GodsendJen

That's right.  You heard it here first.  (And I heard it on the radio this morning.) At least one NHL team is taking dead aim at the core NASCAR fan-base.  NASCAR is hugely popular and how has hockey decided to tap into it?  By celebrating mullets!  On October 21st the Vancouver Canucks will be in Nashville taking on the Predators. Its not unusual for the Preds to have country music stars sing the National Anthem.  They even have a whole web page listing all the crooners who have come to Honky Tonk at their Gaylord areana. Fans at the Canucks game will be treated to the musical stylings of Billy Ray Cyrus who will also judge a "Best or Worst Mullet" contest between periods. I'm not a Billy Ray fan but I think this might beat the heck out of the junk we get on the jumbotron at Philips.

Announcement on Billy Ray's Website.

Wednesday marks Coach Beamers 60th birthday.  Boy do I hope none of our players decides to shoplift a gift for him.  We have a couple of wide receivers who haven't been suspended for a game yet.  I just hope they aren't feeling left out.  Of course petty theft isn't something our boys are known for.  We get DUIs, mouth off to police and break windows on vehicles.  Maybe I shouldn't dwell on such things...but it isn't like there are any recent stats I would prefer to mention.  Two but-whoopings and 6 personal fouls so far this year.  So much for the effectiveness of fining players a portion of their bowl stipend for such fouls.  Aaron Rouse is up to 3 personal fouls all by himself.  What happens when his fines exceed the stipend?  Does he need to hold up a McDonalds and start paying out of pocket? 

So just how bad are we doing?  The four teams we beat so far this year have 6 wins between them (3 of those wins belong to the Cincinatti Bearcats).  Our next 4 opponents have 19 wins between them.  Then we face 6-1 Wake Forrest. (And oh what a sad year it will be if we loose to the Demon-Decons!)  All kinds of proud "trends" are ending.  For some time Frank has held claim to being the 3rd Most Winning Active coach.  Last weekend Jim Tressel tied him for that mark.  With the way Ohio State is playing we can expect Tressel to pass us with our next loss.  We hadn't lost an ACC road game since joining the conference...until last Thursday. We had also posted 11 straight Thursday night wins on ESPN.  We've dropped from the rankings in both the AP and the USA Today coaches poll.  We aren't included in the BCS rankings either--and Tulsa and Rutgers are listed. 

So who is to blame?  Is it the "757" for giving us players with a week work ethic and a penchant for getting into trouble?  Is it the 4 new coaches on our staff?  Maybe Bryan Stinespring for our lack of offense? Or whomever continues to play "consistent passer" Sean Glennon at QB instead of using "very athletic but with off field issues" Ike Whitacker? (Though rumor is Ike is getting more reps in practice this week...so maybe a change is in the works.) Spin the wheel and take your pick. 

Me, I'm blaming Daryl Tapp.  For years we've been hearing about and seeing that blasted lunch pail our defense passes around to reward work ethic.  Tapp kept it for most of the last two years...so what did he do after getting drafted?  He took it out to Seattle where it probably sets in his locker.  We have 25 former players who are active on current NFL rosters and as far as I know Tapp is the first one who thought it would be "ok" to take that lunch pail with him. I don't care the Foster gave it to him.  It was a bad move and Daryl should rectify it.  Sure, we got a replacement tin can....but it obviously lacks the mojo the previous one had.  So please Daryl, for the love of God, fed-ex that lunch pail back to Frank with a birthday card.  I think we need it.

In our most successful years the Hokies have won with excellent defense and special team, assisted by a two back running game on offense.  This year circumstances have forced us into an offensive scheme where we use a single back and several wide receivers.  The problem isn't that Brandon Ore isn't good enough to go it alone.  The sophomore is in his first year as a starter, but he's capable of getting some big runs and reliably picking up 3 or 4 yards on other caries. 

The problem we face is two-fold.  Because he's the only back we can't run as often as we have in the past.  Even with great durability you don't want to push your luck with your only running back--and lets not forget he had shoulder surgery in the offseason.  Even more troubling, imho, is that having a single back makes the oposing defense's job so much easier.  Two backs usually means two running styles.  One back will be the speedster who makes the big runs.  The other is the locomotive who might not be as fast but is strong enough to pick up yards with a couple of defenders hanging onto his leg.  The defense has to work harder and either shift plans based on the offensive personel or play a more generic defense that would do an ok job of defending against either back but not a great job against either.  Our opponents don't have to worry about that this year.  They can count on Ore being the only runner to stop and plan accordingly.  Through in some problems getting the passing game to work reliably and you have the makings of a really crappy season, at least by our standards.

