Tag: football

Jimbo Fisher: The Bobby Bonilla of College Football

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard the rumblings that Texas A&M was planning to axe Jimbo Fisher, I didn’t think much of it.  Just that it must really suck to be Jimbo Fisher and having to hear through the grapevine that your termination was basically coming, and that you just have to sit there waiting for the shoe to drop.  Even more so than the fact that at the time, Texas A&M, while not having a great season, were still 6-4, bowl eligible and in the grand spectrum of the sport, at least more than likely going to have yet another winning season.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Texas A&M is doing such, because Jimbo, in spite of not having won a National Championship for the school, is still a rare breed of good coach, who has been to the top of the mountain before, when he won a natty with Florida State, and for all intents and purposes knows what he’s doing.  The interesting thing is that ATM* hasn’t exactly been a cellar dweller under Jimbo Fisher, which is usually one of the first pre-requisites for firing a coach; under Jimbo, ATM has gone 45-25, and won 9, 8, 9, 8 games before a five-win season a year ago, and as it stands right now, the Aggies probably will finish with seven this year.  But two unsatisfactory years is basically bad luck, injuries, a miss on a recruit or two, but really nothing a fairly successful football program like ATM should worry about.

*what I like to call Texas A&M because their logo’s letter order is literally, “ATM” and it’s also a metaphor to the cash cow that college football is

What it really boils down to is the fact that ATM has higher expectations than much of the rest of CFB, and are tired of hanging out in the middle of the pack and want to make a change for the sake of making change.  The thing is, there’s a vastly higher chance that ATM is going to go through some really dismal years over the next few, possibly miss some bowls (and the payouts that come with participation), and probably would have been better off in terms of wins and losses if they stuck with Jimbo.

But the bigger story is the fact that in firing Jimbo Fisher, ATM is still on the hook for around $77 million dollars of contracted salary, and despite the fact that he won’t be driving the reigns for the program, are very much responsible for paying every single cent.  Unsurprisingly, this is the highest payout in CFB history, and if there’s one thing that never seems to change with my interests, is stories about sports having too much fucking money and doing a whole lot of dumb shit with it.

Long story short, from what I’ve seen, it appears that ATM is taking a page out of MLB and going on an installment plan in order to help spread out the money they owe Jimbo, instead of just plunking down $77M, slapping him on the ass and bidding him adieu.  So until 2031, it looks like ATM will be paying $7.27M every single year to not be coaching ATM.  He gets a lump sum of $19.4 immediately for some reason, I don’t care to know the granular details, but basically starting in 2024 and over the next eight years, he’ll be getting a cool $7.27M for doing absolutely nothing,

This is of course, a similar situation to Bobby Bonilla, the baseball player whose agent somehow transformed $5.9M into nearly $30M, spread out over 25 years, except the fact that it doesn’t appear that Jimbo’s agent negotiated any variables for inflation or interest.  But who’s to say that within the next eight years, ATM gets sick of how much cash they’re literally throwing away, and renegotiate something that does encroach more similarly to Bobby Bo territory, but that’ll be another post for if it ever occurs.

But given the sheer dollar amount and the breakdown of daily intake, Jimbo Fisher is not only the Bobby Bonilla of CFB, he’s actually making out way bigger than Bobby Bonilla ever did.  $77M is greater than $30M, and whereas Bobby Bo is basically making $3k a day for existing, Jimbo Fisher will be making roughly $28k every single day until the end of 2031, merely for existing.

Chalk this up as another reason why sports are so (ironically) great, and just how much needless money is dumped into these industries to where programs can literally set millions and millions of dollars on fire and suffer absolutely no consequences in the process.  Whereas I couldn’t have given any lesser number of shits about Texas A&M in the past, just due to this failure of a scenario, I kind of feel like I need to root against them, and whomever is Jimbo’s successor, just so I can imagine a guy I gave no turds about in the past, laughing in front of a television while the Aggies get rolled around in the basement of the SEC for years to come.

