The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

CNNSI ran an interesting piece this week called “25 Things We Miss in Football“, and while it hit on a few things I would definitely have in my own list (Al Davis as a genius, well-dressed coaches, and the Orange Bowl played in the Orange Bowl) there are naturally some missing items.  So to rectify that I’m going to list the things I miss not just in football, but in sports in general.  Let’s take a look!

1. Helmet/Bullpen Carts:  I miss helmet and bullpen carts for a few reasons.  One is the pure fun and novelty of the concept.  I mean, the notion that a professional athlete needs motorized assistance to travel a few hundred feet is laughable on its face.  Still, despite all the cynicism of our modern age I have to think there’s room in peoples’ hearts for sweet rides like this or this.

Secondly, seeing an athlete with a career-threatening injury being carted off the field in what looks like a bizarre amusement park ride doesn’t seem quite so sad.  I’m sure carts like these are still in use somewhere, but not seeing them on the professional level is sad.  (Paul Lukas of Uni Watch wrote a good article on bullpen carts a few years ago)

Read on Daddy-O…

As cynical as I can be sometimes (most of the time), I find my interest in the Olympics is a lot higher than it used to be.  At least for the winter variety.  And now that the 2010 Vancouver games are less than a year away, my anticipation is growing bit by bit.  And I can’t be alone on that.

I’m all too familiar with the host of complaints that accompany the Olympic Games every time they’re held – they divert money that would be better spent on more worthwhile things, local citizens are at best inconvenienced and at worst harassed or violated in some way, the organizers and even some of the athletes are crooked, it’s an antiquated event that has no relevance for our modern, connected world, yadda yadda yadda.

Are a lot of these complaints are valid?  Sure.  I’m not blind to that reality.  Truth be told I don’t know how thrilled I’d be to have the Olympics in my backyard either.  But I honestly think that more than ever we need grand spectacles like the Olympics so that, if only for a few weeks, we can focus on human accomplishment rather than human misery.

Don’t worry, the rest of the world will still be living in poverty and needlessly killing each other when we’re done watching, and we can all go back to feeling guilty and depressed then.  But dammit, I wanna forget about that just for a bit and see some curling!

So despite all the negative press the upcoming Games are sure to receive, I’m on record as being a fan.  Except for that hideous London 2012 logo – holy crap is that an eyesore.

For the past few days I’ve been mulling over this whole Alex Rodriguez steroids story, and the more I think about it the more I just can’t bring myself to care all that much.  It’s not that I don’t think he’s a cheating scumbag and I’m certainly not impressed by his weak defense, which basically relies on the fact that the substances he took weren’t banned by Major League Baseball at the time.  So what?  Then why lie about it to Katie Couric?

Nor am I bowled over by A-Rod’s claim that he doesn’t know what substances he took that caused him to flunk.  Barry Bonds used a similar defense, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.  Am I seriously supposed to believe that a person whose career depends on their body being in peak physical condition would just blindly take substances without knowing what they are or what they do?  I guess in Rodriguez’s mind it’s better to be seen as a total moron than a cheater.  Now he can be both.

Anyway, there is much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands over A-Rod, a player to whom many baseball fans looked at as the “clean” savior that would break Bonds’s tainted home run record and restore some credibility to the game.  D’oh!

So I think that how you feel about A-Rod now has a lot to do with how you feel about baseball in general.  For those who still think of it as some sacred American institution (and that includes all those venerated individual records), Rodriguez’s transgression is yet another gut punch and unforgivable betrayal.

But for those who, like me, view the game mainly as a pleasant enough distraction and good way to kill a few hours on a summer afternoon, the news is met with a collective “meh”.   It’s hard for me to get too worked up over just another miscreant on what is a fast-growing list for sports in general.  Sure, he’ll have to endure endless “A-Roid” taunts this season (from Yankees fans as well as opposing teams’ fans), and the highlight shows will suffer no shortage of fans bringing giant novelty syringes to the ballpark.  But they’ll still pay to see him play and at the end of the day, as long as he’s out there hitting home runs he’ll be forgiven.

