Month: December 2016

I read a lot of books in 2016 and liked the vast majority of them. As a bit of a year-end project, I decided to pick ten I thought were the best and tell you why.

So here are those ten, in alphabetical order:

“Astoria,” by Peter Stark

This is history at its finest: An incredible story from a place you’ve known your whole life that you’ve somehow never heard before. Stark’s tale chronicles the birth and death of the Astoria colony at the mouth of the Columbia River, a much-forgotten part of America’s growth during the early nineteenth century. It also taught me more about beaver trapping than I ever thought I’d know.

“Barbarian Days,” by William Finnegan

I have never surfed, and Finnegan’s memoir makes me very sad of that fact. But the Pulitzer Prize winner is about a lot more than waves. In detailing his childhood in California and Hawai’i, his travels through the world, and the way that nothing in life has ever quite equaled the feeling of falling down a wall of water, Finnegan tells a universal and beautiful story about life, aging, and the things and people we remember. Continue reading “Ten books I enjoyed reading in 2016”

The Washington Huskies will play the Alabama Crimson Tide this Saturday in the Peach Bowl. They are currently a sixteen-point underdog. Never in college football history has the point spread been so high in a game with such immediate national championship implications.

As you may have heard, the UW’s coach, Chris Petersen, has some experience with notable upsets. He was the first-year coach at Boise State when the Broncos beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, 43-42, in what’s widely considered the greatest game of the millennium. (It’s worth noting, though, that Boise State only entered that contest as just a seven-and-a-half point dog.)

I thought it would be worthwhile (read: a good excuse to watch more football) to re-watch Boise’s classic upset and see what the Broncos did to the Sooners that the Huskies might be able to replicate against the Tide—to see if there was any sort of blueprint to discover. Here are seventeen things I learned:

1. The underdog needs a fast start Continue reading “17 Things A UW Fan Can Learn From The 2007 Fiesta Bowl”