Happy Chrismukkah!

Sandy Cohen Says Happy
Chismukkah everyone.













And a very happy Festivus for the rest of us.

-Art

Rusty's Boring Football Analysis

I exchange a lot of emails about Minnesota sports with Clark W. Griswold. I figured I would start republishing some of the novel length entries here.

Here is Clark's missive:

My concern is more with player development. Brew has a way of turning a 4* kid into a 1*. We need to be developing the lightly recruited guys into good players, guys like Kyle Theret.

Iowa is well known for developing under recruited in state guys into Big Ten and sometimes, NFL caliber players.

I do like it that Brewster pays more attention to the defense. They just need better coaching on that side of the ball.

Rusty's boring response:

I agree that there have been some misses in player development (I'm not going to argue that Theret is league bound), however, Brewster has also had a lot of success. Our entire linebacking corp is playing in the NFL, and none of them were any higher than a 3* last year. I think converting Lee Campbell into a NFL MLB from a DE in two years took some serous coaching. Tripplett was a perennial special forces player and then went in the 5th round. Jacobs and Kirksey have developed very nicely on the line and Sherels went from 5th string walk on wide out to playing his way onto the Vikings practice squad at DB.

I also think you overemphasis the role a head coach plays in a player's development. The head coach needs to be more concerned with big picture strategic development of the program, whether that is fighting for resources within the AD, working the PR trail or developing offensive, defense or recruiting strategy. If Brewster was hanging on an individual's development, I think we would be saying that he needs to direct his priorities and energies elsewhere. It's clear the Butler and Cross to a lesser extent are superior position coaches. On the other hand, Davis, Hammock and Lee have yet to really prove themselves.

I think the area a head coach can influence and that I think we overlook is the level of effort a player puts into their development. If a coach can make every guy on their team hungry to win and hit the weights, there will be more widespread success in development. That is a big picture attitude issue. The Campbells, the Tripplets and the Sherels were the guys who were always staying after practice or hitting the weights on days off. That's how you get better. Brewster needs to learn how to reach out to the highly rated guys from high school, and teach them that natural talent will only get you so far.

The one thing I can point to as my favorite aspect of Brewster is his obvious willingness and ability to learn on the job. We knew when we hired Brewster that he was a first time coach, never higher than a position coach above high school. He came in spouting off like Lane Kiffin about Rose Bowls and national championships, and recruited a ton of low character high talent thugs. In just four years, you can see the great maturation he has gone through. He has become much more low key, while still maintaining the positive energy around the program. He has shifted to recruiting stronger academic kids, and has realized that picking up coaches based purely on their recruiting abilities is not a viable strategy for success in the Big 10. I understand that at Minnesota we aren't going to be able to pull in a Nick Saban caliber coach on the open market, and I truly believe that the only way of breaking through to a Big 10 championship will be with a home grown coach. If we fire Brewster we will either pick up an established coach who is set in his ways, unable to adjust and cope with the unique challenges that come with being a head man at Minnesota (Mason II), or we will just get another young untested coach that will learn on the job again (Brewster II). I think we are pot committed to Brewster and need to bear it out for a few more years.

Here Comes The No Fun Police

So I received an email from Gopher Athletics the other day. I couldn't believe that it had taken this long for the University to offer me my hockey scholarship, but whatever, better late than never. Imagine my disappointment to only find a link to a questionnaire about hockey games.The survey starts out innocently enough, but becomes more and more sinister as it goes on. The term "positive cheers" literally brought chills to my spine and causes me to dry heave.

Here's the thing. The college sport atmosphere is completely different than the professional sport atmosphere. If families are worried about their kid hearing the occasional f-bomb, get seats farther from the student section, or you can go to a pro event for basically the same price. I'm sick of all this PC bullshit. Also, the email mentions "new guidelines on sportsmanship and fan behavior at collegiate hockey games" that were recently passed by the WCHA. But I can't find any mention of it anywhere.

But the best part was when I submitted the survey I got this:Good work, guys.

If you wanna try to take the survey, here it is.

Drunk Blogging! Vol. 1

This is a new feature where I write up an article at 2 AM after returning from the bar. Editing will be kept to a minimum.

Tonight was Art's birthday celebration. We went to William's Peanut Pub, or some shit. I love the salted-in-shell peanuts, but if I eat too many, I'll have an epsidode, as Rusty would say.

