As an unspoken rule around here we don’t post videos over two minutes long, but for Chris Cooley’s live fantasy draft with a bunch of his Redskins teammates we’re willing to make an exception. Prepare yourself for awesome.

Things of note:

• How much we want to have a beer with Cooley.
• One of the few times you’ll ever see Fred Smoot sitting and not receiving a lap dance.
• Cooley calls Colt Brennan’s pick of Lendale White a gay pick.
• The verbal abuse Shaun Suisham gets for taking a Cowboy in the first round.
• Cooley’s wife appears to be getting hotter with age (and drinks Red Bull like a soda).
• Smoot drafts Steve Smith because Steve Smith owns him.
• Santana Moss doesn’t scratch off the picks because he doesn’t want to mess up his magazine.
• The many different first names Smoot assigns Tom Brady.
• Maske is still sporting a rager from getting Cooley in the Cool & Tough fantasy league.
• How much we now also want to have a beer with Fred Smoot.

[H/T: With Leather]

It’s back. Sorry for the delay in details. We’ve been real busy being awesome.

For those of you unfamiliar, for the ‘07 NFL season we conducted our first annual Search for the NFL Handicapper competition. Being the first time and all, results were mixed. But with a season’s worth of experience under our belts — along with quite a bit more regular visitors — we’re ready to get this bitch rolling again.

The Rundown:

Every Friday afternoon for the first 8 weeks of the NFL season we’ll be posting a Search for the NFL Handicapper column. Anyone who wants to participate can email us their picks for that weekend. We’ll regularly update the column with the entrants’ picks and then post the ongoing results in the new column the next Friday. The winner after eight weeks will take over the Friday column and dispense their NFL handicapping knowledge to the hundreds of thousands of people who visit NextRound on an everyday basis.

The Guidelines:

• To be eligible to win you must participate in at least 6 of the 8 weeks of the competition.

• To be eligible to win you must submit at least 30 picks.

• Picks can either be against the spread or against the total.

• Picks must be in 1, 2, or 3 unit increments with wins counting as +1, +2, and +3 units and losses counting as -1.1, -2.2, and -3.3 units, respectively. All pushes will be scored 0. Should you not indicate unit amounts they will default to 1 unit.

• All picks must be emailed to us and received before 1PM EST on Sunday of the given week (no makeup MNF picks, you won’t have this luxury if you win the column).

• Sending funny images for us to add to the posts earns you cool points. Pictures of dongs earns you gay points.

• We maintain the right to disqualify anyone, anytime, for any reason. 99% of the time this reason will be general douchebaggery.

The first column goes up tomorrow afternoon. If you have an uncontrollable raging hard-on for the Skins tonight go ahead and send us an email with that pick and we’ll count it towards Week 1.

Thanks in advance for the participation. We look forward to each and every one of you questioning our math skills in the near future.

The NFL season kicks off tonight. If you’re not excited, you’re a Scientologist.

Of all the NFL oddities one of our favorites is the goofy, seemingly never updated player stock photo. How in this day and age every NFL QB is relegated to one headshot to represent them in fantasy drafts, network graphics, and player bios is beyond us, but it makes for great comedy. While you’ve been debating whether to start Eli tonight we’ve been captioning a bunch of these QB pictures.

Feel free to use, rinse, and repeat…

Ben Roethlisberger

“Have you seen my baseball?”

Tony Romo

“Swear to god, last time I tell Pete Wentz he can bring over jello shots.”

Jay Cutler

“Barely legal is still legal. That’s the part a lot of people overlook.”

Carson Palmer

“Wanna see my best Adam Carolla impersonation?”

(more…)

To Proto, Team Cool & Tough’s fantasy football manager guy, for organizing next week’s draft…

In Proto’s defense he was voted Most Athletic in 2001, although it’s yet to be determined whether the award was one of sincerity or irony. Either way he still shows people the trophy.

[H/T: Hot Clicks]

We’ve talked a lot of college football lately, but the NFL is also around the corner. And that means cheerleaders. During the course of our daily web surfing we happened to run across the Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders’ website (and by “happened to run across” we mean googled “Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders” first thing in the morning).

We’ve always been quite enamored with the Eagles cheerleaders. They’re a fascinating bunch. How a city famous for cheesesteaks, gloomy weather, and a generally unattractive population pulls off one of the hottest cheerleading squads in the league with by far the most comprehensive website is beyond us. Our best guess is that the whole phenomenon is Rocky related.

So as a public service we spent some time “researching” the 2008 squad to uncover the most fascinating of the fascinating. Anyone can search for NFL cheerleaders and discover community college dropouts who know sign language and are from big families, but you have to work a little harder to find the truly interesting pretty ladies. And that’s just what we’ve done…

Alicia

Day Job: Medical Secretary / Model.

College: Rutgers.

Pat’s or Geno’s?: “Both make great cheesesteaks.”

Interesting Fact: “I can drive stick shift wearing 4 inch heels, and I love playing video games with my pink controller.”

Most Unusual Job: “I had a modeling job where I had to jump on a trampoline that looked like a bed for 3 hours to get the right mid-air shot.”

