This partnership has been a long time coming, and Karl-Anthony Towns was waiting at the airport to celebrate the moment.
The partnership between D’Angelo Russell and Karl-Anthony Towns has been a long time coming — the two young stars are friends, and have seemed destined to pair up for a while. As Towns himself says in the video below, “Spoke it into existence for years … the world gave us energy back.”
Russell flew to Minnesota this week after the deal was done, and Towns wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to greet his new teammate. He was on the runway when Russell landed, with a new Timberwolves jersey … and a jacket. It gets cold in Minnesota! It’s a very thoughtful gift!
They’ve borrowed a great idea from Key & Peele and made the great series even better.
“Bad Lip Reading” is the funny and stupid (and I say that lovingly) video series in which people dub over fake dialogue over existing footage. They started doing it for the NFL a few years back, and it’s never disappointed. Doofy voices over your favorite players is objectively good content.
It’s back for 2020, and it’s predictably fantastic.
A nice thing they now do with these — they’ve channeled the perfect Key & Peele sketch and have now given people fake names while they’re introducing themselves. It sneakily might be the best part of the whole video. Original? Not really, but I’m going to frame it as a loving homage.
How not to get “avocado hand” while pitting an avocado.
Avocados are everywhere nowadays, and Super Bowl Sunday is no exception. Seven-layer dip and guacamole are two popular items people serve, and, of course, they’re both are made with avocados (although they’re obviously the most dominant ingredient in one).
In fact, avocados play such a major role in Super Bowl spreads that the California-based Hass Avocado Board predicts 153 million pounds worth of avocados will be eaten Sunday for Super Bowl LIV, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
The problem is that when people make these dishes, they tend to injure themselves while cutting or pitting avocados, leading towhat isapparently called“avocado hand.” The boost in avocado consumption — thanks, millennials — has also led to an increase in hospital visits for avocado-related injuries, and those could spike around Super Bowl Sunday.
Researchers at Emory University, who examined the avocado-hand phenomenon in a study published last year, called the rise in cases “an epidemic of hand injury.” They used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which collects information on injuries related to consumer products.
The researchers estimate 50,413 avocado-related knife injuries occurred from 1998 to 2017, with more than half of them—27,059—happening since 2013. The study said it “likely underestimates the true national incidence of avocado-related knife injuries” because the data only looks at patients who go to the emergency room.
Now, there are a number of different ways to pit an avocado besides the blatantly dangerous method of digging the pit out with the tip of a sharp knife. You can dig the pit out with a spoon, remove the half of the avocado out of its skin with a spoon and then take out the pit or even buy a specific kitchen tool to make it work.
Well here’s one more, extremely simple option. A chef at a restaurant I worked at years ago taught me this easy trick that’s never failed, and — knock on wood — I’ve never injured my hand doing it.
Just follow these three steps:
1. Cut the avocado in half (duh).
2. Hack it (carefully)
With a sharp knife, gently hack the blade directly at the pit so it’s lodged in there.
3. Twist it
Once the blade is in the pit, rotate the knife in any direction, and easily pull the pit out.
Remember: Ripe avocados are the easiest to work with and often translate to the best tasting food. And a dull knife can be more dangerous than a sharp one.
Enjoy your avocado food on Super Bowl Sunday, and don’t cut your hand off!
Transfer QBs and Clemson’s playoff resume are among our biggest takeaways from the 2019-20 college football season.
Welcome to Before The Snap, For The Win’s college football show where we’ll break down the sport’s trending storylines, examine each week’s biggest matchups and track the College Football Playoff and Heisman Trophy races.
Sadly, this means the 2019-20 college football season is officially over. But we’re here to break down two major takeaways from this season.
First up, let’s look at Clemson. The 2018-19 national champions had their College Football Playoff resume called into question all season, largely because of the Tigers’ strength of schedule in a declining ACC, plus their slow start to the season (by their standards).
But judging by Clemson’s performance in the playoff this season, even with the loss to LSU in the title game, and its dominant victory over Alabama to win the national championship last year, it’s clear two things can be true. Clemson can simultaneously play in a terrible conference and be one of the best two or three teams in the country. Even though it didn’t work out this season, the Tigers deserved their shot at a second straight title.
Looking at the 2019 season overall, perhaps the biggest takeaway is this was clearly the year of the transfer quarterback.
Three of the four College Football Playoff teams were led by transfer quarterbacks, who were all also Heisman Trophy finalists: LSU’s Burrow, Oklahoma’s Jalen Hurts and Ohio State’s Justin Fields. There are plenty of players who flourish with the teams they commit to when they’re still in high school, but that’s not the case for everyone. There are a variety of reasons some might want to transfer, but the NCAA needs to make it easier for players to do so — especially when coaches freely and regularly change jobs.
Take Burrow, for example. He didn’t have the starting job at Ohio State a few years ago, and transferring to LSU, a program of the same caliber, changed his life. Had he not transferred, there’s a chance he would have remained on the Buckeyes’ bench throughout his college career, meaning he wouldn’t have won the Heiman and wouldn’t currently be the projected No. 1 overall NFL Draft pick.
Similarly, had Hurts not transferred from Alabama, he would have remained Tua Tagovailoa’s backup and would have only started late in the season following Tagovailoa’s season-ending injury. Hurts played that game during the 2018 season, and it worked out for him in the end. But he transferred to Oklahoma, a program where he started in a system that allowed him to excel even more.
If Fields had stayed with Georgia, he most likely would have remained on the bench behind Jake Fromm. Instead, he led Ohio State’s high-powered and dynamic offense, and after only finishing his sophomore season, his future in college football is looking good.
LSU has released yet another hype video ahead of the CFP national championship game against Clemson, this time featuring Dwayne Johnson.
