This day is called Presidents' Day but it should be called President's Day in honor of the alpha omega, Warren G. Harding, the 29th and greatest President of the United States.
Word of the day: Normalcy.
OSU GOES PRO. Most schools would be thankful for Ohio State's cornerback-to-NFL pipeline. It's No. 1 CB has been drafted ever year since Bradley Roby.
Urban Meyer and Kerry Coombs upped the ante instead. We could see three defensive backs selected in the Top 20.
Here's Bleacher Report NFL draft analyst Matt Miller:
Gareon Conley will enter the 2017 NFL draft, per sources. Is my No. 2 ranked CB.
— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) January 3, 2017
Watched more Gareon Conley this afternoon. Man, this kid is good. His technique is so advanced. Ball skills are good too. Top 20 player
— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) February 18, 2017
Lattimore is the best athlete I've seen at CB this year. Attacks the ball too. That'll help him rise continually. https://t.co/sYUSn7DEJa
— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) January 17, 2017
Lattimore is such a good athlete I think he's rising. I still like Q Wilson best. https://t.co/qZk1xAJeNu
— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) February 18, 2017
I don't see Malik Hooker injury affecting his stock. Still think he's a top 10 player.
— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) February 1, 2017
Malik Hooker: Range is Earl Thomas-like. Ball skills are rare! Finds & flows to the ball w/speed. Avg. tackler. Instincts/vision are elite.
— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) February 16, 2017
I have zero faith in the Cleveland Browns drafting any of the three. What's funny is Bengals fans, at least the ones with which I'm unfortunate enough to interact, have almost less faith than me in their team taking a Buckeye.
Ask one of them about drafting Jeremy Hill over Carlos Hyde. It's almost enough to make me pity them before remembering Brian Robiskie was the last Buckeye my team drafted.
Watch Hooker fall to the Ravens and fulfill "the next Ed Reed prophecy." It makes me sick to my stomach. Somebody needs to ban the NFL.
THERE WEREN'T ENOUGH TOUCHDOWNS. Tim Beck was already out the door before Ohio State took the field against Clemson.
Texas Tom Herman, the founder of MENSA and Beck's new boss, has credited his new hire with all of the good things about Ohio State's offense and none of the bad. It's the bold play you expect from a man who founded the world's premiere organization for geniuses.
Beck, for his part, recently spoke about the issue and delivered a candid diagnosis: The division of duty.
From The Dallas News (via @TuckerBernard1):
"It was kind of weird," Beck said, when asked about the division of duty. "Everything was kind of by committee."
One widely reported version of events had Beck calling most of the plays in 2015 and little this past season, when Clemson beat Ohio State 31-0 in the College Football Playoff.
"We didn't play very well," Beck said. "We were 23-2 [in '15 and '16] going into that last game. I don't know if that's broken necessarily."
If you want to duff menial tasks, form a small committee. Is there anything worse than a group project? Probably one overlorded by an obsessive taskmaster like Meyer.
Herman claims it was "well known" Beck didn't call the plays, but coaches acted as if they faced interrogation on conspiracy charges whenever asked to explain the play calling process.
Thankfully that process probably would've been streamlined even before Meyer tapped Kevin Wilson, a guy who can run his own rodeo.
TMZ NABS EZEKIEL ELLIOTT. Ezekiel Elliott did that one trick where you go back to your old college stomping grounds while earning an adult paycheck. The only difference is he's actually a millionaire and doesn't feel like one for a night.
Zeke was back in Columbus this weekend, partying at The Social Room, which everyone familiar with the downtown Columbus nightlife can instantly visualize without even stepping in the premises.
Here are some pertinent Yelp reviews of the two-star joint:
This place is a joke. Right?
Every inch of this place is packed so tight you cant move, and I am being nice when I say cant move, to the point where the staff is screaming at people to keep moving constantly. The exception to this is roped off private tables all of which look awful because they do not clean up after their guests, for the amount people are paying here they should demand more. The downstairs bar is also one other not crowded spot.
