This Week In GIFs: A Man’s Pants Fall Down, And Other Tall Tales

Welcome, friend, to the fourth installment of THIS WEEK IN GIFs, in which we review the greatest animated sports GIFs from the past week and vote on our favorites.

Today we have a healthy crop of eight GIFs. And lucky for us, our own Matt Ufford and Dan Rubenstein have offered to kick us off with some expert analysis of these GIFs. Take a look:

(Via Ricky O’Donnell)

Chyron typos are nothing new. What is new, as far as I’m aware: a real-time correction. This GIF gives me the image of a producer desperately flying across the SportsCenter studio to slam the backspace key on the console. Like, literally flying. It is a spaceship.

(Via Chad Moriyama)

Oh goodness! It’s Animated GIF Hall of Famer Shane Victorino! Put on some tea, won’t you? I’ll fetch an extra chair from the study. Yes, yes, the hour is late, and the children are in bed. But let us be neighbors. Let us make some time for an old friend of mine.

I think that home run distance should be assessed as [ball distance]*[bat distance]. This ball traveled 17,000 feet.

(Via Mike Prada)

“Oh man,” said ESPN’s scoreboard operator. “He just rose up and stared down KG. That was radical. Two points for him.” The Heat ended up winning the game, 13 billion to negative-boogers.

It’s like the Heat are in a Sears portrait studio and Kevin Garnett is a prop or something. He’s even in the same position as the last GIF!

Anyway, here’s the thing about LeBron James’ personality on the court: He’s always busy. Pretty much always too busy to screw around. Watching LeBron, I sort of get that feeling you get when your friend in high school gets his first job and you go to visit him. You think he’s going to hook you up with a free Arch Deluxe or let you walk around in the back or something, but he’s too busy to goof around or even acknowledge you.

That’s why this was so weird. LeBron just lets it all at once, going all AH HA HA HA HA HAAAAAA while holding the basketball aloft like the skull of his vanquished foe. Poor Frederick Basketball. He died too soon.

(Via Baseball Nation)

I’ve watched this GIF 20 times and I still can’t figure out how the dude’s pants fell down. I’m not an authority, though. I’ve been out of the cargo shorts game for a long time now.

The interesting thing is that even as he raises the ball in triumph, he clearly expects his shorts to fall down, because he’s holding them up with his left hand. So he’s been in public for hours, knowing his shorts could fail him at any moment? That’s, like, the penultimate level of Personal Inconvenience Hell. (The ultimate level is being in public for hours and hours and suffering from extreme allergies without anything to blow your nose into.)

This is magical. I mean, this is an entire tree of GIF goodness, so pick from whichever branch you’d like. I’m over here appreciating Manu’s insistence on chucking the ball to his teammate as he falls. Like the ref’s gonna declare he was fouled in the act of passing, and allow Manu to stand at the free-throw line and complete two dead-ball passes to his teammate on the baseline.

This isn’t a five-second loop. This GIF is actually six hours long. It’s just six hours of Joe Smith trying to enter the game, manager Manny Acta telling him no, and Smith sheepishly hiding only to re-emerge. It’s really cool. After a while the sun goes down and all the fans leave and everything, and this shit is still going on. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to.

VOTE!