March Madness

As I'm sure you have noticed, it's tournament time in the world of college basketball. A time where we all murder about a million trees to print off twenty different brackets, half of which we crumple up and throw away as we struggle to make winning picks before the games begin, the other half we tear to shreds as you realize that somehow, someway, you were the only one that didn't realize that the nine-seeded UAB Dragons would upset the one-seeded Arizona Wildcats. I cannot put the frustrations suffered by sports fans betting on brackets into socially acceptable words.

That being said, I wanted to take the moment I had today to come here and announce a "friendly" little competition between my partner and I. We will both be filling out a bracket this year, and to steal a little something from Mike and Mike in the morning, we have decided to place a bet on it. Obviously we don't have the resources they do, so something high in glam (like their bet this year) isn't an option for us. But I have to say, I think we have come up with something good. The loser will be forced to partake in a weekends bar hopping completely decked out in the sports gear of the others favorite teams. Considering that I cheer for Pittsburgh teams and Hilt pulls for Cincinnati, the loser should be pained by what they will have to cloth themselves with. The amount of black and gold that will adorn Hilt if......when he loses will be nothing short of hilarious.

We'll keep everyone updated as to the standings once we get our brackets filled out and will try to get them posted here. In the mean time, keep your eyes on the website for some upcoming posts and tune into our podcast.

Here Goes Nothing

Since my lesser half has already posted on the blog already, I figured I had best follow suit. I'm the other guy on the right, Andrew Jacobson. And yes, I'm the good looking one; I'll see what I can do to get my shining face somewhere on this page (your welcome).

 I too graduated from Ohio State, but with a worthless B.S of psychology, but am in the process of applying to graduate school. I have only one sibling and enjoy many of the standard "dude" things in life from sports to video games to books about war (and a few other things that I won't mention to preserve my dignity). I currently work part time at the Fawcett Center for Tomorrow, but essentially live off my girlfriend since she's the bread winner these days. That's me in a nutshell; I'm a simple person.

Onto why hopefully most of you are here, the sports. It's probably important for me to preface this with the fact that I am a very passionate sports fan. In other words, I yell and scream my head off for all of my teams because they mean more to me than most anything else. I'm not the worlds most creative person, so I'll just go ahead and copy Hilt's format and give you a run down of a few things that I hold near and dear in the world of sports.

1) NFL first. I love all other sports, from MLB to NASCAR. And damn do I ever love my Buckeyes, don't get me wrong. But I'm always going to prefer the NFL product over the corrupt, hypocritical, moronic game that the crusty old NCAA trustees put onto the gridiron. 

2) I hate Tim Tebow. SO.DAMN.MUCH! That's right, I hate him enough to put this as number 2 on the list. Don't argue with me about it, don't try to change my opinion. It's a waste of time and I will likely cause you harm.

3) I loathe the SEC. Unarguably siding with Nick on this one. They are a bunch of scumbag jackasses who will literally do anything to win (over-signing, Scam Newton, Brandon Spikes gouging eyes out, to name a few) but never receive an ounce of punishment. In fact, I'd punish my kids worse( if I had them) for waking me up early on a Saturday then the NCAA has punished members of the SEC.

4) I don't care about steroids anymore. Let them juice all they want. If they die because of it, that's the athletes problem. I'm too sick of steroids to care about them anymore.

5) The NHL is coming back. Slowly but steadily. And the best part is, it's only thanks to its own increase in popularity. Get an educated commish in there and the NHL could get back to where it was pre-lockout.

6) Rodger Goodell is a prick.

7) David Stern is a bigger prick.

8) Tiger Woods did for golf what Magic and Larry did for the NBA, and I love him for it.

I could keep going and make about a hundred more comments about each sport, but instead I'll stop here and hope you are intrigued enough to come back to see what else I may have to say. And definitely check out the podcast; if nothing else its hilarious to listen to Hilt blow our openings to our segments.

Intro

Hey there (hopefully) soon to be readers!

The blog has been up for almost a week sans any content, so I finally decided to get something down so I can feel like I accomplished something of mild significance today.

While this blog will eventually be chalked full of rants and nerdy takes on all things sports, I felt that it would be proper to start off letting the readers know just where I am coming from.

If you didn't already glance to your right, my name is Nick Hiltbrand. I have lived in Columbus Ohio for the majority of my days, and I am a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a BS in mathematics and a BA in Public Affairs Journalism. I know it's a strange combo, and no, I don't want to write articles about math. In college I covered sports for the school paper and did 3+ years of student radio, all while I was proving math theorems simply for the sake of redoing someone's work for the 1,000,001st time. I'm 24 years old, have five siblings and I'm notorious for the movies I haven't seen (i.e. Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Goodfellas etc.) If you were to ask my friends if I read, half of them may tell you I'm illiterate, while the other half would say I stopped after the third grade. Neither of these are correct however. I love to read, just not books. What the average person reads in book-form, I more than make up for with articles, blogs and magazines. I love sarcasm. I like to think I have a good sense of humor (I'm a guy => bathroom humor is hilarious) and I take the logical approach to most things. I'm pretty laid back for the most part, but I can get competitive/fiery on a few things like video games and most of all sports.

What do you know... a decent segue to my position(s) on sports...

1a. Let's go Buckeyes. 1b. F^&k Michigan. I will try and put a clamp on my tOSU bias, but I do bleed scarlet and gray, and the big house is the cesspool of the world.

Greatness is not defined by rings... Again, Greatness is not. defined. by. rings... Only in Basketball does it hold any weight at all, and even then it doesn't mean much. It's not Dan Marino's fault that he didn't have a 1,000 yard rusher in any year but one of his career, and that his career wasn't spent playing with the likes of Jerry Rice, Dwight Clark and Roger Craig.

If you want to fire a coach in his first two years, fine, but that's on you. I personally think that in all sports, you can be a great coach early, but you need three years at the bare minimum to have a fair assessment. In College sports, recruiting is 75% of the battle. I hate mid-majors/non-AQ teams because they don't deserve half the praise the rest of the country gives them, and the amateurism of college sports is vital as it is what makes them better than their professional counterpart in most cases... Oh and while the SEC is good at football, I don't really respect them for things like over-signing recruits and their coaches being sleazeballs. My girlfriend wouldn't be happy about that, because she is an Auburn alum and a "proud" supporter of the SEC.

The NHL killed themselves with the lockout. Major League Baseball needs to respect itself before they can expect fans my age to jump onboard with their product. While Golf wouldn't be half the moneymaker it is today without him, Tiger is a douche and not the golfer that Jack was and probably will never surpass him.

I hate the race card being played in sports, Colin Cowherd is a one-trick pony and (outside of his opinion on Tebow) I respect the hell out of Skip Bayless.

While there may be more contributors to this blog added later, for the time being it will just be me and my friend Andrew Jacobson. He's a Pittsburgh fan (I know right?), one of my best friends and one of the best parts about him (for the readers' sake at least) is that he disagrees with almost everything I have to say.

We'll try and contribute as much as we can, and we also have a podcast that we do once a week. Check it out at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-brand. 

Adios