Sports – Page 7 – Collin Kottke: All-Around Swell Guy

Perfect NCAA Bracket Now Means a Billion Dollars

Think you know college basketball? Well, you could win a billion dollars for your smarts. I’m not kidding.

Renowned business man Warren Buffett has teamed up with Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and founder of Quicken Loans, to offer the contest. All that entrants have to do is get a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket. That’s all.

The USA Today says your odds are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to get a perfect bracket. That long number is 9.2 quintillion, so if you don’t fill out a perfect bracket, you will at least have that knowledge.

Although the chances of filling out a perfect bracket aren’t great, it’s worth a shot because the 20 closest entrants to perfection will receive $100,000, which has to go towards building a home, refinancing a home or remodeling a home, but still its $100,000.

Another catch is you have to be at least 21 years old and a U.S. citizen, so kids must steal their parents’ identities for one more thing on the internet.

Additionally, Gilbert will be donating a million dollars to nonprofits in Detroit and Cleveland to help education in the inner city which is pretty cool.

The bill more than likely will only end up being four million dollars, assuming no one that enters the tournament actually gets that billion dollars, two million will go to the 20 runner-ups and the other two million will go to charity.

Gilbert and Buffett can find the four million dollars in their couch cushions, so this really won’t be putting a crunch on either of their wallets. It’s a neat deal that will get people to Quicken Loans website and make us further forget about the Cavs actually not winning a championship before LeBron.

The press release was not typed in Comic Sans.

Richard Sherman’s Post Game Interview Was Awesome

Are your ears still ringing? If you answered yes then you probably were watching the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC Championship game and more specifically the Richard Sherman interview immediately after the game with Erin Andrews.

Now, this was right after Richard Sherman tipped a pass attempt into the end-zone heading towards Michael Crabtree which resulted in a game-sealing interception for Seattle.

There is a lot to complain about in this world, but this is not one of those things. Sherman was loud, but didn’t say anything controversial, derogatory or simply wrong. He was right and he sure does seem to be the best corner in the NFL.

It was nice to see emotion, true emotion, from a football player. He was loud and possibly annoying, but it wasn’t wrong. It was awesome.

Shout out to Erin Andrews for staying poised and asking a great follow-up question.

In a day of awesome football, it was a great way to top it off. And it was just the kind of thing the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell pray for every night.

A Rarity: Nine Head Coaches In Minnesota Vikings History

The Minnesota Vikings have a new head coach; they hired now former Cincinnati Bengals defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer to be the ninth coach in franchise history. That’s the part that amazes me, only nine coaches in the 52 seasons of Vikings football.

Granted, Bud Grant did swallow up 17 of those years, but still this is an impressive feat. I’ve written multiple times about how the Twins have only had two managers since 1986, which is simply unheard of, because the Vikings small amount of coaches is impressive.

Let’s put this in context, the Minnesota Timberwolves have been around for 25 seasons and they’ve gone through nine coaches already. The same amount of coaches in half the time, it’s sad neither of the tactics are working because neither franchise has won the big one.

I don’t if I should be applauding the Vikings for only having nine coaches in 50 plus years or note that four of those coaches have been at the helm in the last ten years. It’s probably just an anomaly with the benefactor of having a hall of fame coach, who still has an office at team headquarters.

Congratulations, Mike Zimmer, you have been given the keys to a ride that only a few have taken for a spin. Some have crashed and burned, some have ran some pretty nice laps, but none have crossed the finished line coming in first.

Your new ride might need to go to the shop a couple times in the next year in order to make it a fine tune machine. You’ll have to keep it outside for a couple years while they’re building you a shiny new garage, too, but nevertheless it’s yours now, make her yours.

Take the keys, put the pedal to the medal and don’t make the franchise hire a tenth head coach for a long time.

Nice Guys Finish Last: The Leslie Frazier Story

The saying is that nice guys finish last and that proved to be true on Monday morning when the Minnesota Vikings gave head coach Leslie Frazier the axe after his team finished, well, in last place.

The Vikings finished last in the NFC North one year after clinching a Wild Card spot and finishing in second behind the Green Bay Packers. The Vikings finished 5-10-1 in this just completed season which is a steep five win drop-off from the season previous.

Was this five game downturn solely on the shoulders of Leslie Frazier? No, but it’s always easier to fire one guy than to cut 53.

A combination of the NFL’s unequal scheduling (which does lift the bottom up and a big reason why the Vikings made the playoffs in 2012), a horrid secondary, the decision not to put Cordarrelle Patterson on the field earlier plus the regression and insistence of Christian Ponder being the team’s quarterback all equals up to a losing team and someone needing to pay.

Sadly, that someone is Leslie Frazier.

From every reporter to every single player who talks to the reporters, it sounds like Leslie Frazier is an amazing human being. He’s a nice guy and goes above and beyond the duties of a football coach, especially one at the NFL level, when it comes to his relationship with his players.

I won’t try to pretend that I extensively know the ins and outs of how football works and comment on that part of the equation. People smarter than me say that Frzsier’s defensive scheme, the Tampa-Two, is outdated. The obvious rebuttal to that is that everything looks outdated when your defense is one of the worst in the league.

Frazier is the man that gets to fall on the sword. Frazier is the man that loses his job because another man’s job depended upon trying to prove that Christian Ponder was an NFL quarterback.

