One thing I learned at the Frozen Four is that there is an art to traveling to the Frozen Four. There are definitely pieces of knowledge I wish some more experienced college hockey fan had passed on to me before I jumped on the plane to DC. Thus, RIT, BC, Miami and Wisconsin fans, this is Part 1 of my advice to you before you head off to Detroit Wednesday or Thursday morning.

For Part 1, I present to you an Insider’s Guide to Detroit. I contacted one of the first folks I ever followed on Twitter, Jamie Favreau, PR and Marketing Goddess and Uber Hockey Fan. She resides in Detroit, and I knew I could turn to her for the insiders view of the city.

Kat: What is the best means of transport from the airport to Ford Field or main hotel area? (Bus, subway, taxi)

Jamie: I would call the hotels to find out if they are having a shuttle service. This is a big event so they might be offering something. Rental car or taxi is the best way if shuttles are NOT offered. (Kat’s note: In DC we took public transportation and a taxi to and from the airport, completely ignoring the hotel shuttle services that existed. Looking back, I wish we would have either taken our hotel’s shuttle or the SuperShuttle. Thus, definitely take Jamie’s advice here – taxi’s can jack up their prices if they are heading to the airport.)

The People Mover is best for getting around downtown Detroit.

K: Friday afternoon is when most Frozen Four attendees go site-seeing – besides team practices, the day is relatively quiet until the skills competition and Hobey Baker presentation at night. For those who have never been to Detroit, what three places are must-sees?

J: Slows BBQ and Lafeyette Coney Island are the best places and a must when in Detroit. I have a few ideas as far as what you can do. Greenfield Village and The Henry Ford Mare great places if you have a car and can get to Dearborn which is outside of Detroit. If you are staying in the City, there is a Wheelhouse Bike Rentals and DTours. You can also go to the Detroit Institute of Arts which is in Midtown. If you want to find out some more events you can visit the Downtown Detroit Partnership or for a short list visit Detroit Moxie. The NCAA has a list of what is going on this weekend as well.

If you have a passport, you can always bring it with you so you can go to Windsor, Ontario.

K: Are there any good sports bars either downtown or near Ford Field?

J: If you are looking for cheap drinks you can visit the Anchor Bar. $2 Blue and Blue Light Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Free shuttle to and from the games. Door prizes, giveaways, fun. The Anchor is located at Fort/Cass stop of the People Mover.

Alumni associations are hosting viewing parties at the following bars. Miami is having a VIP party at Hockeytown Cafe, but I am sure you can get in even if you aren’t a VIP. Wisconsin is holding a viewing party at Cheli’s. RIT home base is Angelina’s, but you need to register to attend. Boston College will be holding its viewing party at Bookies. Please contact your alumni association to find out if there will be a VIP event as part of the viewing parties. (Kat’s note: Definitely contact your school’s alumni association before attending any of those parties, even if you are a student. There may be special deals for registering and/or a cover charge. Plus, Alumni Associations always appreciate the heads up on what they can expect for attendance.)

K: Your team has just won the Frozen Four – where are you celebrating that evening?

J: I would be at one of those bars listed above or the Old Shillelagh in Greektown, Hard Rock Cafe at Campus Martius or Foran’s Irish Pub off of Woodward.

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A big thanks to Jamie for her help! This definitely makes me want to hop over to Detroit this weekend, even without my team being in this year’s Frozen Four! Stay tuned for Part 2 Tuesday night.

Jamie Favreau is a freelance interactive marketing specialist. With a passion for hockey and technology, her passion is to help sports clients get noticed. Being active in the social media community in Detroit has helped her understand and get excited about the start up community. You can reach her at her blog, @jfavreau on Twitter or on Linked IN.

twoeightnine's "Franchise Quarterbacks - Buffalo Bills" shirt. (Photo: TwoEIghtNine)

Featured several times on Yahoo Sports’ Puck Daddy (the pantheon of hockey blogs, if you will), twoeightnine Design’s t-shirts have become a hot commodity for hockey fans all over. With shirts featuring those always present allegations of diving towards Sidney Crosby, and an Shepard Fairey-esque salute to the single man who turned around Washington (hockey, that is), the online shirt shop struck a chord with fans that wanted witty and intelligent fan t-shirts.

