The Skolney Blog

Top 25: 1. Avengers: Endgame I still think it is a tiny notch down from Infinity War (I will simply never like Fat Thor), but this film is a grand achievement that nails every single big moment. And the portals scene will never not elicit chills.  2. Booksmart One of those movies that instantly arrives feeling like a classic you've been watching for years. Beanie Feldstein with one of the performances of the year.  3. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Quentin's most laid back film (and one of his funniest) was another instant classic, with career best performances by DiCaprio and Pitt.  4. Knives Out Rian Johnson's brilliantly written and plotted whodunit, with a great cast full of entertaining actors at the top of their game.  5. Waves The most emotionally involving film I've seen in a long time. The first half of the film breaks your heart, then the 2nd half puts it back together. 6. Parasite Bong Joon-Ho's dark satire has more genuine surprises in it than any film th...

Pretty incredible game up in Seattle. It looked like yet again things were going to go the Packers way, that the 49ers were going to blow a late 2 score lead and give the Packers home field advantage.  That whole last minute was crazy. I was screaming for the Niners to use timeouts, but they didn't. Then Seattle got a pass to the 1, so it looked like all the time would run off AND Seattle would score. They spiked the ball, then they made such a production of bringing in Marshawn Lynch that they actually got a delay of game. 2 incompletions followed. Then on 4th down Wilson zipped a pass to the goalline, and the tackle was made with the ball literally inches from the white.  Not since Mike Jones stopped Kevin Dyson one yard shy of the endzone in super bowl 34 has a single tackle held such importance.  That tackle affected every NFC playoff team's fortunes. It could be the biggest play of the whole NFL season depending on how things play out.  Those inches mean that ne...

Bears 21 Vikings 19 Eh, we lost. 11-5 would have looked nicer than 10-6 but whatever. What is there even to say about such a non-entity of a game? Sean Mannion looked very bad. Mike Boone fumbled, was wholly responsible for an interception, and even got safetied(not his fault), but ended up with a nice stat line thanks to a couple big runs. Dan Bailey made all his kicks. Odenigbo had a TD called back The Bears played all their guys, yet had their toughest time of their 4 wins over us in the 2 years of the Nagy era. Not sure what that means. Probably nothing. For much of the afternoon we seemed to be setting up for Vikings-Packers round 3 next week, as the Lions led the Packers the whole day. But then, and I know this is a shocking development, a couple of huge calls by the refs helped the Packers get the game winning field goal. Whatever. We'll see if the refs can carry the worst 13-3 team in NFL history all the way to a super bowl. So at the moment we will be going to either New O...

Overall best of list coming soon, but I figured I'd do new year by year lists first.  2010: 1. Inception. Peak Christopher Nolan both in concept and execution.  2. Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Aside from a few MCU flicks I'm sure this is the movie from the 2010s I've rewatched the most.  3. Black Swan. Natalie won an Oscar. She should have won ten. 4. Kick Ass. Better than Deadpool.  5. The Social Network. Pretty sure this wasn't in my original top 10, but it's only grown in stature over the years. 6. Easy A. When Emma Stone removed all doubt of her superstardom.  7. The Book Of Eli. Denzel at his absolute badass best. Amazing visuals and score.  8. True Grit.  One of the best westerns ever. Launched Hailee Steinfeld.  9. Blue Valentine. Not the most cheerful watch, but peak performances by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. 10. Toy Story 3. The 4th one was fine, but they really had already finished the series off perfectly.  2011: 1. Moneyba...

The Twins, after a 101 win season and a homerun record, let the Yankees come into Target Field and embarrass us with another playoff sweep. The Gophers, at the end of their best season in many measures for decades, let Wisconsin come in here and dominate us, taking away the Big Ten west title and a Rose Bowl berth. The Vikings, in their biggest home game of the season, let the Packers come into US Bank Stadium and completely humiliate us, clinching the NFC North and reigniting all the bad narratives.  2 of those 3 seasons still have a game or more left, but man, we did not need to see our teams lose to THOSE teams in those ways. 

Packers 23 Vikings 10 Christmas is ruined. Now time for the Festivus airing of grievances.  Entering this MNF game the Vikings already had at best an extreme long shot for an NFC North title. We were at the mercy of the remaining wreckage of the Lions. But we had a win and out scenario to grab the 5 seed and get the NFC East winner in 2 weeks.  Well....all those hopes went up in flames in a disheartening, disgraceful, pitiful performance against the god damn Packers. Were we tanking? Was it decided that going all out to get out of the 6 seed was not worth the trouble? I simply do not understand what I saw. This offensive game plan was nothing short of a disgrace. This was like watching John DeFillippo self-sabotage games last year against the Patriots and Seahawks. Nothing I saw in this game on the offensive side of the ball indicated a desire to win a very important football game.  This game was over at halftime. Even though we were leading 10-9 it felt like we were losi...

