Last night Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam came out to the world. Yet again a part of me cheered.

Sam came out to his teammates before last season at a team-building event in August. His head coach Gary Pinkel, the staff and his teammates embraced him. From an ESPN story:

Pinkel said no players came directly to the coaching staff with concerns after Sam revealed his sexual orientation to the team, but he suspects that there was initially a mixed reaction.

“There are certainly players that have differences of opinions, not only on this but other social issues,” Pinkel said. “I’m not naive enough to believe that [there is not], I’m sure there are. But at the end of the day, it’s about the team, it’s about the family. We accept one another, we accept our differences, and that’s where respect and understanding is important.”

A respect of cultural differences is one of Missouri’s four core values, Pinkel said, and he was proud of how his team stuck together after Sam came out.

“I’m really proud of Mike and really proud of our football team,” Pinkel said. “We have great kids and good people, and they’re understanding. That’s kind of the environment we have and the family atmosphere at Mizzou.”

In what is deemed the best conference in college football, Sam led the SEC with 19 tackles for a loss and 11 1/2 sacks. Along with C.J. Mosley of Alabama, Sam earned SEC Defensive Player of the Year honors. The last seven winners of that honor had been drafted in the first round.

Reaction from NFL players current and former and “bullies” have been great also:

So everything is good, right? Sam is going to be drafted high, he is going to be embraced by his teammates especially if he duplicates his senior season in the NFL.

Unfortunately when you read the reactions by the decision makers in the NFL, that’s when the rose-colored glasses turn dark. Peter King in his “Monday Morning Quarterback” column talked to a general manager for an NFL team who, like most of those pussies, remained anonymous.

“We talked about it this week,” the GM said. “First of all, we don’t think he’s a very good player. The reality is he’s an overrated football player in our estimation. Second: He’s going to have expectations about where he should be drafted, and I think he’ll be disappointed. He’s not going to get drafted where he thinks he should. The question you will ask yourself, knowing your team, is, ‘How will drafting him affect your locker room?’ And I am sorry to say where we are at this point in time, I think it’s going to affect most locker rooms. A lot of guys will be uncomfortable. Ten years from now, fine. But today, I think being openly gay is a factor in the locker room.”

I asked this general manager: “Do you think he’ll be drafted?”

“No,” he said.

There you have it, the bullshit red herring about “how will it affect the locker room”? It seemed to be no problem in the small town of Columbia, MO. A lot of other executives and scouts echoed that bullshit sentiment.

And there you see these people trying to deflect their homophobia. “He’s overrated.” Fine. We know that the draft is a crapshoot and most teams do a shitty job of it. Perhaps he is overrated and falls to the third round. Or fourth round. But undrafted?

Let’s not forget. This is the same league that has banished Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo, and those two were only vocal gay allies. Lord knows what they will do when presented a gay man who is unashamed of who he is.

Michael Sam coming out is very important. Here is a tweet I saw last night:

That’s nice, but that’s a false statement. It’s like saying because Obama is the president race doesn’t matter. We know that is false.

I’m glad that a straight man doesn’t care about this issue and doesn’t care if someone is gay or straight. When you look at what’s going on in Sochi, what’s going on in Africa, what’s going on in the deep South, this matters. The more we are invisible, the more we allow ourselves to get exterminated.

I give a damn. I have to give a damn or else I’m complicit with another queer teen’s suicide, another gay-bashing victim, another hate crime against my transgendered brothers and sisters.

This is just one drop in the bucket, but this can be one big fucking drop. Let’s hope the NFL does the right thing.

Think about it. Here’s is the oldest player in the league desperately needed by his team in order to have a sniffing chance of a win. When able to play, the most indelible image of him is lying down near the bench to rest his aching back. I can’t say this bodes well for a team’s fortunes.

To add to the disappointment, the Lakers only had eight other players other than Nash to play against the Philadelphia 76ers. Nick Young is out with a non-displaced fracture of the patella and a bone bruise on his left knee. He’s out a minimum of two weeks. Jordan Farmar was out again. Pau Gasol has a groin injury. Xavier Henry is hurt. Jodie Meeks is out.

You get the picture.