It seems like a ridiculous thing to say, but over the last few weeks I can earnestly claim that my favorite filmmaker working right now is the LSU Football social media team.
Sure, Martin Scorcese has an arsenal of filmmaking techniques, Bong Joon-ho has an unparalleled vision, whatever. None of them have slow-mo videos of Joe Burrow walking into a packed stadium while The Rock narrates some badass nonsense that makes me want to run through a wall.
Every hype video is better than the last one, and the morning of the national championship game, they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a new video called “I Remember Rock Bottom.”
My understanding of these two teams, LSU and Clemson, says this game will be closer than people think. But after watching this video, forget it: LSU by a million.
Coco Gauff’s father and coach didn’t realize he cursed while mic’d up, so Gauff gently chastised him.
Coco Gauff is just 15, but she’s already one of the best players in world tennis. This week she was playing at the ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, and during her match against Laura Siegemund they mic’d up both her and her father, Corey Gauff, who also serves as her coach.
The talk, which took place after the first set, is a great example of her dad giving her a ton of positive reinforcement, which at one point embarrasses Gauff to the point that she looks up at the ball person like, Ugh, dads, right?
That was good, but the best part was when her father said that Gauff hadn’t given up three points to her opponent’s “damn serve” which led to Gauff gently chastising her father, reminding him that he was mic’d up and he wasn’t allowed to curse.
Her dad, who hadn’t realized he had cursed, pleaded his innocence, but Gauff wasn’t having it.
“I cursed?” he said.
She told him he had, and then he bashfully apologized into the mic.
“He was talking Slovenian. So I was like, who is talking my language? And I saw Kobe.”
The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Dallas Mavericks 108-95 on Sunday night, in large part to the Lakers’ excellent defense.
A huge part of that defensive gameplan was keyed around stopping MVP candidate Luka Doncic of the Mavericks. The Lakers did well there, with Doncic having one of the worst nights of his season.
L.A. might have also had a little help getting in Doncic’s head, thanks to former Lakers great Kobe Bryant, who was sitting courtside at the game and isn’t afraid to talk trash to, well, anybody.
During the game, Bryant was shown trash talking Doncic to the point that Doncic actually turned around. When he realized who was doing the smack talk, he smiled and dapped up Bryant.
After the game, however, Doncic revealed that it wasn’t just standard trash talk … Bryant was riffing in Slovenian, Doncic’s native language.
Mavericks’ Luka Doncic on meeting w/ Lakers legend Kobe Bryant: “He was talking Slovenian. He was talking my language. I was really surprised.” pic.twitter.com/IE9sLtZ2TZ
“He was talking Slovenian,” Doncic said. “So I was like, who is talking my language? And I saw Kobe, and I was really surprised.”
Does Bryant know Slovenian from having grown up in Italy and spending a lot of time in Europe? Or is he just such a competitive lunatic that he went and learned Slovenian trash talk so he could give Doncic crap in a game that he wasn’t even playing in?
The world may never know. Honestly, neither would surprise me.
Rogelio Funes Mori gave us one of the goals of the year with a stoppage-time bicycle kick to give his team the lead.
CF Monterrey took on Club América in the first leg of the Apertura final of Liga MX this week, and hoo buddy, what a game.
(For fans new to Liga MX — their season is divided into two parts, with two tournaments. The Apertura starts in the summer and concludes now, with the Clausera starting up shortly.)
The match was tied 1-1 in the 93rd minute, and it looked like the teams would go into the second leg of the final all square. Then the ball started bouncing in the América box, and landed on the chest of Monterrey’s Rogelio Funes Mori.
Then he had an absolute moment of magic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01D0056TDJY
A bicycle kick stoppage-time winner? Yes. Oh heavens yes.
América will be disappointed to enter the second leg down a goal. They fought admirably, even after going down to 10 men when Francisco Cordova was shown a red card in the 53rd minute. To defend that well for that long, down a man, only to give up a late goal like that? That stings.
The 7-foot-5 Celtics cult hero Tacko Fall wore a tuxedo and conducted the Boston Pops for a rendition of “Sleigh Ride.”
Celtics rookie center Tacko Fall has quickly become a cult hero in New England, mostly because of his size — he stands at 7-foot-5. While some of the appreciation for Fall feels a little icky and “look at the tall freak”-y, he seems to be enjoying it, and as long as he’s happy, I’m happy.
The latest stop on the Tacko Takeover of New England was at the Boston Pops on Monday night, when he led the famed orchestra in a rousing edition of the holiday classic “Sleigh Ride.”
He was wearing a size-48 double-extra-long tuxedo, via ESPN, which Fall said was the first tuxedo he’d ever worn.
That is one tall man leading an orchestra.
I do enjoy the initial reaction of the crowd, many of whom clearly had no idea who he was. Then he stood up, and they understood what was happening there.
As long as we’re appreciating Tacko Fall and not gawking at Tacko Fall, I’m . OK with this whole thing continuing. But watch yourselves, Boston. I’ve got my eye on you.
Woods outdrove the 26-year-old Thomas, then paused to inspect his ball, before confidently striding away.
The only thing better than the Big Cat being back is the Big Cat being back with a little swagger.
Tiger Woods is paired up with Justin Thomas at the Hero World Championship in the Bahamas today, and after Thomas hit a huge drive during the round, Woods stepped up and smashed one that flew past his.
Thomas is 26 years old, and last year averaged over 300 yards per drive. He’s a big hitter. Woods is 44, but he’s the Big Cat, so it doesn’t matter.
Even better, Woods then walked over to Thomas’ ball on the fairway, and pretended to look down and inspect it to see if it was actually his ball. He then confidently strode away, because he’s Tiger Woods and he gets to do that.