God Bless Rednecks, Sometimes part 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Nope, the following picture is not a photoshop or a sports meme gone awry.  General Booty’s legal name is actually, General Booty.  There is a man living in the United States who’s birth certificate is legitimately General Booty.  General Axel Booty, and not an actual military rank.

I really hope this becomes more of a thing in coming years, because fewer things are more smugly amusing than hearing about rednecks from Texas who have ridiculous names like General Booty or Bumper Pool, whom to their credit of overcoming the criticism that silly names tend to degrade at, manage to get good enough at football to where they can actually try to make a future out of it.

Because I was quite tickled pink six years ago when I found out about Bumper Pool, and I’m quite amused to find out that there’s an actual possible starting quarterback for fucking Oklahoma, named General Booty.  I mean we’re talking about possibly being a successor to guys like Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts and Spencer Rattler.  General Booty has the opportunity to get his name into the annals of Oklahoma football, and not just because his name is General Booty, although I think he’s already on his way there, regardless of if he ends up as QB1, 2 or even 3.

Regardless of his chances, let’s just do a little mini-dive into this guy named General Booty, and how the hell he came to fruition:

To no surprise, his father is a former player himself, having played at LSU as a wide receiver.  I say no surprise, because it’s the meathead jock type like a guy who played at LSU whom would be so fixated on the military rank of General to where he vowed to name his son by a rank should he have one, and by god did he ever, and therefore we have a legitimate person named General Booty.

Aside from his dumbass dad, it turns out that General Booty is actually related to former USC quarterback John David Booty, who actually made it to the NFL, even if he didn’t last that long in the show, but it goes to show that there’s clearly football in the genetics of the ol’ Booty lineage.

If I’m a betting man, it doesn’t seem likely that he’s going to be QB1 for the Sooners, seeing as how fifth-year senior Dillon Gabriel seems to be the more likely candidate to start, but stranger things have happened in sport.  I imagine that with the awareness of General Booty spreads, he’ll have a Brian Scalabrine-like cult following in the world of sports fandom, and any time he steps onto the field, people will be snickering and chuckling over his name, and by proxy, probably cheer everything he does, just so that they can talk about and spread the word about a guy named General Booty.

A e-tale of two extremes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I got two emails today; one from New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s shop, and then not long afterward, one from the WWEShop, since I’m a big wrestling mark nerd who has shopped with both companies to where regardless of the checkbox I decline to receive emails, they send me shit anyway.  Normally, I delete them all with light prejudice since I never asked to receive them in the first place, but today I opened both of them, because they smartly put in the subject line, shit about my favorite thing in the world: blets.

In one corner, we have NJPW’s shop advertising the pre-sale of the undisputed NJPW World championship that I’ve made no secret to not being a fan of the design of.  But at an insignificant, paltry $3,500 (three thousand, five hundred dollars), you could be one of probably 1,000 extreme marks to get your hands on an extremely rare, official NJPW replica championship blet.

In all fairness, it is typical impeccable Japanese craftsmanship, and unlike lots of wrestling replica blets that are made from brass or some other cheap shit metal, official NJPW blets are (allegedly) made from actual 24-karat gold, to justify the drink-spitting price tag on them, so in theory, they literally could be purchased as a legitimate investment, should the cost of gold ever spike to Gamestop-like proportions, and an actual owner of one of these bad boys could flip them for some actual profit.

But yeah no, $3,500, I can think of a hundred more constructive or better things to spend that money on, mostly going towards my actual house, a real architectural structure where human beings reside in, instead of a championship blet replica, regardless of how much I love collecting them.  Alternatively, I could get like 7-8 WWE replica blets (at full retail) for that cost, or every single AEW replica blet in one fell swoop, instead of a blet that I don’t like the design of in the first place.

