Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to your morning Skull Session! Are you going to see the Dark Knight Rises today? Really? Why.
Seriously, it's Batman, he's going to beat up bad guys and save the day and if the trailers are any indication the Steelers will hopefully be swallowed up by a gaping maw in the very earth below them. Boring, easy, predictable. Look, will I cheer if (as our old friend Luke suggested to me a couple of nights ago) Hines Ward gets unceremoniously dispatched by Bane and his cadre of followers? Yes. A lot.
But really, we all know that the movie you SHOULD be clamoring to see is The Well-Digger's Daughter:
Auteuil stars as the eponymous well-digger Pascale, a widower living with his six daughters in the Provence countryside at the start of World War I.
Oh my God that sounds fantastic. I've seen Batman in a movie before. I have never seen a well-digger in a movie, and I definitely haven't seen one with six daughters. Life is about experiences, folks. All I'm saying is, choose wisely.
IIIII HAVE THE POWEERRRR Okay, so if you look to the Buckshots to your right you'll see a pretty funny story about Jim Delany briefly toying with the idea of making the transition from simple Robber-Baron to full fledged dictator, and hey guess what Big Ten coaches aren't super thrilled with the idea of potentially getting fired because a dude that looks like a muppet says so.
CBS asked a few Big Ten basketball coaches for their opinions on the matter, and though responses were somewhat varied, they all basically boiled down to "Are you f-cking kidding me?" and "The whole thing is stupid. How do people even come up with this sh-t?" Which of course makes me think that Gary Parrish lied and actually just talked to an angry Mark Dantonio.
RITTENBERG'S BORED, Y'ALL Adam Rittenberg has a tough job. He's got to produce a huge amount of content in a small amount of time during a period when there's basically nothing to talk about. Which is probably why he's ranking the Big Ten's OOC games this year, starting with number 48, Charleston Southern versus Illinois. Somehow, to even my surprise, I can be argumentative about a list of crappy nonconference games, because I actually think that Indiana State versus Indiana should be dead last by a mile simply on the merits of how horribly depressing it will be to watch. At least Illinois might be kind of fun to watch with Tim Beckman at the wheel. Indianas fighting each other will just be... sad.
Bear Bryant or Carmen Sandiego henchman?MORE LISTS Athlon figures the Ohio State d-line to be the best in the Big Ten, and though it's just a silly list based on educated guesses, it did get me to start thinking about a guy we haven't really talked to much about, Nathan Williams.
I understand that everyone's jacked from Simon and the new recruits and whatever, and yeah, sometimes guys don't come back from injury as the same players that they were, but it's really hard to understate the impact that not having Williams last year had on the defensive line. He was the only edge rusher and maybe the last in a line of players like Thaddeus Gibson and other tweener linemen. I'm really excited to have him back in the fold this year, and I think he might make even more of an impact than guys like Washington or Schutt.
STATUES ARE ACTUALLY DUMB This is why you wait, guys. I would have no problem building a Woody Hayes statue on OSU's campus. We all know his failings: he punched a dude, was a huge dick like 95% of the time, and was maybe the most stubborn person on the planet ever. But! He also cared for his players' well being, was truly committed to the idea of education, and wasn't a secret racist or anything like that. Also he won a butt ton of football games. So now, years later, yeah I'm cool with that dude getting a statue.
The notion that these statues somehow render the subject immortal, or even perpetuate his or her memory, doesn't square with history. The Colossus of Nero, upon the death of its patron, was turned into a statue of the sun god Sol by the emperor Vespasian. The emptiness inherent in statues is every bit as ancient as statues themselves. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder, who preceded Nero by 200 years, said: "I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one."
That's a weird part of a weird article by Mr. Rebecca Lobo himself, Steve Rushin, but I get what he's saying. Building statues to dudes like Nick Saban or Albert Pujols or even an institution like Joe Paterno is pretty goofy when the story isn't finished. Any reasonable person will tell you that Paterno's statue should be melted down and made into brass bidets at a county correctional facility, but the point is that it should've never been made in the first place.
ABRAHAM LINKON Charles Barkley, just shut up and jam... Cool US Olympic athlete twitter feed... DUUUUNNKKKK... Cuban missile awesomeness... That explains A LOT... Things can always be worse... I love GIS
