Hi, friends, and welcome to another installment of LUNCH JUDGMENT! We've been doing this for three months now. So many lunches. I'm so glad that you have been eating food.
If you're new here, this is the drill: you leave a comment below that describes the lunch you ate/are eating today. (NOTE: since this installment of LUNCH JUDGMENT was originally slated to run Wednesday, you are allowed to report Wednesday's lunch if you would like.) I will then, time permitting, respond to your comment with a 1-through-10 rating, and try my best to explain my rationale.
If it looks as though I have skipped you in the order, this is not the case: due to the nature by which comments show up, it can sometimes look as though you've been skipped. Simply refresh, and you should see that the comments are indeed in the correct order.
Ahem. I'll start: I picked up a Cobb salad from Joe Davola's, a sandwich establishment a couple blocks down the street. You can see it in the photo above. Of course, a Cobb salad is a low-ceiling sort of enterprise. I rate this a 6.5. Functional, unambitious, satisfactory.
Wasn't that an exciting lunch? Well, now it's your turn.
Friend, what did you have/are you having for lunch today/yesterday?
Welcome to Week 22 of THIS WEEK IN GIFs, in which we review the greatest animated sporting GIFs of the last week and determine a champion. The champion, as always, will receive an automatic bid into the GIF Tournament. That isn't happening until January or February, but it's never too early to get excited.
Before we get going, Matt Ufford, Dan Rubenstein, and myself would like to plead our cases for our favorite GIFs:
Voting will remain open until Sunday at 11 p.m. Eastern. Enjoy!
Oh no. OH NO. I remember this camera shot. It's exactly the shot they used when Ziggy Sobotka snapped and then went off to kill a guy. SOMEONE SHAKE HIS HAND PLEASE
Things Geno Smith may have said immediately after attempting to drink from a cup with his helmet on:
g'aww crabapples
d'aww raisins
d'awwwwwww adirondacks
b'aww gunnyklobbs
awwwwwww horsesocks
h'awwwwwwwwwww wherewithals
g'bawwwwww cheese an' jelly sandwiches
crap
FELIX BAUMGARTNER
This is my personal selection for GIF of the week for reasons I already outlined in the video, but I have one more point to add, and that is: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
It's been strange to watch Philip's devolution into a footballing doofus. Perhaps I'm forgetting things, but for quite a while there, Rivers was a Trent Green-esque figure behind center: he made mistakes and he wasn't the very greatest quarterback in the league, but he was a rock for that team.
At some point last year -- probably the time he inexplicably fumbled away a field goal attempt and lost against the Chiefs -- he began the second act of his career, one that will apparently be rife with unexplainable lapses in quarterbacking. In this GIF, captured right after Rivers threw one of his 17 interceptions Monday night, his gesture isn't really one of anger or frustration. It's just, "well, maybe I can at least throw a reception to myself with his mouth guard." He cannot.
IAN RAPOPORT
"Reporter hit with ball": a tried-and-true GIF tradition. And every time it happens, I'm positive it was intentional.
LARRY FITZGERALD
Larry Fitzgerald is still one of the very most talented wideouts in the NFL. Is an elite wide receiver "wasted" on mediocre quarterbacking, or is such a setup the one in which he's meant to be, where he's most sorely needed? I can't decide, but Lord, look at this catch. That ball is probably traveling at 50 miles per hour, and he doesn't even bring it back into his body.
Well, it's certainly not legal to attempt a forward pass after you've already tried to punt the ball, but Michael Koenen is mired in Emergency Punter Logic. In these situation, there are no manuals, only the hallucinations of your stepfather, high school chemistry teacher, college sweetheart, and dentist screaming contradictory instructions at you. In such a Yepremian climate, it is impossible to do anything football-smart.
Let's give a rare GIF nod to the person behind the camera. I love how the lady who yells, "f***," isn't even taken out of the frame. It's just a wince, really.
Why did you ever bother eating meals before I was around to judge them? The answer is beyond me, but what's important is that I'm here for you now. If you were one of over 10,000 Americans to have eaten and imbibed things while watching football this past weekend, I would love to hear from you.
Here's how it works, if you're new here: leave a comment below describing what you ate and/or drank during game day (which may have been either Saturday or Sunday). I will then, time permitting, assign a 1-through-10 rating to your lunch, and do my best to explain my rationale.
I'll start. I didn't go out until later Sunday, and while watching football, I did not drink anything. I cooked and ate bacon and scrambled eggs. It was an unspectacular meal, but fully satisfying, especially since the eggs were my doing. Properly scrambled eggs are vastly superior to the rubbery packing-peanut sort we grew up with in cafeterias. I will hereby award myself a 6.5.
Your turn.
Friend, what did you eat and/or drink while watching football?
Hi, everyone. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that lately, I've been conceptualizing an idea for a sports bar. Well, I've been thinking about it some more, and I'm finally ready to share my plans for this establishment.
It's going to be called Jon's End Zone Bar & Grill. That might seem like an odd name for a sports bar ... which is EXACTLY what I'm hoping for! A funny name like this one ought to turn a few heads, and just might draw a few people in the door, curious to figure out what the heck this restaurant is all about.
The name -- in case you've been living in a cave all these years! -- is, of course, a nod to that spot on the field where every football player finds himself after scoring the game-winning touchdown. Likewise, after deciding on THE perfect place to hang out and watch the big game, I would like customers to feel like they've scored a "touchdown" of their own!
So far, I've draw up the floor plan, sign, and menu.
