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You can e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach individually.
For those who don't have ESPN Insider, every single grade is between a C and a B+. It's the old "on a scale of 4 to 7" spectrum. Thanks Mel! See you in 363!
NFL Draft time. That's right, you heard me. NFL Draft.
Remember May 1 of last year, when dak pointed out that Mel Kiper Jr. gave every team a grade between a C and a B+?
Mel did it again. This year, no one was worse than a C- and no one was better than a B+. The article should be titled "On a scale of B to C, how gutless is Mel Kiper, Jr.?"
---
So here we are. 2008. Mel Kiper Jr. sits down at his Apple Lisa (he's old-school) to write his annual Draft Day grades column -- the single most-read piece of writing he'll do all year. He digs deep in his soul to assign the most perfect letter-grade assessment of each team's performance on this, the day he was born to live, experience, and grade. Draft Day is Christmas, the Super Bowl, and 9/11 all rolled into one for Mel Kiper, Jr. Mel Kiper, Sr. put him on his knee when Mel Jr. was a boy and told him, "Son, there is a sport called football where grown men play a pushing game involving an oblong fun-ball. You will not be one of those men. There will also be men who select the best among these other men, the best 'football players.' You will not be one of those men. You will be the man who judges the men selecting the other men. You will write one article a year that anyone will read, wherein you assign a letter grade evaluating the performance of the men selecting the other men. You were destined for the role of giving these grades. Your mind will be honed like an ancient Indian arrowhead to pierce, with laser-like intensity, the precise letter grade zone that each selecting man deserves."
And Mel Kiper Jr. nodded, for he knew what his father said was true.
And then on April 28, 2008, he would give 31 out of 32 teams between a B+ and a C-. Because everyone pretty much did an "eh" job. Like every year. Except the Chiefs. They get an A -- Mel's first A in the three years we've been tracking this!
If Mel Kiper, Jr. were a college professor, at the beginning of the year he would hand out a piece of paper explaining his grading system:
HDTV Was Better When It Was Called "Ship-to-Ship Semaphores"
Anti-modernization tracts are pretty much our bread and butter here at FJM. Rarely are they this multi-grained and buttery. Hit it, Frank Deford.
Possibly because I'm scared of technology, I'm not always pleased by what are called "advances" in our society. Sometimes I think we were better off in more innocent times -- which is, to say, back when I could understand stuff better.
At least he admits it. One point for admitting it. Deford 1, Sanity 0.
Actually, I consider myself secular Amish.
Admitting it again doesn't get you a second point.
Synthetic rackets pretty much ruined the beauty of tennis. Children have no business swinging lethal aluminum baseball bats. Now there's even talk that a new bathing suit made by Speedo, in which all sorts of swimmers are setting world records, constitutes "technological doping."
The tennis racket argument is one to which I weirdly subscribe. I used to follow tennis fanatically. The first time I ever voluntarily woke up early was to watch Breakfast at Wimbledon when I was like 7. But the other things...aluminum bats is a cost issue, I think, for little leagues and colleges and stuff. The bathing suit thing...? Never heard of it. How much of an advantage can a speedo be? Does it have an outboard motor attached to it? (Hope it's not an inboard motor! Hey-oooo!) (Ouch! Now that's what I call a "close shave!" Heeeyyyyy-oooooo! )
What were we talking about? Oh yes. The Unabomber was giving us an anti-tech panegyric.
You know what's even worse? Technology has made it so there are so few surprises left in the world. Is that really an advance? Parents know whether their baby is a boy or girl long before it's born.
Yes, we should all be like the peasants, and birth our babies in the fields, and decorate our nurseries in gender-neutral yellow. (You do know you can opt not to learn the sex, right? It's a choice. Choices are usually considered good things.)
You can tell who's calling you on the phone before you answer.
I'm calling bullshit louder than I've ever called bullshit in my personal history. Is there a single person on this crazy blue marble we call "Earth" who does not like caller ID? Caller ID is the greatest thing in the universe. How many unwanted calls have been avoided thanks to caller ID? A hundred billion? Does Frank Deford not know the specific pleasure one has when one looks at one's phone and sees "Work" and rotates one's Blackberry toggle wheel thingy to "ignore?" Does Frank Deford prefer -- when awaiting an important call -- to answer his ringing phone and hear the voice of a representative from Wachovia Bank who wants to know if all of his investment needs are being met? I ask you, people -- does Frank Deford not have one crazy ex-girlfriend?
The real joy in taking photographs was that you didn't know how they turned out 'til you got them back from the Photo Zip a few days later. Of course, some of the pictures were awful, but what's the fun of taking only safe shots instead of snap shots.
I measured the decibel level at which I called bullshit on the caller ID thing, and I am now buying a second amp and a kick-ass tweeter, and I am paying some very pricey A/V guys to install this equipment with like 6"-diameter cable connecting everything, and I am inventing a new kind of megaphone that has its own internal volumizing booster, and I am doing all of this in order to call bullshit louder than I just called bullshit on that other thing, because: are you fucking kidding me?
Listen, man -- I like nostalgia. I think there are certain aspects of our pre-internet days that were preferable to their modern counterparts. (For example, baseball cards were much better in the 1980's than they are now. Upper Deck ruined everything.) But taking pictures of important events in your life and then driving somewhere and dropping them off and then waiting a few days and then driving back and picking them up and finding out that half of them were out of focus and the other half sucked? This is not one of them.
Digital cameras are way better -- for the average non-professional, at least, which is all I can speak to -- than film cameras. Easier to use, cheaper to use, faster to use. If you are being driven crazy because you can't remember who played Hunt Stevenson in the TV version of "Gung Ho," IMDb is better than the old method: just going fucking crazy and never coming up with the right answer. (Which is: Scott Bakula.) That's the deal, man. Not everything newer is better. But a lot of stuff is.
Maybe that's why sport gets more popular all the time. It's about the last thing we have that still has some suspense to it.
Tell that to Obama and Clinton! (Political humor. Topical. Relevant.)
And that's why I can't stand the National Football League and National Basketball Association drafts. What disappoints me so about these protracted selections is that fans don't want surprises in the draft. Really, they don't. They want to look into the camera and see the picture before it's taken.
