March is one of the best and worst months of the year. Best because F1 is back but also it's March Madness. Worst because it is March Madness and my grades are going to suffer. I read an article by Ryan Bennion (someone I follow on Twitter) and he explained why he was not filling out his bracket even though he loves sports. While it was well written (read here) I have to disagree. Brackets are what makes March Madness so great. The trick is to not get too attached to your bracket. It may be the Suns and Lions fan inside that allows me to deal with losing and disappointment after high expectations. Brackets are really a social endeavor and it's fun to take some time and play against your friends. Yeah I want my bracket to be right, but I always want to enjoy the games. Of course I'll be cheering for cinderella teams and upsets all the way, as a matter of fact I've already bought an SFA shirt. It's like why I played fantasy football, it's part social and part engaging. I found that by keeping up with my fantasy team I could better follow the NFL and the same holds true for this bracket. I make a bracket and it forces me to pay close attention to all the games. There's a good chance my bracket is just plain wrong, and that's ok because I'll still be enjoying all the games no matter what.
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Thursday was a crazy day in the NBA. It was the trade deadline. Usually only one or two trades are made on that day, but this year was nuts. Twenty minutes before the deadline the trades exploded and it was nearly impossible to keep up with what was unfolding. After the dust settled 39 NBA players had been traded away including my favorite Goran Dragic (check out my thank you/goodbye letter to him here). I was mad. Mad at Dragic and mad at the Suns. I had to stop and ask myself why this made me so upset. This is professional sports and they are businesses. I still don't get the logic, but I'm trusting the team's management understands what they're doing.
I also have a lot going on in my personal life between mission preparation, classes, homework, friends, and of course girls. Now how do these relate? Well all of these trades have proved an important point to me. Let's look at it this way; we are all like an NBA team. We all have the goal to be successful, there are a million different parts to work out, things get crazy, and we have to compete with others. In each of our teams we try to put the best people in our lives to make us happy. Sometimes it works out great and other times we can't seem to have any friends or relationships. It's all about who we let in our lives. There are times that we may think this person is "the one" or going to be a friend forever but turns into a Greg Oden and just leaves you mad and confused. Other times we meet people and don't expect them to affect our lives but they become our closest friends, just like when Steve Nash left Dallas to come to Phoenix; it's the best fit even when it didn't look like it. We may get mad when we lose people and have a hard time getting over it (think LeBron jersey burnings when he left Cleveland) but we have to realize that most of the time it's for the best if someone leaves your life. Don't get hung up on finding the "Superstar" for your team, but instead focus on surround yourself with those that allow you to be yourself and be happy even if that means cutting people off and letting new people in. That is where you will find success. Goran Dragic. A name that 3 years ago I wouldn't even be able to recognize. Now that is the name I speak with plenty of praise and admiration. Then the rumors started. At first I laughed and didn't think anything of them. But these past few days have blown Twitter and other news places up and it seems real that Goran will be leaving the Suns. There was one report in particular that stated he did not agree with management and felt it was better to leave Phoenix. This is terrible news for fans because he was a huge factor in making the team what it was today.
