This Chicken Tender Bracket Shows Truly Terrible Taste

It’s March, and that means brackets of things are all the rage. This means someone made a bracket ranking all the chicken tenders of the fast food world.

Chicken strips are my favorite food, because even though I am 24, my dietary habits would resemble what they did at age 12 if I didn’t think I would be dead by 34 as a result. So I eat vegetables now and as often as I can, but I also eat chicken tenders regularly. I know that will eventually have to change as age and my metabolism really catch up, but for now I eat a lot of fried chicken and have very strong opinions about my experience doing so.

And I don’t know who put this bracket together, but they deserve to be smacked upside the head with a chicken strip for the crap job they did.

A Tale of Two Programs or, Good Germans at State College

There were two football games last weekend involving two programs who are going through two scandals of two different kinds, in two different states, and in two different conferences.

The first is Penn State, which has been in an ongoing controversy about Joe Paterno and the way the coach who won 409 football games for the Nittany Lions handled the fact that his longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was molesting children on the Penn State campus, starting perhaps as early as 1976.

For some incredibly tone deaf and stupid reason, Penn State chose to honor the late Paterno at Saturday’s game against Temple. The presumed goal of this tribute was to remind everyone of the good things Joe Paterno did, like donating to the school library, making sure his athletes graduated and got degrees, and of course, the winning of all those football games.

At What Cost, Victory?

By now the story of the fall of Joe Paterno is one familiar to both college football fans and casual observers of the sport. Paterno was the popular and successful head coach of Penn State’s football team, renowned both for his on-field success and his unusually high graduation rates for players. He also is in no small part responsible for God-knows how many instances of child abuse, if not directly than through a crime of omission.

New court documents were unsealed yesterday that showed, among other things, that Joe Paterno may have known about Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children as early as 1976, when a boy attending a football camp at Penn State told Paterno that Sandusky had assaulted him in the shower. Paterno allegedly brushed him off, telling him he “had a football season to worry about.”

That was the first in what appears to have been a long string of instances where Joe Paterno prioritized winning football games over the safety and security of children on the Penn State campus, attending football camps to try and better themselves and instead having their lives forever shattered by a predator who could have, and should have been stopped.

Baylor Probably Deserves the Death Penalty

Just when I thought I couldn’t be shocked anymore by scandal in college athletics, Baylor came and proved I was wrong. I believed that Penn State had been the nadir, that I would never see a scandal that heinous in my lifetime, at least not related to college football. But here we are.

Voting Is Important and You Should Do It

Today the RedEye, a paper affiliated with the Chicago Tribune, ran an opinion piece from one of their writers today titled “I’ve Never Voted, Here’s Why.” The author of the piece, Rianne Cole, is a 24-year old Chicago Transplant who has never voted, seemingly because she cannot be bothered to go to Google and punch in “Voter Registration Illinois.”

She points out that she’s hardly alone in this matter, and that nearly 55% of people age 18-24 did not vote in the 2012 Presidential election, a number that was likely even lower in the 2014 gubernatorial election that saw just 19% of registered voters turnout to the polls (which means likely single digit turnout for the 18-24 bloc).

Back in 2012, Cole points out that she was just an undergrad at Loyola, unsure about how or whether to register back home in Michigan or in here part-time home in Chicago. She didn’t want to “jump through hoops” here in Illinois and it seemed like “too much of a hassle” to register in Michigan. So she just never registered.  She also wasn’t sure where her vote would be counted (the answer, of course, is Illinois if you’re registered there, and Michigan if you’re registered there. I would hope that was straightforward, but apparently it is not).

Cotton Bowl Recap: An Alabama Ass Whuppin’ and A Season in Review

 

I’ve been sitting for a week stewing about the outcome of the Cotton Bowl (Alabama 38, Michigan State 0), which could be charitably described as an Alabama Ass Whuppin’ (to steal a phrase from the Drive-By Truckers). It’s one of those games that is better not to dwell on too much, or else you start to think that things like T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are relevant to your circumstance:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang, but a whimper

The gunpowder plot, World War 1, the H Bomb, getting curb stomped by Nick Saban. These are all basically the same thing (or at least, the temptation exists to believe that they are).

The Case for a Six Team Playoff

This is the second year of the college football playoff, and despite the incessant doomsaying during the BCS Era proclaiming how a playoff would ruin college football, it has generally been very well received in the first two years of its existence.  Unlike last year’s selections for the four spots in the playoff, there was little controversy this season about who the final four should be, with the only real debate concerning whether Michigan State should be seeded 3^rd or 4^th in the final committee rankings.

So Much Cheese So Close To Home

It’s raining in Green Bay, and I’m finding it very hard to be thankful for that, but for once I feel capable of giving thanks for the Chicago Bears. I’m cold, and wet, but the Bears are winning, and the Packers fan I am dating is being pretty nice about it, as are her mom and sister. I’m trying not to rub things in too much, because even with a lead I know that this team is capable of tripping over themselves in the most spectacular of ways, and that the phrase “it’s not over ’till it’s over” has never been better applied to a team than the Jay Cutler-led Chicago Bears.

I am at Lambeau in person to watch what I assumed would be a Bears thrashing at the hands of the Packers, and I had low expectations for a Bears success going into the game. In the land of cheese, just a few hours north of Chicago, the Bears have been perennial losers, punching bags, and all too often on the wrong end of the oldest rivalry in the NFL. But of course because this stupid team constantly finds new ways to shock and surprise me, the Bears won the game in a freezing downpour.

Hotty Toddy Gosh Almighty A Yankee in the Grove

It’s somewhere around 2:00 PM, Central Time.

My parents and I arrived on the Square, later than we’d expected because I had forgotten my wallet in the car and had to go back for it. That was fine, we still had about three and a half hours until kickoff. We stopped off in a bar to grab a drink or two and something to eat before heading into the Grove proper. This is my parent’s gameday tradition, apparently, because they like to see the other games going on that day, and are not trying to be falling down drunk walking into the game. The same cannot be said for everyone in Oxford, MS, and it becomes clear as Arkansas and Auburn enter their 4th overtime in Fayettville that some of our fellow bar patrons are not likely to make it until kickoff for the game tonight between the Ole Miss Rebels and the Texas A&M Aggies.

Make the Big Ten Great Again

The Big Ten has been roundly mocked year after year for being a soft conference, a conference of pretenders. Last year’s bowl victories and National Championship did little to dispel that notion. One great postseason, it seems, does not a conference reputation make.