As tense as some of these Vikings games have been this year, that Niners-Rams game rivaled them all.  What a weird game. At times each defense looked absolutely dominant, then immediately they would get shredded. The biggest point in the game was that quick 14 point burst by the Niners late in the 1st half, including the.pick six. 21-10 Rams to 24-21 49ers in a matter of seconds The 49ers overcame a lot of mistakes by Garappolo. But he hit 2 huge passes on that final drive. Gould drilled the field goal, and the Vikings are in the playoffs!  I think the Vikings win out anyway, and would therefore be in, but I am hugely relieved that we don't have to sweat it out. All we needed was the refs to pull a fix job on MNF and then we're faced with a must win against the annoying Bears while the Rams would be playing the Cardinals. Same scenario as last year basically. Still a lot to play for. Division is still a long shot, but it would be fun to go into the final Sunday with at least a...

SPOILERS OF COURSE  Chewy's fake out death. What was the point of that? It's cheap enough that they say "oh he was on another transport" when there was only the 1 transport. Out in the open. In the desert. That we saw clearly. In general I can't stand fake deaths. Marvel has done this a bunch too. This movie pretends to kill Chewy, Kylo and Rey, and that female character who Poe has a thing for. Bad look when your plot revolves around Palpatine, a character who was clearly killed in a movie over 30 years ago. Palpatine is way too over the top powerful. A lot of movies do this too, have the big bad, or even the hero sometimes, be so over the top powerful that it's not credible. But it's so beyond anything we ever saw from Palpatine or Vadar or Count Dooku. Imagine if Thanos could do all of what he did in Infinity War without the glove. When Palpatine is wrecking ALL those ships it's just not believable. It seems that the whiny fanboys who never shut up ...

Okay, I did not HATE this movie. I truly didn't. But man does it flub the landing of both this trilogy and the 9 film Skywalker saga. My big issues break down into a few areas. 1. The return of Palpatine. Look, Ian McDiarmid is a terrific actor. He was one of the highlights of the prequels for sure. But why is he back here? The film really doesn't even bother to explain how he is here, or where he has been since ROTJ, or how he managed to somehow amass a whole fleet of Sith. Not to mention that his inclusion really cheapens the ending of ROTJ.  2. The use of Leia. Look, it obviously sucks that Carrie Fisher died, and that it left JJ Abrams and company with an admittedly impossible task in a way to use her in this film and not have it come off as cheap or exploitive. But the Leia scenes here(largely made from TFA cut footage) are uncomfortably awkward and rather clumsily shoehorned in. Plus, the way Leia dies in the film is so bizarrely quick and unmotivated that it does feel ve...

Pelicans 107 Wolves 99 Trash. No other word for that Wolves performance tonight but trash. Hot steaming trash. Riding a 7 game losing streak, but hosting a 6 win Pelicans team rising a 13 game losing streak, the Wolves barfed out one of their worst efforts I have ever seen from them. And I saw a whole lot of garbage basketball during my 2 season ticket holder years in the post-Garnett years.  But I have never sat through a more inept display of.offensive basketball. Absent Towns, the Wolves could not score. Who fails to break 100 points in today's NBA? These clowns couldn't make a 3. They couldn't make a damn layup. They couldn't even run plays, it was just chaos every possession. What the hell dis they do in the 5 days since their last game? None of these players that the Wolves are essentially giving tryouts to this season are any good. Ryan Saunders is clearly in WAY over his head as a head coach. The tank is officially on. Again. 

Vikings 39 Chargers 10 The Vikings took a giant step towards clinching a playoff spot today.  Out in the soccer stadium in LA, mostly full of Vikings fans, the Vikings put together one of their best games of the season, mostly obliterating a Chargers team that, for all their flaws, don't get obliterated. The first half was close. The Vikings came out and went right down the field for an Irv Smith touchdown. Dan Bailey missed his 2nd PAT in 3 weeks, which irked, but he made up for it. But the offense really didn't do a thing the rest of the half.  On defense, we were struggling to get off the field for a while. Philip Rivers was converting a lot of 3rd and longs on us. Our corners were just getting roasted. It looked like a certain shootout.  The only thing that stopped the Chargers offense early was the Chargers. In between their 2 scoring drives, Danielle Hunter forced a fumble deep in their end. We only got a field goal out of it, but they were free points. The biggest ...

