Technically, Chilean U20 defender Bryan Carrasco didn't dive, as he was definitely struck by the Ecuadorian player. Problem is, Carrasco literally smacked himself in the face with the other player's arm. He received a free kick.See also this incident from 2009 -
A couple weeks ago [September 2009], when I posted an article about a victory for "Britain's worst football team" (90 consecutive losses), Mark suggested that I should see the movie "Quantum Hoops." This week I got the DVD from the library.After the movie was released, the basketball team won some nonconference games, but yesterday they ended a 319-game conference losing streak, beating Occidental College 46 to 45.
The movie tells the story of the basketball team at Caltech, one of the top five academic institutions in the world, noted for such nonathlete-students as Richard Feynman, Linus Pauling, and ?Frank Capra. The numbers are incredible - 21 consecutive YEARS without a victory at the time the movie was made - 243 losses in a row. The year before the movie they lost by an average of 60 points per game.
Over the years the teams have been composed of unarguably the brightest (non)athletes in the world. The team in the movie has more valedictorians (8) than students who played varsity basketball in high school (6).
The movie presents the history of the school and its athletic programs and follows the team as they approach a game which they have a chance to win. I won't give the result. You can obviously Google an answer, but that would spoil the dramatic tension. It's a delightful movie, well-suited even for those who don't give a hoot about college sport. Enjoy.
When B. J. Raji nimbly intercepted a pass and shimmied in the end zone last Sunday, helping to put Green Bay into the Super Bowl, the feat was remarkable given that Raji is a nose tackle and, at 337 pounds, is thought to be the largest player to score a postseason touchdown in N.F.L. history...More at the link for those interested (and kudos to the author of the piece for writing "enormousness" rather than "enormity."). I'll bet when the Packers and Steelers arrived in Dallas today that they brought several dozen CPAP machines with them.
In 1970, only one N.F.L. player weighed as much as 300 pounds, according to a survey conducted by The Associated Press. That number has expanded like players’ waistlines from three 300-pounders in 1980 to 94 in 1990, 301 in 2000, 394 in 2009 and 532 as training camps began in 2010...
On the other hand, the enormousness of many players, and the recent deaths of one active lineman and several relatively young retired linemen, have raised questions — and brought conflicting answers — about potential health risks associated with size...
“You can see by looking at the defensive linemen that they carry 30, 40, 50 pounds of fat,” said Jerry Kramer, the All-Pro guard who led the Packers’ famed sweep in the 1960s while playing at about 250 pounds. “Fat doesn’t make you strong and quick. It makes you heavy. Muscle makes you strong. We’ve gotten enamored with the 300-pounder, but give me an offensive guard who’s in great shape at 270 or 275 and understands leverage and positioning, and I’ll bet he’ll whip the fat guy every time.”
Vanessa Tahbone grimaces while competing against Nicole Colbert during the ear pull event at the 49th Annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympic Games July 23 at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. (AP Photo/Fairbanks Daily News-Miner/Eric Engman)From the "Big Shots" compilation of the 100 Best Sports Photographs of 2010 (Part 3) at Boston.com's The Big Picture.
The ear pull is a traditional Inuit game which tests the competitors' ability to endure pain. In the ear pull, two competitors sit facing each other, their legs straddled and interlocked. A two-foot-long loop of string, similar to a thick, waxed dental floss, is looped behind their ears, connecting right ear to right ear, or left to left. The competitors then pull upon the opposing ear using their own ear until the cord comes free or one player quits from the pain. The game has been omitted from some Arctic sports competitions due to safety concerns and the squeamishness of spectators; the event can cause bleeding and competitors sometimes require stitches.Here's a video of the women's competition in 2007:
When he saw a homemade video shot from the upper deck of Qwest Field following Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard touchdown run late in the fourth quarter that clinched the Seahawks 41-36 upset, Vidale, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, became a bit intrigued...
Turns out, Lynch's TD shook Qwest Field and the ground around the stadium — literally.
Vidale said a seismic monitoring station located about 100 yards west of the stadium registered seismic activity during Lynch's run. The shaking was most intense during a 30-second stretch about the time Lynch broke free from the line of scrimmage, finished off his touchdown and celebrated in the end zone with his teammates.
After that, Vidale said, the shaking died down, but it took about a minute for the shaking to completely fade away.
But the highest-stakes action isn't taking place on the gridiron. It's out of sight, in boardrooms and over telephones, as Mr. Goodell and league owners are trying to get the players union to agree to a new collective-bargaining agreement. Negotiations have gone on for two years and if they're not settled by March 3, the NFL will suffer a work stoppage. The roughly $9 billion-a-year enterprise, in other words, might take next season off...The players can't take a cut in an average salary of over $1 million per year? The owners need a larger "pie" to divide among everyone? Neither group gets any sympathy from me.
