*I’ve got evidence that Mr. Rand does read the Weekend Links before publishing them; every once in awhile, some inflammatory language or something bordering on libel is deleted before publication. This week, I made a factual mistake. Rand could have fixed it. Instead, he inserted a note making fun of me. This is part of the reason RandBall’s always a fun place – Rand always goes for the joke. *

We here at the Weekend Links love our less-covered sports teams, so congratulations must go out to the Minnesota Lynx for dominating en route to their first WNBA Championship. It’s an awesome thing for an area that’s been starved of any good news on the sports pages lately, and it’s the first local title since Gopher hockey in 2003 and the first pro title since the now-defunct Thunder won the now-defunct A-League in 1999 the Saints won the Northern League in 2004. [Ed. note: You can see in the published version that Rand calls me out for getting this wrong. It’s always nice having an editor that’s out to make you look good.]. We’ll take any opportunity to celebrate.

*On with the links:

*We start off with soccer, as ESPN’s Leander Schaerlackens looks at the growth of fan groups in MLS. Soccer has for years tried to sell itself as a family game – Junior plays soccer, so let’s get Mom and Sis and go to a game! – but is finally, at the MLS level, realizing that the fan that’s going to drive these franchises is young, urban, and (mostly) male. Soccer is a game that, let’s be honest, has some slow stretches, and what these clubs are figuring out is that they need something to drive the atmosphere. Nobody comes back if the sounds are of Mom and Dad sitting on their hands, or (worse) of Thunderstix and screaming and those god-awful horns that used to be de rigueur. That’s what you get when you go for families. This kind of thing from the (Portland) Timbers Army is really what you need.

*This is as good of a time as any to remind you that if you’re young, urban, and male (or otherwise), head up to Blaine tonight and make some noise for the Stars in the playoffs. As Rand mentioned in his Q&A with CEO Djorn Buchholz, the game’s at 7:30, but you really want to be there at 5:00, when Surly Brewing will be handing out free beer at the tailgate. You’ll be hanging out with the Dark Clouds, the Stars fan group. They are really good guys (mostly guys), and they’re the ones who provide the atmosphere at the National Sports Center, and while it’s nothing like the thousands-strong Timbers Army, you cannot begin to imagine how quiet it’d be without them. This will sound stupid, but I can’t imagine who’d want to go to a Stars game if they weren’t there.

*We move next to the Twins, as Parker Hageman says what the team really needs is guys who’ll hit line drives to center at Target Field. You might scoff at this, but it’s the simplest way to explain the drop-off of Danny Valencia, who made the change to pull the ball more and ended up hitting 65 points lower as a result. Also in Twins news, John Bonnes has another look at the Twins’ likely payroll next year, with the note – there’s really no reason it should need to go down next year. That’ll give the Twins some money to spend, which could help.

*And finally: I don’t have a lot of experience with rugby. I’ve seen a handful of games now, and I’ve heard much of the legends of how much rugby players like to party, and I had a professor in grad school who played rugby and who liked to tell stories of how much Pacific Island players like to fight. I don’t know much, but I’ll say this – this story, in which Deadspin’s rugby correspondents have to rescue a sozzled American girl from an Wellington drunk tank despite being credentialed media, seems like it’s pretty much par for the course for all rugby stories.

That’s enough for this week. I need to go get the air conditioner turned back on. Seriously, it cannot possibly be this warm outside.

The other day I was talking to somebody who knows about my Twinkie Town schedule. He pointed out that I have 20 Mondays between now and the beginning of spring training. That’s 20 Mondays that I have to come up with something, anything, to write about on Twinkie Town. That’s a lot of space to fill.

This week, I filled that space with about two paragraphs of writing, mostly about how it’s going to be a long winter and so fulminating about the Twins’ incompetence is sort of pointless.

19 Mondays to go.

One of the longer editions of the weekend links you’ll find. I blame the fact that I wrote it after attending my first Ortonville football game in nine or ten years. I felt like this necessitated a long paragraph to start with, and things just escalated from there. At any rate, these first appeared at RandBall, your home for wild ranting at Kenny Onatolu.