1. Floor plan
I put the tables in random places because I haven't decided how to arrange them just yet. I want to make sure that folks at the tables have a good few of at least one TV.
2. Sign
I haven't quite settled on the slogan I want to print on the sign. That one is just a placeholder.
3. Menu
A thoughtfully-organized menu can make or break a restaurant. That's why I have divided my menu up into sections for different categories.
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
Page 4:
Of course, there's still a lot to work out. Before I open for business, this is my to-do list:
Get silverware
Get plates and bowls
Hire chefs
Get beer mugs
For now, though, I'm just trying to come up with a good slogan. This is where you come in! Please vote on one of the slogans below:
It's always interesting to look at a World Series team and wonder how the Hell it got here. Neither the Tigers nor the Giants entered the postseason as favorites. Both teams feature potential league MVPs, but are also full of players who were liable to soar or plummet in productivity in any given month. They're baseball teams, you see.
Since they're baseball teams, and since this is the postseason, it's impossible for me to predict a winner with any significant degree of confidence. This season, the Giants finished 94-68, the fifth-best record in baseball. The Tigers were 11th at 88-74. But even if the 98-64 Nationals or 95-67 Yankees had reached the World Series, would they have necessarily received a leg up by virtue of their record? All y'all who have been paying attention for a while, say it with me: nope.
Since the start of the wild-card era, the World Series winner actually averages a slightly worse regular-season record (.588) than the loser (.595). Within this 17-season span, the team with the worse regular-season record has won the championship. Watching the World Series is like watching a hyper-dramatic coin flip that takes 10 days to hit the ground.
At least, though, we can take a look back and see how their seasons went. Presumably, the Tigers will roll with a four-man rotation of Justin Verlander, Doug Fister, Max Scherzer and Anibal Sanchez. Here is what their 2012s looked like:
In case you're unfamiliar with the "game score" statistic, our Astros blog, The Crawfish Boxes, has a terrific explanation here. To give you a rough idea, if a pitcher achieves a game score of 50 for a given start, he has given his team an approximate 50-percent chance of winning the game. If a pitcher has a great start, his game score ought to be 65 or higher.
Verlander, to nobody's surprise, has been consistently great this season. Scherzer rebounded after a rough start, and Sanchez finished strong after a difficult summer. For all four pitchers, things really came together in September, and the upward trend has spilled into the postseason.
The Giants, meanwhile, have trotted out five starters so far this postseason: Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Ryan Vogelsong, Madison Bumgarner and Barry Zito. It's safe to assume that a five-man rotation is not in the cards, but let's take a look at all five seasons:
Lincecum, who won two Cy Young awards before his 26th birthday, suffered the first bad season of his career in 2012. As such, Cain has been the staff's ace this season.
Unlike the Tigers' game scores, these are all over the place, particularly at the end of the season. We have sample-size issues to thank for that, but I included the postseason game scores for the purpose of identifying who has stepped it up: Ryan Vogelsong. He's certainly had an interesting career. The Giants drafted him in 1998, and he spent the first act of his career alternating between starter and relief man. At age 28, he left the Major League Baseball for Japan, and didn't return to the bigs until five years later.
This is his Vogelsong's first-ever postseason, and he's certainly making the most of it: through three playoff starts, he's allowed only three earned runs in 19 innings.
Let's take a look at the bats.
In 2012 the Tigers achieved a .757 OPS, good for seventh-best in baseball. Their best offense came in August, during which Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder hit the Hell out of the ball, and the Tigers saw significant spikes in productivity from Delmon Young and Omar Infante.
Cabrera, of course, has been the rock of Detroit's lineup. After hovering around a very-good .900 OPS during the first couple months, the Triple Crown winner caught fire in June and never let up.
Once again: the postseason component of this graphic is a total mess thanks to the crippling limits of sample size. I decided to include it because it at least offers us a look into who has stepped up this October: Jhonny Peralta and Delmon Young. Both men have a considerable amount of playoff experience, but neither has played in a World Series.
Now let's look at the Giants' hitters.
Similarly, the month-over-month OPS of Giants hitters have been all over the place. Buster Posey ought to be considered the National League MVP front-runner. The rest of the team is like, well, most baseball teams: full of individuals who are liable to go hot or cold at any given time. Hunter Pence, the team's midseason acquisition, has had an especially rough time this postseason: he's 9-for-48 with two extra-base hits and one walk.
This figures to be a fun Series. We'll see top-tier hitters in Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder and Buster Posey, and the best pitcher in the game in Justin Verlander.
The numbers I graphed above tell a story more than anything. They aren't terribly predictive, I don't think. So here's a prediction: Tigers in five.
If the Jacksonville Jaguars aren't the NFL's worst team, they are very close to the bottom. Entering Sunday's game against the also-not-great Oakland Raiders, they stood at 1-4 and had surrendered 73 more points than they had scored. They were a week removed from a 41-3 loss to the Bears in which quarterback Blaine Gabbert looked absolutely terrible.
Sunday, despite the injury to franchise back Maurice Jones-Drew, things were looking up for the Jags. Gabbert found fan favorite Cecil Shorts for a long touchdown, the Raiders couldn't stop coughing up the ball, and before long, Jacksonville held a 14-3 lead. Emboldened, the Jags attempted a surprise onside kick -- and succeeded. Anything seemed possible.
And then Gabbert was hurt, ushering backup Chad Henne into the game. This story, I should warn you, is a tragedy. And it's a tragedy best told by the commenters of our Jaguars blog, Big Cat Country. During these three hours, they left over 1,000 comments. This is their story.