Another impediment to growth, the commissioner says, is that the 2006 deal failed to address the exorbitant compensation of rookies... In an open letter to fans this week, Mr. Goodell cited a recently published list of the 50 highest-paid American athletes. Five were NFL rookies. "Every other athlete on the list was a proven veteran," he lamented. He also noted that "in 2009, NFL clubs contracted $1.2 billion to 256 drafted rookies with $585 million guaranteed before they had stepped on an NFL field."
The NFL is a commercial juggernaut. Its annual revenue, at just under $9 billion, tops that of Major League Baseball ($7 billion), the National Basketball Association ($4 billion) and the National Hockey League (less than $3 billion).
When Forbes magazine recently ranked the world's 50 most valuable sports franchises, all 32 NFL teams made the list... The least valuable NFL franchise was the Oakland Raiders, which still beat out baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs, and basketball's New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers... NFL games accounted for the four most-watched TV programs of 2010, and 17 of the top 25. They also accounted for every one of the 15 most-watched cable TV programs...
That brings us to the NFL's peculiar challenge today: selling hope to its own players. Namely, owners have to convince players that accepting a pay cut immediately—of 18%, according to the union's calculations, or 9% according to the owners'—will make them better off in the long term.
The owners argue that the league will stagnate unless they get more cash to invest in it—which, in turn, will cause the players' 60% share of revenue to stagnate. Alternatively, if owners can invest more in the league, they can grow it so that players ultimately get, say, 55% of a considerably larger pie...
Still, the union doesn't seem to be buying what the league is selling. Little has changed since last year, when union chief DeMaurice Smith said that, on a scale of one to 10, the chances of a work stoppage are a 14...
[Head coach Chip] Kelly has transformed football into an aerobic sport. This style is particularly of the moment because it is apparent that football, at least in the short term, will become less violent. Kelly’s teams have found a new way to intimidate, one that does not involve high-speed collisions and head injuries...Mark your calendar for January 10, when this Oregon team takes on Auburn for the national title.
His teams usually gather steam as the game progresses and draw their confidence from knowing that the other team will wear down. Oregon’s second-to-last touchdown in what would become a 53-16 rout of Washington came on the fifth play of a 1 minute 8 second drive — meaning they ran plays off about every 13 seconds. (That included the time it took to run the plays.) Its final touchdown, a 30-yard sprint to the end zone by a reserve running back, came on the last of nine consecutive rushing plays. It commenced five seconds after the completion of the previous play...
In Kelly’s offense, the point of a play sometimes seems to be just to get it over with, line up and run another... “Obviously, all of our plays are designed to gain yards,” Gary Campbell, Oregon’s running-backs coach, explained. “But our guys understand the cumulative effect of running them really fast.”
College-football offenses have become more wide open in recent years, but the highest-scoring attacks tend to rely mainly on the forward pass. They are aerial circuses, like Texas Tech under former Coach Mike Leach, whose celebrated spread offense from 2000 to 2009 was so pass-first that his quarterback, in 2003, averaged about 60 pass attempts and 486 passing yards per game. By contrast, Oregon was leading the nation in scoring through 10 games this season with an attack almost evenly split between passing and rushing attempts. The run plays — because receivers are not spread all over the field at the end of a play — allow the Ducks to scramble back to the line of scrimmage and quickly snap the ball again. And Oregon sequences its plays and formations in such a way that it can push the tempo even after pass attempts. The running-backs coach, Gary Campbell, told me that if a receiver on the right side of a formation is sent on a crossing pattern to the other side of the field, Oregon coaches have already planned a formation for the next play that keeps him on the side of the field where he finished...
“What Oregon’s doing will take the evolution of football to a whole different level,” Brian Baldinger, a former player for several pro teams and now an analyst with the N.F.L. Network, told me. “Nobody in the whole history of football can snap off plays as quickly as this team does. Other teams can’t condition for it. It’s a great equalizer. If you’ve got a 350-pound guy, I don’t care how good he is, you’ve got to get him off the field. He can’t keep up...
The first challenge of Kelly’s offense, Bellotti told me, was to put in a communications system... When Oregon is on offense, coaches on the sideline give hand signals. The backup quarterback flips a series of cardboard signs, each of them with four pictures or words on them. Some of the pictures include a tiger, a jack-o’-lantern, a jet taking off and a shamrock... Coaches on the other sideline may be able to decode the signals. But the signs change weekly, and with Oregon running plays so quickly, they would have just seconds to communicate what’s coming to their players...
What Oregon’s innovative offense is really about is conditioning, repetitions in practice, precision and, most of all, agreement on the core mission — to go fast. Any team with a nimble, quick-thinking quarterback and an assortment of quick skill players could do it. And Baldinger believes many will. “It’s going to be copied, from high schools up through major colleges and all the way up to the N.F.L.,” he said. “If they manage to win the national championship, you’re really going to see a lot of it.”
In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas...More at the link, via The Daily Dish.