I miss outstate Minnesota, sometimes. Last night, I ate a hamburger the size of a boxing glove at a restaurant that was holding a Friday night meat raffle, then watched a high-school football game at a field best described as “lumpy.” The homecoming court rode around the field in a pickup truck at halftime. The PA announcer made sure to make up alma maters (and possibly the names) of the refereeing crew before the game. (Unless one of them really did go to the University of Westminster, which I find implausible.) The announcer also occasionally forgot he wasn’t doing play-by-play on the radio, and started describing live the play that we could all see from where we were standing, five feet from the sideline. I’ve been to high school football in the Twin Cities, and it’s fun and all, but I’m not sure it really compares.

*Onto the links:

*Patrick Donnelly at the StarTrib’s newish Vikes Centric blog thinks that it’s not quite time for the Ponder era to start. I’ve talked to several people around the state, and using this tiny sample and extrapolating it to all of Minnesota, I can confidently say that all of Minnesota wants McNabb benched, and at least half of the state wouldn’t mind if he was publicly flogged for his early-season errors. Still, though, I kind of agree with Donnelly.

*Spencer Hall writes a letter from an anonymous (as if there were any other kind) lineman. Let us all spare a thought for the linemen of the world, who do the work without the credit, and who look askance at any chair that hasn’t yet been battle-tested.

*Spencer also took a trip to West Virginia. I’m sorry, but West Virginia belongs in the SEC, and if I were president this kind of thing would be priority number one. Any fanbase that drinks moonshine at a tailgate just fits with the rest of the SEC lunatics.

*Twins links to wrap up the year: Parker Hageman gives us the full scouting report on Chris Parmelee (short version: he’s not going to be as good as he was this September), and also bemoans the lack of infield defense for the Twins, who were terrible this year in that facet of the game. Sit down and watch Trevor Plouffe play shortstop for awhile, and eventually you’ll want him to leave the franchise and not come back, because he is awful.

*And finally: The Economist tries to figure out what the second-most popular sport in the world is. Eventually, they propose that the ability to explain a sport’s most arcane rules is what defines a true fan, so I want everyone to study up on the balk rule and the rules about when the clock stops in football, just in case there’s a test.

That’ll do it for me; this high school football thing really takes it out of a guy. It’s no wonder Rand takes methamphetamines from September through November every fall.* (*This statement is not strictly true.)

Monday night, I was supposed to write a recap of the Twins game for Twinkie Town. I’ve done this on Mondays throughout the year, and in the back of my mind, I’ve always thought, “One of these weeks I should just do a running diary instead of writing a recap.”

This Monday was the last Monday of the season, so I had to take my chance. It turned out at almost 2,800 words, and you can clearly see that I got more depressed as the game wore on. By the end I was just about ready to break down and sob. Or hit Trevor Plouffe with a bat.

Still, the Twins were ripe for jokes, and that’s always something.

As I type this, the Twins are leading Kansas City 7-2, which is probably fun. That said, Monday morning I put up a post detailing 11 ways to end 2011 with a little bit of fun, which was half serious and half not.

Either way, by this time tomorrow, it’ll be just about all over for 2011.

*This week in the weekend links, we discuss refereeing, college hockey, and soccer. I should really just start writing about nothing but the Vikings, in the hopes of getting page views. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for never leaving the city limits of Minneapolis under any circumstances. *

I usually like to throw some Twins news into these links, but frankly, it’s finally become too depressing. No link that I can share, no joke that I can make, no fiction that I can invent can possibly describe the Twins’ season better than two players missing a game because they crashed into each other on the highway. As far as I’m concerned, this goes right to the top of Twins injury lore, up there with the time Marty Cordova injured himself with a tanning bed, and the time that Billy Martin punched out Dave Boswell and the pitcher required 20 stitches. Forget about maybe losing 100 games; this team can’t even drive to the airport without something going wrong.

On with the links:

*The refereeing in last week’s Florida-Tennessee game was rather, shall we say, spotty. Spencer Hall goes inside the mind of the field judge to find out why.

*Noah Davis at The Run of Play writes an essay about Landon Donovan, a guy who’s moved from “frustrating” to “fascinating” in my head. I’ve watched him through three World Cups now, and I’ve called him every name in the book along the way, and I’d rate him as probably the best player the United States has ever produced, and I’m not sure I could meet him in person without both insulting him and trying to hug him in the first thirty seconds of this fictional meeting. I think Davis may see this same contradiction.

