The Morning Meat is a bag of news, scores and links designed to make those around you look stupid whenever they try to talk about sports. Serves ‘em right, actually. Img.

Sizzling headlines straight from the griddle

Tiger’s Press Conference is Today. Tiger is finally speaking up regarding Whoregate, coinciding with the Accenture Tournament kickoff.  Players are mad about the timing, and the media are mad about being stifled.

The NBA Trade A-Z. The NBA trade deadline hit yesterday, and a lot went down.  Antawn Jamison went to Cleveland, and Stoudemire stayed put in Phoenix, contrary to speculation.  Tim Duncan is the player who’s been around the longest and has never been traded.

Canada Wins in Spectacular Fashion. Canada beat the Swiss last night in an overtime shootout, 3-2.  Canada will face USA on Sunday in their fight to “Own the Podium”.

Scores Over Easy? We’ve Got Upsets!

Upsets are determined using the opening line on each game.

NBA Nuggets 118, Cavaliers 116

Celtics 87, Lakers 86

NCAABK Syracuse 75, Georgetown 71

Vanderbilt 82, Mississippi 78

Pittsburgh 58, Marquette 51

Gonzaga 66, Loyola Marymount 74

No breakfast is complete without some links!

• The Insider got inside Gary Coleman’s head and started prodding him about smacking his wife around.  Guess what happens next.  Warming Glow.
• Gorden Gekko is back in a new international trailer for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Film Drunk.
• Watch this guy pull of a quintuple barrel roll IN A HELICOPTER. Gamma Squad.
• Eddie Griffin offers advice to Tiger, basically: F off and watch me play golf.  Inside TV.
• Yes!  Wu-Massacre abum (Meth, Ghostface & Raekwon) is on its way and the cover art got a comic twist.  Comics Alliance.
• Why isn’t Carrot Top on a list of Hollywood’s Most Evil Actors?  Inside Movies.
• A cool gallery of old pictures placed in front of their current location to “complete” a picture.  Unreality.
• Name the championship coaches.  Sporcle.

Show us your tips! Drop them off at WithLeather-Tips@Uproxx.com, right before you drop the kids off at the pool. I hope that’s an indoor pool; it’s still really cold outside.

The St. Louis Cardinals have a new batting coach in Mark McGwire and all the joys of the media circus that comes with him.  McGwire admitted last month to juicing during the most monumental portion of his career.  Instead of just kicking off his first day on the job in the cages, he also got roped into yet another Q&A session with the media. He just wants everyone to know that he’s super sorry, and he just wants to move on from the whole debacle and focus on his new role.

“I think people understand how truly sorry I was for what I did.”

McGwire refused to back off his assertion, much criticized, that steroids allowed him to recover from injuries and stay on the field, but didn’t help him break Roger Maris’ single season home run record in 1998. McGwire said it was the evolution of his swing and not a body enhanced by drugs that enabled him to hit 70 homers that year, smashing Maris’ 37-year-old record of 61, and 65 more in 1999.

“Like I’ve said, people are going to have their opinions,” McGwire said. “Listen, it got me the opportunity to get out there and get more at-bats, and I got the chance to play.”–Fox Sports

If I just confessed to shooting up and put a juicy question mark over the legitimacy of my homerun records, I would want to hurry up and move on, too.  OF COURSE he is going to say he’s sorry, because he knows he has to in order to even attempt to regain credibility in the baseball world.  But come on, Mac, you’re really still going to compartmentalize this issue?  To say that using ‘roids only had an affect on his ability to recover and not his power shows that he either a) is in denial, or b) thinks we’re a bunch of slack-jawed knuckle draggers who sit around and drink beer and play video games all day long.  Either way, it detracts from his apologies when he says he’s sorry with an asterisk.  Maybe now he’ll try to tell us that Sammy Sosa isn’t white, or that it’s not cheating if it’s just the tip.

Last June Aplington-Parkersburg High School football coach Ed Thomas was shot to death in the school’s weight room in front of students. The gunman: one of his former players.

The trial is underway for 24 year-old paranoid schizophrenic Mark Becker, who is looking at first degree murder charges. Thomas was the 2005 NFL High School Coach of the Year, and played a major role in bringing the town back from wreckage after a tornado destroyed 1/3 of it [emphasis added].

“He’s a devil, he’s a devil tyrant, he’s suppressing the kids out here,” Becker said of Thomas on the recording. “We can hardly breathe at night. He comes through and he turns us into fish and he turns us into animals and he turns us into dead people. He won’t let us be our heavenly selves. He’s been doing it forever.”

Becker said that after the shooting he told the students present that they were free. Six students who witnessed the shooting have already testified. –FOX Sports

The guy is clearly nuts, and shows no remorse for what he did. There have been plenty of schizophrenics in this world that do not run amok and kill people.  For example, Wesley Willis comes to mind.  Though he passed away in 2003, he brought us such punk rock classics as “Rock and Roll McDonald’s”, “Kris Kringle Was a Car Thief”, and “I Whipped Superman’s Ass”. All Wesley Willis ever wanted to do was give people a headbutt handshake and rock over London, rock on Chicago.

Rather than an insanity plea, Becker’s defense should be that he was leading the crusade against zombie takeover.  Since Thomas was turning everyone into dead people, the attack was imminent.  That’s what he would do if he were serious about this whole “insanity” thing, anyway.

Simply put, the Dallas Mavericks were flailing before All-Star break.  Last week owner Mark Cuban basically said that if he were to make any roster moves it would have to be a damn good one. The Mavs worked out a deal with the Washington Wizards that adds Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood, and DeShawn Stevenson to the mix. Washington was able to pick up Josh Howard, Drew Gooden, Quinton Ross, and James Singleton (he remains a reserve player).  But will this move take Dallas to the playoffs?  I’d throw $20 on it.

