Outside

Somewhere on Sunday, likely in a dimly lit cavernous room inside a decrepit castle atop a craggy mountaintop surrounded at all times by a lightning storm, sat the group of men, likely smoking cigars and likely wearing the finest of suits, who make up the collective brain of the Bowl Championship Series. The committee had just unveiled to the world that LSU and Alabama would be playing for the national championship and had also just laid out the slate of other BCS games.
“Excellent job, men,” said one of the mysterious BCS men through a mouth full of caviar, which he quickly washed down with champagne that had been filtered through the horn of a unicorn.

I'll admit it. I've been borderline apocalyptical in my predictions about the 2011-2012 NBA season in that I have told many, many people that there probably won't be an NBA season this winter. I also wildly declared that professional basketball as we know it would cease to exist as a result of the lockout.
OK, I look a little bit like Harold Camping right now. If you don't remember who Harold Camping is, he's that old asshole who told a bunch of other old assholes to give him all their money because the world was going to end earlier this year. I, too, am kind of an a-hole, I suppose, because there will indeed be an NBA season this winter and it doesn't look like the demise of professional American basketball is coming to an end anytime soon.
I still don't know which side won this dispute or if it even matters, but I'm now faced with preparing my psyche for an NBA season slated to begin on Christmas Day. That's right, as if owners and players weren't displaying enough hubris in their “negotiations,” they went ahead and superseded the birthday of Jesus Christ for their big tipoff day.

The kick was wide left. It was one of those kicks that was doomed from the second it left the ground and it also happened to be one of those kicks that ends a team's hopes for a national championship.
But before Oregon kicker Alejandro Maldonado even took the field to try to send his team into overtime on Saturday night, the Duck gear-clad woman on the bar stool next to me said, “Our kicker is awful.” Then she said it again, and then one more time as Oregon marched down the field. It turns out this was foreshadowing the final seconds of the game when it all came down to the kicker, as it so often does.
And this isn't fair. Not in the slightest, because a kicker isn't really part of the team. Yeah, they're on the roster and they get a uniform (usually taking whatever number happens to be left over) and a helmet with inadequate facial protection, but if you were to grab a defensive end at random and ask if he knew his kicker's name, there's a good chance he'd just mumble something vaguely eastern European and walk away. Hell, kickers don't even participate in the team practice. While the squad is perfecting its offense, the kicker is typically at the other end of the field, perhaps with the punter if he's lucky, just kicking the damn ball around. They just don't fit in and even announcers don't give a damn about them most of the time, failing to even narrate the goings on of extra points – which are an expected certainty yet are actually incredibly difficult to execute.

There's one tenet of sports fandom I hold most dear and it's also the reason I spend so much of my time talking about this subject: these games have almost zero effect on real life.
Yes, you're going to enter a mild depression when your football team of choice fumbles on the goal line or when that last-second three pointer rims out, but unless you're moronically betting large sums of money on these games, none of this affects you, the fan. And that, I've always thought, is also one of the greatest things about allowing oneself to love a sports team: none of it is real. It's just part of the sports world. Not the real world, and that's why it's always so easy for me to nonsensically vomit out jokes about sports in this column – none of it is real, so of course it's funny.

For the past 20-plus years, I've been watching the Detroit Lions play one game each year. And if you're a football fan, so have you. This historically bad – until very recently – squad gets (or is forced) to play on Thanksgiving Day on an annual basis. This is weird and some people don't support it, but I do. Leaving the Lions game off the Thanksgiving Day slate would be like deciding to eradicate gravy from your Turkey Day spread – completely unethical.
This year's Thanksgiving game is already in the news, and not because the contest will see the Lions taking on their division rival, the Green Bay Packers, but rather due to the fact that someone with a high level of authority apparently decided to drink some paint thinner and choose Nickelback as the halftime entertainment. A strong contingent of Lions fans are both embarrassed and outraged at this choice, and as of this printing, they'd gathered more than 47,000 signatures on a petition, which points out that the birthplace of Motown could better represent itself to the world by choosing essentially any other band. And do you think Ndamukong Suh approves of this? Hell no. He'll probably punch Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger in the nards.