Let's hear it for the bench.

​In my season preview for the Houston Rockets, I cited the current portion of the season as the "make or break stretch" for the team -- a six-game road trip against a bunch of pretty-good-but-not-great teams followed by a six-game homestand against mostly good teams.

And once the season started, and the Rockets evolved into a fairly predictable group, essentially knocking off bad teams and struggling against good teams, this current road trip looked even a little more daunting.

But don't look now, after losing to Minnesota in the first game of the road swing (the infamous "Kevin Love Using Luis Scola's Face As Welcome Mat" game), the Rockets have won three in a row and the last two have been in a highly improbable fashion.

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The play worked as designed, on both sides.

​I got home from my show this afternoon and, having just finished up talking about sports for five hours, I did what I normally do -- turn on one of the sports channels on television.

Luckily (or perhaps not so luckily, if I had any designs on being productive), I stumbled across a marathon of Sound FX on the NFL Network. For those of you that are unfamiliar, Sound FX is a no-narrator, field-level version of game highlights where usually a handful of players/coaches are wired for sound.

It takes the game and turns it into a virtual drama, turns the players into characters and sucks you in like a mosquito to a blue fluorescent light. It is awesome.

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Milo: He's baaaack

​In sandlot football growing up, we always had a saying after touchdowns that "losers walk," meaning the team that scored stays at that end of he field to kick off and the "losers" on defense have to march to the other end of the field to receive.

So it's probably appropriate that, due to the NBA calling a presser to announce the 2013 NBA All-Star Game's coming to Houston, the Astros had their scheduled lunchtime news conference today moved at the last second to a 10 a.m. brunch instead.

While the Rockets have been no great shakes lately, they haven't come close to the recent futility of the Astros. So in the battle of dueling pressers, the Astros had to move things to 10 a.m. Losers walk.

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NBA All-Star time already?

​Go ahead and chalk up the NBA All-Star Game taking place in a few weeks (Sunday, February 26, to be exact) in Orlando's Amway Center as the next "feels weird" moment of the NBA season. It feels like the season just tipped off a few weeks ago and yet here we are, about 20 games in, deciding who the best of the best are for the 2011-2012 season.

It's like The Bachelor making Ben decide who he's marrying after the opening cocktail party and one group date. I mean, do we really know who is most deserving? Truth be told, do we really know after the 40-some odd games we get most seasons?

It doesn't matter. On February 26, there will be an All-Star Game, and in it there must be players. Here are my picks if I had a vote for the reserves in each conference:

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Gisele's next step: Calling in to sports-talk radio.

​A good woman stands by her man.

Prior to Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday, Gisele Bundchen, supermodel and wife of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, e-mailed a prayer request out to many of her close friends and family:

"My sweet friends and family,

This Sunday will be a really important day in my husband's life. He and his team worked so hard to get to this point and now they need us more than ever to send them positive energy so they can fulfill their dream of winning this Super Bowl.

So I kindly ask all of you to join me on this positive chain and pray for him, so he can feel confident, healthy and strong. Envision him happy and fulfilled experiencing with his team a victory this Sunday."

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Kelly Clarkson: Take the under on anthem length.

​Finally, the Super Bowl is upon us, and when you head out to that neighborhood party this Sunday, you may need some fabricated incentive to have a rooting interest in the game. I get that.

Sure, you can do it the ultra-lame way by buying a couple squares for five bucks and hoping that you randomly secure the second digit of each teams' score at the end of each quarter. (And I mean ultra-lame with a capital ULTRA.)

Or you can get your sports fan pick-me-up through the exotic world of proposition wagers, a much more civilized, intelligent, "thinking man's" way to amp up the intrigue-o-meter.

So without further ado, here are a few of my favorite prop bets for this weekend and my pick for the game:

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The ultimate dis, Super Bowl LXVI-style.

​So here we are, it's Thursday of Super Bowl week and we've had almost nothing to dig our teeth into from a story line perspective. I warned you earlier this week that it would be this way.

Hell, when news came down today that Rob Gronkowski would be a gametime decision because of his high ankle sprain, SportsCenter interrupted their regular news flow as if there was an end to a hostage crisis.

In short, this Super Bowl hype buildup week has been BOOORING.

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Deontay Greenberry: No way of telling

​There was a time not too long ago when the last-minute defection of wide receiver Deontay Greenberry from my alma mater Notre Dame to the University of Houston would have sent me into a mental funk that would have taken me a week from which to recover. After all, Greenberry is a dynamic "four star recruit" who "almost got a fifth star from Rivals.com."

And if that previous sentence and all of its mentions of these mythical stars makes no sense to you, consider yourself lucky.

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I wake up at about 4:15 a.m. each weekday morning to head to the studio and do my radio show on 1560 The Game (also, shameless plug, simulcast on television on Comcast 129), so many nights I go to bed before the sports world has shut it down for the evening.

My tool to catch up on things when I wake up, not surprisingly, is Twitter, so when one single event dominates my Twitter timeline for the better part of a couple hours of the timeline, I know I missed something.

Last night, I missed the Clippers' Blake Griffin's eviscerating dunk on the Thunder's Kendrick Perkins. Fortunately, between the magic of YouTube and an apparent bet in the ESPN newsroom on how many times they could show it in one SportsCenter broadcast, I got caught up fairly quickly.

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Jock talk radio: Few surprises.

​Super Bowl hype week is underway, and I know that many of you will be consuming sports talk radio this week in an effort to get ready for the big game. (I know many of you won't be, and I understand that as well. I hate me some me sometimes, too. It's okay.)

The general public service announcement that I'm about to give you probably consists of things you already know, but, much like reading the nutritional breakdown on the side of a box of double fudge ice cream, sometimes you need to be reminded that you are about to consume something that just may not be good for you.

I'm not telling you don't consume it, I'm merely doing the noble thing by laying out the facts. So here are my general "sports talk radio" warnings for this week:

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