It seems the trendy thing to do this season is to pretend that everybody hates Cam Newton because he’s black, and it confuses the hell out of me.  I mean, I get why a lot of people have ripped on him in the past…  His college history is pretty damn sketchy and his early pro years have been littered with issues of constant sideline sulking or over celebrating during blowout losses.  But nobody really cares about that shit anymore because his team is awesome and he’s been an absolute thrill to watch all season.

In fact, whenever I talk with friends, go out in public, or even peruse the internet, I can’t find anybody (outside of Falcons and Saints fans) that doesn’t like Cam Newton.  As usual, Big Daddy Drew Magary hit the nail on the head when he summed up America’s collective opinion on the matter .  Where all these supposed HATERS are coming from, I have no earthly idea.

Apparently they exist in large numbers, though, because Newton’s got a lot of questions about his critics this week.  In one of his responses yesterday, he dropped this bomb…

I am an African-American quarterback that scares people because they haven’t seen nothing that they can compare me to.

Umm what?  There’s no other black quarterback we can compare you to?  Okay Cam, you’re on!  I’m gonna give it my best shot…

• Warren Moon – the trailblazers of the black QBs, but nobody under 40 actually saw him play in his prime, so Cam’s statement that we “haven’t seen” a comparison to him technically rings true for a couple of generations

• Randall Cunningham – absolute dynamite in NFL Blitz 2000, also was punter which is pretty dope, but he tore his ACL once and that took like 3 years to recover from back in the 90s.  You can’t blame Cam for playing in the better era

• Steve McNair – maybe the toughest QB of all time and unparalleled leadership skills, but Cam is still alive

• Donovan McNabb – I thought he was pretty sick back in the day, but maybe Cam thinks Rush Limbaugh wasn’t being a complete moron about our biases back then

• Daunte Culpepper – Cam is basically a clone of the Madden 02 cover… Same size, speed, and arm as Culpepper, but Cam hasn’t blown out his knee yet

• Michael Vick – most exciting dual threat QB of all time until, you know…

• Colin Kaepernick – started in the Super Bowl three years ago, but was only successful in one type of scheme (albeit the same offense Cam runs in Carolina)

• Russell Wilson – started the last two Super Bowls, but apparently is not actually black enough to be considered a real black quarterback

Damn.  Maybe Cam’s on to something…  What a pioneer!

I was thinking about nourishing my passion for daytime gambling today and noticed that Aston Villa is only -175 in the FA Cup.  Are you kidding me?  I did some more research, and I still can’t believe this line.  It is the lock of a LIFETIME!

They are playing at home against the almighty Wycombe Wanderers of Football League Two (the 4th division in England).  Aston Villa is last in the Premier League, but they should still clean up against some scrub ass mid table club of the 4th division.  Besides, Aston Villa hasn’t been that bad over the past two weeks – a draw against 2nd place Leicester and a win against West Brom.  Also, Aston Villa was garbage last year but still made it to the finals of the FA Cup.  They take this tournament seriously.

These teams tied 1-1 earlier this month, but that was at Wycombe and apparently the field was shit and had a huge effect on Villa’s abilities.  That is not a cause for concern; instead, it is a blessing that it causes bettors to be nervous enough to make this line so affordable.  Thank you gambling gods – for you are so kind!!

UPDATE: 2-0 Aston Villa, that was easy….  Not content to quit while I’m on fire, here are some Wednesday picks…

Tottenham PK (-122) at Leicester City

These teams have played twice in the past two weeks, with Tottenham getting a lucky draw in the first leg of their FA Cup round and Leicester getting an outright win their Premier league matchup.  However, in both games, Tottenham looked the way better team with twice the amount of time of possession.  They just didn’t have breaks go their way.

This is an important game as the bracket lays out a trail of cupcakes to the final for whoever wins this game.  However, the top priority for both teams is still getting into the Champions League with top 4 EPL finishes, so they’ll be sending out their B squads for this match.  Tottenham is a much deeper team than Leicester, especially with the dope Korean forward (Son Heung-min) they acquired from Germany this past August.

