Saturday, March 28, 2015

Cutch's Cut

I knew the day was coming; but for real I was hoping it wouldn't come for a couple more years or so. I knew it was coming because he said it was coming, hinting in the past that he wasn't going to keep his dreads forever. But even the advance warning wasn't enough to lessen the disappointment I had when I found out the day indeed has come. Watching baseball won't be as much fun for me in 2015, and my guess is that never again will it be as enjoyable as it has been watching telecasts of Pittsburgh Pirates games these last 6 years.

It is with deep sadness and regret that I have to announce that the house has lost one of its most prestigious residents, as earlier this week - Wednesday, March 25, to be exact - Pirates CF Andrew McCutchen cut off the dreads he had been growing for the last 8 years and that he has had for every game in the first 6 seasons of his sensational MLB career. With the college basketball season reaching its climax, I have been paying little attention to baseball this month. But there it was, hitting me like a ton of bricks and impossible to ignore, in the bottom right corner of the last page of Thursday's Chicago Tribune sports section -  literally the very last thing in the section - a paragraph reporting that Cutch's dreads were gone and would be auctioned off for charity.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

2014 College Football All-America with dreads

You may argue I did so incomplete a job of covering the 2014 season that I'm not qualified to pick the season's best players with dreads. And you would be correct. But I'm not going to let a minor detail like that stop me. So here we go with my 7th annual All-America with dreads team. The 2014 team includes many of the 133 players with dreads who earned all-conference honors in their respective leagues. That total of 133 is 16 less than last season's 149; but the number of 1st team honorees remained the same - 50 - and the number making the Associated Press' (AP) All-America teams (FBS and FCS) actually increased from 10 to 16.

I was hoping to be able to include a photo of Wisconsin RB Melvin Gordon holding the Heisman Trophy at the beginning of this post. But despite having one of the best seasons a running back has ever had, he finished 2nd in the voting for the Heisman; so you'll have to settle for a pre-game photo (above) of him from the Badgers' Week 4 game against Bowling Green instead.