Is this true? I'm seriously asking. I don't feel this way. I don't like to know what I'm getting for Christmas, I don't like knowing plot twists in movies, and I don't particularly like knowing whom my team is going to draft. If I'm a Dolphin fan right now, I'm happy, because Long seems like a good bet. But I'm a tiny bit sad, because the wrapping is off the present on Dec. 23.
For weeks now, leading up to the real NFL draft this weekend, all sorts of self-appointed experts have been creating so-called mock drafts, and basically, they're all the same. Oh, some bloviator might have this linebacker going third and that one pegs him fourth, but it's pretty much the same names at the top.
That's because the 25 or so best players in the draft are pretty clear every year, and the needs of the 32 teams are pretty obvious, and the trends of the GMs of those teams are known quantities, so...people can predict things, kind of. Still, nobody nor his mother saw Ted Ginn, Jr. going #9 last year, did he or her?
The fans get brainwashed, and so if their team should dare take somebody who wasn't touted by the echo chorus, they have a fit.
Do they? Again, I am asking. I think fans have a fit because they are diehard and/or drunk, and use the draft to take out their frustrations on their GMs. Jets fans just seem to take out their frustrations, period, no matter whom they pick. I don't think it's always because the pick was unexpected or something.
Mock drafts become the reality that reality must accommodate itself to. It's like in school now, where children study how to take tests rather than study how to learn something.
An elegant analogy, but I'm not sure it's an apt one. Because again, I disagree with the central premise here -- that any variance from Mel Kiper's Mock Draft 16.0 drives people crazy. I think the fans are super knowledgeable and get upset when a team reaches too far, or skips over someone who they think could help them. Sometimes they're wrong -- amazingly, Mario Williams might end up being a better #1 overall than Reggie Bush, and who the hell saw that coming (if it indeed happens)?
It's also terribly ironic. Football fans always want their team to go for it on fourth down instead of punting, to take risks on the field, but when draft day comes they're all conditioned by now to be completely conservative ... lemmings.
Going for it more on 4th down -- last year's Super Bowl 4th and 13 abomination be damned -- seems to be a better bet than most coaches think. And again, I just don't think people freak out on draft day because of conservatism instilled in them by mock drafts. I think they freak out because people freak out about the things their football teams do.
And, of course, draft mistakes are legion. But draft-guessing has become a cottage industry, and essentially these seers are graded on how they assess the draft, not how their top selections actually play football after they are drafted. It would be as if you judged your stock broker on how well he picked the most popular stocks, not how well he chose stocks that actually went up in value.
Being a New England Patriots fan, I can definitively say that we judge Scott Pioli and Bill Belichick on how the guys play on the field. I was shocked when they took Ben Watson in the first round. I was surprised when they went with Maroney. But I didn't really get upset...because I am not an insane person who judges books by their covers. (Except for this one, which you can clearly tell is going to be awesome just by looking at it.)
I sometimes have the feeling that the more film we have of these players, the more sophisticated technology to study them, the less we know, both about the players being chosen and the professionals who choose them.
How can that be? Seriously. Even metaphorically, how can that be? You're telling me that today's GM knows less about Chad Henne now than he would have in the 1970's? How? Why? When? Which? Whap? Worf?
Football people have guts. I think, though, that too few of them any longer dare possess gut instinct.
There you go, NFL GMs. Ditch the scouting reports. Throw away the tape. Ignore the needs of your team. Put the blast shield down and use the Force to deflect the little laser blasts from the training drone.
(Yeah -- that's a ST: TNG reference and a Star Wars reference in the same post. Sometimes I play into the blogger stereotype. Deal with it.)
I want to educate on the "aluminum bats". They are, usually, cheaper than wood...the really crappy ones that is. I don't think that's what he meant, though. The alloy bats, the ones that are standard at the high school level and increasingly popular below that, are MUCH better than wood and aluminum. besides being lighter and weighted for performance, the metal itself generates a "pop" that you don't get in wood...aka hitting is much much easier.
It's also really fucking expensive and prices out any lower middle class family. So if you're poor you won't hit as well. Rich kids always win in America though, i think that's going on the new dollar coin or something.
The Small Sample-Sized Revisionist History Chronicles
In a few hours, the New American Awesomes will play the New Jersey Somethings in the Super Bowl. The Awesomes are 37-point favorites. Is it possible that Somethings’ QB Ed Manning will lead his team to an upset victory? Of course. This is the NFL, where even the surest of sure things has maybe a 70% chance of winning.
And if that happens, it will help the Somethings believe that they weren’t completely violated by the Chargers in the 2004 draft-day trade that gave them Ed Manning and gave San Diego every other great player available in the next two drafts. I mean, we all agree that Shawne Merriman, Philip Rivers, Nate Kaeding, and another choice that led to acquiring Roman Oben > Ed Manning, right?
Every angle says Giants, Eli are winners in big trade
Let's begin this debate about who won the Eli Manning-Philip Rivers mega-deal -- the New York Giants or San Diego Chargers -- with an e-mail from one of the smartest general managers I have ever been around.
Sounds good. If you're going to try to prove that the Giants somehow got the better end of the deal, I guess a quote from a smart GM is a good place to start. Whose unbiased opinion did you solicit? Scott Pioli? Kevin Colbert? Bill Polian?
Giants GM Ernie Accorsi.
Oh. You asked...the guy who did the trade for the Giants. That's smart. If you want an objective opinion on something, ask the dude who did it.
Though Accorsi is of course biased,
Stop right now. Stop writing this right now. You just typed the reason not to write this article. Stop. Stop immediately.
everything he states in the following e-mail is accurate. It makes the best case on why the Giants won that deal -- basically Manning for Rivers, Shawne Merriman and kicker Nate Kaeding.
And a 5th round pick that they traded to the Bucs for Roman Oben, who anchored the Chargers' O-line in 2004 and served as a mentor for all of their young draftees.
Since kickers are a dime a dozen the deal is basically Manning for Rivers and Merriman.
A dime-a-dozen kicker who has hit 87% of his field goals and scored 480 points in 4 years. But okay, let's just ignore him.
Not only did the Giants win the trade, they won easily. Here is Accorsi's reasoning and why I think he's right, run in its entirety with only punctuation and spelling corrections added.