Liverpool -340 vs Exeter City

The exact same situation as Aston Villa, except Liverpool is way better than Aston Villa and Exeter City is much shittier than Wycombe.  Who cares what the price is.  It’s a 100% guaranteed lock.

Jim Caldwell received a lot of scorn for his fuckup against Green Bay last month, and he deserved every bit of it.  Aside from a victory formation kneel down or a spike to stop the clock, defending a hail mary is the easiest play in all of football.  It’s even easier than defending an onside kick or converting an extra point.  You just put all your tall players in the end zone, converge on the ball as it travels in the air for like 5 seconds, and then bat it down.  It’s simple, and it works every time!

That Thursday Night Football game was devastating for Americans everywhere, but at least we all had the foresight to know that if any team was capable of fucking up and losing to the Packers in the most excruciating way possible, it was the Lions.  We all expected much better from two time Coach of the Year Bruce Arians on Saturday night, but he went out and shat the bed even harder…

Seven blitzers failed to bring down or contain one of the most evasive quarterbacks in the history of the league, while the four DBs left to defend the actual important part of the play failed to out-jump a receiver that was four inches taller than each of them (except Patrick Peterson, Janis is only two inches taller than him).  Why???  It was inexcusable, and it felt so depressing to see such a smart man be responsible for the biggest travesty of the season.

The only thing more perplexing than Bruce Arians’s decision is it’s attempted justification in this Bill Barnwell piece making the rounds lately.  I understand that Bill Barnwell’s word is gospel to a significant amount of football fans.  I understand that finds innovative ways to develop mathematical models for his predictions.  I also understand that, despite the significant sample size challenges that come with NFL statistics, his models still turn out accurate forecasts every other year or so…

However, defending that blitz call was still a load a shit.  He says it was the right thing to do because…

• It was still a better defense than what the Lions called
• They would have gotten a sack if Rodgers wasn’t so good at evading sacks
• They didn’t blitz on the 4th and 20 conversion earlier in the drive (that GB did not score on)
• The Cards have blitzed a lot in the past and he really likes that they blitz a lot

Fuck outta here….  Just a classic case of overthinking the situation.  Defend the hail mary normally like every other team besides the Lions have done, and the game is over.

Thank GOD for Larry Fitzgerald.

The NFL Network found away to patch together footage of almost every play of Super Bowl 1 and aired it for the first time ever last night.  They had former players from the game sit down with the network’s own analysts to break down everything that was going on and it was actually pretty cool to watch.  My favorite part of the program by far was the same as Steve Mariucci’s…

WOOWWWWW!!!!!!   Holy shit.  She looks amazzziiiinnggg!!!!  How the fuck did Marylin Monroe get all the fame when this broad was around the whole time??

I can guarantee she’s still a one on the binary scale even right now in her 70s.

This one has to hurt for Everton fans, but more importantly, it is devastating to the gambling sharps like myself who backed Everton +360.  What an absolute screw job.

At the 90th minute with Everton up 3-2, the refs called for a full seven minutes of stoppage time to close out the game…  Seriously y’all?  I thought that was a bogus amount of stoppage time to give, and apparently the refs did too because they let the game go on for a full 1.5 minutes past the 97′ mark.  Then this happened…

You fucking kidding me??  Seven minutes of stoppage time, then an extra two just for the hell of it, and then let’s go ahead and pretend offsides isn’t a rule while we’re at it…  I haven’t felt this screwed since back when I was a kid and I hadn’t yet learned that the NBA was rigged.

On the bright side for us Everton +360 backers, we’re only two weeks into 2016 and our worst beat of the year is already out of the way.  When you start off the year at rock bottom, it can only mean you’re on the cusp of a 12 month hot streak.

I think it’s safe to say that one of the worst moves the Cowboys made this year involved the defensive end position.  No, not the signing of Greg Hardy.  It was appeasing Jeremy Mincey’s training camp holdout with a $500k raise and paying him $2M for a whopping total of 19 tackles and zero sacks…

This week, the media seemed to conveniently forget that lack of production and consider Mincey a relevant and creditworthy source to rip on Greg Hardy, jumping all over quotes from a radio interview where he hints at tension in the locker room stemming from Hardy’s presence.

