The Cover Story: The NHL Winter Classic

Over the last couple of years the National Hockey League has started to steal the spotlight away from college football bowl games and to theirselves with the Winter Classic on New Years Day. This year the Bruins defeated the Flyers in a classic at Fenway Park, the best one of the series so far. The game featured a fight (the first in Classic history), hard hitting and a game played with a passion.

Here are how some of the papers in the Boston area covered the action from Fenway Park:

Boston Globe

Telegram and Gazette (Worcester)

Should the NFL follow the Premier League

The final weekend of the NFL regular season is here and there are still a bunch of things to figure out, like who is going to win the NFC East, the wildcard spots in the AFC, and seeding. During the final Sunday of the season, games will kickoff at 1 p.m., 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Some teams might know that their games means nothing as they take the field because of earlier results.

In know this is going to sound euro centric, but maybe the NFL should look at changing the way that they do the final weekend of the season. Instead of having three different start times maybe they should have all of the games start at the same time, like they do in the Barclays Premier League. During the final day of the Premier League season all of the games start at 4 p.m. . This assures no funny business between the clubs. This makes for fun for all of the fans at the stadiums. All of them are on the cell phones and have radios in their ears to make sure they know what is going on at other sites around the league. At one point your team could be in at another point with results going the other they could be at. But at the end of all of the games there is no more waiting.

Sure the final weekend of the NFL season will be great, cause it always is, but starting every game at 4 p.m. would make for classic drama.

The Storm Troopers are failing

Florida did it for the SEC Title Game, Miami did it for the Champs Sports Bowl, Arizona did it for the Holiday Bowl. What do this three teams have in common, during the before mentioned games the teams played in what is called the ""Storm Trooper Look'' and lost. Oregon started the trend a couple of years ago, when they came out against Washington and had white helmets, white jerseys, white pants and white shoes.
Sure the look was cool but now its getting out of control and bringing teams bad luck. Look at the results. Tempting the football gods is not good and for schools like Florida and Miami there is no reason to use this type of gimick and the results have shown that the football gods were not happy about their choice in uniforms.

Who said Hockey is not growing?

Look back at the United States World Junior Championships over the last couple of decades and it reads like a list of hockey playing states. From Minnesota to Wisconsin to Michigan, this years teams has representatives from those states and a couple of different ones.

A bunch of years back the National Hockey League decided to put teams in Florida, Arizona, Carolina, and Atlanta at the time the leadership said it was make the sport grown and by the looks of this years United States WJC team it appears to have worked.

Eight members of the teams are from nontraditional hockey playing areas. Defenseman John Carlson, Colonia, NJ; Matt Donovan, Edmond, Okla; John Ramage, St. Louis, Mo; Tyler Johnson, Spokane, Wash; Philip McRae, Chesterfield, Mo; Kyle Palmieri, Montvale, NJ; Luke Walker, Portland, Ore; and Jason Zucker, Las Vegas (pictured above).

Sure there are reason why these players are coming from different areas. One reason is that they are sons are former NHLers, like Ramage and McRae, and their fathers played in the those cities and have decided to live their after their playing careers have ended. But with the other kids it looks like their love of the game continued to grow despite playing in an area that did not embrace the sport.

Did you ever think that you would see the day where the a kid from the bright lights of Vegas would be playing the WJC. I'm just waiting for the day when the half of the WJC team is from Sun Belt state, don't laugh, its coming.