Author: Kevin

Here are selections for all eleven games this weekend featuring Pac-12 teams, beginning with a pair of contests Thursday night. If you use these picks for gambling purposes, I only ask for 50% of the profits. You probably shouldn’t do that though.

Southern Utah at Utah (no line)

The Thunderbirds have a brief history of hanging with FBS competition and might be able to keep this one close for three quarters. But the Utes are clearly the more talented bunch, and Kyle Whittingham-coached teams tend not to lay eggs.

The pick: Utah 37, Southern Utah 17

Oregon State at Minnesota (-7.5)

This could be an interesting one for draftniks, as Minnesota quarterback Mitch Leidner has emerged as an under-the-radar possibility to be selected in the first round of next year’s NFL draft. If it were in Corvallis, I’d like the Beavers’ chances a whole lot more.

The pick: Minnesota 36, Oregon State 24 Continue reading “Pac-12 Picks: Week 1”

One of the best parts of my time at a wonderful little newspaper called The Daily was writing these rankings every week. One of the worst parts was that I had to keep them to 550 words. A guy can only be so pithy! So I’m planning on bringing it back this year in (hopefully only slightly) elongated form. Rankings are based on who I think would win on a neutral field in a game played tomorrow. Check back next week to see how the first weekend’s worth of results impact the order.

1. Stanford

It’s still strange to see a Stanford roster studded with five-star recruits, but such is the monster that Jim Harbaugh constructed and David Shaw has continued. Quarterback Kevin Hogan graduates? Here’s All-American recruit Keller Chryst to take his place. Blake Martinez and Aziz Shittu move on from the defensive front seven? A new crop of studs are there to step in. And did we mention Christian McCaffrey? With road games against UCLA, Washington and Oregon, the schedule does the Cardinal absolutely zero favors. On paper, though, this is the conference’s most talented team. Continue reading “Pac-12 Power Rankings: Preseason Edition”

I think only three players in the conference can win the Heisman Trophy this year: Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey, Oregon’s Royce Freeman, or UCLA’s Josh Rosen. Other players could and will have fantastic seasons, but for a host of reasons, they won’t really contend for the most prestigious trophy in sports. They might not have the national name recognition to mount a real campaign. They might play a position other than quarterback, running back, or wide receiver. They might play for a team that isn’t any good. Every college football player in the country is theoretically eligible for the Heisman, but in reality the pool of players with any chance to win is relatively tiny.

But it’s no fun to just do a list of three names. So consider this a ranking of the players from the Pac-12 most likely to be Heisman finalists and qualify for a trip to New York—a much larger population than the number of athletes who could actually bring home the trophy.

1. RB Christian McCaffrey, Stanford, Junior

Most oddsmakers consider McCaffrey one of the three favorites to win the trophy (for very good reason), along with Clemson QB DeShaun Watson and LSU RB Leonard Fournette, and he figures to have every opportunity to put up jaw-dropping stats on a team that could win ten games or more. The only obvious reason to be bearish is that some voters will surely hold McCaffrey’s season up to his 2015 campaign, and matching those totals will be a difficult task with defenses even more firmly focused on slowing him down. Continue reading “New York, New York: The Pac-12’s Heisman Hopefuls”

Note: This is the first of a five-part Pac-12 preview I’ll be pushing out this week. Check back tomorrow (Tuesday) for a look at the conference’s Heisman hopefuls.

The Pac-12’s teams will play a total of 36 nonconference games during the regular season, the vast majority of them during the first four weeks of the year. Some of them will be tight, some blowouts; some will have potential national-title implications, and some will be Oregon State vs. Idaho State. This is a ranking of the eleven that will be the most enjoyable to watch.

11. Sept. 1: Oregon State at Minnesota, 6 p.m.

The action on the field is secondary here: This is the contest mascot aficionados and tooth obsessives have been waiting for their entire lives. Benny the Beaver vs. Goldy Gopher. Rivers vs. dry land. Dams vs. tunnels. Only one rodent can survive.

Continue reading “The Top 11 Nonconference Games of the Pac-12 Season”

There were no laughably flamboyant suits or diamond-studded loafers at last week’s NBA Draft, nor any random player from Brazil popping out of the stands or a Czech lottery pick consummating his selection with a passionate make-out session. So instead the comedy from one of the most consistently comedic nights on the sporting calendar came from elsewhere.

Thon Maker is a 7-footer who represents the truly global nature of the game in 2016. Born in Sudan before immigrating to Australia, Maker eventually made pit stops at high schools in Louisiana, Virginia and Ontario. He burst into the basketball consciousness a little more than two years ago, when mixtapes of Maker looking like a young Kevin Durant began to pop up on YouTube, describing him as “REVOLUTIONARY” and an “incredible sophomore.” He handled the ball like a point guard, shot it like wing, and blocked shots like the 7-foot stringbean he was and is.

Continue reading “The Funniest Part Of The 2016 NBA Draft”

Pitchers generally try to throw the baseball hard. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they do the exact opposite. Sometimes they throw the eephus pitch.

You can keep your home runs and stolen bases, your hundred mile-an-hour fastballs and your picturesque 6-4-3 double plays. The single best play in baseball is the eephus — the lob, the rainbow pitch, the moon ball, the Bugs Bunny curve, a big swooping beauty and a statement of pure chutzpah.

History credits Rip Sewell, the former Pittsburgh Pirate, as the first to throw the eephus in the big leagues, but surely it’s been a part of the game ever since they spelled it “base ball.” It’s a natural progression. Pretty much every pitcher throws a changeup, intentionally slow in order to catch the batter off guard and make ensuing fastballs appear all the faster. So why not slow a changeup down even more? Why not toss the ball up there at fifty miles an hour, arcing fifteen feet in the air before it plummets down through the zone like you’re playing slow-pitch softball?