Dallas president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson called trading Howard, who had spent his entire career in Dallas, an “excruciating decision.” But couldn’t pass up the chance to bring Butler, a two-time All-Star, to a team he acknowledges has been sputtering.

“Caron is kind of probably more of a conventional fit and a better fit of us,” Nelson said. “It’s never easy. You’ve got to give quality to get quality. We just got the pieces that are better fits for us at this particular time.”–Fox Sports

Did the Mavs make a good trade?  Definitely.  They picked up a really strong player in Haywood–a guy that was able to produce and stand out even on the tumultuous Wizards.    While Butler and Howard are similar on paper, Butler’s “fresh blood” has potential to go a long way.  But there are any number of extraneous factors that should be considered.  It could take a while for everyone to gel, or they may not at all.  A key player like Dirk Nowitzki could get hurt and send them reeling. It’s always possible Kidd and Nowitzki could have a standoff in the locker room and both get suspended for the remainder of the season. Nah…that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the NBA.

We’re reworking our lead-off post to give you a plate full of sports news goodness every morning. We’re calling it the Morning Meat, and it will set the table for the business that With Leather gives you throughout the day. Like everything else on this site, it’s a work in progress. Img.

Sizzling headlines straight from the griddle

Canada Goes Gold. Thanks to Alexandre Bilodeau, the rest of the world can finally stop hearing about how Canada has never won a gold on their own turf.  He breezed through the moguls last night with a final score of 26.75, to beat out Australia’s Dale Begg-Smith and USA’s Bryon Wilson.  Canada now has 1 gold, 1 silver, and 1 bronze.

McMurray Popped His Daytona Cherry. Earnhardt Ganassi Racing’s Jamie McMurray won his first Daytona 500 yesterday.  Despite interruptions for a hole in the track at turn 2, McMurray was finally able to pull into the lead for the last two laps.  However, this has nothing to do with Danica Patrick in a bikini so it doesn’t really matter.

How the West Was Won. In front of a crowd of 108,718 fans, the East narrowly beat the West in the All-Star Game at Cowboys Stadium.  Dwayne Wade won MVP with 28 points and 5 steals–nabbing the title from favorite Dirk Nowitzki.  The only impressive things about this game were the record crowd size and Shakira’s ass.  Otherwise it was a defense-less bore fest.  I see more hustle in the perp walk outside the government center.

Snowboard Cross-ed Out. Fans expecting to watch the snowboard cross events today and tomorrow are in for a little disappointment as officials put the kibosh on the course.  I bet you can’t guess why.  Hint: rain washed away about a foot of snow.  8,000 tickets will be refunded for a $400,000 hit.  Hopefully they’ll replace it with more Germans in clown costumes.

Scores Over Easy? We’ve Got Upsets!

Upsets are determined using the opening line on each game.

NHL Predators 4, Penguins 3

Canucks 2, Wild 6

NCAABK Louisville 66, Syracuse 60

Georgetown 68, Rutgers 71

No breakfast is complete without some links!

• Monday mornings are almost always horrible, but today you can wake up with Megan Fox’s Armani ad.  Warming Glow.
• “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything” is a flipbook animation drawn on notebook paper that covers…pretty much everything.  Gamma Squad.
• I know what you were thinking.  You were thinking about how much you love Twilight and that you really hope they make Breaking Dawn into two movies.  You LOVE sparkly vampires!  Film Drunk.
• Peezy gon’ “bust shots in YO’ WATER MAMMAL MOUF’!”.  Trust.  Kissing Suzy Kolber.
• Batman will whup your ass if you don’t shop at Zeller’s.  Comics Alliance.
• “10 Most Devastating TV Couple Splits” – I’m still upset about Kevin and Winnie.  Inside TV.
• Oiling and lotioning, lotioning and oiling…Get your Wendy Peffercorn here.  Gunaxin.
• See if you can name the 2010 Winter Olympics sports.  Sporcle.

Tips? Okay, but that’s it.  Anything more and I’ll have to turn you in to HR: WithLeather-Tips@Uproxx.com

NBA Commish David Stern has announced that NBA teams will lose an estimated $400 million this season, and $200 million per season for the next few years.  Since the American economy is in the crapper, fans are choosing to root for their squad wrapped up in Snuggies on their couches.  Revenues have dropped and the league is hurting and cutback sights are set on players’ salaries.  Unfortunately, negotiations between the NBA and the players’ union don’t seem to be going too smoothly.  Carmelo Anthony, who is currently under a 5-year, $80 million contract extension with the Nuggets signed in 2006, is one of many rising up against The Man.

“We’re not going to break,” Anthony said. “We’re going to stand strong. … That’s good all of us [All-Stars] were in there. That’s the face of the league. [Young stars] represent the [future of the] league. The young players, we need to be there.”

Anthony echoed the thoughts of Hunter in saying the owners’ proposal was unacceptable. With many believing there will be a lockout after next season, Anthony did admit to being worried about the future.–Fan House

While the initial proposal of “drastically cutting salaries, including eliminating the mid-level exception, scaling back guaranteed contracts and reducing the length of deals” may be heavy, it is unrealistic to think that salaries won’t have to be scaled back–there is a business to be run and something has to give.  God forbid players might have to rein in spending habits and cut expenses.  It would be such a travesty for them to have to experience an iota of what the majority of the country is going through, while sleeping on mattresses stuffed with C-notes, and using toilet paper made out of ones.  But I can certainly sympathize with ‘Melo here.  I remember this one time when I went to put gas in my Escalade and Maserati GranTurismo S, but could only fill my Bugatti Veyron up 3/4.  Man, that was so tough it hurts to think about it.