It seems the question posed in Gladiator still applies today – Are you not entertained?

Congratulations Okalahoma City!  Your new NBA franchise, the Thunder (née Seattle SuperSonics), is now the proud owner of one of the crappiest and most unimaginative logos in professional sports.

Oh.  My.  God.  If that logo doesn’t scream “Banged out by a student at a local community college’s graphic design program” I don’t know what does.  Reading the press release announcing the franchise’s new name and logo/colors is laughable.  Here’s my favorite part:

With a nickname denoting energy and power, a classic-look logo, and the colors of an Oklahoma sunset, Oklahoma City’s NBA team unveiled its identity today.

A classic-look logo?  If by ‘classic’ you mean ’sometime in the last 5 years’ then sure, it is I guess.  And if the team name is Thunder, why would you want the colors of an Oklahoma sunset?  Wouldn’t the presence of a pretty sunset typically indicate a lack of thunder?

And I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen other logos like it before.  Hmmm…hey, I remember!

So yeah, good job on your new WNBA logo, Oklahoma City.  If you ever change your mind, you can use this logo I designed for you:

Warning: This video is not for anyone easily offended by derogatory words concerning female anatomy.

Curious?  Yeah, I thought so.  I haven’t watched a second of MSNBC’s Olympics coverage, but I think I need to start right away.  Particularly for the “Olympic Update” segments featuring co-hosts Tiki Barber and Jenna Wolfe.  Tiki, as most of you probably know, was a running back for the New York Giants until 2006, when he retired under less than friendly terms with the team.  They of course went on to win the Super Bowl without him at the end of last season.

That’s what Wolfe is alluding to at the beginning of this clip.  Pretty nasty dig for the situation I must say.  But then Tiki took it to a whole ‘nother level with his supposed slip of the tongue.  It’s at the 28-second mark:

Wow.  Just wow.  There is no way that was accidental, and Wolfe knows it.  Notice how she can’t even look at Tiki after his remark.  Now that’s interesting television, people.

After months of speculation, it’s now official – the nearly 20-year radio partnership between Mike Francesa and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo is no more.  Russo reached an accord with WFAN (and corporate parent CBS) wherein he agreed to stop showing up and they agreed to stop paying him, while Francesa signed a new multi-year contract and is for now the sole host of the show formerly known as Mike and the Mad Dog. Honestly, I think WFAN is getting the raw end of the deal.  While Francesa is definitely the more polished broadcaster, and is measurably more knowledgeable about sports in general, he is also half as fun to listen to.  Russo, for his numerous flaws, is more likely to be able to carry a show by himself.  But since Russo is likely headed to a satellite radio gig, he’s pretty much off my radar at this point as I don’t have a Sirius/XM subscription. That leaves Francesa, whose “new” show will be rechristened shortly and will hopefully avoid some awful play on “Mike/mic”.  I’ll probably check it out for the same reason I listened to Mike and the Mad Dog on occasion: FM radio is a wasteland, and I can never seem to get a strong signal from ESPN’s radio station.  But I fear that without the – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – restraining influence of Russo, Francesa will be free to indulge in his most annoying tendencies.  Listeners can probably expect to hear the following:

• Two-hour segments on what Bill Parcells had for lunch, what color underwear Bill Parcells is wearing, and what Bill Parcells thinks of Francesa.
• All on-location shows to be held at Belmont Park.
• Francesa will have to quiz himself on the weekend’s sports TV ratings, leading to the debut of his colorful cast of voice characters.
• Callers will be cut off in mid-sentence so Francesa can explore the lyrics to obscure Bruce Springsteen songs.
• With no more tennis coverage or discussion, there will finally be some time to talk about baseball!

