The inconsistency of the NFL

The highlight of Thanksgiving night was the rivalry matchup between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens. The last few minutes of the game were incredibly packed with excitement and action, but also included a scary moment, when Pittsburgh running back Le'veon Bells suffered a vicious hit to the head by a Raven defender. By NFL rule, the play is called dead the instant the ball carrier's helmet is knocked off, which happened just shy of the goal line. This was a second-down running play in which Pittsburgh needed a touchdown and 2-point conversion to tie the game, and the ball was spotted inside the one-yard line for third down. You can watch a video of the hit at this link, scrolling down to the first of two videos. I don't have a problem with the rule of the play being blown dead with the coming off of a helmet. My problem is the fact that this was a direct helmet-to-helmet hit and absolutely nothing was made of it. In the lone night game on Thanksgiving, in the closing stages of the game, when the announcer calls it a helmet-to-helmet hit, there has to be a penalty called. Especially if it knocks a helmet off and renders the running back borderline unconscious. I'm not going to bash the NFL, but it would be pretty easy to do so. I just wanted to share my thoughts on a non-call that completely contradicts the NFL rulebook. But hey, would it be the NFL if this kind of thing went the way it was supposed to?

Being thankful

It's important on this Thanksgiving night, as it should always be important, to think about others and what they have to be thankful for. It's pretty common for people to be thankful for their friends and family, but there are some people who don't even have that to be thankful for. It might be a place to sleep, or a warm meal, or a smile from a passing stranger. The fact that I'm typing this and that you're now reading this means that you and I are better off tonight than a lot of people, and it's important to be aware of that and to keep that in mind.

That being said, it's still important to be thankful ourselves after Thanksgiving. The holiday dictates us to be thankful today, and maybe for the couple of days before and after Thanksgiving, but similar to New Year's resolutions, it's important to be thankful every day. Keep these in mind as you spend your Thanksgiving weekend with family, and always find a place to be thankful and appreciative.

The pedagogical is personal

Yes, I'm aware that I have sucked as a blogger this month. I think I know why - I just haven't been excited enough by something to blog about it, except for the Red Sox, but that's all said and done now. So what does that leave? Nothing much, if you've been following along this month. But I'm back in the swing of things after having read a piece on pedagogy, and the discussions that professors and students should be having. It was written wonderfully by a person who saw all of the excitement in classrooms as she was a young student, and then saw it all fade in her undergraduate studies. She believes that this is because the emphasis was on this educational bank, a notion that information is only good if we can spit it out at a later place and time. She also considers this educational bank to be useless, which is something that I agree with. I've been under the belief for a while now that one of the coolest things we can do is to learn about ourselves, and I believe that it's important for us to bring our entire self into classrooms. We can't enter a class or a conversation only expecting to learn information to store for later use. When we really set out to engage with the material (as students) and to make this information personally relevant, the learning becomes much more effective and useful. Bring yourself fully into a classroom and you will leave with a better sense of yourself, a higher self-actualization. Go into it only expecting knowledge and information, and you're selling yourself short.

So that's the idea. I feel as though I should have written more about this, but maybe I'm getting good at saying things concisely. That'd be nice.

Here's the song I was listening to as I read this great piece. It's a good song, and I hope you think so too.

Things my suitemates would read if I blogged about it

• Travel
• Best movies of all time
• Top 5 favorite dictators
• Nothing
• Great men with great beards
• Best carnival freaks
• Best Tom Brady outfits
• Conspiracy theories
• Myron's 90's classics playlist
• Who takes the longest showers
• Best SportsCenter commercials
• "Where Are They Now?" Stonehill edition
• Stonehill barstool
• The Summit best Police Logs
• 315 Knee Hockey Power Rankings

Special thanks to Myron Inglis and Ryan Forte for this spur-of-the-moment blog post. Sorry to everyone reading that this is what I'm producing these days, but I promise something interesting will happen real soon.

10 lists about music

I've had a few ideas run through my head as far as blogging about music, and as always, I can't seem to push past a playlist more than three or four songs deep. So, what I'm going to try instead is offer up some lists that you can make yourself in regards to your own music! Wahoo alright here we go:

1. 10 songs that I don't give enough credit
2. 10 songs that aren't the respective band's most well-known song
3. 10 songs that would belong on House (or any TV show you wish)
4. 10 songs that more people need to know about
5. 10 songs that are good to listen to at night
6. 10 new songs that I've heard in the past week
7. 10 songs to start the best Pandora/Spotify radio stations to
8. 10 songs with one really good lyric
9. 10 songs that I could listen to on repeat for three hours
10. 10 songs to wake up to

And here's one song that would fit on more than half of these lists...

10 minutes

I haven't blogged in a long time, and it's because I haven't really had the time to. And when I say that I haven't had the time to, I'm completely lying. I definitely have the time to, I've just prioritized other things ahead of blogging. So here is this blog post, where I'm just going to be typing for ten minutes. About anything and everything. For starters, it's to prove to myself (and to you) that I actually do have ten minutes every day to blog if I wanted to. This is something I've been doing each day with simply laying in bed for ten minutes. Just to remind myself that I have this time to do nothing, even when it feels like I have no time. Give it a shot if it sounds like something you're interested in.