On paper, Chad Henne was not completely abysmal. He completed nine of 20 passes without throwing an interception. His incompletions, though, tended to be very incomplete. He neglected open receivers, missed easy passes, and produced three-and-out after three-and-out.
Most tragically, though, was the failing of Cecil Shorts at the very end. The beloved wideout who had sparked hope in Jaguars fans at the start of the game was the very same wideout to cough up the ball in overtime, effectively ending the game.
Big Cat Country was more concerned with the quarterback situation. This is a community that knows its history:
Like many disasters, the Chad Henne Experience began innocently enough. Remember, sports fans: never say anything you don't mean.
The Jaguars are now 1-5. The fate of Gabbert is uncertain, just as he began to show flashes of greatness. Next week the team may need to resort to Henne once again, and prepare themselves for more anemic offense. Maurice Jones-Drew is expected to miss several games. A terrible team has lost nearly every vestige of watchability.
Nice to see you again, friend. Did you ... you ate a lunch today, didn't you? I knew it. I like to think that I have come to know you rather well by this point.
This is what happens now: you leave a comment below that describes the lunch you ate today (or yesterday). I will then, time permitting, rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 and attempt to explain my rationale. I normally don't have time to rate every single lunch, but I will certainly get to as many as I can.
I'll start: Qdoba, ranchera burrito, no beans, with guacamole and salsa verde added. It's the first time I'd been to Qdoba in months, which frankly was too long to wait. I have never had a bad Qdoba burrito. I am self-reporting my lunch as an 8.
Welcome to Week 23 of THIS WEEK IN GIFs. With few exceptions, football took a break from being dramatic and exciting to being sort of sloppy and crappy. That, I think, is well-documented within these GIFs. And of course, we have a couple of baseball GIFs for your review as well.
Voting will remain open until Sunday night at 11 p.m. Eastern. Of course, we have our favorites. In this video, Matt Ufford, Dan Rubenstein and myself plead the cases of our favorite GIFs:
JOE MORGAN (Matt's pick)
NFL RULE BOOK
10.1.3 Tackling.
A player must attempt to tackle by floppin' around like some kinda jimmyjohn, just doorknobbin' all up an' down the field and such. The use of arms to tackle is strictly prohibited, unless they are used fecklessly. Feckless tackles are permitted and encouraged.
PHIL COKE (Dan's pick)
Hey everyone, I just wanted to point out that Phil Coke is the first player to have two instances of drink terminology printed on the back of his jersey since Will Drinkwater.
MARCO SCUTARO
It's delightful to see such childlike enthusiasm over something most of us take for granted. It's like snow in New Orleans, in that I'm pretty sure it rains approximately once every six years in California. Oh, man. Y'all think they tried to go rainsledding? Build rainmen?
Growing up, I was not at all a college football fan. I didn't even start understanding the "heh, there's [conference] for you" jeers until a few years ago. Since I didn't grow up in it, I still sort of feel like an alien in this world of teams moving to new conferences, and people caring whether Conference A is better than Conference B, and all this stuff. Frankly, I have become pretty good at pretending like I understand. I just murmur something like, "heh, Big East, more like Big Least," and pray to God that other people agree.
There's ACC football for you. Looks like they're at it again. Heh.
FAN ON FOOTBALL FIELD
I pled my case in the video, but to repeat myself: if you're going to run around on a field of play, make it a baseball diamond. Because on baseball diamonds, there isn't nearly as much movement and the hats aren't deadly weapons.
The haphazard eye dart suggests to me that at this moment, James Harbaugh witnessed the birth and death of the entire universe, gawking in profound awe as the Supreme Being of the Galaxy drew all matter outward from a single point -- as though playing a game of cat's cradle -- then idly collapsed it in upon itself. "That's it," said Harbaugh. "It is all only a hobby; an idle plaything." And then he continued to berate an official, because it was more important.
Strengths: Harold has been with the Hawks since 1985 and seen it all, from the 1986-87 Hawks who lost the Eastern Conference Semifinals, to the 1995-96 Hawks who lost the Eastern Conference Semifinals, to the 2010-11 Hawks who lost the Eastern Conference Semifinals, and also the seven other times the Hawks lost the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
When I was 11 years old, I had a very No Fear-looking Atlanta Hawks T-shirt that read, "NEVER UNDERESTIMATE YOUR OPPONENT," which in retrospect is quite unusual, since there is very little in the way of team-branded gear that carries the message, "HEY THE OTHER TEAM IS PRETTY GOOD TOO." Upon seeing my shirt, my grandfather solemnly remarked, "You know, that's very good advice."
And it is, and I can only assume that Harry the Hawk is complicit in this pragmatic humility.
Weaknesses: I think I'm the only one who would appreciate pragmatic humility in a mascot.
Strengths: One of only a handful of individuals in the Celtics organization who is younger than 45.
Weaknesses: He's just a human person, which is frankly sort of bullshit. Oh, and hey, you know what? The Celtics have a job posting, in case you're interested in becoming the next Lucky. Several essential skills are listed, such as, "proficient with Microsoft Excel, Word and Outlook." Which suggests to me that on any given night, Lucky is just some humiliated office intern they choose at random.
Type: Anthropomorphic time-traveling animal from 1991.