Jumanji: The Next Level This is about as good as the first one. As with the first one the plot is not interesting, so when it dominates the 3rd act my interest wanes. But the actors are fun, and they get a tremendous amount of comedic mileage out of the Danny DeVito and Danny Glover impressions. And Karen Gillan is again a total snack. They also tease a 3rd movie that could be a lot of fun.  Dark Waters This has a good story, but I'm not sure it's at all a cinematic story. Mark Ruffalo is terrific. Anne Hathaway is way overqualified for her standard wife role. I think a documentary would have worked better.  Richard Jewell This is a pretty good movie for about 30 minutes. Then after the bombing sequence it just goes completely off the rails into the laziest, most repulsive bit of political propaganda Clint Eastwood has ever delivered. In his imagination, Jewell wasn't just wrongly identified as the bomber by the FBI and media, but he was deliberately targeted by them out of...

Vikings 20 Lions 7 So that's what it feels like to not have heart failure while watching a Vikings game.  It's a feeling I had forgotten, after 4 straight tight games. Today there was no such anxiety. There really was very little to worry about at all, as the Vikings quietly, methodically mauled the faded Lions. The score is not indicative of how this game went. The Vikings absolutely dominated this game from start to finish. But it was similar to those September wins where they got a lead and played things very conservatively after that. After weeks of defensive struggles, today they really shut it down. They didn't give up the big pass plays, aside from 1 or 2 stray ones. They shut down the run. They got off the field on 3rd down. They got a couple turnovers. They got sacks. Sure, everything must be qualified with who they were playing, but opponent hasn't seemed to matter that much of late. The defense needed this. A fairly quiet day from the offense. Kirk played wel...

2019 is really making a late push to be the best movie year of the decade. One good movie after another of late. Ford v Ferrari is just a terrific kind of throwback to a big budget, big star, non-Oscar baiting crowd pleaser that just rarely ever gets made anymore. And hey, it may even contend for some Oscars. Matt Damon is really good, but Christian Bale as usual is the best thing in the film. He's so charming and funny. Loved the racing scenes. Queen & Slim, also very good, is a great example.of taking topical issues(police violence, racism, poverty) and mixing them into a cool genre film. This feels destined to be name dropped in rap lyrics for years to come. The film has a ton of energy and style, and a couple terrific lead performances. Not sure it needed to be over 2 hours though.  Honey Boy is an autobiographical film written by Shia LaBeouf about his own rocky childhood in which he plays his own dad. Something like this would seem destined to be self-indulgent tripe, but...

Seahawks 37 Vikings 30 They almost did it. One game after coming back from 20-0 down against Denver, the heart stopping 2019 Vikings nearly pulled an even bigger rabbit out of their hat. Down 34-17 after the most unspeakably awful quarter of the season, the Vikings rallied and had the ball with a chance to go take the lead and likely win. It's awful that this rally did not go the final length, but honestly I'm not sure I have felt this good about a Vikings team, and a Vikings quarterback, showing this kind of fight in ages. I expected a loss. This is one of those games that going in feels unwinnable. Seattle is basically invincible in the Carroll-Wilson era in primetime home games. They have always had Mike Zimmer's number. And the Seahawks may be the best team in the NFC, with a star QB playing at an MVP level.  Off the bye, the Vikings came out and played a pretty good first half. We went right down the field on the 1st drive for a Cook TD. We got a nifty pick six from Ha...

Packers 31, Giants 13 Blecch. It's not that I expected the Giants to help us out, but man they just gave this one away.  Ravens 20, 49ers 17 Could be a super bowl preview. I think the rain helped the 49ers keep it close. Baltimore is right now clearly the best team in the league. Dolphins 37, Eagles 31 Philly getting lit up by Fitzmagic is pretty hilarious. And to think the Eagles still might be east favorites. It's criminal that either them or Dallas gets to host a playoff game. Titans 31, Colts 17 Ryan Tannehill is the AFC Kirk Cousins. Good QB being dragged down by a bad organization, but then he switches teams and flourishes. Titans could be a dangerous team in January. Steelers 20, Browns 13 Classic Browns. Just when you think they're a playoff threat, they lose to a 3rd string QB and are now a longshot at best. I think the Steelers, while currently the 6, will have trouble holding off the Titans.  Redskins 29, Panthers 21 Carolina was already in trouble. Now they'...

