What in the Wide Wide World of Sports!?

As of right now, the Michigan economy is in the dumpster. In fact, it’s more of a dumpster fire. Usually a good focal point for states that are in the dumps or that are burning in the dumpster are the local sports. With sports, we can escape from our real world problems for awhile and just watch athletes at their finest.

Being from Michigan and a Michigan State University Alum, I still like to keep up with teams in Michigan. There are the Red Wings, Pistons, Tigers and Lions. I think they have a WNBA team, but no one considers that a sport. If you do consider it a sport name the past 3 champions of the league, yeah, that’s what I thought, shut up.

Besides professional sports, there are great college sports too!

Being in the dumps right now and with an unemployment rate of 46.3% (a little bit of rounding is involved in that figure) people have all the time in the world to watch their teams. You would hope that with the current conditions in the state, things would be great for sports. Well, like the economy, so went the sports, spinning around the toilet bowl on their way down through the crapper. Let me sum up some of the great accomplishments in the great state of Michigan from the 2009 year so far:

1) Red Wings lose in Game 7 of the Stanely Cup finals to the Pittsburgh Penguins. They were up 3-2 and had game 7 on home ice. I still don’t like the Penguins and never will for that reason, jerks.

2) Michigan State Spartans Men’s Basketball team comes out of no-where to be the bracket buster and play in the Championship Game against UNC in the March Madness Finals. The icing on the cake was the game was being played in their backyard at Ford Field in Detroit! The game was over in about 1.8 seconds, they got crushed along with a lot of hearts in Michigan.

3) Just last night the good old Tigers blow a 3 game lead with 4 games left to lose the AL Central. Now I really don’t care about baseball so this had the impact of 1 puff for Snoop Dogg, zero. I just mention it because of the epic failure it was, first time it’s ever happened in baseball. They made the Wall of Shame for this one!

4) The Lions had the distinction of winning for the first time in 2 years in football last week. Then they go to Chicago and get their dogs kicked. To top it off, Johnny Knox returns a kick off for a touchdown. That’s not the amazing part, a ball boy sprinting down the field with 2 balls in his hands outruns the entire Lions team. Granted he didn’t have blockers in front of him, but he also isn’t making hundreds of thousands of dollars for this one game. Terrible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPE110QQ9gU&feature=player_embedded

5) The Pistons managed to make the playoffs in the Spring. No one seemed to notice or care as they were a road bump for a much better team, whoever they played in the first round. They also made headlines for trading away their best player for an older dude that is pretty much an old thug that can’t play anymore. Good thinking! Let’s top it off by ruining our chances for getting a decent draft pick by making the playoffs. At least the Lions had the right mentality when they ran the board last year and ended the season with a perfect 0-16 record.

6) The icing on the cake is the fact that when our professional sports are getting blown out by out of state teams, the in state collegiate teams beat each other up. First Central Michigan pulls a horse shoe out of their butt to win in the last seconds against Michigan State. Then a Top 25 University of Michigan stumbles into East Lansing and loses to Michigan State. Since University of Michigan beat Western Michigan earlier in the season, Central Michigan (!?) claims the prize for best college football team?

The good news is that the Red Wings started again and Michigan State Men’s Basketball is returning a lot of guys. UNC thankfully graduated their top 18 players to the NBA, so we shouldn’t have them as a problem this year!

Go Green and Let’s Go Red Wings!