iggymcfly

I still don't think the Mariners are going to do well this year. Their team was a ticking time bomb that just finally exploded in their face last year. Adrian Beltre is a good patch, and he should bring fans out to Safeco, but the M's aren't really going to be good again until their young players develop. I say they get somewhere in the 70-75 win range this year.

OK, Cena's Writer's gone well over his 12 hours again. I move that we just let Vern Gagne pick and move the draft along. Let's just say that Cena's Writer can get his second round pick anytime he wants, but the other people can pick in the meantime and if they get the person he wanted, then too bad. I'm not trying to be an ass or anything, but it's been over 36 hours and we've only got 8 picks made of the 388 requisite to finish the draft.

LooneyTune, I honestly can't imagine how you could ever lose to anyone on pitching with that staff. OMG. It's like all you could possibly hope for. Your lineup's a little weak for an 8 team league, but good lord the pitching. If it's a straight up roto league, you should end up first in all the pitching categories, and if it's a head-to-head league, you just need one or two offensive categories you can cherry-pick and you're all set.

Yeah, the bar idea works great if I'm in Missoula, but if I'm in Pullman I'm kind of screwed. Of course, ordering it isn't really under consideration either. Either I'll get it bootleg off of the web or just say screw it.

What are you talking about? At this pace we'll be done by the all-star break, easy. I mean geez, we're almost halfway through a full-length round.

The ACC's not as good as they were last year, but they're still the best conference in the country from top to bottom. The reason they're a "three-team league" is just that their elite teams are better than the elite teams from the other major conferences. Carolina and Wake are better than OSU and Kansas, and Duke is better than Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Ga. Tech and Maryland were both ranked when the non-conference slate ended, and it's only the grind of the ACC schedule that knocked them down. Even if you figure that Texas Tech and Texas are slightly better than GT and Maryland right now, there's still Kansas State, Baylor, Nebraska, and Colorado that are worse than anyone in the ACC except Florida State. I'd say right now, the conferences look something like this: 1. ACC- Still the best conference in all the land. Only one team with a losing record, and three legit national title contenders. (4 if you count GT) 2. Big XII- Solid conference with six tourney teams and two national title contenders. 3. Big East- Extremely solid in the middle, but no elite teams, and cellar dwellers like St. Johns and Rutgers really bring them down. 4. Big Ten- Illinois is kind of carrying them, as there are some real dogs toward the bottom. 5. Pac Ten- There's a dropoff after Arizona and Washington but not a large enough one to be embarrassing. 6. SEC- Fallen off huge this year, as only Kentucky and Alabama are maintaing previous levels. 7. Conference USA- Easing their way into next year's mid-major status. Louisville's the only really legit team and they're on the way out. 8. West Coast Conference- More than just Gonzaga this year. St. Mary's is solid enough to get NCAA consideration and only 2 teams have losing records.

Ok, looks like I'm up again.

TNA has a national TV deal. Hence, people see who they are. I bet at least 5-10% of people have caught a little bit of Impact and would recognize the TNA brand name if they heard it, but you'd have a hard time finding 1 in 100 people that have heard of Ring of Honor. ROH has a loyal, small, fanbase that makes sure they draw decent crowds, but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily more recognized than TNA.

That's pretty classless to just bang her in the car and then sleep there. I mean the least he could have done is found a safe place to take her. I can't really say I feel sorry for a high school-aged girl that banged a rock star, but that was still pretty stupid. By the way, does anyone else think the law should have different classes for banging underage girls. I'm thinking 12 and under you rot in jail, 13-15 you get a few years, and 16-17, you get probation. It just seems like that would be a little more fair. Oh, and if she has sex with a rock star and testifies that she had a "really good time", that should cut down the sentence a little too.

No, not the actual boxing scenes. Just stuff like how she'd won a fight on the undercard of a heavyweight title match before training with Clint Eastwood, but when she started, it was like she'd never boxed before. The "twist" was referred to as well. On the other hand though, I know Skip Bayless tends to bitch for the sake of bitching, which makes me not want to lend it too much creedence unless I hear the same thing from another source.

I don't get why everyone's acting all peplexed that HBK beat Edge. Shawn never wins on PPV anymore, he lost to Edge at RR, and they're trying to use him in a "legends" match which is the third most hyped match on the card at WM. It's only natural that he gets at least one good win before facing Angle if they're counting on his match to actually draw money.

