Crab Soup Bowl of Baltimore and Maryland Sports – Bowl 3
Middletown, MD High School Football team in action – photo by permission of Wayne Lee Dutrow
This is the third of what is a regular weekly feature on The Baltimore Wire of links to interesting Baltimore and Maryland sports stories on the web.
In the bowl of crab soup this week are these stories …
Ingredient #1 – I have written a couple of articles about the Johns Hopkins women’s cross country national championship team and season. I hope to be able to also write up an interview with top runner Hannah Oneda before long. Here is an article about how Coach Bobby Van Allen was voted as USTFCCCA National Women’s Coach of the Year after leading Johns Hopkins to a second consecutive national championship.
Ingredient #2 – The entire Mike Tomlin controversy dominated Ravens news this past week, even more than the 22-20 victory over the Steelers. Yet it is also true that the whole country was interested, as it was featured in the sports media everywhere. And it ended up with a huge fine dropped on Tomlin. This link is a summary of the situation and shows the video of the event. Notice that it took the announcers a couple of views to begin talking about it. Notice too the immediate reaction of Jacoby Jones, and also the silly grin of Tomlin – that added to the appearance of a devious plan …
Ingredient #3 – This article about the Pittsburgh coach is filled with lots of Tomlin quotes about what happened. I’ll confess to getting a bit tired of the story …
Ingredient #4 – Here is an article about the rising incidence of the use of drugs for Attention Deficit Disorder in MLB. This really surprises me that this many people with ADD could make it to the 40-man rosters of MLB teams. Having had one of my boys deal with this, I know that baseball is a tough sport for such a person, as there is a lot of waiting for the next thing to happen, pitch after pitch.
Ingredient #5 – The FanSided Network of which this The Baltimore Wire page is a part is really a fantastic entity. Here is a sort of techie (but accessible and understandable to anyone) article about such networks, with the latter half of it detailing some of the interesting history and philosophy of our network …
Ingredient #6 – In my Maryland State football playoff finals preview article this past week, I especially featured the Middletown team and program. Here is a link to their team web page. Maybe there are a lot of football programs in high schools around the country with this level of excellence? But I don’t think so. This is how a coach can build a program that does something like win 35 straight games, including consecutive state titles.
Ingredient #7 – Buster Olney is not a particularly well-liked national voice in Orioles circles, and the ESPN writer’s take on the Jim Johnson trade and the Orioles overall as evidenced in this article shows why. He makes a lot of definitive statements without a lot of definitive stats … but it is interesting …
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