I hate life.

110 pages and 2 thesises later, Schmitt is back on the books. Don't expect anything until the hangover passes.

p.s. Al Horford is a bitch.

Poop is higher paid than Beckham.

Ha ha, poop joke!

In a recently published list compiled by "knowledgeable insiders," David Beckham was listed as only the 44th highest paid player in the world, earning just $142,000 per week (a meager $7.2 million). Coming in first was Brazilian striker Kaka, who has one of the most unfortunate one-word names in soccer history. Between 1st and 44th were guys who love hookers (Cristiano Ronaldo, notably) and several names I have never heard before and don't care to ever hear again (Sol Campbell? Harry Kewell?).

The figure is misleading though, as Beckham earns a percentage of ticket and marketing profits directly from the Galaxy, and with endorsement deals earns approximately $50 million from the Los Angeles Galaxy alone. Meanwhile, Taylor Twellman, the league's 2005 MVP and one of its top players, mades a staggering $181,666 in 2006 before getting a raise to approximately $350,000 in 2007. While new rules have led to higher salaries for star players in the MLS, their top 10 best paid players combined will make less this year ($15,885,000) than Stephon Marbury is getting paid to sit at home and lure interns into his SUV ($20,109,375).

Your parents led you down the wrong path athletically, son.

So what is the lesson learned here? Don't play soccer in America. Hell, I wouldn't even have watched the World Cup if I didn't have a belligerent Mexican roommate. While it must be nice to be earning a 6-digit salary for playing a game, wouldn't you much rather be earning a seven figure salary for being mediocre at a game where all you have to do is swing a bat (I'm looking at you Adam LaRoche, Kevin Millar, Aubrey Huff, Sean Casey, Richie Sexson, etc).

Keegan Bell to leave Vanderbilt; AJ Ogilvy's Awful Smell to Blame?

Alex Gordon takes this shot without hesitation. God, I'm going to miss him.

Freshman point guard Keegan Bell, a rotation player for the Commodores this year, will leave Vanderbilt at the end of the semester to finish out his college career elsewhere. Vanderbilt failed to disclose where Bell would go, or why he was leaving, but experts speculate it was related to the fact that he had to live with a 6-10 Australian who looks like he smells awful.

All the great centers smell horrible. Olajuwon, Ilgauskas, Laimbeer...

Bell had been a three-star recruit out of high school and would likely have taken on an increased role in 2008-09 with the departure of guards Shan Foster and Alex (Fucking) Gordon. Suddenly, a team that did nothing but shoot 3-pointers has no three point shooters. This puts much more pressure on Stallings as he attempts to lock up Oregon guard Brad Tinsley to replace Bell as token white guard on the court.

This also makes Vandy's rotation dangerously thin, as Ogilvy, starting PG Jermaine Beal, and backup PF Darshawn McClennan are the only returning players to have seen more than 11 minutes per game this year. While the team is adding at least 2 more 4-star recruits (Lance Goulbourne and Steve Tchiengang), and a top-150 redshirt center (Festus Ezeli), it looks as though 2009 will be a rebuilding year for the Commodores. My projected record? 18-0 at home, 0-13 on the road/neutral.

Let the Festus era begin.

In happier news, guard/savior Shan Foster was named a 2nd team All-American by the AP, and will face off against AJ Graves, Drew Neitzel, Chris Lofton, and others in the NCAA 3-point competition on Thursday. It will mark the last Thursday that I actually watch something other than Lost or The Office until summer starts.

If you got all four Final Four teams correct you need to grow a pair.

Floyd Mayweather to Fight Basketball Failure

Getting chokeslammed into the hearts of redneck America.

Floyd Mayweather, seemingly determined to shift his legacy from "greatest pound for pound fighter of all-time" to "Rickey Henderson-Style Circus Sideshow", will wrestle Paul "The Big Show" Wight at Wrestlemania XXIV this month. The move is a controversial one, as Mayweather stands to either follow in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali (referee at Wrestlemania I) or Mike Tyson (referee at Wrestlemania XIV). However, unlike the other two, Mayweather will be actually wrestling, which seems like a ridiculous idea for a successful athlete who currently holds multiple boxing titles (Ali and Tyson weren't active boxers at the time of their matches).

Mayweather will take on former Wichita State center Wight, who at 7ish feet, 441 lbs, outweighs his opponent by nearly 300 pounds. Adding to the danger factor is the fact that while Wight is seemingly in better shape than he has been in the past 5 years, he hasn't wrestled in a WWE match since 2006.

Let's think about this. The Tennessee Titans banned Pacman Jones, a player that they have no intention of retaining as anything but trade bait, from wrestling in TNA during his year-long NFL suspension. All he was allowed to do was show up on camera, occasionally acting as though he'd just been attacked mysteriously off-screen.