But speaking of WWE replica blets, it brings us to email #2, from the WWEShop.  Because the WWE has caught up to having released almost every single blet in WWF, WWE, WCW and ECW history at some point, as well as having made a legion of bullshit “commemorative” blets for cherry picked former wrestlers, and a confusing array of MLB and SEC athletics tribute blets, it should come as no surprise that the WWE has finally gotten in bed with the NFL, seeing as how there’s a considerable amount of overlap between fans of both companies.

For what will probably be a low-cost (in comparison to NJPW) of $499 per blet, NFL fans can get official WWE replica blets of their favorite team, regardless of if they’re the Kansas City Chiefs or not, seeing as how they’re probably going to embark on a dynasty and win every Super Bowl as long as Patrick Mahomes stays on the squad, but you can get a blet anyway, because if you’re a Redskins Commanders, Lions, Cardinals, Texans or fan of some other hopeless shitty NFL squad, you can get a blet anyway and feel like for two seconds what it feels like to have something that scripted winners get to hold.

UNLESS you’re a Jacksonville Jaguars fan, because in a humorous turn of events, the WWE overlooked for a few minutes that the Jags are also the owners of AEW, and pulled the option from their site, but not before smartasses on the internet made the astute observations first, and of course, got their archive of screencaps and proof of fucking up, because there’s little else the internet loves to do than call out failure.

Either way, I’m broke as fuck, so there’s no chance in hell I’m getting any of these new blets anyway.  I only like blets that actually exist or have existed, and my general cap for any blets is preferred to stick under $500 a pop.  But all the same, I do think it was amusing that both of these drops happened on the same day, and not without its own malaise by the ol’ E for forgetting that one of the NFL teams also reinforces their number one North American competitor’s bankroll.

Re: the Super Bowl LVII ending

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Although I agree that the ending of Super Bowl LVII was less than thrilling, make no mistake, it was still one of the best Super Bowls there’ve been in recent years.  Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts put on one of the most exciting Super Bowl quarterback battles since like Peyton Manning versus Drew Brees in XLIV, with both of them putting up monster numbers and neither of them blinking until the ending of the game.

And as much as I loathe the Philadelphia Eagles and revel in the fact that they’re the third Philadelphia major sports team to lose a championship in the 2022 season, I personally like Jalen Hurts.  He’s an honorable, mature man in a sport full of overgrown man-babies, and even throughout college, he demonstrated honor, class, integrity and has always been respectable in my opinion.  And despite being on the losing end of the Super Bowl, he put up the superior numbers against Patrick Mahomes, soon to be forgotten solely because he didn’t win the game.

But getting back to the point of this post, it’s been really interesting to me to see in the aftermath of the Super Bowl, all of the butt-hurt filthy casuals and not-actually sports fans who are bitching and moaning about the anti-climactic ending to the game.  Yes, the Chiefs downing the ball at the 1-yard line and milking the clock and kicking a go-ahead field goal with just eight seconds left sucked all of the excitement of the Mahomes/Hurts duel, but it was one billion percent the absolutely correct strategy to employ for the objective of winning the goddamn game.

The Kansas City Chiefs give absolutely zero fucks about what anyone thinks about the finish, because they accomplished the only thing that mattered: winning the goddamn game.  If the Eagles had the ball and they were in the same scenario, there is a two billion percent chance that they employ the exact same strategy.  Milk the clock, take the lead, and give the opposition as little time as possible to have any chance at countering.

And to the filthy casuals and not-fans who ask why?  Because throughout history, the NFL sees this scenario happen on a fairly regular basis, it’s just not often that it occurs in the Super Bowl.  Sure, everyone loves touchdowns, but when a field goal is all that is necessary to win, it’s always the right call to chew up as much clock as possible and kicking the field goal, and in fact, it’s actually more detrimental to score the touchdown if it means salvaging some time for the other team in order to make a counter attack.

