Sports

Most. Overrated. "Dunk." Ever.

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So I’m watching the NBA Dunk Contest and I see Dwight Howard put on a Superman getup and cape and try a dunk and everyone is proclaiming it the greatest dunk ever while the judges are giving it all 10s, and I’m thinking, How is it the greatest dunk ever WHEN IT WASN’T EVEN A DUNK?

So today I’m watching ESPN and I’m hearing that other people are pointing out it wasn’t a dunk and I’m relieved that other people feel the same way I do. And just now I hear ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike on SportsCenter claiming it wasn’t a dunk because it was somehow BETTER than a dunk!

And that snaps it into focus for me. No one’s getting at my REAL problem with this “dunk”. Namely, that even if it was a dunk it’s not that great of one.

First, let’s consider why it ended up not being a dunk. Namely, he doesn’t quite fly enough to reach the rim, so he has to throw it the rest of the way and hope it goes in. He not-dunks it because he’s not good enough to real-dunk it! Now, you might say he throws it with such force and power that that’s what Mike and Mike meant by saying it was better than a dunk. You’re entitled to your opinion. But WHEN YOU PUT ON A SUPERMAN CAPE IN A COMPETITION THAT REWARDS HIGH FLYING, I EXPECT TO BELIEVE YOU CAN FLY! IF YOU CAN’T EVEN REACH THE RIM, THE SUPERMAN CAPE HAS ONLY CREATED HIGHER EXPECTATIONS AND IS ACTUALLY A DETRIMENT TO MY OPINION TO YOU! IF YOU’RE GOING TO PUT ON A SUPERMAN CAPE THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS ACTUALLY REACH THE RIM!

Second, let’s say he DOES reach the rim and throw it down. Take away the Superman cape and what do you have? A rather pedestrian dunk! So far as I can tell he wasn’t intending to do anything special with the ball. He was going to catch it, head up to the rim, and dunk it. It’s essentially the basic alley oop with a running start. There is no way that cuts it in the dunk contest! That’s about as basic a dunk as you can have when you have someone passing you the ball! That’s not worthy of all 10s by a long shot!

(By contrast, how does Gerald Green’s cupcake dunk not only fail to get all 10s from the judges, but actually receive an EIGHT from Darryl Dawkins? Darryl’s a hater! Darryl’s a hater!)

Also, TNT is owned by Time Warner. Superman is owned by DC Comics which is owned by Time Warner. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. At the very least it helps explain why the “dunk’s” shortcomings were ignored entirely by the TNT crew. I guarantee you that if he’d put a Spiderman costume on, the TNT crew would not be creaming themselves nearly as much over the “dunk”.

Thoughts on the Super Bowl of the Ultimate Answer

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I was going to write a post that explored what might have happened if Brett Favre hadn’t thrown an INT in OT of the NFC Championship Game, which would have basically resulted in the greatest Super Bowl in history no contest, but I came under the weather in the middle of last week, and I can’t really concentrate on much of anything under such circumstances.

As it is, this game is definitely one of the greatest Super Bowls in history, but I’m not sure it’s the hands-down greatest. Part of it is also part of the reason I didn’t want to coronate Super Bowl XXXVIII, which XLII is definitely greater than: the slowness of scoring in the first quarter, in this case the entire first half and third quarter, during which most of the scoring effectively came in the first quarter.

But another part of it? No one (well, maybe except people in the Big Apple) is going to remember this Giants team as Super Bowl champions, unless maybe they turn it into a dynasty of their own. They’re going to remember them as the team that dethroned the perfect Patriots.

The story writes itself fairly well, but I just can’t shake the feeling that the better team did not win this game – that the Giants are champions more by dint of their role in a fantastic story, one that really stretches out over the whole season, than by any actual achievement. Part of it is the rather nondescript nature of the Giants. There’s a definite story surrounding Eli Manning but he needs to show that he really does have his brother’s genes in subsequent seasons. It’s nice that Michael Strahan, Plaxico Burress, and company get rings, but none of them are stars the way the quarterbacks and, sometimes, backs and receivers are. Green Bay would have had a better story: Brett Favre winning a Super Bowl in the twilight of his career and almost certainly pulling a Jerome Bettis afterwards. (Which is why I have less of an issue with the Steelers’ Super Bowl XL win than the Giants’ win here, despite the officiating controversies in the former game and the fact that I myself am a Seattlite.) The Cowboys… well, if this were a youth league or even college, a Cowboys-Patriots Super Bowl would basically have been a ready-written sports movie. But the Giants… the Giants are boring. Let’s face it.

About today’s strip: I did, of course, make the strip before the game, but it did cross my mind that the Giants could win the game. I decided I would keep the first panel regardless of the outcome because… well, you’ll see when you see it.

I personally would have preferred a Pats-Packers Super Bowl…

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I mean, that would have basically guaranteed the best rating in Super Bowl history, right? A quest for perfection combined with the most popular and revered QB in America who might have a chance to end his career Elway-style with a Super Bowl win? Over a team a significant proportion of the country does not like because they think Tom Brady is too much of a celebrity, Bill Belichick is too inhumanly cold, and the whole team cheats. (As recently as Christmas I got a comment attacking me for my Patriots Run to 19-0, which has been updated by the way. Belatedly.)

Why I haven’t put up the results of the Golden Bowl (and a few other news and notes)

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Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t posted the results of the first Golden Bowl between LSU and USC, and it’s for the same reason I decided to drop the SuperPower Rankings. The Golden Bowl tournament turned out to be a lot less fun than I had hoped.

For almost every game, I had to pore over the numbers and probably reached a lot of wrong conclusions. I found myself breathing sighs of relief when the two people who voted on the second and third rounds agreed. It wasn’t as time consuming as the SuperPower Rankings but it left me with a sense of dread entering each round.