Add 2 more contenders to the year end ten best list.  Knives Out is the Rian Johnson murder mystery with one of the best casts of the year. Most people know Johnson from Star Wars, but my favorite film of his is Brick, and this is him very much back in Brick mode. I loved the way this movie was structured, where instead of waiting the whole movie to find out whodunit, we are basically told flat out maybe 30 minutes into the film(although there is more yet to come). The ultimate reveal really works too, and in between we get just one terrific scene after another. This ensemble is just a ton of fun. Daniel Craig is hilarious, Chris Evans just tears into his douchebag part, and Ana de Armas is completely endearing. The Irishman is Martin Scorsese's $150 million, 3 and a half hour crime epic on Netflix, with DeNiro, Pacino and a more than welcome return by Joe Pesci. I thought watching such a long movie on my phone would be a tedious ordeal, even for a Scorsese film. Instead I watched ...

Wisconsin 38 Gophers 17 Well, I can't honestly say I am totally surprised. After the win over Penn State put the Gophers into the top 10 with a 9-0 record, basically clinching this as the best Gophers season in decades, there remained a lot of scenarios for more joy. And only one scenario remained in which this season could still be seen as a failure. Guess which scenario played out? I know a wider perspective paints this season as a success. Easy schedule or not, the Gophers don't just win 10 games all the time. They don't beat top 10 teams often. And there was no reason to believe 10 wins were possible when I was at TCF Bank Stadium in September watching this team need basically a miracle to come back to beat Georgia Southern. And this team even now is barely over a year removed from the team was getting trucked weekly by the Illinois and Marlylands.  Don't care. They fucked up ALL the good vibes today. Today permanently tainted, if not ruined, the whole season. What ...

Midway Roland Emmerich can still do grand spectacle like few other directors. And he crafts some really visceral dogfight sequences in this. But he clearly had some serious budget constraints, as this film's Pearl Harbor attack scene looks very cheap, and the film is filled with that awful CGI fire that drives me nuts. Beyond that the script is okay, mostly just standard war movie stuff, albeit performed by a cast full of reliable like Woody Harrelson(who looks exactly like his SNL Joe Biden) and Dennis Quaid. Charlie's Angels Too bad this flopped. I would have gone for another of these. Kristen Stewart is a comedic revelation. Naomi Scott is top 5 gorgeous, with comedic timing to spare. And Ella Balinska is a badass. I wish the movie leaned into the silliness more. It spends an awful lot of time taking itself too seriously.  Last Christmas I could see this settling in as a new Christmas movie to watch yearly. It's not a classic, but they take Emilia Clarke and just set her...

Is there anything funnier than the Packers getting help from the refs all game, yet still getting killed 37-8? Aaron Rodgers barely threw for 100 yards.  Vikings are now tied for first, and control their own destiny to win the division. Win out, you win the north.  Period. 

Vikings bye week, so it was a redzone day. Most of the games were kind of irrelevant, but there were some games that mattered for the Vikings. For sure the Vikings odds of just making the playoffs improved. The Panthers losing to the Saints and the Eagles losing to Seattle further rendered those 2 teams non-factors. Dallas losing probably helps too, but someone's winning the east so only the 2nd place team matters for us. On the other hand those results made moving up in the NFC harder. We could wind up with a 13 win NFC division champ that doesn't even get a bye. The AFC is just a shit show. Buffalo is firmly in one wild card spot, but that 6 seed is totally up for grabs. 4 teams are 6-5, but I think the 5-6 Browns are the favorites to get in with their easy remaining schedule. The last 2 games of the weekend have huge Vikings implications. Hoping for the Packers and Rams to lose. It would put the Vikings in a 1st place tie, and give us a full 2 game lead in the wild card race...

Gophers 38 Northwestern 22 In a week the Gophers play a game with implications bigger than any game in my lifetime. But first they had to get past a terrible Northwestern team. The term "trap game" has become comically overused, but this time it applies. They sure didn't play the first quarter like they were looking past anybody. This thing was 21-0 in a blink. It was a bludgeoning.  And then it wasn't.  Look, I never once felt this game was ever in doubt. And the Wildcats never got it closer than 12 points after that opening burst. But the Gophers played a very poor game the last 3 quarters. The offense never wavered that much. Tanner Morgan threw one awful pick, but they always moved the ball. Problem was so did Northwestern. They even lost their starting QB, but after 21-0 they just kept staying on the field. Now, they don't have players who can make big plays, but those 6 and 7 yard type plays add up too. The Gophers defense really struggled to get off the fie...