I'm not ready to burn my tickets yet, but I sure am less enthused about watching them right now. Unfortunately I get the same feeling about our defense.  They are so unenthused by what the offense can do to keep us in the game that they are slacking off and not bringing the pain on every play.

I'm all for any kind of novelty that helps get buts in the seats at home games.  Really I am.  But this one just makes me laugh.  For tomorrow's game on Friday the 13th the team is giving away Goalie Masks. This can't be the first time an NHL team has done this kind of promotion.  Of course this year what should really give other teams pause isn't stands filled with horror movie bad guys.  It's that we have the league leader in GAA, Points, +/- and have the best record in the NHL East....all while Ilya Kolvachuck hasn't even scored a point yet.

Meanwhile if thoughts of Horror movies and Halloween have you itching to reminisce about your favorite horror flicks check out this cute "find the hidden scary movie" game over at the  M&Ms website.

Last night I was faced with a choice.  Watch Monday Night Football or watch Hockey...and I didn't choose the football.  This is strange for me, and probably an indication that I've let my friends get me too caught up in this.  The problem is the game was really excellent last night.  Everyone said that the team focused on improving defense in the off season and that defense looked incredible against Tampa Bay.  I was yelling happy things at my tv after the finished the 2 minutes of 5 on 3 penalty kill. Kari made some great saves and everyone else was there doing everything they could to help protect him.  We are only 3 games into the season, but I'm starting to see why there has been so much talk about Kari's potential.  Lets just hope the team can keep it up, and maybe even find a little offense to go with that mad D.

NHLRecap
AJC Game Recap

Season Two of the Great Hockey Experiement officially got underway at Philips.  Its the first time I've gone to a game without taking someone more knowledgable along with me. Instead I embraced the notion that you don't need a man to watch hockey and convinced the girls to join me.  This left me as the group expert on the the Thrashers and hockey in general and I think I was able to rise to the occasion. 

The game itself was good but a bit of a disapointment.  The arena was only half full despite it being opening night.  From my perspective that place should be full for opening night even if it means giving away the tickets.  Our passing and puckhandling is much better than it was at the beginning of last season.  I think it was after the olympic break before we started passing the puck successfully. I'm glad it isn't taking us that long to get our act togather this year.  The first game went to a shoot out and left me very perplexed by our choices.  Hossa wasn't one of our designated shooters.  Why would one of our best offensive players not take a turn?  Instead Jon Sim got a shot and we failed to score at all.

Other highlights of our outing included

• An enterprising friend getting ahold of multiple giveaway scarfs and selling them to people at the game.  I know people sell their extras on Ebay all the time, but I'd never considered selling them at the game.  Really, how hard was it for anyone to get an "extra" scarf?
  
  
• The amazing discovery that going to the game dateless opens up the door for any number of men to buy you beer.  Unlike a bar--where men buy you beer to hit on you--these folks were just being nice.  Three cheers for free beer and many thanks to the anonymous pony-tailed dude for offering to buy me Bass and then making his friend buy when he realized he had no money.
  
  
• Girls breed drama.  There really isn't a good excuse for this, it just follows us around. During the course of the game we lost girls and were convinced an aspiring bf was stalking someone.

4:13
Someone sent Bryan Stinespring a memo.  It reads "Hey Bryan, did you know we are allowed to run the football on offense?"  Brandon Ore follows with a rushing touchdown to get us on the board.  21 - 7 with 20 seconds left in the first quarter.

4:05
Touchdown #3 for Georgia Tech. 4:12 remains in the first quarter.

4:02
They blocked our punt and take over on our 25 yard line.

4:00 pm
Three possessions into the big showdown with Georgia Tech and I'm not sure if I can continue.  We are down by 14 with 7 minutes left in the first quarter. Our offense is not designed to play from behind.  But then our defense isn't designed to put us in this position either.

As a former Orioles ticket holder I can appreciate the sentiment some fans express during Thursday's day game at Camden.  Organized by Sports Talk 1570 in Baltimore a group of fans attended Thursday's game and walked out in protest 1 hour into the proceeding.  The protest was against Peter Angelos, the Orioles owner who is perhaps the worst owner in baseball after the Tribune Company.  The fans want new ownership, a better team, or to at least "get some players in here who want to be part of the community, who understand what a crab cake is."

From a fan's perspective good business men make lousy owners because they usually put the bottom line ahead of winning percentage.  Its precisely that characteristic of Angelos that guarantees this type of protest would never work with Angelos.  He is a business man and while you were "protesting" you did it without impacting his bottom line.  If you want to make a statement in Baltimore stop buying tickets.  Don't renew your season tickets.  Don't buy yet another Orioles hat.  Don't even wear the Orioles hats you have.  Stop watching the Orioles on television. If you really want to protest do it outside Camden.  If he can't sell tickets and can't sell advertising during the games....that is the kind of protest the Angelos would understand.  Of course the real problem here is that Baltimore, as much as any city I've spent time in, is a baseball town.  They love the game and they will keep buying tickets even if it is only to see another team win 9 games out of 10.  And you know what....I suspect Mr. Angelos knows this too.

