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Dispatch from Alternate Universe: Remembering Super Bowl XXXVI (St. Louis Rams 23, New England Patriots 17, OT)

For those Americans missing NFL football right about now (and with professional basketball, hockey and soccer mostly at a complete standstill, who could blame you?), BuckBokai supplies a “what if” piece on one of the greatest Super Bowls ever.

No. 36 featured perhaps the biggest upset recorded in the big game, though 12 years, one 16-0 season and “Spygate” later, the collective consciousness has forgotten that the now EEEvil New England Patriots were 17-point underdogs against Kurt Warner and the St. Louis Rams’ offensive machine.

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Superheroes Playing Sports is Gallery Of Awesomeness

Heads up on the online find of the week: Check out the excellently-named fan art website Bam! Kapow! for a frackin’ awesome gallery they just had to call “Superheroes Playing Sports.”

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The top 10 science-fiction sports of all-time

All right, so BuckBokai tries to come off the disabled list today – yes, it seemed like a career-ending injury for a while there, thanks to Father Time (who, as Charles Barkley once so philosophically stated, is undefeated). But fingers crossed that this time BuckBokai once again plays at his steady level.

So to (re)start things off, let’s get back to the basics with a look at the Top 10 Science-Fiction Sports ever devised.

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William Webb-Ellis: Locus of alternate histories

You want to talk what-if scenarios, serious parallel universe-creating moments from the world of sports? Forget relatively trivial stuff like Michael Jordan going to the Portland Trail Blazers in the draft or Harry Frazee taking up the Chicago White Sox’ offer for George Herman Ruth: Go back to 1823 to find a guy that, through simply wanting to gain an advantage in a sports match literally changed world history.

The overwhelming majority of North Americans have never heard the man’s name, despite his literal hand in the creation of three sports currently played and enjoyed by billions. Though he never recorded an official statistic, his effect on the sports universe was a cataclysmic bolt that changed everything. Though his innovation was sometimes called “cheating” by contemporaries, his mode of play now defines leagues all over the world.

Ladies of gentlemen, BuckBokai presents the single most important figure in the history of modern sport itself: William Webb-Ellis!

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The Bizarro Bowl: ’76 Buccaneers vs. ’08 Lions

In honor of the start of the 2010 NFL season – no, a Thursday night opening game will not be acknowledged as official because *you’re supposed to play football on Sunday; God said so.* – BuckBokai celebrates by going to the interweb’s greatest time waster sports simulator site, What If Sports.

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World’s greatest sports mascot prevented by George Lucas

Admiral Ackbar may have led rebel forces to victory in the “Star Wars” saga, but he lost a simple fight for fame in Mississippi.

The University of Mississippi Rebels were without a mascot since 2003 when the question was put out the student body by vote. A group of (geeks) students used a bit of cool logic in conceiving of the perfect mascot in Ackbar: After all, he’s the Rebel Leader, right?

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Your fantasy football draft and six more topics not to be discussed

Why didn’t the surgeon general warn me? Combining a viewing schedule of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “His Way” and the 2010 FIBA World Championships against the squall of a lightning-quick fantasy football draft may result in a dangerous altered state.

BuckBokai did, however, receive one nice hallucinatory insight worthy of The Prophets themselves in finally discovering the answer to a 22-year-old mystery. To wit: Why does any Star Trek episode involving the holodeck/holosuite inevitably suck gagh?

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TMQ returns to ESPN.com, makes it so again: Yes!

Not that BuckBokai worships the computer screen upon which his words float or anything, but Gregg Easterbrook, a.k.a. TMQ on ESPN.com, is definitely a role model.

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Review: “Goliath and the Gridiron” (or, This is Your Brain on Berries; Any Questions?)

In continuing its 40th-anniversary retrospective on DC Comics’ ultimate mini-series, the “Strange Sports Stories” collection in Brave and the Bold issues 45 through 49, BuckBokai today analyzes “Goliath of the Gridiron,” a sobering, moralistic tale of berry abuse in college football in the early 1970s.

In the best tradition of sportswriting-based purple prose, “Goliath of the Gridiron” opens with a bloody good (so to speak) description: “The shock of contact and the thud of body against body heralds the opening of the *Hartnell Aggies’* football season…”

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Arena Football’s Future: Would you like to know more?

Ah, now that the 2010 NFL season has begun (sort of), BuckBokai reflects on two things: 1) how patently *lame* the aberration known as “arena football” is and 2) how awesome said aberration will be in the 23rd century – you know, once we’re at intergalactic war with Klendathu.

First, full disclosure with all the shame of a blacked out one-night stand by a married man – except BuckBokai was conscious. BuckBokai once tried to like the indoor game. Seriously, in 2002, the post-Super Bowl jones (you know, that condition due to which Vince McMahon was ostensibly induced to set up the XFL a year earlier) set in hard with me and BuckBokai sought the Arena Football League as a methadone to the proper football addiction.

What greeted me instead was this:

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Who’s on First: The Doctor’s great moments in sport

Thanks to the performance contributed on the football pitch by the increasingly awesome Matt Smith in this season’s Doctor Who episode “The Lodger,” BuckBokai was inspired enough to delve the ol’ matrix memory banks for other great sporting moments from this frankly mostly cerebral Time Lord.

Some sports in which the Doctor has taken part through his 11 lives and 900-some odd years include the following.