Tonight starts the NFL Draft. For many young men, dreams will become a reality, and for some dreams will be put on hold until the weekend. There is a lot of speculation about who will be the first pick in the draft. The Houston Texans get the first pick after finishing last season 2-14. The Texans are in need of many players in different positions. The defensive player with the most speculation around him is Jadevon Clowney, a defensive end from South Carolina. Many believe Clowney will be the next great defensive lineman in the NFL. Mel Kiper Jr., a draft analysis said, "If Clowney doesn't make it into the Hall of Fame it is his fault." That is a lot of hype for someone who hasn't even played a down in the NFL. Many experts believe he is a once in a lifetime player and says that he should be taken first in the draft. The offensive player with the most hype is Johnny Manziel. Manziel is a quarterback with a great arm and quick legs. He clocked the fastest 40 time at the combine, and had the best performance at his Pro Day than any other quarterback. Clowney and Manziel are just two of the many great players in this years draft.
So today I will be sharing the history of the Detroit Lions with you. The Detroit Lions were actually the Portsmouth Spartans from 1930 until 1933. They moved to Detroit in 1934 and they have played there ever since. They are owned by William Clay Ford, Sr. They play in Ford Field, they have played there since 2002, before that they played in the Pontiac Silverdome. Their overall record in their 80 years as a team in 468 wins, 577 losses, and 25 ties. They have hired 25 coaches in their 80 years in Detroit. They have hired 7 coaches since 2000, including their recent hire Jim Caldwell. They have 6 retired jersey numbers and have 12 player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including Barry Sanders who is the Lions all time leader rusher, rushing for over 15000 yards in 10 NFL seasons. They are one of four NFL teams to have not played in a Super Bowl. They are also the ONLY team in NFL history to go 0-16 in a season. Since 2000 they are 69-155. So that leaves the question, who do you blame for their failure? I guess it would fall back on the owner William Clay Ford Sr., because he hired Matt Millen the Detroit Lions General Manager from 2001-2008. He went 31-84 in his 7 years which is a .270 win percentage. The biggest part of his problem was that he was pretty much incapable of drafting decent players. In his 8 years as a GM, he had 9 1st round draft picks, his only good first round picks were Jeff Backus who played for the Lions from 2001-2012 and started all but 1 game is his 12 years, his only other good draft pick is Calvin Johnson who is now the Lions all time leading receiver with over 9,000 yards in 7 seasons. Other than those 2 first round picks, the rest were awful, here’s just a couple, he drafted Charles Rogers WR, who was the 2nd overall pick in the draft he played for Detroit for 3 seasons and just had 36 catches and never played in the NFL again. Matt Millen also drafted Mike Williams another WR who was selected 10th overall in the draft, he played 2 seasons with Detroit and only caught 37 passes. The slogan “Fire Millen” became big around the Detroit area and in 2008 they finally did. The Lions are now trying to make it into the playoffs and hopefully maybe one day win a Super Bowl. If you have not yet noticed, it is March. Although it has snowed this month and we have missed two days of school, I’m excited for the warm weather, but that’s not the only thing I am excited for in March. First of all next week Titanfall comes out. Titanfall is a first person shooter that combines giant robots with parkour. I have been excited for Titanfall since they showed it at the last E3. I played some of the beta for it and it did not disappoint, I was surprised to find that it was a very balanced online and I can’t wait to play it next week. Another thing I am excited for in March is March Madness. A college basketball tournament that has the 68 best teams in the country going against each other. I love March Madness, it is a fun time to be a college basketball fan, especially if your team makes it to the tournament. This year, Warren Buffett has partnered with Quicken Loans and they are going to give away ONE BILLION DOLLARS if you pick the perfect bracket. In many articles around the sports world, they say that the odds of picking the perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quadrillion, although some believe this to be false like Depaul Universities math professor Jeff Bergen, who believe that the actually odds are 1 in 128 billion. Regardless of which odds are correct, the odds are very slim...so may the odds be ever in your favor. Another thing I am excited for in March is some of the movies coming out. One movie I am really excited for in March is Divergent. The movie Divergent is based of the book Divergent, I am just going to assume that everyone has read Divergent so I won’t give you a synopsis. The last thing that I am excited for in March is Spring Break, although it has been shortened from 5 days to 3 days I still am very excited. I get 3 days off of school just to sit around and do nothing, that gets me excited. Although March started off with a snow, I believe that it will rebound. With all of these things coming up, how can you not be excited. I know I am. Something that influences me is the “Miracle On Ice.” The year is 1980 and the United States men hockey team is heading into the Olympics very undervalued, with almost no chance to win a gold medal. To start off