Over at the Western College Hockey Blog, Chris is asking the tough conference realignment questions. Most of them revolve around questions like “Is the WCHA going to be a minor league?” and “Why does WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod still have a job?”

And finally: as this video clip from EA Sports FIFA 12 proves, realism in video games might have gone too far. (BONUS JOKE FOR ENGLISH SOCCER FANS: It’s nice that EA Sports finally introduced the “Falling All Over Themselves” module for Arsenal, isn’t it?)

That’ll do it for me. Please hang around and enjoy the day of college football. If you’re a member of the National Guard, be ready; LSU plays at West Virginia tonight, and if that one turns close and both sets of fans turn angry, America’s militias may need to be called into duty.

Today’s Twinkie Town post is one of my favorites, ever.

In the interest of staying topical, I usually make jokes about current events, and so what I write ends up being sort of broad satire – poking fun at people, really. Generally, the broader the target, the more people like the post, and that’s fine. There’s something for everyone and if I’m trying to be humorous then my job is done.

Today’s post, titled “What Your Favorite Twin Says About You,” isn’t satire. It’s not truthful and in no way does it hold up a mirror to the Twins organization, and a lot of it doesn’t even make sense. But it makes me laugh. I can’t explain the jokes and I can’t explain why I laugh, but I do.

If you want something more traditional, today’s game thread has a short essay about Yankees hurler A. J. Burnett, and the recap of the Twins’ loss is one long joke about this being a spring-training lineup. But I like the first one better.

For the first time ever, or at least the first time I can remember, the weekend links were published on a Sunday. Given that this is perhaps the only day of the week on which startribune.com is less widely-read than Saturday, the usual links slot, I can’t decide whether this is an accomplishment or a step backwards.

A thought experiment: though I don’t believe for a second that it would happen, let’s assume that the Vikings picked up and moved to Los Angeles. As the most popular team in Minnesota, the Vikings’ move would cause a gaping hole in the sports landscape, both in terms of fan attention and fan attendance. This would have to be redistributed somehow. Would Gopher football suddenly become the most popular game in town, 1950’s style? Or would the NFL, just the generic NFL (and everybody’s fantasy football teams) become the most important thing? Or would something else happen? I’m curious.

On with the links:

*Nick Nelson of TwinsCentric is trying to come up with some positives from this year. It is, at best, an uphill climb, but Nelson tries.

*I really like it when Spencer Hall goes pretty much anywhere, and as the nation’s preeminent travel and college football writer, Hall’s trip to Starkville, Miss. for the LSU – Mississippi State game does not disappoint. Key quote: “You should understand that the cowbell is an instrument of nuance. In full throat, it sounds like you are sitting beneath a cascade of ladles raining down on an immense steel-plated floor.”

*The college football conference realignment Choose Your Own Adventure book is hours of fun, if for no other activity than trying to find a way that Michigan ends up in the SEC and is torn to shreds by rabid Arkansas fans.

*Deadspin has a running diary of the USA-Ireland rugby match. I watched this, and as a rugby novice, understood that the USA was doing better than expected. Ireland kept missing kicks, the USA kept making goal-line stands, and it all went so much better than it could have (for example, Japan lost 83-7 to New Zealand the other day, this representing a significant improvement from 1995, when Japan lost to New Zealand 145-17.) However, I didn’t really understand that in reality, this was one of the best games ever for USA rugby.

*And finally: the video history of American football in Europe. What I have learned from this is that there is a European league of American football that plays in the spring and summer, and why these games aren’t on the NFL Network I have no idea. It’s nice to imagine that we’re drawing ever-closer to my goal of having American football on TV for all twelve months of the year, though.

That’ll do it for me. Enjoy the weekend; if we’re lucky we may even get a bit of rain, thus making our lawns look a little bit less like the Sahara Desert.

