Happy New Year, Nashville Predators. Welcome to 2011, Memphis Grizzlies. Thanks for coming to the party, Oakland A’s, Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto Raptors, Jacksonville Jaguars, Phoenix Coyotes, Minnesota Timberwolves and the whole WNBA -– now go away!  Sorry, kids, it’s a new decade, and we are in the middle of a recession. Time to clean out those closets, throw away your Puddle of Mud CD’s (remember when they were cool for a second?) and really make some hard decisions about what can stay and what has got to go.  That’s right, I’m talking about the C word. Contraction. LeBron James basically said it a couple weeks ago.  Yes, pro sports would be better with fewer teams. The competition would be tougher, the games more exciting, the cheerleaders hotter … and Darko Milicic, Guillermo Mota and Kyle Boller would be looking for other jobs. I’m thinking forehead model for Darko, fishing boat second mate for Mota and local morning news traffic guy for Boller. God, we have wasted millions and millions of dollars on those stiffs.  But I don’t want to just stop with sports. Oh no, I’m drunk with the power now. I’m like Josh McDaniels on draft day. “Wait a minute, you’re telling me Tim Tebow’s blind 72-year-old uncle with a wooden leg hasn’t been drafted yet?! Hell yes, I will give you three second-rounders and Chrysler LeBaron for that pick!”  I want to bring contraction to the every day world. OMG, there is so much stuff I want to get rid of. Bye, bye one of the Kardashian sisters. I’m thinking the one with the super creepy jelled-within-an-inch-of-his-life boyfriend.  Later, Harry Potter movies. The books might be cool but the movies downright suck. They are long, talky and boring. And Quidditch makes the MLS All-Star game look interesting.  Adios, the month of August. Why? Cause nothing really happens then. It’s hot as balls. Baseball is lurching along, football hasn’t started yet and all the movies studios release Rob Schneider or Nicholas Cage flicks. Full disclosure…an ex-girlfriend dumped me in August after I took her to see Cage in “The Wicker Man”, so I might be a little biased.  Why stop there? To quote Clubber Lang, “I got lots a more. Lots a more!”  Say goodbye to ... Brazil nuts, NBC, Jack in the Box, South Dakota, ESPN360, Real Housewives of any city, J-Woww (but not Snooki, she kinda grew on me), “The Cleveland Show,” Ed Hardy T-shirts, PepsiMax and Coke Zero, Pumas (the shoes, not the cat), the iPhone on AT&T, Bing!, movies where the girl finds her dream guy except he turns out to be a serial killer/werewolf/gay/a woman, wearing sports jerseys to go “out” in, combining words to be clever like “Rocktober” or “I’m text-pecting” and, last but not least, guy who wears a blue tooth headset in his ear even when he isn’t even in a car. It’s like, dude you better be in the business of saving lives or there is NO REASON for you to be wearing your blue tooth at a freakin’ Black Eyed Peas concert!  Wow. I could go on and on but … if we can only get rid of one thing this year, please let it be the CHIN-STRAP BEARD ON WHITE GUYS. Man, that is a bad look. Black dudes can barely pull it off. It’s worse than the fo-hawk. I shall leave you with this hell … clean it up, Ryan Mallet.
Josh Bycel and Don MacLean (UCLA All-American, nine years in the NBA) once combined to score 56 points in a high school basketball game. Don MacLean scored 54 of those points. Josh became a writer the next day. Josh has written and produced TV shows for ABC, CBS, NBC, MTV, Comedy Central, USA and Fox. In his past life, he covered Big Ten sports for UPI, AP, Wisconsin State Journal, Milwaukee Journal and the Dubuque Telegraph, local LA sports for the LA Daily News and appeared naked on the cover of The Onion.