Strengths: Thanks to those Oakley-looking wrap-around glasses, he serves as delightfully sublime commentary. "What up, Charlotte? Remember the 1990s? I bet that if Charlotte had basketball in the 1990s it would have been just like this!" [goes 7-59]
Weaknesses: Secretly wishes he was back working his old gig: touring elementary-school cafeterias and espousing the importance of drinking orange juice, preferably whilst riding a skateboard.
He has become just as popular as some of the franchise's most notable figures, such as players Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, and head coach Phil Jackson.
Weaknesses: The "Book Benny the Bull for your next event" page reeks of desperation.
Got a weird idea? Let's hear it. That's what we do.
Got a lame idea? That's ok too... we can help.
"Want Benny to bang 'God Bless America' into a xylophone with a police-issue billy club while you roll around in horse blood and shriek the names of Confederate officers lost at sea? Sounds like a real hoot!"
Strengths: You can read more about Moondog here, but here are the basics: in 1932, at age 16, he lost his sight in a farm accident and subsequently dedicated himself to musical pursuits. By the late 40s, he busked in New York City as a street musician while dressing as a Viking. He was an enormous influence on many 20th-century minimalist composers, and even invented a couple of his own instruments.
Weaknesses: Unfortunately, this is a different Moondog. The Cavaliers' Moondog is just a guy in a dog suit.
Strengths: I think I became aware of the Detroit Pistons' existence when i was five years old. I have spent the last 25 or so years, up until literally three minutes ago, without understanding the team's horse imagery. Pistons. Horsepower. Damn it.
Also, unlike some of the other knuckleheads on this list, Hooper has the good sense not to wear an actual player's jersey number.
Strengths: Is no longer a shadow of his companion mascot, Bowser, who was retired a couple years ago. Bowser's bio notes that his favorite movie was Dog Day Afternoon, a tremendous film in which Al Pacino attempts to rob a bank in an effort to fund his lover's sex-reassignment surgery. This is the single most interesting fact about any mascot I've ever heard of. With Bowser phased out, Boomer seems far less vanilla in comparison.
Weaknesses:Boomer's official bio page isn't just broken. It's, like, "employee benefits intranet site that was built in 2004" broken.
Strengths: Burnie, aesthetically speaking, is the most mailed-in mascot of all times, and he is not interested in making any apologies for this. His Neighborhood of Make-Believe-lookin' self appears as though it was conceived of decades before the Heat even existed.
That this mascot represents the NBA's premier franchise is wonderfully sublime commentary on how little the appearance or creativity of a mascot actually matters. Seriously, you could just send an intern to roll around in confetti and packing tape and call him "MR. CRAZY GUY MAN" and tell him his favorite song is "Wild Thing" and boom, mascot.
Weaknesses: In 1994, Burnie grabbed a random woman on the crowd by her feet and tried to force her to dance with him. The humiliated woman fell while trying to get away from him. This is an unbelievably shitty thing to do, and it's also something that mascots tend to get away with to some degree or another.
Not this time. Said woman was the wife of a federal judge, and the jackwilly in the suit was originally threatened with 20 years in prison.
Strengths: Does one thing, and one thing well, and one thing that was beyond the abilities of the Warriors' previous mascot, Thunder, who was axed once Oklahoma's franchise stole the name: cook rice. This sucker comes complete with an auto-shutoff switch, steaming tray, and measuring cup. The Sylvania can also cook quinoa, couscous, and many other sorts of grains!
Weaknesses: Tends to break after a year. Still, perhaps the best $10 you could spend for your kitchen.
Is the recipient of at least one present over the course of his life.
Stuff's Lair is a lair ... full of ... stuff.
Weaknesses:
Has not bothered to open said present.
The corded wall phone, projection TV set, and Sega Saturn indicate that he has not purchased any consumer electronics since 1997.
His vanity, as exhibited by the multiple pictures of himself that he has hung on his wall, is somewhat off-putting.
His chair is one of those weird shrubbery things from the first Legend of Zelda.
There is something terribly tender and sad about this little beast, hunkered in his little muddy underground home, surrounding himself with human comforts, trying to live as a human would, and feeling as though he is ... and look at that terrifically proud, naive smile he wears. He's so proud of his paucity of treasures. He is equal parts Smaug and Bill Dauterive.
Mascot: None. The Sixers' most recent mascot was a sunglasses-wearing rabbit named Hip-Hop. Almost a year ago, the team commissioned Jim Henson' Creature Shop to develop a new one. So the shop came up with three possibilities, none of which were really any good, and put them to a vote. There's been no news on this front since.
Strengths: If you've been around these parts for a while, you may remember the Raptor's dominance in our Animated GIF Tournaments. His GIF has been crowned the undisputed best sports GIF in the history of the Internet.
Strengths: These two perfectly illustrate the contemporary state of mascot-ing. G-Wiz is fuzzy and funny-looking and absolutely no different from 95 percent of other mascots. G-Man is "Poochie" from Itchy & Scratchy: the franchise's attempt at a hip, cutting-edge avatar.
Weaknesses: And they inadvertently, but poignantly, illustrate this point: it doesn't really matter what a mascot is or looks like, it's about what the mascot actually does. Does it tumble down a flight of steps on rollerblades? Does it backflip-dunk off the top rung of a painter's ladder? Show me someone who can do these things while wearing an upside-down sleeping bag, and I will show you a terrific mascot.
Sometimes your favorite quarterback is your hero, and sometimes he is a baby-armed Marxist infant amateur cowardly idiotic child stupid fraudulent chickenshit baby clueless crybaby who should be benched and shot off to some planet more hospitable to horrible crap-ass quarterbacks with no pocket presence who just get sacked and throw interceptions all the time because they're awful three-year-old morons. This quarterback of yours is capable of being either of these things at any given point in time.