1. The Rugby World Cup began over the weekend just past. The tournament has four pools of five teams each, with two teams from each pool making it to the quarterfinals, and each team plays the other four teams in its pool once.
2. The USA qualified, as it has for every edition of the RWC.
3. The USA will not be part of the quarterfinals. I’m not saying that because I’m making a critical statement about the Eagles, as the team’s called. They just won’t make it out of their pool. There are  nine – maybe ten – teams that have a chance of making it to the quarterfinals, and the USA is not one of them.
4. We are not a top-tier rugby nation, here in America. At the World Cup, the USA beat Japan in 1987, and again in 2003, and other than that we’re 0-16 all-time.
5. The team’s stated goal for this tournament is to beat Russia, the other lower-tier side in Pool C. This is something that the Eagles have done once already this year, winning 32-25 against the Russians at the Churchill Cup.
6. Other than that possible victory, the USA is just trying to make a good account of itself in certain losses to Australia and Italy. Sunday, America lost 22-10 to Ireland, a game that was viewed as surprisingly close even though the Eagles scored seven of their ten points basically at the final whistle.
7. I was all ready to write a million words about this RWC, because I love writing about world championships of sports I know next to nothing about. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of watching all three of the USA’s warmup matches for the tournament. The Americans dropped a pair to Canada, 28-22 and 27-7, then went to Tokyo and lost to Japan 20-14, and it was about that point that I realized that the tournament was going to be a bit of a hopeless cause for America.
8. You should know about a couple of the American players. Todd Clever is the captain, plays forward, and wears a bushy permed ponytail that makes him look like nothing so much as an eighties pro wrestling villain. When he’s done playing rugby, he’ll have the option for a long career of wrestling on Saturday morning television, yelling at small children in the crowd and using foreign objects when the referee’s back is turned.**
9. Takudzwa Ngwenya, known as “Z“, is by far the most exciting player on the American team. In 2007, he scored the try of the year (link to video) by simply running around the entire South African defense, including the guy that was (up until that moment) universally acknowledged as the fastest guy in world rugby. Every time he gets the ball you sit forward in your chair a bit, because you never quite know what he’s about to do. Plus, on Sunday against Ireland, he broke out a bitchin’ Stars-and-Stripes-emblazoned scrum cap, which made him look a little like Captain America. He is awesome.
10. NBC aired the USA-Ireland game. They’re also showing New Zealand play Canada on October 2, and the Final on October 23. Universal Sports is broadcasting seven other games, including the other three USA matches, the semifinals, and the third-place game. Unfortunately, unless you have DirecTV, you probably don’t get Universal Sports, so if you want to watch anything other than the three NBC matches you’re stuck paying exorbitant fees for either PPV or online PPV. If anyone would like to send me $150 so I can afford these packages, I’d appreciate it. (The official Rugby World Cup site has pretty good highlights, so you might want to save your cash.)

11. The tournament favorites are probably hosts New Zealand, though Australia did beat them in this year’s Tri-Nations (a competition between the two and South Africa). The All Blacks are famous for usually being the best rugby team in the world, and for doing the “haka” (a ceremonial Maori war dance) before matches. Let us watch this event before a match against Tonga. The Tongans also do their own ceremonial dance, and the result is two groups of dancing men that is as entirely unlike West Side Story as you’ll ever see:

12. Here’s what I wrote about rugby, the first time I ever watched it: “Maybe I just saw the wrong matches, and rugby aficionados are welcome to correct me, but here’s what I got out of it: rugby is boring… It’s recognizable as a cousin of American football, so imagine American football with no pads. And no passing. And 110 running plays per team, 105 of which go directly into the middle of the line. And extra punting, usually on first down. And both teams playing for field goal attempts throughout the game. And frequent long breaks while both the offensive and defensive lines stop to argue with the referee how to line up for the play.” As I’ve watched more of the game, I get the point of it a little more now. It’s still attritional and violent and can get bogged down, and I still don’t understand three-quarters of the reasons that the referee stops play and awards a penalty. But heck, it’s the world championship of something. Of course I’m going to encourage you to give it a try.</li> </ol>

Today’s Twinkie Town post is a fake memo from the training staff.

I don’t know how good Minnesota’s medical staff is, but I know that it’s certainly easy to make jokes about the staff’s incompetence. I guess my great fear is that some of this is true, especially the jokes about Kyle Gibson.

(NOTE: My dad came up with the idea for this post. I will be giving him a cut of my $0 royalties. Though, given some of his past opinions, I think he’s probably just mad that I didn’t call Joe Mauer a pantywaist and accuse him of malingering and stealing money.)