Nice. Make the expert you're about to cite sound like a dummy who can't spell.
The e-mail began with me asking Accorsi what made him so convinced Manning would be worth the draft picks New York gave up to get him.
"We thought he was the best of the three then (Rivers, Manning and Ben Roethlisberger) and we think he's the best of three now," Accorsi wrote. "People who dwell on statistics in football, just cling to them because they can't evaluate QBs.
You corrected his punctuation but didn't get rid of that entirely superfluous comma? Who's the dummy now, Freeman?
The job is QB, not passer. Unitas and Namath didn't have good QB ratings. They threw a lot of interceptions because they took risks and had to carry their teams."
I'm kind of with you. It obviously isn't just about passing. Though passing is a big part of it, I'd say, and Big Ben's 92.5 passer rating is certainly a good deal better than Eli's 73.4. Eli also has more picks than TDs in his career. [EDIT: No he doesn't. I am an idiot. I looked at "long" instead of "INT" on this page. Sorry, Eli fans.]
I know -- different systems, etc. But you'd still take Eli over Roethlisberger? (America's Sweetheart -- are you reading this?!)
Indeed, if I had to choose the better quarterback of the three,
(sic sic sic sic sic sic sic sic sic sic sic)
it would be Manning, followed by Roethlisberger and Rivers. Manning, right now, is the better winner (which does seem insane since only a short time ago people were questioning Manning's leadership skills).
And equally insane when you consider that Roethlisberger has more wins. And that his team went 15-1 one year. And when you consider that his team won a Super Bowl. (Roethlisberger stunk it up in that game, but apparently Freeman doesn't care: It's About Winning.)
But Manning has clearly entered another stratosphere, as sudden as that entrance has been, in terms of those leadership abilities.
"Manning is a winner," continued Accorsi, who is an avid sports historian and baseball fan. "He had proven that in a host of games before this run.
He has certainly improved, yes.
Why do we determine whether pitchers belong in the Hall of Fame based on games won but that is not an ingredient of the QB rating?
1. We shouldn't, really, discuss "wins" as a baseball HOF criterion. 2. You're right that the QB rating is dumb. But: 3. Roethlisberger has won more games than Manning. 4. In the two years he's started, Rivers has more wins and a far better QB rating than Manning.
In my opinion, the QB has much more of an influence on the outcome of a game than the starting pitcher. With six minutes left in the fourth quarter, Eli can't turn the game over to Mariano Rivera. He has to finish the game."
But Chien Ming-Wang can't hand the ball off to Alex Rodriguez and have him rush it up to the plate. Or throw a screen to Jeter and have Jeter rush the ball to the plate and deliver it to Posada by hand. There are reasons why being a QB is harder than being a starting pitcher. There are other reasons why being a starting pitcher is harder than being a QB. But there are many more (and more obvious) reasons why comparing a QB and starting pitcher is dumb and meaningless.
"What difference does it make what we gave up?" Accorsi continued.
...because that's how you evaluate whether it was a good trade. Do you think Brian Sabean is like, "Who cares about Liriano, Bonser, and Nathan? We got A.J. Pierzynski and cash!!!!"
"You better be right about the QB, but if you are, you can't overpay for a great QB and we think he's going to be a great QB. What would you give up for Elway? What would you give for Montana or Unitas? Just like you can't overpay a great player. Can you overpay for Mays or DiMaggio? That's all fodder."
As the great Bard of Avon once said of ladies who doth protest too much: "This is fucking insane, Accorsi."
This is where I disagree with Accorsi slightly. You can overpay for almost any player -- even a Montana or Unitas -- but only if you leave your team barren of talent and draft picks.
They traded 4 draft picks for the pick that got them Eli Manning. Draft picks that were used to draft several excellent players.
An example of this is the Herschel Walker trade. Dallas received six Minnesota draft picks for Walker. Then coach Jimmy Johnson used two of those picks to draft Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith and Pro Bowl defensive back Darren Woodson. Johnson used other picks to make a series of trades to acquire other talents like Russell Maryland. The Vikings were devastated by that deal for years because they drastically overpaid.
The Giants did not give up that kind of talent or picks. Not even close.
Maybe it wasn't that bad. But Merriman might go the Hall someday, if he keeps being the crazy beast he has been so far. Rivers is a solid QB (more solid than Manning, in the last two years). Kaeding hits 87 out of every 100 field goals he attempts. That ain't a bad haul.
My friend Doyel might know college basketball better than anyone, as well as the thug-filled, cracked-jaw-fest that is the MMA, but one thing NFL media rooks like him forget when discussing the Giants-Chargers trade is this caveat: The Chargers wanted fierce defensive end Osi Umenyiora to be included in the deal.
Accorsi said hell no. It was the right move by Accorsi, and Umenyiora has been a force.
If the Twins had asked for Barry Bonds in the Nathan/Liriano/Bonser deal, and Sabean had said no, that would not have meant that Sabean had made a good deal.
Basically, if the Giants had given up Umenyiora, they might have drafted Merriman. What Accorsi said next is interesting -- and true.
"We didn't get Merriman," Accorsi said, "we led the league in sacks. Osi is better anyway."
Osi is very good, yes. But once again, the fact that you didn't include him in the trade doesn't mean the trade was good. And the fact that they might have drafted Merriman if they had traded him is (hypothetical)^2 nonsense.
And as far as we know Umenyiora never failed a performance-enhancing drug test the way Merriman has.
Fortunately for everyone involved, no one cares when NFL players fail drug tests.
"These are the facts, in the fourth year the kid has us in the Super Bowl," said Accorsi.
Is it worth it to point out that Roethlisberger "got" the Steelers there sooner? Probably not. Is it worth it to point out that the comma in that paragraph should be a colon or maybe a dash? Probably. (Click here, Freeman -- it'll help when you want to correct people's punctuation.)
"He had a chance under adverse conditions on the road to win the game to get in the Super Bowl and he did it. The other guy didn't. Very simple. All the other arguments are just reasons to fill air time."
He has had an excellent playoff run. Very impressive. Very much like Tony Eason in 1985-86.
