Thursday, January 2, 2014

Who do you think will win this year's Super Bowl?

NFL player Dick Plasman
The NFL regular season schedule wrapped up on Sunday, and 12 teams have survived to make the playoff cut – the Kansas City Chiefs, the Indianapolis Colts, the New Orleans Saints, the Philadelphia Eagles, the San Diego Chargers, the Cincinnati Bengals, the San Francisco 49ers, the Green Bay Packers, the Seattle Seahawks, the New England Patriots, the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos.

Playoff action will begin on Saturday when the Chiefs play at Indianapolis at 3:35 p.m. and the Saints play at Philadelphia at 7:19 p.m. Both of those games will be broadcast on NBC.

On Sunday, the Chargers will play at Cincinnati, starting at 12:05 p.m., and the 49ers will play at Green Bay, starting at 3:40 p.m. CBS will broadcast the San Diego-Cincinnati game, and FOX will broadcast the San Francisco-Green Bay game.

On Saturday, I look for the Colts to beat the Chiefs and for Philadelphia to beat New Orleans. On Sunday, I look for the Bengals to beat San Diego and for San Francisco to beat Green Bay.

Seattle, New England, Carolina and Denver won their divisions and earned first round byes, so they won’t play until next weekend, Jan. 11-12.

Last week: 15-1. So far this season: 176-80.

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From the weird news file this week, I saw in the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” comic strip Monday of last week an item that talked about former NFL player Dick Plasman. Plasman, who played professional football in the 1930s and 40s, was the last NFL player to play without a helmet, even when it was mandatory for everyone else.

Plasman was born in Miami in April 1914 and went on to play eight seasons as a running back for the Chicago Bears and the Chicago Cardinals (now known as the Arizona Cardinals). The 6-foot-3, 218-pound Plasman played his college ball at Vanderbilt and was the 28th overall pick in the 1937 draft. He played for the Bears from 1937 to 1941 and again during the 1944 season. He played for the Cardinals in 1946 and 1947. He played on NFL Championship teams in 1940, 1941 and 1947 and was an NFL All-Star twice, in 1940 and 1941.

The last game he played in without a helmet was the 1940 NFL Championship Game in which the Bears beat the Washington Redskins, 73-0. (That’s not a misprint.) Not only was this the last game to feature a helmetless player, but it was also the most lopsided victory in NFL history.

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The Alabama Tourism Department released its list of Top 10 Events for 2014 yesterday (Wednesday), and more than a few sports-related events made the list. One such event is the Bassmaster Classic, which will be held Feb. 21-23 in Birmingham and Guntersville. This competition will take place at Lake Guntersville while the Bassmaster Classic Outdoors Expo goes on at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex.


Also making the list is the National Shrimp Festival, which will be held in Gulf Shores on Oct. 9-12. This festival is one of the nation’s premier outdoor festivals and attracts over a quarter of a million people. Also that weekend, the Alabama Bass Trail Championship will be held at 21,200-acre Lewis Smith Lake in Jasper.

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