Tim Beckman has been doing a great job of this so far, doing non stop PR stops from Chicago to Indy to St. Louis and locally in the Champaign area. Illinois CAN do it like Wisconsin, but we need everyone on board 100%, just like Wisco.

Finally, finally, after me bitching for at least a decade and a half, they are thinking about redesigning the goddamned helmet. Here is the current version:

Damn that is some ugly shit. But we are famous for ugly helmets. Here are some past designs:



Yep, pretty bad.

Well, here are some new concepts they are thinking about for this year:

The CLEAR winner is that fabulous blue helmet with the Block I on it.

Hopefully that is the one they will go with.

This seems minor, but it is all a good sign to me – Beckman needs to break with the past and something stupid like a helmet change seems small, but I am behind it 100% if it means we can get some consistency in the program and if it helps at all in the theme of doing business differently.

Might as well sample some of these ‘goods’ while I’m at it…

-Cheers!

The Yahoo Bowl Pickem is a very fun thing we do each season end, and I was thinking about moving that into our regular season. We have choices.

Pick winners only.
Pick winners plus confidence points.
Pick winners against the spread.
Pick winners against the spread with confidence points.

I understand that it is tough for everyone to get picks in every week due to vacation, work or whatever, but if we did this, it might give us a rooting interest for or against a team, besides our usual hatred.

The prizes would have also be randomly chosen at the end of the year, as it is tough to make a “grand prize” when it will be for sure that most will miss a week or two here and there.

We could always use the full rack as a standard prize and dumb it down, or maybe we could keep a tally of who won what week and divvy up the booze from there. We could play for a sixer a week and keep a running tally and settle up at the end of the year but that could get expen$ive with shipping. Or we could play for maybe a three pack a week? Just shitting out thoughts at this point.

So, what do you guys think? Any other better ideas?

My predictions are Giants and Pats and ks8 gets nothing for his pool choices.

Stage winners:
Classic: Greipel
Stage 1: Greipel
Stage 2: Clarke, UNI SA
Stage 3: Greipel
Stage 4: Friere, Katusha
Stage 5: Valverde, Movistar (doper!)

Overall going into the final stage:
1. Gerrans 18h.49m.24s
2. Valverde, Movistar (same time)
3. Machado, Radio Shack-Nissan (-8 secs.)
4. Rogers, Team Sky (-14)
5. Dennis, UNI SA (-14)
6. Boasson Hagen, Team Sky (-18)
7. Bakelants, Radio Shack-Nissan (-19)
8. Moreno, Movistar (-23)
9. Matthews, Rabobank (-29)
10. Vorganov, Katusha (-32)

What a log jam going into the final stage, a 20 lap circuit that you can see here. Hill profile here. Yep, that is FLAT. Going to be tough to make up time on the leaders today, but with all those tight turns, there could be crashes.

From what I can figure out this starts at 9.10pm central time tonight, which is 1.10pm on Sunday in Australia. Too late for me but I will watch the delay tomorrow on Steephill.