Rick Speilman owes Leslie Frazier fruit baskets for life after taking the fall for Speilman’s own failed draft pick.

Les Frazier now gets to sit at home and get a paycheck to do nothing for a football season if he so chooses. Speilman gets to choose (or at least help choose) a shiny new coach and a redo on another quarterback, despite the fact that if he would have allowed Frazier to play backup Matt Cassell for the majority of the season we’d probably be talking about the Vikings’ opponent in the Wild Card Round.

I don’t know if Rick Speilman is a nice guy or not, but I’m 99.9 percent sure that Leslie Frazier is.

It’s not a guarantee that if Frazier would have had sole control over his lineups that he would have made the playoffs, but I’m 100 percent sure that a nice guy can finish first somewhere. Now if only there was a place or maybe even a whole state that was known for their niceness.

My Metrodome Memories

The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome will close its revolving, blow-you-out-the-building doors and soon be blown to smithereens after the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings faceoff on Sunday. The stadium hosted many events and was the backdrop for many great sporting events, despite being fairly outdated as soon as it was open.

The great sporting events held in the Dome (World Series, Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, MLB All-Star Game, State Football, numerous memorable playoff games), I never was in attendance for. Frankly, most of those great events were before my time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have some fond memories of the Metrodome.

– The first ever professional sporting event I attended was at the Metrodome with my grandpa. I believe it was 2001, the Twins were taking on Jim Thome and the Indians. The give-away that day was a Doug Mientkiewicz shirsey and I adored that thing as a child. That shirsey is the main reason Dougy was my favorite player.

I also copped out a souvenir baseball from Grandpa. It features a Twins logo and a holographic American flag flying throughout a whole section of the baseball. It still is in a case in my room.

The other reason I remember this game so well is that it’s my first memories of downtown Minneapolis. I remember leaving the game early and Grandpa driving us around downtown, showing me where he used to haul mail for the U.S. Postal Service.

– Every summer (for the most part), my parents and I have gone to a Twins game ever since my first appearance with my grandpa. We’ve caught one foul ball in our 13-yearish span. From the hand of Brad Radke off of the bat of Detroit Tigers catcher Ivan Rodriguez to the single-handed bare-handed grasp of my dad.

I remember a couple things from that moment. One, the drunk guy behind us proclaiming that my dad had saved his life by catching that screaming liner off of Pudge’s bat. Two, we were apparently on the jumbo-tron, because my dad got a phone-call right after the catch from a kid just a couple years older than me who was also in attendance at the game.

– The Twins used to annually have an ‘Autograph Party’ out on the Metrodome Plaza. For two or three years of the event a vanload would go to this event. The vanload consisting of my mother, one of my best friends Josh, his mother Jodi, his brother Kyle, his brother’s friend Sam and myself (at least that was the crew for one of the Autograph Party outings). We stood in line for hours getting autographs from current Twins and Twins alumni, all while being only a folding table across from them, which was probably the best part.

– Twins games at the Metrodome were often a school field trip or incentive for us. I can’t remember if being on the school patrol was required or strongly encouraged, but everyone in third and fourth grade was enrolled in the program. The reward for school patrol was one Twins game a year and I remember that these were always the worse seats that I had ever sat in. One year, we sat in straight away centerfield. The last row of school patrol kids could touch the curtain where the murals of the retired numbers where hanging. I was in the front rows of that deck and I remember that I could not see Torii Hunter. He was back far enough, that the overhang of the deck would not let me see Spiderman.

That game also featured a group of girls sitting behind me who did not know the first thing about baseball. I remember vividly the girls saying the score was triple-digits to triple-digits (320-120). The girls read the Runs/Hits/Errors column like it was a basketball scoreboard. I remember shaking my head then and I love laughing at it now. I can’t for the life of me remember who those girls were from my school and that is probably a good thing.

– I attended two Minnesota Vikings games in the Metrodome, because why would you attend anymore now that we have HD-TV? I went to the first one with my dad, and the Vikings were taking on the Detroit Lions. All I remember is that the Lions were down to their third string QB to start the game, that QB (Shaun Hill??? Possibly) not knowing where he was and running out of the back of the end-zone for a safety and hearing Zac Brown Band’s ‘Chicken Fried’ for the first time ever on the ride back home.

The other game I went to was through school, I think the FFA, but I could be wrong. The game featured my two favorite teams, the Vikings and the Denver Broncos. We met in the school’s shop waiting for the bus to arrive, only to find out that we weren’t going to have a bus coming. So the group of us, hoped into various vehicles and drove to Minneapolis ourselves. The vehicle I was in included some of my best buds: Isaac, Austin, and Tipper and we jammed out to Eric Church on the ride to and fro (been hooked on him ever since) and had my first ever Chipotle experience on the way home (also been hooked ever since).

The game looked really good for the Vikings for the first three quarters and then something remarkable happened… Tebow Time. Yes, I was a witness to one of the remarkable comebacks Tim Tebow made with Denver Broncos down the stretch in the 2011 season. #Blessed

—

I can’t really pick which one of these is my favorite memory from the Metrodome. They all have a little something special in my heart. Somewhere in the boxes and boxes of pictures my mother has, I’m fairly certain there is a picture of the Twins game I brought my grandma to. It might not be a great picture, but it’s a picture of a memory. Memories last a lifetime even when lifetimes end.