Just when it looked like things were looking up for the athletic department of one of the nation’s largest Christian universities, freshman phenom Brittney Griner goes and makes a punching bag out of an opposing center’s face.

Can’t Baylor University catch a break?

Before Brittney landed her right fist on Jordan Barncastle’s nostril, it’s been the kind of year the Baylor Bear boosters have been praying for to further distance their program from one of the most nightmarish scandals to ever plague a program.

The men have been winning and playing well enough this season under the tutelage of March Madness hero Bryce Drew’s brother Scott to make LaceDarius Dunn and Ekpe Udoh household names in Big 12 country.

Brittney Griner, meanwhile, has elevated the women’s program and the entire school’s viral marketing efforts with her 6-foot-8-made-for-YouTube-frame that until recently didn’t require any consults with the university relations department of the 14,000-student university with the “for the church, for Texas” motto.

As you may have already seen from the video, it’s an absolutely ugly and indefensible act that unfortunately is capturing the kind of media attention a female dunking machine never will. As is usually the case when someone represents a Christian institution the fallout and scrutiny will likely be even worse.

Perhaps it would be best for us to all say a prayer for Brittney and be reminded in our own way less of a fishbowl lives to the words of The Message translation of Proverbs 14:29: “a quick-tempered person stockpiles stupidity.”

Does this front page make you cringe? Or is all it all in good pun?

Bryan Allain has a post up on Daily Beast today worth checking out called “God vs. the Saints.”

Check it out.

Christianity Today’s cover story for February is a lengthy piece adapted from Shirl James Hoffman’s book Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Its a heady article from what sounds like a scholarly read on the intersection of faith and sports so frequently discussed here.

What struck me was Hoffman’s use of the term Sportianity (coined 30 years ago by SI’s Frank Deford) and how he defines it:

“In other words, Sportianity is Christian theology vetted and co-opted by the dictates of the sports industry. Not surprisingly, it cannot speak truth to power. Its doctrines are promulgated far beyond the locker rooms of the NFL, the NBA, or Major League Baseball. Rationalized and systematized, it is vigorously taught to college, high school, and even younger athletes. Its themes crop up in sermons preached from evangelical pulpits and in articles from the religious press. There are, in fact, few alternative ways of thinking about sports and faith in the evangelical community.

In spite of its theological conservatism, Sportianity advocates a quite worldly view of sports. The concrete trumps the symbolic; doing, achieving, and struggling are favored over mystery, joy, feeling, transport, and spiritual insight. When effort, sacrifice, and competitive success become the preferred ways to glorify God, joyous play—which might be what theologian Robert K. Johnston has called “a prolegomenon [preface] to further encounters with God”—can seem an unworthy offering. In the dialectical, serious-but-not-serious world of play, Sportians tip the scales decidedly toward the serious, made weightier by the evangelistic mission they are anxious to load onto sports.”

Any thoughts?

Oakland A’s prospect Grant Desme made public this afternoon a decision he had already made when he homered and struck out twice in his final game in the Arizona Fall League last fall. He’s leaving baseball to study for the priesthood at a Catholic seminary in California.

Let the headline puns about higher callings, higher leagues, chastity belts, collars and cloth begin. Or even better, miss-the-point headlines like one from Huffington Post talking about Desme “pursuing his faith” (as if one can’t pursue faith while not in seminary).

Desme had this to say during a conference call with reporters today, according to a blog post on SFGate.com:

“I’m doing well in baseball. But I had to get down to the bottom of things, to what was good in my life, what I wanted to do with my life. Baseball is a good thing, but that felt selfish of me when I felt that God was calling me more. It took awhile to trust that and open up to it and aim full steam toward him.”

Grant might want to talk to former pro soccer player Chase Hilgenbrinck about the transition from sports to seminary. Hilgenbrinck retired in November 2008 to enroll in a Catholic seminary on the East Coast.

A while back PFB Founder Bryan Allain wrote about his resemblance to Andy Roddick and how he looks enough like the tennis star to be confused for him in airports.

I’m not a big tennis guy, but I am glued to ESPN360 whenever the Kansas Jayhawks play and for some reason whenever I see Jayhawk center Cole Aldrich play I think of Bryan (someone I’ve seen in person exactly twice, by the way).

Bryan, of course, isn’t 6-foot-11 and on his way to riding the bench in the NBA (Cole hasn’t exactly been playing like an NBA starter to be this season on the offensive end). But Bryan did mysteriously lose a tooth around the same time Aldrich did as this photo I definitely did not Photoshop shows:

Note: If you aren’t already a regular reader, do yourself a favor and visit/bookmark Bryan Allain’s blog at www.bryanallain.com.

You may and probably will disagree more than once with this list, but here are my personal awards for the past decade in sports, given out as I see fit. Be sure to point out my biases/omissions and tell me how crazy I am in the comments. Or even better yet, e-mail me your list at mattralph@earthlink.net.

Athlete of the Decade
Michael Phelps. As easy as Phelps made it look, that wheelbarrow full of medals he collected in two Olympics was no easy task. Add in all of the hardware he collected swimming for World Championships and other competitions and Tiger Woods doesn’t look quite as impressive.

Team of the Decade
2001-02 Detroit Red Wings. Steve Yzerman, Chris Chelios, Luc Robataille, Domink Hasek, Brett Hull, Sergei Federov, Nicklas Lidstrom and Brendan Shanahan. Talk about a great collection of talent. I can’t think of a team that even comes close to having that kind of talent all in one place – or in my case a team in hockey over the last decade that had that many players whose names I recognized.