As I watched Sunday's NFL games, I began to think about how we talk about our quarterbacks. Some, like Matt Ryan, were brilliant. Others, like Mark Sanchez, were abysmal. Still others, like Jay Cutler, managed to be both in a single afternoon. Are we properly appreciative of our quarterbacks? Too forgiving? Too harsh? This episode of the Seismograph is my attempt to find out.
During the 1 p.m. games of Week 8, we saw a total of 18 starting quarterbacks. I scoured the game threads from SB Nation's NFL blogs, observed how these quarterbacks' fans talked about them, and assigned a score to each comment. This was my approximate scoring system:
7 to 10 points: effusive praise. "Matt Ryan is insanely good."
4 to 6 points: confidence in one's quarterback. "RG3 is getting it done."
1 to 3 points: praise of a particular play. "Brady threw a bullet there."
-1 to -3 points: criticism of a particular play. Example: "God, Rivers. Don't do that."
-4 to -6 points: general dissatisfaction with a quarterback. "Cam sucks."
-7 to -10 points: outright misery and disgust. "I am done with Sanchez. He's a disgrace."
I then mashed all the scores together and pieced together a minute-by-minute assessment. The green line is a collective representation about how NFL fans felt about quarterbacks -- just quarterbacks, in general -- during these 1 p.m. games.
Here's how the first hour went.
The sum of all comments scored in this first hour: negative-46. In other words, we were pretty down on our quarterbacks in the early going. Dolphins fans were pleasantly surprised by Matt Moore, who took over for the injured Ryan Tannehill, and Steelers fans applauded Ben Roethlisberger's game management. On the other end, Jay Cutler was suffering a complete meltdown, and Jets fans were quick to identify yet another crummy performance from Mark Sanchez.
The second hour:
Between 2:00 and 2:59 p.m. Eastern, we grew even more negative, with a "quarterback satisfaction" score of negative-51. Lions fans delighted in Matt Stafford's apparent return to 2011 form, and Russell Wilson gave Seahawks fans a few things to cheer about, but for most of us, the second quarter wasn't a pretty one.
The folks at our Jets blog, Gang Green Nation, did not let up on Sanchez, and for this I can hardly blame them. The Windy City Gridiron commentariat found particularly creative ways of expressing what they thought of Cutler's abject collapse. Meanwhile, Blaine Gabbert, Michael Vick and Cam Newton found ways to contribute misery of their own.
As 3 p.m. neared, though, our spirits began to soar. Gabbert began to pull it together. Robert Griffin III heroically soldiered on, no matter how many passes his receivers dropped. Matt Ryan stepped into Kill Mode. Things were beginning to look good.
For like a few minutes.
Here's where the Seismograph begins to zig-zag all over the place. A couple of Colts fans -- i should stress, literally two Colts fans -- began to doubt Andrew Luck's long-term prospects. Sanchez, for his part, threw an interception that sent Jets fans into despair. At nearly the same moment, Stafford threw a beautiful touchdown pass, and Sam Bradford did what he could to suggest that he is not the root cause of the Rams' struggles.
We reached the crescendo of happiness at around 4 p.m., when Jay Cutler -- unbelievably -- marched the Bears through a game-winning drive and redeemed himself. This happened as the rest of the games wound down to zero, and fans offered a few last bits of praise to the quarterbacks who had emerged as heroes.
I should note that when I looked through Windy City Gridiron's game thread and saw that someone had commented, "Jay Clutchler," I just about fell out my damn chair.
So. Before we wrap things up here, let's slice up the numbers in another direction.
These quarterbacks are separated into four quadrants ... and frankly, I did not anticipate them to find themselves in such like company. I mean, look, we have:
The well-appreciated quarterbacks. Matt Ryan, Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger are elite quarterbacks, and were rightly considered as such.
The coddled spoiled baby quarterbacks. Note that Brandon Weeden and RG3 are rookies, Gabbert is a second-year QB, and Matt Moore is a backup. Fans were willing to hang with these guys and grant them some slack, even when they didn't perform terribly well.
The quarterbacks who were not well-appreciated, and probably for good reasons. What do we have in Mark Sanchez, Philip Rivers, Cam Newton, Jay Cutler and Michael Vick? Oh, only THE FIVE MOST HATED QUARTERBACKS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION (who aren't Tony Romo). These guys have all ably demonstrated that they're capable of greatness. They didn't produce it Sunday, and their fans were happy to say so.
The under-appreciated quarterbacks. As you'll note, no quarterback is firmly set in this camp with both feet. At the margins we have Aaron Rodgers and Matt Hasselbeck, and it's sort of difficult to say why they find themselves together here. Interesting side note: at Acme Packing Company, Packers fans made very little explicit mention of Rodgers the entire game.
Finally, here is the magic number:
Negative-171.
This is the collective plus-minus of all rated QB-specific comments I gathered during these games. That's an average score of negative-0.85 per minute.
Note that these comments did not come from fans across the NFL, they came from fans of these quarterbacks' teams. For three-plus hours Sunday, we were unhappy with our own quarterbacks, and I suspect this is true on a larger scale as well.
Whether this is because quarterbacks are stupid horrible quitters, or merely horrible quitters, I will leave for you to decide.
So glad to be back, friends, and I'm sorry I had to cancel TAILGATE JUDGMENT Monday. Thankfully, my bout of (probable) food poisoning has passed, and I can once again read about food without wanting to vomit.
