The first time I spoke to the current head coach of the Akron Zips, he told me, “I’m never coaching Division I basketball again.” This was in 2000, and Keith Dambrot was coaching a local high school team after years of not being able to find a basketball job at all; he spent his weekdays working at securities firm in downtown Akron and his Sundays coaching a youth basketball clinic at the Jewish Community Center.

On Thursday night in Auburn Hills, Michigan, Dambrot’s 12th-seeded Akron Zips will play fifth-seeded Virginia Commonwealth in the NCAA tournament. It may not be the most compelling first-round matchup on paper, but it features the most intriguing tandem of coaches of any game in the entire tournament.

I have never been to Lubbock, and therefore I have never visited Chrome, the clothing store owned by Texas Tech alum Stephen Spiegelberg, who became the source of mockery this week when a rather fervid marketing memo he sent to a deputy athletic director at the school was forwarded to Deadspin. Here is what my research reveals: According to the utterly impartial reviewers at Yelp, it is pretty much the only designer boutique in town; according to these reviewers, its salesgirls are skinny and impatient and mostly naked, and they occasionally make snide references to Nordstrom.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the tenor of Spiegelberg’s memo, which is so utterly Zoolander-ish that I have to wonder if he wrote it just to attract attention to his wide selection of designer denim. And yet beneath all the bluster about Tom Landry’s fedora and the media’s (admittedly true) wizard fetish, his larger point is not entirely insane: Coaches have always been the face of college football, and coaches have long established an identity through iconography, and the iconography of the Red Raiders’ newest head coach, Kliff Kingsbury, is indeed unique to the sport.

Last Saturday, Nick Saban offered a scholarship to an eighth-grader. Saban is the best coach in college football because he is also its most zealous authoritarian, and yet, in this case, what Saban did is not quite as Machiavellian as it sounds. For once, he was actually playing catch-up with a trend: The eighth-grader in question, Dylan Moses, is a 6-foot-1, 215-pound running back who runs a 4.46 in the 40 and was already offered by LSU last summer (watch him ravage the Alabama Louisiana middle school countryside in this highlight video — I highly recommend 2:11, when Moses actually makes a tackle by using an opponent as a projectile).

Moses is not the youngest football player to be offered a scholarship in recent years: Quarterback David Sills committed to USC at age 13, and another quarterback, Tate Martell, committed to Washington at Moses’s age of 14. And none of this is particularly new: Back in the fledgling years of the previous American century, a Princeton recruiter named Charles E. Patterson trolled the greens of Exeter and Andover in search of talent. “He sent into the Princeton entrance examinations boys one, two, even three years away from college,” wrote muckraking journalist Henry Beach Needham in McClure’s magazine. “‘Go in and try it,’ he told them. ‘There’s no harm in trying. You might get through.’”

1. I should declare up front that I am firmly entrenched in the strata of college football fanatics who find National Signing Day to be a weird and discomfiting phenomenon, and that I do not frequent any message boards, and that I believe that the hat dance has really run its course. I am of the firm belief that recruiting, while of obvious importance, probably means slightly less than we think it does, especially at this moment, with the sport on the dawn of a new age of offensive schemes, at a time when actual coaching seems to matter more than it ever has.

On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

Everything, Everything

I don't know if something as unabashedly macro as the Super Bowl could ever be considered a microcosm for anything, but here's what I'd say: It seems almost stupidly fitting, after a season in which the NFL's commissioner displayed an uncharacteristic surplus of political ineptitude, that the league could not manage to keep its own power on. And it seems just as fitting that one of the more entertaining NFL seasons in recent memory climaxed near the goal line, with a quarterback who represents the possibilities of the future ultimately in charge of the game's result. The NFL is great, and the NFL is dysfunctional. It lives in the light, and it lives in the dark.
— Michael Weinreb

On any given Sunday (or Monday or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

Anquan Boldin: Hall of Famer?

Anquan Boldin has not made a Pro Bowl since leaving the Arizona Cardinals at the end of the 2009 season. He has not had a 1,000-yard season in Baltimore, and the beast who caught 11 touchdowns in 2008 has been limited to a total of seven touchdowns in his past two seasons. Up until these playoffs, Boldin had mostly fallen off the casual fan's radar — if your interactions with the NFL come mostly from highlights, fantasy, and Red Zone, you might have even forgotten that Anquan Boldin was still in the league.

