Forbes.com has released their list of the drunkest cities in America, and I believe that you can trade the causes for the alcoholism directly to sports. A brief analysis:

1. Milwaukee. You know, the focus here will naturally be on the nickname “Brewers,” as it should be, but I’d argue that the Bucks had more to do with this than the Brew Crew. It was those purple uniforms. Asking a fan to show up and root for the guys in purple threatens the fan’s masculinity, and counteract that, he has to drink to prove his worth. You could see a guy in a Michael Redd jersey and say, “Hey, is that a jersey or a camisole? Did it come with matching panties?” And then he’d say something like, “Screw you, bucko. I drink $7 scotch, right out of the fucking bottle.” And a champion was born.

2. Minneapolis-St. Paul. This one’s a surprise to me. So here’s the question: Did the sex boat incident happen because everyone in Minnesota is drunk, or is everyone in Minnesota drunk because the sex boat happened? I mean, Fred Smoot can’t get every woman in Minnesota drunk to the point that they consent to have a big rubber dong inserted into them. Or can he?

3. Columbus, Ohio. 70% of the beer consumed in Columbus was drank by one guy: this fellow. But he’s quit now, so expect Columbus to drop off the list next year. Maybe not, though. You throw in a dash of Maurice Clarett, a pinch of Mike Cooper, these guys, and some intense lacrosse molestation, and yes, the folks in Columbus have plenty of reasons to drink the pain away.

4. Boston. 100% whiny Red Sox fans. “Waaah, we’re cursed, it isn’t fair. We were just swept at home in a five-game series by our sworn enemies, my daddy never loved me, I hated Bill Russell because he was black, I can’t pronounce any word that includes the letter “r” and Good Will Hunting isn’t on free cable anywhere for the next two months. Oh, what am I to do?” Have another Mickey’s, you drunk son of a bitch.

5. Austin, Texas. Well, Texas is the top party school in the nation, an accomplishment that becomes easier to achieve when you win every damn national championship that the NCAA makes available.

Much like every other cyclist who anyone’s ever heard of, Floyd Landis is in a little bit of pee-pee trouble. He tested positive for an unusual amount of testosterone, and… you know what, I just don’t care.

And it’s not because I don’t care about cycling, or that I hate the Tour de France, in fact, I actively followed Floyd’s pursuit of the yellow jersey, and I found his story to be pretty damn inspirational. And I mean inspirational in the sense that it really might have inspired someone other than me who cared more about cycling or had any kind of ambition.

Rather, here’s the reason I can’t make myself care about this: cycling is so tainted, so drug-infested, that I think you’ve just got to accept it as part of the deal. How many of the top riders were banned from this race right before it began? It just the way things are. And I’m not pointing a finger at cycling, I know other sports have their problems, with in recent cycling history, hey, the needle is there. Doping is to cycling, as ground balls are to baseball, the nickel defense is to football, or super-absorbent maxi-pads are to the WNBA. For better or for worse, it’s a part of it.

My opinion of Floyd Landis hasn’t lowered a bit. I mean, I hope he didn’t do it, but even if he did, he certainly wasn’t the only one in the field, he still beat everyone else, and he still did it with a hip that’s mangled worse than the Knicks salary cap. I’m not saying that I assumed he was dirty beforehand, but I didn’t assume he was clean, either. All I assumed was that he was a cyclist, and thus, under the cloud of “maybe/maybe not, but let’s just see who’s the fastest anyway.” It was Floyd, his comeback was still manly as hell, no matter what turns up in his urine, he’s still a bad-ass.

Maybe that’s a bit too skeptical of me, and maybe it’s not fair to put all cyclists in that same category. And hey, I’d like to believe that purity is possible in cycling, and maybe someday, that’ll be the case. But for right now, to me, believing with 100% certainty that any pro cyclist is clean is about the same as believe that Mark McGwire was clean, too.

Last night, in my post about the NBA Finals, I asked the questions, “Are officials worse now than they were ten years ago? Or do players and funs just bitch more?” And I knew at the time that it was a bigger question that deserved its own discussion, and again, I didn’t want to rain on the Heat’s parade. So I figured we’d get back around to it later. A couple of commenters made good points…

The officiating is the same as it was 10 years ago. The difference is now that the losing fans have more of a voice (via blogs, talk radio, message boards, etc) to be heard after the game. And since the majority of the fans can’t point at their own team, the obvious choice of their ire is the officiating.

