When the player’s strike hit in 1994, the Rockies were in last place in the National League West division, though they were playing much better ball than they had been in the ’93 season. Colorado’s hitters were noted for their raw power, which was contributed to the fact that the air was thinner in Denver than in other parts of the country. Combined, Rockies’ players Andres Galarraga and Dante Bichette were projected to hit 80 home runs during that season if it had not been cut short by the player’s strike. Those two players, in addition to Mike Kingery (replaced just one year later by Larry Walker) and VinnyCastilla, would become known throughout the league as the “Blake Street Bombers”.

The Bombers would hit a combined total of 139 homeruns in ’95, the season when the team moved to Coors Field. The Rockies won seven out of their first eight games in their new home, and by the end of the ’95 season had placed 2^nd in the West division and made it into the playoffs. Despite their sudden run for the World Series, though, the Rockies were shot down by the powerhouse that was the Atlanta Braves. The following year, Larry Walker got injured, killing the Rockies dreams for a second playoff appearance. When he got better, though, he went on to win league MVP in ‘97.

The Rockies wouldn’t see their World Series debut until 2007, when they came out of nowhere to fight their way into the playoffs, beating out both the Dodgers and Diamondbacks, who were favored to win. Finally, the Rockies and the Padres were tied for the NL wildcard spot, and a game was played at Coors Field to determine who got it. The 13^th-and last- inning was the most intense. The Padres gained the lead with two home runs, but Colorado came back to match those two plus snag another one.

The Rockies breezed through the competition to become the National League champions and face off against the Red Sox in the 2007 World Series. Unfortunately, they met a devastating loss and were swept in four games. Despite this loss, though, the Rockies team continues to look promising, and another World Series appearance could be in the near future.

The person who should be the most excited is Kobe Bryant who has been feeling the pain of not having a true complete point guard.  With the point guard duties in the hands of someone Kobe can trust it allows him to concentrate solely on scoring and not worrying about trying to be the set up guy and distributor.  It allows Bynum and Gasol to know that if they run the fast break they will be getting picture perfect lob passes to them.  The only part of the Lakers that I do not like is smal forward.  I don’t think Ron Artest fits in.  He is old, his three point shot is off and he loves to shoot them, he is much slower now, and he is not the defender he used to be.  If the Lakers can get a small forward who guards great, rebounds the ball, and is physical I think they will win the Championship next year.  They should keep Gasol, don’t trade him, and either he or Bynum need to check the ego at the door and realize one of them is the number 2 option in the post.

How Does Wiwizig Forums Work?

Wiziwig works on the principle that people share.  The forums are filled with people who enjoy watching sports and in order to do so they must all share with each other.  A moderator will begin a thread, as an example, Football for October 1st, and he will ask people who are streaming football games that day or for people who know where there will be football streams that day to contact him and inform him of the streams.  He then verifies that the stream is credible and he creates a consolidated list of all the football games that day and the links that direct people on where to go to watch the games.  The links can be for a website, or a link to be used within an application like Streamtorrent or Sopcast.

Do All the Links Work?

No, all the links do not always work, but surprisingly a majority of them do work.  A stream may go down during the game if the site it is streamed on receives a DMCA takedown notice.  Also, the person streaming the game may run into technical difficulties.  And there are always people who try to do a fake out, where they say they are streaming a game but when you get there all you see are ads.  They are trying to get traffic to their page and hope that some of that traffic will click an ad.  Wiziwig does a pretty good job of finding these tricky people and removing them from their forum.

Are People Allowed to Stream Games?

There is no universal law concerning the streaming of games.  The United States aggressively combats this and you can get in trouble for streaming sporting events online.  They have even started to go after sites that link to the streams even though they aren’t streaming anything themselves.  They call this contributory copyright infringement though some people argue that they are effectively surpressing free speech.  If I verbally communicate to someone that they can watch a football game at a certain web address do I run the risk of being arrested?  It seems highly unlikely though they are doing just that to sites who post the links online.  There are some countries, like Spain, whose high court ruled that sharing links to sporting events is legal and ok to do.  You should check your local laws to see what they are before you decide to broadcast or link to broadcasts online.

Does Wiziwig Have Links to Every Game?

Of course not, it would be nearly impossible to have this though they are very impressive in the number of games they provide links to.  While it is not nearly every game it is usually greater than half the games and closer to the 75%-85% range of games that are covered, especially during football season.

This brings up the interesting question of what happens when different countries have different laws about online related issues.  Is sports streaming and linking to sports streams legal or illegal or can it be both depending on whose soil you are standing on?  Is it legal for the US government to take away the assets of Spanish citizens?  What are the ramifications for cyberspace when one country begins to impose their laws on people located outside of their country?  These are all important questions that need to be answered before the online world and real world face a collision course.

