Actual wife not pictured

It’s Super Bowl week—which for many men is the most important gambling day of the year. The one question on gamblers’ minds everywhere is not who will win the game, but which team will cover the spread.

Last year, not knowing whom to pick, I consulted with my wife, who knows next to nothing about football, with the hopes she would be my good-luck charm.  Amazingly, not only did she accurately predict that the Packers would cover the spread but she nearly got the score of the game right.

So I decided to consult her once again in hopes that she could pick me another winner. Here’s how our conversation went… (more…)

It’s that time of year: your officemate is collecting money for Super Bowl boxes. Those things where you pay somewhere between $5 to $20 to put your name in a blank box which will eventually have two numbers attached to it. At the end of each quarter, the last number of each team’s score is taken and someone wins. The great thing about these things are that they require absolutely no skill, i.e. non-fans are just as good at it as the guy who watches three games simultaneously every Sunday and is in four fantasy leagues. When you fill in the box, there’s no way of knowing which numbers you are going to get.

You get your numbers and hope for the best. Nonetheless, if you know the first thing about football, with a 2-5, you know you’re sort of screwed and are going to be resigned to rooting for safeties, missed extra points and teams going for two in inappropriate situations. So, what if this were a game of skill, and there’s an auction for the numbers. What’s the most valuable box?

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This is always a great time of year at Living with Balls. The Super Bowl is around the corner, which is usually exciting in its own right. But because I create my annual Super Bowl drinking game, I see a huge spike in visits. My pageviews nearly double because of it. Apparently, there are plenty of degenerates in this country looking to get obliterated during the Super Bowl.

I’m not a big drinker these days but I plan on getting blitzed on Super Bowl Sunday. As a Jets fan, I couldn’t imagine a worse Super Bowl than Patriots vs. Giants. Sure it was great in 2008, when the Giants took down the undefeated Pats. I was right there, rooting for Big Blue. But now I’m just tired of it. I have obnoxious Giants fans gloating to me in one ear and even more obnoxious Patriots fans gloating in the other. I hope to get good and drunk and forget the result of the game.

But enough about me. You came here to find a Super Bowl drinking game. Well, you came to the right place. As always, I must warn you with this disclaimer:

This drinking game is not for the casual drinker. Proceed with caution. Living with Balls is not responsible if you get violently ill from playing this game. Feel free to adjust the rules to your tolerance or just quit playing when you’re good and drunk.

I have set up a game for both beer and shots. You’re welcome to do one or the other, or play both if you’re feeling daring. (more…)

Every year, in the world of fantasy football, there are a few guys that just don’t live up to expectations. No matter how good your team is, you’ll always have one guy on your team that you hate. Every so often, there will be a guy SO BAD that you swear you’ll never draft him ever again. NO MATTER WHAT. You hate him for destroying your dream of fantasy football glory and you’ll never forgive him.

The 2011 season is no different. Below you will find a list of players who are currently the most hated men in fantasy football.

I prepared a similar list in 2009, but many of those players have become largely irrelevant. Predictably their shitty play in the fantasy world correlated with their shitty play in real life and now most of them are out of football. Before I get to the current list, let’s recap where the players from my 2009 list stand now. (more…)

October has arrived. Though I do miss the warm weather and good times of summer, October is always exciting because when it comes to sports, there is no better month.

It’s time to neglect your responsibilities and ignore your girlfriend because you have a lot of TV watching to do. With college football on Saturdays, NFL football on Sundays and the MLB playoffs just about every day, there isn’t much time for anything else.

When it comes to sports, there is really no other month that compares. (more…)

Scandals are everywhere in college athletics. Over the past year, we’ve seen Terrelle Pryor get paid to autograph memorabilia at Ohio State, Cam Newtown get mixed up in allegations that his father tried to bribe Mississippi State and, most recently, that half the Miami football team was enjoying free prostitutes. Anytime a new scandal comes up, someone in the mainstream media, with nothing else to write about, likes to pose the question: Should college athletes get paid?

ESPN and the Wall Street Journal have made a case for paying college athletes and most recently, Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer joined in on the fun with an insanely long article in the Atlantic. He gives plenty of reasons why college athletes should be paid to play—even comparing student-athletes to slaves—but fails to outline any sort of plan to pull this off. Here’s the main point of his argument…

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

The basis for many people’s argument, including Branch’s, is that these college athletes are poor and this is why they resort to taking improper benefits. Since the NCAA and big-time Division I schools are profiting from these athletes, aren’t the students entitled to get a piece of the revenue pie?

Can we PLEEEAASE STOP with this argument!? This will NEVER, EVER happen, (more…)

I typically do some sort of fantasy football post around this time each year.  This year I struggled with a way to present a fantasy football post in a different manner than in years’ past.  I suppose I could have done some sort of predictions or strategy guide but I waited too long to do that and no one is coming to this site for fantasy football advice anyway.

Instead, I have a somewhat random collection of thoughts about the upcoming season and fantasy football in general.  They are a little all over the place but hopefully you’ll find this post both informative and entertaining.  (more…)

It seems like anytime an all-star game approaches, no matter what the sport, there are always people talking about how to make the game more interesting or how to make the game as exciting as it once was.

The truth is, there is nothing anyone can do to makes these games more exciting. All-Star games in any sport are nothing but a glorified, overly drawn out exhibition game.

All-Star games used to be exciting many years ago because sports coverage was very regionalized. Fans could usually only watch games of their local team. To follow the other teams in the league, you either had to read the newspaper or wait till the end of the news broadcast for a sports anchor to scroll scores across the screen.

The All-star game used to be one of the few opportunities a fan would have to see some of the game’s best players. Let’s say you were a fan of a National League team in the 80s. Your only chance to see American League stars such as Don Mattingly or Roger Clemens play was during the All-Star Game. This isn’t the case anymore. (more…)