An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
What happened on Sunday, November 30, 2014?
The longest weekend of football almost concludes: The long Thanksgiving weekend has a lot of football spread out over four days. The NFL action concludes tonight with a game between the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets. Until then, take care of all your NFL conversational needs with our NFL One Liners column.
The Major League Soccer finals are set: The New England Revolution and Los Angeles Galaxy will meet in the finals of Major League Soccer thanks to this weekend’s games. The New England Revolution tied the New York Red Bulls 2-2 thanks to Charlie Davies’ two goals. Davies was a promising National team caliber player until a terrible car accident derailed that part of his career. It’s nice to see him find success at the club level. The Los Angeles Galaxy lost 2-1 to the Seattle Sounders but that was enough to get them into the finals on a tie-breaker. The career of Landon Donovan, once captain of the U.S. Men’s National soccer team, will continue for one final game. Line: I’m starting to understand the MLS playoff rules but it still seems weird for the team that lost its last game to be celebrating their advancement to the finals and the team that won to be sadly packing their bags for vacation. What’s Next: The MLS Cup on Sunday, December 7 at 3 p.m.
Buzzer beater in College Basketball: I have to admit, I find a lot of the college basketball regular season to be less than totally compelling. The problem with having the most purely exciting post-season, March Madness, is that it does take a little of the attention of your sport’s regular season. Nonetheless, games like yesterdays one between the seventh ranked Texas Longhorns and the 24th ranked Connecticut Huskies remind me of why college basketball can be so exciting. Jonathan Holmes of the Texas Longhorns hit a shot with two seconds left in the game to put his team up by a point. That’s how the game ended, 55 to 54. Line: Hints of March in November!
Kobe gets numbers and the Lakers win: The Lakers are one of the most compelling teams in the NBA this year because their star player, the aged (for basketball) Kobe Bryant seems EITHER to be torn between a desire to win and a desire to chase individual scoring records OR to be convinced that his teammates are so bad that the best way to win is for him to shoot the ball constantly. Last night, during an overtime game against the Toronto Raptors, Kobe got to have his cake and eat it too. He scored 31 points and got 12 assists (and 11 rebounds for a “triple-double”) and helped his team to a 129-122 win. Line: Hey! Kobe shoots and passes!