Rojadirecta was able to easily move their site and operates on the .es registry now, so the US government effectively accomplished nothing but forcing Rojadirecta to change their domain extension.  Was this worth harming the US/Spanish relations or sending a signal to the rest of the world that the US will impose their will on foreign citizens?  Whatever the end result position of the US the fact remains that Rojadirecta is alive and well and still linking to live sporting events.

The original site began as P2P4U.net.  The site was very simple from a web design perspective, it offered a common template and you could choose between the different sports to see which streams were listed.  P2P4U grew in popularity starting in the UK and most especially among soccer fans.  Those european football fans came to P2P4U in droves as they wanted to watch games from all over the world, from major league soccer in the United States to the European League in Europe to many other football leagues.

As their popularity started to grow so did other things.  The site moved up in the search engines to be near the top when people searched for where they could watch live sports online.  As a result of this their fame and notoriety grew and eventually it landed them within the scope of the US government.  Two years ago before the Superbowl the US government went after many of the famous sports streaming sites and sports linking sites and P2P4U was among them.  The US Government had the ability to confiscate domain names that fell under any domain extension that was run by the US company Verisign.  P2P4U was under the .net registry which was run by Verisign and so the domain name was lost.

Not to be deterred, the founders came back as First Row Sports but a little while later the same thing happened and FirstRowSports.com was taken by the US Government.  This is when many of the sports streaming and linking sites decided that it was better to put their sites on a domain extension out of the grasp of the US.  While extensions like .tv, .eu, or .es are not as common and popular worldwide and recognized by people, the ability to start building a brand that could not be taken outweighed risking losing your domain name to the US government and sites started to move to these lesser known domain extensions.  Sites like FirstRowSports, ATDHE, and Rojadirecta all moved and MyP2P moved and rebranded itself as Wiziwig.

The biggest challenge that these sites faced in moving to these extensions is to have people give their trust, as most people do not visit anything other than .com domains.  There have also been sites that popped up using the same templates as the real sites but not run by the same people.  Some of these sites are harmless and some of them may cause harm to your computer.

Let’s take a look at what happened last season and see if Mark Sanchez should be worried and if the Jets have a bigger decision on their hands than they are letting on.  The Jets were primed for a playoff spot and collapsed at the end of the season.  You can blame Santonio Holmes for a lock of the lockerroom bad vibes going on, but Sanchez was throwing more lame ducks than you’d find at a pee-wee league game.  The Jets as everyone knows fell apart and so did their shot at the Playoffs.

On the flipside the Denver Broncos started the season horrible going 1-5.  With their season presumable wasted they decided to throw good ol’ Tim Tebow in there as the fans were calling (and taking out billboards) for him.  What happened next has to be one of the biggest middle of the season turnarounds we’ve seen in the past 20 years.  There were multiple games where the Broncos (and their playoff hopes) were dead.  Against the Dolphins, against the Bears, nobody would have thought with a few minutes to go the Broncos had any shot of winning those games.  You can’t give the credit to Tebow because what happened was a combination of extreme luck, good defensive and special teams plays, and of course Tebow.  The Broncos found a way into the playoffs (beating the Jets on the way there) and won the first round playoff game against the Steelers and their vaunted defense.  They of course went on to get squashed by the Patriots but everyone’s luck has to run out sometime.

If Sanchez gets off to a shaky start in the season it won’t be long before they New York fans start their Tebow calls from the stands.  Fireman Ed will have to create a Tebow cheer for this season.  What he brings to the team (besides some hard nosed running from the QB position and throws that leave much to be desired) is passion, and that passion is priceless because it ignites the rest of the players.  Players because energized on the football field when they have a passionate leader to follow.  Sanchez has shown us he is not the born leader that Tebow is.

If we had to give a prediction for what will happen this season we would guess that by game 5 Tim Tebow will become the Jets starting quarterback and what happens from there is anyone’s guess.

The Spurs eliminated the Jazz in their usual dominate self, though the four game sweep didn’t see the Spurs scoring as much as they had in the regular season… might be a sign that some of the players are tiring down after the shortened season which saw games played more frequently and players getting less rest.

Those aging Celtics keep finding a way to win, with Paul Pierce winning a game for them and Rajon Rondo winning another, but their bench is going to need to step up if they are going to advance further in the playoffs.  And as we saw on p2p4u net the Pacers made quick work of the depleted Orlando Magic 4 games to 1.  The Magic were going without their big man Dwight Howard who made more news off the court then he did on the court this year.   First he wanted off the team then he wasn’t sure then he wanted off and finally he wanted on.  We couldn’t keep track of what he wanted as it seemed the story was changing every other day.

