September 6, 2021
The Lakers must be determined to sign every player they struck out on in free agency in the last decade. Dwight Howard, Carmelo Anthony, and now DeAndre Jordan. I’ve been happy with all the signings to this point, except for DJ. DJ is an aging player with fading athleticism, an outdated skill set, at an outdated position. His free throw shooting is also so bad, he makes Shaq look like Rick Barry from the charity stripe. I’d much rather see the Lakers split their center minutes between Dwight and Marc Gasol, who can at least stretch the floor with his shooting. This is really starting to play out like the script of an Expendables movie.
To College Football where USC was in typical season opener form on Saturday at the Coliseum. I haven’t seen a season opener that bad since last year. Or the year before that. Or the four years before that! They found the win column against a lowly San Jose State team, but it was pathetic. Six straight years of this rinse and repeat Clay Helton nonsense. The offense is a mess, the o-line can’t protect anything, and the play calling has no imagination. I’m beginning to think Helton could get away with sending e-blasts with porn content throughout the University, and they still wouldn’t fire him. That seems to be how low football is on the priority list at USC. The good news (or maybe bad depending on your perspective) is that Stanford is coming to town next week and those Chardonnay drinking nerds aren’t very good at football right now.
Meanwhile, UCLA looked the best we’ve seen in years in a huge win over LSU. It’s been four years of hate on Chip Kelly, and rightfully so. The Bruins looked like they were playing a high school team with a high school size crowd last week vs Hawaii, so I wasn’t sold yet. Now they’ve got my attention. The running game is solid, the defense is making plays, and Dorian Thompson-Robinson is suddenly playing better. I still don’t know how good this team can be, but thus far, they are making me think they can contend for a conference title. That would be a miraculous turnaround, but let’s see if this is the same elite looking team that shows up against Fresno State, and the same Chip Kelly that suddenly remembers how to coach for the first time in 10 years.
Nice win by Notre Dame yesterday vs Florida State. Jack Coan looks like much more than a capable successor to Ian Book. However, the story that made headlines afterward was Brian Kelly making a joke by saying he’s a fan of execution and maybe his entire team needs to be executed. Of course the Twitter police was out in full force ready to arrest him for this comment. Those people definitely need their lives re-examined if they are offended by what he said. I think it’s safe to say the delivery of the joke could have been much more polished, and was rather poor, but what kind of idiot thinks that Kelly meant he was going to kill those kids?
Walker Buehler picked a bad day to forget how to pitch. Buehler didn’t have it yesterday, while Max Muncy and Chris Taylor didn’t have it all weekend. The Dodgers dropped 2 of 3 and now trail the Giants by a game with 25 to go. The Dodgers and Giants are going to go down to the final games of the regular season to decide the NL West. It’s somewhat of a shame these two rivals aren’t going to play again during the regular season. I say somewhat because these games have been stressful. So stressful, there’s probably not even a software update for Andrew Friedman’s computer that can adapt to that stress. Despite losing two of three over the weekend, the fact the Dodgers are in this position is somewhat amazing. Cody Bellinger has been awful, Clayton Kershaw, Dustin May, Corey Seager, and Mookie Betts have been injured. Trevor Bauer has been an idiot. Now AJ Pollock is injured. That’s not easy to overcome, even for a team with a payroll as large as the Dodgers. The real shame though is that regardless of who wins the division, these two teams are likely to meet in a 5-game NLDS rather than a 7-game NLCS.
As for the Angels, all you need to know about them is that they started some dude named Jansen Junk yesterday. This is not surprising because the Angels have been starting junk on the mound for years! The Angels can stop pretending like they are in some kind of a pennant race anytime now, and officially shut down Mike Trout for the season. On the bright side, the Angels are getting a nice look at younger players like Brandon Marsh, who has been tearing it up lately. The Halos are going to need a lot more Brandon Marsh’s to develop to support their top heavy payroll.
Well here we are, just one week away from NFL Football. I fully expect the Rams to beat the hell out of the Bears next Sunday. The Bears offensive line is older than Joe Biden. The Rams defensive line is going to eat them alive, and Aaron Donald should have a field day. The Bears secondary could also easily get manhandled by the likes of Cooper Kupp, Robert Woods, and Van Jefferson. If this doesn’t happen in the opener at Sofi Stadium, you should be supremely disappointed.
Then there’s the Chargers, who should be in for a battle with The Washington Football Team. Washington has one of the best defenses in football, and at 1:00 pm EST, the Bolts would rather be drinking coffee in their pajamas at that time. A year ago you might pencil this in as a win, but now this feels like a much improved Washington team, and a Charger team we still can’t trust in big games.
Finally, nice episode of The Walking Dead last night on AMC. PETA is probably going to come after the producers of the show once they saw that a horse was killed and the meat was fed to the people of Alexandria. Bet you’ll never look at horses the same. That last walker kill by Negan hit a little bit too close to home, and felt a lot like him murdering Glenn six years ago. Alden probably wanted to get left behind because hanging out with Negan and Maggie is like hanging out with your two divorced parents who still don’t get along to this day. The Reapers are creepy, the Commonwealth are weirdos, but they don’t creep me out as much as Alpha and the Whisperers. You think people were upset when Glenn died? If dog dies next week at the hands of the Reapers, people are going to show up with pitch forks and tiki torches at the AMC studios.
