By Mike Luce

‘Tis the bowl-projection season as top teams vie for spots in premier postseason bowls and a national championship playoff berth.
While all eyes will be on Mississippi State-Alabama (the #5 Tide favored by a whopping 9.5 at home over the #1 team in the country?) and Florida State-Miami (a conflicted national audience must balance rooting against the ‘Noles with lingering distaste for the ‘Canes), we feel the hapless, the down-on-their-luck, and generally woeful need some attention.
Why? Because these kids work hard and even though the record may not . . . well, you know. Besides, it’s more fun. You can read about the rest everywhere else.

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Posted on November 14, 2014

By Carl Mohrbacher

Epic Performance
It was as if there had been a way to turn the difficulty down to “Grandma” on real life Madden 25 and the CPU opponent was the Bears.
Nearly as one-sided as they come, Sunday night produced an ass-whooping for the ages that featured some of the empirically worst pass coverage in NFL history.
The distance between Jordy Nelson and members of the Bears secondary ceased to be measured in yards in favor of units like “clicks” and “leagues.”

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Posted on November 14, 2014

By Dan O’Shea

Entering this season, Mark Sanchez was destined to be remembered, if at all, for a single notorious play that marked his sorry stretch as the starting QB for the New York Jets.
Yet, in Week 9, the guy who has long since looked more like the quintessential big-name backup QB got his chance when Philadelphia starter Nick Foles suffered a serious injury. Sanchez didn’t do badly, and Week 10 was even better: 332 yards passing, two TDs, zero INTs, zero buttfumbles.
Now, as we enter the last third or so of the season, and the fantasy diamonds in the rough are becoming fewer and farther between, Sanchez is looking like he has fantasy value for the first time in years. A bit more on Sanchez and a few other remaining fantasy bargains in our Week 10 review:

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Posted on November 11, 2014

By Mike Luce

1 – 3. Haters.
The long nightmare for Notre Dame haters ended late Saturday, as the Irish lost to Arizona State in Tempe, 55-31. ND (7-2) dropped in the polls (to #15 in the AP) and out of the running for a playoff spot. Even Touchdown Jesus can’t save the Domers now, much to the delight of ND-detractors everywhere. No doubt dentists across the country sighed wistfully over the sports section Sunday morning: teeth gnashing brings in business.

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Posted on November 10, 2014

By Jim Coffman

This morning the meatballs are right about everything. And when you look back at the last couple years, they have been right about everything all along.
We refer of course to the meatball sports fan, who can always be counted on to proclaim that a struggling team must fire its coach and/or general manager, or cut all prominent players, or at least bring in the backup quarterback for God’s sake!
After the Bears’ 55-14 loss at Green Bay last night, on top of the 51-23 debacle against New England in their previous game, how could anyone who cares at all about this team respond in any other way? Here’s an idea: fire everybody, cut everybody and make all McCaskeys who work for the team take the field next Sunday.

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Posted on November 10, 2014

By Thomas Chambers

This sounds like a broken record, but I wonder if I have a sport anymore. I’m not anesthetized to these kinds of things – maybe I should be – but that’s kind of the point.
Things were proceeding rather swimmingly last weekend as the two-day Breeders’ Cup World Championships, in their 30th year, kicked off with an intriguing and touching appetizer Friday afternoon and swung into the substantial and mostly satisfying middle courses on Saturday.
What should have been the sweet dessert, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, turned into such a sour experience, it was as if the pastry chef used tar and salt instead of chocolate and sugar in the tiramisu.

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Posted on November 7, 2014

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes with Noahbattacola

Bench Shea, hurt Rodgers. Plus: College Football’s Iron Lotus; Derrick Rosebud; Joe Maddon Facts; and Kickstart The Blackhawks!

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Posted on November 7, 2014

By Mike Luce

College football loves catch phrases. Or rather, the media (encouraged, no doubt, by the billion dollars of ad buys during the season) loves catch phrases. This weekend hardly needs a nifty buzzword, but we’ve got one anyway: Separation Saturday. Thus, if your team stinks this season but you’d like an excuse to watch anyway, here it is: Separation Saturday. A can’t miss event, a day-long orgy, brought to you by the likes of CBS, ESPN, ABC (i.e., ESPN on ABC), NBC, and for sad bastards who must endure it, Fox Sports, with the support of UPS, Nike, AT&T, Allstate, Miller Lite, Gatorade, and thus, indirectly, viewers like you. If you wreck your car while driving and texting during a halftime beer run, you’ve effectively helped pay for the day’s slate of games for the rest of us. We appreciate it.
The slogan speaks to the numerous head-to-head matchups of Top 25 teams, which will no doubt separate the wheat from the chaff, the pretenders from contenders, the men from boys, and the sheep from goats, as though John the Baptist looms over the Saturday schedule, winnowing fork in hand, ready to thrash out the unworthy.

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Posted on November 7, 2014

By Carl Mohrbacher

Riding low on a two-game losing streak, the Bears head into the second half of the season searching for ways to make a playoff push plausible.
I’ve spent countless hours breaking down the near limitless ways that the NFC playoff picture can shake out over the remainder of the year.
Now I don’t want to get too technical, but mathematically speaking, the season has eight games remaining.
So, let’s see. Eight divided by four, carry the one, compensate for wind variance . . .
Ah, here we go. The Bears will have to win eight games to get back in the playoff picture.
For those of you who don’t have the ability to limbo under bullets*, I’ve distilled the complicated algorithms needed to see the possibilities of the multiverse into step-by step-instructions (see Figure A).

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Posted on November 6, 2014

By Jim Coffman

The sports news chasm created by a bye week can only be filled by a smorgasbord of sports. Here are several reports on local franchises in a sort of chronological order:
* The Hawks have given up a total of two goals in their last two home games . . .and lost both.
On Sunday it was the Hawks alumni team, aka the Winnipeg Jets, who came out on top. Former red-sweater-wearer Michael Frolik scored the only goal on the first shift of the game with an assist from fellow former Hawk Andrew Ladd. The home team then had 59 minutes and 40 seconds to even the score. It wasn’t enough.

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Posted on November 3, 2014