NFL

Did I just fall into the Twilight Zone?

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One minute I’m thinking Jay Glazer’s report/opinion piece predicting a Favre comeback merely reflected disgruntled Vikings who didn’t like their quarterback situation and maybe didn’t quite understand the circumstances and reasons why Favre wasn’t already there, didn’t quite understand that Favre wasn’t any ordinary free agent. I wondered if ESPN’s obsessing over the story was related to its willingness to give Glazer credit for it instead of saying “ESPN’s Michael Smith reports…” and whether ESPN was setting up Glazer to get maximum egg on his face when the report proved spurious.

The next, Favre not only signs a contract with the Vikings, he shows up at training camp and is going to start the next preseason game like he was always there?

I mean, within 24 hours, we went from Favre being retired and in Hattiesburg, to being at training camp and the No. 1 QB on the depth chart without even throwing a practice pass.

Did history somehow retroactively change on everybody?

No more calling out the mainstream media for Favremania, mmmkay?

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The Jets released Brett Favre from their “reserve/retired” list yesterday, an auspicious move considering so far as I can tell players on the R/R list don’t count against roster or salary caps, but ordinarily a fairly routine move, at least for any player not named Brett Favre.

So naturally you’d expect plenty of “does this mean he’s thinking of coming back?” speculation from ESPN and the like, and you’d expect the blogosphere to do plenty of “there they go again, obsessing over Brett Favre” and thumbing their nose because they’re so above that…

…hold on, it appears the number 1 topic on SportsCenter’s “Blog Buzz” segment this morning was Favre’s release. Seems not even the blogosphere is immune to Favremania when a plane traveling between Minneapolis and Hattiesburg and back again sends them going “OMG OMG OMG IT ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH BRETT FAVRE BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN ALL OF HATTIESBURG THAT EVER HAS TO TRAVEL OMG!!!!!11!!1!!!eleven!”

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… another retype. I thought I made myself immune to this bullshit.

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If the Super Bowl were covered the same way the NFL Draft is:

  • It would last two days.
  • It would be covered by TWO networks.
  • It would be preceded by a five-hour pregame show. Same (or less) than now, right? Well, there would be pregame shows on both networks.
  • One of the two networks would have analysis throughout the entire game on a sister channel.
  • There would be cameras inside each team’s locker room which each broadcast could switch to whenever they needed to, AND cameras inside the houses of players who could be called in at any moment to fly to the game and pitch in for either team.
  • There would be in-game interviews with coaches and team executives, and an interview with one player after every play either early or late in the game.
  • Each network’s broadcast team would include an expert who has analyzed every single play each team could possibly use during the game and has drawn up a “mock game” scripting every move of the entire game (or at least the first quarter).

On another note, Al Davis is now officially certifiably insane.

Something I’ve been meaning to say since the news broke.

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There’s been a lot that’s been said about John Madden’s retirement, and I could repeat everything that’s been said about how beloved he was (not so much in my household, but that may be because he made all the obvious things he said obvious) or his alleged man-crush on Brett Favre or his impact on football and the broadcasting profession or his retirement’s impact on NBC, the NFL and its network, and the careers of Cris Collinsworth, Al Michaels, and Frank Caliendo.

But let me just say this about replacement Collinsworth.

NBC was caught off guard by Madden’s retirement, but they were not caught unprepared.

That said, I have to agree with what Curt Smith had to say about Harry Kalas: “[Collinsworth] will succeed [Madden]. None will replace him.”

A simple game of connect-the-dots.

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How was it possible that despite a far less compelling matchup than last year, including the until-recently laughable Arizona Cardinals, the Super Bowl still drew a bigger audience than last year?

Amidst people crowing “when it’s the Super Bowl the teams are irrelevant”, I was wondering why more attention wasn’t paid to the surprisingly large female audience – which seemed to explain the large audience but gave me more questions than answers. Where did all these women come from all of a sudden?

I may have a partial answer, at least. (Courtesy Fang’s Bites.)

Another thing about the Super Bowl that NO ONE has noticed…

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Everywhere I’ve gone, starting with the announcing team itself, people have lamented that if James Harrison’s long touchdown run to end the first half was called down at the 1, time would have run out and the play would have been for nothing.

Um… has anyone actually seen the play, and watched the clock, and the exact moment when the clock ran out?

THERE WOULD STILL BE ONE OR TWO SECONDS ON THE CLOCK! Watch that clock in the video below!

