Monthly Archives: January 2012

by | January 31, 2012 · 9:56 am

Covering the Coverage: Your Guide to Ridiculous Super Bowl Storylines

If you give the media two entire weeks to talk about one game, you’re bound to hear some ridiculous things.  Early in week 2 of the coverage I thought I’d take a look at what people are talking about, and bitch about it for a while!

Tom will spare no expense!

Patriots’ victory party

Here’s a headline from the New York Post on Monday: “Keep Talking, Tom. Giants will make Brady pay for already planning victory party.”  Man, Tom must have really talked some shit.  The New York Daily News dropped this gem, “Huh? Tom Brady already planning post-Super Bowl party.”  The gall of that Tom Brady to guarantee I victory!  What a cocky bastard.  Anyway I’m going to give Brady’s quote its own paragraph so you can see what caused all of the hype.

“We’re going down there, and we’re going down there for one reason. We’re going to give it our best and hopefully we’ll have a lot more people at our party next weekend.”

Yes, that is all he said.

Rex Ryan, who coaches in New York, guarantees Super Bowl victories before the preseason.  Here we have Tom Brady who shrugs his shoulders and in his patented aww shucks tone basically says, “We’re gonna do the best we can and it’d sure be neat if we won” and it is a big deal apparently.  When I saw some of these headlines it reminded me of looking through the TV guide as a kid trying to find movies that featured nudity, and then after waiting up till 3 in the morning all I got was two seconds of side boob.  I don’t know how many times I have clicked on a sports article with a salacious headline only to be disappointed.  These stories literally rely on someone picking up the newspaper (as if anyone actually buys newspapers) and saying, “GRRR THIS MAKES ME MAD!” and then throwing it down without actually reading the article.  I think the next level of Belichick trolling the media is Brady starting out each press conference with, “The other team is awesome, I just hope we can keep it close and not lose by three touchdowns.”

The Giants have a way of turning any thing they want into a slight, and if they are going to do that anyway Vince Wilfork might as well just give a graphic description of violating Justin Tuck’s mother on media day.  That way he can finally be disrespected to the extent that he imagines he and the rest of his teammates are.

The key to the game is the Giants front four

Here’s a drinking game!

Take a shot every time you hear someone on ESPN or the NFL Network say that the key to the game is the Giants getting pressure with their front four.  If by the end of the week you still have a job, family, friends, or your driver’s license…you win! 

Brady won’t “allow” his team to lose

A lot of sports casters secretly wish they were writing screenplays instead of commentating on actual sporting events.

The mystique of Tom Brady has been built up to the extent that pundits tend to believe he will actually “will” the team to victory and he won’t “allow” the team to lose this Super Bowl re-match.  As Ryen Russillo astutely stated on the Scott Van Pelt show on Monday, Tom Brady could have an absolutely masterful effort and they could still lose.  They could still lose by 17 points.  What if the offensive line doesn’t block well?  What if Julian Edelman gets locked in man to man coverage against Victor Cruz on a few key downs? 

Tom Brady might be the most important player on the field on Sunday, but that’s the beauty of football – he still needs his teammates.

ELI MANNING IS TRYING TO WIN HIS SECOND SUPER BOWL IN THE SAME CITY THAT HIS BROTHER PLAYS OMG THE IRONY!

Eli has done enough with his career so far that he deserves more than endless questions about his brother’s condition during the build-up to his own Super Bowl appearance.  Does a reporter honestly believe he is going to say something controversial like, “Our Dad is going to beat up Jim Irsay!” or something we all didn’t know like, “He didn’t want me to tell you this, but I like you guys.  Anyway, Peyton’s career is over.  Next question.”

I know there are some questions that just have to be asked, but do they really have to be asked that many times?

What are you already annoyed about this week?  Let us know in the comments section!

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by | January 28, 2012 · 9:14 am

Here Goes Nothing: Defending the Pro Bowl

Champ Bailey was penalized for forcing a fumble on this play

I’ve been highly critical of the Pro Bowl over the years for several reasons.  For one, shit like this happens.  Yes, the title of that Youtube clip is “Fat Lineman Scores TD!!!!!!”  (For the sake of integrity I left the proper amount of exclamation points in the title.)  But I’ve been thinking about this the last couple days, and god help me I’m about to defend the Pro Bowl.  Nate is out of town otherwise I’m sure we’d have to take this one to court.