My prediction is that Russo finds moderate success in his satellite radio role, while Francesa is either forced to take a new partner within a year or is out of the afternoon slot.

No matter what poor Aaron Rodgers does for the Green Bay Packers, it’s highly unlikely that he will ever be able to live up to the legacy of a certain quarterback who wore #4 and whose name has been mentioned way too much for my liking lately.

But while most of the media focus has been on the story of another aging star quarterback moving to a new team (invoking names like Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas in the process), what about those like Rodgers, who are left behind to deal with the aforementioned legacies?  While some have managed to step out of the long shadows cast by their predecessors, most have not.  Here’s a sampling:

Scott Hunter, Green Bay Packers – Selected by the Packers in the 6th round of the 1971 NFL draft, Alabama University’s Hunter had the unenviable task of replacing the legendary Bart Starr, who retired that year.  It was Starr, after all, who helped lead Vince Lombardi’s team to dominance in the ’60s, winning five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls.  But age and Lombardi’s retirement in 1968 took their toll on the mighty Pack, and the team quickly descended into mediocrity despite Starr’s best efforts.

With Hunter under center, the 1972 Green Bay squad regained some of their past glory.  They won 10 games and took their first divisional title since 1967, but lost 16-3 to the Redskins in the Divisional round of the playoffs.  They never made it back the postseason for the rest of the decade.

After 1973 Hunter bounced to the Bills, Falcons, and finally the Lions, where he ended his career after the 1979 season.  He finished with a career record of 21-18-3, and threw for just over 4,700 yards.  The Packers, meanwhile, were never more than mediocre for a few decades before head coach Mike Holmgren and the quarterback-who-shall-not-be-named arrived in 1992.

Steve Young, San Francisco 49ers – You may have heard of this guy, as he did one or two good things in the NFL during his career.  You know, seven Pro Bowls, two league MVP awards, one Super Bowl title (two more as a backup) – that sort of thing.  But before all that, things weren’t exactly rosy for this BYU product.  In 1984 Young signed with the Los Angeles Express of the upstart USFL out of college.  His (and the league’s) last season was 1985, where things got so grim for the team that he was forced to play running back.

After a brief and rather inauspicious stint with the Buccaneers from ‘85 to ‘86, Young was traded to San Francisco to serve as Joe Montana’s backup.  It was here that he began to flourish, and by 1993 Montana was history (traded to the Chiefs) and Young was the undisputed starter.  It then took only a few seasons for him to get the proverbial monkey off his back and lead the 49ers to a blowout win over the Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX.

Concussions finally got the best of Young, whose last season in the league was 1999.  While he couldn’t eclipse Montana’s greatness, he left behind a pretty impressive legacy of his own.  He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005 and still holds the records for career QB rating (96.8), career rushing TDs by a quarterback (43), and TD passes in a Super Bowl (6 in XXIX).

Jay Fiedler, Miami Dolphins – Somewhere in between Hunter and Young comes Jay Fiedler.  Fielder entered the league from Dartmouth in 1994 and spent most of his time holding a clipboard with the Eagles, Vikings, and Jaguars (where he got his first start in 1999).  He came to the Dolphins in 2000, the first year of the post-Dan Marino era.

The Fins made the playoffs twice under Fiedler and new head coach Dave Wannstedt, in 2000 and 2001.  The 2000 team finished 11-5, won the AFC East for the first time since 1994, and beat the Colts in the Wild Card round before getting blanked by the Raiders the next week in Oakland.  The team matched their 11-5 mark in 2001 but were suffocated by the stout Baltimore Ravens defense in a 20-3 Wild Card round loss.  Fiedler threw one touchdown and seven interceptions in his Miami postseason career.

Although Miami posted winning records in two of Fiedler’s next three seasons with the team they failed to make the playoffs, and by the end of 2004 both he and Wannstedt were finished.  Fiedler signed with the division rival Jets as an unrestricted free agent in 2005 (as a backup for Chad Pennington) but suffered a season-ending injury in week 3.  He hasn’t played in the league since, while the Dolphins are still looking for a true successor to Marino.

