first extensive interview since the 2012-13 NBA season began. "I'm not coming back until I'm 110%. Who knows when that can be? It can be within a couple of weeks. It could be next year. It could be any day. It could be any time. It's just that I'm not coming back until I'm ready."
How close is Rose to 110%?
"Right now, probably in the high 80s," he said. "Far away. Far away."
The Return is picking up steam! Get excited, you guys.
Grantland's Jonathan Abrams has a written a great profile of Shaun Livingston, the former NBA phenom whose horrendous knee injury still haunts the league. It's about Livingston's slow slog back to the NBA, and it includes vivid anecdotes that remind us of Livingston's once-tremendous talent, as well as the the truly horrific nature of his injury. One of the most stomach-churning moments in Abrams's piece comes with the description of the immediate aftermath of Livingston's injury:
Jasen Powell, the Clippers trainer, raced to Livingston before play stopped. Dr. Steven Shimoyama quickly followed. Livingston's knee looked like a pretzel, Shimoyama thought to himself. He could tell that Livingston had sustained a severe knee dislocation and wanted to lessen the agonizing suffering immediately. He prepared to pop the knee back into place, knowing the potential problems if it did not lock back in on the first attempt. Each subsequent attempt would have a lower rate of success than the last. The dislocation impaired the circulation to Livingston's foot; gangrene could set in if Shimoyama failed. Worse, failure could necessitate amputation. Shimoyama flexed Livingston's knee and hip to loosen up the hamstring so he would not fight muscle contractions as he tried to put the knee back into place. He placed an elbow on Livingston's knee to increase his pull. After a few seconds, the knee popped back into place.
Good god. Livingston's injury was so terrible that it essentially transformed the Clippers' athletic trainer into a combat medic. If you need me, I'll be over here shuddering.
And of course, since this is a story that involves the Los Angeles Clippers, there's a nice reminder of just what a dysfunctional, slipshod organization it is:
Back then, the Clippers practiced at a public athletic club. The infrastructure was far different from the state-of-the-art facility the franchise now showcases. The training staff did the very best they could with Livingston and others, but they lacked the equipment of other organizations, Livingston said. "We've got practice and we finish practice and we got 60-year-old naked guys in the hot tub," Livingston recalled.
The Los Angeles Clippers: the team to play for if you want rehab from one of the most disastrous injuries in NBA history with naked old dudes at a public recreation center.
One of the sadder developments in the NFL has been the extinction of the fat running back. Gone are the days when Jerome Bettis, T.J. Duckett, Ron Dayne, Najeh Davenport, and LenDale White made a living by hefting their considerable weight up and down the field.
Which is why it's so refreshing to watch David Fangupo, a 350-pound high school running back from Hawaii do his thing. His highlight reel is a gift from heaven to anyone who likes watching fat guys score touchdowns. (Note: everyone likes watching fat guys score touchdowns.)
Fangupo has committed to the University of Hawaii for next season. Perhaps a new era of fat running backs is upon us.
Yep, that's Will Ferrell, decked out in the official uniform of a Staples Center usher, scanning the crowd and keeping the peace during last night's Suns-Lakers game. As is usually the case, we have no idea why Will Ferrell was doing this, or why he was wearing a name tag that read, "Ted Vagina." No, really, that's what it said. Here's a picture:
Ferrell's big, attention grabbing move of the night was kicking Shaquille O'Neal out of the game. So keep an eye out for Will Ferrell's new movie, Usher: The Legend Of Ted Vagina, I guess.
[Pictures via @KamPashai and @Espo]