Again, a slight disagreement with Accorsi. Rivers was playing the New England Patriots, a better team than Manning's opponent, the Green Bay Packers. Also, Rivers was impressive by playing without an ACL in one of his knees.
Oh, right -- there's also that.
And in Manning's defense, the physical conditions he played in were far worse than those Rivers faced. Manning's game was the Ice Bowl; Rivers by comparison played in the Nice Bowl.
First of all, excellent Woody Paige-esque writing. Second of all, miserable weather tends to level the playing field, I think. The Giants passed 543 times this year and rushed it 469. The Pack was 578/388. The Giants stood to benefit from the weather. And since they're from a cold-weather city, it shouldn't have bothered them as much as it might have otherwise, like, say, if they were from San Diego. (And also, the Giants' defense won them that game.)
The larger point Accorsi makes is nevertheless valid. To me, we have seen all of Rivers' upside. This is the best Rivers is going to be -- a good quarterback but not great. We might be witnessing just the early stages of Manning's rise from good to outstanding.
In other words, there is far more upside to Manning than Rivers and that in itself makes the trade worthwhile.
I like it when people issue opinions based on very little fact, and then draw conclusions based on the conversion of those opinions into facts.
Rivers might one day reach the Super Bowl, too. I'm just not sure he can. However, we know Manning is capable. There are no more questions when it comes to him.
Rivers has lost twice in the playoffs, both times to the most dominant dynasty in recent football history, both times in close games. This year, he lost by 9 points while playing on the road, on one leg, and with the best RB in football on the bench and the best or second-best TE in football also on the bench. But I guess a sample size of three games -- which contradict a wealth of other evidence -- is enough to declare Manning better than Rivers.
"Milt Davis, a corner who started for the Colts against the Giants in the '58 sudden death game in Yankee Stadium and now owns a doctor's degree, told me 38 years ago, 'Ernie, you judge a QB on one thing: Can he take his team down the field in the fourth quarter, from behind, with a title on the line and into the end zone. That's what matters.' I came (into the league) under Unitas and that's how I judge quarterbacks."
In the Tampa Bay WC game, the Giants were up 17-7 after 3. In the Green Bay game, the winning FG was set up by a terrible Favre interception. And here's the Microsoft-Yahoo! sports description of the game winning drive in the Dallas game:
The Giants trailed only 17-14. After not getting anywhere on their next drive, a 25-yard punt return by McQuarters left Manning only 37 yards from the go-ahead touchdown. He needed only six plays to get it on a 1-yard run by Brandon Jacobs, who celebrated by throwing the ball into the play clock.
There was still 13:29 left, the 92nd between these division rivals but the first in the playoffs. While it got more interesting, the caliber of play didn't improve. Dallas made more sloppy mistakes and New York missed chances for clock-killing drives.
That's all Eli, baby!
He was good in all 3 games, but if you're judging him on Milt Davis's criterion, Eli gets an INC. And for the record, in the Dallas game, after the go-ahead TD, Manning did not attempt a pass. The Giants went 3-and-out with 3 rushes. Then, on their next drive, they rushed twice and Eli was sacked. Fourth quarter heroics!
"All the people that still knock Eli better settle down for a long period of frustration," Accorsi said. "Because as his brother said today, 'Eli is going to a lot more Super Bowls.' Whether people like it or not."
What was it again that Shakespeare said about ladies who doth protest too much? Oh yeah: "Hey, Accorsi -- take it down about 1000 levels."
"By the way, we drafted Rivers in order to make the trade because that is the QB San Diego wanted," Accorsi said. "We would not have drafted (Rivers). If we didn't make the trade, we would have drafted Roethlisberger. He was our second-rated QB."
Your team would probably be better if you had just drafted Roethlisberger.
Did the Giants win that trade with San Diego?
Yeah, they did, and it really wasn't all that close, either.
For the record, you did not write one single thing about Shawne Merriman in this entire article, except that he failed a drug test and that Usi Umeemoyeiyre is better. Shawne Merriman is wicked good. Nate Kaeding is also: wicked good. Rivers is better than Manning. Teams are more than QBs. You are: wrong.
Eli Manning may win a Super Bowl today. If he does, congratulations to him. I think it's probably hard to be the less-good younger brother of a HOF QB, especially when you play in NY. But you just can't say that he's better than Rivers, or Roethlisberger, yet, and you certainly sound like a little bit of a crazy person when you not only say that Eli was worth Merriman, Rivers, Kaeding, and a year of Roman Oben, but indeed that "it really [isn't] all that close." That's bonkers.
For years dumb sportswriters have been declaring certain players (Scott Brosius) "better" than certain other players (ARod) simply because they -- the first certain players (Scott Brosius) -- performed well in the playoffs. This, in the immortal words of nerdbone conservative George F. Will, is nonsense on stilts. I'm glad to see that football writers are finally catching up.
Hate to be a dick, but "nonsense upon stilts" was coined by Jeremy Bentham, one of the greatest philosophers of the last two centuries. Attributing it to George Will is kind of like attributing "veni, vidi, vici" to Ja Rule.
I knew he had stolen it (used it in "Met at Work") but did not know from whom. So: nice, Brandon.
The full citation is Bentham, /Anarchical Fallacies/(Article II), which you can find in vol. II of the Bowring-edited /Works/. He's critiquing the idea that individuals have inalienable natural rights.
If you ever find yourself at University College London, Bentham (himself) is displayed there in a wooden cabinet with a glass front. I'm not kidding.
I am now proud to announce the first-ever use of the "jeremy bentham" tag.
I can't be the only one mentioning this, but it merits mention that while Bentham's body appears at UCL, his head does not. From the UCL Web site:
Bentham had originally intended that his head should be part of the Auto-Icon, and for ten years before his death (so runs another story) carried around in his pocket the glass eyes which were to adorn it. Unfortunately when the time came to preserve it for posterity, the process went disastrously wrong, robbing the head of most of its facial expression, and leaving it decidedly unattractive. The wax head was therefore substituted, and for some years the real head, with its glass eyes, reposed on the floor of the Auto-Icon, between Bentham's legs. However, it proved an irresistible target for students, especially from King's College London, who stole the head in 1975 and demanded a ransome of 100 [pounds] to be paid to the charity Shelter. UCL finally agreed to pay a ransome of 10 [pounds] and the head was returned. On another occasion, according to legend, the head, again stolen by students, was eventually found in a luggage locker at a Scottish Station (possibly Aberdeen). The last straw (so runs yet another story) came when it was discovered in the front quadrangle being used for football practice, and the head was henceforth placed in secure storage.
