The Situational: Born on 3rd Base

By Ramzy Nasrallah on May 25, 2016 at 1:15 pm
ohio state rose bowl 2010
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Ohio State just lost a player from every one of its positional groups to the pros.

You may believe that the conventional wisdom suggests any college team losing a dozen players to the first four rounds of the NFL draft leaving giant, premium holes all across its roster is destined for a reset. But you would be wrong because it's never happened before. Not like this. 

Ohio State's quality of matriculation from last season is without precedent, and yet the Buckeyes are still viewed in the futures market as one of the safer bets to win the East Division, contend for the Big Ten championship and thus land in the College Football Playoff again:

That same betting pool is also bullish on Jim Harbaugh and a Michigan roster with plenty of holes of its own. You might notice the defending conference champion that defeated both of those ancient rivals in 2015 - on their home fields - is conspicuously absent from that list.

But that's simply fuel for the reigning champs. They frack for this kind of stuff in East Lansing.

So yes, the Buckeyes are in the title chatter again among gamblers buuuuut also have 8.5 wins as an over/under target, suggesting that unprecedented matriculation quality could deliver Urban Meyer as many crushing losses between this September and December as he suffered between 2012 and 2015.

Something has got to give. Could we be looking at another 2004...or perhaps a 2014 repeat? (the Buckeyes beat Michigan both times; as long as that's the starting point we're in good shape) Either way, Vegas is all over the place with this team.

SITUATIONAL WAGERING: Take the under for Buckeye wins, bet Michigan to win the title and use the cash to dry your tears if you're right. But if you should lose your money, at least there's a strong chance Ohio State made you happy.

Live life on the hedge. Let's get Situational!

The Boredom

bennie oosterbaan

Who is that mysterious leather helmet-era football man in this grainy, black and white photo? Is that Red Grange? Chic Harley? We'll skip the suspense - it's Michigan legend Bennie Oosterbaan.

Oosterbaan was objectively one of the Big Ten's greatest athletes. He threw three touchdown passes in Michigan Stadium's dedication game. He led the conference in basketball scoring and was also its batting champion (!). Oosterbaan later coached all three of those programs at his alma mater. His number 47 is retired there.

And that's just part of why naming him the Big Ten's greatest wide receiver, as an obviously very bored ESPN writer recently did is so impressively dumb. It manages to diminish the breadth of Oosterbaan's athletic prowess while slighting the countless dozens of Big Ten wide receivers who were significantly better wide receivers than Oosterbaan was in his relatively abbreviated receiving career. When you did everything as well as he did there was no reason to specialize, especially in that grainy, black and white era.

The second greatest wide receiver on that same list is Johnny Rodgers, who clocked 154 receptions in his college career averaging a gaudy 17.4 per catch (for comparison's sake, that's 33 more catches than Devin Smith had - and Rodgers played one less season). He also rushed for 836 yards, a whole bunch of touchdowns on the ground and was a pretty decent punt returner as well.

You would be hard-pressed to find a rational person who doesn't believe Rodgers is one of the Big 8's greatest receivers. Big 8. [echo] Biiiiig Eiiiiiiight. Apparently the same author took Nebraska's entry into the conference 40 years after Rodgers played - and the Huskers' three memorable wins over Minnesota in the early 1970s - as reasons to qualify him for this list, behind Oosterbaan, who himself played in an era when the forward pass was still in its infancy.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Your two greatest wide receivers in Big Ten history! Please like this list on Facebook.

The Blind Spot

Eleven Warriors Dot Com: Shop For RitaRod Safari Gear
Your home page, circa 2010. Started at the bottom now we're here.

This summer as part of 11W's 10th birthday we'll be putting together some unique content to celebrate the evolution of this site. As it's grown Eleven Warriors has never strayed from its roots, which is striving to consistently develop exceptional, unique and differentiated content while deliberately working to curate and foster a vibrant online community (and as fellow Internet consumers, we also despise slideshows, clickbait and cheap devices designed to pull extra, empty clicks out of readers - so we don't tolerate them here)

For awhile during those first few years several dozen of you noticed and appreciated our efforts. Then you told your friends. Then it became several hundred of you. Then several thousand. Fast-forward to April 2016, and between the Spring Game ending and right now over a million people have visited the site and clicked around it 11 million times - we're assuming, to desperately try and find a May football game somewhere.

There isn't one. We've looked too. It took time to earn you as an audience. We'll never forget that or take it for granted. It wasn't easy; it was just super fun.

Bill Simmons, who took a similar (albeit muuuuch larger path) seems to have forgotten that:

Simmons was known as The Boston Sports Guy in 2001 when ESPN hired him out of relative obscurity. Over the next decade-plus, the mothership as ESPN is called spent millions of dollars investing in him and his projects, promoting him and them across all of its platforms and making him one of the most visible people in sports media.

Motherships are not overrated. Without motherships Simmons is The Boston Sports Guy.

Yes, aspiring writer - all you need is good content. Having a verified Twitter account with 5 million followers and having been on television, Internet and radio on behalf of the biggest sports media company in the history of the world provides no real visibility or advantage. Just be a good writer. After all, that's how hot sports takes get their huge audiences. By being good!

Ask Larry Cheesenthal, aka The Topeka Sports Guy (I just made him up) if he thinks it isn't hard. Everything that's competitive and rewarding is hard. Anything easy ain't worth a damn. I seem to remember the local football coach where I grew up saying that a lot.