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard is that there is no blitzing.  Okay, so this one pissed me off for a long time.  Imagine a baseball game where a pitcher was only allowed to throw fastballs, or in basketball if you couldn’t do any half court press.  Yes, it does suck that you can’t blitz.  But what if blitzing was allowed?  What if a group of offensive lineman who are only together for a week have to learn an entirely new system of blitz pick-ups from a coach that they’ve never worked with in their life?  My guess is this would happen.  Okay, well maybe not…that, but there would be some banged up quarterbacks.  Big name signal callers would start declining invites left and right.  What you’re left with is Matt Moore vs. Matt Ryan and people are even more bored than they were already.

If you honestly think there needs to be more defense in the Pro Bowl, you probably haven’t thought this through.  Or you’re really old and grumpy.  If defenses were really able to do anything they wanted, it is unlikely that offenses would get much done at all.  Nothing like a good ol’ 13-10 all-star game.  But this isn’t the only reason that people hate the Pro Bowl.  It’s very common for bloggers to rage against this event and suggest a variety of fixes.  Hell, I did it last year.  Here are some suggestions from the “Neon Tommy” blog.

-Cancel the game and have an awards show instead.  Actually they have an awards show starting this year independent of the Pro Bowl.

-Make the incentive for winning the Pro Bowl greater.  I think I speak for the rest of America when I confess my desire for professional athletes to be making more money!

-Fine players who skip out on the Pro Bowl.  Yes, let’s dispatch investigators to make sure that everyone that wants to sit out is “actually injured”.  And then let’s get doctor’s notes!  Actually no let’s not do that.  Because it’s stupid.

-Create a skills competition.  They used to have this, and they still might.  Why don’t I know for sure?  Because no one cares about Drew Brees throwing the ball through a tire.  (Alright, Nate might care about that)

The Pro Bowl is what it is.  It’s not meant to be an epic battle that rivals the Super Bowl, or even a pre-season game for that matter.  It is a chance to watch some of your favorite offensive players put up sick stats one last time this season, and your favorite defensive players getting torched.  It isn’t must see TV, but it’s not worse than kicking yourself in the dick.  Or Fox’s Sunday night line-up.

I might be live tweeting this game, or I might find a really good re-run of Seinfeld instead.  It could go either way.

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by | January 26, 2012 · 10:59 am

Five Things I Was Totally Wrong About This Season

Save one meaningless all-star game and one game for all the marbles, we are done with the 2011 season.  I was going to start talking about the Super Bowl today, but honestly I just don’t have enough to say about it to last us a week and a half so I thought I’d take a look at five things I was the most wrong about this year.  So sit back, relax, and enjoy my wrongness. 

Note: You’ll notice that this list is Tebow free as during the pre-season he didn’t even win a starting job so I didn’t make any predictions about his performance.  I try to fit in Tebow cheap shots as often as I can!

"Suck it, Van Iten!"

1. Cam Newton is going to suck – “With the first pick in the 2011 NFL draft, The Carolina Panthers select Cam Newton, quarterback,Auburn”.  Following these words by the commish, I couldn’t help but shake my head.  I was singing the same tune on Facebook, Twitter, or to anyone that happened to bring it up: this was the kind of pick that sets your franchise back five years.  It seemed like the kind of situation every single season we’d be wondering aloud, “when are the Panthers finally going to cut ties with this experiment?”

Yeah, whoops.

Well 4000 passing yards, 21 passing TD’s, an NFL QB record 14 rushing TD’s later I might have to back off of that a bit.  Of course there is still time for his career to end up in shambles, but that no longer seems nearly as probable.  This one really took me my surprise, mainly because in college he looked more like a bruising halback than a QB.  Perhaps my hatred of the zone read offense (another rant for another time) blinded me in this instance.  I was upset for a bit because his success ruins my “JaMarcus Russell: The New Batch” joke, but then I realized I was going to get to watch an amazing player for a bunch of years so I’m alright with it.

2. Al Davis is going to live forever – All political correctness aside, you kind of thought so too, right?

3. New England would finally yield control of the AFC East to the Jets – At one point this looked highly plausible.  Going into a Sunday night week ten showdown New York had a chance to seize control of the division at home against the Pats, but then they revealed their true identity: a team with no discipline that was rapidly spiraling out of control.  The following week in Denver they got Tebow’d (okay the list was almost Tebow free) and despite a few promising wins they never seemed to recover.  Rex and (almost) everyone else are saying the right things when it comes to Mark Sanchez, but you’d have to think that if Peyton Manning is available that they will do everything they can to get him in a green uniform.  This is a league that has about as much patience in its QBs that it does in its coaches.  Which is to say, none.