Next Sunday, it's Either Gonna Be the Patties or the Giants
Neal points us to this article, wherein Wojo revisits his pre-season NFL predictions and determines their accuracy.
Here's one:
If one NFC team is going to shock the world, it's going to be ... the New York Giants. Workable schedule. Desperate team. Quarterback with something to prove. Better-than-you-think replacements for Tiki Barber (remember what Tiki says in those Caddy ads about opportunity?). Understanding, patient fan base. It all adds up to a possible mini-miracle.
Pretty cool, right? Nice work, Wojo! Heres another one:
What is the point -- I say, what is the point -- of making two equal and opposite predictions. You have no chance of getting credit for either of them. At least be the person who gets to write, "What a bonehead I am!" recaps. This way, you just look like a hedger.
(Pitchers and catchers soon, people. Then we can stop writing about football, and start getting real.)
It's time to play no one's favorite game: "Does This Mean Anything?" with Woody Paige.
Simply read one of Woody's complicated, faux-clever, oddly-capitalized pun-tences, and decide whether there is actual, salient, delineable meaning contained therein, or whether it's a smoosh-'em-up of letters which = nothing. Award points based on level of goodness of writing.
Here we go.
Brett Favre committed the Frozen Blunder.
A reference to "Frozen Tundra?" "Blunder" does not rhyme with "Tundra," but it at least has a referent, so I will award Woody .5 of a point.
In Ice Bowl, Too, Favre was neither the star nor a Starr.
I am not sure what rhetorical or stylistic advantage "Ice Bowl, Too" gives you over "Ice Bowl II" or "Ice Bowl Two." It has the appearance of a pun, but it is not, really, anything. Zero points.
"Neither the star nor a Starr" gets a full point, I suppose, though it's pretty lazy.
The Big Chill is not gone from Green Bay.
It was undeniably chilly in Green Bay last Sunday. However, there is no connection that I am aware of between the 2008 Packers-Giants NFC Championship and the seminal 1983 Kasdanian yuppie-celebration "The Big Chill." There is absolutely no reason on earth to cite "The Big Chill" here, and make it seem like it's a clever witticism. Negative 50 points.
The Big Thrill evaporated like a foggy breath in the overtime loss to the Giants.
I don't think there is any such thing as "The Big Thrill." I certainly cannot find any meaning of the term that would lead to it being cited in an article about football, much less in a way that makes it seem like a pun off of "The Big Chill," which itself, again, has nothing to do with football. Unless, of course, Woody is somehow linking the Packers' performance in the 2008 NFC Championship game to the 1989 hard-core porno, "The Big Thrill." Let's see if there is some connection we can draw. I quote from an intrepid IMDb user who has provided a summary:
The "story" revolves around a barber shop where Joey Silvera and Porsche Lynn are the owners, and Nina Hartley, Sharon Kane, Tracy Adams are the barbers, with Peter North as Manuel, the hispanic help. Things are already humid. But when some spanish fly type substance is spilled in the coffee, things really start heating up. Once the effect kicks in, the shop becomes wall to wall sex. It gets going pretty fast, and then there's almost non stop action, with the stunningly gorgeous Nina Hartley, Tracy Adams, and Sharon Kane at the height of their careers.
Huh. I suppose that Woody might have been suggesting that when Favre connected on the 90-yard pass to Driver, it was sort of like when Manuel spilled the spanish fly in the coffee. Then the game got going really fast, and there was non-stop action...but in the end, just like at the end of a hard-core pornographic movie, Packers fans felt depressed, ashamed, lethargic, and angry that they had wasted all that time instead of like reading a book.
It should be noted that these first four examples of Woody Paige's overblown fakey non-language were the first four sentences in his article. Unabridged, consecutively quoted.
The Quarterback, who wanted so badly to return to the Super Bowl, passed so badly at the end.
No reason to capitalize "Quarterback," and the rhetorical link between "wanting so badly" and "passed so badly" is a rope of sand, I say! A rope of sand! (Negative 100 points.)
Ultimately, Favre was outplayed by The Other Brother. Eli's certainly coming.
"The Other Brother" marks the sixth consecutive sentence in this article that has employed an archly capitalized non-phrase. And if there is something to "get" involving the sentence "Eli's certainly coming," I don't "get" it. Negative 10 points.
A crowd of 72,740 convened at Lambeau, Two-Below Field.
Seven out of eight, now, with capitalized phrases.
The lights were off, and nobody was home anywhere else in Green Bay.
This is like how a gay British gossip columnist would write about football.
". . . the last pass I threw in this game . . .," Favre said. In this game or this game? This particular game, or this game of football?
Incredibly ironically, the one time he could actually use capital letters, he decides not to. If he had written, "In this game -- or This Game?" he would not have had to repeat the sentiment in the next sentence in order to get his point across. Mind-blowing. Negative ten billion points.
There was no joy in Green Bay and no "v" in Fare on Sunday night.
I swear I have been staring at this for ten minutes and I do not understand it. If "Favre" were spelled "Faivr," and he said "there was no 'v' in Fair," meaning that, like, life isn't fair or something, okay. But what does the word "Fare" have to do with anything? Someone please help me. Negative infinity points until I get an explanation.
(EDIT: see comments. He still gets negative infinity points. I get negative ten for overthinking it.)
Forty years ago, on a similar climatic (weather) and climactic (drama) day, the city was joyous, and the quarterback was victorious.
This makes sense, at least. But isn't anyone else sick of the overwritten, stop-and-go, "The situation was both (x) and (linguistic variant of [x] with wry [y] meaning)" style? Woody Paige's writing style is the literary equivalent of watching "Cloverfield" in the front row while listening to a book on tape of an Oscar Wilde biography. Plus one point for making sense, minus one point for exhaustion.