Despite all of this, fortune did give a wink at the Lakers tonight: the schedule had them playing the Sixers. The woeful Sixers. The 15-35 Sixers. Sure, that record isn’t as bad as the Lakers 17-32, but there are very few teams out there the Lakers can boast to be better than.

Nash had 19 points to lead all Lakers to along with five assists in 28 minutes. Chris Kaman also had a big game with 17 points and eight rebounds off of the bench.

This time there was no hardly needed rule for the Lakers to take advantage of. Once Robert Sacre fouled out in the fourth quarter against Cleveland on Wednesday, since the Lakers would have been left with only four players on the court he was allowed to continue to play in exchange for a technical foul.

No, this time they played some defense to give themselves the 112-98 victory. Although the Sixers scored 35 points in the first quarter, the Lakers only allowed 34 points in the entire second half.

The Lakers have now won two in a row after losing seven straight. They come home on Sunday for brunch with the Bulls.

The Lakers still stink. They won two games on the road against shitty teams. Hooray?

But in this game, the Lakers looked fun again. If you recall the season opener against the Clippers, the Lakers attacked the paint and had some good defensive plays to pull out the 116-103 win. With all of the young players they had, they seemed to play with a sense of liberation. It had been the first time in a long time that watching the Lakers play basketball could be classified as “fun”.

With the injuries, the “fun” was sapped away. But with Nash and Steve Blake back, it does appear to be rearing its head back. Could this be a sign of things to come? Probably not. But for at least one day it looked fun again.

With the nonsense going on in Russia right now, everyone’s favorite Norwegian electro-princess Annie craft her own version of a protest song. “Shake your fist for the Russian Kiss.” Beats by Bjarne Melgaard, video directed by Richard Kern.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

For the first time in a long time, things seemed to be looking up for the Lakers. The Lakers got Steve Blake and Steve Nash back against the Minnesota Timberwolves tonight.

Lord knows what anyone can expect from the nonagenarian Nash, but before Blake was sidelined with a torn ligament in his right (shooting) elbow he was playing his best ball of the season. That, in turn, meant the Lakers were playing their best ball of the season.

So there was promise, right?

But here is the motif that is the Lakers season which kicked in. Just less than 90 seconds into the game, Jodie Meeks sprained his right ankle landing on Corey Brewer. That’s 14.7 points and 40.6 percent three-point shooting gone for the immediate future. Jordan Hill later in the quarter left the game with a severe headache after getting Chris Kaman’s elbow to his head.

And just for shits and giggles Blake suffered a ruptured eardrum in the first half, but he managed to play the rest of the game.

That’s the nightmare of the 2013-14 Lakers season.

Of course that’s detracting from the fact the Lakers are AWFUL on defense. My barely ambulatory grandmother could probably defend better than this lot we call the Lakers. They gave up 68 points to the T’Wolves in the first half. Even though they are the best first half scoring team in the NBA, they average only 54.6.

But then the most amazing thing happened. The Lakers played what looked like defense in the third quarter! The third quarter has been the bugaboo for the Lakers all season long. They average 23.2 points in the quarter, sixth worst in the league. Their point differential is -3.4 in the quarter, only better than the Philadelphia 76ers.

This Laker team actually won the third quarter 26-21! What was an 18-point deficit at the half was an 11-point deficit by the end of the quarter.

So despite the Timberwolves’ mediocrity, the Lakers showed that they still stink. They couldn’t take advantage of some bad Ricky Rubio passes, Kevin Love airballs and missed dunks by Corey Brewer. The Lakers lost 109-99 giving them a 16-32 record. They are now tied with the Utah Jazz and Sacramento Kings for the worst record in the Western Conference.

The Timberwolves are now 24-24. In other words, Kevin Love to the Lakers next season?

Some notable stats:

Nick Young: 24 points off the bench.
Chris Kaman and Ryan Kelly: -11 rating.
Manny Harris: 19 points in 20 minutes.
Wesley Johnson: 15 points.
Ricky Rubio: 4 points, 13 assists.
Kevin Love: 31 points, 17 rebounds.
Kevin Martin: 32 points, 4-for-6 from three-point land.

I had a strange dream last night that I was super svelte and was a contestant on America’s Next Top Model. I was getting ready to do a runway show, had no idea what the hell was going on and tripped over steps. The clothes didn’t fit me — I tried to use a paper clamp to fit the clothes to my body better, but it was too conspicuous.