I have to admit something. I had given up on the NBA. Steve Nash (the only player that I really cared about) was on the decline and I got sick of LeBron. There was a span of two years where I only watched the Finals. Then something changed. I decided to give the NBA and more specifically the Suns a second chance. I was reading all the pre-season stuff and they all had the Suns ranked pretty low. Nothing new, and being a Lions fan, I embraced it. Then as the season went on, the Suns got hot. They were even on the brink of reaching the 8th seed for the playoffs. They didn't make the playoffs, but they made a statement. They proved the league wrong and showed them the potential they had. And all along that journey, I was captivated by the play of one guy; Goran Dragic. I had never head of him before but I did my research. He was the guy who helped transition from the Steve Nash era to now. He was dynamic but quiet, qualities I admired. Dragic became my new favorite player (Steve Nash, Jason Kapono, and Kyle Korver, I still love yall, but Goran was my new main man). I studied his highlights and started to model my game after him. I always made sure he was on my 2K team. This past November, after 9 months of waiting, I finally got to see the Suns and Goran Dragic. I was so excited. I went down to a section of seats just to get a look at Goran doing a pre-game interview. Ask my friends because I may or may not have squealed "That's Goran Dragic!!!" They ended up losing to the Jazz, but I didn't care, because I had gotten to watch the Suns play. This season for them has been harder than last season, but I've still defended them and stood cheering for them (through Twitter of course). That's why this trade is tough. While everyone is still trying to sort out just what happened, one thing is clear; the Suns are going to be a different team. I'm still hoping for a playoff spot, but at this point the team chemistry might not be good enough. These trades have left me a little speechless. I still don't understand the logic behind it, but I hope someone does. I have a feeling we'll have to wait until next season though. Goran, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being the great player you are. Thank you for being humble. Thank you for fighting with this team, and thank you for your patience. Good luck in Miami. Last week I decided to do "Marshawn Monday" where I could only communicate in Marshawn Lynch quotes. It didn't go as well as planned. I realized that I don't really talk to anybody for the first 17 hours of the day and by that point I did try to have normal conversations with people. And then on Twitter, a lot of people didn't get the tweets so it was awkward for me and very confusing to those who read them. It was an interesting idea, and I failed at it. I guess I'm not just bout that action boss.
The biggest thing this NFL postseason was Marshawn Lynch and his interview answers. Reporters hated him but the internet has loved every answer (even if they were all the same). I watched a video where a guy used only Marshawn Lynch interview answers as pick-up lines. It was hilarious and surprisingly he got some phone numbers. I have decided to take that to another level. Tomorrow I am only going to tweet, text, and talk in Marshawn Lynch interview quotes. I will write up a report after on Tuesday. I can already tell this is going to be a lot of fun. The only exception I might have to make is in mission prep if we have to teach in companionships but other than that I'm gonna be Beast Mode. Who knows, maybe I take Marshawn Monday into Beast Mode week.
I'm just about that action boss. On January 12 I made an announcement. That announcement was that I was after 3 seasons (mainly as a free agent) I was retiring from dating. Now that it has been 2 weeks, I feel I should issue a full and official statement.
The decision to retire was a tough one. I mean no one just wants to give up and quit something, but with a record like mine, I probably should have done it a while ago. I just have not had any luck with girls. They always seem to cause problems and all my relationships have not ended well. So while I blamed the girls and them being psycho, there is still some blame on me. Retirement will allow me to become a better person and hopefully after my mission things can go better than they have for the past 3 years. In these 2 weeks I have not really missed being in the dating scene. I still have friends and have fun, but without the worry of dating or flirting or feelings. I look forward to retirement for at least the next 2 years and also look forward to returning at some point in the future. So yesterday during church I had an idea. I don't know exactly where it came from, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. The basis for this analogy is the late 1980's Detroit Pistons Bad Boys. The Bad Boy Pistons were known for being incredibly tough down low and not allowing and easy layups. They had a saying "Tap Tap" and it was the end for the other team. They put up huge fights against anyone brave enough to venture down in the low post.
