Caught up with the neighborhood oracle tonight. Dion from Youngstown — you're damn right he rocks a YSU Penguin tattoo — he says the Cavs are still winning (8:00, ABC).
"LeBron's gotta let his teammates get hot first and then go alpha."
With the series basically on the line tonight, that's a strategy that works for me. (Somebody run this up the flagpole to the Kang, Larbon Jim.)
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Big-time OSU target, Austin Mack, a four-star pearler out of Fort Wayne, is set to announce his collegiate decision today from his hometown. His Crystal Ball is 91% to Ohio State.
11W WEEK IN REVIEW. Here is some stuff written this week by people more talented than me:
- Scouting Virginia Tech.
- Is OSU commit Jake Hausmann the next big thing?
- Jon Cooper WILL be the next big thing.
- 2015 signee Denzel Ward can cook.
- Urban said Braxton is in the best shape of his life. He wasn't lying.
- Get to know one of 2015's most coveted recruits: Signee Torrance Gibson.
- World Cup '22 in the Shoe? I could dig it.
- Ramzy wrote a satirical piece on why Ohio State will be bad, actually, and a bunch of people were outraged. (Cheers to Ramzy.)
- Ezekiel Elliott: deep-threat weapon.
LOT TO UNPACK HERE. I did not think this was real the first time I saw it:
It cracks me up to think of some poor UM graphics guy trying to conjure sticks to throw at the Batmobile as it rolls down the street with thrusters blasting.
Here's the question: How desperate are you when you have to shirk the facts? (Zach Smith, zero NFL WRs produced and coached? Really? You couldn't sneak that one by my fact-checking intern, and he's been dead for the last three years.)
Of course, Zach Smith launched that softball into the hemisphere:
Back to my regularly scheduled Saturday... #ThisAintWhatYouWant #Zone6 pic.twitter.com/6bxT0IoN3E
— Zach Smith #Zone6 (@CoachZachSmith) June 7, 2015
Let's just play The Game tomorrow. No objections? Nice. We should've done this sooner.
THE LEGEND OF BILL NOSKER. R.I.P. to Nosker House. Do you know how it came to be the Nosker House, though?
From Grant Miller of TheLantern.com:
A few years before that soldier entered the military, the young airman was undoubtedly one of the most recognizable men on the campus of Ohio State University — he participated in student government, honor societies and competed as a member of the football team for three seasons. But as of Aug. 15, 1944, the most important thing he had been involved in was World War II. At zero two thirty hours, military time, he took up his spot in a B-24 Liberator as an observer, taking off from San Pancrazio in southern Italy with his pilot, bound for a bombing raid in southwest France.
But they didn’t make it. The plane crashed on takeoff. Medics were quickly sent to retrieve the bodies — or remains — of the two men, but darkness combined with exploded ammunition, fuel and a terrible fire made even identification nearly impossible. But then a member of the search party noticed something on the fallen observer’s finger: a ring. That led him to the identity of the man who lay before him.
His name was William Conklin Nosker, and it would’ve been difficult to find anyone on the OSU campus in the late 1930s who hadn’t heard of him.
Having lived in a dorm (another lifetime ago....) please don't name a dorm after me. I would much rather have a rock named after me.
GODSPEED NUERNBERGER. Reminder: There is nobody forcing you to step foot in Alabama, and that's part of what makes this country No. 1 in the world.
Nothing better than getting dirty looks when rocking an Ohio State shirt in Alabama #rollbuckeyes
— Sean Nuernberger (@Sean4Heisman1) June 6, 2015
I want to meet the saltiest Alabama fan. I want to meet the guy that wakes up angry about the Sugar Bowl.... the guy whose dreams get eviscerated every night by a rampaging Ezekiel Elliott.
BRING ME THIS MAN.
SILK'S BIG BRO REMEMBERS THE DAY HE GOT PUNKED. As a big brother, my heart goes out to Antonio Russell, big brother of D'Angelo Russell.
From Fred Kerber of NYPost.com:
As a ninth-grader who already was playing varsity at formidable Central High School in Louisville, Ky., Antonio Russell routinely bounced little brother D’Angelo around in competitive, but often lopsided, one-on-one games. If D’Angelo got a step on him, Antonio turned physical and knocked him to the ground, when little brother would call “foul” and be ignored. That’s just the way it was.
Until this one day…
“I nudged him a little and he didn’t go down. It was like a 9-foot rim and he just went up and dunked on me,” said Antonio, now a senior at Northern Kentucky University. “I was in ninth grade playing with seniors, playing varsity, so I was like, ‘This can’t be real. My seventh-grade little brother did not just dunk on me.’ ”
I still remember the first (and only) time my little brother beat me in one-on-one. That lucky, turnaround bankshot from the elbow still burns my soul.
THOSE WMDs. Blogs and Social Media Have Killed the Mainstream Media Local Sports Portal... The Devil Was a Lie... Two murderers use power tools to escape New York prison.... Meet heroin's youngest victims.... I will never stop arguing on the internet.
