For all you football or videogame lovers out there, the game that I’ve been slaving away at in Boston over the past 14 months has recently gone live in Beta. The game is Quick Hit Football and it’s a free-to-play online football game that you can play on your PC or MAC. The game is still in Beta, so it’s buggy and we have a long way to go before it’s considered complete — however, even in it’s infant stages it’s a lot of fun and admittedly quite addicted.

The game I’ve been slaving away on — Quick Hit Football — made Game Pro’s list of the Top 15 Sports Games of 2009! We still got a lot of work to do, but I hope we can come through with something that’ll be truly amazing.

Check out my Quick Hit blog about my thoughts on the Miami Dolphins drafting WVU QB Pat White in the 2nd round of this past weekend’s NFL Draft and why it has me super excited for the coming football season.

I’ve put together a little drinking game for the 2009 NFL Draft for my company @ QuickHit.com. Check it out and follow the rules if you truly want to enjoy tomorrow’s NFL Draft — it will be the same game that I will be playing with Brandon & Roger and we plan to be completely plastered before the end of the first round if not sooner!

Maybe it’s just my negativity with my sports teams, but I’m starting to think that the Miami Dolphins are headed to a last place finish in the AFC East this season. Maybe I should be a little more confident with the “trifecta” of Parcells, Ireland and Sporano, but I’ve always seen last seasons’ 11-5 record and playoff berth as a bit of an aberration that was a result of an easy schedule, Brady’s knee, and Favre’s INT-parade.

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One of my many duties at Quick Hit when I’m not designing the football game or giving Brandon Justice massages with happy endings is to do a lot of community-oriented work such as writing blogs and development diaries. Given my background with this site, my old fan sites, Working Designs and IGN.com, it’s pretty much the cake part of the job since I’ve been sharing my thoughts and opinions with the netizens of the World Wide Web for nearly 13 years.

My first significant entry, other than my initial introduction which none of you should need, is my dev diary on Fixing the QB Passer Rating. It doesn’t necessarily do with the development of the game, other than the fact I plan to use the formula in player stats, but it should give you a little insight how my mind works as far as football and statistics are concerned.

During the Super Bowl and after one of Larry Fitzgerald’s many miraculous plays, we decided that from now on that he should be referred to as simply, “Better Than You”. The reason being that we figured that when he’s making some of these amazing catches, often with perfect coverage on him by the defensive back, that he must be thinking to himself as he’s going up for the grab, “I’m just better than you”, as he snatches the ball out of the air. He’s just been doing that kind of crap for as long as I’ve watched him play, which goes back to his college days. He’s an amazing player and thankfully he’s a class act character as well.

I’m proud to reveal that my company’s newly remodeled website has officially launched with our new name — Quick Hit, Inc. @ www.quickhit.com. The name of the game has also transformed from Play Hard Football to Quick Hit Football and we’ve also just announced the signing of former Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach, the legendary Bill Cowher, to be our official voice. A lot of exciting stuff is happening on the professional front and I can’t wait till you guys get to see what’s in store down the road with the game.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this but it kept slipping my mind. After doing a bunch of research and watching the UMass Division 1-AA championship game he won as a head coach, I must say that I’m feeling extremely happy with the Miami Hurricanes’ hiring of Mark Whipple to be Assistant Head Coach and Offensive Coordinator.

He seems to have a great offensive mind and his track record at UMass, Brown and New Haven on the offensive front is astonishing. The praise being thrown his way by guys like Bill Cowher and Andy Reid are also fairly significant and his former players seem to like to throw out the “genius” tag when talking about him.

The only thing that makes me have concern is the fact that it seems a bit odd for someone to be have been in the coaching business for as long as he has without getting any true big-time opportunities, especially if he’s deserving of the overly-used genius moniker. Then again, there could be numerous reasons other than lack of ability that could cause something like this to happen. It’s not like he’s getting any automatic Rooney Rule interviews.

As big of a whooping that we’re getting, it kinda makes me laugh a little amongst the tears that the Miami Dolphins’ are pretty much getting their asses knocked out of the playoffs by the Miami Hurricanes. Ed Reed’s INT return for a TD pretty much ended my hopes and then McGahee’s long burst pretty much put the final nail in the coffin. Throw in Ray Lewis’s excellent play, including his effort in causing that 19 yard loss on the reverse by Tedd Ginn, and today it’s clearly all about the “U”.  Yesterday also saw some big performances by Edge and Antrelle Rolle, so the ex-Canes have done the school proud this weekend.

