There will not be any more posts on this site, all new posts will be at http://www.thepostgame.com.

The new site will have a forum, more pictures, and many ways to spend your day avoiding doing actual work.

On Tuesday the NFL released changes to streamline Draft Day procedure, thanks in part to the first round of the 2007 draft lasting a record 6 hours and 8 minutes.

Here’s an overview of the changes:

• Starting time of the draft was moved to 3 p.m. EDT from noon.
• Teams will have 10 minutes in the first round and 7 minutes in the second round to make their choices, down from 15 and 10 minutes.
• Saturday, the first day of the draft, will only feature rounds 1 and 2.
• The time between picks will stay at five minutes for rounds 3-7, which will take place on Sunday. That session will start at 10 a.m. instead of 11.
• If any team selects an athlete who didn’t have good numbers in college just because they performed well in the NFL combine, that team’s president gets punched in the nuts and the franchise loses their next three picks.

I’m glad the NFL realized that the draft was becoming tedious and made the appropriate changes, but I’d rather watch “The Hills” than sit and listen to sports commentators rehash the same information and say the same things for six hours.

Well, maybe not. I’ve actually rigged my television so that if someone changes the channel to MTV, a giant construction boot shoots out and kicks them in the face. It helps me weed out girls I bring to my apartment, but my niece wasn’t too happy. Serves her right for being in the third grade.

Ah, third grade. The best four years of my life…

Due to Sunday’s late-night conclusion of the ALCS Game 7 between the Red Sox and the Indians, newspapers everywhere had to prepare two separate versions of their story: one to print if the Indians won the game, and another to distribute if the Red Sox came out ahead. John Horton, a reporter for Cleveland’s “Plain Dealer”, released his “what-if” story, which would have been published had the Indians been able to win the game and secure a berth to the World Series.

The article was entitled “Believe it! Indians in the World Series.” Here’s an excerpt:

Racing heart?

Shortness of breath?

Feeling dizzy and discombobulated?

All symptoms of altitude sickness, a definite side-effect of the Tribe’s rise-from-the-depths-of-despair victory over the Boston Red Sox late Sunday to claim the American League pennant.

The Indians scored ? in the ? inning and scratched out a ?-? win after struggling all night.

Their prize? A lofty trip to the World Series.

The question marks obviously would have been filled in with relevant details, as Horton had only five minutes after the end of the game to add final details to the appropriate article and finish the story.

Reading this is like watching a little crippled kid climbing up the ladder of a slide in the park. You know it’s all for naught, because as soon as he gets to the top his tiny arms will give out and he’ll just fall over the side into the mulch, but you’ve got to give him points for trying.

The Cleveland Indians haven’t won a World Series since 1948, when John Wilkes Booth was president and the world was still black-and-white. If you put five Indians fans into a giant boiling pot of water with five Cubs fans¹ and stirred them around, you would probably create a black hole of ineptitude which would implode and spit out the cast of “Two and a Half Men.”

I mean, that show had Denise Richards in it (before Charlie Sheen threatened to kill her), and I still wouldn’t watch it. That’s how bad it was. And my TV standards are pretty low; sometimes I even watch FOX. Just “House” and “Family Guy”, though. Give me some credit.

¹ If you do this, please add sugar. Because of the results of this year’s ALCS, Indians fans are very bitter.

A recently-released AP poll reports that 1 in 5 sports fans do things “in an attempt to bring good luck to their favorite team or avoid jinxing them.” One disturbing anecdote given is from nurse Heather Pate of Eldridge, Alabama, who claims that she caused her beloved Auburn Tiger football team to lose by unwittingly using a pink toothbrush. Apparently this genius refuses to own anything red, the color of archrival Alabama, for fear of jinxing her Tigers. After someone brought her the pink toothbrush while she was in the hospital delivering twins, Auburn dropped two straight games. “It was all because of that red toothbrush,” she claims.

Bzzt, wrong answer. Thanks for playing.

The accounts continue,

Lisa Rawlinson, 40, a pharmaceutical sales manager from Huntington, W.Va., won’t watch crucial Cleveland Indians games on television. She didn’t watch Sunday night but her Indians somehow lost the decisive game anyway against the Red Sox, allowing Boston to creep into the World Series, which starts Wednesday.