group play, the Americans played Sweden, the game was almost lost, but the Americans scored with 27 seconds left to give them the win. The next game they had to play the Czech Republic, who were the silver medal favorites. The Americans stunned the Czechs winning 7-3. With their 2 toughest opponents out of the way, the Americans had to play Norway, Romania, and West Germany. The Americans won all of those games, and then advanced to the medal round. Russia was the HEAVY favorite to win the gold. They steamrolled through their opponents beating Japan 16-0, then beating the Dutch 17-4, then Poland 8-1, and Finland 4-2, and the finally they beat Canada 6-4. In the medal round both USA and Russia advanced to the gold medal game. No one believed that the United States could beat Russia. Dave Anderson a columnist wrote in the New York Times, “Unless the ice melts, or unless the United States team or another miracle, as did the American squad in 1960, the Russians are expected to easily win the Olympic gold medal for the sixth time in the last seven tournaments.” With 8,500 people in attendance at Lake Placid, New York, the Americans took the ice. The first period was a hard fought period and the score after 1 is 2-2. The second period was just the same as the first, but instead of a tie, the Russians were leading 3-2. The Americans tied the game 8 minutes into the period, then quickly scored again giving them a 4-3 lead with 10 minutes left in the game. The Americans held the lead, and Al Michaels gave his most famous call saying, “11 seconds, you’ve got 10 seconds, the countdown is going on right now! Morrow up to Silk. Five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracles?! YES!” This event influences me because even if no one gives you a chance, you can still succeed. So today I will be reviewing the Xbox One, the all in one console. Lets start with the price, $500, it’s fairly expensive, but for the next decade of entertainment, it’s an alright price. Although compared to the PS4 it is $100 more expensive. It has a Kinect that can pick up your movements and voice. The Kinect is a nice feature for the Xbox, you can yell, “Xbox on,” and it will turn on. The Kinect also can help you do things quicker, so you don’t have to fidget with the controller. The Xbox One is much faster than the 360. You can snap from games or apps, this allows you to run two applications at the same time. You can watch TV from your Xbox, and you can run movies in Blu-ray now. You can Skype with your friends, the Kinect acts as a webcam and you can talk and see your friends. The Xbox also includes a 500GB hard drive so you can store all of your saved data. The Xbox has many exclusives including Ryse: Son of Rome, Titanfall, and many more. Games are now in higher quality than ever before, the graphics are almost as good as a computer. Though there are many pros, there are also many cons. The party chat system isn’t fully working yet, sometimes you can be in a party, but you can’t turn on party chat. Another one of the problems is that if you want to download a game from the store most games are usually around 40GB so it takes a long time to download, and it uses about an eighth of your hard drive. Also another problem is that you have to install games on your hard drive before you play them, although I believe this is a waste of time, I know the console needs this so it can run the games better. Although the Xbox One is $100 more the competition, I believe that it is worth the price. It is in all in one console that can suffice your daily Xbox needs, so yes, I like the console. If I had to rate it on a 5 star scale, I would rate it a 4. The Rise of the Robots began in a town called Sochi. The Olympics were coming up and instead of using humans as judges it was robots. During the figure skating event the famous skater Yogi Terrell had almost a flawless run and it was almost certain that he was going home with the gold, but the undiscovered skater Homer Hilton had almost a flawless run, but he slipped at the end. The robot judges decided the Homer won the gold and Yogi was angry at the new. Yogi went and got in the judges faces, and he struck one of the judges, little did Yogi know he had justed started the Rise of the Robots. As soon as the robot was hit the robot immediately grasped Yogi by the neck and choked him to death. The robots kill switch was activated and it died immediately. Just like a disease the news spread and soon robots all over the world were attacking anything they could get their hands on. Soon robots were out populating humans 8 to 1, if you were a human and you valued your life, you were hiding or you were on the first ship to Mars. Mars…humans sought it as a refugee as soon as the robot rebellion got out of hand. The first few trips to Mars were not so successful, you only had about a 3-5 month window to land on Mars. The trips only consisted of 1,800 people to one ship at the cost of $3,000. It sounds expensive but for the chance to get away from the robots nothing was too expensive. Robots had soon taken over all major cities in the world. The robots almost ran their lives like humans, except with one different, they had one supreme ruler, he went by Robo Regan. Robo Regan was a complete copy of Ronald Regan, except for the fact that he was a robot. Robo Regan assumed complete control of the world, and very quickly the robot world was out achieving the human race. Robots had already come up with the first flying cars, they were soon after working on a anti-gravity missile to send to Mars to destroy the human race once in for all, but there