Here's how it works: in the comments section below, tell me about the lunch you ate today or yesterday. I will then, time permitting, rate it between 1 and 10, and try to explain my ruling as best I can.
Let's get right to it: friend, what did you have for lunch today?
Welcome, everyone, to Week 24 of THIS WEEK IN GIFs. Over the last week, we had a short window in which baseball had concluded but the NBA had not quite started. That means an all-football episode of THIS WEEK IN GIFs!
We have our favorites, of course. Here, I stump for my favorite GIF with fellow GIF enthusiasts Matt Ufford and Dan Rubenstein:
We don't talk about the value of chryons much in this space, and I guess this presents the perfect opportunity. As legendary as MORTIFIED MICHIGAN PUNTER was, wouldn't it have been even better if they'd docked a stoic headshot of the dude in the corner while his real-life face went all BLUUUUURP? Our friend the Raptor still would have crushed him, of course, but still.
I touched on this on the video, but to elaborate: I love showboating, even if it means my own team is the one getting sonny'd. Perhaps that just means that I've been beaten down enough as a sports fan to not have any Team Pride or whatever the Hell left in me, but if that's the case, I'm better for it.
Because this way, I get to enjoy Antonio Brown running backwards almost as quickly as he he was running forwards. It's simultaneously hilarious and impressive, a combination we very rarely see in GIFs around here.
At this point, Philip Rivers is a serious GIF Hall of Fame candidate, y'all.
I get Rivers' first "throw" motion. I mean, it was a bad idea, but he was actually trying to throw a football. I get what he was trying to do.
Not so sure about the second "throw" gesture. Or maybe it was a "spike" gesture? To Ryan Clady, a guy who was ineligible to do either of those things, and whose back was turned to him?
Definitely not sure of the third "throw" gesture, which Rivers gives to Clady while Clady is swallowed up by a tackler and in the process of hitting the ground.
In 10 years, once he finally mimes his way out of the NFL, look for Rivers' first blues-pop album, "Throw Gestures." He'll be wearing Wayfarers and a bomber jacket and leaning over the saddle of the cheapest Harley he can find. The back cover will show him in black and white, standing against a brick wall by himself and laughing. It will sell 428 copies and land him an interview on All Songs Considered, which he will use to talk about how his cats are doing and how one of them is nice but the other can be a real handful sometimes.
I don't know who first came up with the end zone corner boundary rules, but that person is a mad genius. Thinking of in-bounds territory as three-dimensional space gives ball carriers just a little more room to work with, and allows for crazy shit like Vick Ballard is doing here.
I'm sort of a hypocrite: I am categorically opposed to fighting and violence, unless it's between athletes. Maybe that's because a) they almost never sustain serious injury as a result of fighting, b) they're big dudes who can take it, and c) they walk in with some measure of expectations and know that, yes, they might possibly end up fighting.
These fights are generally the culmination of an hour or so of trash-talking, so I really don't know who was being the punk-ass here. Probably both of them. I will say, though, that fighting a guy without a helmet, while YOUR helmet is still on, is some PUNK-ASS SHIT.
Bro has rope. Brope. This GIF is silly and will get like 14 votes.
CHIEFS SPECIAL TEAMS
One of the freedoms of being a 1-6 (now 1-7) team is that you get to pull out all the stops, Open The Whole Playbook, et cetera. Your team can basically become this big, steaming, bubbling laboratory, in which you get to experiment with all sorts of things.
One of those things, if you're the Chiefs: a double-fake onside kick attempt. Strangely, it almost worked. For their next experiment, I'd like Jamaal Charles to wedge the football in his face mask as tightly as he can and try to run upfield that way. Just sort of feel that out and see how that goes.
In fact, not only did Doug Martin have the best fantasy game a Doug has ever had, his performance ranks very highly among the all-time greatest. As ESPN's Matthew Berry tweeted last night:
Martin's 51 pts in ESPN standard scoring ties C Dillon for 3rd highest all time in Internet era ('95 on). Portis (54) & Alexander (52) more
If we're counting decimals -- which some leagues do not -- Martin actually holds the fourth-best score in modern fantasy history. This list is dominated by running backs, which isn't much of a surprise -- if a player is scoring a lot of touchdowns, it's more likely that his team is considerably ahead. Teams who are ahead are certainly more likely to keep giving the ball to their running back.
(As an aside, no quarterback 1995-present can touch Vick's score of 49.32. During that game, he threw for 333 yards, four touchdowns, and zero interceptions, while also rushing for 80 yards and two touchdowns.)
Here's where Martin stands out, though. The week prior to Sunday's performance, Martin totaled 33.4 standard-scoring fantasy points, which gives him 84.6 over a two-week span. I was only able to find one player in the "Internet era" to do any better -- Clinton Portis, who scored 85.1 within two weeks in 2003.
Some other miscellaneous notes:
Martin is the ninth player of the 21st century to rush for 250 or more yards in a single game.
Martin became the first player to rush for four touchdowns in a single game in four years.
Martin is the ninth player in NFL history to score four second-half touchdowns by any means.
At halftime, there was no reason to believe that Martin was midway through a historic performance. At that point, he had zero touchdowns and 41 yards on nine attempts.
Martin scored touchdowns on rushes of 70, 67 and 45 yards. He is now the first player in NFL history to rush for three touchdowns of 45-plus yards in a single game.