After the Hurricanes’ debacle in San Fran last night, I had this feeling of impending doom about today’s Jets v Dolphins match-up. The one thing that started to give me hope earlier in the day was the fact that Drew Brees fell 16 yards short of breaking Dan Marino’s single-season passing yards record, despite the fact that Carolina almost GAVE it to him when they booted the kickoff out of bounds with just one second left on the clock. Luckily, Brees choked and threw it short on a wide open pass that would’ve got him one of Dan’s last major NFL records.

While that gave me a lot of hope, the way things were going early on in the Dolphins game had me nervous beyond belief. They were seemingly dominating the Jets, but kept making significant boneheaded mistakes. The Pennington fumble, the Ricky drop on what would’ve been a huge pass play, and the errant pass by Ronnie Brown that could’ve been a potential long TD. Throw in those and all the false starts and offsides and I was beginning to think it just wasn’t meant to be. Luckily, things started to come together. Favre started trying to put his interceptions record out of reach, and we held on to a euphoric 24-17 win.

To be quite frank, I don’t think we have any shot at all at making it to and winning the Super Bowl. We won’t likely make it out of the first round. However, after suffering through a 1-15 season last year, just making the playoffs is a huge victory for me. That said, it’s the playoffs and anything can happen. Maybe we surprise some folks, myself included, and we make a nice little run.

It’s official. Jacory Harris is my least favorite Miami Hurricane in the history of the football program. He’s been so hyped, people have been begging for him to get the start, and he finally got a big shot in tonight’s lame ass bowl game against Cal in San Francisco. He started the game off horribly, then showed some promise in the middle, and then absolutely choked down the stretch to hand the game to the weak ass Pac-10 team.

First, he fumbled inside his own god damn 5 yard line. Take care of the fucking ball you fucking moron! Just take the sack or throw it away, don’t run around with the ball loose like the world’s biggest moron. His idiotic fumble resulted in a Cal TD that gave them a 24-17 lead with 2 1/2 minutes left to play. So, he has a shot to make up for it, right? Well, yeah, except his idiotic play continued.

It began with our retarded offensive coordinator starting off with a straight run play, that netted us nothing and took some time off the clock. Then Jacory, dinked and dunked it 3 times to gain 9 yards and a first down while taking a minute and a half off the clock. Then the brainless wonder takes off running and instead of just stepping out of bounds like he had a clear shot to, he cuts it up field and takes off another 30+ seconds off the clock. He waisted 2 minutes just to gain about 15 yards. Pure genius. I hate him and blame his retarded ass for us losing to Cal.

EDIT: January 15, 2009 — Now that some time has passed, my hate for Jacory has faded. The truth is that it was a fairly meaningless bowl game that the team was expected to lose and, as is the norm with me, I often just get too worked up over any game the Hurricanes lose. I’m back to being a Jacory fan and am now anxiously awaiting for National Signing Day to see if the Canes can land another solid top 10 class!

I had to “watch” the game via Gamecast because the Pats were the only game on at 1PM today, but the Dolphins game against the Chiefs drove me crazy nevertheless. Thankfully, I was able to follow it while blowing shit up in Mercenaries 2 or I might’ve gone insane. They managed to pull yet another rabbit out of their hat and are now the first team in history to win 10 games in a season following one which they won 1 or less.

I’m still a bit pessimistic about their chances at beating the Jets, but it’s pretty simple for them — if they win they’re AFC East champs and in the playoffs, if they don’t, they’re most likely left out in the cold. After last year’s 1-15 disaster, I honestly couldn’t have wished for anything better than this. I’m proud of them either way and it’s been a very fun year of watching them play.

This week is the first round in the playoffs of my the Playhard FFL and my team is up 53-50 and my opponent only has T.O. left tonight while I have Eli, Tashard and Westbrook left. It “should” be a win for me, but you never know with Fantasy Football, T.O. could respond with some crazy 30+ point game after all of this week’s Romo/Whitten drama and I could get toasted. But for now, things are looking great.

Things are also looking good for the Dolphins after winning yet another close game today. They’re still in a 3-way tie for first place in the AFC East with the Jets and Pats, and are still in complete control of their destiny. They beat the Chiefs and Jets and they’re in. If not, then they’re probably watching the playoffs from home yet again.

I’m just blocking out last night’s game against GTech out of my mind and will pretend it never happened. It’s my fault for getting too excited for this team and coach. Embarrassing. I had to stop watching and kill some zombies in L4D at halftime because I was just getting so frustrated that I was starting to get physically ill.