– Mondesi’s House

mjd…the answer is clearly the latter. It’s going to get worse too. The fact of the matter is that with commentators ripping on refs, sportscasters ripping on refs, fans ripping on refs…the propaganda machine is unstoppable. You don’t even need any evidence anymore. If a coach or an owner doesn’t feel like being accountable for a loss, all they need to is blame the refs and people will hop on the bandwagon.

– jerloma

Good points there. And there were more, but… space is limited. I can’t quote them all. Sorry.

And two things I don’t want to do are 1) pretend that bad calls don’t exist, or 2) put all of the blame here on Mavs or Mavs fans. The discussion isn’t solely about the Mavs, and I do believe that Seahawks fans set the gold standard on that one (and continue to do so). Mark Cuban, Avery Johnson, and Dirk Nowitzki were all adequately concilliatory in defeat, much unlike Mike Holmgren. I don’t think the ‘Hawks will ever be topped… I seriously fucking hope not, anyway.

And, as I said, it’s not pretending that bad calls don’t happen. They do. I still believe that the Mavericks were wronged in Game Five, but, as quite a few others have pointed out, the Mavs have been the beneficiary of some other calls in their journey to the Finals.

And the bigger point is that they lost because of their own mistakes. When it came right down to it, the Mavs could not play as well in 4th quarters as they did in 1st and 2nd quarters. If they had, they’d have won the series, and it might be Heat fans right now finding something to bitch about.

My contention is that if a team plays as well as it possibly can and still loses (which is rarely the case), there’s about a 99% chance that it’s because they weren’t good enough, and about 1% chance that their loss was the direct result of an erroneous decision by an official. I just don’t think it happens very often.

And maybe the difference between now and ten years ago is imagined… maybe we just don’t remember the bitching, because it’s not what stands the test of time. And maybe ten years from now, no one will remember the Mavs bitching, and we’ll be asking this same question again.

Or maybe it’s true, and we really are just whinier people. Like the commenters quoted above said… everyone’s got a voice now, and the whiniest voices tend to get heard. Maybe we’re a nation raised on Bill O’Reilly, and CNN’s Crossfire, or whatever. If you don’t like something, bitch… and if you’re wrong, then just bitch louder. The important thing isn’t the content of the discussion, but that we get really loud about it.

And please note that I’m not leaving myself out of this… note the usage of ‘we.’ I’m guilty of it, too. I try to never blame the failures of any of my favorite teams on the officials, though I don’t have a perfect record there. For a recent example, see my treatment of Jorge Larrionda this past weekend on Deadspin (though I would contend that when a ref is suspended for corruption, it opens things up for a whole other line of debate).

Connecticut high school football coaches are facing a suspension if they win a game by more than 50 points next season. They say the rule isn’t aimed at any one guy, but… there is one particular dickhead who was calling timeouts en route to a 60-0 win last year. The opposing coach was arrested after punching an assistant coach on the winning team.

I do think that coaches who run up the score are quite loathesome, and they might deserve to have someone egg their house or slash their tires… but I don’t know about this rule. I think high school is about the age where we have to stop worrying about protecting feelings. But I may be the wrong guy to ask… I don’t have kids, and I am of the opinion that it’s absurd that they don’t keep score in T-ball. I think if you’re old enough to play sports, you’re old enough to learn about both sides of the ass-whooping.

And I just don’t know if this rule is going to prevent anything harmful. If it’s me, I’d rather lose 70-0, as opposed to losing 49-0 while the other team has to intentionally run backwards every third play, just so they don’t care. The former would anger and humiliate me. The latter would force me to incite a brawl.

If they wanted to institute a mercy rule, where the game ends when one team takes a 40-point lead or something, that would be preferable. But they’re setting themselves up for some awkward and contentious situations with this one.

Sometimes, a team’s 3rd-string, their absolute worst players, are better than some other team’s best players. It happens. You can send all your scrubs out, put the waterboy in, put the managers in, but if the other team can’t tackle them, they can’t tackle them. That’s how it goes sometimes. Ask Temple.