3 comments Rick Reilly Gets Paid Millions to Write Columns Like This Once a Week

I think my title about summed it up pretty well for me. Right beside the ESPN Magazine article on how the Giants and Titans Defensive and Offensive Lines are the real MVPs of the season (it seems like the postseason award curse for this year has gotten them also), you can see how Rick Reilly tackles the hard hitting issue of.............beer pong.

We've all played, unless you don't drink, in which case I salute you, and we have all played it in different types of ways with different types of beer (my roommate and I used to use Natural Light, the worst beer in the world and put it in the cups and tore a door of its hinges and put it on our kitchen table). Never have we actually thought, "my God, there is no reason ESPN has not hired someone for millions of dollars to write an article about this yet." We all love the game and have played different types of people at it (Said roommate above and I played our graduate school's basketball team at beer pong the year they won 4 games and beat them, trashed talked the entire time of course...I don't tell this story to be impressive just to say, there is no reason beer pong should be written about by ESPN.) Life is so ironic that I currently have a perfect room in my attic to build a beer pong table and my mom won't let me do anything related to beer pong. Oh the horror!

Let's focus on Reilly's hard hitting expose.

The first thing you should notice is the picture accompanying the article, the gentleman throwing the ball is leaning over the table, a clear violation of my beer pong rules. This would cost him a penalty of the other team getting two free throws at his cups.

There is only one place I know that combines tiny balls, plastic cups and vats of beer.

It is actually not vats of beer but beer poured into a glass and if you are really, really good at the game you may want to keep a drink handy while planning on drinking in excess because if you are good at the game, you aren't getting drunk.

Beer pong is played on a table slightly smaller than Ping-Pong's, by teams of two. Ten cups, filled about one-third with beer, are set like bowling pins at the ends.

If Rick Reilly gets paid $3 million per year, this is $57,692 per week, which is also how much he makes per column, so far he has written nothing but described how beer pong works, which took up 1/6 of the article, so basically he got paid $9,615 for describing how beer pong works. Read these numbers, think about how much money you make, and try not to have suicidal thoughts. If you succeed, congratulations, it is much easier to just not think about it though.

What's next for Rick Reilly, is he going to do another hard hitting expose on the drinking game Flip Cups or maybe he will explore the roll of the drinking game Quarters on athletics?

But the beer pong I play is nothing like the kind in the World Series of Beer Pong, which I covered recently at the Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. That's where North America's 414 best pong teams competed for the $50,000 first prize. Second prize: bubkes. Gulp.

I want to get paid to do shit like this, so I am going to make fun of the person who gets to.

You have never seen such large people throw such tiny objects into such small receptacles with such hair-raising frequency.

I am sure it was absolutely shocking and amazing to see such athletic feats in progress. I am glad you were there to write about it.

One team used only water in the first round—Mrs. and Mrs. Lara and Kristin Mendez of New York City. That's right, two married women.

This is simply the most amazing thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Good thing ESPN sent Rick Reilly to cover this or else we would not know married women are allowed to drink beer and throw ping pong balls into cups. Clearly, ESPN is getting their money's worth out of Reilly with this.

I am able to mock Bill Simmons a whole lot better than I am able to mock Rick Reilly because Reilly is absolutely useless, there is really no way around it. He doesn't even do anything that would be described as following sports and has nothing to add to any conversation about sports. If it doesn't involve trying to convince a player to pee in a cup Rick Reilly, stays out of locker rooms and sticks to beer pong tournaments. Hats off to him, but its not going to stop me from writing critically about him.

There was also Francois the Butt Dusters, made up of my sons, Jake (21) and Kel (23).

Oh yes, Rick Reilly's children are on a team called the Butt Dusters. I will allow others to make jokes about this, but I will just say I am not sure I would name my team this for fear others would ask me why I was dusting butts or assume there was a reason I enjoyed dusting butts.

The Dusters started off 4–0, including a W over a team from Rochester, whose members, no joke, would, out of nowhere, slap each other hard on the face.

Rick Reilly just made $1,000 writing this sentence.

One guy from Jersey ripped his shirt off just before a crucial point.

Is this the point where Rick Reilly could have joined the team called, The Massive Erections?

And that's when I saw something I've never seen in sports.

An actual sporting event on television. Usually Rick Reilly stays away from these for fear it would bias his ability to write stories about Charles Barkley's golf swing (though strangely there has been no follow up about Barkley's ability to get oral sex and drive a car), how it feels to ride in a race car, and whether Tyler Hansbrough is tough at all.

Fortunately, Rick only had to watch the sporting event and not actually cover it, otherwise the game summary would include a story about one of the player's bathroom habits and how many sunflower seeds the players ate during the game, with the column ending in a coy one liner.

All this bush league stuff will have to go if we're going to take beer pong to the next level: the Olympics.

How coy is this? It's like a little bundle of coy wrapped in a blanket of cute remarks with a cherry of precociousness on top!