Quick thoughts on the Super Bowl

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  • If I were putting together NBC’s opening sequence, I would have made a few more changes to the opening song. For example, instead of “waiting all day”, how about “waiting all year”? And how can you pass up the fact that “forty-three” rhymes with “NBC” and so could have been inserted into the song with few other changes? You won’t get anything like this until Super Bowl 70!
  • I hate to disagree with Roger Goodell, but this game did not top last year’s game. This game does have the advantage over Super Bowl XLII, and XXXVIII, that the first half was not boring as hell. But while this game did produce some landmark, all-time Super Bowl plays, those individual marks can’t really compare with a great game – this game was just like any other Super Bowl from a pre-game angle standpoint, unlike XLII, and the Cinderella team didn’t win, which hurts its standing – in fact I was rooting for Pittsburgh to pull out the win just because it would have been too bizarre otherwise. There are in fact some similarities with XXXVIII, another game people wondered about being the best Super Bowl ever. One of these days I need to go over the game film, or at least the NFL Films distillations, or even compact game stories, of every Super Bowl and rank the greatest ever. FSN’s “The Sports List” did a ranking probably around the time of XL, maybe even before XXXVIII. Obviously, that list needs a serious update.
  • Is it too early to start talking about Ben Roethlisberger’s Hall of Fame credentials? Remember, in the lead-up to the Super Bowl people were talking about Kurt Warner’s Hall of Fame credentials now that he had reached three Super Bowls with two different teams. Now Roethlisberger has been to one fewer Super Bowl and won two, becoming just the tenth QB in NFL history to do so, and not completely throwing up in the second. Not to mention his leadership in the regular season. If there’s a knock against him it’s that he’s leading a team composed of a bunch of parts that might win Super Bowls without him, but then again that was the knock against Tom Brady for a while as well. If he so far as makes one more Super Bowl, is he a shoo-in for the Hall? And is it possible that his final drive in this game, which had Steve Young positively salivating on ESPN’s NFL Primetime, is the one that puts him in the Hall?
  • Speaking of ESPN, and lists, about your “Top 10” Super Bowl plays: Your own analysts, who clamored for Manning-to-Tyree to beat out Roethlisberger-to-Holmes for , are correct. What you should have done was rank the Harrison INT return significantly further back, in the middle or even near the back, since it was one of those sideshow gimmicky plays that come out of the blue every once in a while in the Super Bowl. By ranking it , you forced the Holmes play to to avoid consecutive plays from the same game. Probably the main reason you rated the Holmes play was because it actually scored the game-winning TD, but it arguably makes Manning-to-Tyree greater that it attained such greatness without actually scoring. (Incidentially, initially I rendered “Holmes” as “Burress”. What does that tell you?)
  • Am I the only one who noticed that the clock briefly stopped at two minutes left in the game when Roethlisberger barely got a play off, then started again as the clock operator realized there was a play going on, and the discrepancy was never corrected? How might that have influenced Arizona’s final drive? The game-ending fumble would have only occured with two seconds or so left on the clock! You think Arizona would be working a bit quicker? And am I the only one who thinks that on the play to the 5 on Pittsburgh’s final drive, the main reason the Steelers called a timeout was that the receiver (I think it was Holmes) was a little lazy getting back to the line of scrimmage, as though he didn’t quite realize the situation? The Steelers might have needed that timeout to set up a field goal with a few seconds left on the clock if the Cardinals had been able to get a stop. I think there was one other “Am I the only one who noticed that” in there, but damned if I can remember it now.

I have plenty to say about the ads in a later post, where I hope to hand out awards for the ads, and some comments on NBC’s modified banner for the game, which is also an opportunity to talk about ESPN’s new tennis banner it broke out at the Aussie Open. There were a LOT of great ads in the second half of this game. Lineal titles updated for the offseason.

More football than you’d ever expect two days before the Super Bowl

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(Editor’s note: This post was  reconstructed from scratch because WordPress’ importer missed it the first time through. I don’t think any comments were left with this post but if there were I apologize.)

Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated uses the Arizona Cardinals to back the BCS, or at best a plus-one, in a column on SI.com. In his eyes, if the Cardinals could tank once they cinched their division and then rendered their mediocre regular season irrelevant in the playoffs, what’s to keep Florida from tanking before the SEC Title Game, or Virginia Tech from rendering irrelevant their mediocre regular season and cruising to the Golden Bowl in Cardinal-esque fashion?

You know I’m a staunch backer of an 11/5 system for college football. While Mandel makes a compelling argument, I think it falls flat for a number of reasons. Ignoring the tanking-Florida argument because I’ve covered it before, it’s worth remembering that V-Tech wouldn’t automatically get a home-field seed just for winning a mediocre conference, meaning the confluence of good fortune that assisted Arizona would need to be significantly greater. Even with a home field 8th seed, V-Tech would either need three games to go their way (not two as Arizona needed), or make their own luck twice (not once as Arizona needed). That’s before considering how much home field has been diluted in the NFL, which you can’t say about the famous college football crowds.

I have more in my comment to the Bleacher Report article that tipped me off to Mandel’s article.

Meanwhile, the college football rankings are finally up, as are updates to both lineal titles.

Because I just wasted my free time on my first day back at school…

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…this is the only post you get from me today.

Because of all my college football stuff, I’ve sort of been growing distant from the NFL Lineal Title (the Colts’ long reign hasn’t helped). During the before-the-bowls interregnum, I’ve been neglecting to update it at all. That changes now. However, the college lineal titles aren’t updated until after the National Championship.