Mark Malone/David Woodley, Pittsburgh Steelers – Four-time Super Bowl champion Terry Bradshaw staggered to the finish line of his career in the Steel City, missing most of the 1983 season after elbow surgery.  His lone start that year (December 10 against the Jets) was his final game, ending a run under center as part of the most dominant franchise of the ’70s.

Cliff Stoudt, who started in Bradshaw’s place during the ‘83 campaign, signed with the USFL in 1984.  So the Steelers opted for a two-headed approach to quarterback in ‘84, and those two were Mark Malone and David Woodley.  Malone had seen little action as a backup since being drafted by Pittsburgh in 1980, while Woodley came from the Dolphins (whom he led to an appearance in Super Bowl XVII just two seasons earlier) via trade after losing his starting job to Dan Marino.

The 1984 season began with Woodley as the starter, but by season’s end the job was Malone’s.  Pittsburgh took the AFC Central with a 9-7 record, won their first playoff game since Super Bowl XIV, and advanced to the AFC Championship, where they were swamped by Marino’s Dolphins.  The pair resumed co-starting duties in 1985, but finished just 7-9 and missed the playoffs.

Woodley unexpectedly retired before the 1986 season, leaving Malone to assume the role of full-time starting QB.  He kept that job until he was traded to the Chargers before the 1988 season, and was replaced by Bubby Brister.  Malone’s final season was with the New York Jets in 1989, where he played just one game.

Woodley, who was 24 when he made his Super Bowl appearance with Miami, never again lived up to the potential he showed when he replaced another legend – Bob Griese.  He fell hard into alcoholism and received a liver transplant in 1992 (not yet 35 years old at the time).  Woodley died in 2003 of complications from kidney and liver failure.  He was 44.

Todd Collins, Buffalo Bills – Despite falling short in four straight Super Bowls, Jim Kelly is to this day an icon in Buffalo.  A few years after he came to the Bills from the USFL in 1986, Buffalo became the most dominant team in the AFC.  It all finally came to end for Kelly when the Bills lost to the Jacksonville Jaguars, 30-27, at home in the Wild Card round of the ‘96/’97 postseason.

At the time of Kelly’s retirement, only Fran Tarkenton, Dan Fouts, and Johnny Unitas among Hall of Fame quarterbacks had passed for more yardage.  His replacement was Todd Collins, who was drafted by Buffalo out of the University of Michigan in 1995.  He had performed fairly competently in a handful of spot starts over two seasons before winning the starting job outright in 1997 (over such luminaries as Alex Van Pelt and Billy Joe Hobert).

Collins started 13 games in ‘97, and threw for 2,367 yards, 12 TDs, and 13 interceptions as Buffalo went 6-10 (their worst record since Jim Kelly’s first season) and finished fourth in the AFC East.  With that, he headed west to Kansas City (the Bills didn’t exactly throw themselves on the hood of his car), where he spent eight years doing little more than taking up space on the Chiefs’ bench.  Collins didn’t play a down until being appointed the team’s #2 QB in 2001.  He finished his Chiefs career with 229 passing yards and one touchdown.

In 2006 Collins signed with the Redskins but again saw no action.  His shot finally came in 2007 when starter Jason Campbell injured his knee late in the season.  Collins rallied the ‘Skins, already reeling from the murder of teammate Sean Taylor, to four straight victories and an improbable postseason berth.

Although the Redskins were pasted by the Seahawks in the Wild Card round, Collins’ accomplishment can’t be denied.  After playing precious little football outside of practices and scrimmages for a decade, he led a team numbed by tragedy to a place few thought they could go.  Although he enters the 2008 season as the team’s backup once again, he was rewarded for his contributions with a new 3-year, $9 million contract.