Obviously, I owe plenty of thanks to the “Wide Right” Gods in how they’ve helped my ‘Canes beat FSU several times and subsequently won National Championships. Now you can chalk up an apparent fantasy football victory to their credit. I went into the game with all my players done and up by 14 points with Kellen Winslow and Ryan Lindell left to play for my opponent. It was looking really good for me in the first three quarters, but then things started to get frightening.

Winslow got 30+ yards bringing his point total up to 4 and Lindell made a couple of extra points bring him up to 9; this made the score 67-66 in my favor after Dawson made that 56 yard FG to give the Browns the lead with 93 seconds left to play. I was actually hoping that Dawson would’ve missed because then the Bills would’ve just run out the clock but he made it with plenty of time left for Buffalo to get into FG range. Then the idiotic Romeo decided to squib kick it and put give the Bills prime field position near mid-field and the Bills quickly marched into FG range. I was absolutely livid. I was thinking that he would surely make the kick and I would lose to one of our league’s worst teams 69-67.

But then when the Bills were lining up for the field goal I thought to myself “wide right” and then I typed “WIDE RIGHT” in my aim chat window to Dave Toole. Then the announcers started talking about “wide right” in the Bills lore…and then…Lindell missed the kick “wide right” and I squeaked out a 67-65 victory! And unless the official scoring changes between now and this morning, I will be sitting pretty at 8-3 and with a playoff spot potentially locked up!

Already stated it after the Hurricanes game on Thursday and I’ll state it again after today’s narrow escape by the Dolphins against the Oakland Raiders — a win is a win. I thought we might have blown a great opportunity to stay strong in the playoff hunt after that long kick return for a touchdown gave the Raiders their first lead of the game, but my boys came through in the clutch and drove for the game winning field goal with less than a minute remaining to seal a victory. Miami is now 6-4 and if they can upset the Pats next week and if the Jets lose to the Titans, then we will be sitting in a position never thought possible — atop the AFC East!

The one apparent downer to my fruitful football weekend, which began on Thursday, is that my fantasy football team has a very precarious 15 point lead over one of the worst teams in the league, with that team still having Winslow, Randle El, and Lindel to play. He also has the Cards D going right now while all I have is 2nd string Mewelde Moore. If I lose this game, it was be heartbreaking given the competition and the fact that I got home 1 minute too late and was stuck with BenJavus Green-Ellis who I was going to bench in favor of either Ted Ginn Jr or Lance Moore (15 and 16 points respectively) if Sammy Morris was cleared to play, which he was. I ended up with 0 points in that slot instead of at least 15. The late work day on Thursday just might cost me a victory that I was favored to win by 51 points. Sad Christmas if that happens.

Go Terps! Thanks to the Maryland upset of North Carolina today, my Miami Hurricanes are completely in control of their own destiny in the ACC. If we can beat Georgia Tech and North Carolina State then we’ll likely be getting a rematch with FSU in the ACC title game. We actually have a legitimate shot at making it to the Orange Bowl this year. At the start of the year, particularly after coming out of the gates 2-3, I may have hoped for a BCS bowl appearance, but I never thought it was a realistic possibility with this young team. Yet, here were are now in the driver’s seat in our division of the ACC. We still have some tough games ahead of us, especially next Thursday at Georgia Tech, but I’m just thrilled that we’re in this position and am excited about the possibility about being a National Power again within the next 2-3 years. It’s all about the “U”!

For starters, I had amazing nights out on both Friday and Saturday. Both evenings were loads of fun and there were plenty of hot chicks to entertain everywhere we went. Then things went really good with all of my football teams on both Saturday and Sunday.

The Miami Hurricanes took care of business against Wake Forest and still have an outside shot at the ACC title or at least being bowl eligible. The Dolphins played great today and beat down the Buffalo Bills, with Ginn Jr finally showcasing his playmaking ability. And that’s not all, my fantasy football team scored 109 points and barring a 40+ point outburst by Scaife on MNF should up its record to 6-2 and into a three-way tie atop the division.

And in what might quite possibly be the best news of the weekend, I weighed-in this morning at 299.6 lbs. Hopefully I won’t ever allow myself to go up past the 300 mark ever again for the rest of my life. If I do, I give you permission to put a bullet in my head. It feels good to be back under 300 lbs and I can’t wait till my wrist and ankle/foot heal up so I can start getting back into the gym on a regular basis.