1. Jadeveon Clowney
Until the year 2013, if you had asked me to cite off the top of my head the greatest defensive play in college football’s recent annals, I might have noted this, or made a blatantly homerish reference to this. But that era has ended, because I have been told by a seismographer of questionable repute that Jadeveon Clowney’s hit during yesterday’s Outback Bowl actually triggered a minor aftershock at the breakfast buffet of a Shoney’s in St. Petersburg.

It was a year that provided plenty of personalities, story lines, and moments, but the question is, which of those moments got their due and which did not? Could LeBron James actually be underrated? Could the Olympics? They just might be.

Underrated: LeBron James's Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinals at Indiana

Everyone remembers the 45-point evisceration of Boston on the road in an elimination game, and the ultra-efficient inside-out torching of the Thunder in the Finals. But Game 4 against the Pacers has sort of gotten lost in the shuffle, which can happen, I guess, when a game kicks off one of the greatest 15-game stretches in the entire history of a sport. Miami felt like it was on the verge of a franchise-altering crisis going into Game 4, down 2-1 to a feisty Indiana team and missing Chris Bosh. Dwyane Wade had shot 2-of-13 and snapped at Erik Spoelstra during a Game 3 blowout loss. It wasn't an elimination game, but in that moment it was hard to imagine Miami coming back from a 3-1 deficit against a Pacers club that clearly didn't fear them.

And when Miami fell behind by 10 points in the first half of Game 4, looking a bit listless, it was tempting to start thinking about the consequences of a conference semifinals loss. Would they make a panic trade of one of the stars? Would they conclude James and Wade just couldn't coexist well enough to win a title? Would they fire Spoelstra before his extension — which was signed before the season — even kicked in?

Then LeBron and Wade went absolutely bananas, scoring 38 straight points for Miami in a second-half stretch for the ages. It wasn't just the production; it was the way it looked. Both were cutting actively off the ball and feeding each other for the sorts of semi-improv scores we all envisioned when they teamed up. Spoelstra began leaning on sets in which Miami cleared one side of the floor for LeBron and letting James go to work. He was dominant in those sets, which were rarely a major part of Miami's offense before, and they morphed into post-ups as the playoffs wore on — the post-ups for which Oklahoma City had no answer. It all just came together, at a startling speed. James finished with 40 points, 18 rebounds, and nine assists, numbers that no other player has ever put up in a postseason game since the mid-1980s. He hit post-up shots, jumpers, graceful floaters over Roy Hibbert in the lane — shots he just didn't quite have down even two or three seasons before. It was masterful, and the Heat needed every bit of it.
— Zach Lowe

The year in sports, 2012, told in GIFs and riffs.

The Little Giant

Here's a video of Lionel Messi scoring 86 goals in the year of our Maradona, 2012, breaking Gerd Muller's record of 85 goals for club and country in a calendar year.

It's hard to pick just one. There was the cheeky chip against Valencia, a shooting-star free kick against Atletico Madrid, the time he froze the Bayer Leverkusen backline in carbonite like a bunch of German Han Solos, and when he invented the geometry of the future against Granada. I liked when he backed a pickup truck into a compact parking spot on the roof of Zaragoza's keeper's garage, and when he made Philippe Senderos look like Lennie from Of Mice and Men against Switzerland. I loved the free kicks against Uruguay and Real Madrid, and the snapshot against Deportivo La Coruña. Nobody's better at their chosen sport than Lionel Messi is at football, right now. Watching him score 86 goals, either during the games, or in YouTube compilations, for Barcelona or for Argentina, was one of the greatest gifts we received this year. He'll be justly rewarded for these accomplishments with trophies and silverware, but I just wanted to give him my thanks. Watching him play is one of the best things I did with my time this year.
— Chris Ryan

A century before the Saturday evening that will forever be recalled for the painful death of Bill Snyder’s 16 precepts in Waco, and for the gumming up of Phil Knight’s fast-twitch widget-production apparatus in Eugene, and for Les Miles’s epic Lebowski Speech — tell me he doesn’t resemble Jesus Quintana just a little at the 1:39 mark — Notre Dame was just a tiny Catholic college in Indiana with a progressive strategy and a dream of defeating the U.S. Army. This goes back to the summer of 1913, when Irish quarterback Gus Dorais and an end named Knute Rockne worked together as lifeguards in Sandusky, Ohio, practicing a newfangled stratagem on the beach known as “the forward pass.” They unleashed it on the first day of November, against a bigger and stronger West Point squad; the Irish won, 35-13, and an epoch’s worth of treacly film scores were birthed.

