Skip to main content

Thanksgiving Football Thoughts
















With all due respect to the Pilgrims, to the traditional sentiments of harvest time, and to expressions of gratitude, both cosmic and local, Thanksgiving Day for some of us constitutes chiefly the center of the football season -- its culmination for high schools, and a good time for the college games that serve as the natural lead-in to the wonders of the bowl-game season. Have you ever noticed, after all, how much a turkey looks like a football?



My personal thoughts in this regard this year turn to my alma mater, Marist College, home of the Red Foxes.



Their football season is over and it wasn't a resounding success. Their 11 games yielded a 4-7 record. But on the last of those games, November 15th, they kicked the butts of the Davidson Wildcats, with stand-out performances from their seniors. Of course, it sounds like a natural rivalry, a canine wild creature against a feline analog.


One senior, running back Emmanuel Onakoya, scored two touchdowns in the first quarter. Another, running back Atiq Lucas, also scored a TD while gaining 74 yards on 16 carries.


On the defensive side, a linebacker, Paul Sakowski, also a senior, recorded eight tackles on the day, a team record.



But what about Thanksgiving Weekend? I have to shift my focus always from my alma mater to say anything about that.



The University of Connecticut Huskies are playing this weekend -- Saturday, November 29, they'll play Memphis in the Liberty Bowl, at Memorial Stadium in Memphis, Tennessee. It'll be on ESPN. 


As to their won-loss record, Connecticut should envy Marist! The Huskies have only 2 Ws to 8 Ls overall. They are 1-5 in their conference.


Tim Boyle, a QB, has spent most of the season on the bench. He got his chance as the starting QB last Saturday, against Cincinnati. The team lost but, according to the New Haven Register, Boyle acquitted himself well.


Still, what about Thanksgiving Day itself. Today! What's my rooting interest going to be?


Georgia Tech will be visiting Georgia. My irrational preference is with the Engineers, a/k/a the Yellow Jackets. Why do they need two names? Don't know.  The latter is the usual reference from the animal kingdom, the former refers to the nature of the school behind the players. but, hey, the heart knows what it knows.


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more