Pun City In 2008: Feel Free To Call It A Comeback

The U62 Telethon is on the air!

Always wanted to say that. Paraphrasing Stanley Spadowski, Pun City is back on the air. Sorry for the delay. Lots to cover here, so let's get cracking.

From the pun front:

People from Texas can be a bit Austintatious.

From the Tecmo front:

This blog finished up its Tecmo Super Bowl season where Pun City was trying to get every team to wind up 8-8. Some unexpected results there. First off, this blog was indeed successful in getting each team to 8-8. From there, Pun City had noticed/been informed by Ronk Romens that point differential was the second tie-breaker. Once Pun City was in week 17, it tried for some point differential ties as well. There were some successes on this front, including some nail-biters.

The first game of week 17 was Kansas City versus the Los Angeles Raiders. The Chiefs were sitting at +183 on the point differential, and 8-7 in record. The Raiders were 7-8 in record, +85 in point differential. So....doing the math for you, if the Raiders beat the Chiefs by 34, the two teams would tie in both record and point differential. Fortunately Pun City was able to pull off the feat, and after all other games were played, the AFC West Division standings showed the following lines:
1. Rai 8-8
1. KC 8-8
2. SD 8-8
3. Den 8-8
4. Sea 8-8

Similar ties were able to be accomplished in the AFC East, where the Bills and Dolphins tied at 8-8 and +90, and this blog was also able to get the AFC Central champion Pittsburgh Steelers to +90 on differential also.

In the NFC East, the Giants and Eagles tied at +79, and though the NFC West race wasn't close with the 49ers winning by 163 points, the NFC Central was close going into the last game. The Green Bay Packers were taking on the Minnesota Vikings. If Green Bay was able to beat Minnesota by exactly 30, the Vikings would fall into a tie with the Chicago Bears at +121. Leading by 27, the Packers gained possession of the ball on the 50 yard line with 45 seconds remaining, and proceeded to run off 29 ineffectual seconds, advancing only to the 39. Pun City knew that 16 Tecmo seconds was not very much, but figured there was just enough time for one pass play. Don Majkowski found a streaking Ed West down the sideline, who caught the ball with 2 seconds remaining and ran out of bounds at the 11 yard line with 1 second remaining. From there, Chris Jacke hit a 28-yard Field Goal to clinch the Bears-Vikings tie. After checking the game statistics, Pun City let the fireworks ensue.

Tecmo aficionados know that the "division champion" graphics normally show up when a team clinches the division based on record. With all teams having the same record in this season, that wasn't going to happen. Another quirk of Tecmo is that it will wait until a week is completely over before declaring any tie-breaker division champions. Given this knowledge, Pun City knew that all six division champion graphics would be appearing in sequence, and this blog would find out a) If Tecmo could handle a 3rd tie-breaker, and b) Potentially what that was. There was also a good possibility of finding out c) How to put out a fire started by a smoking Nintendo.

As it turned out, the screen flashed across Buffalo Bills, Pittsburgh Steelers, Los Angeles Raiders, New York Giants, Minnesota Vikings, and San Francisco 49ers as division champions; with the Miami Dolphins, New York Jets, Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Eagles, Chicago Bears, and Detroit Lions as wild cards.

This meant that indeed Tecmo Super Bowl can handle a 3rd tie-breaker, and it turned out to be total points scored. Pun City enjoyed the project, but getting two teams to have the same number of wins, points scored, and points against is a tough nut to crack.

Lastly, from the college basketball front:

This blog was at the Marquette-Savannah State game in Milwaukee's Bradley Center last Saturday. This was fun, but just prior to the game this blog had some business to do. Pun City had been listening to the Wisconsin-Texas game on the radio on the way down, and was very much interested in tracking the result. The Bacardi Club in the concourse was a huge disappointment and was not showing the game on any of their 3 flatscreen TVs. Fortunately, just down the hall, a normal cathode ray TV was displaying the game. A crowd had gathered around the screen, probably about 15. The group swelled to about 20 before the end of the game. What followed was a pleasant surprise for Pun City. As you may be aware, Marquette and Wisconsin are arch-rivals, so Pun City was expecting at least a minority of the watchers to be rooting against the Badgers. This wasn't outwardly noticeable, however. And when Michael Flowers hit the game-winning shot to put Texas away with 2.7 seconds remaining, the entire group let out a genuine, giant cheer. Maybe they were just happy that Marquette's RPI was being raised, maybe they found Wisconsin to be the lesser of two evils, hopefully they were happy for the state of basketball in Wisconsin, but Pun City is happy to report that they cheered. Mad props Marquette fans.