Players vote unanimously to approve deal with owners to end NFL lockout.

Let the unrestricted free agency rodeo begin!

February 6, 2011, 22:10 EST – @maitri: “We won the Superbowl, Packer nation! The Lombardi trophy goes home! Titletown! Aaaaahhhhahahahaha! LOVE LOVE LOVE!”

Packers quarterback & Superbowl MVP Aaron Rodgers with the Lombardi Trophy (thanks for the picture, Blair!)

That is all. I am going to be in bed for the rest of the week watching the highlights reel over and over again.

Light posting ahead. A small battalion of the Packer Nation is upon us tomorrow for this weekend’s great, green and gold cheesapalooza ahead of the Superbowl. For the record, my house is going to sound like this for the next few days, ya hey dere. I love my people!

Except that no self-respecting cheesehead drinks Budweiser.

As is customary prior to a Big Game, fans exchange paeans, love songs and war chants penned and/or updated especially for the occasion. And now we have the internet to help hasten this pre-game soundtrack. Here’s a selection of what’s making the rounds on the cheesetube.

This ain’t a diss comment, Lil Wayne, but it’s green and GOLD. I know, I know, it’s a freestyle over Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow.” And you worked a nice, little, um, scatological Najeh Davenport reference in there. It’s all good. What matters is you’re a Packer fan and you’re from NEW ORLEANS. Peace.

Butch Vig and Duke Erikson of Madison band Garbage have updated Go Pack Go! I LOVE the new video. Remember, kids, Jesus drinks Old Style!

Oh, gosh darn it, don’tcha know, I’m a cheesehead, baby, the pride of Wisconsin! Somebody pass the cheese curds.

And, just in case we forgot:

GO PACK GO! Wooooohooooo! See you on Tuesday!

• GeoTripper | The Yellowstone Media Storm: We’re All Gonna Die! Oh, Well Sure, But …

… worrying about whether I’m gonna die from an eruption at Yellowstone is so far down my list of concerns that I am more worried about being gnawed to death by a pack of angry prairie dogs. It could happen, but it is highly unlikely … for the record, “supervolcano” isn’t a geological term.

• Life | In Praise of Ham the Astrochimp. Fifty years of Hammy! I love these pictures of the first primate in space. What a cutie! Wish they didn’t have to restrain him by the neck during training, though.
• Hunt Oil loves the Packers! This was the view last night from a balcony in downtown Dallas. (Thanks, Julie!)

Rodgers, Shields, Matthews, Kuhn! Superstars! The defense rocked (Dom Capers, I am still naming our hypothetical son after you), but last night’s MVP was #90, The Fat Man, The Freezer: Busari Raji, Jr. To quote fellow Packer fan, Athenae, “If you like it, then you shoulda put a belt on it!”

The oldest American football rivalry is set to meet again this Sunday for the NFC championship. This is only the second time these two teams have met in the playoffs since seven days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

D is excited. He wanted us to play the Bears and he got his wish. I simply wonder whether we want to play the Bears or a team that beat the Saints and the Bears (which Seattle didn’t, of course). It doesn’t matter. Sunday approaches. Who wants it more? Also, who do the refs want more?

You who know me well and visit here often know of my immense love for the Green Bay Packers franchise and why. It’s just that. Love. The love that envelops this team and its fans – people who own the team – and shoots from Lambeau Field to the most impossible corners of the earth. We are proud Cheeseheads of the Packer Nation, we wear, eat, drink and share goofy crap and don’t care who thinks what of it and the Bears still suck. Whatever happens, two things: 1) Whether our team is stinking it up with a 0-16 record five years in a row or in the playoffs, we never, ever leave a game early. Hell, with more than 80,000 names on the season tickets waiting list (that’s approximately a 60-year wait and I’m being generous), we demand and stick around for a fifth quarter. 2) The only beer bottle we’ll throw at you is one you have to catch and drink from.

It’s real, old love, baby.

Despite my love for football and the Packers, I don’t post much about them here given that I’m not into post-mortem analyses, prognostication and pools when it comes to sports. For me, it’s completely the athleticism and strategy of the moment. They play, score, win or lose, next game.

Another reason I don’t blog a lot about the Packers is you don’t want to know what’s in my head when it comes to this team. Imagine something louder than a Mardi Gras parade, all covered in green and gold and old-fashioneds and pasties and snowboots and antlers, that barrels down the field and plows into the stands for a Lambeau Leap. While Clay Matthews does this.

And you’re not even close. Everybody sing!

Scene from Sugar Bowl 2011 pre-game festivities in New Orleans: Spot the fake Buckeye (hint: it's my friend on the far right).

Back in the year 2000, in that Paleozoic miasma when the internet first went mainstream, a new menace arose to occupy us overworked and underpaid graduate teaching assistants: easy, cut-and paste plagiarism. If memory serves, we caught a few stars of the university’s football team in the act and waited for a) the department and a dean or two to enact UWS 14 on the offenders and b) the smoldering hatred of the rest of the players and their ardent fan base. Nothing happened. Unless a slap on the wrist and us being told in many words that the money Athletic Dept. brings in to the university outweighs academic integrity is grueling punishment.

As a teacher and a fan, I loved these kids. But, I could only wonder what some of them would do with their lives once they did not hit the big time on graduating. Insurance sales isn’t so forgiving.

So, Ohio State, I’m sorry THE, AS OPPOSED TO ALL OTHER OHIO STATE, Ohio State University plays Arkansas tonight in the Sugar Bowl. The smack talk has begun ahead of another “sure Big Ten loss.” As I said after TCU beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl this past weekend, private TCU’s football budget is a scant $2 million less than state-university ours, we have the better marching band and Madison may be godless but we sure are literate. That last blow was a tad low, I admit, but I’m not from the school with a Pokemon for a mascot. Great horny toad, special attack!

