Well, once again, it's been a while since I was with you. The last time I was with you, we'd just come off the NCAA basketball championship game...one of the best games I've seen in my lifetime for sure. Since then, a lot has happened and a lot more Cinderella stories have come to fruition.
However, this is still a football blog, first and foremost, so that's where I think I will start.
And in particular, I'm going to start with what's going on with Von Miller and the Broncos. Von Miller holding up the Denver Broncos franchise is not some new novelty; this has been going on for quite some time.
In fact, this thing has been simmering all offseason; as recently as April, the Broncos and Miller were 20 million dollars apart in contract negotiations. See, Von Miller after a five year run which includes four Pro Bowls, two first team All-Pro appearances, 60 sacks, 6.5 playoff sacks and a Super Bowl win, Von Miller wants to be the highest paid defensive player in the NFL. The problem is, the Elway-led Broncos don't like to overpay for players; we saw that with Osweiler. If history repeats then Elway will almost certainly not overpay for Miller.
Then, a few weeks ago on Jun. 16, the day of Game 6 of the NBA Finals, Miller took to Instagram to deliver this message. That he loved his teammates, coaches and fans, but that there was no way he would play in 2016 under the franchise tag.
So far, neither side is blinking and it's July. Training camp is right around the corner. The world champs have a lot of problems other than #58 (namely Mark Sanchez being the quarterback), but right now the Miller story is almost certainly at the top of Denver fans' concerns. Miller almost certainly saw Eagles defensive player Fletcher Cox get a 6 year extension worth 103M and he's thinking about mean green.
Now, on to other major sports stories such as...
Well, the NBA Finals, for one thing. Two things come to mind two weeks into Cleveland's first championship in 52 years. The first thing is, whether you love or hate Lebron James, you have to respect Lebron James. The fact that anyone could get to six NBA Finals and win three championships is astounding. I watched Michael Jordan in his prime and he didn't come close to pulling off the feat Lebron pulled off in these NBA Finals.
At one point during the Cavs comeback, which was from three games to one down against the 73 win Golden State Warriors, and included the seventh game win on the road, I thought to myself, perhaps this is the way the 52 year Cleveland drought had to end. It had to end in the most dramatic way possible, in a decisive game, on the road, coming back from impossible odds against a historically great team.
As for the Warriors, I think it will be a while before they get back to the top of the mountain. They'll still be a great team and win a lot of games, but there's no way that sort of loss they suffered in the NBA Finals can't have an affect on them. You don't suffer that sort of loss without some hangover effect. The early prediction here says that if Kevin Durant re-ups with the Thunder, they are the favorite in my book to win the NBA title in 2017. If not them, then probably Cleveland if Lebron returns.
Oh and Ayesha Curry, Stephen Curry's wife should be made to delete her twitter account. Twitter is seriously the biggest loaded gun ever. It's great for news, but that place also tends to bring out the idiot in a lot of people. After the Cavs won game 6, Ayesha was on Twitter claiming the NBA was "rigged."
This is coming from someone who has internally questioned the fairness of the NBA for years, Ayesha needs to 1. have her account deleted and 2. keep her mouth shut. There have been a lot of questionable events in NBA history but this was not one of them. Golden State not only got beat they got beat fair and square. In games 5 and 6 they got hammered.
Staying with the NBA and the beginning of free agency, the big theme so far has been massive, max contracts. Guys like Chandler Parsons, Dwight Howard, Mike Conley and DeMar DeRozan and others are getting paid massive contracts. Of those four, I think only DeRozan really deserves that sort of money. I can't imagine what Durant and Lebron's contracts will be like when they get done.
On to golf now and the US Open. Sure, we've seen PGA tournaments since the Oakmonster and the Bridgestone is going on this weekend in Lebron James' hometown. But I'm not sure I've seen anything quite like what happened with Dustin Johnson at Oakmont. Just as a matter of record, I've never been a huge Dustin Johnson fan, but I became one after Oakmont. I was so impressed with how Dustin handled himself considering how much the USGA tried to screw him over. You want to talk about someone who could easily have complained about a bad call and I wouldn't blame him, this was the guy. You can read more about the incident here: Dustin
First of all, on the controversial sequence that happened at 5 on Sunday, Jun. 19, Dustin never hit the ball from what I saw. Dustin even told officials he never hit the ball. And I'll repeat something David Feherty said on the Jim Rome show the Monday after the US Open and that is that golf is a gentleman's game of honor. If the guy says he didn't hit the ball you have to take him at his word. Even worse, is that officials said they were going to wait till the end of Dustin's round to decide whether they were going to penalize him. What a load of poppycock.
Dustin Johnson's PGA win may have been a harbinger of good things to come for his alma mater, Coastal Carolina University because on Thursday in Omaha, the small commuter school from Conway, South Carolina won the College World Series, beating Arizona to claim its first NCAA title in any sport. Get a load of this; as improbable as it sounds that Coastal Freaking Carolina University has an NCAA title in baseball, take a look at the run they had to get through to win it all. They had to beat:
NC State @ NC State (down to their last STRIKE in regionals)
LSU @ LSU. Yes, THE LSU. College baseball power, six time national champs, AT LSU
Overall #1 seed Florida (Florida eventually went 2 and out in Omaha)
#5 seed Texas Tech in an elimination game
TCU who has been to the CWS four times in the last seven years and they had to do it twice
Arizona Wildcats, baseball power, four time national champs and had to do it twice to win it all
What an impressive run. They are just the latest Cinderella story in a 12 months that's been full of them. Such great sports stories include the Kansas City Royals as World Champs, Leicester City Football Club as English Barclays Premier League soccer champs and Cleveland becoming champs for the first time since 1964 amongst others.
Until next time...