“I hate [that] it happened. You talk about a team that was so close knit and tight, and all of a sudden it was just different,” Mincey said.

Aww poor Jeremy.  Is that really why the team sucked this year?  Because everyone wasn’t BFFs like last year?  Tough shit bro.  You’re being paid to win, not to make new friends.

Jerry Jones brought in Charles Haley back in the day, and he was a much worse teammate than Greg Hardy.  Did the rest of the Cowboys (including Jason Garrett) respond by bitching about ‘tension in the locker room’?  Fuck no.  They synergized with that talent and won three Super Bowls.

That’s why The Playmaker wanted Hardy extended while he was still cheap back in October.  That’s why nobody important actually gave a shit when Hardy slapped a clipboard away from our dumbass special teams coach who ruined our season.  Passion for winning and pass rush ability trump locker room chemistry when you’re trying to win Super Bowls like Jerry…

Don’t believe me?  Let’s look at some excerpts on Charles Haley from the G.O.A.T. of NFL literature, Boys Will Be Boys…

He’d wrap his hand around his penis, turn toward a Joe Montana or John Taylor, and bellow, “You know you wanna suck this!” or “you only wish you had this, baby!”  Charles used to beat off in meetings while talking graphically about players’ wives,” says Michael Silver, who covered the 49ers for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.  “It got to the point of ejaculation.”

With tears streaming down his cheeks, Haley yanked the needle from his arm, punched a hole in the wall, took a swing at coach George Seifert, and began screaming at quarterback Steve Young, who had played poorly.  “I could have fucking won that game in my sleep!” he yelled.  “You’re a motherfucking pussy faggot quarterback!  A motherfucking pussy faggot with no balls!”

Haley’s resentment toward his teammate festered throughout the season until, near year’s end, he cut a hole in the roof of Harris’s $50,000 BMW 733i convertible, stood on the top of the car, pulled down his pants, and urinated onto the steering wheel and floor.

Immediately after the game Haley stormed into the locker room, tears streaming down his cheeks.  He fumed aloud, “We’re never gonna win with this fucking rookie!”  When Jones entered, Haley picked up his helmet by the face mask and whizzed it ten feet through the air, past the owner, and through a wall.  THUD!  “You need to sign that motherfucker now!” he screamed.  The silence was deafening.  “I thought that thing was gonna kill me,” says Jones.  A bawling Haley proceeded to approach Jones, lean into his ear, and whisper, “Sign Emmitt!  I don’t care how you do it.  Cut me.  Take the money out of my check.  Just sign Emmitt!”  It was a new type of crazy for Haley, who – in a career chock-full of nutty moments – had never before whipped a helmet at the man signing his paychecks.

With the scent of alcohol wafting from his pores, Charles Haley rode his Harley-Davidson through the front door and into the eatery’s lobby.  Just days earlier Haley had thrown a world-class tantrum in the Valley Ranch training room after someone had tossed his dominoes into the garbage.  That was nothing compared with an incident from the previous training camp, when Haley approached the Pathfinder belonging to rookie linebacker Anthony McClanahan, grabbed its underbelly, and single-handedly flipped the vehicle upside down.

As RG3 left the Redskins locker room for the final time of his career yesterday, he claimed that he had nothing to tell reporters.  However, the media found that to be a lie when they went to his locker and found a passive aggressive message in the form of a bible verse and a Mother Teresa poem…

This.  This encapsulates so much of what people hate about Baylor.  It’s not how obnoxiously they bitch and moan about the ‘lack of respect’ for their cartoon football team as they blow out cupcake squads every September and October.  It’s not the fact that they always clamor to be labeled as elite despite the fact that they’ve never won a top tier bowl game and are less than five years removed from their first ever winning season in the Big 12.  It’s the insufferable culture amongst students and alums embodied by this stupid note…

These squares are the celibate, bible-thumping, ‘sober annoying’ people that just don’t have a grip on modern society.  You see, despite the mediocre education and shitty campus life in Waco, Baylor students take pride in shelling out $50k/year to be at a place that is ‘unambiguously Christian’.  They claim to be one of the last institutions left to be “founded on Christian principles (and not begin) a relentless retreat from their spiritual heritage.”

