Tuesdays with Tom: A Thanksgiving Potluck
I address a potluck of topics like Turkey Bowls, Thanksgiving films, my podcast, Mizzou football, Inside the NBA and FX's Say Nothing
It’s Thanksgiving week and I’m sure you’re thinking…no main topic? What gives! I’ll be transparent. I had something half-baked that I decided to scrap. At this point, I’d rather give a fully formed opinion on something rather than an incomplete thing I’m not as passionate about. Instead, I’m pivoting to what I’m calling a Thanksgiving Potluck post. Think of it as an extended version of my “thoughts of the week” section. Lots of Thanksgiving stuff coming your way and a whole lot more. I’ll be back with my annual MVPs for the year and 2024 recap in a few weeks.
Turkey Bowl Tips
As a first-ballot Turkey Bowl Hall of Famer, I’ve played in my fair share of games. I’ve been (rightfully) accused of taking them too seriously, though I think I’ve chilled out a bit over the years. If you’re organizing a Turkey Bowl amongst family or friends, I’m ready to give out my unsolicited advice. The first step is making sure the teams are as fair as possible. This usually involves splitting up the best two players and making them captains. In a common Turkey Bowl, there’s going to be a wide range of talent. Winning teams make the most of the bottom end of their rosters to exploit mismatches.
From there, it’s about simplicity and motivation. You are never going to install a Turkey Bowl offense or defense on the fly. It’s better to give out a few instructions at a time and tell your players to lock up opponents one-on-one on both ends of the ball. Keep the vibes high and get as many people involved as possible. Occasionally, if you have some savvy football minds, you can draw up a route or two in the huddle with key players. Too often I’ve seen disastrous outcomes from overly complicated trick plays. If you can keep a turnover free game, that’s a minor miracle.
It’s important to lay out the rules and enforce them accordingly. Flags are a huge plus if you can get your hands on them. The old “two-hand touch” policy gets messy in a hurry and quickly delves into argument. You’re going to deal with a “brotherly shove” at least once, if not a few times. A neutral referee is a great addition to the game to resolve some of these inevitable disputes. At the end of the day, this isn’t professional football. But Turkey Bowls can be very fun and bring everyone together on the gridiron. After all, football is America’s sport now and it is forever intertwined with Thanksgiving. It’s a shame we can’t show you highlights from my Turkey Bowl past. That would be quite a sight!
Thanksgiving Movies
I’ll confess that I haven’t seen Planes, Trains & Automobiles. It’s a miss on my part and easily the most well-known movie set during Thanksgiving. This is a pretty light movie category. Like the actual holiday, Christmas movies are far more prevalent and available over a Thanksgiving movie. However, there is one Thanksgiving movie I’m fond of and it is absolutely NOT for the whole family to enjoy. In fact, I can only recommend this to people who enjoy absurd horror-comedies.
I’m talking about ThanksKilling -- a 76-minute thrill ride of crass jokes, bottom-tier production and ridiculous sight gags. You can watch this movie for free on Tubi and the summary is quite simple. “A possessed turkey terrorizes five college students during Thanksgiving break.” ThanksKilling was made on a $3,500 budget and it shows. The tagline is “Gobble, Gobble Motherfucker!” and it sets the tone of gleeful stupidity before the movie even starts. If you are looking for a dumb, so-bad-it’s-funny movie to kill some time over the holiday, ThanksKilling will be etched into your brain forever. Just don’t show it to your kids. Please.
Friday Night Beers Updates
You knew this was coming! In the last two episodes of Friday Night Beers, Vince and I drank Coriolis Effect and Lizard King. We got a little bit scientific with Coriolis Effect, our first New Zealand style IPA in series history. It led to a chat about the wildest conspiracy theories, penguins and our interaction with animals. Lizard King is a phenomenal beer with lots of reptilian scales to it. We dove into our favorite quirky reptiles and some Lizard King lore in that one. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast here and follow our Instagram page for relevant updates!
Missouri Loves Company: A Slightly Underwhelming 2024 Football Season
I predicted that Mizzou would fall just shy of their 9.5 regular season projected over/under win total. However, I did think that making the College Football Playoff was a possibility for a group returning so much talent from last year’s Cotton Bowl champs. It doesn’t excite me to announce that my prediction is officially correct. Mizzou is 8-3 heading into their regular season finale against Arkansas. They won’t be part of the expanded College Football Playoff. On the positive side, notching 8 to 9 wins in the country’s most competitive conference is worth something (especially for a school that ranks 64th in all-time winning percentage for D-1 football).
But if you’ve watched this team with regularity, it’s been a lot less impressive on the field. They squeaked out some narrow victories against inferior opponents (Auburn, Boston College) and needed some miraculous outcomes to beat similarly talented foes (Vanderbilt, Oklahoma). Getting destroyed by the two toughest teams on their schedule didn’t help. It’s a shame because I do think this team squandered a talented roster that could have challenged for a playoff spot. Frankly, it wasn’t as fun as a 9-win season should feel for Mizzou fans. Now comes an even tougher test: building upon this short run of success and making it a consistent thing. Good luck with that, Eli Drinkwitz. We’ll be watching. There are dozens of us!
Inside the NBA Finds a New Home
The NBA is leaving TNT after this season, but the stellar cast of Inside the NBA isn’t quite done yet. Warner Brothers and ESPN have reached an agreement to allow Inside the NBA to live on going forward as part of a licensing deal between the two media companies. Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal will remain under contract with TNT and the show will continue to be produced by their team in Atlanta. However, it will air on ESPN and ABC starting in the fall of 2025. This is a unique arrangement that provides wins for everyone involved. Fans of Inside the NBA will continue to enjoy the best sports pregame show in the business. The entire cast and crew of the show will keep their jobs as is with minimal differences. It also solves ESPN’s ongoing issue of trying to compete with their various iterations of NBA Countdown. In a roundabout way, this continues ESPN’s strategy of simply buying out their competition for on-air talent, like they did with Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Pat McAfee. Even TNT gets to make money off this despite losing their rights to air games.
FX Does It Again with Say Nothing, A Miniseries about The Troubles in Northern Ireland
FX has a reliable reputation for creating high quality adult TV dramas and comedies. The latest out-of-left-field addition to this stunning list is a miniseries called Say Nothing. This nine episode limited series was adapted from the 2018 non-fiction book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. The book is about a real group of Belfast citizens who were intimately involved in the Irish Republican Army during The Troubles from the 1970s through the 1990s. Say Nothing is not an exhaustive history lesson on the conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the United Kingdom, but it feels like a deeply authentic portrayal of what life was like in Northern Ireland during this decades-long war.
The accounts are fact based and the “characters” in the series are riveting. There’s definitely a GoodFellas influence with the back and forth narration from characters in different time periods and the occasional bit of gallows humor. The front half of this series has a lot more action than the back half, but that’s by design. This was a controversial movement in which many innocents died. The fallout is just as intriguing as the set-up. I knew very little about the events of The Troubles going into the show, but I found it very engaging (I also strongly recommend subtitles if you watch it). This is right in my wheelhouse, with the Irish historic angle and effectively being a criminal gangster show. If that intrigues you, I think it’ll be worth the nine episode investment on Hulu. FX continues to bring unique stories to the forefront in television.