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Top 10 Videos of 2011: 5. “Tiger Woods Fails to Qualify for Sex with Dive Bar Waitress”

January 14, 2012 | Comment

5Back in January of 2011, the reliably hilarious satirical web site The Onion branched out into broadcast TV. Onion News Network was renewed for a second season and can be seen on IFC. A second show, Onion SportsDome, appeared on Comedy Central but was cancelled in June. SportsDome can’t be called a total loss, however, because it produced at least one terrific segment which has continued as a weekly feature on the web.

GOOMF masthead

“Get Out of My Face” (often referred to by the delightful acronym “GOOMF”) is a brilliant parody of the dick-swinging, rapid fire sports pundit barking match shows which have become a staple for ESPN — ones like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption.1 The Onion’s first installment of GOOMF appeared in the summer of 2011, and it laid me out laughing: Read the rest of this entry »


Pro Football Hall of Names: First Team

October 19, 2011 | 2 comments

Whereas my Second Team Hall of Namers were football players whose names are merely amusing, these First Team designees are ones whose names seem to independently declare, “this guy is an effin’ football player, my friend!”

I must admit, this one was tough because there are so, so many great candidates. Especially from the mid-century era: randomly looking at the roster of the 1947 Chicago Cardinals reveals such minor gems as Plato Andros, Babe Dimancheff, Pop Ivy, Buster Ramsey, and Walt Szot. With the purely arbitrary nature of this little exercise in mind, here are my favorite favorites.

NOTE: an asterisk after a player’s name denotes a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

FIRST TEAM: NOW THAT’S A FOOTBALL PLAYER NAME

  • Bieniemy-thumb
    Eric Bieniemy
    pronounced “bee-EN-uh-mee”RB • San Diego Chargers (1991-94), Cincinnati Bengals (1995-98), Philadelphia Eagles (1999)

    We can all be grateful that Bieniemy chose not to attempt a post-football hip-hop career under the name B-Enemy. I can only imagine the various mockeries he must have heard on the playgrounds of his childhood: “Eric B. Enema,” “Eric B. Anthony” (from women’s suffrage history enthusiasts), etc. ESPN’s Chris Berman probably rendered any other nicknames moot when he famously dubbed him “Eric ‘Sleeping With‘ Bieniemy.”

    • Read the rest of this entry »


Pro Football Hall of Names: Second Team

October 14, 2011 | Comment

Confession time: I wrote the bulk of this post a year ago, at the beginning of the 2010 football season. It grew into a long enough opus to fall by the wayside because of my mercurial re-editing tendencies. Before I knew it, the divisional playoffs were upon us and I decided that the post and I needed some time apart.

But now football is back, baby, attended by two of my favorite ancillary activities: trash-talking my friends in our fantasy league and contemplating the funny names of players. The former I have mentioned in this blog before (although not lately), and the latter is the basis of this post — which is now a series of posts. That’s how many unusual, distinctive, or just plain funny names I have dug out of the annals of American football between the 1920′s and the present. So enough pre-game, let’s kick this thing off!

2ND TEAM (MILDLY SILLY)

  • atari-bigby

    Never played this Atari

    Atari Bigby
    DB • Green Bay Packers (2005-10), Seattle Seahawks (2011- )
    He claims that his first name is Japanese for “attack,” although that doesn’t account for the fact that Bigby is a defensive player. I think it would be cool for Bigby to celebrate his interceptions by forming himself into a triangle, rotating in place and ‘firing’ at larger players with a “pew-pew-pew!” sound. It would probably draw an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, of course. The refs might even tack on an additional five yards for copyright violation.

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Oregon’s Big Reveal at the Rose Bowl

January 1, 2010 | 2 comments

First of all, welcome to 2010. I don’t know about you, but I feel better already.

Late in the previous decade (i.e., about three weeks ago), at the end of a post about the University of Oregon football team and their Amazing Technicolor Uniforms, I wrote:

This coming New Year’s Day, Oregon will face Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. The questions abound in the minds of the Ducks faithful… will the “steel”-colored pants appear in Pasadena, or will it be one-and-done for the gray trousers? What if they combined those with the day-glo chartreuse jerseys and the yellow helmets, for a perfect storm of mismatching?

RoseBowlWell, now we know: straight-up green and white. Nice restraint. Certainly nothing like the possible train wreck I envisioned. Despite looking good, right now the Ducks would surely rather feel good, which seems unlikely in light of their just-completed 26-17 loss to Ohio State. Read the rest of this entry »


Oregon Ducks Take Forever to Get Dressed

December 9, 2009 | Permalink

I’m going to slag off the University of Oregon football team. Not because they are going to the Rose Bowl and the team I support, Stanford, isn’t (I dislike such petty player-hatin’). I won’t even be mocking the fact that their mascot is the Ducks. …OK, maybe I will a little. But my real point is that U of O’s team should be called the Clothes Horses.

It’s not news that the athletic program in Eugene has assloads of money, very much of it flowing from alumnus Phil Knight, founder of athletic apparel behemoth Nike, Inc. As a result, this football team has a bigger wardrobe than a Lake Oswego debutante. I’ve been a football fan for a long time, and I’m used to your basic two uniforms per team: home and away. I’ll admit that the NFL’s mixing in nostalgic “throwback” uniforms appealed to my own history-nerdiness, save for the occasional ghastly misstep (of which I blogged not long ago). However, the Ducks have taken things to a new level, all but erasing the line between football season and fashion week. Check out this fancy shit:
preseason unveiling
According to GoDucks.com, this first re-design of the football uniforms since all the way back in… um, 2006, is all about sound science: Read the rest of this entry »


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