Ok what does this have to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Well we all need to adopt a sort of "Tap Tap" attitude in our fight against satan. Like it or not, satan comes at us hard and once he gets it he can become pretty relentless. We can not passively defend ourselves against him. If we stand idly by, satan can come at us any way he pleases. On the other hand if we hard foul any temptation and put up a huge fight, satan can't score and we can walk away with wins. Yes every once in a while satan will get us, but that's what weekly repentance during the sacrament is for. We need satan to fear us. This can not happen over night. It is a diligent and at sometimes tiring effort if we want to be successful. Reading from the Book of Mormon and improving our relationship with God through prayer allows us to stay tough. I'm not going to lie, it feels great to send satan to the floor when he tries to get to me. The first victory is the hardest, but after that you can have the confidence to keep up the fight and keep getting those wins. To quote Stan Van Gundy "Build A Wall" 2008. That's the year I became a Lions fan. That's also the year they went 0-16. Coincidence? Oh yes, huge. That's the reason I fell in love with them. They did something no other team had done. I have to admit, I'm weird when it comes to picking teams to root for. For most of my life I was not exposed to sports. Neither of my parents had any allegiance to a sports team and I never was exposed to sports. Then in middle school, in order to keep up with the guys in my PE class, I watched SportsCenter every morning to keep up and through that learned all about sports. With that I established a good base of all sports, but still couldn't really pick a team to root for. Yeah the Patriots had me cheering for them when they went 16-0 but after that Super Bowl loss I cried and kind of swore them off.
Then I met Dennis who was a big everything Michigan sports fan. He introduced me to the Lions and then they kept losing. See I have this thing where when I pick favorite players and teams I have some interesting criteria: They can't be that good, for at least 50% of the time considered underdogs, and have good loyal fans. The Lions fit all of that (and so did the Suns, Steve Nash, and the Pistons, but those are for other posts) and at that point became a Lions fan and have never looked back. I was for the most part a casual one cheering when I heard about wins and shrugging off losses. Those seasons taught me about dealing with big loss and enjoying even the small victories. I thought I could handle any season the Lions would have, but this season was different. I became more fully invested than I ever had before and was paying more attention to the team. I realized how much potential the team had and like everyone else saw this team doing something special. Making the playoffs on its own was impressive but we all knew that the team was capable of making a playoff run. The game started off amazing with a 14 point lead and then things went downhill from there. Before halftime I had the feeling that this was going to get a lot closer than any Lions fan would have liked. In fact I had a sense of Deja Vu. I remember having a dream a year ago of me sitting on the couch on twitter watching the game fall apart. And then it happened. I'm not going to being to rant about "The Call" that really turned the game around. It was heartbreaking to watch my Lions team fall apart at the end. The worst was the post game conference and the mighty Suh was reduced to tears when talking about the game. That is rough. This was my first real hardcore following of the Lions and by far it won't be the last, but this is a new experience having some of these emotions of anger and disappointment. It's hard especially when you know they should be playing at least one more game. You never want your team to go out like that. But there's always next season. Detroit forever. Lions forever. There has been a lot of talk recently about Ndamukong Suh and his "dirty" style of play. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a video for reference.
Now personally I don't really care about his style of play. Honestly I admire it (to a degree) because he does what he's supposed to do; instill fear in his opponents. He plays tough. I don't consider it dirty, and if you look at those "dirty" plays, you can argue that they come about accidentally and just in the heat of the moment. Suh gets results and is considered to be one if not the best defensive tackle in the league, so excuse him if he plays tough. I watched an interesting segment on him that really helped me understand Suh and that he's not a horrible person as most people think. If you have the time watch it here. I will continue to defend Suh and any Lions player. This brings us to other dirty teams and players in other sports. My personal favorite is the 1980's Bad Boy Pistons. If you get the chance check out he 30 for 30: Bad Boys, because it's really good. I have a connection with them because that's how I play. When I played city league I was down low. I'm not a very talented player and don't have a lot of offensive skills, and because of that I had to learn to use my body to my advantage on defense. So I started transforming myself into a defensive player with a no easy shot mentality. Usually the guys I would defend would be either my height or taller so I learned to use my elbows and get away with it. I would push, shove, elbow, and foul and soon enough I figured out I could get away with it. So that was my style of play. I never went too far and never injured or hard fouled anyone, but I always made sure my presence was felt. Before my last season started I was introduced to the 30 for 30: Bad Boys and I immediately came to admire the team and more specifically Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. They were the anchors of the team and played very hard. Now some people called it dirty, but I call it tough. They had a saying "Tap-Tap" and that meant it was over for the other team. Watch here. My friend and I started to learn from them and on the court we were unstoppable. There were plenty of memorable moments and the other team never liked it. And the best part was that when they reacted, they got the fouls. There have been plenty of other notoriously dirty teams and players and I think it's good. It helps prevent the pacification of sports. It allows them to be the tough players they're supposed to be. Usually they don't result in gruesome injuries, in fact most of the worst injuries in sports were freak accidents. It's just always nice to see a player be tougher than everyone else and play a little dirty. As long as there are rough players, they'll have my support. 2014 was the first year I did fantasy football. Well I technically did it last year too, but this was the first year that I actually cared about it. I had decided over the summer that I really wanted to do it because I figured it give me something to do in my free time at school (this was when I expected to have little to no friends and a ton of free time). On the BYU Freshman Facebook page among the tons of annoying posts someone posted about doing a league and 11 of us commented to join. He got it all setup and I was in a 12 team league with no idea what I was doing. I didn't know any of the guys except for one; Chandler. He's like an NFL scout/draft pro on twitter and I had him picked to win the whole thing.
