Each week Jon Marthaler bakes up a delicious batch of links for you. Other times, you can find him here. Jon?

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I have just been made aware of the trailer for "Goon," a movie starring Cottage Grove native Seann William Scott as a slow-witted bouncer who becomes a hockey goon. I am aware of two decent hockey movies ever - "Slap Shot" and the first "Mighty Ducks" movie. (I'm still peeved that the unspoken subtitle of "Miracle" was, "The story of how Herb Brooks and three guys from Boston won a gold medal, with the help of a bunch of Minnesotans who get two minutes of combined screen time." Yes, I'm a bitter, parochial lunatic. Sue me.) And now I can't decide if I hope this movie is the third decent one, or not.

Since I'm your typical paranoid hockey fan, I'm just as concerned about the wider public's opinion of this movie as I am about my own opinion. I'm afraid that this movie will spend two days in theaters, sink like a rock, and be out on DVD three weeks later, thus proving that even a hockey movie with Stifler can't succeed even on a limited scale, because nobody in the country cares about hockey. I'm also worried that it will be a success, even a small one, because any non-hockey fan that sees this movie will assume that hockey is UFC on ice - a little bit of exhibition skating in between bare-knuckle brawls.

This sort of seems crazy to me: I want you to like this sport, but not for the wrong reasons. But maybe this is a common thing; if you took a friend to see a band you loved, you wouldn't want that friend to say, "I don't know about the music, but I like that the singer's wearing red shoes." You would feel like your friend had entirely missed the point, and what's more, you wouldn't be able to argue with him without sounding like a crazy person.

I guess my point is this: instead of trailers, theaters should be required to show ten minutes of clips like this one.

Anyway, on with the links:

*The Division 3 football playoffs start today. The Minnesota representatives, St. Thomas and St. Scholastica, meet in the first round at 1:00 in St. Paul. It is supposed to snow. Somehow, this feels right. In celebration of this, here's a long Shawn Fury interview with Pat Coleman of D3Sports.com. Coleman is the guy who manages to keep track of a division that has 25 conferences that get automatic playoff bids, plus a bunch that don't - sort of like the BCS at 100 miles an hour and with no national TV contract.

*I know how we love invented stats on this blog. Chase Stuart at Smart Football has come up with rather a good new stat: rating run plays in the NFL based on a fairly logical definition of success or failure.

*The Sports Media Watch blog wonders: given that six companies control most of the TV in this country, and four of these have relationships with the NBA, how much unbiased NBA lockout coverage are we really going to get?

*And finally: I had no idea that the scheduling in men's professional tennis was this goofy.

That's enough for this week. As mentioned, we in the metro area are scheduled to get our first shot of snow this year. I'm looking forward to driving in it, and to my annual first attempted stop of winter, when I temporarily forget what I'm doing and slide gracefully into an intersection. It should be fun.