TAGMAT!: So it Begins

TAGMAT (They are giving money away today!) is a weekly column done every week by APIAS.net’s resident gambling addict, Smoothron.  This site in no way advocates gambling, especially excessively.  Smoothron’s degenerate friend, who will refer to as Casino Bobby also gives you his picks for the week.  If we can tell you anything, bet against both of them and you should be able to retire within the first month of the season.

I am so excited to be able to gamble again.  Yes, I’m aware that gambling is allowed on sports other than college football, but this is the official start of the gambling season.  Get excited!  With no games to recap from the last week, I’ll go ahead and share a story about where the title of this column came from.  Let me take you back to Keeneland, April of 2006.  Casino Bobby, BobWicket, cp22bru, Casino Bobby’s mom and a cast of thousands are tailgating before heading into the races.  I put down about 20 beers in two hours and embarrassed myself incredibly in front of CB’s mom.  Quite impressive, of course.  Somehow, I managed to find my way to the track and was coherent enough to place and win a few bets.  CB and Bru are looking for me and spot me from a balcony looking down at the paddock.  “Smooth!  What the hell are you doing??”  I look up, perplexed, and then realize these are my friends.  “Boys, they are giving money away today!”  I, of course, had won about $37.  Regardless, that’s how we’re looking at this season:  they’re just going to give us the money.  Follow along after the jump if you want to live like Turtle for the rest of your life.

FYCFP: The Time Has Come

Typically, I write FWP on Fridays predicting what will transpire over the weekend.  I am stepping things up and am going out on a limb to predict what is going to happen this year in college football.  If you’ve spent any time around this site, you know we are huge college football fans and love the four months over which it spans.  What’s not to love about the upcoming football season?  There are no less than eight teams with legitimate national title hopes and a bunch of guys gunning for the Heisman Trophy.  Who will come out on top?  Let’s find out…

• The preseason #1 team in the country (Georgia) will not finish the season at the same place.  Hey, the talent that Georgia has is second to none.  Matt Stafford at QB is solid and the Moreno kid at RB is just nasty.  They were playing as good as anyone in the country at the end of last year, but their schedule is ridiculous.  They play at South Carolina (rivalry game), at #15 Arizona St., #24 Alabama, at #7 LSU, #5 Florida in Jacksonville and at #10 Auburn.  That’s a damn gauntlet, but that’s the curse of playing in the SEC.  If Richt can get double-digit wins with that schedule, he should get a medal.
• Mark Mangino will eat more doughnuts than could fit in Memorial Stadium.  Yes, for those of you know didn’t know (I had to Wiki it), the Jayhawks play at Memorial Stadium.  Mangino is a favorite around the site, because of his mammoth size.  What a fat bastard!  The Jayhawks were a one-hit wonder last year and I look for them to plummet quickly back to Earth.  This will cause Adidas to make the largest pullover in history as Mangino copes by investing even more money in Krispy Kreme.
• The winner of the Ohio State/USC game on September 13 will play in the national championship.  I love the fact that these teams are playing this game.  Neither team is scared to play a big game early in the year.  Ohio State has played a home-and-home with Texas in the last few years and USC had one with Nebraska.  Both teams play in conferences which are subpar, so the winner is in the driver’s seat to the title game.  If Ohio State is that winner (which I think they will be), the entire country may vomit if they have to watch them play in the national championship game again.

FWP: My Head Hurts

Fearless Weekend Predictions is a weekly column running on Friday afternoons where our resident soothsayer (or whoever we can get) locks down what will transpire in the coming 72 hours. It’s better to get these out before the 7-year is open.  The crystal ball gets cloudy.

Wow, what a week!  I love the NBA Draft and I highly encourage you to check out the NBA Draft LiveBlog from last night.  A few commenters even stopped by and they were fantastic.  There was also some interleague baseball that was mildly entertaining, capped off with Shawn Chacon trying to kill his GM.  The douche known as Kyle Busch won the NASCAR race out in Sonoma.  EURO 2008 raged on to a cast of hundreds in the US.  And, as usual, the Mets stink.  Summer rolls on this weekend: Mets/Yankees, Cubs/White Sox and that riveting Tigers/Rockies rivalry; the finals of EURO 2008; Joe Crawford moves to LA and you-know-who will be on the prowl.  Here we go…