After a one-week hiatus, TAILGATE JUDGMENT returns! I know it's now been two weeks since you've eaten or drank anything (since eating or drinking things outside my purview is inherently pointless), and you must have been hungry. I am sorry to have kept you waiting.
Here's how this works, if you're new here: leave a comment below describing what you ate and/or drank while tailgating, or at the bar, or watching football at home, or whatever else. I will then, time permitting, give you a rating between 1 and 10, and do my best to explain said rating.
I'll start. FOOD: homemade chili and cornbread at a friend's house. The chili was not as spicy as I would normally like, but it was made from homemade tomatoes, rather than canned paste or the cruddy watery tomatoes that tend to populate grocery stores this time of year. It was delicious, as was the cornbread. I will rate this an 8 out of 10.
DRINK: well, this was certainly unfortunate. I had a few Coors Lights, and that was it. In previous installments of TAILGATE JUDGMENT I have been rather forgiving toward crummy macrobrews. While they do have their place, drinking them exclusively is just about the least fun I can imagine having. I must hand myself a 3/10 rating, and I must be prepared to hand you a similar rating if you committed the error I did.
Before we begin, a programming note. Our friend Spilly has been busy:
4. When I was eight years old, there was a 10-second window in which it would have been socially acceptable to ask what offensive holding is. I didn't, the window closed forever, and to this day I think it's just when you grab somebody's shirt.
5. I told you all I had ACL surgery because of a high school football injury. It was actually because I tried to stand on a chair.
6. I follow the Fox Sports robot on Twitter.
7. I watch golf in the nude. It is the only thing I have ever loved.
8. I don't actually know what doping is. Frankly, I hear the word and picture Lance Armstrong wearing a kangol and tracksuit and just sitting on a bench by himself and feeding birds.
9. I just had the image of Gary Bettman's face, in the exact size of his face, tattooed directly onto my face.
10. I am the one who has been parking a van in the Talladega parking lot, flipping on a high-intensity shortwave transmitter, holding the mic too close to my mouth, and impersonating Fat Bastard in the form of short, halted shrieks for five hours.
11. When Matchbox 20 played in St. Louis, Rob Thomas said, "go Cardinals." It was the most important moment of my entire life.
12. I choose Cover 6 every time in Madden because the picture shows the circles covering the largest area.
1. The impact of your vote is negligible. It only counts for one percent of the overall vote. If you had like 75 friends, you and your friends could decide the election, but you do not have that many friends. People with that many friends generally have better things to do than voting.
2. If you live in a swing state, it's either really cold or really weird outside.
3. You don't have anything nice to wear to the polling place. You're going to look stupid.
4. Everyone on the ballot is probably an asshole.
5. If you skip work to go vote, your employer can legally fire you.
6. Polling places are often set up in fire stations, where firefighters are trying to sleep and do their job and save your home if it catches on fire. It would take a lot of nerve for you to loiter around in their fire station and get all up in their shit like that. They're going to be nice about it, but God they hate it so much.
7. While in line to vote, you might meet someone you hate running into, and it will be in a scenario that's most likely to involve political conversation. This is going to be terrible.
8. The ballot is complicated. It's been years since you voted, and you're not going to know what to do. Here is a sample ballot:
9. If the polling place has private booths, this will be awful because nobody will be able to help you figure out how to fill it out. If you fill it out incorrectly, you risk jamming the vote counting machine and negating the votes of hundreds of other people.
10. If the polling place does not have private booths, everyone in line, and everyone who works there, is going to stare at you while you nervously fiddle with the ballot. When it becomes apparent that you don't know what you're doing, people in line are going to start shouting things like, "Come on! Hurry up!" Soon, everyone in line will be saying that very loudly. The poll workers will say things like, "you're a grown adult, why don't you know how to fill out a simple ballot?" One of the workers will wave your ballot in the air and say, "Remember to punch out columns A-3 through ZA-17-b only! Don't do what this knucklehead did! Use the multiplier columns!"
11. You need to bring your birth certificate to vote. It's at your mom's house in Iowa. You really should have been thinking about this weeks ago. Did you really think you could simply roll out of bed and vote? Why don't you have immediate possession of your most critical documents? How old are you?
Saturday night, No. 1 Alabama took a 14-3 lead over No. 5 LSU into halftime. Anyone who has watched these teams play know that their games tend to play out as 12-9 field goal festivals, and an 11-point lead in this game seemed like a 21-point lead in any other.
To everyone's shock, LSU scored not one, but two touchdowns in the second half. Suddenly, the Crimson Tide had to come up with a score of its own to preserve its undefeated record. What followed was one of the most memorable finishes of the 2012 college football season.
For myself, an impartial observer, this game was a ton of fun to watch. For those with a vested interest, this was a more complicated affair. In this episode of THE SEISMOGRAPH, we visit our Alabama blog, Roll Bama Roll, and our LSU blog, And The Valley Shook. The game threads from these blogs produced thousands of comments, and within, there was plenty of elation, cussing, despair, cussing, and cussing.
Let's see how and when the winning fans preferred to cuss.
There was very little cussin' going on at Roll Bama Roll until the second quarter, when LSU tried (and failed) a fake field goal, and Tide quarterback A.J. McCarron rushed in for a nine-yard score.
And then the Tigers scored at a breakneck pace -- which, by LSU-Bama standards, means they scored two touchdowns in a single half. The second came minutes after Alabama fumbled at the LSU 10-yard line, coughing up an opportunity to build a 21-10 lead. As you can see above, there was plenty of freaking out to be had.