Baltimore Sun Story

Ok, our new kicker isn't actually Moses, but at 46 Morton Anderson probably cheated off his paper on spelling tests in the second grade.  We needed a kicker, desperately.  I just never dreamed we'd find one so old.  Anderson hasn't taken the field in the NFL since 2004 when he was with the Vikings.  At one time Anderson was great.  He holds the franchise scoring records in New Orleans and Atlanta. Not surprising since he is only 76 points short of the all time NFL scoring record.  (Gary Anderson holds that distinction with 2,358 points. No word yet on if the two are related.) Anderson is from Denmark and his career highlights include kicking 3 50+ yard field goals in the same game.  I can't say that wouldn't be nice, but it happened in 1995 so I wouldn't hold out hope. It's possible he won't have the opportunity to do that for the Falcons again.  Koenen has a strong leg and I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't get a shot at everything over 40 or 45 yards.  Plus Anderson is OLD.  A 50 yard kick might be enough to put him in the old folk's home. He holds a handful of records related to kicks over 50 yards and his pro bowl appearances.  Record highlights from his wikipedia entry:

• Most points ever in Pro Bowl history - 45 (15 points after touchdown, 10 field goals)
• Most points after touchdown ever in Pro Bowl history - 15
• Most field goal attempts ever in Pro Bowl history - 18
• Most field goals in Pro Bowl history - 10
• Most field goals (50 or more yards) in NFL history - 40
• Most field goals (50 or more yards) in a season - 8
• Most field goals (50 or more yards) in a game - 3
• Most games played in NFL history - 354

He's also a member of the Danish American Football Federations Hall of Fame (Who even knew such a thing existed?) and the NFL's all decade team for the 1980s AND the 1990s.  The annoucement on the Falcon's site is filled with career accomplishments as well.  It's clear that he was clutch at one time, I just hope he still has it. 

The question this really holds for me is what exactly did Todd Peterson do?  I know we have cap issues but he had to have really ticked someone in our player personnel department off to not get the call.  Maybe Peterson is sore about us not renewing him earlier and is demanding unreasonable pay....but he was pretty good for us and I can't believe we didn't try to work something out.  I wish Anderson the best of luck but I'd rather have a younger proven commodity.  Maybe some friendly staffer up at Flowery Branch will email me an explanation because this really baffles me.

Oh, one other note about Morton Anderson....he last wore #7.  Hope someone told him was have a fellow on our team who is already pretty attached to that number.  Thankfully his old #5 Falcon's jersey is still available.

Falcons Story
ESPN Article
Anderson's Career Statistics

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that you can easily proliferate stupid ideas.  This one is dumb, but at least fun.  Its Talk Like A Pirate Day.  In the spirit of this I took a quiz to determine my pirate name.  The result: Bloody Jenny Bonney.  For me the pirates life is about the fighting.  I'm unpredictable but that's ok because a "pirate's life is far from full of certainties."  Get your own at Pirate Quiz. Once you have a name you watch this video to learn how to talk like a pirate and then you can hit the local watering hole and try out these Pirate Pickup Lines.

Before last season kicked off some friends convinced me to start watching hockey. Already a certifiable sports nut, I wasn't sure I needed another team (and a whole other league) to follow. Beyond this my biggest problem with hockey is that it isn't accessible for me.  Football, baseball and even basketball and soccer are games I can go out and play in my backyard or my driveway.  As mentioned here previously, I can barely stand on ice skates so I can't just up and play with friends at a cookout for fun.  Despite this I gave in and watched anyway.  I went to some games and even got a jersey sweater.  I was hooked.  Hockey wasn't entirely new to me.  I'd gone to enough Renegades games in Richmond (prior to their demise) that I understood the rules, the basic positions, and that improperly laying a basketball court on top of the ice makes for one really sloppy basketball game. Last year I focused on learning who our players are, how the new rules affected the game and how to recognize penalties.  This year I've decided to learn about strategy.  What the major plays are and where players should be on the ice.  I thought preseason training camp might be a good place to start learning so I decided to pass on watching College Game Day Saturday morning and check out camp.  I learned a lot from watching practice and talking with my new friend Noah, but it wasn't what I expected to learn.  Here are the highlights.