Draft day came and I had done some research but still had no idea what to do for a draft strategy. I had my brother on the phone for help. Here's how the draft went: Round: 1. Calvin Johnson (WR) 2. AJ Green (WR) 3. Matthew Stafford (QB) 4. Ryan Matthews (RB) 5. Jordan Cameron (TE) 6. Joique Bell (RB) 7. T.Y. Hilton (WR) 8. Pierre Thomas (RB) 9. Tony Romo (QB) 10. Panthers (D/ST) 11. Mike Evans (WR) 12. Justin Tucker (K) 13. Tavon Austin (WR) 14. Martellus Bennett (TE) 15. Lance Dunbar (RB) 16. Mike Tolbert (RB) I had no idea what to do think of this team, but now after the season is over, it was a really solid team that if I kept the majority, would have taken me to the championship. I accidentally took AJ Green in the second round because of AutoPick but it ended up helping me for quite a number of weeks. One kid dropped out so it ended being an 11 person league and that meant there would be a bye week for each person. I ended up with the bye week for the first game. Which proved annoying because I had the best game of anyone all season with 122 points (Stafford and Johnson both had huge games I got to watch it because it was Monday Night Football). The next 4 weeks were a disaster. I couldn't win. I would spend at least 2 hours a week doing research and tinkering with my lineup but it wouldn't work. Then something happened I won. Then won again. And again. And two more times. I was on a roll with big wins. I made a lot of acquisitions (84 by the end of the playoffs). I was feeling good. I credit most of it to setting my lineup in Sunday school, but mainly it was because of the breakout seasons by Odell Beckham Jr. It was surprising because of Johnson and Green having injuries but I made the weekly pickups to get me through the wins. I then lost again but it was ok because I was looking to have my season turn around and make the playoffs. Here is the team that I ended with. I never had the good team or lineup, but somehow I made it. QB: Matthew Stafford RB: CJ Anderson RB: Isaiah Crowell WR: Calvin Johnson WR: Odell Beckham Jr. TE: Owen Daniels FLEX: A.J. Green D/ST: Packers K: Shaun Suisham Bench: T.Y. Hilton Mike Evans Joseph Randle Matt Bryant Down the stretch I picked up C.J. Anderson and he single handedly carried my team at the end of the season right to the playoffs. Overall it was a great season and it gave me something to do each week and I had fun. I will have to admit I stressed about it more than I should have, but I'd do it again. I finished 3rd in the regular season and 3rd in the playoffs. I was the Cinderella team and I thought I was going to the championship game but because of stat corrections I lost by 2 points. But I can accept 3rd. I didn't expect to get anywhere and if it were the olympics I'd get a medal. The Inglorious Staffords will return, and next time will be in the championship game. |
Austin "Apex" SteeleSports. Cars. Sports cars. Archives
January 2018
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