I’m not sure how things work outside the New York City television market, but we have this annoyingly restrictive setup when it comes to NFL broadcasts.  Whether or not you like the Jets or Giants, they’re almost always the only games you get to watch on Sunday afternoon.  And it usually works out that the Jets game is on at 1, then the Giants at 4.  There are no other games broadcast opposite them, and the networks pretty much never cut away to another game even if it’s a blowout.

What this means is that if you don’t feel like a) going to a bar or b) coughing up some big bucks for DirecTV and the NFL Sunday Ticket package, you’re pretty much screwed.  The situation got a little better for me when I moved to central Jersey about 4 years ago, as I’m now also in the Philly market and get the option of watching Eagles games.  But not much better, as I’m a lifelong Raiders fan.

My worst nightmare, come to life

I’ve come to accept my lot in life, and the fact that any football talk I’m exposed to around here is logically focused on the Jets and Giants.  But I fear that this situation will quickly become untenable, with the recent announcement that the NFL’s premiere drama queen, Brett Favre, was traded to the Jets.

This is not good, not good at all.  To no one’s surprise, the usual legion of Favre worshipers in the media are already working themselves into a nice lather over this momentous occasion.  Witness Sports Illustrated’s Peter King – always good for at least one worthless/ignorant/insanely hyperbolic statement per article – declaring that, “One of the biggest stories in recent sports history just got a lot bigger: Brett Favre is a New York Jet.”

No Peter you giant tool, it’s not one of the biggest sports stories in recent history.  It’s an irritating display of aggrandizement on Favre’s part, and you clowns in the media have been all too happy to help.  It got so bad that ESPN, which fell on the wrong side of the credibility threshold a long time ago, introduced a separate “Favre” ticker item at the bottom of the screen.

I don’t begrudge Favre for wanting to play another season.  Pro sports is not like most jobs – once the window has closed on your useful playing life (which for the majority of players is in their 20s), it’s closed forever.  But this insane amount of press coverage does nothing but reinforce what has to be his belief that the sporting world revolves around him, and that people outside Wisconsin and Bristol, Connecticut actually give a shit what he does.

And so now he comes to the Jets, and the most intense media market in the country.  I will be helpless to escape the gravitational pull of his ego and the obnoxiousness of Jets fans.  And now I have to suffer through the usual game time pabulum like “he’s a real gunslinger” and “look at him, he’s just having fun out there!”.

And just wait until John Madden rolls into town.  I think he may actually spontaneously combust now.  And I may just light myself on fire.  I guess I could always watch the Giants or Eagles instead.

Man, now I’m really depressed.

If there’s one event that affords Americans a chance to revel in both an overinflated sense of our importance in the world and a near-total ignorance of just about every other part of the globe, it’s the Olympics.  And while the sight of the American flag and the sound of a canned rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” will likely be fixtures at this year’s Beijing Games (we are sending nearly 600 athletes, second only to China), there are a lot of countries that are simply mathematically unlikely to bask in the glory of the medal podium.

So in honor of those lesser-represented nations, here’s a little game to test your knowledge of them.  The flags here are of countries sending fewer than 50 athletes to this year’s Olympics.  Answers are at the bottom (no cheating!)…

A)

B)

C)

D)

E)

F)

G)

H)

I)

J)

And the answers are:

A) Ecuador
B) Iceland
C) Thailand
D) Saudi Arabia
E) Rwanda
F) Vietnam
G) Morocco
H) Cambodia
I) Fiji
J) Chile

The scene: Lambeau Field, early morning on July 27…

Brett Favre, helmet in hand, strides onto the practice field and approaches Aaron Rodgers as a phalanx of reporters and fans cheers.

BRETT FAVRE

Hey Aaron!  I’m here buddy!  Listen, I know I said I was done with football, but I just couldn’t stay away.  I hope that’s cool with you, man.

Aaron looks around tentatively and takes a few steps back.  He runs directly in front of Brett, wheels back his right leg, and kicks him square in the nuts.

The End