And those aging Lakers are leading the more youthful Nuggets 3 games to 2.  The Lakers have a solid 1 2 big man punch with Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum, but still on any given night we can see Kobe jack up more shots than both big men combined.  The Lakers bench play is also very weak and provides little scoring or depth.  The Nuggets don’t have any go to player, they rely on a bevy of players to contribute and need someone to step up every night in order for them to have a shot.

The prediction here at i P2P4U is that the Spurs will face the Heat in the NBA finals with the Spurs keeping Lebron championshipless.  The Spurs have the best bench in the NBA (against a Heat bench that has had numerous jokes made about it this year).  Spurs in 6 games.

While the football forums grow in popularity, exposure, and membership it will be interesting to see how many stay alive.  A large number of live streaming sports sites have been shut down by the government due to posting links to live streams which is said to be illegal.  While there has not been a court case yet that we can find at P2P4U, it should be interesting once the first case does come to court to see what the ruling will be as they will have a very large impact on the football streaming forums and sports sites.  As of right now, there have been websites taken offline before an actual trial is had which seems to be counterintuitive to the way the legal system works.  Anyhow, football forums are here and for now they are here to stay so enjoy watching the live sports online.

How streaming sports online is technologically possible is a question many had years ago, but nowadays most people take it for granted.  The process can be broken down into three parts.  A person must have access to a broadcast, this can either be through the most popular form which is their cable tv channels, it can be through items they find online, or even a video that they have at their house.  An application will take the broadcast and break it down into tiny bits and transferred them across through a medium, such as a P2P application or an internet streaming website.  When received on the other end, the pieces will be connected back together and form the stream that the viewer sees in front of them.  There are not many requirements for a person to stream a sporting event.  The streamer would need a high speed internet connection, something like a cable modem or DSL through the phone lines would be ideal.  If a person has the dial up modem circa the 1990′s then streaming sports is not going to be an option for that person.  Besides the high speed connection the person needs to find a program to use to stream the sports.  There are many standalone applications that can be used or there are many websites that have the software integrated into the site.  You may just need to install an add-on that will interact through your web browser to work with the stream and send it over to the site.

There are normally a few steps a person must go through to set up a stream.  With P2P4U net you would need to send your stream to a third party site which will broadcast the stream.  A lot of the popular third party sites like Justin.tv or UStream.tv now limit what can be streamed because many streams were not supposed to be rebroadcast.  When the owner of the broadcast complains to the site, the site must comply and take the stream down or they can face consequences.  As a result, many of the sports streamers now stream their games through the lesser known streaming sites on the internet.  This has resulted in it becoming harder for the game’s owner to identify where the stream is occurring and getting it removed.  As sites fall off the map there are always new streaming sites that pop up.

While it has not been released yet how the suspension lengths were determined our best guesstimate here at P2P4U is that the NFL reviewed some of the games and possible injuries as a result of hits from these Saints defenders.  Since Vilma received a year long suspension you could guess that one of his hits on a player may have been viewed as a direct correlation to the bounties offered.

The Saints has a prolific offense but their has been where they need to step up.  The suspension of Vilma will definitely hurt the Saints in 2012 as he was their starting linebacker and definitely a player that was considered one of their top guys on the defensive side of the ball.  Whether the Saints decide to move someone up from their second team onto the starting team or if they will go and sign someone or trade for someone is yet to be seen.

While the action of wanting to lay out big hits and knock players out of games is common in the NFL and not a surprise to anyone, putting a bounty on this is what caused the NFL great concern.  NFL contracts are not guaranteed (the non-guaranteed portions that is) so causing someone a serious injury could result in them losing substantial income and their livelihood.

It will be interested to see how the Saints respond to start the season after the trying offseason for them.  They open the season at home and while they will surely put up points on the board the question is how much Bountygate has hurt them on the defensive side of the ball.

In other New Orleans news there was news out that the Saints GM had the ability to listen in on opposing teams.   Whether or not the GM actually did do this, or solely had the ability to do so if he wanted to is unknown and the NFL is most likely trying to gather all the facts and interview people before making any decisions concerning this.

A lesson to be learned for all other NFL teams, all it takes is one person to slip and mention something and your house of cards can come crashing down.  Teams should take a harder look at their actions and behaviors because even if you consider people in your inner circle of trust today, tomorrow they may be outside the circle and find some loose lips.