NR’s Commentary: We once tried driving stick in 3 inch heels and it was damn near impossible. Alicia officially has an open invitation to play video games with her pink controller at our place anytime. She best be prepared to have her ass handed to her at Mario Kart though.

(more…)

After months of keeping the football world in suspense, the Chicago Bears announced yesterday that Kyle Orton will be their starting quarterback (Grossman supporters, eat a dong). There are more reasons than we can count that you’d want Kyle Orton under center for your team, here are a few of our favorites…

He’s Mysterious. You don’t want some boring asshole like Peyton Manning representing your team. That guy has looked the same since high school. Orton knows how to switch it up and keep you guessing. Just when you think you know all the answers, he changes the questions.

He Supports the US Economy. Whether it’s Coke Classic, Jack Daniels, or homegrown working girls, Orton relentlessly goes America all over everybody’s asses.

(more…)

In one of the more unexpected — and ridiculously awesome — karaoke related turn of events of the decade, Dave’s Football Blog has uncovered this spectacular video of Stu Scott singing Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” in the most non-ironic of fashions.

Here’s a question: What’s the opposite of cool and tough?

Answer: Stu Scott claiming to be “love suicide” to a room full of people.

To Stu’s credit, he apparently did this for charity. And he didn’t pussy foot around: he made Edwin his own. But still. At the end of the day he’s singing Edwin McCain, our generation’s Dan Fogelberg.

Reports are mixed as to whether Stu did in fact follow up with Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” as an encore. Man, we hope he did.

[Source: Dave’s Football Blog via Awful Announcing]

He likes Coldplay.

From Boston Herald’s Inside Track:

“Tom, who is reportedly a HUGE fan of Chris Martin & Co., blew out of a late practice at Gillette Stadium Monday night to join Gi and her GFs at the Garden shortly after the British rockers took the stage at 10 p.m.

“In fact, Martin dedicated the last song, ‘Death and All His Friends,’ a cut off the new CD, to Brady…”

The Herald didn’t do Tom any favors with the all caps HUGE to describe his Coldplay fandom. We were to understand HUGE in all caps was reserved solely for text messaging between teenage girls. If Tom was just a “huge” fan or maybe a “big” fan, he wouldn’t be all that gay. Just kind of gay.

The crazy — and undeniably awesome — part of this whole story is that Tom told Belichick to suck on training camp so he could accompany a bunch of models to a concert. That part really isn’t gay at all. Unless you consider James Bond a homo.

When we called Tom’s cell to ask for a comment, he texted us back: “bangin ur girlfriend. hit me back l8r.” To which we replied: “We only date Chris Martin because we heard you’re a HUGE fan.”

Is it possible to give yourself a self congratulatory touche?

• Dreamboat Brady Hearts Coldplay and Vice Versa [Sports by Brooks]
• Coldplay Rockers Dedicated to Tom Brady [Boston Herald]

Fantasy football drafts will be kicking into gear over the next couple of weeks, and while running backs are the most valuable players, quarterbacks are still the face of your fantasy franchise. We can’t all draft Tom Brady, which means you’re more than likely going to be stuck with one of these guys. And drafting these guys is weird.

Brodie Croyle, Kansas City Chiefs. Is it the Bama bangs? Or maybe the wicked case of slack jaw? Or maybe it’s simply his ability to hit cornerbacks right in the numbers? Regardless, unless starting him on your fantasy roster translates to you getting to third base with his wife, drafting Croyle is nothing short of weird.

Brett Favre, New York Jets. Yep, he’s a Jet. Think you got tired of Favre stories this summer? Good luck sitting through Jets’ games this season.

Jeff Garcia, Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Quotes like, “I’m going to choke it to death until somebody pulls my grip off it,” haven’t led you to believe Garcia is any less in the closet.

(more…)

We’re not ancient enough to remember Bob Golic the football player, instead we remember Bob Golic the actor for his role as Michael Rogers — the awesomest RA EVER — on Saved by the Bell: The College Years. Remember the time he and Screech were watching football and Screech started rooting for the refs? Hil-fucking-larious. We think about that scene every time we see Ed Hochuli do something bad ass.

Well, SBTB aside, Bob has lost a shocking amount of weight, like pretty much a small Asian person’s worth, and it seems to have had the Billy Bob Thorton effect on him where his skin doesn’t know what to do with itself. We’re not sure we would have had any idea that this is Bob Golic if we’d just seen a stand alone picture.

What we are pretty sure of though is that we’d like to see Bob take over for Mike Greenberg on Mike & Mike in the Morning. There would still be a shtick and Mike Golic would undoubtedly seem less annoying. And then on slow sports days Bob could go on tangents about how he mislead tons of kids into believing when they got college RAs wouldn’t be losers and their dorm rooms would be the size of penthouses. He could also talk about what a hooker Elizabeth Berkley is. Bob could even go by Mike Rogers. They wouldn’t even have to change the name of the show! It would be awesome. Let’s make this happen.

• The Other Golic Loses a Mike Greenberg [Sports by Brooks]