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...

So, Friday's Scott Rolen trade upset me (and many other Jays ' bloggers ) considerably, as you probably already know if you follow me on Twitter . I already broke it down a bit in my Last Call post at The Rookies Friday night, but I figured it was worthy of some further analysis. Without further ado, let's get to it. First off, let's consider what the Jays lost. Rolen was hitting .320/.370/.461 in Toronto this year with an OPS+* of 122. Looking at Baseball Reference 's batting leaderboards for this season, that's the 30th-highest OPS+ in the entire AL and the second-highest on the Jays (behind only Adam Lind ). Even more impressive is when you compare Rolen's OPS+ to that of other third basemen; only Michael Young (137), Alex Rodriguez (135) and Evan Longoria (127) rank ahead of Rolen among third basemen ( Kevin Youkilis is also ahead of Rolen with an OPS+ of 145, but he's only played 29 games at third this year and has played 59 games at fi...

It's Friday Night Football in the CFL, and the early game should be a great one tonight. I'm live-blogging the match between the 1-3 B.C. Lions and the 2-2 Hamilton Tiger-Cats starting at 7:30 Eastern. It should be a fascinating one to watch, as the Lions will try and rebound from a 48-10 thumping last week at the hands of Calgary. That loss was bad enough to prompt owner David Braley to issue a rare public apology [ Lowell Ullrich , The Province ] for the team's dismal performance. It was possibly the worst loss head coach Wally Buono had suffered in seven years [ Jeff Blair , The Globe and Mail ]. However, all is not lost yet , according to Vanya Tucherov of the great BC Lions Den . Now, the Lions are underdogs against the Ti-Cats for the first time in a decade. Can they rebound, or will their nightmarish season continue? Find out tonight! B.C. Lions v. Hamilton Tiger-Cats

Apologies for the lack of content around here lately. I've been working full-time for the past couple of weeks, filling in for editor Kurt Langmann at the Aldergrove Star , and have been swamped with other writing in my downtime, so I haven't had a lot of time to blog here. Don't panic, though; today's my last day, so things should hopefully return to normality soon and anything you still can't cope with will then be your own problem ! Anyway, I'll hopefully have a real post up before the end of the day. I'm also planning to live-blog the B.C. Lions - Hamilton Tiger-Cats game tomorrow (7:30 P.M. Eastern) and the Vancouver Whitecaps - Cleveland City Stars game Saturday (7 P.M. Eastern) but until then, here's a few links to some of the other pieces I've been writing. - A report on the BC Peewee and Bantam baseball provincials coming up this weekend. [ The Aldergrove Star ] - The second part of my list of annoying fan traditions. Everyone's favo...

It should be an action-packed evening in North American soccer. I'll be covering the Toronto FC - Columbus Crew game at 7:30 Eastern (4:30 Pacific) and the Vancouver Whitecaps - Puerto Rico Islanders game at 10:00 Eastern (7:00 Pacific), but there's also plenty of other MLS action, including New England at Houston at 8:30 ET, the L.A. Galaxy at Kansas City at 9:00, the New York Red Bulls at Colorado at 9:30 and D.C United at San Jose at 10:30; some of the other guys at Epic Footy will be reporting in on those games as well. Come join us for what should be a great evening of soccer! Soccer Saturday live blog

It's getting close to the end of the work week as we know it, and that means it's time for one of my favourite moments each week in the summer; a B.C. Lions game. The Leos are hosting the Calgary Stampeders tonight in the second game of TSN's Friday Night Football doubleheader (the early game is Toronto against Winnipeg). I'll be live-blogging the B.C. - Calgary game here and at Out of Left Field . Kickoff is at 10:30 Eastern/7:30 Pacific. This should be a good one. Both the Lions and the Stampeders got off to poor starts, and they both sit at 1-2 after three games. That's not what many had expected, as the Stampeders are the defending Grey Cup champions and the Lions went to the West Final last season. Still, they've both struggled early on, so both sides will be eager to get back on track tonight. Calgary may be in good shape to do that. After a 40-27 thumping by Montreal in Week One and a 42-30 defeat against Winnipeg in Week Two, the Stampeders responded wit...

There will likely be plenty of angry rants about this Jay Mariotti blog post popping up in the sports blogosphere over the next while, and deservedly so. I've complained about Mariotti before thanks to his embodiment of the absolutist shock journalism principles heavily promoted on Around the Horn , where he's a frequent cast member. However, this is a new low even for him. This time around, Mariotti used a tragedy (the Erin Andrews incident, which I discussed with James Brown and First Derivative in The Phoenix Pubcast Monday (episode 2) and also talked about briefly on Twitter over the past few days) to restart his anti-blogging crusade. That's reprehensible in and of itself. What makes it worse is that he didn't offer any valuable points in his column, as mainstream journalists such as Erin Nicks , Chris Zelkovich , Michael Rand and Bruce Arthur did. They offered thoughtful criticisms of the blogosphere, and I agree with some of the points they made; they ...