Yearly Archives: 2011

Inception/Conception

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Joey

6 Comments

Please welcome new contributor Joey, with thoughts on fandom and parenthood.

Since I arrived as a freshman at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1997, I’ve based most (if not all) of my social calendar around Carolina Sports, with heavy emphasis placed on football and basketball. If there was a Tar Heel game being played, I was either there in person, or planted in front of a television watching it. Hell, I had to get my wife to assure me that we could accommodate our wedding guests by arranging for a meaningless UNC/UVA conference basketball game in February to be on an accessible television. Bear in mind, this was a wedding reception that was held on-campus at UNC at the Carolina Inn, during which our guest mingled with Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge, James Worthy, and other Carolina Hoops dignitaries (Naismith Ceremony at halftime of the game). Long story short, a huge chunk of my identity is wrapped around my fandom.

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Posted in Miscellaneous, UNC | Tagged fatherhood | 6 Comments

The Youngest Plumblebee

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Marc

Responding to Spam Comments

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Shane

5 Comments

WordPress does a great job filtering out spam comments, but sometimes we think it’s good to let the spammers know we still appreciate their efforts. With that in mind, here are some featured spam comments from the past week. For better or worse, these are all real.

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-Background Pictures

Okay, look man, I shouldn’t be doing this, and you can get in a lot of trouble, but paypal me $100 and I’ll write your presentation for you. Because believe me, motherfucker, you’re not going to get this kind of ideal writing anywhere else. Anybody who says you can? Liars, brother. Fucking liars.

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Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged spam comments | 5 Comments

UNC’s Mystifying Loss – Weekend Recap

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Shane

The Duke Football Essay Project: Stanford

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Shane

3 Comments

I played tennis with some friends on Saturday morning, which immediately put me in the mindset that I had fulfilled my physical obligation for the day and could commence with drinking heavily. My pal Jim was having a little pre-game soiree at his place in Durham, and I took a growler with me. We only had about an hour before it was time to roll, but I managed to eat a giant sausage wrapped in bacon, piss off an Auburn fan by telling him I hated Cam Newton, and drain the growler. For reasons I can’t really remember, I was wearing an Eli Manning jersey.

Miracles are all around us, David

Needless to say, there were some high spirits among our little group as we walked toward the stadium. We used a gravel road to get there, and on the way I grabbed a fallen bamboo shoot from the woods. Did you know there was bamboo in America? I did not. In fact, I’m not even certain it was bamboo. But as I carried the long shoot over my shoulder, I had a thought: you never know when a miracle is going to happen. It could literally happen at any point. Miracles almost require that you don’t expect them. So just because I didn’t expect a miracle against Stanford, that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to happen. But there I went, violating my own rule: I started expecting a miracle. Then I threw the bamboo back into the woods and got down to the awful, wearisome act of hoping.

Snyderwine and the Hypotheticals

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Posted in Duke | Tagged Duke Football Essay Project | 3 Comments

Optipessimism Week 2: Carolina vs. Rutgers

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Nate

8 Comments

Carolina won. Barely. Now that I’ve had a few minutes away from throwing remotes and trashing my apartment in frustration, I can approach this week’s Optipessimism with some idea of perspective.

But before we get into that, I need to ask about the Blue Zone. I saw a bunch of shots during the game of an end-to-end camera that showed the Blue Zone, aka The House That Butch Built, almost completely empty. What the hell? This is becoming a legitimate problem, because besides the fact that it makes Carolina look like a small-time loser school (okay, some argue that its football program is just that, but I don’t agree), it ruins any aspect of intimidation created by having it filled with angry Carolina fans. I know that it’s hot in the sun there, and I know the concourse is air-conditioned, but seriously, what the hell. Never fear. I have a solution, though one that might not even be legal and definitely won’t ever happen.

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Posted in UNC | Tagged Bryn Renner, Everett Withers, football, Optipessimism, Rutgers | 8 Comments

The Triangle Prophets, Week Two

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Shane

6 Comments

Every Friday, a group of fearless webmasters and sports fanatics from around the Triangle will gather to predict five college football games against the spread. Every Duke, Carolina, and N.C. State game will be featured, along with a smattering of high profile non-Triangle games. As the season goes along, we’ll keep the standings updated and see who emerges as the one true prophet. Make your predictions in the comment section. Every week, we’ll feature any and all commenters who pick all 5 games correctly.