Of course, once I found out Matt Johnson, the founder of twoeightnine, was running his business out of Western New York, and that he features the following “Franchise Quarterbacks – Buffalo Bills” shirt in his store, I had to feature him on the blog. Besides talking t-shirts, I of course had to ask Matt’s thoughts on the always depressing state of the Buffalo Bills.

Kat: How long have you been designing shirts? How did you get start up twoeightnine?

Matt: I think I’m at 2.5 years now? Maybe three? The last few years have been a strange trip for me and I really have no sense of time anymore. I got my start designing a t-shirt for Deadspin. It was back when the site was still “underground” but starting to make a name for itself. There was a small loyal group of commenters who joked about the start of a revolution. I took a sketch I did of Will Leitch as Che Guevera down to my neighbor in Philly who was a screen printer and twoeightnine was born.

Kat: Your designs run the gamut of sports, teams, and regions. Do you come up with all of the design ideas, or are some ideas submitted by fans of that particular sports or team?

Matt: They’re all mine. I tend to gravitate towards the Sabres and Bills because those are my teams and I prefer to work on ideas that I’ll enjoy working on. I’m in the process of expanding from that while killing some older designs at the same time. Right now I know I have limited periods where I do most of my sales. Mainly NFL training camp and Christmas. Plus most of my sales come from the Upstate NY region. It’s something that I want to break away from.

I’m always open to anyone’s ideas but the fact of the matter is that 99% of the time they suck. It’s a very inside joke or something that has no staying power past a week or two. As much as I love designing shirts at the end of the day I have to sell them too in order to make it worth my time. Something that only sells a handful of shirts isn’t going to do that.

Kat: What has been your best selling design?

Matt: The Beast Mode shirt for Marshawn Lynch, hands down. It’s not even close. Even with the suspension and the down year people were still buying it. Unfortunately I still haven’t sold enough to make a dent in those “lovely” I ♥ Buffalo sports shirt. If you’re a guy and you wear one of those please check your balls at the door.

Kat: As a Bills fan, I thought the Bills Franchise Quarterbacks design was depressing…until I saw the new Browns Franchise Quarterbacks one. Then I felt just a twinge better. Personally, which franchise do you think has a better chance of escaping their QB woes sooner?

Matt: Can I vote for neither? I guess if I had to choose I’d pick the Browns. I trust Holmgren and Co. more than I trust Ralphy and his crew. I’m not sure what happened this season in particular as opposed to the last ten but the switch finally flipped for me. My diet is now koolaid free. I need results before I get any sense of hope up. Unfortunately those results this year look like they’ll be even more losses.

twoeightnine's "Beast Mode" homage to Marshawn Lynch

Kat: Marshawn Lynch (subject of your Beast Mode shirt): lost cause or a risk to continue taking by the Bills organization?

Matt: The second one, by far. I don’t understand the “cut or trade him now before he screws up again people” at all. Nothing he’d bring back in a trade is worth it; he’s still a talent on a team seriously lacking it. And frankly anyone who says cut him is an idiot. I’m not sure what the real risk is. If you cut him now you don’t have him, if he gets suspended you don’t have him. But if he doesn’t get suspended you have a pretty good one two punch with Jackson and Lynch. It’s not like if he gets his third strike the Bills are going to have to forfeit the rest of the season or people are going to think that they’re a poorly run franchise that only has a future in Toronto and is one of the laughingstocks of the league.

twoeightnine’s shirts are available for sale on their website, and Matt is also active on Twitter.

The NFL Snuggie. The horrors.

I never truly believed the apocalypse was near until I saw this.

To celebrate the beginning of the NFL pre-season, HSN has been selling the NFL Huddler (aka an NFL Snuggie) all day. To demonstrate its use, they are continuously showing a group of male and female models sitting on the back of a pickup truck eating with various teams’ Huddlers on.

Oh, because the people tailgating in Orchard Park, Pittsburgh, Philly, or Oakland aren’t going to beat you up for wearing a massive piece of team printed felt with arms while grilling and kicking back beers in their vicinity.

Sports fans, if you fear being cold while watching a game, I would like to introduce you to this nifty invention called a jacket. Last I checked, they worked really well for most of human kind.

Unless you’re an athlete. Because if you are an athlete, sports fans – fickle ones, at that – make it their own pastime to comment about your bad day, remind you about your bad day, and hold it over your head for days, weeks, months, years, lifetimes on end.