I’m obviously as annoyed as anybody else by these crazies who throw their values in your face whenever they get a chance.  However, my vexation peaks whenever I come across these zealots and their real life actions and habits reflect anything but their religious ideals.  And when it comes to Baylor athletics, you’ll find yourself quite the paradigm of that hypocrisy…

Take, for example, the 2003 murder scandal on their basketball team, which is second only to Sandusky as the most horrific athletic scandal in the history of the NCAA.  In short, one of their players murdered a fellow teammate.  Their scumbag coach was worried about much of his blatant cheating and lack of institutional control being uncovered, so he trained his players to fabricate a story on how the victim was paying for school through drug dealing.  It was not a good look.

They eventually recovered from that scandal thanks to star players like LaceDarius Dunn, who beat the shit out of his girlfriend and broke her jaw.

Most recently, we learned about Sam Ukwuachu, the backup defensive end that Baylor sheltered and gave an education to despite the fact that he raped another student.  It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill college rape accusation, either.  He was tried and convicted, and Texas Monthly provided the disturbing details of how he violently took the victim’s virginity against her will.  Baylor also oversaw these criminal actions and gave Ukwuachu help brushing it under the rug despite earlier warnings about his nut job tendencies from his previous coaches at Boise State.  Even by my typically mild standards for athletic programs and player behavior, that is really fucked up.

Needless to say, despite reminding the media how Christian he is, I don’t foresee RG3 taking the time to go back and reread his lord’s teachings on humility.  Have fun in Houston homie!

A lot of football fans may have forgotten Joey Porter’s name until Saturday night, but his knucklehead behavior has been a part of AFC North lore for over a decade.  A few of my favorite highlights include…

• The time in 2000 when he kept trying to paralyze Browns punter Chris Gardocki
• A 2003 incident when he randomly got shot in the ass while standing around as an ‘innocent bystander’ at a bar on the wrong side of town
• His ejection during warmups of a 2004 matchup at Cleveland when he brawled with Browns RB William Green (starting James Harrison’s career)…

His greatest knucklehead moment, however, came in 2006 when, despite having just signed with Miami, his years of pent-up Bengals hatred boiled over at a casino in Las Vegas…

Joey Porter may be too old for fistfights by this point, but he proved he can still get under his rivals’ skins on Saturday night when he goaded Pacman Jones into the dumbest penalty in the history of the NFL playoffs…

Absolutely ridiculous…  Joey Porter knew exactly what he was doing there and the Bengals are fucking morons for taking that bait, especially when you consider all the pregame warnings the league gave out.  Bullshit call or not, it doesn’t change the fact that all you have to do is keep your mouth shut and cover somebody one more time to move on to New England.

The Burfict penalty was also unacceptable.  It’s a textbook example of the CTE-inducing hit that the NFL has been persistently reiterating can no longer be a part of the game.  It was pretty much the only way a linebacker could fuck up the game in that situation, and somehow Burfict managed to pull it off.

This brings us to Marvin Lewis…  If the Bengals were an organization that truly cared about winning, they would’ve sacked this dude by now.  Even when he’s gifted the opportunity to swap out a choke artist quarterback for Mr. Clutch himself (and boy was McCarron clutch), he still loses playoff games because his players do not have the mental tenacity to come through in the big moment.

Some people say that players like Burfict and Jones would be out of control no matter who was coaching them and that you can’t lay blame on Lewis’s shoulders, but that’s ridiculous.  We’ve been hearing about undisciplined Bengals players for over a decade now because of a culture that Lewis has tolerated for far too long.  Remember in 2006 when they racked up twelve arrests on the year?  Remember when they had both Chad Johnson and Terrell Owens on the same team?  Remember when Carson Palmer would’ve rather retired than deal with the mess up there for another season?

