Smack Zone

By Erez Ladetzky, Smack Zone Contributor Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, you’ve seen all the commercials for FanDuel and Draft Kings. How could you not, they are only played about 23 hours and 59 minutes a day! Yesterday came word that an employee of Draft Kings won more than $300,000 on FanDuel. Nothing wrong with that. However, that employee used inside information not available to the public to pick his team. Everything wrong with that. Now, both sites have made it a rule that no employee is allowed to partake in the fun of daily fantasy sports. That makes perfect sense. It’s a bit surprising that this is the first we have heard of this going on. While gambling is “illegal” in almost every state, somehow the NFL partners with these sites that allow … wait for it … gambling. Daily fantasy during the NFL season is fun. I play using FanDuel and it allows for much more creativity than your regular fantasy team. Every week, you pick a lineup using a $60,000 salary cap. You guess who will have the best games that week. The key is finding cheap players who will have career games that week. There are tons of $1, $2 and $5 leagues with 100 other people that can win you a few hundred dollars. There are also bigger promotion leagues in the same price range with over 200,000 entries that you can win over $100,000 thousand. This is why these sites are so popular right now: Any given week you can win a lot of money. But don’t bet on winning in the large promotional leagues; that is (or was) a privilege reserved for the employees of FanDuel and Draft Kings. All that said, one great way to win some sweet Smack Apparel merchandise is to enter and win the weekly football picks contest. It is LIVE NOW, and the weekly winner gets three (3) Smack Apparel shirts, while the runner-up gets one. Go register at CONTEST.SMACKAPPAREL.COM and make your picks. DO IT. We promise no Smack Apparel employee will snake the victory away from you.

[caption id="attachment_1061" align="alignright" width="240"] If the curse is going to end this year, it's gotta start Wednesday.[/caption] By Erez Ladetzky, Smack Zone Contributor The National League wildcard game takes place tomorrow night at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. It features a division rivalry as the Chicago Cubs take on the Pittsburgh Pirates. It also features two teams that finished with the second- and third-highest win totals in all of MLB, and both would have won any other division that didn’t include the St. Louis Cardinals. This will be the Pirates’ third straight year in the wildcard game, losing last year to the eventual World Series Champions San Francisco Giants. In 2013, they beat the Reds but lost to the Cardinals in the NLDS in five games. They are looking to finally get over the hump this year and take down their division rival Cardinals. The Cubs, on the other hand, are one of the feel-good stories of the year. They weren’t supposed to make the postseason this quickly, but don’t tell them that. Joe Maddon took this very young and inexperienced ball club and turned them into a legitimate World Series contender in his first year. Needless to say, Chicago fans love them some Maddon. Chicago hasn’t been in the postseason since 2008. That year, they ended up getting swept in three games by the Dodgers, a season after getting swept by the Diamondbacks in the NLDS. Cubs fans are very confident in this team advancing to take on the Cardinals. That’s because Jake Arrieta and his MLB-history-best  0.45 ERA since the All-Star Break takes the mound. That’s right … A  0.45 ERA -- insane! This game has the makings of a classic October baseball clash. Two teams that both should be in the division series, but have to play this one-game playoff to advance (it would be nice if they at least could play a best-of-three series). A 3-2, or 2-1 game seems about right. Cubs fans will be traveling in droves to the 'burgh to cheer on their beloved Cubbies. Most people know the history of the Cubs, and how fans think the team is cursed. One college professor shows his sympathy for his student: That's our kind of professor! We're going to go out on a limb and take the Buccos in one.  

New Smack Zone contributor and Dolphins fan Mike Julianelle WAS going to write about how much it sucks to get up and watch a crappy team play a crappy game in crappy London. Then Joe Philbin got fired, and all was right with Mike's world. Sort of. Here's what he wrote instead: By Mike Julianelle, Smack Zone Contributor It’s a sad day when you start rooting for your team to lose just so they’ll fire their coach. As a Dolphins fan, that’s what I was doing Sunday morning. And at the end of last season. And the end of the 2013 season. And when Cam Cameron was the coach. And when Dave Wannstedt was the coach … But hey, at least Sunday’s embarrassing loss to the Jets (there’s no other kind of loss to the Jets) was good for something: The Dolphins finally fired Joe Philbin! And only 10-to-22 months too late! Let’s ignore the fact that 2015 was a wasted season as soon he wasn’t fired in January, regardless of the flashy Suh signing and subsequent preseason buzz. And let’s ignore the fact that even if interim head coach Dan Campbell lights a fire under the team and fires off a few wins, the odds that they can overcome two division losses and a 3-0 (probably 4-0) Patriots head start and somehow win the division are basically, laughably ZERO, and the odds that they can secure a wildcard berth are slim-to-none. Not at 1-3, with a patchwork offensive line, a decimated secondary, no linebackers, an inability/unwillingness to run the ball, and a quarterback who can’t throw a deep ball or an end zone fade to save his life and an owner who doesn’t have much of a backbone or any knowledge of football and somehow I’m not even referring to part-owner Gloria Estefan. [caption id="attachment_1243" align="alignleft" width="300"] If Joe Philbin was in charge of an actual dolphin show. Image: Giphy.[/caption] Instead let’s rejoice and ignore the fact that now we have to wait another four months before they hire a new head coach and another six months before the optimism of draft season dawns and another 10 months before the 2016 season starts and another sixteen months before we get depressed again. Today, they finally did something right! Mike Julianelle lives somewhere in New Jersey (we think; maybe it's Staten Island) and publishes the "anti-parenting" blog, Dad and Buried. He also writes for something called Huffington Post, whatever the hell that is. He's a long-time Dolphins fan for some reason.  

