The Sixth Cents II

I hope everyone had a great weekend; I apologize for the lack in posts over the past few days. I've been working on a big post that will probably come out either Wednesday or Thursday of this week. In the meantime, I'll hit you up with my Six Cents for the first week in December...
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1. Hail to the Victors!
Congratulations are in order again to our Miami University hockey program. After sweeping Bowling Green over Thanksgiving weekend they moved up to #8 in the country. Then, this past weekend they faced #3 TSUN (Michigan) and handed the Wolverines their third and fourth consecutive losses during a series sweep in Oxford, Ohio. It was our first sweep of TSUN since 1998 during my freshman year!

Senior captain Andy Greene won CCHA Defensive Player of the Week honors on the strength of his game-winning goal capping a 4-3 comeback win.

Also, sophomore netminder Charlie Effinger earned CCHA Goaltender of the Week honors. He turned aside 33 shots in Friday night's 4-2 win and shut TSUN down for the final 39:02 of the contest. He also extended his personal unbeaten streak to 10 games (9-0-1) dating back to the end of his freshman season.

After the polls were released early Monday afternoon, Miami (12-2-1 overall) came in at #2 in the NCAA, trailing only Wisconsin (13-1-2). The Redhawks also increased their lead in the CCHA standings (10-1-1) and now have an 8-point lead over second place Ohio State.

(Note: this is the only sport that I will actually root against the Buckeyes.)
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2. Playing with the house's money
It was reported on Sunday that the dreaded New York Yankees finished the 2005 season in the red. Congratulations to Brian Cashman for assembling a team that would not only lose in the first round of the playoffs, but would also lose his owner, George Steinbrenner, somewhere between $50 million and $85 million. Guess the $200 million payroll didn't quite pay off, huh Georgie?

I wonder if George is still happy with that contract extension he just gave Cashman. Seriously, if you have unlimited resources like that, there is no excuse for not going to the World Series every year, is there?

My favorite analogy in sports for some time has been from one of the Sports Guy's readers: "Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the house in blackjack." Looks like those MIT guys showed up and counted some cards.
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3. Playing with the house's money, part deux
As is the typical Sunday tradition, several members of the crew ventured over to Gongolapad for afternoon NFL football. When they bought the new condo almost two years ago, they also bought a big screen TV and installed the Direct TV Sunday Ticket. Recently, they upgraded it for HDTV. Let me just say this, if you have never seen the difference between regular and high definition, well, you're missing out. It's so sick, it's sick.

This past Sunday was the big AFC North showdown between the Cincinnati Bungals and the Pittsburgh Steelers, two teams that under most circumstances I would root heavily against. Growing up in Cleveland you are supposed to hate the Steelers, but after the move to Baltimore and Pittsburgh's acquisition of Big Ben, I have decided to wish him and his teammates well until the Browns' return to prominence. I mean, I have to hate Art Modell more than Pittsburgh no matter what ESPN and it's "Top Five Reasons you can't blame..." show tells me about poor Art.

Clevelanders have always been a little apathetic in their rivalry with Cincinnati though, and even more so recently. But if you go south of Columbus you'd realize that the hatred towards the Browns (and the entire city of Cleveland in general) borders on homicidal down there. Further, I just can't stand listening to the "Who Dey!?" chants from the Bungal fans. At the very least, I give them credit for sticking with these guys even though they haven't had a winning season since 1990.

Back to the point: December 4th will forever be known as All-In Day. Our buddy, who has earned the nickname "All-In" due to his wagering, and losing, all of his chips in the first hand of several poker tournaments, had a most impressive gambling day. Not only did his fantasy teams win, not only did he win a few bucks playing poker online while watching the games, but he also won over a grand in football wagering thanks in part to the 5-team parlay he nailed last night when the Seahawks smoked the Eagles 42-0. He also won several exotic bets including "longest touchdown from scrimmage" in the Bengals-Steelers game. For one day at least, the boy could do no wrong.
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4. But All-In's boy couldn't make good on his guarantee
I've always been against the whole end-zone celebration thing. Maybe I'm one of the few young people who is old school in that sense, and this probably sounds fairly hypocritical from a soccer player, but as my dad always told me, "Act like you've been there before." In college, I certainly participated in a couple of celebrations, but mainly they were when our team came through with goals in huge spots. In my soccer leagues now, I do as my father told me and just get my butt back in position for the restart.