On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

Comeback Season

The day before Christmas last year, Adrian Peterson was lying on the field in Washington and screaming in pain. His left leg had just bent in a way legs are not supposed to bend, and as he waited on the FedEx Field turf for the training staff, his right one shook, as if his brain were distracting itself. It has been said a lot in the past 10 weeks of this NFL season, but after yesterday’s win, Peterson’s fourth straight game with more than 120 yards, it should probably be said again — Adrian Peterson had no business playing football again by September. He has less business putting together one of the best seasons a running back has ever had.

For me, at least, that Peterson is playing at all is the most awe-inspiring thing. In catching chunks of the Vikings every week, there always seems to be at least one run that makes me shake my head and give an obligatory, “Wow, Adrian Peterson.” I just didn’t know how many of those runs there were, and that each week, there seems to be more of them. Peterson’s season started modestly enough. In Minnesota’s first six games, he broke the 100-yard mark just once while averaging about 4.4 yards per carry. In the Vikings’ past four, that number has gone to 7.67, including 8.2 against the league’s best rush defense. The new gear is shifting Peterson’s 2012 from unbelievable to potentially historic.

I imagine there are worse things to be remembered for than felling a horse with a single punch, but it should be noted for posterity that this was not the only highly theatrical brawl of Alex Karras’s career. In 1963, a professional wrestler named Dick the Bruiser strutted into the Lindell AC Bar, a Detroit pub Karras partly owned, and Dick the Bruiser was intent on stirring up trouble. Karras and Dick the Bruiser were scheduled to wrestle that coming Saturday, but Dick suggested they settle it then and there, and so they did, reportedly shattering windows and engaging patrons and passersby and several of Detroit’s Finest in the fracas. Dick the Bruiser wound up with five stitches, but Karras lost the subsequent wrestling match, so I guess we can call it a wash.

Here, for the paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists in our midst, is a brief peek behind the journalistic curtain: Sometimes those of us in the press chase after stories because they are there at that moment, and we figure they might not be there forever. Sometimes we pursue the narrative of a certain player or a certain team while they are hitting .400 or leading the league in scoring, knowing full well that the magic cannot possibly sustain itself. But I swear on my life that this is not one of those cases. This is much sadder than that.

On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

The Consequences of Free Football

Within a span of eight minutes, three games — Dolphins-Jets, Titans-Lions, and Saints-Chiefs — featuring six middling contenders briefly turned bad football into balletic anarchy. And in one of those special, even DirecTV’s–Sunday Ticket–package–is–useless moments, three games that seemed, on their faces, to be less than important quickly unraveled a rare combination of overtime results. To convey what happened in the fourth quarter in Tennessee would require a dry-erase board, a fully loaded Sharpie, and a mastery of the dark arts. It was a ludicrous game, one of the most exciting you’ll ever see while also trying to watch seven other games. In the end, the Titans got a win-win: a victory in the standings; an encouraging performance in OT after Detroit stormed back behind Shaun “LOL” Hill; and a brief affirmation that Jake “The Quake” Locker is their quarterback of the present and future. Until next week.

In New Orleans, the Saints completed some sort competence inversion master class. They lost after the no-good, very-bad Chiefs sloooowly overcame an 11-point fourth-quarter deficit. Jamaal Charles ran all the way to Vaughan’s Lounge and back, Ryan Succop kicked all of the field goals, and the Saints felt a true pain. Theirs was a loss-loss. It’s clear that they are weak and 0-3 and officially praying for a secret package from Sean Payton this week. It will contain either a redesigned playbook and in-depth tape analysis, or 53 cyanide capsules.

You Know Nothing of Our Work
About seven days ago, right around when Baltimore finished cleaning up the Bengals, it seemed like we knew a few things after Week 1. The Ravens were good — maybe very good. The Patriots were the Patriots, but with the type of defense they hadn’t fielded in almost a decade. Atlanta’s offense looked ready to break out, and the Jets’ offense looked better than all of us expected (that includes the Jets). The Cowboys got over their Giant hump. No one wants to play San Francisco, ever. That’s why it’s always nice to get to Week 2. It’s that yearly reminder — “Oh, that’s right, we know nothing.”