I figured the Seattle Seahawks defense was going to be suffocating, they’d quickly jump out to a 28-0 lead or something and let up in final minutes to beat the Denver Broncos 31-14. I underestimated the Seahawks.

They smothered the Broncos offense, made Peyton Manning uncomfortable without having to blitz him and thoroughly demolished them in special-teams situations. 43-8. It should also be noted no other NFL game has ended with that score.

Sure the Broncos aren’t strangers to being blown out in a Super Bowl. They now lead the NFL in losing the Super Bowl five times. Yadda yadda yadda. There are going to be a lot of words written about this game, but these words by Charlie Pierce on the Grantland Super Bowl roundup does a great job of succinctly relating my thoughts of all of the pregame pageantry:

I have accustomed myself to accepting the fact that the Super Bowl pregame is going to be the kind of militarized patriotic pageant that would have occurred had Leni Riefenstahl immigrated to Manhattan and gone to work with Don Draper.

That is all. See you in September NFL.

Again, I have no evidence to back up this prediction, but the Seattle Seahawks will beat the Denver Broncos 31-14.

I will pay as little attention as possible to the commercials, the halftime show and everything not related to the game. I’m sure Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will do a good job on the broadcast. I’m also pretty sure the game is going to be really shitty.

Maybe I’ll find a way to loop the Kitten Bowl over and over again during the game?

I first noticed Hoffman in the 1998 Todd Solondz film Happiness. Who doesn’t like an unsuccessful pervy wannabe rapist?

Hoffman was found dead in his apartment in New York City. I hope he’s happy right now.

Simply put, no.

Millions of NFL fans in LA did gay gasps when they read Sam Farmer’s story yesterday. The Rams owner bought a 60-acre parking lot at Hollywood Park!

But the last several paragraphs of the article highlight why the Rams coming back is still unlikely.

In the post-9/11 era, there is a potential Federal Aviation Administration issue with building a stadium at or near Hollywood Park, which sits in the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport. Al Davis, then owner of the L.A. Raiders, got a Hollywood Park proposal approved in the 1990s, but the world was a different place then.

There probably would be a slew of other environmental challenges to building a stadium there — among them traffic and parking issues — particularly next to a large Hollywood Park Tomorrow development.

Already, there are two competing NFL stadium proposals in the Los Angeles area, one next to Staples Center, and another in the City of Industry. Both almost certainly would exert as much political and public pressure as possible to derail a third option.

Finally, a relocation would require a three-quarters majority vote of the league’s 32 teams. The fact that the Rams already left this market would be a strike against them. What’s more, a team filling the L.A. market would be a detriment to getting stadium deals done in San Diego and Oakland because it would deprive those teams of leverage in their home cities. A coalition of at least nine NFL owners could block any such move.

Football fans in LA need to stop playing games with themselves. I remember when the Seattle Seahawks were supposed to move to Anaheim back in 1996. In fact they had already moved their team operations to Anaheim, but a last minute injunction stopped them in their tracks.

Then, to add insult to this big hot stinking pile of shit, the NFL awarded an expansion team to LA in 1999. But no one could decide on where to put the team or who would own it, so the NFL later in the year gave the team to Houston.

At that point I took the hint. I stopped the mental retardation and made a vow not to get my hopes up until I see a shovel hit the ground with my own eyes. My own ojos.

Proposals have come and gone. Farmers Field in Downtown LA. LA Stadium in the City of Industry. I’ve talked to the people heading those proposals one-on-one, and none of them have convinced me the NFL was coming anytime soon.

In fact, I was told by one of the people off the record that we will see the NFL in Los Angeles by 2014. Cue the crickets.

The NFL loves that LA has no team. They can use the city as leverage for all of the other teams to bully other cities to hand out oodles of taxpayer money for new shiny stadiums. In fact Stan Kroenke, owner of the Rams, also owns land in London where he can further leverage the city of St. Louis to get anything he wants. Gotta love capitalism, right? And at last check, Jacksonville, San Diego and St. Louis still have stadium “issues”.

Fun fact: Let’s also ignore the fact that the Rams originally played in Cleveland from 1936 to 1945. It just proves that Cleveland was a shithole forcing athletes to flee going back to 1945.