Heaven forbid said bad day occurs due to an injury. Then you’re “injury prone,” “weak,” “not a professional,” “disingenuous.” Injury equals weakness, and unless the limb is severed, many believe you ought to be out on the field, ice, court, or pitch.

Jason Bay is having a bad week. Maybe a bad month. (Photo: Flickr user lifes ill)

One could say that Boston Red Sox’s outfielder Jason Bay is having a bad week. Maybe a month. After he pulled a hamstring this past weekend, he had to sit out two games. Nevermind that Bay was the last Sox player to take a day off since the All-Star Game. Nevermind that the last day he had off was when he was hit by a pitch around Memorial Day. Bay suffered from a bum hamstring, and Sox fans took to the Boston.com comments labeling the guy as a “bust,” as “lazy,” as being not worth the money he allegedly is asking in a new contract.

Bay came back for Wednesday evening’s game against Tampa Bay (the 2009 home of everyone’s favorite Californian Jewish Outfielder, and your June interleague play run leader, Gabe Kapler), and tweaked the hamstring again. Hamstrings are a fickle part of your body. Any athlete will tell you that. You can aggravate it running sideways, in the beginning of a vertical jump, on the landing of a leap – all routine parts of an outfielder’s game. It shouldn’t be a great surprise that maybe Bay shouldn’t have played Wednesday. He most likely felt fine on Tuesday, and then in the routine movements of playing his position on Wednesday, felt the injury again. That happens. Heck, as a teenager, my permanently wrecked knees felt great when I wasn’t throwing roundoffs or doing my ballet bar exercises. And then I would do such things, and holy heck, I thought someone was splitting my knee open like one would take a cleaver to an avocado pit and eating the bone alive. But you wouldn’t know if you would feel the pain until you tried physical activity.

No tears were shed for former fan favorite Bay in the comments section of Boston.com. One of the first commenters to the report about his hamstring re-aggravation claimed that, “Star players step up,” and accused Bay of being lazy, and that he ought to get out there and play like a professional. Others followed the negative suit, saying that he isn’t worth the money he might get in a new contract, that he’s been nothing but a disappointment, and that he ought to be replaced by farm system players. One commenter even went as far to describe Bay as “injury prone” throughout his career – Bay, of course, being the guy who played all 162 games in 2005, 159 in 2006, 145 in 2007, and 155 in 2008. If that’s injury prone, I would hate to see that commenter describe JD Drew or Carl Pavano.

Bay had been out 2 games as of Thursday morning. He had been out maybe 4 games all season.

I know most newspaper commenters exaggerate in their comments. That the majority of commenters don’t think before they type. But listen to sports radio. Read blogs. The commenters are just joining in the negative fray of those contributors. How disingenuous is a fan that their first thought upon the injury of a player on their team is that the player is lazy or undeserving of a chance to heal? Bay isn’t the first one to be held to the impossible standard possessed by sports fans, and he won’t be the last. Athletes may be paid for their physical ability, but they shouldn’t be put down and used for glue the minute they suffer a muscle pull. Sports fans ought to lose the barbarian-ness and reestablish their humanism.

Because, after all, I don’t see strangers publicly criticizing stenographers suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome who need to take a day off, or a lunch lady for missing work because she’s sick from caught-from-first-graders flu.

(And yes, I’m hoping just by slipping her name in there, I get 6-10 extra hits on my blog today.)

On to our regularly scheduled sports related blog, because while I may have been named Most Political in high school, it was because there was no “Overly Involved Wanna-Be Sportswriter” superlative, not because I actually like politics.  (American politics is faker than the WWE, as far as I’m concerned.)

Two and a half weeks ago, I found myself on NFL.com pricing a Trent Edwards jersey or t-shirt (call me cheap, but I prefer the t-shirt fake jersey because of price and because I can wear it more places.) I believed Edwards had shown enough over the previous four weeks for any serious Bills fan to consider buying his jersey.  It would be the first time since the Drew Bledsoe era that a Bills fan could consider buying a starting quarterback’s jersey.  Sure, the cheapest option would set me back at least $29.00, but one’s weekend wardrobe can’t consist of her three Gabe Kapler and one Jason Bay shirts through the entire baseball off-season.  (And that’s not a new thing for me – I wore my 49ers, Bills, Amerks, and Steve Young shirts all through high school.  That was before this whole women’s sports paraphernalia thing was accepted.  No wonder I didn’t have a date until college.)

