Craig H

My main concern, which is the a concern for my other buddies who are Cubs fans as well, is the amount of regression the Cubs are due for. Arrieta, Bryant, Schwarber, and Lackey will all likely regress, with the latter being due to age. It's exciting to think that the roster as it stands now could potentially win 100 games, but that's with everyone playing at the same level they played at last season. Or those fears could be unfounded, but the Cubs have had an amazing offseason thus far putting together one of their best teams ever on paper, not just a team of the best players.

Baseball isn't played on paper, but goddamn are the Reds going to be bad. The NL Central is again going to be the Cubs, Cards and Pirates with the Cards looking like they fell behind the Pirates. The White Sox are just so shitty too. A quick list of shitty 2016 NL teams: - Reds - Brewers - Marlins (Possible for them to have a good season I guess) - Braves (maybe?) - Phillies - Padres (How does Preller still have a job?) - Rockies I could see the Diamondbacks having a year where they went bananas in the offseason only to have nothing to show for it during the regular season. Going to be tough competing with the Giants and Dodgers.

Got my Steven Jackson lottery ticket. Fully prepared to drop him.

Right. Even if he doesn't opt out, which I'm not sure why he wouldn't if he meets the requirements to do so, the hit isn't going to be that much since the Cubs will have even more money at that point.

More Pats news. They're meeting with Steven Jackson today.

FUCK YEAH! Tickets for NXT in Chicago go on sale Friday. Weirdly enough, I've never been to any concerts at the Portage theater before. Has any of the DVDVR Chicago folks been there for anything? Seems like an odd setup for wrestling.

And Breeze was called up because...? No wonder Finn thinks being called up would be a detriment to his career. Who wants to deal with this level of bullshit. And it's at this point that I kind of wish SmackDown! were it's own brand again, especially with Mauro coming in and saying that SD! is going to be a hybrid of Raw and NXT, whatever the hell that means.

You should go back and re-watch. I wouldn't say Roman "no sold" her slaps. He takes the first one, turns back with his smirk, gets slapped again, winces, gets slapped again, winces and rubs his jaw and area by his eye. He's not going to take a bump off of a slap, but he's still selling it.

So is he like an Armond White type of dude?

I had the bye in my PPR league since I came in 1st, so no concerns there, except for being worried about the points Hopkins and Sanders aren't putting up. In my 2 QB league, I'm fighting for most points scored over weeks 14 through 17 to get my $100 back (all non-championship game teams compete for this). I feel like I avoided a disaster considering that Hopkins and Julio did fuck all because their QBs SUCK, I didn't get a notification from ESPN that Gronk was Probable until just before his game when it was known before 1 PM that he would play causing me to start ASJ instead, and Jameis was disappointing against the Saints. I scored 120.8 points and a few other teams were projected to score in the 150s. Only one team scored 155, another scored 135 and another scored 131. So at the most I'm down 34 to 35 points. I think I can make that back, but my team needs to score like it should. Plus, I would have scored 133 if I had started Gronk instead of ASJ. Tyrod, Carr (or Jameis), J Stew, Martin, OBJ, Julio, Gronk, Hurns (or Powell, Denard, Ted Ginn...), a non-disappointing D and Gano scoring a consistent amount of points close to what they're projected at should allow me to win that $100 back.

