Sports On TV: Saved By The Bell’s 20 Greatest Sports Moments

Written by Brandon Stroud / 07.19.12


saved_by_the_bell_sports_moments

Welcome to the first edition of With Leather’s newest, least cool weekly feature ever: SPORTS ON TV, where we countdown the greatest sports-related moments from your favorite, mostly not sports-related television shows.

This week’s edition tackles ‘Saved By The Bell’, an UPROXX network favorite about early 90s southern California high school kids who get to do anything they want whenever they want and face zero consequences. The show ran from 1989-1993, but existed in one form or another before that and afterwards until 2000. I’m not too proud to admit that syndication eventually showed me every ‘Saved By The Bell’ episode five times over, so we’re starting there. Maybe we’ll get to those clips of Urkel playing basketball next week.

Anyway, pre-column notes:

1. I only included moments from the primary run of ‘Saved By The Bell’, so that means no ‘Good Morning Miss Bliss’, ‘Saved By The Bell: The College Years’ or ‘Saved By The Bell: The New Class’. The TV movies feature the most popular cast, so I included those.

2. I really wanted to include video of each moment, but you know how the Internet works. I don’t want you to read this in two weeks and not be able to see what I’m talking about. Besides, the entire run of the show is currently available on Netflix.

3. Big thanks to the special guests who contributed commentary on some of their favorite moments.

And now, in no particular order, the 20 greatest sports moments from ‘Saved By The Bell’. If you’ve got a favorite sports moment that didn’t make the list, be sure to drop in on our comments section and let us know.

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NFL Suspends Casey Anthony Five Games For Wearing Ohio State Hat

Written by Brandon Stroud / 09.05.11

… but then she cried and they found out her fantasy league was full of made-up players without faces, so they’re probably just going to let her play.

Jim Tressel, however, is not so lucky. In a good and fair move (in response to a move that seemed pretty shifty), the Indianapolis Colts have decided to suspend the employment of their new gameday consultant and former Ohio State head coach for the first six games of the season, giving him more or less the same treatment ex-OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor got when the league suspended him for five. The move was reportedly Tressel’s own, decided upon after meeting with the team.

A statement from Colts president Bill Polian included the following, so decide how phony you think everyone is as you go:

“After the announcement of Coach Jim Tressel’s agreement to join the Colts as a game day consultant, questions were raised with respect to the equity of his appointment as opposed to suspensions being served this season by present and former Ohio State players.

“Over the weekend Coach Tressel, Mr. Irsay, Coach Caldwell and I had a discussion of the issue. In addition, we had a conversation with league officials to apprise them of the details of Coach Tressel’s employment and the issues we were reviewing.

“At Coach Tressel’s suggestion, and with Mr. Irsay’s concurrence and support, we have decided to begin Coach Tressel’s employment effective with our seventh regular season game. We have informed the league office of our decision and expect that they will be supportive of it.

“We are very happy Coach Tressel will be joining us.”

I’m still not 100-percent on the whole “getting suspended by the NFL for NCAA violations” thing, and as Yahoo commenter soxfannh astutely put it before deciding to use the word “retarded”, it’s like “being sent home from a job at Burger King because you dropped a few hamburger buns on the floor while you worked at McDonald’s”. Tressel making the noble choice to sit as punishment for crimes they wouldn’t have hired him in the NFL over if anyone actually cared about them seems like a really empty gesture, and only works as appropriate when you consider the logic gaps it fills in and the class difference it helps balance. You either have to care about the violations or not care about them. Don’t hire him if he did a bunch of bad stuff, or hire him in spite of the bad stuff because it doesn’t matter. One or the other.

Besides, does anyone really think Tressel is going to wake up on the morning after game six and feel like he’s finally paid back his debt to society? Is he going to go straight, only to be drawn back in for one big score when an Indy car dealership decides to cut him a deal because they like the Colts?

[h/t everyone around to write about sports on Labor Day]

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Ohio State Learned It By Watching You

Written by Brandon Stroud / 05.26.11

FROM YOU, ALL RIGHT? I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU

Former OSU wide receiver Ray Small told the school’s student newspaper that he got special car deals and sold Big Ten championship rings during his playing days. Why? Because everyone else was doing it. You’re killin’ me, Small. If Michigan jumped off a bridge, would … wait, don’t answer that.

Small said, ‘We had four Big Ten rings. There was enough to go around.’

He added that, despite Ohio State’s large and proactive NCAA compliance department, most of student-athletes ‘don’t even think about [NCAA] rules’ … ‘We have apartments, car notes. So you got things like that and you look around and you’re like, ‘Well I got [four] of them, I can sell one or two and get some money to pay this rent.’

Ohio State is investigating more than 50 transactions between Ohio State athletes and their families and two Columbus auto dealerships.

‘They have a lot [of dirt] on everybody,’ Small said, ’cause everybody was doing it.’

The entire Ohio State issue deserves a big press conference from the President of the United States where he throws up his hands, says “welp” and does his “now run and tell THAT” Osama Bin Laden death announcement walk down the hallway.

This interview is another in a string of weird situations where athletes don’t seem to realize how much money or opportunity they have. Football players are going broke and resorting to crime and celebrity boxing before we’ve even gotten to a locked out season, and now guys with college football scholarships have to sell championship rings to “make rent?” How does this work? Why are college sports turning into Dead Man on Campus?

[via CBS Sports]

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Ohio State Football Takes A Big Leap Toward Death Row

Written by JOSH Z / 05.09.11

As Jim Tressel was booking his flight for a mandatory NCAA compliance seminar next month, more questions arose over the integrity of the Ohio State football coach’s program. The school announced over the weekend that they would be reviewing car sales from two Columbus-area dealerships to at least eight Ohio State football players and their families. More than 50 sales from 2004 to 2010 will be under investigation.

Public records show that in 2009, a 2-year-old Chrysler 300 with less than 20,000 miles was titled to then-sophomore linebacker Thaddeus Gibson. Documents show the purchase price as $0.

Mauk could not explain it. “I don’t give cars for free,” he said. Gibson said he was unaware the title on his car showed zero as the sales price. “I paid for the car, and I’m still paying for it,” he said, declining to answer further questions.

–Columbus Dispatch.

To be fair, that’s about as much as I would pay for an American car these days.

But the Buckeyes are giving us an argument to bring the NCAA’s death penalty–a one-year ban from competition–back to Division I football for the first time since Texas’s Southern Methodist got the chair in 1987.

If both this and the “Tat Five” investigations are determined by the NCAA to be major violations, Ohio State would be slapped with the “repeat violator” label, placing the football program within the proper criteria for such a ban. Of course, Jim Tressel probably knew all about this, but just wasn’t sure who to tell about it. Oh, quiet Jimmy. I bet when he was nine years old, he was a Catholic priest’s wet dream.

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