One prime example of the touchdown blowing up in a team’s face actually involved the Atlanta Flacons who obviously haven’t ever recovered from the fuckup of Super Bowl Lee, and there was a game a few years ago where the Flacons were playing the Detroit Lions, and they were down with a minute left, 14-16.  When it was evident that the Flacons were going to score, the Lions basically conceded the end zone, hoping to salvage some time and get the ball back as quick as possible.  Despite the fact that a field goal was all that was necessary for the Flacons to win, running back Todd Gurley had a brain fart when rushing into the end zone, and despite his best efforts to drop at the 1-yard line, he crossed the plane and accidentally scored a touchdown.  The Flacons took the lead, but they left a minute on the clock, to which any NFL fan knows is the equivalent of like 15 when considering timeouts, commercials and clock stoppage.  Naturally, the Lions would score their own touchdown as time expired to defeat the Flacons, validating the importance of the strategy that the Chiefs employed.

In fact, off the top of my head, the same tactic was almost employed in Super Bowl XLVI, where the Giants tried to kill the clock, but Ahmad Bradshaw too, fell into the end zone despite his efforts to stop short.  It just so happens that the Giants defense managed to neutralize Tom Brady, but New York fans were sweating those last 82 seconds of the game, knowing Brady’s reputation for late-game heroics.

The point is, the Chiefs made the right call, and everyone bitching about it is just some filthy casual scenester tourist into the world of sports fandom, and your opinions hold zero weight and do not matter.  It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t fun, but it got the fucking job done, and anyone who knows the game of football knows that in every single similar situation, the outcome would be the same 100% of the time.

I don’t think many people realize the ownage here

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously after winning a second national championship, there’s been a lot of rhetoric thrown around about the legend of Stetson Bennett the Fourth, about how he’s basically bigger than god in the state, he’ll never have to pay for a meal or a drink in Georgia for the rest of his life, etc, etc.

And honestly, good on his part, because after living here for 20 years now, I never thought I’d see the day when Georgia would actually reach the top of the mountain much less win two in a row, after the years on top of years I’ve passively witnessed the Dawgs come close but choke, mostly to Alabama.  As a Georgia resident, I am happy to see the hometown team reach the pinnacle of college football not just once, but twice in a row is pretty sweet.

I recently saw this ad come across my theFacebook feed, and was pretty surprised to see the God of Athens going so all-in as the poster boy for Raising Cane’s chicken.  To my understanding, Cane’s has a pretty big, almost cult following in the markets they exist in, but down in Georgia, is Zaxby’s country, their carbon copy franchise.  No seriously, their menus are nearly identical, and I remember the first time I ever came across a Cane’s, it was in Las Vegas, and their menu looked surreptitiously familiar, and my close friend I was with, when ordering her usual Zaxby’s equivalent, I implored her to get the “Cane’s Sauce” and sure as shit, it was the same thing as Zaxby’s Zax Sauce.

I have no qualms with Cane’s, but as someone who discovered Zaxby’s first, between my friends and I, I usually just refer to Cane’s as “Zaxby’s Red” for obvious branding reasons.

The thing is, Zaxby’s is not only based out of Georgia, their headquarters is in Athens, right near the University of Georgia.  I actually interviewed with their corporate offices, but the flaky response to whether or not I’d need to make periodic visits to the office in Athens, which is nearly 90 minutes away from me made me not pursue it, but the point is the fact that Zaxby’s allowed Raising Cane’s to somehow swoop beneath them and sign the kid in their very own backyard, and make Stetson Bennett their poster child is a pretty devastating blow.

Then again, Cane’s apparently has that killer instinct about their company, because while I was interviewing with Zaxby’s, it was brought to my attention that there’s actually one solitary Raising Cane’s location in Georgia; and it happens to be in Athens.  Very cut-throat and guerilla of them to do such, but it was clearly enough for a guy like Stetson Bennett to probably have tried them at one point and have enough of a positive association to the brand to when they came knocking with some NIL money, he signed on.

Although I said I have no beef with Cane’s, I’m still a Zaxby’s first person, because they’re here and available.  When I travel to places that have Cane’s, I enjoy them all the same.  But I have to give some respect to Cane’s for landing such a critical hit to a chief competitor, because as I said, I don’t think a lot of people are going to understand or realize just how much of a big deal it is that Cane’s got a hold of Stetson Bennett and not Zaxby’s.