Current Standings

1. Me – 3 points
1. The Devil Wolf, TRB – 3 points

3. John Watson, The Devil’s Den – 2 points
3. Tar Heel Fan Blog – 2 points
3. William Earnhardt, Site Designer – 2 points

6. James Henderson, Publisher, Pack Pride – 1 point
6. Nate Friedman, UNC football correspondent – 1 point
6 Jim Young, Editor, ACCSports.com – 1 point

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Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged football, picks, Triangle Prophets | 6 Comments

The History Corner: Duke-Stanford, 1971

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Lewis_Bowling

3 Comments

As Duke prepares to play Stanford at 3:30pm Saturday, Lewis Bowling enters the TRB fray with a piece on the last time these teams met, in 1971. In addition to being a published author and a Duke historian, Bowling writes for GoDuke.com and the Herald-Sun, and teaches a sports history class at Duke.

Duke had a new coach in 34 year old Mike McGee. Tom Harp’s last year as coach of Duke was 1970, so 1971 under Coach McGee had a lot of question marks. Great players in Leo Hart, Wes Chesson, and Dick Biddle had played their last games in 1970. The team lacked depth, according to Coach McGee, and faced a tough schedule.

But after impressive wins over Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia to start the season 3 and 0, Duke climbed to the 19^th ranked position in the nation in the AP poll.

But now their task was their biggest of the season, taking on the defending Rose Bowl champion Stanford, who came into the Duke game ranked number ten in the country. Like Duke in losing their great quarterback from 1970, Leo Hart, John Ralston’s Stanford club had just graduated the 1970 Heisman Trophy winning quarterback in Jim Plunkett. But Stanford had an outstanding replacement for Plunkett in Don Bunce, who had a plethora of skilled, agile, and fast receivers to throw to.

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Posted in UNC | Tagged football, Stanford, The History Corner | 3 Comments

Everyone’s Dirty: An Ethical Guide to College Football’s Top 25

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Shane

14 Comments

Folks who know me will tell you in a Carolina heartbeat that I’m a moral man. I want to root for the good guy. I want to embrace the good guy. So in an attempt to filter out the good from the bad, I took a broad look at the black marks marring college football programs and their players and coaches in this year’s preseason AP top 25. (I know the rankings have changed, but such is life.) The results, to put it mildly, are not encouraging. Quick synopsis: watching college football may compromise your soul.

Special thanks to SportsDelve, which compiled a comprehensive list of schools which have been placed on NCAA probation since punishment policies began in 1953, and made the research much easier. Let’s begin at the bottom.

Justice, where is thy stern visage on the gridiron?

25. USC – The Trojans are in the second year of a 2-year bowl ban due to “lack of institutional control” between 2004 and 2009. Reggie Bush was the focus of the sanctions, and the illegal benefits he received from two sports marketers (including a rent-free home for his family) cost the football team 30 football scholarships through 2013. They were forced to vacate the 2004-05 national championship, and Bush was later stripped of his Heisman trophy. USC is second all-time with 15 years spent on probation in program history. Recent graduate Everson Griffen was arrested in Los Angels in January for battery, and had to be subdued with a taser after he grabbed a cop in the groin.

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Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged football | 14 Comments

The Queen of Style Checks In

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Carrie

6 Comments

Ever week or thereabouts, our new contributor Carrie will be analyzing uniforms from around the Tobacco Road universe. Today’s assignments are below.

1. Duke Football’s Black Uniforms

Duke's "controversial" new uniforms. Also appears they didn't quite make this play.

It’s not so much the shoulder stripes that concern me with Duke’s new uniforms – I actually think those are quite sharp and on a different uniform (on a different team?) might even lend an (appropriately) militaristic look to the uni – really, I’m bothered by those white helmets. Continue reading →

Posted in Duke, Miscellaneous | Tagged football, Maryland, Uniforms | 6 Comments