NFL Awards

The NFL season is over. The Super Bowl was great. San Francisco clearly choked and was the better team but congratulations to the Ravens and Ray Lewis. Thanks to getting back in a couple fantasy football leagues, we kept closer tabs on the league and it led to a more excitement.  The SportStew enjoyed the season and we wanted to announce our award recipients for the season. Here’s who we like...

Offensive POY: Adrian Peterson

Why? AP came back from a series knee injury to gain almost 2100 yards and come within a whisker of Eric Dickerson's rushing record. Don't forget to add in his 13 touchdowns and 40 pass receptions. He also is the only offensive weapon the Vikings have so opposing defenses could key on his.

Deffensive POY: JJ Watt

Why? Watt lead the league with 20.5 sacks and was a huge disturbance in opponents passing offense. He may have created a new defensive category, the swat. The former Wisconsin Badger is also a giant off the field, constantly giving back to his community.
 

Best Offensive Rookie: Robert Griffin, III

Why? Wow, what a rookie class. Five different players had seasons that would have won it every other season. RG3 came on top of a super close ballot. Griffin threw for 3200 yards and 20 touchdowns and added another 815 yards, with 7 touchdowns, on the ground. The deciding factor came down to interceptions, where RG3 only tossed five, while Russell Wilson had 10 and Andrew Luck threw 18. Washington's Morris and Tampa's Martin also had stellar rookie years.

Best Defensive Rookie: Luke Kuechly

Why? Kuechly led the NFL in tackles as a rookie with 164. He added a sack, two interceptions, and three fumble recoveries.

Coach of the Year: Bruce Arians

Why? The Colts improved from 2-14 a season ago to an 11-5 playoff team. Arians was 9-3 in the 12 games he was interim head coach. The Colts had many rookies contribute and under went a massive turnover from last year's roster.

Enjoy the games.

I'm A Cheater

The last few weeks have been dominated by sports scandals; Lance, Te’o, the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is time for me to come clean. I cheated also.

In the early 1990s, I was part of a powerful dynasty in co-ed softball. The team went by many names like Around the Horny, 2 Strikes Blue Balls, and Scissors and was responsible for three straight University of Northern Iowa intramural championships. I assembled this team with my buddies Woody and Smiley. No, we didn’t use PEDs. But we may have used unethical recruiting methods and if we were college coaches we definitely would be under investigation. By some miracle, no media picked up on the story. We kept it under the watchful eyes of ESPN, Fox Sports, and even The Northern Iowan.

The whole elaborate scheme started in Softball Theory. The connections we made in class and the allure of the wild keg parties featuring underage drinking gave us a huge pool of candidates to pick from. We had several college softball players, even a Division III All-American on the team.

Why am I bringing this public now after all these years? The guilt has weighed heavily on my conscience and caused many tearful, sleepless nights. Would I do it again? Hell yes. I have three UNI Intramural Champion shirts and lots of memories that I can’t fully remember. We slaughtered cocky fraternity teams. Plus, it was awesome.

Big 10 Bowl Outlook

The college football bowl season begins tonight if you're a Big 10 fan with Minnesota being the first of the seven conference teams to see action. It looks like it could be a long week, although, as every Big 10 team is the underdog in their game. Here are the lines as of this afternoon...

Texas Tech -13.5 Minnesota
TCU -2.5 Michigan St
Oklahoma St -17.5 Purdue
Miss St -1.5 Northwestern

South Carolina -7 Michigan
Georgia -10.5 Nebraska
Stanford -7 Wisconsin

There are definitely an couple of blowouts there, in fact we didn't even realize that Purdue qualified for a bowl, and hopefully a couple of victories. The Badgers seem like a good upset candidate. Either way it's going to a tough road for the Big 10 in the Bowl games and it may be time to move onto the hoops season as that's looking very promising.

Sports Reality Show

Sports are the only true reality show. You never know what may happen. Will you see history? The big upset? I've been a fan long enough to know that it's not over 'til it's over. I thought I'd share my massive screwup from last night.  Forth inning, Game 5, the Nationals are up 6-1. A boatload of new movies, to me anyway, are calling my name. I've picked up The Avengers, Dark Shadows, Prometheus, Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and Battlestar Galactica Season 1 in the last week but the playoffs have been so good that there hasn't been any movie time. I don't know why, as I know better, but I popped Prometheus in the PS3 and essential gave up on the game. Fast forward a couple hours, I find out the Cardinals pieces together a remarkable comeback to fend off elimination yet again. I didn't even receive any text message from my Cardinal fan friends or my old drinking buddies. I'm disappointed. In them, in the Nationals, and in myself. Why would you ever turn away from a playoff game when your hated rival was getting beat? You wouldn't. I'm just plain stupid. On a good note, I did miss out on the pain of having to watch the Comeback Cards do it again. And for your information, I thought the movie was over hyped. I give it a sideways thumb. It was good but not awesome. Sigh.

Saturday 6 Pack 10-13

It's been a magical week of MLB Playoff games but today is for the pigskin. Noticed there aren't as many high profile games in prime time this week. And that's a shame. Both fans and players enjoy the games under the lights but universities probably don't like the extra hours of beer consumption and tailgaters. Seven days until we make our return trip to Kinnick. Can't wait to see everybody and enjoy a Hawkeye game. But, hey, we still have this week's picks to roll out and here they are...

Michigan St  -7.5
Wisconsin  +1
Alabama  -21.5
West Virginia  -3.5
South Carolina  +3.5