So, on Sunday night, things looked bad. Roman loses again, looks like a punk, doesn't beat everyone's ass, and then finally does after the match, getting the same reaction he used to get as a heel in the Shield when they were unstoppable. So the Shield broke up after Payback in 2013. It took over two years for them to figure out that no one wants to see this scary ass Samoan talk, they just want to see him wreck shop. Throughout that time, and you can count the number of times on one hand, they would go back to what made people like Roman to begin with. Sunday night, after he lost, they got back to that and it was a cool moment that could have been infinitely better all things considered. That said, kudos to creative for seemingly pivoting and having Roman win. I say seemingly because I still didn't like him getting slapped a bunch and then selling the slaps. When Steph slapped him, I was really hoping that Roman wouldn't even budge, like he was carved out of stone, but Steph was really laying into those slaps. Then Vince nut shots him. Like, again, he looks like a punk, regardless of what has happened in the past with the Rock and Austin. Would current Brock take a nutshot from Vince or sell slaps like that from Steph? No. It didn't occur to me before Bryan's rant, but dammit, book Roman like he's Brock. Like he's an unstoppable killing machine. When you look unbeatable, when you feel unbeatable, when you show you're unbeatable, people eat that up because then you have an aura. I want to end on something positive though, and so again, props to pivoting and putting the strap around Roman's waist. At some point, you just have to commit to the booking and they finally did. PLUS, as a bonus, it happened on Raw, where there's a lot more visibility. I think they actually stumbled into something far more successful than having Roman win on Sunday because this got so many more eyeballs. Now...capitalize on this. Turn it up a notch and have Roman say fewer things and beat more asses. Keep building on what was done in the last 5 minutes of TLC and at the end of Raw. No more getting heat off of Roman. Just commit to making him look awesome and gut out any dips in the ratings. Stick with this run. Don't book him against Kane, like they do with every new face champ. I really want this to work and I like what I'm seeing. The rest of Raw I really can't speak to because I typically spend more time watching the Hulu version since other ways of watching Raw aren't that reliable when you're a cable cutter. If you watch the 90 minute Raw on Hulu, it feels like 75 to 80 minutes of build to the title match. It made for good storytelling and it shows you just how much better this show would be if it were cut back from 3 hours to 2 hours OR if they made better use of those 3 hours. The Hulu Raw was this: - Opening segment setting up Vince's return - The angle with KO and Ambrose with KO bringing the heat against Ambrose and looking like the violent threat he was in NXT - Vince returns - Roman and Vince have their confrontation - The angle with the New Day - The 8 man tag garbage match - The main event There was some other stuff on the Hulu version, like the Divas tag, but the Divas division is so shitty that it was hard to remember much from that match. There was also no Miz and Neville, and probably a bunch of other stuff was missing as well. The point is, the streamlined Hulu version makes an OK episode of Raw good and it makes a good episode of Raw really good where the 90 minutes flies by.

He's HIV positive. EDIT: Shit, maybe he isn't. I know I remembered seeing this at some point. Did it turn out that he's ok? In any event, I recall HT getting tryouts and things of that nature.

Request: No creepy MGFanJay screenshots.

That Star Trek trailer is not good. I can't understand anything that's happening because there's a zillion quick cuts. As for the new Star Trek movies, I like them quite a bit. The hyperbole behind comments like Into Darkness was near franchise killing is pretty amusing because it's pretty damn far from being franchise killing. If you don't like the new movies, just leave it at that and spare the hyperbole that's not even accurate.

Alvarez on everything wrong with last night and he isn't wrong. https://youtu.be/52Pc4Ywlb-c I find him to be annoying and overly negative too, and perhaps this would carry more weight if he weren't always pissed about everything, but he nails this and echoes what a bunch of us were saying on here and Twitter last night.

His character is dead.

He turned a corner? He was booked to look like a violent badass. The writing thrned a corner for all of 5 minutes AFTER Roman lost. Exactly what corner was turned?

Here's a fucking idea...Roman wins, beats the shit out of Sheamus post match for his troubles, and basically does EVERYTHING else he did. Better yet, book Roman like this ALL the time. But don't worry, they'll go right back to the well with making him look like he's beating the odds and is an underdog because God forbid a WWE babyface look like a badass.

God damn MGFanJay and his creepy fucking pictures. The fuck is wrong with you?

Yeah. Wonderful. After he looks like a complete punk bitch do they have him crank it up and do something badass. And now he'll work a suspension angle, not capitalizing on his heat at all.

I fucking hate this company and its backwards fucking bookinh so much. I fucking hate myself for watching this bullshit and expecting something better.

Just wanted to say how much I hate Matt Ryan and Shanahan. Fuck them both. How the fuck do you not score?! How the fuck do you have Julio go this long without a TD? Fucking ASSHOLES.

https://vid.me/lvBw Holy Fucking Shit YEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

If Frankie vs Conor happens, Frankie is your next champ. No one puts a fight plan together better than Frankie. I'm also biased.

Lololol this is my first year in the PPR league I joined and it had been going on for 11 years. The guy who is in dead last has been saying all sorts of racist shit to me today on the league message board and is crying about how me picking up and dropping Marcel Reece a few times shows that I make all my picks based on what the Internet says. So, he's pretty stupid, for a multitude of reasons. Like, really, calling me the N word? And this is someone who knows me and has been another family member's friend for years. So dumb. And Marcel Reece? Really?