Twitter handles like @ringer are just sitting there, available and pre-verified. Tenured, experienced and renown writers like the ones Ringer is hiring are just hanging out waiting for your call - with no price tag. Social networking is all you need! By the way, the two best accounts going on Twitter are Sales Pig and Spongeworthy247 and they currently have 118 followers combined. Ringer already has 213K and all it does is advertise Ringer content.

The irony here is that Simmons was leading some of the best sports content as recently as eight months ago - and ESPN killed it for many reasons, none of which having anything to do with quality. He's resurfaced without the mothership with all of the advantages you would expect him to have but still, a relative fraction of his former audience.

Motherships aren't overrated. Best doesn't always win. Stay humble and remember where you started - and who helped you - even if they turn out to be huge jerks.

The Experiment

Eli and Mama Apple
Eli and Mama Apple via

This will be quick, because being forced to defend ESPN once in a column is bad enough. Twice just pisses me off.

Mama Apple is joining ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown, a four (five? six?) hour show that is entirely comprised of phlegm-magnate Chris Berman grunting at a panel of other men, who snort back at him while laughing and affectionately referring to him as Boom, which is a Comanche Indian term for "man who appears in commercials for both Applebee's and Nutrisystem simultaneously."

Take a look at the responses to this tweet announcing her hiring:

This is what it's like to be a female with sports opinions on the Internet. When you're hired it's because of quotas, looks or political correctness, not merit or appeal. This mentality brings great comfort to the shallow, fragile psyches that need it the most: Internet cowards.

She shouldn't have to explain her qualifications. No woman should.

Annie is already a good writer who is extremely well-versed in both football minutiae and its business environment - and unlike the vast majority of humans is also interesting and outspoken. She will be joining a panel of men whom Tom Herman would never allow into the society for towering intellects which he originally founded. 

She's fresh, relatively inexpensive, now has current NFL ties and is an interesting talent no matter what you think of her. This is exactly what ESPN needs to do with its operating costs in the condition they're in. Find new talent with fewer paycheck commas.

It's a terrific hire. Annie is already better than Clay Travis by leaps and bounds and she hasn't even started yet.

The Bourbon

There is a bourbon for every situation. Sometimes the spirits and the events overlap, which means that where bourbon is concerned there can be more than one worthy choice.

Panty melter. You're welcome.
Amador Double Barrel: Kentucky meets Napa.

The rise of vanity-driven hipsters creating shortages bourbon's popularity in America has resulted in a lot of bourbon drinkers looking for an obscure shelf called The Similars. Don't have several thousand dollars in bribes to get a bottle of Pappy that should retail at $300? Simply get your hands on a similar mash bill (I'm not going to list examples here because, damn it, vanity-driven hipsters have already created shortages there too and the bleeding needs to stop)

Anyway, I have been asked recently by numerous people - including last week in the 12W Premium Lounge - about how to find Angel's Envy with it flying off shelves. That bourbon is great both by itself and as part of The Herald Angel on Christmas Eve, which also requires Angel's Envy rye. The bourbon is finished in port casks; the rye in rum barrels.

AE leads a renewed commercial charge in bourbons using this kind of differentiated and unconventional finishing process, which includes products like Belle Meade, made in Tennessee and finished in sherry casks (it's fine). But if you live somewhere AE is hard to find, take a look at Amador, which - currently - costs less than what AE bourbon runs when it's on store shelves. It's about half the price of AE rye.

The finishing tool here is an unnamed Napa Valley winery's discarded wine barrel, which doesn't give it the caramel croissant-finish of AE rye or the morning fruit tart finish of AE bourbon. Amador is more like warm raisin bread with pat of sweet cream butter that arrives behind it. Yes, that terrible.

Can't find the bourbon you're looking for? Don't get mad? Get creative.

The Playoff

When I was 13 I had braces. On the left side of my mouth, right above the canine tooth and the little guy next to it further back in my gullet (sorry dentists, I'm too lazy to google this) the orthodontia my parents paid for knocked my gum line a few millimeters to the north, exposing more tooth than should be exposed.

A few decades have passed and I finally got sick of dentists telling me I needed more gum line covering those two teeth nobody can see. I have no cavities, enjoy flossing more than Urban likes to run up the score and don't take threats to my dental health seriously because I'm cocky about my oral care regimen.

But the badgering finally got the best of me and two weeks ago I received a gingival graft, which is when a periodontist basically takes a medical grade cheese grater to the roof of your mouth, scrapes off several chunks of it and grafts the chunks to where you need more gum line. It sounds horrifying - literally - because the scraping of your own mouth roof is not something you want ever to hear, even if you're too full of painkillers to feel the pain.

So the remedy I came up with was to focus on the music playing above my head and the bright lights where my mouth was being chopped up. As my procedure was happening, Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer came on. My brain - desperate for distraction - went straight to here:

Twenty-five years after it was released I still knew every word to Pop Goes the Weasel, the 3rd Bass anthem railing against Vanilla Ice that uses Sledgehammer as its backbeat. Vanilla's sudden emergence in 1991 - it's funny to say this in 2016 - threatened the sanctity of the authentic hip-hop establishment. I closed my eyes and focused on this song, the one in my head, triggered by the former lead singer of Genesis - and some of the crazy lyrics that only being mad at Vanilla Ice can produce:

I've got a squad with a list of complainers | I should have started R.A.P.E: Rappers Against Phony Entertainers

Painkillers are something, man.

There's your Situational. The roof of my mouth currently feels like I ate a slice of pizza that was delivered directly from the surface of the sun. Go Bucks.

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