Mayweather, who is not suspended from boxing, has plenty of money, and is arguably boxing's best hope at a revival against the rise of MMA, is fighting seemingly because he can't find more constructive ways to quell his boredom.

Mayweather-Hatton. The most romantic weigh-in since
that time George Foreman fought Leroy "Cuddles" Jones.

What's worse is that Mayweather couldn't win over the WWE fans, a group so fickle that they'll support a corpse-raper like the Big Boss Man so long as there's someone slightly more evil around for him to punch. Mayweather, despite following the time-tested WWE script and throwing money to the crowd, was unable to garner any support and as a result was turned into the bad guy for his face-off with Wight, who supposedly will now be turned into the sweetest 7-foot giant you've ever met. Sort of like Gheorge Muresan.

So unless the WWE has some ingenious plan where Mayweather is disqualified for saving big breasted hookers and kegs of Natty Light from a sinking ship and giving them to the fans, he's not going to make any headway with the rest of America. And for a man who is known for making it rain over strippers/hookers/white chicks, clearly the money is not an issue. So Mayweather has no good reason to be a part of Wrestlemania other than as a wrestling fan, and possibly to join the ranks of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali - a group that he seemed destined to join regardless.

Will the Big Show ruin Mayweather's undefeated record? Will Mayweather ever admit that this pay-per-view is a mistake? I doubt it on both counts.

Thanks Bill Cosby.

Pictured: Certain virginity, bitter nights of bunk-bed dry humping

Bill Cosby, in an act of benevolence which will surely erupt in a flamewar on some chat room, donated a live Terrier to become Carnegie Mellon University's first living mascot. And now, the university is giving students the chance to name the poor dog. Why Cosby would give a live animal to a university he has no affiliation to is still unknown, but it's rumored that the dog contains smallpox and the Philadelphia native is attempting to systematically destroy Pittsburgh.

None of this would be so bad, but the four naming options available to the public (alumni evidently are not invited) are:

• Andy/Andi
• Skibo
• Scotty/Scottie
• Heart

along with with a grassroots movement to name the dog Chia, after a student whose parents presumably hate him soooooo much. I'm not sure that I could have thought of four worse names for a dog. They might as well be pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In our efforts to help out the one time Sugar Bowl participants (1939 - TCU 15, Carnegie Tech 7; TCU was awarded an additional 8 points after Sammy Baugh boxed and defeated an Australian kangaroo for his alma mater) we've come up with our own names for candidacy, which we feel will be a better fit for the university.

• St. Anger
• Asian kid
• Asperger's
• Virgin
• Kid Loneliness
• Creeping Death
• Uni-wheel, the dog that unicycles to class EVERY DAY
• Compulsive Masterbator
• Pokemon
• Butterface
• Antisocial failure
• Belligerence
  

Feel free to vote or write in your own in the comments section. We'll have a final verdict in the coming days. Also, feel free to comment on the fact that a school filled with Korean kids is adopting a live dog as its mascot. You don't see Wisconsin carrying a glazed ham to all their games. Just sayin'.

Country fry that and we'll talk, Wisconsin.

WHADDYA GOT THERE, NUMBERS?: NO HUMAN WILL EVER PICK THIS TOURNAMENT CORRECTLY

This in addenda to the Washington Post's article covering the futility of picking this year's Sweet Sixteen.

Offering a million dollars for a complete bracket is a safe marketing bet by ESPN that stirs up considerable interest with very little risk. There are 2⁶³ = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible ways to fill out a bracket given the play-in game is not counted, and only one way to win that money. If we assume that a bracket weighted with knowledge of the game improves those odds by about 6 orders of magnitude (base 2), let's say the four 16-1 gimmes and two other games, and that the 3.65 million participants of ESPN's Tourney challenge each entered a unique bracket (didn't happen, but irrelevant), the odds of ESPN paying up each year are about 0.0000000002814%, which will not happen in our lifetime, or in the expected lifetime of the human species. In fact, the odds of ESPN paying up at least once between now and 900 million years from now (when the surface of the Earth becomes inhospitable due to gradually rising solar luminosity) is only about 0.3%.

If during those 900 million years, ESPN invested their million dollars in an average mutual fund (with a nominal interest rate of 5%), they'd double their money every 14 years and have a total of 2^64285714 million dollars at heat death Armageddon. However, if the treasury was continually printing $100 bills (about 2^64285727 of them by the end) to allow ESPN to cash out their savings to actual currency (which is ridiculous, but bear with me), at a point of about 5 solar masses (1 gram per bill) their combined weight would collapse Earth to a singularity. This would happen in only about 1,416 years. This is without considering that college basketball would become a much more difficult game to play as the surface gravity of Earth steadily rose under all those dollar bills. So I think it's safe to say that we should either rob ESPN or stop this whole bracket thing sooner rather than later.

The Earth would look roughly like this in 3424 A.D.
thanks to ESPN. You, as the observer, would also die
if you got this close.