Dribbling Ink

Tonight is Game 7 of the NLCS between the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants. Winner takes all—all being a trip to MLB’s greatest prize, the World Series. Neither of these teams are strangers to postseason play: the Cardinals won the World Series last year and the Giants the year before that. It’s the Rally Squirrel versus the Rally Monkey. The Midwest versus the West Coast. A violet state versus a blue state (don’t worry if this political reference makes no sense). One team’s season will end tonight. The losing team will be banished for five months, unable to call itself the champion, until the quest starts anew in 2013, when the season begins in April. There is nothing more exciting in sports than an elimination game. Every aspect of the game is exaggerated. Nothing goes unnoticed. Every detail matters. Hyperbole abounds. First pitch is slated for some time after 7 PM central time. (Via Forbes.com) Fittingly, the third and final presidential debate is...

(Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images) It’s finally that week, the one that rolls around once a season in college and professional football: the bye week. Coming off a 49-7 beat down of Kentucky, the Arkansas Razorbacks have a free week to get healthy and prepare for a critical stretch of games. (If the Hogs want to salvage 2012, they have to win their next two games against Ole Miss and Tulsa. Assuming they win those games, the Hogs would have to beat one of three top-12 ranked teams remaining on the schedule—at #7 South Carolina, at #12 Mississippi State, and home against #6 LSU—to be bowl eligible.) Usually during bye weeks I pay special attention to my secondary team, Arkansas State. This year, however, provides Arkansans with a special twist: the dreaded double-bye weekend. A quick thought: Maybe ASU should schedule a game at War Memorial during Arkansas’s bye week each year. I’m not trying to be facetious; I actually think this is a good idea. There are a lot of football f...

With the Razorbacks searching for their next head football coach, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the positives and negatives of the state of Arkansas. It’s an often-cited fact that Arkansas doesn’t have a professional sports team, which makes the Razorbacks the state’s pro team by default and consequently increases the attractiveness of the football head coaching position. (I don’t think there’s any question that Arkansas would struggle to support a professional sports team—the population just isn’t large enough. I think there would be a core of rabid fans, but not enough casual fans to make a consistent profit. And professional sports teams are all about the money.) This led me to consider an important question: If the state of Arkansas had to vote on which professional sports team to adopt as its own, which team would Arkansans pick? Regional proximity was one of the most important aspects I considered, so I included how many miles each team is from Little Rock...