Definitely Kurt and Taker. Sometimes it's better to just let someone have a legacy than to be like, "Oh they'll be gone pretty soon, let's job them out."

OK, time to get this thread on topic. Being gay for Batista isn't gay at all. Discuss.

The thing is that's not even true. The vast majority of the culture is perfectly fine with open sexuality. The problem is that there are small segments of the society left over from the Puritancial days that are extremely militant, and are constantly trying to beat down every little thing they can. Comparing the American culture where small focus groups keep things off television to the Japanese culture whose attitudes on sex are so weird that I can't quite comprehend them is completely wrong.

I haven't actually seen it, but I saw Skip Bayless complain that the whole boxing storyline was completely unrealistic and had a bunch of plot holes? Is this true? It's just weird to see one person decry it as utter shit when it's being almost universally praised everywhere else.

Oh, they completely blew any chance they had at a 1 seed tonight. That's exactly the kind of game that the committee will keep at the forefront of their memory. In fact, if they don't do well in the Big East tourney, they might not even get a 2 seed at this point. BTW, I think Pittsburgh's a team that could do great come tourney time. It seems like they just jerk off when they're playing shitty teams, but they really step it up against good teams. They swept Syracuse, and beat both Boston College and Connecticut on the road. I'm getting an Elite Eight vibe with them, possibly even Final Four if they get an easy bracket.

OK, first pick! I'm taking Carlos Beltran.

You know what would be awesome? If Cena won the title in the middle of the show, Batista won the real main event, and then when Cena came out to celebrate, Batista just powerbombed the shit out of him because he's tight like that. I'd mark out hardcore for that. I mean if Smackdown's gonna be the B-show, they might as well just go all the way with it. I can just hear JR in the background: "That egomaniacal bastard John Cena tried to steal Batista's spotlight, but Batista powerbombed him straight to hell!"

There's not really anyone else to plug in there. Florida, Cincinnatti, and Texas A&M are the only major conference teams with better records, and all the unranked mid-majors have at least five losses. TT looks better than A&M in conference, and the SEC and CUSA are pretty woeful this year. I even thought about putting GT in there, but I can't justify that until they have more than one big win to hang their hats on.

It's Sunday night again, so here are some new college basketball rankings. 1. Illinois 28-0 2. North Carolina 24-3 3. Boston College 23-2 4. Duke 21-4 5. Wake Forest 24-4 6. Kansas 21-4 7. Kentucky 22-3 8. Oklahoma State 20-5 9. Washington 23-4 10. Connecticut 19-6 11. Syracuse 24-5 12. Villanova 19-6 13. Michigan State 20-5 14. Gonzaga 22-4 15. Oklahoma 21-6 16. Louisville 24-4 17. Arizona 24-5 18. Pacific 23-2 19. Pittsburgh 18-7 20. Wisconsin 18-7 21. Charlotte 21-4 22. Alabama 21-6 23. Utah 24-4 24. Texas Tech 17-8 25. Texas 19-8

When did St. Louis wear navy on the road? I'm trying to picture a navy Cardinals uniform in my mind and I can't see it at all.

First round. Sorry, can see how that could be confusing.

I don't really see that happening at all. The critique on Boston College all year has been that they've been beating bad teams. Well, what are they gonna do in the 1/16 game? Play a bad team. They'll be right in their element and they should win with no trouble. No 1 seeds will actually lose this year, but if one team had a chance, it would probably be Wake. They've had a tendency to let up a little bit against lower-level teams like Florida State, and there's no reason to think they might not do the same in the first round of the tournament.

Rock/Hogan for me, just because it was the only truly special WM moment that I saw as it happened.

Well, on some level, I guess the story has a point. Yes, it's true that Roosevelt did want into the war, and Churchill was going to continue it at all costs. However, there are perfectly valid reasons for this. (1) Churchill only came into power because Nevil Chamberlain's policy of appeasement failed miserably when Hitler ignored his previous terms as soon as they became inconvenient. Even if he did want peace temporarily, it was only because he realized he couldn't win a war that he was fighting on two fronts and wanted to defeat the Russians before refocusing on the war with the British. (2) Roosevelt also knew what a threat Hitler was. He probably had at least some knowledge of the Holocaust, and also realized that Hitler wouldn't stop until he had taken over the world. Even if most of America was willing to let Hitler take over Europe, FDR realized that if no one stopped Hitler at the time, America wouldn't be able to stop the Germans if they wanted to take over the US a few years later.