Vikings 27 Broncos 23 Did that seriously happen?  By halftime today I had already so fully accepted the loss, that the Vikings had gone into their bye with an absolute turkey of a loss, that the reality that instead they head into the bye having pulled off their biggest comeback win in nearly 30 years still feels like a dream. I cannot believe what I saw. I mean, this team was DONE. The first half they were absolutely catatonic, incompetent, you name it. The defense was being humiliated by something called Brandon Allen, who was dropping dimes all over our decayed secondary. Even their wide receiver pass clowned us. Our offense was basically a spectator. They were never on the field, and when they were they couldn't do anything. Cook was stuffed. OL wasn't blocking. Cousins was a mess. I saw a million comments referencing that Buffalo game last year, but this was worse. This wasn't a bunch of weird plays happening. This was complete and utter domination on all sides.  When ...

Iowa 23 Gophers 19 For the first time in a calendar year the Gophers lost a football game. Kind of saw this one coming. To have that unprecedented hype for that Penn State game, followed by an emotional win, and to then immediately follow that up by going down to Iowa to play a good team in a stadium that the Gophers haven't won in since before a lot of these players were born....you couldn't really devise a more obvious setup for a letdown loss. And this team was dead flat in the first half. The defense was AWFUL. Couldn't stop the run, couldn't stop the pass, couldn't do anything. The offense was a little more functional, but they couldn't run, and could not sustain drives through the air. The fact they went to the locker room down just 20-6 was a miracle. This loss sucks, but keep things in perspective. Every Gopher team in my lifetime winds up losing this game by 30 points. They just get run out of the stadium. They made it a game. They put one in the endzon...

Yes, the majority of the attention and criticism and outrage has been directed at Garrett for his insane, violent outburst last night. And he has been handed an indefinite suspension. He is rightfully the story. But my god, there are an astonishing number of people, including paid commentators, feverishly trying to shift the blame over to Mason Rudolph. They say he is the one who started it. WHAT? The whole thing began when Garrett laid a dirty late hit on Rudolph, pile driving him into the ground in a decided game. Then they tussled for a moment, the kind of after the whistle thing you see in almost every game. Garrett was the instigator at every single step.  It's like these people are in an alternate reality. Absolutely NOTHING Rudolph did justified getting a helmet swung at him like that. Garrett could have literally KILLED him if that had been a more direct hit. I don't think Garrett should ever see an NFL field again, although I know that's not gonna happen. 

In theaters: Parasite From Bong Joon Ho, the director of Snowpiercer. This is a hall of a film. A poor Korean family worms their way into the lives of a rich family. This might sneak onto my top 10 of the year. It's a true original, a film that has genuinely surprising twists in it, and which manages to bounce effortlessly between drama and thriller and comedy.  Jojo Rabbit Another great one, this is Taika Waititi's comedy about a little German kid in WW2 who has Hitler as an imaginary friend. This one is just flat out really, really funny, but it also has a lot of heart and substance too. The kid is really good. Scarlett Johansson is wonderful.  Motherless Brooklyn A shame that Edward Norton's long in the making passion project flopped. It's not amazing. You could chop a half hour off this easily, and the particulars of what the bad guys in the movie are doing escape me. But it has a nice throwback style to it. Norton is great. He assembled a great supporting cast too....

Vikings 28 Cowboys 24 The newest biggest win of the season came against many of this team's biggest buggaboos. Primetime road game against a winning team, and coming off that painful loss in Kansas City. And with the Packers having won again and needing to keep pace. This team looked early like a totally different team than last week, where they basically game planned to lose. They ran, and did so outside. They ran screens, which Cook turned into huge plays. They moved Cousins outside the.pocket. And they rolled down the field for touchdowns on their first 2 drives as if Dallas' defense was barely there. I never really thought this game was heading for a rout anyway, but the Vikings pass defense stepped in and made that a certainty. Basically the last 3 quarters of this game was horrific. It was Leslie Frazier era pass defense. Granted, Dallas did make a few just ridiculous catches, including 2 for scores, but this was disheartening stuff to watch. Wide open receivers constantl...

Gophers 31 Penn State 26 The final minutes of this game were playing out like a well worn script. The exact thing that has happened every single time this Gophers program has had a chance to really do something impressive and meaningful for my whole lifetime, and even a couple decades further back than that, was happening again.  A dazzling first half full of big pass plays and turnovers was about to go to waste. A 12 point lead with under 5 minutes left was about to be erased. It was going to be a total kick in the teeth. We were even going to have the obligatory huge officiating mistake to grumble about, as the Nittany Lions last TD should not have counted due to a delay of game. Now, it was not going to be a program-killer. It wasn't even going to destroy this season. But how often do you get a chance to take down a top 5 team at home? So as Penn State was going right down the field again for the inevitable winning score, every Minnesota sports fan had to be feeling the same dre...