A big reason why I've hopped on this "10 minutes" bandwagon is because I'm really getting tired of school. I'm not sure if it's just this semester, or that I'm burning out, or whatever it is, but I'm just finding it hard to be excited about schoolwork right now. I want to start focusing on things that I truly enjoy, which I can still do in an academic field. Next semester, my two math courses will be a sabermetrics directed study, and a thesis project looking a new way to model GPA, depending on the difficulty of class, times the class is offered, etc. This is something that I'm almost positive I've blogged about before, but I won't go searching for it now.

For those who don't know, "Intro" by The XX is a really good song. What's even better is this ten-hour loop of it, flawlessly executed. It's definitely one of those songs that you can listen to for a long time, so I'm glad that someone actually made it possible.

This has been a very busy weekend for Stonehill sports. I feel as though I should give a ton of credit to the deserving teams. Field hockey made it to the NE-10 Tournament Championship and will host an NCAA game this weekend; football clinched a share of the Regular Season NE-10 Championship and will play for the conference crown this Saturday at American International College. There's word of fan buses and this is something that everyone should be a part of. Men's basketball kicked off the 2013-14 season with a pair of wins this weekend. I was at the first game, and yelled a lot because it's fun. The other team probably didn't like it, mainly because I was yelling at them, but it seemed to work, because they weren't very good. The women's basketball team is in the top 10 of the country and will face #1 Bentley in eleven days. That's not a lot of days which means the Bentley game is coming up really soon and that's exciting. Both men's and women's cross-country won the East Regional, which is starting to become a routine, from what I'm hearing. Volleyball is in a prime playoff position, and both soccer teams had a strong finish to their regular seasons. Hockey has picked up, too. It's a fun time of year where a lot of teams are in action - some starting, some finishing their seasons.

Ten minutes is a lot longer than you think, or at least these ten minutes are a lot longer than I thought they would be. Which is interesting because it is the exact same amount of time as any ten-minute span of time. There's the alarm indicating the end of said ten minutes, so I'll wrap this up now by nicely putting that when you think about it, you'll always have ten minutes to do something, even if it's nothing.

Boston Strongest, pt. 3

Well, this is it. A fitting end to one of the most memorable baseball seasons that we've had. There is no better day than Parade Day. As recent as the day after the World Series win, sports radio talk shows were talking about 2014; who would be resigned, who would be let go...but today, it was all jubilation. Starting with Fenway Park, moving to the Marathon finish line, and ending in the water, it was the happily-ever-after for the 2013 season. Now that all's said and done, it's time to let the World Series hangover take its toll for a while, and then look to next year, where the Red Sox begin their title defense. Home Opening Day is only five months and two days away, but until then, Red Sox Nation will continue to remember the amazing 2013 season. Thanks, Red Sox.

Boston Strongest, pt. 2

Of all the teams to pull through for the city of Boston, it was the Red Sox. People will talk about the seeming turnaround from Boston as a baseball city to Boston as a hockey city, and rightfully so. In two years, the Bruins had won a Stanley Cup and two division titles. In the same two years, the Red Sox suffered one of the worst September collapses ever, and had a misery-filled 2012 season, culminated by the firing of a manager who epitomized zero of the ideals that belonged to the Red Sox and the culture of baseball in Boston. But 2013 completely reversed that, and cemented the Red Sox as Boston's team. For this year, for next year, for however long it is, Boston belongs to the Red Sox. And it's because this team cares, and this team gets it. Jonny Gomes, the poster child for the appeal of these 2013 Red Sox, came out after the World Series and said that "We didn't put Boston on our back...Boston put us on its back. I don't think a won-loss record sums up how much we care."

And this team cared because they knew what it meant for the city of Boston. The Red Sox are most closely associated with Marathon Monday, having played an 11:00am game on each Patriots' Day since 1968. Boston was desperately grabbing at something to hold on to, and every step along the way, the Red Sox were there. Daniel Nava's three-run homer to seal a come-from-behind victory in the first home game since the Marathon bombings. A historic number of walkoff victories. An emergence of a group of baseball players that let the city know that everything would be okay. Bill Simmons wonderfully writes about this in a recent article for Grantland. The key takeaway from that article, and something I've believed all season long, is this:

"You always hear that tragedies put sports in perspective, that they prove we shouldn't care this much about the successes and failures of a bunch of wealthy strangers. I'm going the other way - sometimes, sports put everything else in perspective. Our favorite teams bring people together...some of the happiest moments of my life involve something that happened with one of my teams. Some of the best relationships I ever had were with Boston athlete I never even met. That's a bad thing?"

Nothing more true could have been written. In a time where the city needed the Red Sox, the Red Sox were there. For some time, it was Boston Strong. Then the beards came along, and everything started happening at once. Throughout the playoffs, the Red Sox needed Boston, and Boston was there. A home record of 6-2 in the postseason for the Red Sox. Everything came together one final time for a glorious October night, where the last game of the baseball season was to be played at Fenway Park, and the last team to have won a game in the 2013 season was to be the Boston Red Sox. This season became a marriage of city and team, a marriage that had faced serious problems in the past few years. But when the firework smoke-ridden dust had settled, after everything was said and done, the Red Sox would stand tall, not just as a baseball team, but in their rightful place at the heart of Boston.