Here's one that takes waaaaaaay too long to emerge:
Bart Starr, who was captain then and the honorary captain now, sneaked over left guard with 13 seconds left to give the Packers the right to go to the second Super Bowl.
Favre, who has come through so many times for the Packers over the years and this season, was through after the interception. They had no right in Super Bowl XLII.
You have to work really hard to understand that last sentence. It appears to most normal readers that he is missing the words "to be" after "right." Except that you forgot that the man is incapable of writing anything without like forty puns/linguistic trickeries, and is bouncing the word "right" off of the deadened trampoline of the word "left" in the previous paragraph, which itself was used as the A in the A-B link-up of "left"-"right" in that very same paragraph. Negative fifty jabillion points.
He indicated that for the Packers and their Backers, "Everything had fallen into place, and "all that was left was to play the game." They didn't figure on the Giants. And the Packers fell out of grace.
At this moment I am seriously considering legal action against Mr. Paige, the Post, the citizens of Denver, and Johann Gutenberg.
1. The quotation marks are just all kinds of wrong here.
2. "their Backers" = why capitalize this?
3. What does "And the Packers fell out of grace" mean?
Most of America, outside of New York and New Jersey, planned to go to bed Sunday night dreaming about a Packers-Patriots Super Bowl, but barely could sleep after their night of the Living Dread.
"Night of the Living Dread" only makes sense if you believe that everyone wanted the Packers to win, which, I don't know, did they? And also: stop capitalizing things. Negative five.
Don't pity the Pats. They did their job, although not very efficiently.
Why would anyone pity them?
So it's New York and Boston. It's actually Foxborough, Mass., vs. East Rutherford, N.J., but this is not a geography class; this is the Super Bowl.
You're the one who wrote that. You're the one who named the actual cities they play in. Then you got angry. That makes no sense.
New England: The perfect team in a pluperfect land.
What the fuck are you talking about? Or, in the pluperfect tense: "What the fuck had you thought of before you sat down at your computer, drunk, and wrote this?"
New York: The imperfect team with an improbable run.
And the Packers, as the Chargers before them, were not cool in the cold. Especially Brett Favre.
Many of you have already written in to suggest that "Eli's coming" is a reference to a Three Dog Night Song of the same name. Thank you. And thank you as well to point out that the song is about an inveterate womanizer, making the reference even less applicable.
Also, immediately after publishing this, I understood that in the phrase "There's no 'v' in fare," the "no 'v'" part was in reference to Favre not getting the "v," or "victory." I still think it's odd that he writes "Fare" instead of "Favre." It makes it seem like the word "Fare" is important. I guess I overthought it.
I think. THINK. The "pluperfect" reference has to do with the old (OLD OLD) joke about someone visiting New England for the first time and asking a cab driver where "you can get scrod around here." Answer: "I've been asked that many times, but never before in the pluperfect subjunctive."
Actually, it's kind of a cute old joke. Percentage of readers who have an outside chance to get the reference: .00021. I don't think Woody cares.
I first heard that joke many many years ago, though I heard it as an old man talking to a hooker on the Green line near Copley Square. If Woody is actually referencing this bit of Boston arcana, he gets one billion points.
So I will make fun of this Don Banks article about the upcoming AFC Championship game between the New England Perfects and the San Jose Somethings. This falls under the umbrella statement: "Every time a critic tells you how Team X could beat Team Y in a 'Keys to the Game' type of deal, shit gets stupid."
[H]ere are five things the Chargers need to pull one of biggest upsets ever:
1. LaDainian Tomlinson must be a difference-maker.
The #1 offensive weapon the Chargers have must have a good game. That seems crazy to me, but keep going. 2. A surprising contribution from an unsung player.
He's talking about Billy Volek, if Rivers can't play. So, so far we have:
1. Chargers' running back must be good. 2. Chargers' QB must be good. 3. Keep those turnovers coming.
1. Chargers' running back must be good. 2. Chargers' QB must be good. 3. Chargers force turnovers. 4. Harrison and Seau play more like old Patriots rather than ex-Chargers.
1. Chargers' running back must be good. 2. Chargers' QB must be good. 3. Chargers force turnovers. 4. Some members of Patriots' defense do not play well. 5. History to repeat itself.
He's talking about Week 4 of the 2005 regular season, when the Bolts beat the Pats and broke their streak of home wins. So, to conclude, here are the things the Chargers need, in order to win the game:
1. Chargers' running back must be good. 2. Chargers' QB must be good. 3. Chargers force turnovers. 4. Patriots' defense does not play well. 5. Chargers [make? cause?] history [to] repeat[s] itself.
or
5. Chargers win game, thereby winning game.
Who needed this article to be written? This article is a waste of time. This article is the "liberal use of the 'food metaphors' label" label of "Keys to the Game"-style articles.
Lest You Turn To Slate To Be Your One-Stop Shop For Sports Analysis
It turns out they're not perfect. Robert Weintraub suggests some ways to defeat the Patriots:
Eliminate mistakes: This Patriots dynasty is reminiscent of the 1996-2000 Yankees. Like those Yankees, the Patriots lack a bunch of guys with gaudy numbers...
Tom Brady: 12 games, 41 TD, 5 INT, 70.2% of passes completed, 308 yards per game, QB rating of 123.4 Randy Moss: 12 games, 17 TD, 75 receptions, 94.1 yards per game
Plus Wes Welker is third in the NFL with 84 receptions. If you look up gaudy in the dictionary, you'll find an animated GIF of Robert Weintraub shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head sadly, with the caption "I don't know what this word means."
These are motherfucking record-setting paces, Rob. Graphics comparing these guys to Manning and Rice show up every game they play.
There’s another reason for the Patriots to win them all, one that will loom larger with each passing Sunday. That one has conspiracy types beginning to look under every rock to see if the fix could possibly be in.
Some members of the Baltimore Ravens think so. Hard to fault them after a bizarre series of plays turned what looked like certain victory into defeat and left them fuming at both the calls and the attitude of the referees.
"Hard to fault them?" Hard to fault them. Really. It's hard to fault them for thinking that the fix was in, that the refs got together and decided: "Listen. The NFL wants the Pats to win. And since we are a collection of fatuous corrupt toadies who deny our own free will and responsibility, and seeing as we have no moral center or ethical compass by which we navigate, we will do anything in our power to ensure a safe passage for New England."