Their stance on Tide-related affairs, however, was never in doubt.
In total, there was a staggering total of 132 "Roll Tide" comments. In fact, these accounted for seven percent of all Roll Bama Roll comments Saturday evening. They spiked at three predictable intervals: the opening kickoff, the start of the second half, and the end of the game.
Of course, we can't afford not to check in with our LSU fans. A heartbreaking, up-and-down loss inspired a lot of questions, and not many answers.
What is Gary Danielson ever talking about? Nobody knows, LSU fans, but it's worth asking anyway. Is the world ending? That is perhaps best answered by a clergyman. Why is A.J. McCarron crying? BECAUSE HE WON THE FOOTBALL GAME AND WINNING FOOTBALL GAMES MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY AND SOMETIMES PEOPLE CRY WHEN THEY ARE HAPPY.
OK, we've been fiddling with meaningless minutiae for long enough. On to serious matters:
Top 6 comments about beds or bedrooms
6. We are shitting the bed
5. We shitting the bed boys.
4. Win first half, shit the bed the second.
3. We go from confident in the 1st half to bed-shitting in the 2nd half?
2. It's one thing to just get beat, it's another to crap the bed.
1. Oh, they shit the bedroom against LSU in the regular season too?
For other episodes of THE SEISMOGRAPH, please see:
Welcome, friends, to this week's installment of LUNCH JUDGMENT.
Here, once again, is the drill: in the comments below, describe the lunch you ate today or yesterday. Try to be more descriptive, if you can, than, "I ATE PIZZA." I will then come around and, time permitting, rate your lunch between 1 and 10. I will also do my best to explain my ruling.
I'll start. Today I ate what most of us would call a "breakfast," were it eaten a few hours earlier: four scrambled eggs and a glass of grapefruit juice. It wasn't very lunch-y. It was very delicious. There are many things I do not know, but I do know that spending five minutes stirring a scrambled egg over low heat is worth it a dozen times over. The result is what you see above. It was a bit simple and one-dimensional. I will still award myself a 7.5.
Your turn!
Friend, what did you have to eat for lunch today or yesterday?
Welcome to Week 25 of THIS WEEK IN GIFs, everyone! This week is a strange one, full of GIFs of things I have never seen before. But I can certainly pick out a favorite, and so can my fellow GIF enthusiasts, Matt Ufford and Dan Rubenstein:
Voting, as usual, will remain open until 11 p.m. Eastern Sunday. Enjoy!
I'll give you a choice here. I explained the context in the video above, so if you want that, you can watch that. Or, if you'd rather, you can just stare at this for a minute and wonder what the Hell is going on.
Nick Young is one of my favorite players in the NBA. He's perfectly emblematic of the Wizards team he began his career with: tons of talent, tons of dumb shit. Depending on the night, he will either emerge as a top-rate scorer or commit 300 turnovers.
This play was fun to watch, because the Falcons were playing the preventiest of prevent defenses. With the clock at zero, Atlanta was obviously happy to allow the Cowboys to advance to the 50, or 40, or 25, or anywhere that wasn't the end zone. The only way for the Cowboys to give themselves a chance in this situation would be to chuck a couple laterals and hope the Falcons left a door open.
You remember Labyrinth, that wooden game you would tilt to guide the marble through the maze? Watching this is like watching someone try to use the marble to bust down one of the walls.
This moment occurred shortly after Les Miles called 423 Power O Hound Dog, which instructed quarterback Zach Mettenberger to hand the ball off to his running back, Jeremy Hill, who dropped the ball into his satchel and made haste for Memphis while his teammates kept Alabama at bay. "There's a man at the train station," said Les, "who will know what to do with this football." Upon receipt of this delivery, the man put his ear to the football, furrowed a brow, smiled, produced a buck knife, and slashed it open. Out of the slashed-apart seams of the football waddled a baby chick, who unsteadily made his way to Hill's feet. "It would seem you're his mother now," the man said with a smile. Hill was worried; after all, he had never raised a chicken.
The play resulted in a loss of five yards, by virtue of where Hill stepped out of bounds to hop the train. There are things more important than a first down, and Les knows this. Perhaps in some world, the little things -- the babies -- can survive without shelter or guidance, but it is not this one. "It is our charge," said Les with a thoughtful ear-scratch. "It is our charge to keep. And my finger is like a special drill for ears."
Alright, well, KORVIC NEAT. I would probably nominate a GIF of a man named Korvic Neat drinking a glass of milk. I can't say no to that name.
What is actually happening here, and what appears to be happening, are probably two different things. But it appears as though Neat got so thoroughly spun around that he kept on his trajectory without a hitch, and without realizing that his course had been altered a full 90 degrees. Look at his hand gesture at the end. WAIT WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING IN THE END ZONE
Reggie finds his way on this page because this GIF reminds me of the NFL Films reels I saw as a kid. That's in part because it plays at half-speed, but also because this play is just so Barry Sanders-like.
To this day, despite all the running backs that have arrived over the last 15 years, and despite the ramped-up physical abilities of NFL players, Barry Sanders remains the owner of the greatest highlight reel in the sport. Perhaps defenses from the 1990s were bad, or perhaps Barry just made them look that way, but watching him make his way down the field was like watching a student complete a math worksheet. Every defensive lineman was a problem that needed solving, and then it was on to the next one. On his best runs, he had the perfect answer for every single one of them.
Barry was so incredible that I just spent Reggie Bush's entire entry talking about him just because he reminded me of him.