Thank you Chargers! 

Chiefs 26 Vikings 23 The Vikings have many infamous playoff losses that hurt. They have a few others that were essentially playoff games(like week 17 last year). This game doesn't fit either criteria, but excluding them this is about as big a punch to the gut of a loss as I can recall.  Basically the Vikings did all the things you can't do on the road against a good team(which the Chiefs still are even without Mahomes) and get a win. The offense was very hot and cold. Cousins was fine. I'm already annoyed at the resurgence of the Kirk haters and it's just started. He missed a couple throws, sure. But he also led a 4th quarter drive to go take the lead, culminating in a dart to Rudolph. But he will get zero credit for that, and get 100% of the blame for the loss, because people are fucking stupid. The offensive line was bad. They could not open holes for Dalvin, against a run defense that had previously been awful. They didn't protect Kirk. And to make it worse they ...

I actually liked a couple of the movies in this franchise since the consensus high water mark T2. Terminator 3 is a great action flick, and yes I thought Genisys was alright. Only Salvation was a dud in my eyes.  But most people seem to agree the franchise has been bad since T2. So now they have taken the Halloween route, by going back to the best movie in the series, and creating a direct sequel to that film, while basically pretending all other sequels never existed.  And it works. Dark Fate is a really good, crafty reboot/continuation of the franchise. It has great action, and perhaps due to James Cameron coming back to produce and work on the story, it has the heart and gravitas that helped make the first 2 films so iconic. It does adhere to the formula of the first 2. Once again both a terminator and a protector are sent back from the future, this time to find a young woman whose survival is essential to surviving a future war with machines. The whole first act is just a ...

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil I thought the first one was just okay. I think this sequel is just okay...but maybe a tad better than the first due to a pretty well done 3rd act battle. I really don't like Angelina Jolie, but she's very good in this particular role. It's too bad she's so often off screen in favor of a batch of largely dull supporting characters.  The Addams Family There are worse ideas than taking this property and making it animated. But this thing is really bland and short on laughs. I liked the style of the animation, and the voice cast is strong, but I was pretty bored.  Judy Renee Zellweger might as well have just held up a sign in every scene that read "Please give me an Oscar." Her portrayal of Judy Garland is such transparent Oscar bait that it kind of wrecks the whole film. It just felt very fake to me.  Black and Blue Not a bad dirty cop thriller. These are almost always at least pretty good. Probably could have maintained the suspense ...

I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of Houston sports like I do with Minnesota,  but this has to be right there with the worst moments they have ever had.  This game wasn't over, but it was in control. Zack Greinke had given up a homerun(to one of the best hitters in baseball) but he was pitching the game of his life....and his manager pulls him. And pulls him not even to go to Gerrit Cole. And in seconds the Nationals take a lead they never gave back. AJ Hinch's actions in those later innings are a fireable offense. He will never live that down. Brian Dozier, Kurt Suzuki and Fernando Rodney get rings. Especially cool for Rodney to get one after such a long career. And so, yet again, a franchise in one of the 4 majors gets their first title. This was the last title won within the 2010s decade. 11 teams won their first titles(Nationals, Astros, Saints, Seahawks, Eagles, Mavericks, Cavaliers, Raptors, LA Kings, Capitals, Blues), plus a few others broke long droughts(most n...

The first Sunday of the NFL season that was Vikings-free should have been relaxing. But it really wasn't.  We got one positive. In one of the most incompetently played games on both sides I have ever seen, the Chargers beat the Bears when the Bears shanked a fairly short field goal at the gun. Trubisky was awful, yet Matt Nagy stuck with him stubbornly. If he had switched QBs they probably win by 20. This pretty much knocks the Bears from contention. The Lions won, with some more makeup calls from the refs helping(that 1st Lions TD was a forward pass not a lateral, and the Giants were robbed of a late TD on a picked up flag). I didn't expect much if any help for the Vikings today, since most games looked like mismatches in favor of other NFC contenders. And indeed, the Rams, Seahawks and Saints all had pretty easy times with bad opponents. The 49ers destroyed Carolina, which could be either good or bad. The Hatriots had another easy win where both their opponent's unforced ...