William's sells their beers by the liter, which is awesome, both because I can say "I would like a liter of beer" and because each liter is more than 2 pints. Whih makes you drunk faster. And you feel like a real man lifting up a 1 liter mug. Unfortunately, they wouldn't sell us pitchers for some reason. Thats the only thing more manly than a 1 liter mug.

There are 2 things I meant to write about this week. The first is Deadliest Catch. This is honestly one of the best shows on television. Its about crabbers in the Bering Sea near Alaska, and its on Discovery Channel. To be honest, it can get slightly redundant at times, due to the nature of the job, but the people on this show are amazing. This show embodies the manliness we try (and fail) to capture with this blog. This seaoson, the captain of one of the boats suffers a stroke during the season, so its all captured on camera. He eventually succumbs to it and dies. Captain Phil is was one of the most likable, but badass people on the show, and since this show is more of a documentary than a reality show, its actually incredibly depressing to see this all happen. Deadliest Catch is in it 6th season, and while the risk has always been there, nothing of this magnitude ahs happened before on the show.The way the producers handle this is respecful and interesting. They literally had video of him taking his last breath, but chose not to air it, which I agree with. They handled it with class and grace, while making for an intereting show, even though people knew he died way back in February. (I just spelled February right on the first try. Just goes to show why I deserved to finish in the top 5 of the 5th grade spelling bee. Fucking "swineherd" knocked me out. I'm still bitter. I'm pretty sure that's not a word.) My point here is, if you haven't been watching Deadliest Catch, you probably should be. If anything, you should at least watch the newest season, though I'm afriad you wouldn't be as attached to the people on the show as if you watched it for the entire run of the series. Full espisodes can be found online.

The second thing to talk about is the Mikko Koivu signing. Soon after the deal was announced, Rusty sent me an email asking my thoughts on the matter:I was excited to say the least at the beginning. But as I thought about it more and read around the interwebs, little doubts began creeping into my head. THe Wild may very well be overpaying here. But then again, they may not. The truth of the matter here is, the Mikko Koivu contract is hard to judge. No one will know whether or not its a fair deal for at least another seaon. The addition of some scoring wings could dratically help, but it doesnt't really look like that will happen this season. The cap space occupied here could fuck us over in the long run when it comes to signed other players. Thats actually the thing I'm most scared of. We need to sign players, and if we have so much tied up in Koivu, especially since theres grumblings that the salary cap will decrease in the coming years, we might be screwed. HOWEVAH, I'm gonna be optimistic here and say this is a good thing. The Wild need a leader, and Koivu can definitely fill that role.

At the very least, it's better than this:I would say moer, but I'm about to pass out. This has been the inagural issue of Drunk Blogging. Sleep tight folks. I know I will.

Viva España

First off, I'm going to make an attempt to update this pile of words we call a blog regularly again. Since I don't have homework to bitch about anymore, I should make an attempt to get off my ass and do something productive when I get home from work rather than play GTA4 for 5 hours. And by "get off my ass" I mean "shift my gaze 10 degrees to the left."

So Spain won the World Cup yesterday. I was forced to watch it soberly with my dad and my sister, because she had to go and turn 20 yesterday. Twenty has to be the worst possible birthday ever. All you get is to start the countdown until you don't have to pay shady older kids a $20 premium for a 12 pack or risk getting date-raped by a brah.

I was glad to see Spain win it. I've been a "fan" of Spanish soccer for a couple of years now. I'm actually less of a fan of the team itself and more a fan of the country. That place is niiiice. I recently returned from a 10 day post-graduation excursion to the country. I've been there twice before in high school and saw all the tourist-y shit, so this time was about doing nothing in particular. And drinking.

The thing I noticed first in Spain this time around was the multitude of attractive females. I literally started counting the number of UNattractive 20-something's around the city. My final tally after 10 days of constant people watching: 12. Twelve unattractive people in the whole country. Which leads me to the point of this post: Sara Carbonero.

She is the Spanish keeper's girlfriend. But she's also a reporter for one of the big TV stations over there. And it was her job to cover the Spanish team in the World Cup. Which was kind of awkward when she had to basically say "You sucked out there" in a live interview after Spain lost to Switzerland in the first game. But after the final yesterday there was this:

Madre mia, indeed. What a lucky bastard. She gives Bar Rafaeli a run for her money. But I think my favorite part is the reporter on the right laughing like a little girl when they cut back to the studio. Anyways, more Sara Carbonero:
BONUS!
FALCON KICK!