New USA Basketball Jerseys

I don’t have a whole lot of time to write about this, but Bryan emailed me a link about it so I figured I’d put it up real quick. The United States has new jerseys for it’s basketball team. Thanks to Nike’s awesomeness the jerseys look nearly the same but weigh significantly less. The jersey somehow has 13 inches less of material than before and the shorts weigh about half as much as the old ones. I don’t really know how much of a difference all this will make, but at the very least it sounds impressive; and hey, every little bit counts, right?

Friday 5 – Favorite Highlights

This is going to be short because I have a lot I need to do but figured this would be a good way to start my day. I’m simply putting up my five favorite football highlights. This isn’t including anything that has personal, emotional or any other sort of biased attachment or they would simply be plays from the Colts Super Bowl XLI win, the win during that year’s AFC Championship game, Peyton Manning throwing his 49th TD in 2004, the Vols 1998 National Championship and one of my favorites from Peyton at Tennessee. But alas, none of those will be included. These are just highlights that I love to watch over and over simply because of how awesome they are as football plays, not because they had any sort of meaning (to me or anyone) or influence over a game or season. This was hard to narrow down to five so there are a ton of honorable mentions, but I’m sure all those will come up in the comments. Let’s get started:

Early 2010 NFL Predictions

This isn’t going to be in depth. That will come later. I am planning on doing an in depth preview of each of the eight divisions and that will be when I offer my analysis and thoughts behind my predictions. This is simply me taking a brief (very brief) look at each division, keeping in mind what they did in the draft, what they’ve done this offseason, and all the knowledge of each team that I have accumulated over the years as well as my gut instinct about each one. I won’t be providing anything for this other than simply listing the final standings for each division, the playoff seedings and the winner of each playoff game. Most of which I will be deciding as I go. So without further ado…

Holmes to Jets

Santonio Holmes, Super Bowl XLIII MVP, was traded yesterday by the Pittsburgh Steelers to the New York Jets for a fifth round pick. Wow. Wow is all I can say. I don’t have a whole lot of time to write about this, but the Jets just got a steal of a deal, or should I say steel of a deal? Santonio Holmes will be suspended for the first four games of the season because he has a friend named Mary Jane. The Jets will easily be able to survive their first four games without him. The schedules aren’t set yet, but I don’t think it matters. I told my dad (and I’m praying he remembers this) the day after the Colts lost the Super Bowl this year that I thought the Jets would win it next year in response to him saying “well son, there’s always next year” and at that point I had an extremely fatalistic attitude toward everything (see this post) and now I’m basically 100% convinced that I was right, however I am now much more optimistic about the Colts (see this post) and think that they are the only team that might even be kind of capable of standing between the Jets and the Lombardi Trophy next year.

I have to go to class. Let me know what you think in the comments.

New York Jets at Indianapolis Colts

This is the ninth installment of my 11-part series, previewing each and every NFL playoff game this year. To read any of the other eight click on the appropriate link below:

Jets at Chargers

Cowboys at Vikings

Ravens at Colts

Cardinals at Saints

Packers at Cardinals

Ravens at patriots

Eagles at Cowboys

Jets at Bengals

The Jets need to play their absolute best football to win this game. Unfortunately for the Colts, that’s exactly what the Jets have been doing lately and on top of that the Jets seem to have luck on their side as well. For the Colts this will be a very similar game to last week, with one difference. The Ravens had a defense that excelled at stopping the run, and the Jets are a team that excels at stopping the pass but both are great overall defenses. The Jets and Ravens are essentially the exact same team offensively. Run first, pass minimally, young quarterback, one successful young running back and an effective veteran running back as well as a good full back. So if the Colts defense can have a similar performance to the one they put on last week the Jets will have a tough time scoring, therefore a tough time winning.

Arizona Cardinals at New Orleans Saints

This is the fifth installment of my 11-part playoff preview series. To read the others click on the appropriate one below:

Packers at Cardinals

Ravens at patriots

Eagles at Cowboys

Jets at Bengals

Let me first start by saying that Saturday will be a great day to watch great quarterbacks play at a high level. Peyton Manning in the late game and Drew Brees squares off against Kurt Warner in the earlier game but the Cardinals have had a short week. They played the late Sunday game last weekend and they play the early Saturday game this weekend. I don’t think it will really have much of an impact on the game, but you never know. The real question here is can lighting strike the same place twice? The place being represented by the Arizona Cardinals and the lightning being represented by an unlikely playoff run. Bad analogy? Fine, but you get the idea. This is gonna be a high-powered, high-flyin’, high-energy game that you like to see in the playoffs. Both teams are pass-happy, and score a lot of points. The Cardinals beat the Packers in this very type of game last week. Again, can lightning strike twice?

Brett Gardner: Still An Ass

Yes, for any of you that were wondering, Brett Gardner is most definitely still an ass… and he can go ahead and get ready to park his ass right over on the bench for the 2010 season! A little over eight months ago I wrote a post about Brett Gardner being an ass. It was a great post and I still love reading it (and all the comments) to this day. The post was quite popular as well, bringing nearly one thousand views to our site and 21 comments, granted most of those were people defending him and telling me just how much of an ignorant idiot I was for making “false statements” that made them “soooo mad.”

Some apparently even knew Brett and tried to correct me by saying that he is “respectable, kind and loving.” One commenter called the post “the most terribly opinionated thing (he/she had) ever read” and went on to say “the kid is a rookie… of course you don’t know his name, but he has proven himself on many occasions and beat out Melky Cabrera for starting CF.” Well, I have news for you, buddy. I knew Matt Wieters name and he was a rookie too! And who is Melky Cabrera? I might be impressed if he’d actually beat out somebody I’d heard of before, maybe like Matt Wieters, maybe. That same commenter even had the audacity to imply that I was the ass, not Gardner. Another commenter took it one step further and told me “whoever wrote this, you are rude and mean and sloppy and frizzy and i don’t like you at all!”

NCAA Football 10

A few days ago I put up a fake post about the new cover of the EA Sports video game, NCAA Football 10. Well today, tidefan at 3SIB put up a post about the new features that will be a part the game. It’s hilarious and I recommend that everyone reads it.

Brett Gardner: Now An Ass

Who is Brett Gardner? It doesn’t matter. All you need to know right now is that the picture below is of him (ok, no it’s not, but I sure wish it was) and that he’s my least favorite baseball player in the world. We’ll get to that later though.

In case you aren’t a frequent reader of WaB, the title of this post is a play on Bryan’s most recent post. Unlike that post however, the title of this one is a little deceiving. This is actually Part 3 in my “Weller’s becoming a baseball fan” series. The first one being about how I picked my team, and the second being about my first fantasy baseball draft. This one is about my Orioles laying the smack down on the Yankees in their first game of the season,  and what I learned from watching the game. I’ll start by explaining the title.

Weller’s Fantasy Baseball Team

As you may recall, I am attempting to become a baseball fan this year. I took a big step in that direction by joining a fantasy baseball league on Yahoo. It’s a standard public league with 12 teams/managers and head-to-head scoring. My first real shock came when I found out that I was in a live draft league. I had actually thought that I’d signed up for a league with an automated draft because I knew that I wouldn’t have heard of enough of the players to pick my team, and I certainly wouldn’t know enough about the players that I had heard of to know which to draft and when. I was wrong, it wasn’t a auto-draft league. Here’s the story: