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Blogs for Kids

Written by on February 27, 2011 · 34 Comments

Blogs for Kids

<b>Blogs for Kids</b>

Blogs for Kids

Could flush out the writer in our kids, blogs for kids could draw out a young writer and open doors to their future. Contemplate encouraging your child to start blogging!

Blogs for Kids

Kids love having an audience. The instant recognition and approval that comes from a crowd just cannot be beat. Employing blogs for kids to assist develop very good spelling habits, grammar skills, and develop a love for writing at a young age is an innovative idea that has prospective benefits:

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Youngsters enjoy having an audience. The instant recognition and approval that comes from a crowd just cannot be beat. Employing blogs for kids to assist develop great spelling habits, grammar abilities, and develop a enjoy for writing at a young age is an innovative concept that has possible rewards:

1.) Blogs for kids – Responsibility/Commitment – Every day Posts

Regular updates demand young children to be disciplined and responsible.

2.) Blogs for kids – Communication – Increased Communication with Friends and Relatives

Blogging or journaling gives children the chance to connect with relatives who may possibly live some distance away, communicating critical timely problems.

3.) Blogs for kids – Technologies – Exposure to Web Technologies

Kids are growing into technology-laden world. Exposure to innovative Web technology will support them with communication abilities and résumé-building. Children are growing into technology-laden world. Exposure to innovative World wide web technology will support them with communication skills and résumé-building. Young children are growing into technology-laden world. Exposure to innovative World wide web technology will support them with communication skills and résumé building.

4.) Blogs for kids – Improved Writing Skills

When presented with an audience, children will want to present their “best” work.

5.) Blogs for kids – Improved Editing Abilities

Proofreading is an critical skill that’s difficult to teach. Editing of everyday entries will aid young children discover how to present their suggestions clearly and professionally. Proofing is an important skill that is tough to teach. Editing of daily entries will assist youngsters understand how to present their suggestions clearly and professionally.

6.) Blogs for kids – Improved Spelling

Automated spell-checking assists children be aware of spelling errors when they occur.

7.) Blogs for kids – Typing

Finding children acquainted with keyboards at a young age will help them become familiar with their layout and function, quickly generating them proficient typists.

Please let us know if there is anything you would like to change to our website. Thanks so much for visiting our Blogs for Kids site.

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Daytona 500

Written by on February 9, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Daytona 500

For 2012, it will be on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida as announced by Jole Chitwood III, President of Daytona International Speedway.


“The decision to kick-off to the NASCAR racing season one week later was made in close partnership with the sanctioning body, our broadcast partners including FOX, community partners and others within the industry,” said Chitwood. “This move shortens the racing season by one week, which is something the teams and competitors will surely enjoy, and it eliminates the off-weekend typically scheduled in March, which many fans and media partners have said created a drop in momentum in the early part of the racing season.

“We also know some of our great fans like to plan their visit to the ‘World Center of Racing’ well in advance so we are announcing the 2012 date much earlier in the season to minimize any inconveniences in planning their visit.”

The dates of Daytona International Speedway’s other racing events that comprise Speedweeks, in addition to the motorcycle events in March, will be determined in the near future.

Tickets for all Daytona International Speedway events are available online at www.daytonainternationalspeedway.com
daytona 500

The First Daytona 500

On February 22, 1959, Daytona International Speedway hosted the first Daytona 500. The posted awards for the “500-Mile International Sweepstakes” totaled $67,760. A field of 59 cars took the green flag for the start of the 200-lap race. A crowd of 41,000 was on hand to witness the beginning of another chapter in the history of racing in Daytona.
The finish of the race also went into the history books. The finish was too close to call, but Johnny Beauchamp went to Victory Lane and savored the celebration although the results were posted as “unofficial.”

Sixty-one hours later, Lee Petty was the winner in what appeared to be a dead heat between Petty and Beauchamp – with the lapped car of Joe Weatherly making it a three-wide finish at the checkered flag. A clip of newsreel footage proved that Petty was the winner by a few feet.

The Daytona 500 – 50 Years And Still Growing

Fifty years later, the Daytona 500 is NASCAR’s biggest, richest and most prestigious race.

“The Great American Race,” which traditionally hosts a sell out crowd, has the biggest total payout in prize money for any motorsports event in the United States, surpassing the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400. The 2007 Daytona 500 posted awards exceed more than $18 million with race winner Kevin Harvick pocketing more than $1.5 million.

The perks of winning the Daytona 500 are more than just collecting the largest payout in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series or hoisting the prestigious Harley J. Earl trophy. Winning stock car racing’s greatest prize also brings fame and fortune.

“It’s the ultimate race,” said three-time Daytona 500 winner Jeff Gordon following his 2005 Daytona 500 victory. “There’s just no better place to win at than Daytona. You know the sport’s getting more competitive. It’s getting bigger and it’s just one of those races if you pick one, this is the one you want to win.”

Traditionally, following a victory in the Daytona 500, the winner goes on a whirlwind media tour that includes visits to New York City and Los Angeles with appearances on such a high-profile shows like “Late Show with David Letterman” and “Live with Regis and Kelly.”

In addition, the Daytona 500 winning car rests inside Daytona 500 Experience, “The Official Attraction of NASCAR,” for a year for race fans to view and the winning driver has his hand prints, right foot and autograph immortalized in cement at the Daytona 500 Champion’s Walk Of Fame.

Bill Davis Racing reaped a huge benefit after their 2002 Daytona 500 win with then-driver Ward Burton in the form of a sponsorship deal.
Caterpillar, who was in the final year of a sponsorship contract on the No. 22 car, opted to extend its sponsorship agreement and the Daytona 500 victory was a major factor in the decision.

“You hope it wasn’t the only thing it was based on, but it probably made a difference,” Davis said. “The team that they believed in, the team they had been with for four years, had done them a good enough job that they would look at five more years.

“Certainly, winning the biggest race, winning the Super Bowl, winning the Masters, winning the World Series, didn’t hurt.”

Besides the financial aspect of winning the Daytona 500, the victory can also elevate a driver’s status in the sport.

“Winning a race during Speedweeks, it makes you quite a bit more valuable, I think, in the sport as a driver,” said Dale Earnhardt Jr., the 2004 Daytona 500 winner.

“Winning any race at Daytona, it’s like going into Yankee Stadium and winning a game. It further solidifies you as a driver.”

NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Elliott Sadler has yet to win a Daytona 500 but knows the impact would be huge for his career.

“If you win the Daytona 500, it will stay with you throughout your racing career,” Sadler said. “It’s really helped a lot of people catapult their careers up to the next level. There are a few races that if a driver wins, owners and sponsors really pay attention too.”

Said 1990 Daytona 500 champion Derrike Cope: “When you say you have a Daytona 500 win, that’s like a Super Bowl ring.”

The Great Finishes
One quality that the Daytona 500 always delivers race fans is a memorable finish.

The 2007 Daytona 500 could have produced the most thrilling Daytona 500 finish in the history of race.

Kevin Harvick, who started seventh on the final green-white-checkered restart, nipped Mark Martin at the start/finish line to capture the 49th annual Daytona 500. The margin of victory — .020 seconds – was the closest Daytona 500 finish since the advent of computer scoring in 1993 and the eighth closest in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series overall.

While Harvick beat Martin to the checkers, a multi-car accident broke out with Clint Bowyer’s No. 07 Chevrolet flipping upside down and catching fire as he crossed the start/finish line.

Here’s a quick look at some of the other exciting Daytona 500 finishes:

2002 Daytona 500
On a restart with six laps to go, Sterling Marlin, running second, slowed as he approached the green flag in order to get a run on race leader Jeff Gordon.
Gordon quickly reacted and blocked Marlin and the two cars made contact. Gordon spun out into the grass while Marlin took the lead but suffered damage to his right front fender. At the same time Marlin and Gordon tangled, a multi-car crash broke out.

NASCAR quickly threw out the red flag and stopped all the cars on the Superstretch to clean up the accident. Marlin climbed out of his No. 40 Coors Light Dodge, walked over to his right front and began to pull the fender away from the tire.

Teams are not allowed to work on their machines under the red flag and NASCAR officials quickly ordered Marlin back to his race car and forced him to start at the tail end of the lead lap.

Marlin’s loss was Ward Burton’s gain as Burton went on to lead the final five laps to become the first Virginian to win the Daytona 500.

1979 Daytona 500
Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison delivered quite a show in the first live televised broadcast of the Daytona 500.

On the final lap, Yarborough pulled out to pass Allison on the Superstretch. The two banged fenders so hard they crashed into the Turn 3 outside wall before sliding down to the apron.

A.J. Foyt, Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip were about a half lap behind the two embattled leaders. Foyt checked up once he saw the caution light while Petty and Waltrip passed him.

Petty and Waltrip proceeded to battle for the victory with Petty holding on for his sixth Daytona 500 win. But it was the show in Turn 3 that continues to make the highlight reels as Yarborough and Allison began a heated debate that turned into a fist fight with Allison’s brother Bobby jumping into the fray.

1990 Daytona 500
This edition of the “Great American Race” offered one of the race’s biggest upsets.

Dale Earnhardt, who had won almost everything at DIS except the Daytona 500, looked like he would finally break his losing streak.

Earnhardt’s famous black No. 3 Chevrolet was the class of the field as he led 150 laps and nearly lapped the field. But Earnhardt couldn’t lead the most important lap – the final one.

About a quarter lap away from the checkered flag and his elusive first Daytona 500 victory, Earnhardt’s right rear tire failed after running over a piece of bell housing.
Earnhardt miraculously kept his car off the wall, but he was off the pace and out of contention. Derrike Cope, with Terry Labonte behind, passed Earnhardt as they headed toward the checkered flag.

Cope, an up-and-coming driver from Spanaway, Wash., in only his third Daytona 500 start, fended off Terry Labonte to record one of the greatest upsets in motorsports history.

Meanwhile, Earnhardt had to wait until 1998 and his 20th Daytona 500 start before finally hoisting the Harley J. Earl trophy in Daytona’s Victory Lane.

1976 Daytona 500
It was a classic David Pearson-Richard Petty duel that produced one of the most incredible finishes in NASCAR history.

The showdown had been building for about 100 miles when Pearson, on the final lap, passed Petty on the Superstretch.

Exiting Turn 4, Petty had ducked low and passed Pearson but his car slightly drifted up the track and the two drivers touched and crashed. When both cars came to rest in the tri-oval grass, they still had not crossed the start/finish line.

Petty’s radiator was pushed back into the fan on the front of the engine and the car wouldn’t restart. But Pearson dumped the clutch and kept the car in neutral keeping it from stalling.

Pearson straightened out his damaged machine and slowly crossed the start/finish line to capture the only Daytona 500 victory of his career. The finish was the slowest under green flag conditions in Daytona 500 history.

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Facebook IPO at 5 Billion

Written by on February 6, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Facebook IPO at 5 Billion


The Holy Grail of Internet IPOs is finally here. Facebook filed Wednesday to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering. In 2011, Facebook earned $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. As of December 31, Facebook had 845 million monthly active users.

<b>Facebook IPO at 5 Billion</b>

The company crossed the line into profitability in 2009, five years after it launched in founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. Facebook earned $229 million that year on sales of $777 million, and has remained profitable ever since.
It’s not yet known on which stock exchange Facebook will trade, though it said it plans to use the ticker symbol “FB.”
Facebook will likely re-file its paperwork several times over the coming months. Those updates will add more details and could even restate some of the financial information detailed in Wednesday’s filing.
In this initial paperwork, companies don’t declare how many shares they’re going to sell, or how much those shares will cost. Those details will be added in an updated filing shortly before trading begins.
Without that share price information, Facebook’s valuation is still speculative.
Facebook has its own guesses, though. The company said it conducted its own valuation of its stock at the end of each quarter, and as of December 31 determined it to be worth $29.73 a share.
Zuckerberg’s letter to investors: ‘Hacker Way’
Revenue breakdown: Advertising accounted for 85% of Facebook’s 2011 revenue, or almost $3.2 billion.
Facebook’s other revenue stream is its payment system for purchases within apps and games: Facebook Credits. Facebook keeps 30% of the revenue from those payments, and passes the remaining 70% on to the app developer.
Those fees brought in $557 million for Facebook last year.
Revenue from Zynga, which makes FarmVille and other games played on Facebook, represented 12% of Facebook’s total revenue in 2011.
About 44% of Facebook’s revenue came from overseas last year, compared with 38% in 2010 and 33% in 2009.
As of December 31, Facebook had $3.9 billion in cash and liquid assets.
Exec compensation: Another choice tidbit: In 2011, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg raked in a $500,000 base salary. But he requested — and will receive — only $1 per year in salary starting January 1, 2013.
Don’t feel too bad for Zuck, who remains the largest shareholder in the company he created. His total compensation in 2011 came to $1.48 million, according to Facebook’s calculations.

He was one of the lowest-paid among Facebook’s executive ranks. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg topped the list with a total package Facebook estimated at $30.9 million, almost all of it in stock.
Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer made an estimated $24.7 million — again, mostly in stock — while CFO David Ebersman collected an $18.7 million pay package. (For more on Ebersman, see Fortune’s profile: “The man behind the Facebook IPO.”)
As far as the regular rank-and-file at Facebook, the company had 3,200 full-time employees as of December 31. That was a 50% increase from the previous year, and Facebook said it “expect[s] this growth to continue for the foreseeable future.”
Facebook also noted that it has bought out some small companies mainly to acquire employees, and said that it intends to continue that strategy.

How much Facebook is worth: Trading won’t begin for several months, as Facebook now has to field questions from regulators and court investors for its stock sale.
Most analysts estimate Facebook’s valuation will fall somewhere between $85 billion to $100 billion. But the value of Web companies can be extremely volatile.
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A recent example: Zynga (ZNGA). The FarmVille maker’s IPO filing reported that it valued its shares in August 2011 at $17.20 each, which gave the company a valuation of $14 billion. But when Zynga went public in December, shares sold for just $10 — valuing the company at $7 billion.
Several other Internet companies made their public debuts in 2011, but the end of the year proved to be a turbulent time for the sector. Shares of Groupon (GRPN), Pandora (P), Zillow (Z), LinkedIn (LNKD) and Angie’s List (ANGI) all suffered steep double-digit losses for November, though most clawed back at least a bit in December or January.

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Super Bowl TV

Written by on February 6, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Super Bowl TV: Good game, nasty ads, pathetic half-time show


We are supposed to review NBC’s telecast of the Super Bowl itself. You know, what kind of job did Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth and Bob Costas do? And I will deliver a short, fast version of that.

But you cannot review the Super Bowl without talking about the ads and the halftime show.

The ads are a barometer of our culture. And what they said to me is that we have become a truly dumbed-down, crass, trashy and even cruel society — and somehow proud of it.

And if seeing that kind of straight culture talk upsets you, stop reading now, because when I get through the game review and get back to the ads at the end of this piece, you will really be angry. And I have not even started in on the joke of a halftime show featuring an embalmed version of Madonna snatched off the undertaker’s table and surrounded by a sea of empty noise, glitz and wretched excess.

The good news: As has been the case all season, Michaels, Collinsworth and the producers and director of the game telecast were superb. What is pleasure it is to listen to them after a season of watching Ravens games featuring the sorry CBS Sports team of Greg Gumbel and Dan Dierdorf.

Typical of the production values, the opening kickoff featured three different camera angles, and the viewer was shifted seamlessly from one to the other. The point of view started with a ground-level sideline shot of the Patriots front line as the kicker approached the ball. And then, once the viewer was anchored on the field, the p.o.v. went to an overhead shot showing the return team setting up, before zeroing in on the runner from yet another angle.

It seemed as if everyone on the NBC Sports team was on his or her game. I loved Collinsworth’s explanation of how the New England Patriots defensive linemen held up huge paddles in practice all week to simulate for quarterback Tom Brady what he would face from the New York Giants defensive line. (Too bad, Tom, it wasn’t enough for you and your cheating coach.)

Wasn’t it shocking to hear a sideline reporter, in this case Michele Tafoya, quickly tell viewers what happened to a player who was helped off the field: a torn anterior cruciate ligament for Giants tight end Travis Beckum? When CBS covered the Ravens, viewers were usually left to wonder what happened to players forced off the field with injuries.

And what superb camera work late in the fourth quarter on Mario Manningham’s marvelous sideline catch. NBC had it from every angle to show the Giants receiver getting both feet down with total control of the ball.

But forget the game for a moment. I want to make my larger points about the commercials. Nothing approached inspired, that’s for sure. David Beckham’s underwear ad was probably best — all sex, tattoos, longing and physical desire. (I wonder how many women are going to buy those briefs for their boyfriends or husbands, hoping for an act of God.)

But what was really sad about most of the ads was how many featured stupid, gross or cruel behavior.

A dog having killed a cat and trying to cover it up was supposed to be funny in a Doritos ad. A little kid urinating in a swimming pool and laughing when his sister jumps in was the punch line for an online tax service. The joke in a brain-dead, apocalyptic Chevy Silverado ad featuring a group of survivors is that one of the group died because he drove a Ford. Is this where the Obama bailout money went?

But I think the ad that best summarizes how debased our excessive commercialism has made us is the Go Daddy commercial that features two women using another woman’s body as a billboard on which to write and draw the Go Daddy brand. There is something especially calculating about having two women do it to another woman — when you know the intended appeal of the ad is male voyeurism.

And I have seen some of my colleagues online and in social media already applauding this exercise in debasement. And the media world will be filled today with more celebrations of other ignorant ads — count on it.

And then, there was Madonna’s zombie halftime show.

<b>Super Bowl TV</b>

I can’t recall the last time I saw a major TV production so desperately in need of a guiding concept. And that includes the obscene gesture from one of the other performers, which typifies the utter lack of imagination from beginning to end of Madonna’s so-called performance. (You can read about that crude and ignorant gesture from singer M.I.A. here.)

But what the hell was she doing? Was it ancient Egypt with the Cleopatra entrance? Or was it ancient Rome with the toga boy bouncing on the wire in front of her? (Hey, at least toga boy brought about five seconds of energy to that death march of a production.)

Oh wait, I know, it was supposed to American circa 1950s high school football with Madonna waving pom-poms as a cheerleader.

No wrong again, because now Madonna is standing in front of a huge choir full of people in robes – and she’s acting as if she’s almost singing. I say almost, because there is not a whit of artistic aspiration in the star performer or the production as far I can tell.

But hey, that’s our sad-sack, super-sized, gross American culture these days, isn’t it. And it is perfectly suited for empty Super Bowl half-time spectacle. When you don’t have real energy, true conviction, religious belief, art or transcendence, just trot out a monstrous, phony, show-biz choir of singers clapping their hands and looking heavenward as they strut and prance around the lip-synching star.

Thank goodness there was real emotion on the field in a thrilling, 21-17 Giants victory.
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On Sunday night, the game was the thing that wound up counting — as it should be. Not the ignorant and nasty ads or the moribund Super Bowl TV halftime show.

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Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil

Written by on February 1, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Virgin Coconut Oil Gold Label – The Purest Unrefined Coconut Oil


Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil – When we first read about the wonderful benefits of coconut oil, I asked my wife Marianita, who grew up on a coconut plantation in the Philippines, if there was a more natural way to extract the oil from the coconut, so that we didn’t have to buy the refined coconut oils found in all the stores in the Philippines. She answered that there was a method the older generation used to extract the oil by grating the fresh coconut, extracting the coconut milk, and then letting the coconut milk stand in a covered container for about 24 hours. After about 24 hours, the oil naturally separates from the water producing a crystal clear oil that retains the full scent and taste of coconuts. So we started making our coconut oil that way and using it for our cooking needs with our three children. We couldn’t believe how wonderful it tasted, and how great we felt. We had been living on Mt. Banahaw in the Philippines for almost two years by that time, and in the year 2000 telephone service was provided to our rural farming community, allowing me to put up a website about our Philippine Herbs. I decided to also put our Virgin Coconut Oil up on the website, not really expecting people to order it because it was a bit expensive since we had to hire people to make the oil, and shipping cost a lot because of the weight. We were so surprised when people started ordering, and then re-ordering it because they felt so great after using it! They told us there was no other coconut oil like it on the market. (See a sample of testimonies below.)

Before long we had businesses contacting us asking how to order it in bulk. So my wife and I discussed how we could mass produce this kind of oil, and almost abandoned the product because we didn’t want to lose the traditional way of making it. In the end, we decided to just keep making it the same way, by having others in our coconut community also make the oil the traditional way. Many of our producers are in areas so remote, that if they did not use their coconuts to produce Virgin Coconut oil for us, no one would buy their coconuts because it would cost too much to transport them to manufacturing plants. In these areas, the coconuts generally just fell to the ground unused until we started training people to make our Virgin Coconut Oil. We were the first ones to export Virgin Coconut Oil from the Philippines to the US market. The success overwhelmed us.

Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil

Today, more than 9 years later, there are other companies now selling coconut oil again in the US, most of them mass-produced by machines from dried coconut. But we are committed to time-honored traditional practices that have produced healthy coconut oil for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Our Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil is still produced by hand, using the wet-milling process of extracting the oil from fresh coconuts. Our producers have learned a lot of things over the years, since most of them have been producing this oil for over 9 years now. They have learned how to pick out the best coconuts from each harvest that produce the best quality oil, for example. Independent laboratory analysis shows this to be one of the highest quality coconut oils on the market, having the highest levels of antioxidants. This enhanced Virgin Coconut Oil is now in the US market under the Tropical Traditions Gold Label brand. It meets our strictest standards to earn this designation. Today when you buy Tropical Traditions Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil, you are buying the highest quality coconut oil we have to offer, and it is still made by hand and benefiting families in the rural areas of the Philippines where the coconuts grow.

Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil

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Super Bowl XLVI Media Day

Written by on January 31, 2012 · Leave a Comment

All eyes on Gronkowski’s ankle at media day

Musings, observations and the occasional insight from the exercise in pack journalism that was Tuesday’s Super Bowl media day at the beehive known as Lucas Oil Stadium, which served to remind me once again that when it comes to this over-hyped event, alas, we’re farther away all the time from chatting up Namath at poolside…
• What would Super Bowl week be like without an ankle injury to obsess over? There always seems to be a Dwight Freeney or a Maurkice Pouncey to fixate on, and thank goodness New England tight end Rob Gronkowski’s gimpy left ankle gives us something that warrants breathless updates and round-the-clock coverage, like a hostage crisis or maybe some celebrity divorce proceedings.
I couldn’t be in two places at once Tuesday morning when Gronkowski took to the podium and fielded 27 questions about the state of his ankle in the first 3 1/2 minutes of his hour-long press availability, but I swear when he talked, only Bill Belichick’s lips moved. It was a positively Patriot-esque performance put on by the second-year tight end, and New England’s belief that no news is good news on the injury front was never more in evidence.
Gronkowski said the phrase “day by day” so many times in so many different answers that I lost count. He threw in the occasional “I’m taking it step by step,” but his go-to reply was of the “I’m just going day by day” variety, which I think all of us can relate to on some level.
The most obvious piece of news didn’t even require a question: Gronkowski has shed the walking boot he wore to town on Sunday afternoon, and that has to pass as progress. Gronkowski said the boot came off for good on Monday, and while he didn’t say he’d be taking salsa lessons from Giants receiver Victor Cruz this week, he seemed to be moving around OK on his bad wheel.
“Gronk” also deftly and repeatedly sidestepped the issue of his availability for the Super Bowl against the Giants, telling the media again and again that the only thing he was worried about is “Tuesday, which is today.” The game, he helpfully reminded us, “that’s on Sunday.”
Gronkowski again displayed his keen awareness of time when one reporter asked if he’d be receiving treatment on his ankle “24/7” this week? “If it was 24/7, I’d be doing it right now,” he correctly pointed out, to little argument. If this had been a Republican presidential debate, at that point the crowd would have jeered the reporter who asked the question and given Gronkowski a standing ovation for the grand slam he just hit.
Lastly, while his head coach is known for reiterating that he’s not a doctor when meddlesome reporters ask questions in search of his team’s injury news, Gronkowski did try to shed some light on his situation, describing his ankle as “nagging,” and “sore.” He went on to say “there is a difference between hurt, sore and banged up,” without specifically telling us which category he’s in. “In the NFL, you definitely have to play hurt,” he said.
I happen to think Gronkowski could probably accurately list himself in all three categories, but it won’t stop him from playing Sunday against New York. Whether he’s his same effective self, and whether the Patriots’ devastating two-tight end set does its usual amount of damage is the real question. That’s the answer we won’t find out until Sunday night. But I bet it won’t stop anyone from asking about The State of the Ankle and how it might affect the New England game plan for the next four-plus days.
• The Giants may be a three-point underdog, but New York isn’t trying to parlay that into some phony no-respect angle for motivational purposes, and I find that almost refreshing. After all, the Giants did beat the Patriots at home in Week 9, and there was that Super Bowl upset of New England four years ago to draw on. It sounds like the underdog role should be something the Patriots are willing to claim.
“Absolutely not. We don’t feel like we’re underdogs again,” Giants running back Brandon Jacobs said. “That’s Vegas. They’re going to do what they’ve got to do to make as much money as they can make.”
OK, that’s just Vegas trying to get some action on the game started. I buy that. But Jacobs said this year’s team and the 2007 Giants were in different positions, and it makes for a different mentality entering this game.
“The difference between this team and the 2007 team, the last time we made this run, the 2007 team was just playing,” Jacobs said. “We knew we had a terrible season and we had a last opportunity that we took advantage of. We were just playing in the playoffs, because we didn’t really know then. But this team knows we can come out and do this. We knew if we could make it to the playoffs, we could win once we got to the playoffs. We worked super hard to get here and we’re going to try and finish this thing off.”
• I walked around the Giants media day session and tried to decide which little-known reserve New York receiver has the best possible chance to pull a David Tyree and help beat the Patriots with an improbable late-game catch, a’la Tyree’s famous “helmet grab” of 2008. I came to the conclusion that third-year veteran Ramses Barden, he of the 6-foot-6, 225-pound frame, was my best guess to go up and out-sky Patriots safety Devin McCourty or someone else in the New England secondary.
Barden found my theory interesting at least, and heard me out.
“Yes and no,” he said, when I asked him if he ever let himself think of being the David Tyree of this game, with a catch that becomes a signature moment in Super Bowl history and maybe changes his life forever.
“You always want to be the guy, but you can never really foresee the exact circumstances,” said Barden, who made just nine catches for 94 yards this season, with both totals representing career highs. “You don’t plan for having the one particular catch. You plan for being the starter, being the guy, the go-to guy throughout the game.
“So throughout this week, throughout this season, throughout my career, I’ve always tried to train my mind to be someone who expects to be the starter week in and week out, regardless of whether or not that’s the situation. Because that’s the only way you’re going to be prepared for it if it actually does happen.”
Barden was still in college at Cal-Poly San Luis-Obispo when Tyree made his iconic catch in February 2008 and helped the Giants upset the 18-0 Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. But he said he knew instantly that Tyree had pulled off that mini-miracle.
“I stood up and said, ‘He got it. He got it. That’s a catch.’ I knew it right away, the same way I knew Mike Tyson bit Holyfield in that fight. I was like 10 or 12 years old, and I was home on the couch in my house, and I was like, ‘He bit him!’ And nobody paid any attention to me. But then I said, ‘He just did it again. He bit him again.’ That was the same type of moment as Tyree’s catch.”
• Got my first real chance to listen to the Patriots’ multi-tasking offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien, and Penn State’s new head coach is pretty quick with the wit. Someone asked if he is handling any more responsibility this week, given that he’s already at the head coaching level, and O’Brien proved he has not lost track of who he works for.
“When you work for Bill Belichick, there’s only one cook in the kitchen, and that’s Bill Belichick,” O’Brien said. “We’re all just dishwashers.”
O’Brien is at the very least the busiest dishwasher in New England. It’s Super Bowl week, but Wednesday is also National Signing Day, the hugely critical first day high school prospects can sign a letter of intent with a college. O’Brien said he’ll be at Penn State full-time starting on Monday or Tuesday after the Super Bowl, but that this week he’s focusing like a laser on his old job.
“This is a week about the Patriots, and really not about Penn State right now,” he said. “I’m trying to do the best I can to put together, with the staff, a great game plan for Sunday.”
That’s admirable, and at least it’s better than the maneuver pulled by then-New England head coach Bill Parcells at Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans. Parcells that week had to coach around reports that he already had a secret deal to leave the Patriots for the Jets head coaching job after the Super Bowl. New England lost to Green Bay, and Parcells soon resigned and took the Jets’ post, producing years of bitter feelings from Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Pick Boy has become an institution at media day in recent years.
Reuters
• At least five times I must have chosen the same player podium to be at — unfortunately — as that Nickelodeon guy who always shows up on Super Bowl media day and calls himself “Pick Boy.” He’s dressed in a knockoff version of the “Robin” cape, mask and tights of “Batman and Robin” fame, and let’s just say hilarity doesn’t often ensue following his zany questions put to players.
I did, however, leave media day with one very strong impression of “Pick Boy”: He bears a striking resemblance to Lions head coach Jim Schwartz, and come to think of it, I’ve never seen them together.
• I almost felt sad and a little embarrassed for Chad Ochocinco on Tuesday at media day. I couldn’t even find him for the longest time in the scrum of reporters and players down on the field. One of the most quotable and media-savvy players of his era, Ochocinco didn’t even rate his own podium on media day, and that galling omission accurately reflects his lack of standing and significance in New England’s offense this season: just 15 catches for 276 yards, both 11-year career lows.
“I like it like this,” said Ochocinco of his lack of status in his first Super Bowl as a player, without sounding the least bit convincing. “Everyone’s surrounding me and I don’t have a podium. But if I was up there, you couldn’t get to me. You couldn’t smell the cologne I have on right now. So this is cool.”
• Speaking of being forgotten, Patriots third-team quarterback Ryan Mallett didn’t draw much of a media crowd either. But I asked him if he thought about making it to this game the moment he was drafted by New England in the third round last year?
“I would have thought of this game no matter what team I would have went to,” said Mallett, the former Arkansas quarterback who had character issues attached to his name in the pre-draft scouting process, no doubt contributing to him lasting until the 74th overall pick. “But yeah, obviously, with the Patriots you think you want to go win.”
Mallett refuses to bristle about his low profile this season, and he has yet to appear in a regular season game. But playing behind both Brady and Brian Hoyer left him inactive on game days this season.
“It’s been good for me to be able to sit back and watch and not have to do media stuff all the time and be out of the spotlight I guess,” Mallett said, rather tellingly. “But as a competitor, of course I want to be on the field and be playing in the game.
“Every Sunday, when that clocks starts, and they sing the national anthem, I’m ready to go. But then I look down and I’ve got tennis shoes on, so I’ve got to settle down a little bit [and remind myself] I’m not going out there today.”
I’m sure it’s great to go to the Super Bowl as a rookie, but I couldn’t help but ask Mallett what he would think and feel if he had to endure a second season of no playing time in 2012? Would he still feel as fortunate to be drafted by the Patriots?
“This is my job, this is my career, and in this business you don’t have too much say,” he said. “So I’ll do whatever I’m told to do.”
• You see some crazy stuff on Super Bowl media day. Like Tiquan Underwood’s haircut. The Patriots reserve receiver is sporting a Will Smith-”Fresh Prince”-like ‘do to begin with of late, but he has kicked things up a notch or two for the Super Bowl, getting New England’s “Flying Elvis” logo cut into the back of his head.
“I wanted to spice up the haircut,” Underwood told reporters. “It’s a big game.”

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Super Bowl XLVI week begins

Written by on January 31, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Super Bowl week begins, ice and snow no-shows


Patriots coach Bill Belichick could leave his familiar hoodies in the hotel drawer. There was no need to bundle up for the start of only the fourth Super Bowl week in a northern city.

Ice and snow? Notable no-shows.

Fans threw open their jackets as they walked around downtown streets near Lucas Oil Stadium on Monday, hoping to get a glimpse of a celebrity in town for the game between New England and the New York Giants. Temperatures in the mid-to-upper 50s were forecast for the start of the week, well above normal.

The sunshine felt so good that it made for a joke or two.

“I know the way we’re preparing and the way we’ve controlled the weather, which is hard to do,” Colts owner Jim Irsay said, smiling. “But we’ve had certain techniques that were going to keep hidden, and I hope they hold.”

Already, it’s way better than Dallas.

Weather is a major concern when the title game goes north, but some of the biggest problems came down south last year. Snow and 100 hours of sub-freezing temperatures snarled traffic and led to injuries when an icy patch fell off the stadium roof and hit six workers.

Indianapolis watched and prepared.

“You can have anything in Indiana,” Super Bowl Host Committee spokeswoman Mel Raines said. “Our plan is intended for everything.”

In its first three times at a northern exposure, the NFL’s title game has experienced a little of everything.

The ground-breaking game came after the 1981 season in Detroit, a test of whether it would work outside the sunny climes of Florida, New Orleans, Texas and California. The week leading up to the game between the Bengals and 49ers included bursts of snow culminating in nasty conditions for game day.

Bored players passed the time that week by spinning their tires on the ice-covered hotel parking lot for fun.

“I think the biggest challenge was for guys not to get bored to tears,” former Bengals offensive lineman Dave Lapham said. “We kind of felt cooped up, really. Guys talked about: What are we going to do? Ski? Ice skate? You could strap on skates and skate on the streets. There was nothing do to.”

Traffic heading to the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich., on game day got clogged by another burst of snow. Fans braved temperatures of 13 degrees and a wind chill of 21 below.

After that experience, there was talk that the league would never venture north again for a Super Bowl.

“I thought they’d stick to it, honestly,” said Lapham, now a broadcaster for the Bengals. “But with the dynamic of people putting up more money for stadiums, they’re going to reward communities.”

Ten years later, the Bills and Redskins played for the title in Minneapolis, where the ground was covered with snow but the region handled it much more smoothly.

Then, the cold became a selling point for some Redskins players. Earnest Byner, Art Monk, Monte Coleman and Chip Lohmiller went ice fishing on Cedar Lake in 30-below wind chills. Byner caught a 4-inch perch using a wax worm.

The game returned to Detroit after the 2005 season and things went much more smoothly despite a little snow on game day, when the Steelers beat the Seahawks.

Last year’s game in Dallas became an unexpected reminder of what can go wrong in winter, no matter where the location.

A snowstorm and 100 consecutive hours of subfreezing temperatures turned the Dallas area into an ice rink. Snow and ice fell from the roof of Cowboys Stadium, injuring six workers on the plaza below. Organizers had spread events around a 30-mile area to emphasize the regional support for the game, creating major travel problems when the weather went bad.

Indianapolis has done it differently.

Most of the Super Bowl events are clustered downtown, minimizing travel. Temporary structures for the Super Bowl festivities were fitted with wind gauges for safety. On Sunday, two tents at an NFL fan exhibit were closed for about an hour because of high winds.

The city removed parking meters from high-traffic streets downtown so snow could be easily pushed away. Twenty-four snow removal trucks were on call for the game, four times the normal amount. The host committee recruited “Super Shoveler” volunteers to help clear sidewalks if it snowed.

In some ways, it’s a warm-up act for the first true cold-weather title game. The 2014 Super Bowl will be co-hosted by New York and New Jersey, played outdoors instead of in a dome during the middle of winter.

The logo for that game? A blue-and-white snowflake.

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Facebook IPO Rumors

Written by on January 30, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Sorting through Facebook IPO Rumors

There’s no shortage of speculation and rumors about Facebook’s upcoming initial public offering, some of it plausible, some of it not so much.
First off, the Wednesday date that has been making the rounds from several sources does not mean that the actual IPO will occur Wednesday or Thursday.
If anything actually occurs this week, it will involve Facebook registering the offer and disclosing information that it was previously able to keep private.
The Wall Street Journal is also being more cautious with Facebook’s valuation, pegging it at $75 billion to $100 billion, while several other media outlets are running wild with the $100 billion figure. We saw that the company’s valuation on SharesPost closed at $79 billion, so that’s the number we need to stick with.
And then there’s the matter of which bank will be named lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Reports have surfaced about Facebook having issues with each of them — with Morgan Stanley for leaking information, as reported by CNBC and expanded upon via Twitter by Fox Business’ Charles Gasparino; and with Goldman Sachs for its mishandling of a private placement last January.
The New York Post reported last week that Facebook reserved the ticker symbol “FB” on both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, but the company has not selected which stock exchange it will use, although reports later in the week appear to be trending toward Nasdaq.
And rounding up today’s edition of speculation gone wild, Silicon Alley Insider reported that “a source close to an employee at one of the banks underwriting the IPO” said the weekend of May 18 to 20 is being called a “be ready to work weekend,” allegedly for underwriting purposes, although the last time we checked, the stock markets were closed on weekends.

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Tough Love for jobless in South Carolina

Written by on January 25, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Tough Love for jobless in South Carolina

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich may or may not win the GOP nomination. But his words warm the cockles of the hearts of Republican business leaders here.
If’s he’s elected, he told South Carolina business leaders this week, “We never again pay anyone for 99 weeks of doing nothing. … It is profoundly wrong to pay people to do nothing.”
Gingrich wants to require job training in exchange for an unemployment check. In South Carolina, some lawmakers want to impose mandatory volunteer work and drug tests.
Welcome to the tough love state for people without jobs. Or people who have some work but not enough to make it.
Kevin Bryant, an outspoken conservative in the state Senate, is sponsoring a bill to require drug tests for people who apply for unemployment benefits.
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Conservative lawmakers in 10 other states have introduced similar measures.
Bryant, an affable, rosy-cheeked pharmacist from Anderson, is backing Ron Paul for president.
“Barry Goldwater said back in the day, ‘It is not my goal to promote welfare — but to protect freedom,’ ” Bryant told CNN this week, standing on the steps of the South Carolina State House.
“When we protect freedom, the quality of life always improves. When we try to distribute wealth, we only bring everybody down.”
South Carolina is one of the poorest states in the nation, and its official unemployment rate — just under 10 percent — is higher than the nation’s. It has been since the recession began.
It ranks near the bottom — 45th — in the amount of money it gives to people who’ve lost jobs. The average check is $235 a week. And South Carolina cuts off benefits six weeks earlier than most other states.
Bryant says he thinks it’s too easy for workers who don’t really want to work to get unemployment benefits.
“We’re subsidizing poor behavior,” he says. “When you do that, you get more poor behavior.”
He tells a story of a constituent who called his office asking for help to extend his unemployment benefits. Bryant’s office offered to help the man get a job that required a commercial driver’s license.
“And he said, ‘No, I’m not really interested in that job. I just want to keep my check coming.’”

Job seekers speak with a potential hirer at a job fair in Columbia Friday for veterans and National Guard members.
“And it’s unfortunate that we do have a mind-set that is really based on breaking one of the Commandments — Thou shalt not covet. We have some segment in our society that feels like they are deserving of something taken from somebody else. And we’ve got to get away from that.”
That’s not the real issue, some people say.
“The problem is, we are a poor state,” says Sue Berkowitz, director of South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, a nonprofit group that works on behalf of poor people.
“We don’t have many jobs. The jobs we have don’t pay living wages. Instead of addressing the real problems out there, he’s blaming people for having misfortune.”
Frank Knapp says Kevin Bryant isn’t alone in doing that. Knapp heads the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce.
“What we typically do here in South Carolina is try to blame the victim — instead of having a true game plan to grow our economy from the bottom up,” Knapp told CNN this week.
South Carolina has long tried to create jobs by recruiting outside manufacturers — such as BMW and Boeing — by offering huge tax breaks and other incentives.
One of those incentives is South Carolina’s cheap labor force. It’s a right-to-work state, meaning unions have little influence.
Knapp says the state’s strategy of “chasing the big elephants” has left South Carolina with a vulnerable economy.
“We rely on all these deals to recruit a manufacturer from another state,” he said. That’s what we did with Boeing. Boeing was going to build someplace. We won that deal. Did we create any new jobs for this country that weren’t going to be created anyway? No.”
“But if we invested a little more effort in South Carolina to grow small businesses and create jobs that would not go anywhere else, and are never going to move out of state — we would have more of a sustainable economy.”
He said that would mean fewer unemployed people.
One of those unemployed people is Hudie Evans of Columbia.
He’s 62 years old, and he hasn’t had steady full-time work since mid-2009 when he lost his job as a production supervisor at a bakery company.
But here’s a twist: Evans says he likes Senator Bryant’s tough-love philosophy.
“I’ve worked all my life,” he said. “I don’t believe in government handouts. Because it’s not government’s job to do that.”
Evans is another Ron Paul supporter. He’s a college grad — he has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
But he doesn’t know where his rent is coming from in three months.
His last real job was at the new Amazon facility here — one that got millions of dollars in state incentives to move to South Carolina.
Evans said the agency that hired him led him to think it would become a full-time job. He says he worked his heart out to make that happen. But he and dozens of other workers got laid off days before Christmas.
That’s when Evans learned he’d just been hired to help out for the holidays.
Evans keeps looking for full-time work. He says he won’t be asking for help from South Carolina. He’s a believer in tough love, too.