Da Blog’s Predictions for 2009

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Because a lot of sites I visit are putting up predictions for the new year, so am I, and I’ll check back in at year’s end to see how I did:

  • The year in sports is a massive disappointment. The Super Bowl pits the Dolphins against the Vikings. North Carolina, after an undefeated regular season, loses in the Final Four and the national championship pits UCLA against UConn. The game is a laugher. Cleveland beats San Antonio in the NBA Finals; the Knicks just barely miss the playoffs and LeBron James signs a contract extention to stay in Cleveland after winning his first championship. Mike D’Antoni agrees to a buyout soon thereafter to coach LeBron in Cleveland, condemning the Knicks to a decade of mediocrity. The Stanley Cup Playoffs pit the Calgary Flames against the Montreal Canadiens, and America tunes out. So does Canada when it turns into a four-game sweep that’s not that close. Neither the Red Sox nor Yankees make the ALCS, and one of them misses the playoffs as Tampa Bay and Philadelphia square off again in the World Series.
  • Tiger Woods comes back too soon, finishing second in the Masters, and misses most of 2009, raising concerns he may retire. Jimmie Johnson wins yet another Sprint Cup in a laugher, and by the end of the season he’s winning races basically by showing up, with all the teams quitting. Rafael Nadal is the only player to win at least two majors of either gender, and Roger Federer never makes a major final. USC, Cincinnati, and Alabama are the only three undefeated teams by week 4; they stay that way through the end, and USC routs Alabama in the national championship. There are no BCS buster mid-majors. At least one minor league cancels either the 2009 or 2010 season, and at least one MLS team folds. The IRL cuts back drastically on the 2010 season, and doesn’t so much pass NASCAR as NASCAR passes it backwards. By 2012, though, the IRL is back to 2008 levels, and returns to ESPN in 2018. UFC effectively becomes NASCAR’s replacement as one of the four major sports, and shows it wasn’t moving to pay-per-view that killed boxing.
  • The Olympics moves to ESPN and ABC after landing in Chicago. NBC immediately pulls out of the NHL following the 2009-2010 season. ESPN becomes the exclusive cable home of the NHL (beyond NHL Network) after 2011.
  • The Saints challenge for the NFC South, and the Lions are at least respectable. Brett Favre retires and the Jets become the new Lions. Matt Cassel bolts from New England to join the Jaguars, who instantly become a Super Bowl contender. Tom Brady comes back a clearly different player, and the Pats begin a slow slide into mediocrity. The Cowboys self-destruct and don’t even challenge for the playoffs. The Titans trade Vince Young to Houston in the offseason.
  • Barack Obama finds himself frazzled by the vexing economic crisis and various foreign crises. Troops are out of Iraq by June, but by August Iraq is effectively ruled by several cabals of warlords. Obama uses the money freed up by exiting Iraq to institute his own version of the New Deal, but it doesn’t work very well. Meanwhile little actual “change” happens, even from the politics of the last eight years, and when Obama calls in the military to break up a food riot in November, many in his own party compare him to Bush, and the “netroots” begin forming their own nascent political movement for 2012.
  • By 2012, that movement has gained enough steam to attract attention (and support) from both major parties. However, the economic crisis has only gotten worse and the US has effectively become a vassal state of China… and the Republicans, as a result, prove far more resilient than expected after adopting a bizarre fascist-anarchist policy, a strange kitbashing of the politics of Ron Paul and George W. Bush. Before 2020, World War III has erupted, and America is Nazi Germany after the GOP win the 2012 elections, the last to be held under the Constitution of 1776. The 2016 Olympics become America’s 1936 Munich Games, and come complete with a past-his-prime Michael Phelps being dragged back to the pool. The world comes out of the war with the economy back on track, but set back to the Middle Ages if not before. China, India, and Japan become the new “modern” world powers with Depression-era technology, set back from reaching 1950s-era technology by the ravages to the environment. The Amazon becomes a desert; Canada and Russia become the world’s new breadbasket.
  • The Internet undergoes its latest metamorphosis. By the end of the year, it is as good at watching video as the average television. In the short term, it only benefits from the deepening economic crisis. When the Obama administration passes a universal broadband bill, it sparks an Internet revolution, and blogs become the new MySpace, since you can at least theoretically make money off them. Internet advertising finally becomes viable, if only because nothing else is.
  • Webcomics undergo an explosion during this time. A Penny Arcade TV series is commissioned for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block by year’s end. By 2010, a Girl Genius movie is in development, and rumors of an Order of the Stick movie persist as well. Sandsday becomes the biggest new thing in webcomics, and by year’s end I’m fighting off TV series offers of my own.
  • Da Blog attracts two huge followings in particular: people looking for webcomics criticism, who singlehandedly make it ten times more popular than Websnark ever was, rendering my getting a real job unnecessary, and people looking for straight-dope political analysis. Da Blog plays a significant role in attracting new audiences to politics, healing the rifts of our political landscape, and shaping the aforementioned nascent political movement.

And that just left me incredibly drained and depressed. I think it’s better if I don’t try to predict what happens, and just try and enjoy the ride. You should try it some time.