Stetson Bennett went to Grambling State??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because that golden G logo next to his name is Grambling State University’s logo, an HBCU in Louisiana.  Pretty big of Stetson Bennett IV to not see color, in spite of having the whitest name on the face of the planet.

Or more likely, pretty bad on ESPN to not consider the copyright infringement and flagrant disrespect to an HBCU by gold-washing the team logos just because it was the national championship.  No shock there that ESPN doesn’t notice stepping on a black school.

But all jokes aside, holy mary mother of god, was that an ass-whoopin’.  65-7 is basically a Madden score when you turn the difficulty down to very easy, turn off injuries and fatigue, and truck the shit out of the AI, whose lone TD comes on a successful Hail Mary because the game’s rubberband mechanics basically make it impossible for someone to get shutout.

In spite of the chips on the shoulders, the media disrespect and all other detractors that should have for all intents and purposes fired them up to put up something of a fight, TCU put up what surely has to be one of the most embarrassing and worst national championship game performances in history. [2011 LSU and 1991 Miami were both shutout, and 2000 FSU scored just 2 points lol safety]  Undoubtedly, it was the biggest blowout in natty history, and outside of Georgia, probably one of the most boring national championship games ever.

Seriously, seven points?  In a natty?  It’s flabbergasting just how wrong everything was about TCU, and hopefully we never see TCU anywhere near the playoff again, much less playing for another national championship.  Frankly, I think it’s time we stop using the phrase Power Five when it comes to talking about conferences, because the Big-12, or the Pac-12 haven’t proven shit when it comes to football, considering notwithstanding that fluky first 2014, every single natty has been won by an SEC school or Clemson.

I mean I know I’m coming off as a mega SEC blowhard, but the numbers are the numbers.  All of my zero readers know that I’m really an ACC blowhard, regardless of how much Virginia Tech pretends to be a football school. Any single SEC school would have put up a better fight against Georgia than TCU did, and so often times is the case, after an SEC school routs a non-SEC school for a natty, there’s always some player or coach that makes the backhanded remark about how conference games are more competitive.

For context, unranked Florida and Missouri put up 20 and 22 points against Georgia earlier in the year.  Georgia Tech put up 14 points.  Even Kent State hung 22 on Georgia and they’re not even a Power-Five Three program.

I mean everyone has bad games, but this was the national championship.  This is the game where nobody should have any bad games, this is the game where everyone has been duking it out for the last six months and where real contenders should be showing why they’re contenders.  It’s not even that I’m happy that as a Georgia resident, Grambling State Georgia won another natty, I’m just disappointed that TCU shit the bed so embarrassingly bad.  Of course I was hoping Georgia would beat them, but when they basically didn’t even try, it’s tantamount to as being as meaningful as a win as beating a bunch of blind paraplegics in any sort of physical contest.

Whatever though, the only reason this post even came to fruition was the hilarious observation that I’m sure that only I noticed, that Stetson Bennett IV was shown on screen as playing for Grambling State.  Being the logo master that I am that collated all the logos and team colors for NCAA.com, only a snob like me would have.

What an incredible way to New Years

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve made it pretty clear that I am no fan of Ohio State, especially when it comes to football.  I won’t call them “The” unless it’s in irony and with the intention to mock and ridicule, and few things make me happier during any given college season is seeing them get lose, be it to Michigan, Oklahoma, or better when it’s against some unheralded school.

However, regardless of my bias against them as a program, there’s no denying that they are talented and are always a threat to win a National Championship.  And the way that the media has been overwhelmingly favoring Georgia over them for the CFB semi-final Peach Bowl, I couldn’t help but have this sinking feeling that it was all tempting fate a little too hard, and it was a ripe scenario where Georgia was going to get their shit pushed in and choke hardcore to a program that should frankly never be overlooked.