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Super Bowl XLVI Tickets

Written by on January 23, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Super Bowl XLVI Tickets

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Super Bowl football fans will need big bucks if they want to watch the Big Blue take on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis on Feb. 5.
The rematch of the 2008 thriller between the Giants and the New England Patriots is attracting huge interest on ticket resale websites, where thousands of seats are selling for $2,500 to $15,000. Originally priced at $900 and $1,200 per ticket, a street level suite listed on StubHub was listed at $882,375 today, hours after the Giants defeated the San Francisco 49ers for a berth in the big game.
“It’s a hot ticket,” said StubHub spokeswoman Joellen Ferrer, who said the Super Bowl attracted 1.5 visitors to the site on Sunday, or 40 percent of the day’s total.
There are several reasons for the crazy prices. For one, Boston and New York are big markets with large, wealthy fan bases. And the game will be played in Indianapolis, which is relatively close to both home teams and thus attractive for a weekend trip.
But the biggest force driving prices might be the rematch. The Giants were underdogs in 2008, when they surged to victory in the final minutes of Super Bowl XLII, ruining the Patriot’s perfect season in dramatic fashion.
Earlier this season, Big Blue again beat the Pats in a close game in Foxborough. Even so, they are the early underdogs for the championship.
“New York-Boston is always a rivalry, and the way the game ended four years ago? The rivalry is there,” said Tom Patania, owner of Select-A-Ticket in Riverdale. The average ticket today was selling online for $2,800, less than the $3,134 average from 2008 but on par with the average price for last year’s Steelers-Packers showdown at Cowboy Stadium in Arlington Texas, according to TicketNetwork.com, a secondary marketplace.

• Giants edge 49ers, 20-17, as Lawrence Tynes’ field goal in OT sets up Super Bowl rematch with Patriots
The Giants’ victory over the 49ers and the Patriots’ win over the Baltimore Ravens left many brokers smiling.
“I don’t know if I can think of two better markets for any game,” TicketNetwork.com’s Tim Fraser said. “The Giants and Patriots have fans that span the country. Of the four teams, there’s no doubt that this is the match-up that would have the highest demand for tickets.”
Patania won’t predict where prices will end up, but he said the number of available tickets is smaller than last year and that could drive them up. Lucas Oil Stadium, which opened in 2008, will hold 70,000 for the big game, a couple thousand more than a normal Colts home game. But that total is significantly smaller than last year, when Cowboys Stadium announced a total crowd of more than 100,000.
“The teams are going to get less tickets and there will be less tickets overall, and that means a tighter market,” Patania said. “But you don’t know what the market is going to do. We’ve seen situations where its dipped and then rallied.”
While millions are trolling the internet marketplaces, others have an easier route. Nazo Haroutunian of Hilllsdale is one of thousands of lucky Giants season ticket holders whose names were drawn in a lottery for the opportunity to buy two tickets through the team.
Haroutunian, 38, bought a pair of $900 tickets and plans to enjoy his first Super Bowl with Michael Gostanian of Queens, his friend who is half-owner of his season tickets.
“I love it, the rematch,” Haroutunian said, adding that watching Sunday’s game “probably shaved 10 years off my life.”
As soon as he saw the e-mail from the team Sunday night, Haroutunian started surfing the web for hotels and flights. He was shocked by the costs.
“Everything’s through the roof,” he said. He found rooms going for as much as $800 a night, but managed to book one for $400.
The NFL divides the ticket inventory the same way every year, said Giants spokesman Pat Hanlon. The Giants and Patriots each get about 12,250 tickets, or 17.5 percent of the total, Hanlon said, and the Indianapolis Colts as the hosting team get 3,500. Each NFL club gets 1.2 percent of total tickets, and the league gets the final 25 percent.
Hanlon said the team notified the season ticket holders who were selected by random (but weighted for seniority) drawing to purchase tickets. The winners must bring a certified check to the Giants offices this week to get their tickets.
“I’m almost looking at it like I got a little lucky,” Haroutunian said. “I’m looking forward to it all, to getting caught up in the craziness.”

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Super Bowl XLVI

Written by on January 23, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Super Bowl XLVI – Indy Bound

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New York Giants and New England Patriots head to Super Bowl XLVI -

Stuck in traffic on a bus headed for rainy Candlestick Park on Sunday afternoon, Devin Thomas had a vision. Thomas is the No. 4 wide receiver for the New York Giants, and as such he doesn’t get too many chances to make plays. He’s a special teams guy, mainly, and not even a return man anymore after flopping in that role earlier this season. So when Thomas has a vision of himself making a huge play to help win a game, it’s a special teams play — a frantic, full-speed crazy play that no one could have seen coming.
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“I knew I was going to do it,” Thomas said. “I was just thinking today was one of those crazy days where something crazy’s going to turn the game. And I had a vision in my mind that I would be the guy who did it.”

Thomas made two such plays Sunday. He recovered two fumbles on punt returns by Kyle Williams, the 49ers’ backup return man. The first set the Giants up for a go-ahead fourth-quarter touchdown at a time when they appeared totally incapable of moving the ball against the San Francisco defense. The second came in overtime, and a few minutes later, after Lawrence Tynes kicked the second NFC Championship Game-winning field goal of his career, the Giants had a 20-17 victory and a date with the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.

“Our guys never quit, never have any doubts,” said Giants quarterback Eli Manning, who spent his night being knocked around by fearsome 49ers defenders but never flinched, completing 32 of 58 passes for 316 yards and two touchdowns. “We just keep believing and keep fighting until the very end, no matter what the circumstances are.”

These Giants are as improbable a Super Bowl participant as the NFL has seen in some time. Widely predicted (especially here) to miss the playoffs during the preseason, losers of four games in a row in a tough stretch in late November and earlier December, their record stood at 7-7 after a Week 15 loss to the division-rival Redskins. They have not lost a game since. If they had — if they’d lost even one of the five games they’ve played since that loss to Washington — they would not still be playing. The defining aspect of these Giants is their toughness, but out of that over the past five weeks has grown a patience and a discipline that’s rooted in intense self-belief and has propelled them to unexpected heights.

“They have grit, now,” a beaming head coach Tom Coughlin said of his second Giants Super Bowl team. “We’ve had five straight single-elimination games. We’ve played an awful lot of superior football teams this year, and that has certainly helped.”

But no one could have seen this coming. Not from 6-6 or 7-7 and certainly not from the preseason, when they were dealing with a major injury per week and everybody was in love with the offseason the Eagles had. Back then, there was no way to know that Jason Pierre-Paul would become one of the best pass rushers in the league or that Victor Cruz would become one of its best wide receivers. The odds against both of those things happening were astronomical.

“I think we knew, here in this locker room,” said rookie linebacker Jacquian Williams, who stripped the ball from Kyle Williams so that Thomas could pounce on it in overtime. “You see the talent those guys have on the practice field and you know it’s just a matter of when they’re going to get their opportunity.”

Victor Cruz had 142 yards on 10 catches in the Giants’ win.
From October, you couldn’t have seen Williams coming. But he’s become a critical asset in the Giants’ coverage units over the past couple of months, and as he showed Sunday, he’s capable of making game-changing plays on special teams. He laughed when I asked him how this was matching up to the expectations he’d had for his rookie season.

“Rookies don’t usually have an opportunity to play,” he said. “Especially when you got picked in the sixth round.”

But this has been an all-hands-on-deck kind of season for the Giants, and opportunities have piled up. Brandon Jacobs got an opportunity to be a big part of the running game again when Ahmad Bradshaw got hurt. Bradshaw had the bigger game Sunday, but Jacobs has been a key part of the current streak. Osi Umenyiora came back from a late-season ankle injury and has elevated the pass rush to teetering heights, terrorizing quarterbacks and forcing fumbles during this run and helping Pierre-Paul and Justin Tuck get free to wreak their own havoc.

