Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis is best known for watching a dude murder someone his leadership abilities and unstoppable determination.  His pre-game pep-talks (read: screaming a bunch) are the stuff of legend and always entertaining. On Tuesday, Lewis paid a surprise visit to the Stanford men’s basketball team, who were preparing for their semifinal game against UMass in the 2012 NIT Tournament at Madison Square Garden.

Tom FitzGerald at SFGate was kind enough to share the video of Lewis giving his pep talk. Have a look for yourself:

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This gallery may not appeal to the more Hot-Cheerleaders-In-Slow-Motion-inclined members of the With Leather readership, but don’t be afraid to enjoy it, because at some point during the 1970s the Walt Disney Corporation teamed up with Wonder Bread to give away pennant stickers with loaves of bread that are literally nothing but Disney characters destroying college names with puns. Yes, that’s a sentence I’ve written.

As I see it, there are two fine ways to enjoy this:

1. Flipping through and trying to figure out which school each pennant represents, because some of them are a stretch.
2. Losing control of your neck and bashing your head against the desk in a full-body groan when you realize “Mickey Can Skate” is Michigan State, or whatever.

A third way to enjoy it is through the absurdity of the illustrations, like Cinderella doing 2,000 pounds of laundry in her ball gown or Goofy with a broken leg because you can only make so many puns about Tulane. And yes, ACC fans, here is where you learn about how Disney preappropriated your “dook” joke for Duke and made it about fowl royalty a decade or so before you were born. I kept expecting to see a Virginia Tech pennant where Shan Yu from Mulan is holding up a castrated turkey.

Note: Full credit for these goes to Disney, I guess, but credit for putting them on the Internet goes to Jason Liebig.

[h/t Disney Food Blog]

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Listening to Alex Trebek’s words wash over a college football game just feels magical. That’s a testament to the guys at Solid Verbal, who must have spent weeks parsing over old episodes of “Jeopardy!” to pull enough dialogue from its host to fill over three minutes of highlights of last season’s Standford-Oregon game.

Well done, guys. This is fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in November, Ohio State President Gordon Gee told the Associated Press that teams like TCU and Boise State didn’t deserve to play for the BCS title because those programs don’t have strong schedules like the teams in the BCS automatic qualifier conferences. Said Gee:

“Well, I don’t know enough about the X’s and O’s of college football,” said Gee, formerly the president at West Virginia, Colorado, Brown and Vanderbilt universities. “I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it’s like murderer’s row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there’s some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to [be] in the big ballgame.”

Boise State lost to Nevada two days later, ruining the Broncos’ BCS hopes, but TCU continued to steamroll opponents, as the No. 3 Horned Frogs finished with a 12-0 regular season record. The Frogs added their exclamation point on New Year’s Day, when they defeated Wisconsin 21-19 in the Rose Bowl. Wisconsin, of course, finished 7-1 in the Big 10 just like Ohio State. So for Gee’s comments, a mysterious TCU supporter has gently extended his middle finger by posting the banner image above on 20 electronic billboards throughout Columbus, Ohio. Well done.

While we can chalk this one up as a W for the little guys, as TCU was the first ever non-automatic qualifier to win the Rose Bowl, Gee and the rest of the big boys are probably still scoffing at the Frogs while they refill their high balls and light cigars with $100 bills. But tread lightly, big conference presidents. TCU will be in the Big East soon enough, so if you thought the Frogs had an easy road now, just you wait.

In the meantime, I was a little surprised to find out that TCU wasn’t the only school to have mystery billboards popping up around the country. Follow along after the jump…

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These gruesome photos come from Track and Field News:

Stanford’s Alicia Follmar took a hard fall on the leadoff leg of the Penn women’s distance medley. While she was on the ground, Follmar took a spike to the head but got up to finish a gutsy 3rd, the same position in which her team ultimately finished behind Michigan and Tennessee.

I'm glad they renamed it "women's distance medley."  The "escape from my apartment" event was drawing fewer and fewer entrants every year.

[sportsBYbrooks] 

ESPN sideline reporter Jack Arute (try saying it "Jackaroo" — whee!) seems to be a little oblivious to terminology that entered the popular lexicon via Friends a decade ago.  John Walters writes, 

The most disturbing image [from Saturday's Notre Dame-Stanford game]? ESPN sideline reporter Jack Arute describing how Charlie Weis likes to deviate from his scripted plays at the 8-minute mark of the first quarter. Arute informed viewers that Weis' wife, Maura, describes her husband's ad-libbing as "going commando."

Thanks to 289 and his Photoshop skills, I won't be able to fall asleep for the next couple nights. So let me stress something here: CHARLIE WEIS DOES NOT ACTUALLY GO COMMANDO.  He has cast iron underwear that are never removed from his body.  They get cleaned when he walks through a car wash every day.

That's what I'm going to keep telling myself, anyway.  Gah.  Fucking 289.  That much FUPA should never see the light of day. 

[FanHaus]