Coach of the Decade
Geno Auriemma. Sure, he gets all the best women’s basketball recruits, but the guy coached UConn to five titles and only 28 losses in the entire decade. That’s not just impressive; it’s unbelievable.

Fans of the Decade
Minnesota Twins. Their frost-bitten hearts break just about every off-season when they lose talent to a team with deeper pockets, yet the Twins fans persist and practically will their team into contention every season. They’re stadium sucks and their homer hankies are kind of annoying, but watching the one-game playoff this fall only confirmed for me how much better their fanbase is than the ones with which I most regularly associate.

Baseball Player of the Decade
Pujols has all the right numbers and even has a ring, but no player for me represents dominance in the decade of the ‘00s quite the way Mariano Rivera does. I’m a Yankee hater so I don’t care too much for Rivera or his cutter by association, but aside from his meltdown against the D-backs in 2001 he’s been as automatic as one can be in the highest pressure job in the game.

Baseball Team of the Decade
The Red Sox and Yankees both had two World Series titles, but you have to give beantown the edge for a number of reasons. 1. Their dramatic comeback to get to the series in 2004 and finally get that Babe Ruth-sized monkey off their back. 2. The Yankees’ World Series wins were bookends to an otherwise unremarkable decade by Bronx standards. 3. The Yankees utterly ruled the ‘90s so it’s time for another team to have a turn. 4. The other Sox also won a World Series so if nothing else it was the decade of teams named after items in your top drawer.

NFL Player of the Decade
Adam Vinatieri. I know. He’s just a kicker. But if Scott Norwood can be considered one of the biggest goats in the history of sports for missing a field goal that would have won a Super Bowl, then Adam Vinatieri has to be taken seriously for making two clutch field goals that won his team the Super Bowl (and countless other crucial field goals). Tom Brady would have zero Super Bowl MVPs if Vinatieri didn’t have ice water pumping through his veins. To top it off, Vinatieri brought his magic to the Colts in 2007, filling all but his thumb on one hand with Super Bowl rings in the decade

NFL Team of the Decade
New England Patriots. No contest. Look at the stats. Do the math. It’s not even close.

Read the rest of this entry →

From the Twitter feed @fakeAPstylebook:

In high school sports stories, do your best to play up star players’ big-league chances so their failures are more tragic.

As nice of a ring as the name Ndamukong Suh winning the Heisman Trophy would have had to it, I found Mark Ingram’s winning the Heisman trophy on Saturday worthwhile for the speech alone.

After back to back years of high-profile Christian quarterbacks bringing their God talk to the nationally televised broadcast, the parts of Ingram’s acceptance speech when he wasn’t thanking God were for me far more influential and Christ-filled than any name dropping of the savior of the world could ever achieve.

First of all, he teared up almost as much as I did on my wedding day. Sure, it was kind of awkward watching the oddly-timed pauses in between tears, but it was also beautiful to see such raw emotion expressed from someone who plays a sport where toughness and acting like a muscle-headed, heartless jerk is so often the norm. His reaction was heartfelt and so vulnerably human.

Secondly, he thanked an intern. Did you even know there were interns in college football? I didn’t, but I do now, because Ingram showed enough humility to give credit to all of the people who have helped him this season. Ditto to his name dropping of the Alabama SIDs. Anyone who has ever worked in a sports information department or knows someone who has knows how hellish the hours and thankless the job can be.

Thirdly, his talk of relationships. I don’t know much about Ingram off the field, but when he talked about the relationships he had formed with the other Heisman trophy candidates and stressed their importance, I had a passing thought about some of the things Paul writes about the early church in the New Testament and a few more thoughts about how Jesus talks about how we should treat our enemies, or in this case, our competitors for the Heisman trophy.

The Heisman trophy is kind of silly. It’s basically a trophy given to the most popular offensive player on one of the teams computers and popularity polls have decided should get to play for a so-called national championship. Sorry, I had to fit that in somewhere.

But still, kudos to Ingram for bringing raw emotion and humility to an otherwise anti-climactic and drawn out television program (anyone count how many times Herbstreit said “in the trenches” when talking about Suh?). You can argue up and down why Toby Gerhart should have won it, but by all indications college football and Crimson Tide Nation are being represented well by the likes of Mr. Ingram.

Dear Readers,

Several months ago, Bryan Allain introduced myself as the new editor of Prayers For Blowouts. It was with great excitement I accepted the position and began to craft a vision for the future of this website. We brought several creative features to the table with hopes of gaining a more widespread audience. Several of those features have been rolled out, several have not. However, in the time since I took over as editor for PFB, I’ve been facing a deeply personal battle that is requiring my full attention and support. It’s with great sadness that I announce that effective immediately, I am taking an indefinite leave of abscence from PrayersForBlowouts.com. I’ve asked the wonderful staff of writers I have here to continue on in the vision that Bryan and I laid out months ago, in hopes that this site can gain the audience we feel it is capable of. I will always support this site and wish it much success. If you have any questions, concerns or thoughts, please feel free to contact me at joshuadrollins at gmail dot com or on twitter @joshuadrollins. Thank you for being so kind to me in my short tenure here at PFB.

Joshua D. Rollins