One of the Edwards jerseys I considered

I priced out the jersey option and the t-shirt option, and said to myself, “Okay, if the Bills beat Arizona, I’ll suck it up, cut out my daily coffee run for three weeks, and buy the Edwards shirt.”

That Sunday, Edwards was befallen by a late hit by Adrian Wilson (because the Cardinals hate any quarterback I remotely like), was concussed, and my plan to buy the Edwards shirt went out my apartment window.

Why?  The whole purchase of a player jersey is such an iffy investment.  They might suffer a nasty concussion or ACL tear that knocks them out for the rest of the season.  In some instances, that player may never be the same after that injury.  What if they just play poorly, continue on a downward spiral, and end up being replaced?  Unless they have two or three solid seasons to their credit before that happens, if you buy their jersey, it looks like you make rash judgments and spend frivolously.

For example, all my fellow Bills fans that purchased JP Losman jerseys a few years back – now they look a little silly.  Losman didn’t develop into much of a quarterback, befallen by a bad attitude.  He had few excellent performances when he did start, but not enough that you can say to a Losman jersey owner, “Oh, well, he was good for a few seasons, and that jersey could be worn with a heck of a lot of pride when he was.”  No, Losman never played well enough to justify the jersey purchase, the outlay of eighty some-odd dollars.  By wearing a Losman #7, you aren’t paying homage to a former clutch player for your franchise – you’re saying, “I jumped on the Losman bandwagon two years ago, and now the man owes me $89.99 for buying into his hype.”

With Edwards concussion, I was jolted back to reality.  This kid hasn’t played an entire 16 game NFL regular season yet in his career.  He’s only in his second year in the NFL.  He’s been befallen by knee injuries in both college and pro ball, he’s now had a concussion…there is just too much at risk.  Even after today’s win against the Chargers, I’ll reevaluate where Edwards is at Week 10 and see if he’s still the quarterback of the Bills future he looks like he is.  If he is, maybe I’ll purchase the Edwards t-shirt.  Or maybe I’ll wait.  Buying a jersey is a serious commitment, and a serious outlay of cash – you really have to be committed to the athlete to take that step.

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Can't put the FWSNBN's name on my jersey, but I'll live

The other jersey question that has been brought up in the past few weeks is the question of jerseys of college athletes. My beloved NCAA regulations specify that the selling of jerseys or t-shirts with student-athlete’s names on them for profit is prohibited.  For example, when Boston College quarterback Matt Ryan was in contention for the Heisman Trophy last year, you would find t-shirts for sale that read, “Heisman Trophy Candidate, #11″ with the Eagles logo on it.  Ryan’s name did not appear anywhere on the shirt.

The production and sale of student-athlete jerseys is regulated by Article 12.5 “Promotional Activities” in the NCAA Division I Handbook.  Specifically, 12.5.1.1 (h) reads:

Items that include an individual student-athlete’s name, picture
or likeness (e.g., name on jersey, name or likeness on a bobble-head doll), other than informational items
(e.g., media guide, schedule cards, institutional publications), may not be sold [by the member institution or athletic conference.]

However, some jersey customizations fall through the cracks.  Despite the “forbidden customizations” list many licensed retailers have, at Boston University hockey games, you will see a smattering of customized jerseys.  Someone two rows back from me sports a Gilroy #97 jersey, a pre-teen girl the section over sports a jersey of the Forward Who Shall Not Be Named (FWSNBN), and a colleague of mine owns a MacArthur #16 jersey.  There’s more than just those three, but those are the three that are always there. The University can’t mass produce these jerseys and sell them, but these fans somehow custom ordered these jerseys to reflect their favorite players.

I own a Boston University hockey jersey, wear it religiously on game nights, and trust you me, I would love to break the rules, copy the pre-teen girl in section 115 and get it customized to reflect the FWSNBN.  But for now, I’ll leave the customization of our BU jerseies to the more brave souls among our fanbase, and will wait until the FWSNBN plays professional hockey to buy his jersey, even if it is in Europe, Siberia or for the Iowa Chops.  (And trust me, I’ll grimace if it’s the Chops.  Seriously.  But I’ll suck it up and buy it.)