Inhospitable, rude staff, and overpriced. We booked 4 tables for a Birthday Party and they THREW AWAY THE UNCUT CAKE. Refused to give back gratuity, GM was absolute jerk about the situation. Told us if we wanted our gratuity back for them throwing the cake out we could "pay the 800 dollars in 4 free bottles we received". Yeah, well they can shove their $12 bottles of flavored Bacardi you-know-where.
Started off as a private, pay by the month escape from the primordial slime other bars on Park Street attract. A few fools paid to sit and look down at Park Street Patio below, but not enough, so within a few months the Social was open to everyone.
Watch out for people, especially women, sneaking their drink orders on other people's tabs. The Social lures a hotbed of text-while-driving types.
"Text-while-driving types" is perfect. I hate text-while-driving types. Also, this is why you only take cash to bars. That way you can't overspend and nobody can stick you with $76 of Washington Apples.
From our nation's paper of record, tmz.com:
Ezekiel Elliott interrupted his Friday night by having a talk with cops in Columbus about an incident that went down in a nightclub, but he was not detained.
Ezekiel's rep tells us he spoke with cops about something that happened inside a club he had just left. The rep did not describe the incident but says it did not involve Ezekiel.
This of course was a change from an original report that said police detained Elliott. Such is how it goes when trying to ascertain the shadowy machinations outside Columbus' swankiest seats of influence.
OK, SURE, LITTLE FELLA. Give Nebraska this much: It beat Joe Bauserman. Since then, though, it's not like a palpable odium descends over Central Ohio whenever the Cornhuskers come knocking.
According to Billy Devaney, the Huskers executive director of player personnel (aka their Mark Pantoni), they see themselves belonging to the upper crust of the Big Ten.
From journalstar.com:
There's little time to rest when you're chasing monsters in the form of Ohio State and Michigan in the Big Ten. During an interview in Devaney's office last week at North Stadium, I mentioned it might be difficult to consistently out-recruit the monsters.
In what other ways might Nebraska gain ground on them?
"I don't want to concede anything to those guys," Devaney says. "Three years from now, you may say, 'You idiot, I told you so.' But we're not conceding an inch."
"Three years from now, you may say, 'You idiot, I told you say.'" That would make a helluva en epitaph.
I'm not saying Devaney is an idiot. Far from it, obviously. It just seems recruiting teenagers to spend the prime of their lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, isn't what dreams are made of.
THE TINY KIDS PLAYING SCARFACE. Here's something I wanted to be true: Somewhere in suburbia America, parents, stuffed like sardines into an elementary school gymnasium, recoiled in horror as their progenies play out Scarface, the infamous 1983 narcocorrido:
What school decided that it would be a good idea to do a "Scarface" play? pic.twitter.com/GOdArbWnQz
— Steph LdaVoski (@StephLdavoski) January 9, 2017
Unfortunately we must settle for petrified parents passing this around via email chains. It was not an elementary school play. It did however, feature children making thinly-veiled cocaine references.
From The Los Angeles Times, via snopes.com:
The video was actually made [in February 2010] with professional child actors in a rented theater in Koreatown and directed by Marc Klasfeld, a veteran music video director.
With the quirky homage to “Scarface,” Klasfeld said “we had a great cast, great kids and great parents … they enjoyed the process.” The director said it was amusing to watch the pockets of outrage as the purposely provocative video spread out across the Internet.
“We definitely suspected that would happen,” said Klasfeld, a father of two who says he wonders why the most vocal critics of the ironic video don’t speak out more against the sexualization of young girls in American culture or the relentless violence on screens of all sorts.
"Why don't you speak out against the relentless violence on screens of all sorts?"
Thank you to this brave man for giving me my new go-to reply to any criticism.
THOSE WMDs. Most college-bound seniors know "literally nothing" about student loans... Ohio State student slaying an anomaly, few sex offenders repeat crime... The age of rudeness... The coffee shaman... Queens of the stoned age... Why do Americans refrigerate their eggs?
