Showing posts with label University of Minnesota. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of Minnesota. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The Minnesota Misery

Bill Simmons loves to talk about tortured fan bases and franchises. It's actually really interesting to fully immerse yourself in the history of other cities and franchises. You begin to understand how lucky you are if you happened to have been a fan of a championship team. I consider myself lucky to be a fan of two champions: the 2000 Super Bowl Champion Rams (the most fun I've ever had watching a team and probably one of the most fun teams to watch ever) and the 2006 World Series Champion Cardinals (my favorite team on top of the world). Seeing a team raise its sports' respective trophy above their head in absurd jubilation is one of the best feelings a sports fan can ever have. It is the ultimate prize in fandom.

But there are some who have never felt the glory, or at least haven't for a generation (or two or three). There's Buffalo (1965) and Cleveland (1964) and Seattle (never). That's right, Buffalo's two teams haven't won a championship since the Bills won one before the Super Bowl existed, Cleveland's three teams have had a similar streak of futility, and Seattle has lost a franchise to a prairie town and never won any kind of professional championship. Those are definitely the three cities (if we are talking about sports cities, which we are) that currently should top the tortured list.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Killer Kool-Aid?

Before the beginning of this Cardinals' season, a lot of fans were in a bit of a panic mode. Adam Wainwright went down for the season, we signed an aging veteran to a one year deal to attempt to shore up our outfield, and the Reds just seemed like some sort of Red Machine Redux in the eyes of the media and the citizens of Cincinnati. Honestly, I can say I wasn't overly worried about them competing. The baseball season is 162 games long. Anything can, and will, happen in that time span. I can't say I picked the Cardinals to win the Central but I thought they would be competitive as ever. My initial prediction was a close three-team race between the Brewers, Cardinals, and Reds, with the Brewers winning at the end of the season. The main point is, sometime between when I knew enough about sports to make semi-educated predictions and becoming an "adult" (graduating college) I stopped guzzling my teams' Kool-Aid with reckless abandon.