“I love these guys. They’ve had my back the whole time,” said Umenyiora, who’s transformed from cranky contract complainer to peaceful, happy team player in a span of a few months. “So I wasn’t going to come back and be selfish. I just wanted to come back and do what they need me to do, whatever that is. That’s what I’ve done and it’s had an impact.”

This Giants team may have led the league in surprise clutch performances. You may be able to say you thought Cruz would be good, or that Pierre-Paul would come on quickly, or that Umenyiora would put his personal stuff aside for the good of the team. You may be able to say you knew Manning was going to play turnover-free football in the conference title game against a team that forced 43 turnovers in its first 17 games. You may be able to say you knew Mathias Kiwanuka was going to change positions and be a critical part of the defense, or even that you believed Williams and Thomas would be making key plays in the biggest game of the season.

But to say you saw all of that coming? You’d have to be crazy to expect anyone to buy that. These Giants represent the reason we watch sports — to be surprised and amazed, to see human beings push their own limits and achieve things few expected of them. These Giants are overachievers, a team that has found ways to win all year when it didn’t appear they should. And you can’t be that without getting big-time contributions from every corner of the roster.

“I think we always believed — in ourselves, in our coaches, in our plan, in each other,” wide receiver Hakeem Nicks said. “And that’s the reason why we’re here.”

There are so many reasons, and they range from the obvious to the obscure. Nobody picked Thomas to make the plays that won the NFC Championship Game, because Thomas is the kind of guy you have to work hard to remember is still on the team. But as the Giants left their locker room late Sunday night, Thomas carried the ball he’d recovered in overtime and got right back on the bus where he’d envisioned himself doing just that. It may have been a surprise to the rest of us, but it wasn’t to Thomas, and it wasn’t to the Giants. There are many, many people who are surprised to find the Giants still standing. But the Giants are not among them. They may not have known how they were going to do this, but they always believed they would. And it’s quite a varied and remarkable collection of players that has found a way.

Two plays separated the Baltimore Ravens from reaching the Super Bowl. But it was those two plays that secured the Ravens’ place in the NFL history of heartbreak.

Billy Cundiff’s missed field goal and Lee Evans’ drop in the end zone will long be remembered among the biggest flops ever in the playoffs. Cundiff is the new Scott Norwood, and Evans is the new Jackie Smith.

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Teams can often pour their pain into one play. What makes the Ravens different is they received a double dose of bitterness and agony. While the Ravens players and coaches put on a composed face to reporters, a source said helmets were thrown in the locker room and then it became silent as everyone reflected on what might have been.

Cundiff should have made a 32-yard field goal. Evans should have made the catch in the end zone. Baltimore should have gone to Indianapolis. The scoreboard — Patriots 23, Ravens 20 — said otherwise.

That’s why this is the most devastating loss in the Ravens’ 273-game existence. Nothing comes close. There have been other crushing blows, but the Ravens have never had a ticket to the Super Bowl taken away from them twice in the final 22 seconds of a game.

The Ravens did everything on their checklist to win the game. Joe Flacco threw for 306 yards — 67 more than Tom Brady. The defense held the Patriots to 23 points and held Brady without a passing touchdown. The team forced three turnovers and dominated time of possession (33:33 to 26:27).

It didn’t matter because of two plays. The Ravens blinked when the game was on the line. They flinched when the pressure had reached its peak.

The Ravens’ previous incarnation, the Browns, endured The Drive and The Fumble. The Ravens now have The Drop and The Kick.

Cundiff has gone from the top of his profession, a Pro Bowl kicker in 2010, to enduring the position’s worst nightmare. By hooking that kick wide left, he joins the likes of Norwood, who will forever be remembered for missing a 47-yard field goal at the end of the game that cost the Buffalo Bills a Super Bowl XXV victory against the Giants.

“It’s a kick I’ve kicked a thousand times in my career,” a solemn Cundiff said. “I just went out there and didn’t convert. That’s the way things go. There’s really no excuse for it.”

The Ravens might have been able to avoid that miss. Cundiff was rushing out onto the field and barely got set up in time.

The snap and hold looked good, but Cundiff pulled it wide. If the Ravens had taken a timeout, Cundiff would have had more time to set up and might have made that kick.

Asked if he thought about using a timeout in that situation, Ravens coach John Harbaugh said, “That never occurred to me. I didn’t think that. You know, looking back at it now, maybe there was something we could have done. But in the situation, it didn’t seem like we were that rushed on the field. [I] thought we were in pretty good shape.”

Baltimore punter Sam Koch, who is also the holder, acknowledged “we might have been” rushed.

“But it’s something that we’ve practiced,” Koch said. “I thought there was plenty of time for him to get set up and do his thing. I’m not sure how rushed he really felt.”

You could argue that Cundiff should’ve never been put in that situation. Two plays before that kick, Evans had a 14-yard touchdown pass in his hands — for a second. Undrafted rookie Sterling Moore slapped the ball away from Evans in the end zone when it looked like he seemed to relax. It didn’t look like he had possession of the ball when his second foot landed.

Evans finds himself lumped in history withCowboys tight end Jackie Smith, who dropped a pass in the end zone after being wide open in the end zone in Super Bowl XIII against the Steelers.

“Honestly, the most disappointing part of all this … that I feel personally that I let everybody down,” said Evans, whose began to brim with emotion. “This is the greatest team that I’ve been on, and I feel like I let everybody down. Yeah, it’s on my shoulders. I think Ray (Lewis) gave a good message coming in here. It’s hard to sit here and accept how and why things happened, but it’s the reality of it. It’s as tough as it gets.”

Patriots free safety Sterling Moore stripped Ravens receiver Lee Evans in the end zone.
Flacco thought Evans had caught the ball and the Ravens had taken a 27-23 lead with 22 seconds remaining. He threw his hands up in the air and started running toward the end zone until he saw the referee signal incomplete.

“If you weren’t celebrating, you weren’t a Ravens fan,” linebacker Ray Lewis said.

Ravens center Matt Birk is the only player who knows this pain. He was on the Minnesota Vikings when Gary Anderson missed a field goal wide right in the NFC championship game 13 years ago.

He understands the toll a loss like this can take on a franchise.

“This team, this group, this organization is a pretty mentally tough group,” Birk said.

The Ravens had been building to this moment. Baltimore swept the AFC North. The Ravens went undefeated at home. They earned a first-round bye and a home playoff game.

It looked like this was the Ravens’ time when Flacco marched them down 65 yards in 82 seconds. But then came The Drop and The Kick.

“When it’s your job … and get paid to make field goals, I think you have to take it personally,” Cundiff said. “First and foremost is to stand up and face the music and move on.”

The pressure will be ratcheted up even more on the Ravens next season to make the Super Bowl. The window of opportunity is closing for defensive stars Ray Lewis and Ed Reed.

But the Ravens must prove they can handle the pressure better than they did in this AFC Championship Game.

“We have to keep moving and keep building and remember this taste no matter how many times you go through it,” Lewis said. “Because when you finally get it, you appreciate it more.”

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