If you’re still reading this, it probably means you (are bored and) have more than a passing interest in football. Then, you’re aware that five Ohio State football players have been suspended the first five games of next season for selling their own stuff. Wow, what a mess on so many counts.

To the NCAA:

1) Players should be able to do what they want with their possessions.
2) Good grief, are you inconsistent with how you apply the rules. All I hear is, “You’re suspended, but wait wait wait, not until you play in the Sugar Bowl. And this isn’t how we treated other cases but what the hell.”
3) They’re kids. Kids playing football for free and with hopes of making the pros, when they should be studying more. You call 1.65 to 2.0 GPAs that drugged goats could keep an eligibility requirement? (We’ll get back to this. Oh yes we will.)
4) All so you can make millions, greedies.

To the players:

1) Don’t give me that “I didn’t know I couldn’t sell my stuff” crap. Player misconduct is not worth it, and many Division 1-A athletic departments walk around bellowing to you guys what you can and cannot do. If you didn’t hear it from Tressel (because he was off somewhere ensuring the finer terms of his own career furthering), you heard it from someone else.
2) You see your fellow players doing what you did? Why do you think that is? And what makes you five so special?
3) Maybe the rules are dumb, but no matter what, you broke them. That’s what it comes down to.

The same semester as the plagiarism almost-debacle, I told my students this, “I don’t want you to learn geology. I want you to learn how to learn science. Or anything, for that matter.” A whole load of us are not athletes and cannot even dream of being Terrelle Pryor, much less LeBron James. We, too, go through school broke-ass but with no jerseys and rings to sell, in the hopes that our degrees will get us more than nugget squishing duty at McDonald’s, not probable entry to multi-million-dollar pro contracts. Student athletes have that going for them.

But, what of the athlete who doesn’t make the professional cut? What is he going to do with that 2.0 GPA and degree in communications? That’s why I wanted them to learn how to learn, just for that situation. Sure, there is plenty of room in corporate America for “creative” rule-breakers, but Ohio State’s five broke the cardinal rule of that game: Don’t get caught. That means you’re just dumb enough to make scapegoat. And, even if the kid goes pro, what are the odds he makes it through to retirement and sportscasterhood having invested wisely, not selling his Superbowl ring at the local pawn shop to make rent and, most important of all, with his spine and other vital body parts intact? Remember what that Chicago Bear and wise investor Walter Payton once said, “Tomorrow is promised to no one.”

Football is football. It isn’t life, except for a certain cream of the crop and they, too, need a backup plan. It isn’t going to put food on the table, educate and clothe your kids, pay the mortgage, build schools, hospitals and levees and bring about world peace and harmony. [Unless we get our enemies into football and they huddle with us around the gridiron, beer and bacon cheeseburger in hand ... wait, nope, oh well.] Real life and its continued existence requires doing things right, with integrity. Barring that, don’t get busted. If you lack the sense for either, and I say this with love, good luck. You’re going to need it when you walk into that job interview and the rest of your life.

Packers vs. Giants on The Frozen Tundra tomorrow. Look for D and me in the stands!

Sainted Mother Of JoePa. This is all some overpaid graphic design group can come up with as the Big Ten’s much-awaited new logo?

You have got to be kidding me.

SBNation Cleveland’s Martin Rickman: “It’s good to see that they went out and grabbed a branding firm worse than the one that did that atrocity of a GAP logo earlier this year. The Big Ten refuses to be outdone. Should we hire Jim Tressel’s six-year-old nephew to draw something up?”

And the dropping of the other stinky cleat: the new Big Ten Twelve Ten’s division names are … wait for it … Legends and Leaders. The shock of 6000+ Chicago Tribune readers is nicely encapsulated in the results of this poll.

Didn’t the internet get GAP to reject its cheesy new logo in one week’s time? The Big Ten and its money deserve better than Jim Delaney and this.

Tomorrow is the final day of the Science Bloggers for Students fundraising challenge at Donors Choose. Thank you, guys, for helping me raise $461 which will hopefully be doubled by HP some time this week! One of the projects, Rockin Earth, has only $176 left to go! Please, VatulBlog readers, let’s be responsible for the kids of Jacksonville, North Carolina acquiring a decent mineral testing kit. Just one more day and a beleaguered teacher will thank you from the bottom of her heart.

Why should you help kids learn science? So that they appreciate football, of course! Scientific American reports:

In partnership with the National Science Foundation and the National Football League, NBC Learn has created 10 videos that explore several concepts:

* Newton’s three laws of motion
* The Pythagorean theorem
* Projectile motion
* Vectors
* Geometric shapes
* Kinematics
*  Torque
*  Hydration and nutrition

All this week, we’ll be providing additional stories that take the concepts explored in the video further.

Remember those awful word problems in which a dude has to swim across a river flowing at a certain velocity, so how far upstream does said dude have to start, given his own speed, in order to reach a specific point on the opposite bank? In What Are Vectors, and How Are They Used? “you see that quarterbacks must account for their own motion when throwing a pass.” Explains Jay Cutler. Sorry, was that out loud?

And yet, I don’t think angular momentum and torque can explain the big blond FABUlousness that is my very own defensive linebacker, Clay Matthews. Especially against the Cowboys.

The Sack Of John Kitna (Credit: Tom Lynn)

Hey, any excuse to talk Packer football raise money for science.