For those of us that have been playing NCAA football and the Madden NFL franchise over the last years the gameplay has been pretty much the same year after year.  EA did a great job this year on Madden and I’ve been really impressed with how much better it is compared to the last few years.  The game is much more realistic and you can’t get away with some of the garbage 360 jump passes for touchdowns that you can pull off in NCAA 09.

I must say that the Rewind feature EA is touting as a great new feature for the 09 version of Madden might be the worst thing ever incorporated in a video game. If you are unfamiliar with the rewind feature in Madden, if you throw an interception, miss a field goal, fail on a 4th down conversion, fumble, etc. you can press a button and the game will literally rewind and you will be able to play that play again.  Even golf games don’t have mulligans and people actually use those in real life.   I am really baffled as to what in the world EA was thinking when they put this into the game and what made them think that it would be a good addition to their game.

The best feature ever included on and EA sports game by far has to be the EA Locker that you can access on NCAA football. It is a place for you to save your rosters and other game files on EA’s online server. EA has done this because they are aware with how annoying it is to see “#39″ when P.J. Hill is running the ball instead of “Hill”. The same nerds (and I mean that in the best way possible) that enter in all of the names of the players for every team every year can now save their rosters to their EA locker and anybody with an XBOX Live account can download these rosters to their machines.  The website that led me to this discovery that has the Gamertags of the xbox live users that have the rosters in their lockers is http://freencaa09rosters.com/.

On what he misses most about playing: “I get up and 60,000 people aren’t cheering for you to take out the garbage on Wednesday morning, you know what I mean?”

     If you haven’t already heard about ChaCha, you are in for a treat.  ChaCha is “a mobile answers service for people on the go” according to their website.  Here is how it works: You text a question to CHA-CHA (242-242).  A ChaCha guide receives your question, searches for the answer on the internet, and texts you back with the answer. The service is free.  It counts as a standard text message so if you have unlimited text messaging it is free. It also includes a link to the source where the ChaCha guide got his or her information so you can verify that the information you get is correct.  You can text them any question and if the answer can be found on the internet you will have your answer along with the source it was found in a minute or two. You can even text the letter “w” and your zip code and they will send you the weather forecast. The service is marketed as a way to turn any phone into a smart phone but for me, it turns my phone into SportsCenter.  Yesterday I was driving to the Braves game at Turner Field in Atlanta and wanted to know how the Nadal-Federer match was going.  My brother texted the question to ChaCha and it gave him the score. Its unfortunate that we didn’t ask ChaCha what the weather was going to be so we could have known that there were going to be heavy thunderstorms.  While ChaCha isn’t marketed as a sports tool necessarily, it is perfect for sports fans without smartphones.  If you want to know how your favorite team is doing, no problem. ChaCha is also extremely useful when you are having a sports argument with a friend.  How many championships has Sam Cassell won? ChaCha to the rescue. Have fun.

We decided that this was necessary because there was no one place to find a list of all the blogs that are written by athletes. Yardbarker.com has a ton of athlete blogs but even they don’t have a page with a list of all of their “verified” athletes. This is our list of blogs written by athletes and it is meant to be a comprehensive list of all blogs maintained by athletes. If you know of an athlete blog that we don’t have on our list we want you to email us.

Our Athlete Blog Directory

The name Billy Knight will mean little to the casual sports fan. He served as the Hawks GM for five seasons which was most notably marked by a Hawks team that barely managed double digit wins and ugly ownership battle concerning one of Knight’s arguably best moves, the trade for Joe Johnson. Yet there is only one name which Hawks fans will remember from the Billy Knight era and funnily enough it is a player that has never even worn a Hawks Jersey: Chris Paul.
Three years ago the Hawks landed the second pick in the draft. It was a given that Milwaukee would draft the center from Utah Andrew Bogut. However, the Hawks stood in an interesting position with the second pick, whether to draft for need or to draft the most talented player left at that spot, unfortunately the Hawks did neither with the pick. To be fair, it should be noted that the player the Hawks drafted Marvin Williams was considered to be clearly the better NBA prospect than anyone else in the draft after Bogut. Instead of blossoming Williams has turned into a solid and still improving wing that does nothing exceptionally well. He still could turn into a good player but one thing is painfully clear, he is no Chris Paul.
continue reading "Eulogy for Billy Knight"

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