Really.
Attention, fucking morons:
The Ravens' coach called the time out.
The Ravens' coach. Not the Patriots' coach. The Ravens' coach.
There is nothing about the action of the referee that could in any way, shape, or form, insinuate that there was a pro-Patriots bias. Because the Ravens' coach called the time-out, and it was granted to him. Because that's how fucking football works.
If the Ravens' coach had called a time-out and it had not been granted to him, and the Patriots had scored a touchdown, then you could jump up and down and put on tinfoil hats and yell about the NFL conspiracy to help New England all you wanted. But that did not happen. What did happen was: a Ravens' coach asked for a time-out and it was granted to him.
Point the second: the penalty call on the next play was "false start." And indeed, if you understand football and watched the play, the Patriots' guard was guilty of a false start. This play, as all adults who watch football know, nullifies the play. There is no play. It is a "no-play" type scenario. The Patriots are penalized 5 yards.
Point the third: on the second 4th-down conversion of the drive, Ben Watson was pretty obviously held. (So was Jabar Gaffney, coming across the middle.) He was held. Flags came in from two different officials. That's how obvious the holding was. He was being held, dummies.
Was this sequence of plays unusual? Yes. Was it the result of a corrupt officiating crew who were paid off with large amounts of cash in white envelopes by guys who look like The Judge from The Natural? You decide!!!!!! (No, turdfaces, it was not.)
“It’s hard to go out there and play the Patriots and the refs at the same time,” cornerback Chris McAlister said. “They put the crown on top of them. They want them to win. They won.”
Grow up, man. Seriously. On the 2-yard-short Hail Mary at the end of the game -- a play which is also somehow being used in these bouillabaisse-of-stupidity articles as evidence of nefarious doings, despite the fact that it was just, like, a football play -- Asante Samuel was literally grabbed by the shoulders and forced to the ground by a Raven receiver. A call should have been made, and was not. It's just football, people.
In a playoff game against the Broncos in January of 2006, Champ Bailey picked off Tom Brady in the Denver end zone, ran it back 100 yards, and just as he crossed the goal line (and started dogging it) he was stripped from behind by Ben Watson. (This led to one of my favorite athlete quotes ever, by Bailey: "It was a great play by me.") The ball looked like it went through the end zone for a touchback, but it was ruled on the field that it went out of bounds, and the Broncos kept the ball and scored. Every thinking Patriots fan in the world bit his/her tongue about this, because we knew that without the Tuck Rule Game a few years earlier there's no Rams-Pats Super Bowl. This stuff evens out. It's sports.
Whining about conspiracies and refs who love the other guy and hate you is something you get yelled at by your dad for doing when you're in little league. Writing articles for mainstream media portals and lending credence to it -- in any way -- is so painfully, stultifyingly dumb it makes my brainpan hurt.
Yes, yes, yes, I fucking know that technically an assistant coach isn't supposed to be allowed to call a timeout. I watched the same SportsCenter/NFL Live shows you all did. Tell me, though, people, did any of you know that was a rule before this game? (Please don't email me if you did.) And does anyone in the fucking universe really think that the ref did something wrong by granting the time out? And does one solitary human being on god's goddamned green goddamned earth think that if the time out had not been granted and the Pats had scored a touchdown that one single Ravens fan in the fucking universe would have said, "No no -- that's fair. Assistant coaches are not allowed to call time outs. That's the right call, there, not to grant that time out. Good work, refs." No, friends, no. They would have screamed so hard and for so long their throats would have shredded into a bloody pulpy mess.
And to the small number of wrong-brained people who have emailed me and pointed out that Bill Belichick was caught cheating earlier this year -- as if that is in some way indicative of a larger NFL-wide conspiracy involving referees in the Baltimore Ravens game -- I say to you: yes, he was. Then he was punished, and then the Pats won 12 straight games with the whole fucking NFL breathing down his neck looking for anything out of the ordinary.
You can hate the Patriots because they're good and they beat everybody and Belichick is a dick and Tom Brady is better looking than you are. But -- and listen to me very carefully here -- you cannot hate them because there is a conspiracy to help them win. Because that belief is childish and mentally deficient and wrong and stupid and reductive and you are an idiot.
Matt points us to this NFL second-half prediction article by ESPN's Jeffri Chadiha. If you total up his final records for each NFL team, you will find that he has predicted that the NFL will go 262-250, against itself.
I think that's unlikely.
This has happened before, over at ESPN. How hard is it, I have to ask, to go game by game for each team and actually make predictions, and then total up what you have predicted? You can't just wildly guess what each team's record will be without figuring out whether it's actually possible.
Or, I guess, you can, and they do. Because they just don't work that hard.
Hey, it's football! Emmitt Smith, Brett Favre had one pretty good game. What's your take on SportsCenter tonight?
Brett Favre has taken very good care of himself and very good care of his arm. He has shown time in and week in and week out that he is the best quarterback that's on the football field today.
The best on the field...tonight? Or today as in today, everywhere in the world, including whichever supermodel's spaceship Tom Brady is sleeping in? Because tonight, okay, he was better than Jay Cutler. But in his first seven games, Favre has 11 touchdowns and 6 interceptions. Through six, his QB rating (an imperfect, weirdly scaled tool, but still) was 87.0. Now granted, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady may have the numbers to show all those things, and last year was a suffering year for Brett Favre and the Packers, but this year is something different.
Yes. It is different. For Tom Brady. Who has 30 fucking touchdowns, 2 interceptions and a QB rating of 136.2 on the year. It's like he's 2006 Ben Sheets and touchdowns are strikeouts and interceptions are walks. Right? Anybody? Anybody?
Looking forward to the deluge of terrible A-Rod articles still to come.
2. Bench Brian Westbrook, obviously. Even if he plays, I don't like an Andy Reid guy who was not in the first two full practices of the week. He won't be himself Sunday against the Leos.
NFL Draft time. That's right, you heard me. NFL Draft.
Remember May 1 of last year, when dak pointed out that Mel Kiper Jr. gave every team a grade between a C and a B+?
