To Browns Fans, With Love

It’s been awhile….you guys miss me? Working the night shift so I can pay student loans isn’t what I call living the dream…you know what I would rather be doing?

(this is where you say ‘what would you rather be doing bryan’)

…I’m glad you asked. I wish, like a lot of other collegiate athletes, that I could have graduated from college and played the sport I love professionally. Who doesn’t, right? Whether it be futbol, football, baseball, basketball, etc down the line. It’s the dream of nearly every collegiate athlete to go pro (unless you played at my college…couple kids just wanted drinking buddies) Everyone always asks, “IF you could play for one team who would it be?”

To me, that’s the easiest question in the world. The Cleveland Browns, right? A team I grew up watching as a young kid in Eastlake, OH (represent 440 whaaaat..ahem sorry). But lately, as I look around me I see things I never saw as a kid. As a kid I watched with my uncle Greg as the Cleveland Browns would play their hearts out to the fans who cheered their hearts out…..but back then…. I was blind, or deaf, to the voice of the disgruntled Cleveland Browns fan.

What Ever Happened to Free Speech?

AH

On October 3, 2011, Hank Williams, Jr. appeared on the daily morning talk show, Fox and Friends. He was asked how he felt about the upcoming election and who he preferred in the GOP race. Williams, Jr. then, with what seemed like a Herculean effort, blurted, “Nobody.” He then went on to allegorically  associated a golf game between political party leaders with the likeness of Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu. (For those of you not certain who Netanyahu is; Benjamin Netanyahu is the current Prime Minister of Israel.)

Williams, Jr. continued by shouting, “OBAMA!”, in response to a request to explain whom he was referring to as the enemy. He made perfectly clear that the aforementioned golf game was the biggest political blunder, “ever.” Furthermore, Williams, Jr. reiterated time after time how against bipartisanship he was.

Today, October 5, 2011, Monday Night Football (product of ESPN, ultimately controlled by Disney), whom Hank had been the “voice and face” of since 1991,  essentially announced that they gave Ol’ Hank a corporation sized cowboy boot to the curb. Williams, Jr. has responded in anger declaring a violation of his 1st amendment rights (Free Speech), saying he himself has decided to leave. It seemed like a mutual departure. Regardless, when the story broke, a majority of the masses shared Williams, Jr.’s outrage. Their arguments also hinge on the value and more importantly the RIGHT of Free Speech.

The irrelevant NFL preseason: a statistical analysis

Overview

I am creating this post so my fellow blog-writer, Bryan Boggs, can formally agree that he was wrong, and I was right, in last night’s Twitter battle. I got annoyed that Cleveland Browns fans were boasting about the Browns beating the (super bowl champions!!!) Green Bay Packers in the preseason opener. Boggs, an avid fan of all things Cleveland, felt the need to call me out. Here are a selection of tweets (not all, because that would take forever)

• Me: Funny seeing browns fans excited over a preseason win. The lions went 4-0 before their 0-16 season. Patriots went 0-4 before 16-0 season.
• Boggs: @dougbrown8 part of winning is taught through habit. Things going well boost confidence&can lead into the season #thatandthelionswerebad
• Me: @itsboggs: Preseason is for coaches to evaluate their scrubs, not to win games. It literally has no bearing on team’s success.

NCAA football ’12: Reviewed

D.B.

I’ll admit it, i made an impulse buy today. I  picked up a copy of the new EA Sports NCAA Football ’12 today. And like every year since the game’s come out since the second year in the Playstation 3 era, my initial response after putting the disc in was “… this is it?”