Hope they don't test for whiskey.

Last sentence: Cha-ching! Score $57,692 more dollars for Rick Reilly.

I don't want anyone to feel cheated because I know everyone is used to epic posts from me. Let's JemeHill it up.

When Mike Shanahan got canned, I wonder how people would have reacted if Shanahan, the winningest coach in Broncos history, told owner Pat Bowlen, "but I thought we had a contract!"
That would be absurd, right? Yet when Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo essentially used that same rationale to fire Jeff Jagodzinski for interviewing with the Jets, there was universal applause.

Not so absurd, right?

I am assuming Massachusetts is an at-will employment state so yes, they can fire whoever the hell they want.

The hypocrisy is as thick as fresh concrete.

There are certain people who want everything to be equal, so that no one gets hurt and everyone gets treated fairly. These people don't like hypocrisy and they don't like it when one person gets treated different from another person. They would prefer we all get treated the exact same and they are called Communists.

JemeHill is one of these people. Not a Nazi as she was once accused, they are too violent and they did not treat everyone fairly. Would not work for her.

When a team fires its winning football coach before his contract is up, the team is operating in its best interests. But when a coach looks for another job opportunity while under contract, he's vile.

For someone who doesn't like this principle, she sure does a bang up job of explaining it.

DeFilippo is being hailed as a heroic trendsetter, even though his petty inflexibility will hurt BC in the long run and guarantee future coaching candidates will have serious reservations about working for an athletic director who prefers issuing threats to practicality.

Will this hurt JemeHill? Will this threaten Detroit and the state of the nation? Will this cause any problem in any way for JemeHill? The answer is no. BC made the decision and BC has to live with the consequences, so she can stop writing now. What's that I hear? Quick JemeHill, there is a story that needs you in Detroit, I think the Lions are holding another seminar on good manners, hurry up now and write about it!

All sarcasm aside, this was a dick move by BC, but they have to live with the consequences and no one else has to. We don't have to insert ourselves into every single argument, it is really not necessary. Don't tell JemeHill that though.

The ugliness probably could have been prevented if Jagodzinski had informed DeFilippo he was interviewing for the Jets' head-coaching position. Instead, DeFilippo found out from a reporter.

There you go, you piss off the boss, the boss does what he can do to you, which is fire you. It's pretty simple, yet still does not involve JemeHill in any fashion.

I don't expect fans to fully understand that because most are too emotionally connected to their schools to be objective, and there have been some brutal examples of coaches' leaving programs rather gracelessly.

Oh yes, fans are just stupid as shit, there is no way they could look at things objectively like JemeHill can look at things objectively. She is being objective when she calls the Celtics "Nazis" and when she says Barry Bonds is treated poorly because of his skin color, it has nothing to do with the fact she is a Detroit Pistons fan and a minority. Nothing at all. Her nickname in college was the The Objectivo, because she could look at every situation objectively, except her own ability to write objectively, it was her only weakness and still is.

Her preaching to fans to stay neutral is like Bill Parcells doing a seminar on loyalty.

Not all fans are too emotionally connected to their favorite schools. It took my favorite college football team 4 years to finally hire the guy who they should have hired when the original coach was fired for no reason. I saw all of this and made statements about this and can understand when one of my teams really, really sucks, I can be objective.

Nothing makes me angrier than when columnists talk down to fans like they are lemmings or sheep that just do what they are told. We have brains and are able to make decisions for ourselves and we also know when we see bad writing.

That's why college coaches don't -- and shouldn't -- hesitate to leave and seek better jobs.

And this is why they don't hesitate to leave and find better jobs. The sooner JemeHill becomes comfortable with this idea, the sooner she will become a fitter happier person.

There's so much money and pressure to win in college football that it's foolish for any coach or athletic director to enter a contract expecting complete loyalty.

The coaches also don't go into a contract expecting complete loyalty. I feel like I am being lectured right now about something I already know enough about.

Stanford's Jim Harbaugh is being pursued by the NFL, but you don't hear about his athletic director's throwing a hissy fit.

He hasn't interviewed yet. There is a difference. I bet JemeHill really, really sucked at Match Game when she was younger and was especially bad at figuring out what was different about two pictures that had slight differences in them.

If this were a perfect world, every contract would be honored. But as most of us know, college football is far from perfect.

I think JemeHill has again taken an incorrect premise and then just run with it here. No one is thinking Boston College is absolutely right in this situation or that the BC ex-coach was completely in the wrong, but that is what is needed to write this column, an assumption of how everyone feels and we got it. Most of JemeHill's columns start off like this and it gets tiresome.

"I have heard people say the Lions were the league's best team but they are wrong..."

"Everyone seems to think Kobe Bryant is not the best player on the Lakers and that is wrong because..."

I think JemeHill may have voices in her head or imaginary friends that feed her false information just to see what the columns look like.