There have been major changes in canned hunts since I last wrote about them 19 years ago. For one thing, they’re vastly more popular... One of the club’s most prominent members is rock star Ted Nugent, who runs his own canned-hunt operation in Jackson, Michigan. Five of Nugent’s kills have made it into the club record book, including a feral boar he shot during a canned hunt in Texas and a bison he shot on, of all places, Alaska’s Kodiak Island, where they’re being raised to be crossed with cattle for “beefalo.” “Lunatic fringe” is how Nugent describes people who think canned hunts “degrade the heritage of American hunting.”
Another big change in canned hunting since 1992 has been the composition of its critics, which now include more fair-chase hunters. Because the general public has scant understanding of canned hunting, it frequently doesn’t differentiate it from real hunting. “If we don’t protect our image, we may not have a heritage,” says the Colorado Wildlife Federation’s treasurer and board member, Kent Ingram, a leader in the recent well-fought but failed battle to ban canned hunts in the state.
He reports that he was informed by a Denver taxidermist that half the elk coming in to be mounted had tattooed lips, which identify captives. Ingram also said he had reliable information that one canned-hunt customer had flown into Colorado and paid $40,000 to kill a Minnesota-raised bull that had been trucked in for the one-day shoot...
Not all product is shot. What’s considered “best” for canned-hunt production is sold to other breeders. Russell Bellar of Peru, Indiana, paid $100,000 for Xfactor, a yearling whitetail with a freakishly large rack. Some bucks are plied with antler-growing concoctions and as they age are kept on life support with meds and surgeries. Their function is to produce semen for other breeders who buy it for as much as $28,000 per standard unit, or “straw.” A prime buck might produce 500 straws a year. And there’s additional income from photographers who sell phony wildlife images to outdoor magazines and calendar publishers. Old, decrepit males with waning semen and antler potential are sold to canned-hunt operations as shooters...
Finally, there’s the disease issue. Game farms and the canned-hunting operations they supply are spreading bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, chronic wasting disease (the wildlife version of mad cow), and brain worm (carried by white-tailed deer and fatal to ungulates that didn’t evolve with it, such as moose, elk, caribou, and pronghorn). So far the worst epidemics have been in Canada, but they apparently were touched off by animals imported from the United States...
So terse and tight is the prose of Montana’s fair-chase hunters that they were able to pack everything I’ve been trying to say in this column into a single sentence. Maybe you’ll read that sentence this month on one of their trucks, if you venture into Montana’s wild, beautiful deer and elk country, because MADCOW adopted it for a slogan during its ballot-initiative campaign. It goes like this: “Real Hunters Don’t Shoot Pets.”
If you haven't heard, players and coaches were recently ushered into a suite stocked with 27 tony gifts and allowed to select up to $500 worth of leather recliners, digital cameras, headphones, camcorders, mountain bikes and the like — all on Rose Bowl sponsors' dime...
... it came as a surprise to me to learn that this is standard practice in NCAA Division I college football, whose 69 other bowl-bound teams are getting a similar perk.
UW assistant athletic director of external relations Justin Doherty said the NCAA allows football players that go to a bowl to get up to $350 each in institution-funded and up to $500 each in bowl-funded "participation awards," or "bowl gifts."
"By doing that it creates some equity and a rules structure around which this participating award process can happen," he said, and that's different from allowing a school or its boosters to buy things for their athletes willy-nilly, because not all schools nor their boosters have pockets of equal depth.
The Firecrackers are a performance jump rope team made up of talented 4th-8th graders from the Kings Local School District in Ohio. Coached by Lynn Kelley, they perform at venues across the country.It's not a high-res video, but I found it easier to enjoy at fullscreen.
Speed Flying is a new winter sport created by paraglider pilots and skydivers looking for a new sensation and to create a link between gliding by ski and gliding through the air... As it's an extreme sport in the same league as Skydiving and BASE jumping etc. it is also very dangerous with a high risk of injury or even death. Wings can reach speeds in excess of 100km/h in the hands of the top Speed Flyers but normally are flown between 35 & 70 km/h and unlike Paragliding you don't have a reserve/safety parachute if anything goes wrong.Enthusiasts have descended the Eiger in this fashion (video here). Conventional ski clothing is worn, but one would think that a first-time participant might choose brown pants...
The classically trained Kolacny brothers, Steven (piano) and Stijn (conducting) have turned this Belgian girls’ choir into an international phenomenon, performing imaginatively reworked covers of Radiohead, U2, Rammstein and Nirvana songs...
Though there's no base in sight, various historians of sport have identified this game as a version of "stool ball" or "stump ball", which was baseball played with only one base, where the object was for the pitcher to hit a stump or a stool or other handy protrusion with the ball while the batter protected it by batting away the pitcher's balls...For further discussion and a picture of medieval monkeys playing baseball (!!), see the link.
We have no clue how the scoring might have worked, but apparently the game was co-ed and the sort of thing you'd play at an Easter festival.
