Welcome to the Dog Days of the sports calendar

Good morning. As some guy on some show I’ve never seen says, winter is coming. The calendar may say June, and the weather may suggest that it’s summer, but we are on the precipice of winter on the sports calendar. It’s not so bad if you’re a golf fan or a baseball fan, but the time between the NBA Finals and the start of football season is sports Siberia.

As such, there isn’t a lot to talk about WSU-wise. We could re-hash some offseason-long topics like which position group needs to step up, where Luke Falk stands in the Pac-12 quarterback pecking order or why everyone involved in Pac-12 TV scheduling hates fans on the east coast, but I don’t think there’s a lot of new ground to cover there.

I’m a big fan of the Seinfeld television series. For those of you in our audience who skew younger, it’s a show from the 90s in which the main characters got themselves in all sorts of odd situations, 98% of which would never occur in the cell phone age. Regardless, the show was one of the funniest in history.

One of the reasons I loved the show was because of the seemingly inane topics and questions it brought up. I’ve been thinking about one of my own for a while. This will interest somewhere between two and six of you, but like I said, there’s not a lot out there this time of year.

I have a 27-mile commute to/from work every day, from the Tampa suburbs to MacDill AFB. Tampa has a toll road called the Selmon Expressway, named after Pro Football Hall of Famer and former Buccaneer Lee Roy Selmon. I leave early enough in the morning so as to get to work via surface streets. In the afternoon, however, I take the expressway on the middle part of my drive since traffic is so bad.

Many times when I get on that road, I ask myself whether I’d want a toll road named after me. On the one hand, I must have done something pretty good in the local area for the powers-that-be to give me that honor. Also, thousands of people pay extra money every day to use my highway because they know it will get them to their destination quicker. The traffic always moves much more rapidly on the Selmon, which is a huge feather in its cap.

On the other hand, there’s a good chance that every time someone sees my name on a sign, their first thought is that their wallet is now a bit lighter, and are cursing beneath their breath that they have to pay extra just to drive a few miles on my road. It’s a near certainty that every time they see my name anywhere, they’ll think “goddamn toll road.”

So here’s my question: If you had a street/highway/freeway segment named after you, would you rather have it be a toll road or a free-use road, and why?

As I said, it’s a barren wasteland of WSU-related news and information right now, and I’m sorry that you will never get these couple minutes back. But Go Cougs, right?

Football

Preview 2017: Pac-12 Rankings | College Football News
Of course Wazzu will rely on Falk, but this year, it won’t have to.

Preview 2017: Pac-12 Quarterback Ranking & Situations | College Football News
It was a massive coup for the program to get Luke Falk back for another year to run the Mike Leach offense.

Pac-12 football: Required weekend reading
Pac-12 football weekend reading focuses on the extension for Colorado's Mike MacIntyre, a Q&A with Washington's Chris Petersen, ASU's decision to not extend Todd Graham and more.

Who is the future coach on each Top 25 team - Ohio State Buckeyes, Florida State Seminoles, Alabama Crimson Tide
The son of a football coach and a known motivator, linebacker Peyton Pelluer has the pedigree to transition into a successful career in coaching.

Beer

Best beer I had this week: Currently on vacation in the Smoky Mountains with some other families from my wife’s college days. I decided to bring up some of my better beer. The cool part is that none of them like it, so I get it to myself. A couple days ago, I drank the last of my Funky Buddha Last Buffalo in the Park. The beer and the view were equally tremendous.

How Craft Beer Took On Anheuser-Busch's St. Louis Monopoly | GQ
People take pride in their local craft breweries, and St. Louis is no exception, which begs the question: How can craft beer survive on Anheuser-Busch’s home turf? These four inventive St. Louis craft breweries hold the answer.

Non-Sports

After the Whole Foods Acquisition, Jeff Bezos Is Tech’s Most Powerful Person
Since Amazon was a tiny startup selling paperbacks, Jeff Bezos has been focused on the long game. In his first letter to shareholders in 1997, he advised investors to strap in for a bumpy financial ride that could include short-term quarterly losses and risky acquisitions that fail to pan out.