It would appear that Neo Jarod is able to throw a football tens and tens of feet and have it land somewhere near where he wants it to! From the look of Coach in
today’s strip, this is not a common occurrence. I’d be more impressed if Jarod wasn’t using some kind of a Dragonball Z powerup in panel 1 to get the job done.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Oh, this should be good. “Hey kid, you want to join the team? I’ll drive every bit of spirit out of you than blame you for my failures as a coach; it’ll be fun!”
so bathack going to show he know nothing about football
So Jarod is the Tatum O’Neill of the 21st century. What a surprise! A thirty four year old guy can throw a football, and now Westview wins against Big Walnut Tech!
Can somebody please introduce Bull to a salad?
And whatever happened to John Darling’s daughter, the woman whose father John Darling was murdered? TB did a Sunday flashback strip about him back in June and its been completely forgotten. Why introduce new stock characters like The Subway guy and leave other story lines ignored?
Okay… now his hair resembles that Nic Cage “Bird Hair” meme.
Man, all this sudden plot development is just so jarring after all those months of near-total inactivity. A new character, things happening…it’s almost too much to absorb all at once. I mean the whole “troubled kid has major league talent” trope seemed so obvious that I’m actually kind of surprised that he did it, to be honest. I suppose this could go in any number of directions, maybe a lengthy arc featuring academic scandals, sanctions, Les, Nate, Bull, championship games and such. Or it could end tomorrow with Jarod telling Bull to go f*ck himself. Or TB might drop the story cold, go do something else for a while, return to it later or maybe never mention it again. You just don’t know with this thing.
Still, as, uh…”borrowed” as this is, it’s still refreshing to finally have something happening in this f*cking thing. Whether or not he can sustain it is another thing entirely, though. These complicated (chortle) arcs wear him out pretty quickly these days, witness the two month crash after the Frankie thing ended. Or then again maybe he was just (guffaw) pacing himself.
I find it more entertaining to imagine that it’s Doctor Strange in panel one, and he’s throwing the Jewel of Cyttorak over to Iron Man in panel two, and in panel three we see Stan Lee’s cameo. Because otherwise this comic just drains the life out of everything.
“How could you throw a pass like that?” says Bull. Then a realization dawns. He gets out his wallet and waves bills around. “Okay, everyone, I want you all smoking five packs of Marlboros a day! Apparently all those ‘smoking-is-bad-for-you’ messages were just a load of Cyttorak!”
Is Bull surprised that Jarod threw such a great pass, or surprised that his team member caught it? Wait… the team member didn’t actually catch the ball yet in Panel 2, therefore I will assume that he missed it badly. In fact, I will assume that the football collided with his helmet and he is now lying in broken heap on the grass.
Well Batiuk is actually using a ‘teenage’ character with a name for several strips. Of course that teenager looks nothing like a teenager, this situation is incredibly contrived and it could have just as easily used actual members of the team, but hey at least it’s actually not just using teens as something to respond to what the adults do.
I’m not all that into sports – is there a positon in football in which a trench-coated player stands smoking in one spot, occasionally pausing to hurl a football a great distance? Because this guy would be GREAT at that!
With the lung capacity of a small rodent and the coachability of a young Al Capone, what could go wrong by starting J-Rod at quarterback on Friday night?
Actually, I think that this arc is BatBoy’s way of saying that football players are nothing special. With the team shitty as a case of Nut Boys, a random hoodlum casually throws farther and with greater accuracy between drags on a cigarette than anyone ever did for Coach BB. “What is this queer shaped ball?” J-Po queries. “Git it away!” and he flings it. Hours and hours of practice and the team remains incompetent, and then this most distasteful of creatures demonstrates for us all that it is Random Talent that makes a good athlete. Batboy’s contempt for men’s athletics continues unabated.
On one of those past “freaky Fridays” when eddies in the space-time continuum cause the characters to speak to one another, little Billy in Family Circus said he thought reading Dilbert was like prison “because you get three squares a day.” I thought two of today’s squares were drawn with excellent incorporation of perspective. The third square is an unfortunate close up of Coach’s amazed blubbery face, which spoils the effect. But who didn’t see this coming?
I’m with Epicus Doomus on this.
Sure, we could remark about how hackneyed this whole undiscovered athlete storyline is, but is it not better for TB to use other people’s well-worn tropes than to continue to wallow in his own tropes of misery, comic books, misery, and “substantial issues”?
When you start ripping off plot lines from “Gil Thorp,” it’s time to retire.
As long as TB is stealing, he should steal from “Hoosiers” as well. Jarod can’t play football because his widowed mother won’t let him. It will be up to Coach Bull to seduce mama so that Jarod can play and win a championship for good old Westview. Gene Hackman can play Coach Bull in the movie…oh, wait…
Okay, so apparently we are made to swallow that J-Rod has the arm of Daryle LaMonica, and the accuracy of Kurt Warner, and playing football on the Westview team was never a consideration???!! Potential scholarship money, chicks and a pro-career never rang a bell with anyone?
I know Gil Thorp struggles with this, but by golly I’m gonna rip Funky Winkerbean on this trope. One of the big things that come out of gym and phys ed classes is that coaches who teach these classes actually get a chance to see if there are some kids that might be right for certain team sports. So unless J-Rod skipped every single phys ed class or just took fucking archery every time..someone should have seen his arm.
Heck J-Rod had to have learned proper passing technique from some football experience whether it be pass and throw camps or Pee Wee football.
I think this just proves what we already know…
1. Bull Bushka is as bad a program manager as he is a coach.
2. Nobody in Westview has any desire to succeed in life or help anyone else succeed.
As for stealing, there’s definitely a Heathers element here, too. Guy in a trench coat orchestrates weirdly erotic football player teen suicides, maybe? I gotta motor or I’m gonna be late for that funeral.
So is Bull going to hire Walter Matthau to coach this kid?
“Uh, gee, thanks, but considering that you benched the last ‘star quarterback’ this school for the championship game for some incident that one of your teachers probably blew out of proportion as to what happened, I’ll pass – or, in this case, not pass.”
I just had an awful thought….what if this whole plotline is just the prelude a retelling of the Lisa rape story? With J-Rod as FTR, Goth chick as Lisa and Owen and/or Cody as Les Moore.
Hey, FoxDeLuxe has a point over on NJ. Remember a strip or two ago when Bull said this Jarod had detention with him “tonight”? Look at panel 2 of this strip. Does that look like nighttime to you? Sure doesn’t to me.
Judging from the way the stripes are marked on the field, Jarod just threw the ball about 40 feet, since footballs fields are typically 53 feet wide. It looks longer since he is throwing to a giant.
“Judging from the way the stripes are marked on the field, Jarod just threw the ball about 40 feet, since footballs fields are typically 53 feet wide. It looks longer since he is throwing to a giant.” —
It is longer. Bull has laid out the field 90 degrees off kilter so his offense has to go only 53 feet, not 100 yards, from goal to goal. Sadly it has not increased scoring. Jarod is in fact throwing out of what would normally be the end zone, but is now the sideline.
Maybe Frankie the Legitimate Rapist can come back and do a reality show about the Columbine Kid and his amazing arm!
“Hey, FoxDeLuxe has a point over on NJ. Remember a strip or two ago when Bull said this Jarod had detention with him “tonight”? Look at panel 2 of this strip. Does that look like nighttime to you? Sure doesn’t to me.”
Teachers work bankers’ hours. Anything after 2:30 pm is “tonight”