As little as two weeks ago, it looked like Purdue’s Caleb Swanigan was about ready to lap the field in the Big Ten Player of the Year race. Swanigan has been a double-double machine, is a matchup nightmare for almost any defense and is a bona fide Naismith Trophy candidate.
With roughly one-third of the Big Ten season now completed, the race for the conference title is starting to truly take shape.
By all accounts, 2015 has been an unmitigated failure for the Milwaukee Brewers. With the bitter memory of their September collapse last year fresh on the minds of fans, the Brewers face-planted out the gates to a 5-18 start to the season that immediately quelled any hope of postseason contention this season.
Sometimes the grass is actually browner on the other side. This may be the case for the new lawns of former Wisconsin head football coaches Gary Andersen and Bret Bielema. Bielema and his gut left for Arkansas in 2012, while Andersen bolted for Oregon State just two years later. Both moves seemed puzzling at the time, so allow me to explain why staying at Wisconsin would have been the wiser choice.
If you took a bunch of aliens and showed them a NFL game and asked who the most important player on the field is, odds are that the aliens would point to the quarterback. Heck, even Roger Goodell might be able to figure that one out. This importance has typically led to many of them being drafted with the first pick, and sometimes even both of the first two picks.
It’s September and the New York Mets stand alone atop the NL East standings. It should be a time of excitement for fans as their team seeks its first postseason berth since 2006, but instead the Mets have become the talk of baseball for all the wrong reasons.
Early Monday afternoon, Badgers fans received news that they had long feared—the Bo Ryan era in Madison is coming to an end.
On the fifth floor of Lathrop Hall, every new cohort is taught the pride of the phrase that heads this article. Each student shouts in boisterous unison the phrase that welcomed them from across the country. Students proudly hail from cities like Phoenix, Ariz., Brooklyn, N.Y., the Bay Area in California, Chicago, Ill., and, of course, Madison, Wis. They hold dear the cultures they carry together in this room. They are the movement of the hip-hop and urban arts scholarship program First Wave, who speak with poetry, rap, beat, vocal, dance and visual art, and I am blessed to use my talents for this program.
In today’s digital society, the relationship between the fan and the athlete has become closer than ever. Social media allows fans to have a more personal relationship with players than ever before. While it’s great to be immersed in the off-the-field lives of our favorite athletes, this increasing connection often does more harm than good.
Obvious statement: the Angels regret giving Josh Hamilton $125 million. They paid a king’s ransom for three mediocre, injury-plagued seasons and a whole lot of (semi-deserved) bad press. Pro tip to Arte Moreno: Don’t “Mean Girls” a recovering drug addict while trying to use a contract clause that doesn’t exist to recoup money you freely gave to him knowing the risk associated. You’d think they’d teach that in billionaire class.
The school year is almost over, and spring TV is just heating up. In the limited amount of time we have left together, I figured I would write a totally arbitrary awards column, partly because there’s not really any new TV happening this week. What follows is a number of awards I’ve given to shows throughout the year: Awards named after my favorite examples from other shows. Look, the point of this exercise is not to reinvent the wheel—or the awards column—just to bestow awards to those I deem deserving.
It’s not discussed too often, but musical composition is wedded to mathematics. The way certain frequencies and tones sound good together is an artistic extension of physical laws that govern our universe. We currently live in an era of human technology where a computer program can make a piano composition so genuine that humans can’t distinguish its creation from a fellow human’s. Slowly, every part of our society that we used to accredit to mysticism and luck can now be explained by modern mathematical algorithms. Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but soon enough maybe even the human brain will be seen as nothing more than a series of biological wires and programming.
The first round of the NBA playoffs has a little bit of everything: the wonderful play of the Warriors, the crap pile that was Toronto, the wonderful Spurs-Clippers series, the Rondo disaster and everything in between. The ups and downs as well as constant swings in momentum are what makes it so appealing and what makes it so similar to life.
So as finals dawn on us once again, many of you will be looking for ways to less productively divert your time and eradicate stress (while preserving brain cells). And while, as a film student, watching films “technically” counts as studying for me, it remains the absolute perfect way to kill a couple of hours. So without further ado, I humbly present a list of films, from old favorites to new friends, with which to amuse, thrill, reflect on and altogether distract yourself this, or any, exam’s eve (and for bonus points, most of them are on Netflix).
I find myself often stymied when considering how to write about games. Not truly permeated into the mainstream (though advocates will herald the “Call of Duty” series’ gross as “larger than Hollywood”) I find myself often simply justifying the thought I put into the medium. Yet the games themselves and the subtexts they contain is enough to merit study as a form of literature, akin to the study of cinema and television.
This past Sunday, a violent tug of the shoulder may have changed the landscape of the entire Eastern Conference playoffs. Kevin Love’s dislocated shoulder in Cleveland’s Game 4 victory over Boston could be a season-altering play for many other teams besides the Cavs.
I remember the first time I was asked to state my personal gender pronouns. Sitting in a forum at “Engaged and Empowered: the Lieutenant Governor’s Conference on LGBT Youth” at UW-Oshkosh in March 2010, I had to ask for clarification what “PGPs” are. At that time, I was an ignorant, 16-year-old queer teenager who had never been asked to state his gender.
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony once famously rapped in 1995, “See you at the crossroads (crossroads).” It referred to the conjunction between life and death, the place where Bone Thugs paid tribute to their recently deceased mentor, Eazy-E.
The first round of last year’s NBA playoffs was addiction for many fans, as an unprecedented five out of the eight series went to Game 7s. So far, the first hit of the playoff drug has been less potent, as six out of the eight top seeds won their first game.
The 2014-’15 Wisconsin men’s basketball team produced a lot of things, including great memories, cut-down nets and two potential first-round NBA draft picks. After drying away the tears, we heard that Sam Dekker is truly gone, and he will join his co-star and Wooden Award winner Frank Kaminsky at the next level.
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Solutions by The State News