I had been planning on having a grandiose, John-Facenda-esque description of the Golden Bowl, but I barely managed to work up the knowledge or desire to write any description at all throughout the tournament. I have a feeling I would have fallen well short. Not only is a college football playoff far from an original idea, but others are doing much of what I intended to do a lot better than I would have.

That said, unlike the SuperPower Rankings, I’m still doing this next year. I like the Golden Bowl name, I’m hoping Da Blog grows enough in the next year that I won’t have to break ties at all, and I feel that a lot of simulated playoffs or proposed brackets blindly follow the BCS standings. I’ve heard it argued that a plus-one system would have ignored Georgia or USC in favor of Virginia Tech or Oklahoma; what that ignores is that a plus one would have forced the pollsters to pay more attention to the top four the way they pay attention to the top two now, which likely means Georgia would have gotten past V-Tech or the Sooners, since they arguably had a stronger case for a national title shot than either. (Yes, I know V-Tech was my number 1 seed.) A true simulated playoffs that follows close to what the reality probably would be should follow the NCAA guidelines.

So, this ends the brief spurt of productivity from Da Blog from football. Sure, we’re a few steps away from the Super Bowl – the Patriots just blew past their 17th team, as reflected on the site – but that’s a fairly small part of what we do around here.

No, don’t run away! Come back! I know a lot of you are here for the football, so what can I do to get you to stick around?

Well, let’s start with my 100 Greatest Movies Project, which has been described in the past on the off chance you came here before it was cool. If you happen to be a fan of the movies, and not just the standard popcorn fare but all the classics from Hollywood’s golden age to the present day, I could use you to explain to the masses why they better recognize. If you want to write tributes and descriptions for Hollywood’s greatest films, let me know in the comments or at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.

But I have another plan to induce the teeming masses to come here. And stay here. I have plans for a new regular feature that I have high hopes for, one that could potentially attract a much larger audience than what I’ve achieved so far. One that could start as soon as tonight.
What is it? Well, let’s just say you can expect to see a lot of this sometime soon:

The final college football rankings of 2007 (and other musings)

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I’ve kept track of who won my College Football Rankings for three years, counting this year. The first year, the title went to Texas, as my rankings correctly predicted the winner of the national title game. The second year, it went to Louisville as the Big East got disrespected.

This year, West Virginia’s beatdown of Oklahoma threatened to topple them, but for two out of three years, the BCS and my rankings agree on who is the true national champion: LSU.

Longtime readers know that I have, on occasion, remarked on the standing of professional sports leagues and their market penetration, this being an example. I’ve realized that I haven’t had any words on Seattle’s long-time-coming MLS team, which will result in an uneven distribution of teams between Eastern and Western conferences. Seattle bypassed Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, and former MLS home Tampa Bay to put the league’s 15th team in the #14 media market. But being a Seattleite myself, and especially being the son of a soccer fanatic, I’m actually a little surprised MLS didn’t come here sooner – this area is one of soccer’s few homes to truly devoted fans, and MLS is sure to carve a niche should the Sonics move. It’s like having a hockey team in Buffalo – there aren’t going to be a lot of people, but boy will they be devoted. The only possible objection I’d have is that MLS didn’t try to re-establish itself in the South, especially with the WNBA putting a team in Atlanta. But I’m sure they’ll do that in a matter of years to put the league at a nice, round 16 teams.

By the 2000 definition, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, and Miami are the only larger metro areas without an MLS team. I erred on my earlier post on the Atlanta WNBA team, where I said that Seattle had been the largest metro area with a WNBA team but no MLS team; not only does that honor also go to Detroit, but Detroit wasn’t even dethroned by Atlanta. Phoenix would have inherited that crown had I been right.

A Confession

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As I’ve said before, it’s a bit of a chore to put out the SuperPower Rankings each week. Therefore, I have made an important decision:

I will not put them out this week.

There’s even less impetus this week than there normally is, I’ve delayed it to Friday already, and there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to do over the vacation that I haven’t done, which the SuperPower Rankings would only delay.

But if you want to put together some ratings yourself, look at the following URLs:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/powerranking
http://www.sportsline.com/nfl/powerrankings
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/powerRankings
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/dr_z/01/02/rankins.part1/index.html
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/2007-power-rankings.htm
http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=331743
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ys-rankings010108&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
http://www.nbcsports.com/portal/site/nbcsports/menuitem.26521619de8457ec32288a6f8a3c2d04/?vgnextoid=af1c7e8491615110VgnVCM10000082c3d240RCRD&vgnextfmt=default

I still like the idea behind the SuperPower Rankings, but I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I might. Let’s move onward into the NFL Playoffs and whatever else we look at on Da Blog from here on out.

The 2008 Golden Bowl – Setup

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Once again, I had one easy selection and one in which I had to make the tiebreaker:

LSU v. USC
Once again, what home field gave to Georgia in the Capital One Bowl, it took away in the Rose Bowl. A ten-point win for USC gives the Men of Troy a game… has it really been five years in the making? Yes, it’s exactly the same national championship game we thought we’d get at the start of the season, but how we got here is another matter entirely.

Simply put, this is a battle between the solid LSU offense, keyed by a strong running attack… and one of the toughest defenses in the country.

But LSU is no slouch of a defense. In total yards allowed, it’s third and USC is second. If the old adage – “defense wins championships” – is true, this game will certainly prove it. And perhaps the only reason LSU trails USC is because LSU had to come out of the SEC… not to mention its high-powered offense… and the game, like the real national championship game, is in New Orleans…

Polls close 8 PM PST on Monday.