Mel did it again. This year, no one was worse than a C- and no one was better than a B+. The article should be titled "On a scale of B to C, how gutless is Mel Kiper, Jr.?"
In-Depth, Substantive Super Bowl Analysis Right Here!
Title is totally inaccurate.
Let's instead look at Bill Simmons' Super Bowl pick from last week, with the obvious caveat that picks are meaningless and no one that I know of guesses the future with any sort of impressive accuracy.
Bill? As for the big game, I'm picking the Bears and taking the seven points. Here's why:
1. As I mentioned Thursday, everyone in Miami seems to be handing the trophy to the Colts already. ... Um, didn't we learn this lesson already from the Saints-Bears game? You never want to be on the same side as the gambling majority. Ever.
Not a football reason.
2. The Bears are staying near the airport (not near anything), while the Colts are staying closer to the beach (and closer to all the trouble). That makes it about 20 times as likely that an Indianapolis Colt will be this year's winner of the Stanley Wilson/Eugene Robinson Award and distract his team in the process. I can't take the chance.
Not football-related.
3. It's been said a kajillion times, but how can anyone be sold on this Colts defense? Against the Chiefs, the Colts stacked the line against LJ and just made Herm Edwards and Trent Green try to beat them. Against the Ravens, they didn't even have to stack the line because Jamal Lewis is so freaking slow, so they concentrated on forcing Steve McNair to make mistakes (and he obliged). Against the Patriots, they gave up 34 points and it would have been more if Troy Brown didn't get flagged for that illegal pick and the fourth-quarter interference against Reche Caldwell had been called. Now you have a Bears team that can pound the ball with two running backs AND has the receivers to throw deep. I know the Colts will stack the line and force Grossman to beat them, but teams have been doing that against the Bears all season -- they always seem to make two or three big plays.
Kudos. Football. Ended up being wrong, but still: football. 4. Peyton Manning's record in big games: Not so good. A little better recently, but still ... not so good. I'd like to see him win one title at the college or pro level before I'm laying seven points with him in a Super Bowl game.
Not really football.
5. Remember when the 2003 Yankees outlasted the Red Sox in that seven-game bloodbath and had nothing left for the Marlins series because it was like they had already played their World Series? I'm not saying the same thing will definitely happen here, but it's worth mentioning the Letdown Potential here. The Colts and their fans just spent the past two weeks breaking out the popsicles and doing the "we finally made it" routine. Meanwhile ...
Baseball. Bullshit Capitalized Theory Reference (Letdown Potential).
6. The Bears just went 15-3, made the Super Bowl and then had to spend the next two weeks hearing everyone take shots at their QB and give them little to no chance of winning the game. They have all the makings of being one of those teams that pulls off a mild upset in a championship game and spends the next few days telling everyone stuff like "Nobody believed in us!" and "The only people who believed we could do it were the people in this locker room," followed by everyone getting annoyed that they won't shut up that nobody believed in them. But it's kind of true. Nobody believes in the Bears. That's the best motivating force in sports. It really is.
Psychology. Come to think of it, 5 was also psychology. Well, I believe in the Bears from Chicago. I see this being one of those Super Bowls that's crappy and disjointed for most of the first half, followed by a point explosion right near halftime and one of those second halves when the teams just trade scores (like the Pats-Panthers Super Bowl). And in those games, either team can win, right? So here are my predictions.
A. Chicago 33, Indianapolis 30.
B. Thomas Jones for MVP.
C. The greatest Manning Face of all-time.
D. A new record for "nobody believed in us" quotes.
E. A dead heat with the Sports Gal (she's one game ahead of me and picking the Colts) that can only be decided with the one sporting event that best determines whether you have a gambling problem: The 2007 Pro Bowl. I'm already giddy.
Of course A. was going to be wrong. No one gets those right. They're a semi-fun (ok, not really fun) waste of time. B. through E. also wrong. Congrats, Sports Guy!
** MEALY-MOUTHED ADDITION **
Just wanted to add that we all understand that hey, Bill Simmons isn't really even a sports analyst, per se. It's almost gotten to the point where criticizing him for his sports-related opinions is like criticizing Andy Rooney's political stances. It's beside the point. He's going for "light," "fun," "entertaining," "pop-culture-y," "fizzy" -- understood. That's why we don't write about him that much.
My question is: how long until he turns into Rick Reilly?
What's even stupider about point #5 in that column is that the natural comparison for that rivalry would be 2004, when the Red Sox staged a comeback to finally knock off their hated rival (who had owned them until that point) and then went on to utterly destroy their championship competitor who came from a clearly inferior league/conference. What do you know, just like 2004, the team from the better league/conference won? Of course, Simmons would never compare the Colts to the Red Sox...
I understand. The Super Bowl is America's biggest sporting event. You're ESPN.com. You're going to run a celebrity picks article.
At what point when compiling this thing, though, do you stop and ask yourself the question "how much is too much"?
Is it after Tobin Bell (Actor, "Saw")?
Al Oerter (Four-time Olympic gold medalist in discus)?
Maybe after you get the pick from Sheila Kelley (Actress/entrepreneur), you're all set. No?
Better go after two guys from Deadwood (William Sanderson and McShane).
Okay, Mike Leavitt (Secretary of Health and Human Services).
Bobby Thompson (Former N.Y. Giants baseball player who in 1951 hit "Shot Heard 'Round the World") and Ralph Branca (Former Dodger who threw the famous pitch to Thomson).
No, no, wait. John Amos (Actor, "Men in Trees").
Fine, ESPN has nothing to do with this article. Says here it's something called "the Scripps Howard Celebrity Super Bowl Poll" and they ask 100 celebrities. John Amos was one of those celebrities.
Since Scripps Howard started the Celebrity Super Bowl Poll in 1990, only one celebrity has ever picked the winner and the score exactly right. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova aced it in 1998 when she predicted Denver would beat Green Bay, 31-24, in Super Bowl XXXII.
I think the problem is they're too strict with their definition of "celebrity."
Do you think Cyd Charisse (Actress) has heard of Alfred Rascon (Retired Army Major, Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient)?
I just looked it up. Cyd Charisse is 85 years old. And she's picking the Bears. ("Bears, 28-21. Chicago is my kind of town!")
