Sporting Madness

Once again , I've written a massive piece for The Good Point on the NFL. This one looks at the role of unconventional thinking in the league, specifically with reference to the Wildcat offence, the zone blitz and the 3-4 defence. For this piece, I spoke with Steve Sheiner , the senior editor of Fanball.com and the editor of the Dolphins' site Blog With A Porpoise , Adam Best , the senior editor of the Fansided blog network and the co-founder and senior editor of Arrowhead Addict , Frank Mineo (drinkyourmilkshake) of Behind The Steel Curtain and Brandon Peterson of Vikings' Throne . As before, I got some great information from them that I wasn't able to squeeze into the article, so I figured I'd continue my On The Ground interview series with some of the extra information from each interview. First up, Adam Best . The other full interviews will follow later this week. Adam's a very knowledgeable sports fan, as anyone familiar with his blogging at Fan Ad...

Welcome to the first match of the Chris Cummins era. Can TFC repeat their success from Wednesday night's win over TFC? Find out in the live blog below. Kickoff is at 5 p.m. Eastern/2 p.m. Pacific. You can check out the It's Called Football pregame show here, featuring Michael Kuhn of Down the Byline . Toronto FC - Kansas City

Just a quick note that I'll be live-blogging the Vancouver-Portland game tonight (the battle of the 2011 expansion teams!) and the Toronto FC - Kansas City game tomorrow here and at The 24th Minute . Kickoff tonight is at 10 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Pacific. Tomorrow, it's 4:30 p.m. Eastern/1:30 p.m. Pacific. Come join in the fun then!

(Photo from The Red Line ) Gary Bettman's most recent interview with Ron MacLean, which just aired on CBC's pre-game show, clearly is deserving of its own place in history on the Unintentional Comedy Scale . I recommend at least a 78: better than the Super Bowl Shuffle but not quite up there with Bill Clinton's denial . Credit to MacLean for going after Bettman with both barrels blazing, instead of throwing the softballs usually delivered at the commissioner's public appearances (often by broadcasters from his league's own network ) or by callers to his radio show . A key topic of conversation was sports business columnist extraordinaire Rick Westhead's piece in the Toronto Star yesterday, which revealed that the six Canadian teams (20 per cent of the league, if you're keeping track) account for a staggeringly disproportionate 31 per cent of the league's gate receipts. This provoked incredible hilarity, as Bettman tried to bash the piece as sensationa...