was one problem, the humans were fighting back. It was late into the night as the scientist worked on his “world changing” invention. He worked tirelessly into the night, hoping that maybe he could possibly finish it my morning. He’d been working on it for months now and hoping that it wouldn’t fail him, his reputation in the scientific community was at stake. Hours and hours rolled by as the sunlight creeped over the hill and into the back of his workshop, still he had not finished it. It was driving him to the brink of insanity, it should’ve been done by now, he didn’t understand, but he continued to work. Again hours rolled by, still he wasn’t getting the results he wanted, he’d worked for months on it, and he still didn’t couldn’t get it to work. He couldn’t take it anymore, he was past his breaking point. He wanted to give up, but he was so close that he knew he couldn’t quit, not yet. He went back to work, hoping he had come up with the solution. As he started tinkering away at it, he heard it crackle to life. “Finally,” he said with a edge to his voice. He had finally done it, he had just built the world’s first fully fully functional robot. The robot sat up. “Hello,” the robot said in a rough voice. “Hello,” he said in complete awe. As he looked at his creation, impressed with what he had done, he knew that the world was never going to be the same. Months later after he showed the scientific world of his discovery, he was approached by a older man that wanted to buy his robot from him. He respectfully declined, but the man continued to press into buying the robot. The scientist wouldn’t sell him the robot, but he would sell him the blueprints, for a billion dollars. The man accepted the offer and they went on their way. The scientist later noticed that they had began factory producing his robots all over the world. These robots weren’t the same as his robots though, the robots were programmed to adapt to the changing environment around them. The news flickered on and the headline read ROBOT ATTACKS MAN. It shouldn't have been that big of a deal, but since robots had the ability to adapt to their environment, so when the robots around the world heard the news, they started attacking. Thus causing the Rise of the Robots. So in AP World this week Coach Herrod decided that we should write 2 column notes over chapter 15. We haven’t had to write 2 column notes this entire year and so I was pretty disappointed when he said we had to. I personally hate writing with a pencil, and I REALLY hate writing 2 column notes, especially when we have all this technology around us. I think that 2 column notes is the most inefficient way of learning, it just makes me waste an hour or two writing, it’s very pointless. In Chemistry, we have been learning about ionic, covalent, and hydrogen bonds. It has been really boring in there, and very confusing. In Geometry, we went over unit 7, and we also did a EOC review. In Oral Comm. we did our first speech of the semester, it was a self speech. I nailed it. In TV Intermediate, we just reviewed over last semester, and did a project, I was no help at all, and did not participate in the project at all. In Spanish, we got a vocabulary sheet for food items. It has been a fun week learning how to say certain foods in Spanish. My favorite word to say is lechuga which is lettuce in Spanish. In Art 1, I learned how to draw in 3rd perspective. It has been really interesting because I usually hate art, but drawing in linear perspective is actually fun. I have had a fun week in school all in all, but other than that I haven’t done much outside of school. I went to the Arkansas vs. Florida game, it was pretty good, but Arkansas ended up losing in overtime. I also went to the Arkansas vs. Kentucky game, it was the best game I have ever been to. Kentucky hit a game tying shot with 3 seconds left to send it into overtime. In overtime Arkansas trailed by 1 point with 15 seconds left. Arkansas decided to take a 3 pointer with 4 seconds left, it missed, but while the ball was in the air, an Arkansas player grabbed the rebound in air and dunked it with .3 seconds left. It was crazy. The stadium erupted in madness as Arkansas just beat the number 14 rank in the nation. It was awesome. My Christmas break was a very uneventful one. I was happy for the break, don't get me wrong, but I didn't do anything at all. I wasn't angry that I didn't do anything, but I would've like to. To start my break I bought myself an Xbox One, a early Christmas present to myself. It's a really fun console, I didn't have games for a few day for a while, so that sucked. Eventually Christmas came around and I got to open my presents. I got a pair of headphones, Ryse : Son of Rome and Battlefield 4, and a nice shirt. I was happy with all my gifts and thanked my family for them. I beat Ryse, the game was REALLY GOOD. The only downside was that the story was only 5 hours, other than that it was a great story and very graphically appealing. Most of my days I spent playing either Torchlight 2 or Payday 2. Both very good games that my friends and I play once in a while. I also went to the Bentonville vs. Pea Ridge basketball game. It wasn't really a good game, I didn't expect it to be. Bentonville has the 8th best player in the class of 2016. He had a couple of dunks, not to shabby for a high school player. All in all it was a good Christmas break. I had a lot of fun and got many new toys to play with. I had a really fun Christmas break, I spent time with family and just enjoyed the holidays. I enjoyed all the time away from school, everyone needs a break. |