There's only one thing to do when you're on the receiving end of an above type of annihilation. You stumble off meekly into the night while saying nothing.
Maybe DeAngelo Hall could use a lesson from Michael Spinks in the aftermath of Nuk Hopkins showing him up in a most public and embarrassing way.
Later, the cameras caught Hopkins and Hall going one-on-one in a football setting. Hall slipped while backpedaling and didn’t get up. Hopkins turned, caught the pass and turned a routine play into a celebratory moment when he noticed Hall was still on the ground.
Hall was injured on the play and didn’t return to action. Hopkins — and several nearby Texans teammates — let Hall hear about it, yelling things about broken ankles and shattered pride and generally touching on what a nice gentleman Hall was.
The incidents making the cut of a national TV series left Hall with a bruised ego in addition to the strained groin muscle he apparently suffered on the play.
Thursday morning, Hall tweeted: “When the highlight of your career is catching a 10 yd pass on a DB while he slips and you feel like you did something. #SadDayInFootball.”
Hopkins jabbed back via his Twitter account 25 minutes later: “Hope treatment going well.”
The referee should stop this fight.
A few Friday links:
Well this is a headline that will help my stock in Lake Life:
Goodness. Story here.
Two Cape Cod beaches closed early on Wednesday when visitors spotted a great white shark in the water biting a seal and spitting it back out onto the beach, officials said.
Nauset Light Beach and Coast Guard Beach, just over a mile away from one another, each closed at about 4 p.m. Wednesday and remained closed through 5:15 p.m., when its lifeguards are off-duty for the night, said Leslie Reynolds, chief ranger at Cape Cod National Seashore.
Beachgoers at Nauset Light saw a shark bite into a seal, resulting in a pool of blood. Minutes later, the seal was thrown out of the water onto the beach, where it died. Though no sharks were sighted at Coast Guard beach, lifeguards closed the waters because of its proximity to Nauset Light.
-- Interesting stuff here in the Dallas Morning News: Participation is declining in Texas high school football.
Texas has led the nation in participation for over two decades. Notwithstanding, numbers in the state’s showcase sport, football, are declining. While Texas still leads the nation in high school football players (163,998), the sport has seen a 2.78 percent drop from its peak in 2010 (168,680) despite having one of the fastest-growing populations in the nation. Nationally, football participation has dropped, but at a lesser rate (2.22 percent decline).
“It does surprise me that Texas has a declining participation in football,” Highland Park head football coach Randy Allen said. “Our participation has been outstanding and continues to be consistent.”
Cedar Hill head football coach Joey McGuire says that his team’s “numbers are up and have been for the last 5 years.”
Allen isn’t sure what is propelling the decrease.
“We had an expert from The Brain Health Center in Dallas talk to our parents last year,” Allen said. “The conclusion of this scientist was that the benefits of playing football far outweighed the risk.”
Here are the full state-by-state numbers:
-- An update from Miami Hurricanes camp.
The breakout player of the scrimmage was freshman nose tackle Kendrick Norton, who had at least one sack-forced fumble — one teammate said Norton had three sacks – working with the second and third units. “Really smart play. Tracked the ball from behind and ripped it out,” Golden said of his sack-forced fumble. “Obviously he’s well-coached to do that as young as he is, and the wherewithal to do that in the first scrimmage is a good sign for him.” Since arriving in June, D’Onofrio said, he’s dropped 15 pounds to get to his goal weight (listed at 6-3, 315, Norton said last week he came in at 334 and is currently 322). “He’s very strong. It’s not too big for him right now.” “He’s a beast,” linebacker Jermaine Gracesaid. “I love him at the nose.”
-- Nice profile of Bret Bielema by Matt Hayes of The Sporting News.
When Bielema arrived, players were flunking out, missing class and changing majors to find the easiest roads to staying eligible. There was a saying within the football team: “Ds get degrees.”
“I worked in the academic advisement office when I first got here, and what I saw, frankly, was shocking,” says Aaron Henry, a former All-Big Ten defensive back at Wisconsin under Bielema and current Arkansas graduate assistant coach. “Our academic report was horrendous. We had a bunch of guys with sub-par GPAs, guys who wouldn’t go to tutoring appointments, who wouldn’t even push a button to log in to the system. They couldn’t even do that.”
The response from Bielema was simple: you don’t go to class, you don’t play. You miss tutoring appointments, you don’t play — and you pay back the cost of the appointment.
When Bielema arrived at Arkansas, 18 players had sub-2.0 GPAs. At the end of the final session this summer, the team GPA for that semester was just under 3.0. Every single player — all 105 scholarship and walkon players — now has at least a 2.0 GPA.
In his seven seasons at Wisconsin, one of the nation’s elite academic schools and a football program known for its high academic standards (see: Gary Andersen recently leaving for Oregon State because of the strict standards for recruits), Bielema says he never had a season when every player was above 2.0.
“It’s cool to get good grades now,” he says.
-- Interesting stuff here from a band called Mail the Horse:
LW
