This post is supposed to extol on the virtues that Technology has wrought upon the sporting experience. For the most part technology has done much to improve the coverage and enjoyment of sports relative to past decades. This era of facebook, twitter, and an ever expansive blogosphere have done much to render the old methods of enjoying sport, just reading the newspaper and watching the games obsolete in comparison. All of this is ultimately a good thing from my prospective, my general rule is the more open sourced a phenomenon becomes the better. But there is one case in which the rising tide of technology does not lift all ships to enlightenment. That case is the douchebag who goes to live sporting events and proceeds to spend those three hours of game time with his nose three inches from his phone screen for the entire game. I am a rather dour individual by nature, I never good too high or to low about anything. Nor am I prone to get upset about the behavior of others. But one site that is most likely rile me up is the guy starting at his little three inch screen during a crucial third down play. Pay attention or give your fucking ticket to someone else who will. Sporting events are social in nature, so most people go with their friends. On the off chance that, heaven forbid, that someone has to go to a game alone there are many ways to remedy the situation that don't involve digging through your skinny jeans to pick up your phone to shoot a pithy text off to someone. My advice to you Mister Text Machine Douchebag the next time you feel lonely and insecure at a sporting event and you have an overwhelming desire to say something to someone to bury those feelings deep down inside don't pick up your phone to shoot a text to a person that I can personally guarantee is tired of your lame attempts at humor pick up your head instead. There are people around you to talk to. Thousands of them. Cheers

One of the more interesting/nefarious developments in college sports has been the advent, and subsequent explosion, of social networking. The advent of this stuff has cast rather a pall over the image of the student athlete in this era. It was very easy, and very common, to idealize the image of the student athlete in the past. In the 70's and 80's college athletes were sacrosanct to most of the public. They lived very strictly controlled and regimented lives. It was much easier for a coach in that era to completely isolate their players from the media and the fans. A coach could always put his best foot forward in regards to how his program would be portrayed, he would provide his best most well rounded student athletes as representation of his team and his program. 

That's why Miami hit that era of Football like a runaway train. Howard Schnellenberger, and to an even greater extent, Jimmy Johnson made almost no effort to put their collective best foot forward. No one had seen anything like them before. They were so brash, so aggressive and so different to what the general public had been conditioned to expect from a Football program. Most people tend to fear the things they don't understand, and the general public of that era certainly had a healthy fear of Miami.

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Every now and then people have to make tough decisions. I am finding that as you get older these tough decisions come with increasingly alarming speed and regularity. The toughest decisions are often those where financial expediency trumps a lack of desire to do something. This is one of those times because bills have to be paid so half a league, half a league, half a league onward.

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