Midwesterners, good-hearted folk we are, are not so incredibly fucking stupid as to think that someone thinking their football team could beat ours is reason for them to lose our vote.  If you’re a genuine sports fan, you’d rather have someone who believes in their team rather than hops on whatever bandwagon comes along.

Especially with this Buckeyes team…

On a similar topic, I’m going bowling tonight.  I fully expect to suck at it, and I also expect any credibility I have as a political candidate to be flushed down the drain, because the entire Midwestern tribe passes around names of those who should be shunned for bowling under 150. 

I don’t know what idiot tribe of meaningless cultural distinctions everyone between Philadelphia and Las Vegas is supposed to belong to, but nobody actually does.  It’s entirely the construction of media elites and conservative political hacks deciding that the only valuable things we have in our lives are our food, our beer and our sports, and if anyone dares mess with any of those things, they will be summarily burned in effigy outside of our local butcher.  It’s a special fetish of the right in particular - come up with any sacred idol in our cultural religion of self-worship, and then declare that Democrats have profaned it.  The problem, however, is that when we have real things to care about, all of a sudden the guy who ate a double gut-buster burger incorrectly kind of looks like a guy eating a goddamn sandwich rather than an agent of al-Qaeda.

This Terrelle Pryor kid might be good.

After news of Tom Brady’s season-ending injury hit, the most common reaction I heard was a sense of glee at any of a number of things - Brady finally getting his just deserts, Brady finally being exposed as a sham if the Patriots win without him, Matt Cassel finally getting to throw a pass - but I still don’t understand why Brady’s hated so much. 

Unlike Peyton Manning, he doesn’t choke in big games.  Unlike Eli Manning, the defining moment of his career wasn’t throwing a tantrum of draft day (and yes, that’s still his biggest contribution to football history, the Super Bowl ring be damned).  He wasn’t a big-name draft pick who spent years struggling.  There’s a bit of tarnish from Bridget Moynihan’s pregnancy - although from all accounts he handled it as well as he could - but not nearly enough to justify the level of hate he receives. 

The psychology of sports hate is always fascinating; Kobe Bryant is nowhere near as hated as he was a few years back despite, in my opinion, being more hateable than ever.  The Ohio State Buckeyes are largely despised despite always losing the big games, which probably comes from the admitted fact that the difference between a pack of OSU fans and a pack of pitbulls is that Sarah Palin would never root for the Buckeyes.  Alex Rodriguez is despised, even though he’s on net a giant money sink for the most hated team in baseball. 

Why is Tom Brady so hated?  Or is it just overstated in light of the fact that haters always come out to celebrate when someone goes down for the season?  Is it because he’s pretty?  And if so, how does that bode for me when I go down to carpal tunnel next blogging season?

Did you know George W. Bush is at the Olympics?  Because I was unaware until NBC brought it up every seven minutes.  I think he dunked on Yi Jianlan.

I’ve never really liked the NBA Draft, even when I was rabidly collecting cards and attending Cavs games in the mid-90s.

...Yes, I attended Cavs games in the mid-90s.  Shut up. 

I was trying tonight to figure out why I don’t like the NBA Draft, particularly as compared to the Cadillac of Drafts (I meant BMW), the NFL Draft.  And then I went to ESPN and figured out why. 

In the NFL, you have teams that have consistently bad drafts year after year, like Detroit, but even the worst teams usually find some gold somewhere along the way.  You even have the odd horrific draft year, like 1999, where such stalwarts as Tim Couch, Akili Smith, Ricky Williams and Cade McNown thrilled us with the prospect of legendary flameouts. 

But in the NBA, there are very few picks overall and a crapton of bad ones.  Your average draft year is good for a half dozen Euro players you’ll never see play, fifteen players solid enough to contend for starting spots and another forty-five who’ll be lucky to go up against Darko Milicic in practice.  There just don’t seem to be that many NBA-caliber players available in any given year, which makes the entire thing a trudge towards involuntary retirement trussed up as the future of the league.  I prefer that my sports not come with a constant influx of needless depression.