First of all, Lisa, what’s the point of being a fan if you can’t watch your team’s big games? That’s like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and only getting a salad and some of those shitty beets. Maybe it’s not like that at all. It’s more like getting wasted playing Edward Fortyhands and taking a corn shit on your kitchen floor and making your roommate clean it up that time when I was nineteen. Or something.

Lisa is 40 years old. After consulting my abacus, I’ve concluded that means she’s older than seven, which is the maximum allowable age for believing that your actions can possibly affect the outcome of a sports contest many miles away between large men you’ve never met and who wouldn’t like you anyway.

So, dear readers, since you are reading this, you’re apparently smart enough to operate a keyboard and a mouse and code a buffer overflow that exploits a memory leak to insert a trojan and install a DDoS botnet. Well, maybe not that last part. But I am. That’s my point. That’s why I’m hanging out with Kim Kardashian in the Grand Caymans and you’re reading this from your mom’s attic.*

^ I respect her for her talents. Her two big, bouncy, beautiful talents. Also she has a sex tape.

*Hi, Ron. Put some pants on, man.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that early betting for the 2007 World Series is heavily in favor of Boston, despite Colorado’s ridiculous red-hot streak and the Sox’s history of choking in the Series.

Las Vegas oddsmakers put the Red Sox at minus-$2, meaning every $2 bet will win $1 if Boston wins. Colorado is plus $1.70, meaning every $1 wins $1.70 if the Rockies take the series.

These numbers prove where the real money is made in this series: being a bookmaker. If my math is correct, and it always is because I invented math, the bookies are hoping for $1.80 of Boston bets for each $1.00 of Colorado bets. I’ll explain how it works. Let’s assume $100,000 will be bet on Colorado, which means the bookies are looking for $180,000 to be bet on the Red Sox. In this case, the total pre-Series cash inflow for the bookies would be $280,000.

If Boston won, the bookies would pay out $270,000 ($180,000 in original bets plus $1 winnings for each $2 bet) to the Red Sox bettors, leaving the oddsmakers with $10,000 profit. (The Rockies bettors would of course get nothing.) If Colorado won, the bookies would pay out $270,000 to the Rockies bettors ($100,000 in original bets plus $1.70 winnings for each $1 bet), leaving the bookies, once again, with a profit of $10,000.

That’s a little math lesson for the kiddies and Pete Rose: the bookies always win. That’s why they’re always the ones breaking peoples kneecaps and cutting off fingers. Well, I do that too, but for entirely unrelated reasons.

The Colts breezed by the Jacksonville Jaguars 29-7 Monday night in a showdown of the AFC South’s two best teams, further separating Indianapolis from the rest of the non-Patriots league and keeping their perfect season intact. The Colts are now 6-0; Jacksonville dropped to 4-2 with the loss.

Last year, the Jaguars handed the eventual Super Bowl champions an embarrasing 44-17 loss in a game which the Colts had obviously not forgotten. Joseph Addai and Kenton Keith combined for 141 yards rushing, and Peyton added a rushing touchdown of his own, as Indy improved to 3-0 in the division and continued to build hype for their showdown with Tom Brady and his also-undefeated New England Patriots on November 4th.

Jacksonville’s starting quarterback David Garrard was knocked out of the game in the second quarter with a sprained left ankle and will miss at least a few weeks. Following this year’s preseason, coach Jack Del Rio surprisingly named Garrard the starter over Byron Leftwich, and Leftwich was released just days before the season began. Byron was picked up by the Atlanta Falcons and named their third-string quarterback, then second-string, then first-string; he was injured Sunday in his first start with Atlanta, a game the Falcons lost.

Quinn Gray came in to replace the injured Garrard for Jacksonville, and promptly went 9-24 with no touchdowns and two interceptions.

I think it’s high time the NFL did something about the quarterback situation. Defensive players are getting bigger and stronger, and quarterbacks can’t keep up, physically. They are getting injured at an alarming rate this year, a trend that shows no signs of reversing. At least two quarterbacks that weren’t even playing at the beginning of the season, Tim Rattay and Vinnie Testaverde, are now starters.

Watching an NFL game now is like scattering some Pringles chips on your floor and letting eleven preschoolers run around the room. (In this metaphor, the Pringles chips are the quarterback, the preschoolers are the defensive unit, and the creepy drunk babysitter passed out on the couch is David Hasselhoff.)

Cleveland Indians pitcher Paul Byrd has acknowledged that he purchased up to $25,000 worth of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) from 2002-05, but insists that he ingested the substance under doctor’s orders for a pituitary gland condition, and that he has done nothing wrong.