1. Hockey practice is not for the color blind. The team looks like they are auditioning for a skittles commercial on ice.  Thankfully it didn't take long to realize the point of this is to color-code the lines.  At first it was frustrating.  I learned about the players, but I'm used to finding them on the ice based on their name and number.  The color coded jerseys don't have names and numbers.  This proved not to be as troublesome as I feared.  It doesn't take long to realize who is on what line and after that finding someone on ice is actually easier because of this handy color scheme. I was interested in watching a couple of our new centers and spotting the short guys in navy (Metropolit) and gold (Kapenan) was pretty easy.  For the record Metro is very very fast and Kapenan is adorable. Can they make up for the departure of Mr. Savard?  Who knows?  Of course finding my favorite (Hossa) and everyone else's favorite (Kolvachuk) was easy.
   
   
2. You spend a whole lot of time just standing around at hockey practice. In most sports, training camp is designed to get players back into game condition.  To build up their endurance so they can go full speed for an entire game. I was really surprised to see most of practice consisting of short bursts of activity by one line while the players from the other lines are waiting in a queue for their turn.  Maybe this works for hockey and not for other sports because no other sport imitates their pattern of constantly rotating personnel but I was surprised. In addition to this there were several times during practice when Hartley called the team over to his white board to explain what he wanted them to do. (That's what is going on in the first picture.)  Never-the-less some of these guys were just exhausted at the end of the 2 hour, 20 minute practice.
   
   
3. It's really hard to take good pictures of hockey practice.  Part of this is because some of these guys skate very fast.  Part of it is the glass.  Part of it is that I wore sandals, shorts and a t-shirt to practice and was shivering while taking photos.  I was absolutely struck by how short one of our new goalies is.  Brathwaite is 5'7" and looks like a dwarf compared to Kari Lehtonen who is 6'4".  The photos I took to illustrate this look terrible, but I'm using two of them anyway.  The photos are taken at different distances but with the guys standing in front of the same goal.  Look at the difference in where the top of goal hits each of them, and then look at the top of their head in relation to the yellow line in the background.  Like I said, Brathwaite looks like a shrimp. 
   
   Brathwaite surprised me in general.  I knew we'd signed new goalies but I had no idea that Brathwaite is whatever you call African-Americans in Canada (African-Canadian?) [on advice from my Canadian friend the correct label is-->]Canadian.  He had his helmet painted up with MLK and and a Welcome to Atlanta sign that people appeared to like.  Our other new goalie was a big hit.  I think the inner sports fan in all of us just loves shouting "Moose."  Frankly I wouldn't mind not seeing either of these guys in goal this year for any reason other than giving Lehtonen a night off on occasion.  I also learned that while some players are fast, goalies are slow on skates.  Maybe it's all the padding but these guys lagged far behind everyone else when the skating portion of practice began.
   
   
4. Of all the various sports practices I've watched or participated in I think hockey practice reminds me most of basketball practice.  Lots and lots of drills done as a whole team (football splits up into units for these) and not so much game simulation.  This struck me most at the end of practice when it was time to do some skating.  They moved the goals out of the way and everyone got situated behind the red line at the end of the ice.  I had instant recollection of coaches yelling for us to line up at the base line during basketball practice...and sure enough it's the same exercise but on skates.  We ran between the baseline and the top of the key, half-court, the top of the other key and finally the other baseline before collapsing and trying not to vomit.  Swap out the keys with the blue lines and the hockey players were doing the same thing.  I guess everyone appreciate the effort as the assembled voyeurs were cheering, usually for the last guy to finish in each group. I guess since hockey adopted the best part of basketball (the fast break) they decided to adopt the most excruciating part of practice as well.
   
   
5. Real hockey fans are serious about hockey and this starts young.  My new friend Noah was happy to tell me something about almost every Thrasher.  He knew every player's first and last name as well as their number.  He knew where players who had left the Thrashers during the off-season had signed.  He knew how to pronounce the funny sounding European last names.  His favorite player is Kolvachuk because of his fierce slapshot. He was happy to share with me some key statistics form Kovalchuk's season last year.  Noah plays hockey and skates fast just like Kolvachuk and even skates fast backward.  He has not yet mastered that slapshot.  Noah plays left wing on his hockey team.  I told him my favorites are Hossa, because I think he plays smart and because he scores all the short-handed goals and Jim Slater because I think he's cute.  Noah thought that last bit was funny. This was a moment of enlightenment for me.  I am used to being one of the more knowledgeable people in any sports conversation but Noah knew much more about the game and its players than I do. According to his dad, Noah's room is a shrine to all things Thrashers.  Did I mention that Noah is 5? Last season he got to be boy of the game once.  He stood on the ice with Kolvachuk, Mellanby and right next to Peter Bondra.  I think with Hockey I might have to accept that I can't catch up to some serious fans.  I mean if they start committing these details to memory at age 5, and I didn't start until last year....I'm going to take it as a sign to just enjoy the game rather than talk about it.