Paul Brown would’ve sacked this bum a long time ago because he was a winner.  His son, on the other hand, doesn’t give a shit.  He is never going to fire a coach that can consistently reach the baseline level of mediocrity required to pique a profitable amount of fan interest, so Marvin Lewis is safe for as long as it takes Bengals fans to wise up.  Sucks for them…

Kansas football coach Charlie Weis reacts while answering a question during a news conference in Lawrence, Kan., Friday, Dec. 9, 2011. Weis says that Kansas offered him an opportunity too good to pass up: The chance to rebuild a long-suffering program and mend his own tarnished reputation.(AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

I admit that ever since I saw those sorry scumbags in Veterans Stadium cheer on Michael Irvin’s stretcher, the Eagles have usually been awesome and always terrified me more than any other team.  That is, until they hired Chip Kelly…

We all saw the train wreck that was Steve Spurrier in Washington, and it was pretty obvious this was gonna fare worse.  Kelly had an even zanier version of cartoon football that he used against historically pathetic defenses in the Pac-12, and still found a way to choke every year.

Needless to say, it’s been pretty fucking dope watching this catastrophe in Philly hit its peak this year.  Not only did he ruin the team, he absolutely shattered the collective soul of the Eagles fanbase.  Those same assholes that built such a badass reputation with their ‘Brotherly Love’ were reduced to a pathetic state of denial last spring as they tried to cope with all of the asinine moves their ‘mad genius’ was making.

While I thought it was clear by now that Kelly doesn’t belong in the league, for some reason I hear rumblings that he might actually make a good fit in San Francisco as long as he’s not the GM…  Because Colin Kaepernick is a mobile QB?  Seriously?  Get the fuck outta here….

He is garbage.  Always has been, always will be.  In fact, the more you think about his run in Philly, it’s interesting to note how eerily similar it was to Charlie Weis’s at Notre Dame.  They both…

• Came into prominence with an insufferable level of arrogance over their supposed ‘decided schematic advantages’
• Won in their first years with teams that their predecessors built
• Got fired after losing with ridiculously easy schedules
• Disgusted viewers with their morbid levels of obesity

If Chip does end up going to San Francisco, I can easily envision a short tenure there where he takes arguably the worst team in the league and decimates it into one of the worst teams in NFL history.  Which, ironically enough, would seem exactly like what Charlie Weis just did at Kansas…

If you were living under a rock last year when the story about Greg Hardy beating his ex-girlfriend was all over the news, you were in luck this past November when Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz released a 4,000 word exposé about how, well, Greg Hardy beat up his ex-girlfriend last year.  There was absolutely nothing new in the story, but we got to see pictures!

The approved Kinja commenters were undoubtedly thrilled to rediscover today that Adrian Peterson hit his kid last year.  The rest of us have been over it for well past a year now.

This is starting to get tiresome…  How many decades do we have to go through this endless debate?  Some athletes are bad people.  Some people want us to feel bad about watching athletes perform.  Those same people then consume pro sports anyway.  And then nothing changes, because why should it?

The worst part about this whole AP story is that the Vikings made him stay with the team this year…  Whipping a kid is a petty crime compared to a ton of other shit NFL players have done, yet the Vikings still sat him out the whole season.  All because some shitty Radisson hotel chain tried to grandstand and get their name out there by pretending to care about the morals of the freaking NFL…  That’s fucking ridiculous.

It’s cool that the Vikings are in the playoffs and all, but you’ve got to feel for AP knowing he just spent one of his last prime years slaving away for those pussies in the upper midwest.  If he had gotten his wish and come down to Dallas, we’d be on our way to a fucking Super Bowl right now.

He’d also be playing for a fanbase that actually wanted and deserved him.  If AP was a Cowboy last year and some hotel tried to call for his suspension, you can bet your ass we’d set up a boycott.  If for some reason our governor said he wanted AP gone, we’d impeach that lying sack of shit.

Minnesota priorities:

1. Moralistic grandstanding
2. Winning

Texas priorities:

1. Winning
2. Winning
3. Winning