GatewayRedbirds.com

longhornbaseball wrote:

cardsfansince82 wrote:Current forecast for SB shows a high chance of a wintry mix during the game.

I think the weather is going to be a huge factor in this game, which is really stupid. If it's 35 and sunny Denver blows them out, but if its 20 and snowy, Seattle has a chance.

longhornbaseball wrote:

cardsfansince82 wrote:Current forecast for SB shows a high chance of a wintry mix during the game.

I think the weather is going to be a huge factor in this game, which is really stupid. If it's 35 and sunny Denver blows them out, but if its 20 and snowy, Seattle has a chance.

But for decades, the sport's most transparent scandal has gone untold, if not unseen. Since the advent, in the 1980s, of modern narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet, and then later OxyContin, team doctors and trainers have dispensed pills in the millions to keep hurt players practicing and playing. That fact has long been an open secret among writers who cover the game, an unspoken pact between league and press to protect what's left of the sport's mythos. In the wake, however, of the concussion pandemic and the cluster of ex-player suicides, the football media has begun to stir. Articles have appeared in regional papers (the New York Daily News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune) that delve, for the first time, into opioid abuse, though only on the part of the players, not the teams that fed them the drugs. Last year, ESPN filed a report on the plight of ex-players with toxic narcotics habits, releasing the results of a survey of pain-pill abuse it had commissioned with a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The survey found that more than half the league's veterans had taken narcotics during their playing days; that almost three-quarters of that cohort had misused the drugs, taking them longer, and in greater amounts, than suggested; that the majority (63 percent) received their drugs from a nonmedical source like a trainer instead of the team doctor; and that a third were using them habitually in retirement. Given the population of 18,000 current NFL retirees, that means at least 3,000 are taking narcotics, and at least 1,500 suffer from pain-pill dependence that compounds their chronic conditions. "They addict these guys to drugs to keep a product on the field, then cut them when they're too hurt to play," says Mel Owens, a former outside linebacker with the Los Angeles Rams who's now a disability lawyer in Southern California with hundreds of ex-players as clients. "The guys file for workmen's comp, and the teams say, 'Why should we pay you? You're nothing but lowlife addicts!' It's the next big front in our battle with the league: a class-action suit for drug malpractice."

As far as the pre-game festivities, if there were ever a city that couldn’t give a f*** about something the rest of the country is excited about, it’s New York City. Specifically Manhattan. When the Super Bowl hits other cities, like Miami or New Orleans, all the stops are pulled out and the week-long party literally takes over the town. The locals get into the spirit, businesses play it up and people from around the country (along with their tourism dollars) are welcomed warmly.

In contrast, here’s what we did in New York:

1. The two main focal points for the pre-game “party” are located at Times Square and Herald Square. There are two places in Manhattan that no native New Yorker will ever set foot in, for any reason, ever: Times Square and Herald Square. I know people who’ve quit jobs or broken up relationships because their route involved traipsing through either of these places. Times Square is essentially a petting zoo New Yorkers have set up so that they can see real-live Americans up-close in a protected environment and maybe feed them something. Herald Square, the triangle anchored by Macy*s, is what your town’s main strip mall would look like if they were to airlift unnavigable crowds and an aggressive traffic snarl right smack in front of it and slather the pavement in a gauzy layer of perma-grime and chewed gum.

Ohmygod it’s like I’ve been magically transported to some sort of Pigskin Paradise! Come on.

[SHOW]

pioneer98 wrote:The Saddest Super Bowl Ever

JL21 wrote:That guy sounds like an enormous jackass. It all comes off as "You peasants outside of NYC can have the Super Bowl. We don't need it."