© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
An update has been released for the Android version of the WAMC App that addresses performance issues. Please check the Google Play Store to download and update to the latest version.

Keith Strudler

  • So in case you haven’t noticed, which is pretty much impossible, it’s been pretty cold around the US the past week or so. Like arctic cold, the kind of cold where TV news runs stories about how quickly a bottle of water freezes kind of cold. There were a lot of cities that had a minus sign in front of the temperature, and that’s in Fahrenheit. Which is worse. So, it goes without saying, this past weekend was not the best to hold outdoor sporting events unless they involved a dog sled.
  • Sports commentator Keith Strudler shares his thoughts on the influence of NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
  • At the end of the TV show The Office when the character Andy Bernard seemed to fulfill his lifelong dream when he secured a job at his alma matter Cornell yet realized he missed his life in Scranton, he famously said, “I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.” This is one of the more prophetic quotes from a show that was famous for more satirical ones, and not just to Cornell grads who admired Andy’s reverence to the Big Red, a cappella group and all.
  • Perhaps my favorite stat line from this NBA season is that out of the 27 games the Golden State Warriors have played, temperamental star Draymond Green has been thrown out three times and suspended twice for a total of nine games and counting. That’s because his current suspension, which came for hitting Phoenix Suns center Jusuf Nurkić, is indefinite, and will probably run at least three weeks.
  • I spent last weekend in Tallahassee, Florida, a trip that had absolutely nothing to do with Florida State not making the college football playoffs. I was there to run a master’s 10k cross country race, something I do about once a year. It’s become an annual tradition with a group of people I ran cross country with in college years and years ago, back when we were much faster and less achy than we are now. All of us still run, slower of course, but really we use the race as a way of everyone getting together.
  • Sports commentator Keith Strudler shares his thoughts on the college football playoffs.
  • What would have been one of the most unexpected news headlines at the beginning of the NFL season now makes perfect sense: Giants’ Tommy DeVito Draws Crowd at Primo Hoagies in Wayne. I suppose that isn’t quite as strange as the headline, Tommy DeVito Fever Is Reaching New Heights after Two Giants Wins. Either way, when the season started, it would be hard to imagine that the biggest quarterback story coming out of MetLife stadium was a guy who still lives at home with his parents and last won a game at that stadium as a high school junior.
  • Last weekend was one of the more frustrating in recent memories. I mean that specifically around sports, or more pointedly about watching the few teams that I still actually cheer for. For the most part at this stage of my life, my fan loyalties have been ground to a pulp through a confluence of disappointment, geography, and cynicism. But I still find the strength and courage to root for a couple of my favorite teams, driven almost exclusively by where I went to school – perhaps the one sports habit you can’t quit.
  • The term dead money gets talked about a lot around college sports, especially right now. Dead money is dollars paid out to coaches for essentially not coaching anymore. This happens when a coach gets fired, but contractually their university has to pay out most or all of their contract. It’s like severance on steroids.
  • It’s not unusual to analogize things happening in college sports and governance to the wild west. That’s especially true in recent years, when long held foundations of what college sports was and what its players were allowed to do and how schools aligned seemed to evaporate in a series of court cases and economic partnerships. So a lot of the rules about what you can and can’t do seem to be made up as we go.