I'm just saying I am available for the right price??... #freeagent @nfl

— Connor Barth (@contbarth) October 4, 2015

By Erez Ladetzky, Smack Zone Contributor After Week 4 of the NFL season, one thing sticks out like a thorn: Kickers are bad. Kickers are really bad. Sure, the NFL made the extra point harder by moving it to the 15-yard line, but is that really an excuse for missing so many field goals?? The extra point has already been missed more times this year than all of last season*! Josh Scobee, who missed two critical field goals last Thursday in the OT loss to the Ravens, was promptly cut the next day. The kicking game is so bad after Sunday that a number of teams are calling Scobee in for a try out (he is injured and will need a few weeks to heal). Teams are willing to bring in Scobee, who is injured and missed two kicks last week. That has to be a blow to the egos of all these kickers missing left and right (pun intended). There might only be five good kickers remaining in the NFL. By good, we mean when they line up for a kick, they have an 85 percent chance of making it. It’s gotten that bad. The Saints kicker missed a potential game-winning kick at the end of the fourth quarter. Josh Lambo of the Chargers missed an easy field goal with no time remaining in a tie game. Lucky for him, Cleveland did a Cleveland thing and was offside. He made the game winning kick following that. (That guy in Jacksonville missed a bunch, too, but it's Jacksonville so who cares besides Gus Bradley? You know, GUS BRADLEY? He's the Jaguars coach. Gus. Bradley. Nothing? You need to read more.) Nobody for sure knows why kickers are struggling so much. Yes it is a lot of pressure to make a kick, but these guys are professionals. If you have a knack for kicking something, call an NFL team and see if you can try out. About half the league is looking for kickers. Don’t worry if you don’t make it or get cut, another team will be looking for you. *Including two by now-former Bucs kicker Kyle Brindza, who was released even as we wrote this post.

[caption id="attachment_1236" align="aligncenter" width="474"] Things are bad for the University of Texas, but it could always be worse. Illustration: Steve Hill for Smack Zone.[/caption] We know what you’re thinking: What college football team sucks more than the Texas Longhorns under second-year coach Charlie Strong? Wait a minute. WHY WOULD YOU ASK SUCH A QUESTION? What are you, some kind of agitator? Do you relish negativity? Are you one of those people who enjoys the misery of others? Damn, that’s cold, dude. And at the start of Red River Rivalry week, too. You ought to be ashamed. Rather than ask such a negative, nasty, unhelpful question, why not take a positive approach? Why not think of it in terms of how much better University of Texas football is than these 33 things:

1. A root canal.
2. Dropping a bowling ball on your big toe.
3. Taking a sip of coffee that you thought was still warm but turns out to be ice-freaking-cold.
4. Taking a sip of coffee you didn’t realize was about 8,000 degrees and burning the hell of out your tongue.
5. Unpassable kidney stones.
6. Running out of gas on Route 90 between Del Rio, Texas, and Van Horn, Texas.
7. NOT running out of gas on Route 90 between Del Rio and Van Horn.
8. Idaho football. Barely.
9. Dropping your iPhone in the toilet.
10. Losing the remote. Again.
11. Sitting in a recliner 15 feet away from the coffee table, which is where the remote turned out to be.
12. Graduating with $60,000 in student loan debt and having to move back in with your parents.
13. Standing in line for an hour at the DMV with no signal on your iPhone.
14. When the PlayStation network is hacked again and all you want to do is play FIFA 16.
15. Going into the Swamp on a high with national title aspirations and getting the crap kicked out of you.
16. Getting sand in your Tag Heuer at the beach.
17. Not being able to figure out what Instagram filter works best on your amazing sunset photo.
18. Drafting Jordy Nelson in the first round on your fantasy football team.
19. When Tori Spelling spills the beans about your summer romance.
20. Any given Kardashian.
21. At least half of the kickers in the NFL today.
22. Stepping in dog poop – barefoot.
23. Getting eliminated from baseball’s post-season on the last day of the season.
24. Getting your name spelled incorrectly on the cup at Starbucks.
25. When you have the perfect tweet about how bad Texas football is, but it’s too many characters.
26. Finding out Darth Vader is your father.
27. Finding out Hayden Christensen is Darth Vader.
28. Making out with Michael Scott of the Office.
29. Having to login EVERY TIME you open an app on a free Wi-Fi signal.
30. Craving Chick-fil-A on a Sunday.
31. Watching your carefully planned and choreographed Star Trek routine turn into a national laughing stock when the band loses its shape on the field and it starts to look like a giant Jawhawk performing oral sex instead of battling the Enterprise. [caption id="attachment_931" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Image: Kansas State University.[/caption]
32. Ebola.
33. Toby Flenderson.

Texas football is bad, yes. But it is still better than all of these things. So, take heart, Longhorn fans. It could always be worse.