As far the NFL goes, most of these clowns are obnoxious, but for one reason or another I've always enjoyed the antics of Chad Johnson. The riverdance thing was hysterical, the CPR thing was the most creative celebration I've ever scene... But the golfing? Hmmm... he seems to get alot of credit for this when it wasn't completely an original.

For those that didn't see it, after scoring a touchdown a few weeks ago, Johnson picked up the pylon from the corner of the endzone and pretended it was a putter. Seems to me that a similar celebration has been going on in soccer for years. In soccer it's done like this: a teammate runs to the corner flag and puts his hand on it. The goal scorer then comes up takes a shot with his "air-putter." As the imaginary ball comes towards the flag, the teammate plays the role of a caddie and lifts the pin out of the ground. The golfer then celebrates with a "Tigeresque" fist pump.

Back to Johnson. He promised us before the Steelers game this past week that he would give us his "best touchdown celebration yet" because he felt his team had to "iron" some things out against the Steelers. The Bengals won, although you could see the discomfort in Big Ben's throwing hand after injuring his thumb last week. Ben threw three picks, and even though his boys came through, Chad was extremely quiet and did not score. I can't believe I'm saying this, but too bad. I guess we'll have to wait until next year (or perhaps the playoffs?) to see what he had planned for the Steelers.
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5. Bark like a Dawg
The Cleveland Browns lost again on Sunday, this time to the Jacksonville Jaguars after taking a 14-3 halftime lead. We Dawgs are in the strange position of having to root for our team to play better and show signs of life, but continue to lose to ensure a decent enough draft pick. I think we're out of the running for Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush, however, with the play of Charlie Frye and Reuben Droughns in Sunday's game I think this might be a blessing in disguise. Clearly we would like to further booster our defensive talent pool after switching from a 4-3 to a 3-4 this year under rookie head coach Romeo Crennel.

Another rookie, quarterback Charlie Frye from Akron University, got the first start of his career just three days after his Zips won their first ever conference championship in the MAC title game against Northern Illinois. He went 13-20 for 226 yards including 2 touchdown passes to yet another rookie, wide receiver Braylon Edwards out of TSUN. Frye started strong in the first half, but was put under pressure and sacked five times in the second half as the Browns couldn't hold off the 9-3 Jaguars.

It was also a big day in Cleveland for running back Reuben Droughns, who we acquired from Denver during the off-season. Droughns became the first Browns back since 1985 to rush for over 1,000 yards in a season. In '85, Kevin Mack and Earnest Byner both broke the 1,000 yard barrier for the Brownies despite the team finishing 8-8 and losing in the first round of the AFC playoffs.
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6. WARNING: Conservative Political Comment Below
When I speak of watching the news, I usually mean ESPNews. But there wasn't much going on yesterday in the sports world so I flipped on Fox News Channel. Now, I know that the liberals out there are probably tuning out already and everyone knows how much yawl complain about how conservative FNC is. Big deal. Every other media outlet is liberal, so quit complaining and leave us our one place where we can see and hear positive things about our party.

Hannity and Colmes was on when I flipped to FNC, which, for those who haven't seen it, is an interesting show. Alan Colmes is a hard-hitting liberal and actually has his radio show syndicated by FNC (and you thought it was ALL conservative.) Basically, he and Sean Hannity conduct a live show debating various political and social topics. It's nice because it's just the two of them and they occassionally have guests on. Most political debate shows have a single host and then both a conservative and liberal guest. Whichever way the host leans, the debate leans, because they can tag-team the opponent and not allow him to speak. With H&C, there are two hosts so this rarely happens.

Last night, I had to hear about John Kerry's opinion on the conduct of our troops. Recently he went as far as to call OUR troops terrorists, saying that our boys are over there raping and pillaging throughout most of Iraq and Afghanistan. This man was seriously almost our Commander in Chief, are you kidding? Let's just say that there is a reason that our troops overseas voted the way they did in the past election. The final tallies were Bush 78% - Kerry 14%.

By continually demoralizing our troops and throwing the entire cause under a bus, Kerry and most democrats are creating an environment in the Middle East where Iran can get away with building a nuclear weapons program. They know that the general public isn't happy with our continued presense in Iraq right now and this is allowing Iran to push the envelope and almost dare us to attack them.

Congratulations John, you have successfully managed to get the general public against our President and put our troops even further in harms way.