Pete The Prankster

Let's face it.  Most people think that the NFL’s preseason is a joke.   The only people who take it seriously are the coaches.  All the coaches besides Seattle Seahawks’ Head Coach Pete Carroll. 

Carroll likes to use the preseason to pull pranks on his players and then post the video on YouTube for the world’s enjoyment. 

The first prank happened last preseason, when he or someone on his staff put a rubber snake in a drink cooler and video typed people opening it. 

This year he pulled a prank on one of his players by having officers arrested him in the middle of a team meeting.

This is not the first time Carroll has used police officers in a prank on his team.  When he was the head coach at USC, he had a player fake arrested for assaulting a freshman.

Being the head coach in Hollywood has made him a great actor.  In this one he has a fake list of players who illegal downloaded music from the Internet.

The ironic thing about this video is that the USC football program still cannot go postseason bowling because of Pete Carroll and his coaching staff.

Sanctions or no sanctions, Carroll’s players know that they can lean on him to keep the locker room loose and fun.

Is Jermichael Finley Overrated?

Have you ever gone to a movie that everyone was saying was the best movie ever, but when you saw it, you thought it was only ok.  It had some good parts. Maybe one or two good one-liners, but it didn’t live up to the hype.  That ok movie is Jermichael Finley’s career so far.

Finley is entering into his fourth season. This year isn’t a make or break for him, but he has yet to play all 16 games in the regular season. If he doesn’t play in every single game, he will get the dreaded injured prone tag to his name.

There is no doubt he is highly talented, but what good is all his talent when he is injured on the sideline?

People are making him seem like the greatest tight end in the league, but I don’t even think he’s the best tight end from the 2008 draft. 

John Carlson of the Seattle Seahawks has had a far better career than Finley.  Both Carlson and Finley average 32 yards per game.  Both of them average more than ten yards per catch and around five yards after the catch.  Carlson has nearly five hundred more receiving yards in his career than Finley and almost twice as many touchdowns.

This is due to the fact that Carlson is more durable than Finley. Since they were drafted in 2008, Carlson has only missed five games compared to Finley’s sixteen games.

Finley has had flashes of greatness in between his trips to the inactive list.  Until he can go a whole season without getting hurt, I don’t see how people can get lost in his hype.  The local media and die-hard Packers fans make it sound like he is a first ballot hall-of-famer, when he hasn’t even made a pro bowl yet. 

I root for Finley, but some people need to take off their green and gold blinders and look at the facts.   In his one decent year, back in 2009, he only ranked in the top ten among tight ends in one category—receiving yards—and he was ranked tenth. That year he was twelfth among tight ends in receptions and fourteenth in touchdowns. 

ESPN's Top 10 Tight End Rankings

Before people make Finley King of the Tight Ends, shouldn’t he at least finish among the league leaders in receiving yards, receptions, and touchdowns? Or maybe just top five in one of those categories?

I know people say that he creates mismatches, but how valuable are those mismatches? The Packers went 3-2 in games that Finely played in last season. In games he didn’t play, they went 11-4, including the playoffs and a Super Bowl victory.

Is Jermichael Finley overrated? Not Yet.  Is he over hyped? Definitely.

Zack and Kelly Are Back

Before The Office’s Jim and Pam were America’s sweethearts, there were Saved by the Bell’s Zack and Kelly. Many of us grew up watching the reruns on T.B.S. early in the morning before school.  Some people were lucky enough to watch the new episodes on Saturday morning on N.B.C.  Believe it or not, Saved by the Bell only lasted four seasons, not counting the College Years.  In the four seasons of the show, it produced more than 80 shows, each episode more beloved than the previous.

After the show ended Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and Kelly (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) seemed to vanish off the map.

It took them more than 15 years, but both of them reappeared on two of the best new shows on television.

Tiffani-Amber Thiessen resurfaced in late 2009 in the U.S.A. Network show, White Collar.  She plays the wife of F.B.I. agent Peter Burke, who is in charge of the F.B.I.’s white-collar crime division in New York.  Burke’s criminal consultant is conman Neal Caffrey, who is on a work release program after being caught twice by Burke—once for being a mastermind thief and the second after he escaped from prison to see his ex-girlfriend.  He now needs to wear an ankle monitor so that the F.B.I. can monitor his every move. 

The show focuses on the dynamic relationship of Caffrey and Agent Burke.  Burke tries to show Caffrey that a man can either be a man or a con.  He cannot be both.

The show is similar to end of the movie “Catch Me If You Can,” where Leonardo DiCaprio character helps Tom Hanks catch other criminals.

The show has stronger main characters, where Thiessen plays Elizabeth Burke.   Who proves that behind every great man is a great woman.

The show is just finishing up the third season. 

Seventeen years after Saved by the Bell ended, Mark-Paul Gosselaar landed a starring role in T.N.T.’s new show Franklin and Bash. The show just finished its first season, and it’s a story about a pair of lawyers who use unconventional ways to win their cases.

Franklin, who is played by Breckin Meyer, and Bash, who is played by Gosselaar, are best friends who live a bachelor lifestyle that would make Hugh Hefner envious.  

Both shows mix in dry humor with the drama.  It is a shame that both shows are not on a major network so they could gain the popularly they both deserve.