Well, aside from the off chance the pitch doesn’t catch the batter off guard, in which case it ends up 475 feet away in the upper deck instead of snugly in the catcher’s glove, and you’re left standing on the mound looking like quite the schmuck.

It takes some cojones to throw an eephus, is what I’m saying. Continue reading “An Ode To The Eephus”

The thought hit me sometime during the backstretch of the men’s 1,500 meter final at the Pac-12 Championships last Sunday at Husky Track, as Washington’s Izaic Yorks began to inexorably pull away from the rest of a world-class field of middle-distance runners, his legs churning, the afro atop his head resting impossibly still, the murmur that had pulsed through the crowd for the opening three laps starting to approach a roar. The thought being this: Why on earth isn’t this sport more popular?

It used to be. During the first half of the twentieth century (and again for a brief resurgence during the 1970s), track and field was among the country’s most popular pastimes — right up there with boxing, horse racing and baseball, to give you an idea of how much things change. For a brief moment in time during the early 1950s, it even surged to the forefront of the global sporting consciousness, buoyed by one event in particular that captured the world’s imagination: the mile. And three men in particular were responsible for that race’s rapid rise.

Those men were England’s Roger Bannister, Australia’s John Landy and America’s Wes Santee, the three milers who during 1953 and 1954 dueled to determine who would be the first human being in the millennia of our existence to cover 5,280 feet of ground on foot in fewer than four minutes. They were front-page fixtures and national heroes. Their chase is the subject of Neal Bascomb’s excellent 2004 book “The Perfect Mile,” a rip-roaring chronicle of the three men’s disparate backgrounds, their chase of the four-minute barrier, and Bannister’s ultimate triumph. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to go find a track and run as fast as you can. It was one of the two recent reads that sent me down this rabbit hole. Continue reading “Running In Circles”

The summer when I was twelve years old, I was the second best pitcher on my Little League all-star team. The best was a kid named Blake Snell. Yesterday, I watched him make his major league debut for the Tampa Bay Rays on the mound at Yankee Stadium. It’s safe to say I never quite caught up, skill-wise.

Blake was always the best baseball player in our little suburb, ever since we were nine years old. His dad, Dave, was a former minor league pitcher in the Mariners system, a hulking guy who constantly wore the ultra-reflective Oakley sunglasses that baseball players seem to favor. He always coached our all-star teams and taught us words that ten year olds probably shouldn’t know. I lived in constant fear of muffing a grounder and incurring his verbal wrath. But he was a great coach, and Blake was his prize pupil. Dave ran a training center out of a warehouse where Blake and his twin brother Tyler spent much of their time. I remember going there one time in high school with Tyler and some other friends to play Wiffle ball at 10 o’clock at night. It was their home away from home. Baseball was what just what the Snell kids did.

Continue reading “Watching Your Friend Make His MLB Debut Is Cool”

 

Kobe Bryant played his final game last week. You might have heard. Bit of a to-do.

With the end of Bryant’s career comes the end of something else, too, something that probably had just as big an impact on the NBA as the Mamba’s twenty-year career: the era of players who entered the league straight out of high school.

The population of preps-to-pros players drafted between 1995, when Kevin Garnett revived the trend, and 2005, the final year before the NBA implemented its current age minimum, is a relatively small one, well below 100 men. But the group has had an outsized impact on the league. From Garnett to Bryant, from Tracy McGrady to LeBron James to Dwight Howard, so many of the league’s marquee names from the past two decades never went to college.

With Bryant’s departure, it’s an apt time to reflect on this transformative generation of players, which is exactly what Jonathan Abrams does in his still-relatively-new book, “Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution.” Abrams, a former newspaper reporter and Grantland longform ace, tells the full breadth of the prep-to-pros story, beginning with Moses Malone in 1974 and continuing to the present, as the final high-school draftees (guys like Martell Webster and J.R. Smith) enter the second decades of their careers. The book is a piece of NBA sociology, using the stories of individual players as a lens through which to examine the history of the league’s age limit.

Continue reading ““Boys Among Men” And The Prep-To-Pros Question”

I am decidedly late to this party.

“The Boys In The Boat,” by Daniel James Brown, and “Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand, are two of the more popular nonfiction books of the past few years. “The Boys In The Boat” is still hanging around the NYT bestseller list three years after its release. If you haven’t read either of the books, you’ve probably at least heard of them. Maybe you saw the film version of “Unbroken,” written by the Coen brothers and directed by Angelina Jolie; in the future, maybe you’ll catch the “TBITB” movie, too, which is currently in production. Point being, these two tomes are as widely read and widely applauded as books about history can be. I’m not breaking any new ground by telling you to read them. They’re both well paced, tightly written and highly entertaining, the sorts of books you can read in a couple long sittings, if you’re into that sort of thing.

What jumped out to me the most, though, was their similarities. “Unbroken” tells the truly unbelievable story of Louie Zamperini, a kleptomaniacal California kid who turned into an Olympic distance runner before the age of 20. Then World War II begins, and Zamperini enlists and is sent to the Pacific theater, where his plane goes down over the open ocean. What follows is a cavalcade of gnar, including six weeks floating at sea in a six-foot raft, shark attacks, capture by the Japanese, and an ensuing marathon of torture as a POW, of both the physical and mental varieties. When the war finally ends in August 1945, Zamperini and his fellow POWs are a week away from being massacred by their captors. It’s no surprise his readjustment to civilian life afterward was a bit of an adventure.

Continue reading “Belated Book Reviews: “Unbroken” And “The Boys In The Boat””