• The Mets will get swept by the Yankees.  Well, I really hope this doesn’t happen, but every week I talk about how they’re going to do well, so we’ll see how they do if I say they’re going to do poorly.  I have little to say about the Mets until they start playing better.
• Bethanie Mattek will keep on rolling at Wimbledon.  I’d never heard of Mattek until about five minutes ago, but by the looks of this picture, I think she’s great.  I really could give two shits about tennis, however, when the ladies look like her I can really get into it.
• Joe Crawford will start living the dream.  Wow, the guy balls at the pre-draft camps and ends up getting drafted in the second round by the Lakers.  Come on, if Sasha Vujacic can play significant minutes for them, surely Joe Joe can make the team.
• Rick Dutrow will have some free time.  HA HA HA.  I laugh at you, Rick.  A mistake apparently caused one of his horses to test positive for a banned steroid?  Yeah, because none of his horses ever take steroids?  Oh, that’s right… they all do.  I’m glad he’s suspended and I’m glad Big Brown isn’t a Triple Crown winner. 
• Danillo Galinari will travel around NYC with a bodyguard.  Shit, what a way to be welcomed to America!  If I were him, I would have played it up; asking the people to boo more.  That would have really confused the Knick fans.  Either that or I would have held up a homemade poster that read, “AT LEAST I’M NOT BALKMAN!”
• Jimmie Johnson will win this weekend at Loudon.  Even if you’re not a big NASCAR fan (and I’m certainly not), it’s easy to tell Jimmie Johnson is a huge tool.  He’s just not a guy you’d want to get a beer with, unlike Tony Stewart or Dale Jr.  Somehow, some way, he managed to get Chandra to marry him.  Chandra is sexy and I really like that cowgirl hat. 
• Everyone will keep counting down to college football.  Seriously, this is not a good sports weekend.  Only about two months left… thank Mitch.
• Billy Gillispie will keep lurking in the weeds, but then sleep with your girlfriend.  We haven’t heard a peep from the guy in months!  What’s he doing?  Well, if you have a significant other in the greater-Lexington area, you may not want to know.
• Fathers in Indianapolis will lock up their daughters.  Troy Murphy, Mike Dunleavy and Josh McRoberts are all now Pacers.  That is one vanilla team right there.  It’s no surprise that their GM is Larry Bird.  You know, White Jesus… or something like that.
• Spain will win EURO 2008.  I have no clue who’s going to win, but I don’t really like Germany and I found this picture of a sexy Spanish fan.

Gosh, that was brutal.  There isn’t a damn thing going on this weekend.  Here’s hoping you have a pool to use and cold beers to drink.  Enjoy.

We’re 400!!!

Well, technically, we’re not 400 days old until tomorrow, but much like 2SL we can’t keep help but bust out a little early.  For those of you who haven’t been here from the start this here web log started back in ought seven on April 22nd.  That parting shot fired over the wall of the Internets at Lexington Herald Leader resident write John Clay was our first foray into this odd world of sports blogging. 

Since that day we knew we’d never be the same again, and if you’ve read this site more than 2 days, we suspect you feel much the same about your own life since discovering us.  We’re sure you’ve never been more horrified.  Where’d we go from there? 

Well it’s hard to say.  A little baseball, a little racin’, a little college football and then it was New Year’s.  Time was flying and our hits were going up.  Soon, with the help of Deadspin, With Leather, and some well-timed Google image searches we were floating at about 1,000 hits per day.  We’re happy to say that’s still the case.  And we’re extremely happy that we’re had over 330,000 hits in a little over a year since we started this.  We’d like to get teary and thank everyone but we’ve still got some time to recap.  Hit the more for recaps of our best and worst ideas around this here blog.

So Close To Being Good

It’s been some slow Holidays for the APIAS crew.  It’s been somewhat chaotic in our sports worlds as we all wait to see where we end up in the bowl standings.  TGC and 2SL have one more game before they have to worry about all that.  That’s because their Vols won the SEC East.  Congrats to them on that, and good luck with LSU in the championship game. 

This post isn’t about the SEC championship though.  It’s more of a recollection.  It’s a “what-might-have-been.”  We’re talking about UK football.

How could seven and five be dissapointing?  For UK football!  It’s insane to think that a winning season is dissapointing, but after the six and one start, CATS fans were thinking BIG.  Like 9-3 big.  Surely we could scrape one out against LSU and Florida.  Surely we would wipe up Vandy and Miss St.  One win out of the Georgia and Tennessee games and we win nine and play on New Year’s.

 That’s not how it ended though.  A crushing defeat to Mississippi State led a long end of the season for this year’s UK team.  Woodson laid an egg in the Georgia game and a crushing defeat at home against the SEC champs (which BobWicket and eDay watched up CLOSE) ended the season at 7-5 just like last year. 

Where do they end up this year?  Music City Bowl again?  It’s too bad, because this team was special.  They battled every game.  They played a good UT team (again, SEC East champs!) to a 52-50 loss in 4 overtimes.  No UK team in the last 20 years would have played that way.  They would not have made a game out of it after getting rolled up in the first half.

This year’s UK team was (is?) special though.  The record at the end of the year will be equal to or less than last year’s, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.  A killer schedule this year (compared to last year’s) made most fans (this one included) think that 6 and 6 would be lucky.  These kids played above and beyond all expectations all year except one week (we got Croomed) and they deserve respect for that.  No matter what the final record says.

All SEC All The Time!

It’s only one week until football Saturdays sports fans.  You know what that means.  The boys from APIAS.net will be bringing you one solid week of Southeastern Conference action.

Next week’s Super Monday Sports Radio will be all SEC, all the time.  Leading up to that, we’ve got a whole week of SEC action for you to sink your teeth into.

2SL will be bringing you Tuesday’s post on the SEC, eDayStat will be bringing you TWIRS from the SEC, SmoothRon will be bringing you the best of gambling odds in the SEC, and TGC will be dropping the T’d Up on the biggest SEC tool of the week.

We’re excited.  You’re excited.  The American people are excited.  It’s SEC week on APIAS.net.

College Football Countdown: 7 Weeks

I  realize TGC loves Tennessee, but I had to hijack this week’s CFC for my man D.L.J.  Definately the best UK catch ever and one of the best I’ve ever seen in college sports.