I didn’t watch the game at all, but I was casually following the gamecast, because it’s not so much that I’m any bit of a UGA fan as much as I like that they represent my home, as much as I was just hoping to see Ohio State lose.  And as much as I didn’t like seeing it, I wasn’t really at all that surprised to see just how tightly TOSU was playing them, and when they went into half with TOSU up by a hair, I spoke with my one friend who actually liked sports at our chill New Years Eve gathering, about how I just had a bad feeling about this game.

When TOSU was up by two scores in the 4th quarter, I had the split feeling of being disappointed that Georgia was on the verge of choking against another team notorious for choking in TOSU, and how they were no longer buoyed by the baby luck that brought them, the Braves and Virginia Tech successes over her first year of existence, which is why they were crashing back to normalcy.  But at the same time, a degree of satisfaction at being right at the prediction that TOSU would pull the upset, because this is exactly what happened in 2014 when TOSU was so overlooked in favor of Alabama, before they steamrolled them en route to winning the first-ever CFB natty, but when it came down to it, I still would’ve preferred to see Georgia win, because seeing TOSU is always a treat.

But then fates intervened again, and TOSU just had to pull another TOSU and threaten to choke themselves, in a battle of notorious chokers.  Georgia would threaten, but it looked like TOSU got the stop, and forced Georgia to settle for the seemingly fruitless field goal that didn’t change their need for two TDs, but at least put them into a position where the second one would be a game winner and not a game tie-er.

Next thing you know, Georgia gets a stop, scores, and then gets another stop, and suddenly in crunch time, Georgia’s in a position to take the lead, which they do, with less than a minute to go.  In a battle of two programs notorious for choking, it was a war of who was going to fuck up last and go home as a result, and it was looking like it was going to be TOSU. 

But as many football fans know, 0:54 seconds might as well be 54:00 minutes, and before you know it, TOSU has gotten down the field, passed the arbitrary television field goal range marker, and they’re suddenly in a position to possibly win the game with a field goal.

All the while, the clock is ticking down towards midnight, where my friends are all watching Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Years Eve, as tourists in Times Square who have been likely standing there since 5 am, with pee jugs all hidden from cameras, are pretending like they’re having the greatest day of their lives, while the most exciting college football game in recent history is happening 15 miles away in Downtown Atlanta where not any one of us wants to be remotely close to.

The countdown to midnight starts taking up the screen, and I’m watching on my phone as Gamecast seems to be frozen forever, presumably where TOSU is setting up for the game winner while Georgia is presumably burning their last timeouts in an attempt to ice the kicker, and as we get to the last ten seconds of 2022, the snap and the kick are happening, and by the time the kick sails wider than I-285, and the refs are signaling NO GOOD, it’s suddenly 2023.

Seriously, it’s bonkers to me just how perfectly timed everything occurred, where Georgia completes a legendary comeback and survives the upset, at the very same time when the ball drops in Times Square, and the Peach drops less than a mile outside of Mercedes Benz Arena, and there are probably 100,000 people going apeshit gonzo in the 30303 zip code with thousands more around the Georgia, Ohio and sports bars across the nation, all while the new year changes, with millions more celebrating that.

I could only imaging the insanity that was occurring in Downtown Atlanta after the new year had lapsed.  Jubilation over survival and being on the winning side of an epic bowl game, all capped off with the celebration and jovial happiness of many others for bringing in the new year in memorable fashion.  With the cherry on top being THE Ohio State getting jobbed in a humiliating manner.  As much as casuals will throw the kicker under the bus, frankly he should never have been in a position where he was relied upon to deliver the win.  Watching the highlights of the game after the fact, TOSU’s defense got absolutely shredded in those last two drives, and they’re the motherfuckers who lost the game, not the kicker.

Whatever though.  TOSU loses, Georgia gets to defend their championship and go for two, and the New Year was brought in with good company and a chill and relaxed evening.  Seems like a fun start to me.