Just hours before game 7 of the ACLS, which the Indians subsequently lost, Byrd stated,

“I have nothing to hide,” Byrd said about two hours before his team’s biggest game against the Boston Red Sox. “Everything has been done out in the open. I have a reputation. I speak to kids, I speak to churches. I do not want the fans of Cleveland or honest, caring people to think that I cheated.

“Because I didn’t.”

According to the Associated Press article, Byrd is “known for his old-school windup and savvy on the mound,” and he “relies on location and off-speed pitches to get outs.”

If I were Paul Byrd, I would be embarrassed right now. This guy is just over six feet tall, he weighs 190 pounds, and his fastball rarely gets above 90 miles-per-hour. If you’re going to take performance-enhancing drugs, don’t you think they should, um, enhance your performance? He’s 36 years old, so maybe he’s got a disease that makes him age super-quickly, which requires him to take HGH so he doesn’t look like Ted Kennedy.

Because, as my uncle always says, “One Ted Kennedy is one Ted Kennedy too many.” For some reason my uncle usually says this right before he vomits on the recliner and passes out with his hand down his pants, but I don’t think that should affect the validity of his opinions.

Of course, I’m never sure when to trust my uncle, because he also says I have Attention Deficit oh my God I have the itchiest asshole EVER today.

In Sunday night’s game 7 of the ACLS, Boston beat the Cleveland Indians 12-2 to clinch the American League pennant and move on to a World Series matchup with the red-hot Colorado Rockies. Cleveland had led the series three games to one and looked poised to eliminate the Sox, but Boston outscored Cleveland 30-5 and never fell behind in emphatically winning the final three games.

I’m not sure how the Red Sox managed to pull this one off, but I was impressed. Or, more accurately, I would be impressed if all these donkey tranquilizers allowed me to experience emotions. I had predicted that the Indians would win the series because Boston is, well, cursed. Don’t tase me just because I was wrong. Everyone knows hindsight is 50-50.

Hopefully Boston will choke in the World Series, giving me freedom to write funny material about them on my site, which will draw readers, which will make me rich, which will allow me to retire so I never have to sit behind this bench with my gavel and decide the guilt or innocence of strangers again. Seriously, being a judge sucks. I should have listened to my mom and became a dogwalker. Picking up poop isn’t so bad.

^ Me

The Falcons’ newest starting quarterback Byron Leftwich was injured Sunday in Atlanta’s 22-16 loss to the Saints, leaving the game in the third quarter with what coach Bobby Petrino said was a high ankle sprain. Leftwich was named the starter after the Falcons struggled to just a 1-5 record under Joey Harrington. Harrington, of course, has started this entire year due to Michael Vick’s well-publicized legal troubles. He came in to the game after Leftwich’s injury on Sunday and completed 12 passes for 128 yards.

Last week, in an article on the inordinately large number of backup quarterbacks getting playing time in the NFL this year, I suggested that the Falcons were “looking past Byron Leftwich to see if Erin Andrews is available.” I’d like to withdraw that suggestion. Apparently there is a curse on quarterbacks in Atlanta, and I don’t want her breaking her jaw or shattering her femur or getting arrested for meth distribution. If that happened, who would I secretly fantasize about when I’m watching ESPN college football? Chris Berman? Don’t make me laugh. He’s way too old for me.

^ Not Chris Berman

Tony La Russa has agreed to return for his 13th year as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, despite a disastrous 78-84 2007 season following the Cardinals’ surprising World Series championship in 2006. La Russa was speculated to be a candidate to replace Joe Torre with the New York Yankees, although he had denied being interested in the position.

La Russa’s 2006 Cardinals, with 83 wins, had the worst regular season record ever by a championship team. In 2007, the Cardinals finished the season seven games behind the Chicago Cubs and were never really in the race for a postseason berth. Their payroll of over $90,000,000 is 12th in the majors, but top offensive stars such as Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds had off-years, and only two of their pitchers managed to win more than eight games. La Russa managed to start the year off with a bang, getting arrested in March for drunken-driving charge near the team’s spring training complex in Florida.

In short, Tony’s got a lot of work to do if he wants the 2008 team to climb over .500 and not be like the 2007 team, which was a fat, stinking bowl of severed buffalo wang. The 2006 team was mildly better; I’ll call it a somewhat-smelly container of almost expired Chinese noodles. Man, I should write a cookbook.