Oh well, they only lost the division by five games.

4. The Packers defense would become elite with another year in the Dom Capers system – Perhaps this one was just wishful thinking, but it seemed to make sense.  They were returning basically the same defense from their Super Bowl run.  I’m not really sure what to make of their dismal showing this season (last in yards given up) other than Capers didn’t seem to know how to adjust to not having a dominant pass rush.  Last year Green Bay finished second in sacks behind Pittsburgh and the only significant pass rusher they lost was Cullen Jenkins.  This might have been a bigger deal than I originally thought because the unit just didn’t look the same.  Without pressure coming from the normal blitz packages, Capers began to send more and more people from the secondary.  Often these blitzes seemed to come from so far back that they didn’t even have a chance to get there.  Obviously Capers knows way more about defensive football than I ever will, but it just seemed like his gameplan was off all season long.  If you can’t get pressure with any of your blitzes, why wouldn’t you just play more coverage based schemes?  Instead, he blitzed on over half of all downs.

5. Eli Manning is a middle of the pack NFL QB – Look, I’m still not willing to put him in the class of Brady, Brees, Rodgers, or his brother but Eli has obviously proved that he deserves to be talked about as one of the upper tier QBs in the league.  Coming off of his 25 interception season last year I had to scoff when he wanted to call himself elite, and it appears that I might have been wrong on that.  The younger Manning has played better than any quarterback in the playoffs and has finally made a believer out of me, which actually hurts to type.  I firmly believe that almost any quarterback can win one Super Bowl, but winning two or more really goes a long way to solidify your status.  His status in the stupid face hall of fame is already more than secure, however.

What were you wrong about?  It’s okay, you can admit it in the comments section.

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by | January 25, 2012 · 9:23 am

Sports Journalism is Lazy, and Eli Manning is Pretty Darn Good

Sports media is one of my favorite things on earth. I love football and basketball, but more importantly I love talking about the sports with anyone who will listen. I love analyzing and evaluating and figuring out who belongs where in the discussion of great players.

But sports media is guilty of a lot of things. Most notably, it’s guilty of being lazy.

When someone makes a point, or an observation, it isn’t uncommon for other sportswriters to latch onto it without much debate. And that creates a dangerous effect in the sports world: opinions that might not even be true are regarded as indisputable fact. This isn’t exclusive to sports, but seeing as I write for a football website, I could give a shit if people believe other things that aren’t necessarily true like “Obama is a secret Muslim” or “Ben Affleck is a terrible actor.”

HE'S ON A MISSION TO SAVE THE WORLD

But can we finally put to rest the notion that Eli Manning isn’t a really good quarterback?

The flaws in his game are well-researched and well-founded. He is inconsistent. He gets hit too much. He throws interceptions like Brett Favre is his idol. I’m not saying that this playoff run negates all of those flaws.

But I am saying that lazy sports journalism has put Eli into a box already, and he’s been in that box since his first year in the league. The label on that box reads, “Talented, but not as good as most other quarterbacks, and certainly not as good as his brother.” And no matter what has happened over the course of his career, Eli could not ever escape that box. Maybe the sports journalism used duct tape to seal it shut or something.

Before the season, Eli was asked if he thought he was an elite quarterback. And he said, “Yes, of course,” WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO SAY WHEN SOMEONE ASKS YOU THAT QUESTION. “Hey, Nate, do you think you’re a good writer?” “Yes, I think I’m the best writer to ever have a name that rhymes with Hate Baby.” That’s the common answer. But Eli got ripped for it, and that’s because the world doesn’t believe in Eli.

But something funny happened this year. We got to see every version of Eli we’d ever seen (fueling the inconsistent talks). Eli went from a red-hot quarterback of a 6-2 team to a slightly above average quarterback of a 7-7 team to a world-beating quarterback of an NFC Champion team. And if things go the way they did in 2007, Eli will have two championship rings. More than Rodgers. More than Brees. More than his brother Peyton.

If this happens again, Manning family dinners are going to be a little awkward.

Rings aren’t the end-all be-all of quarterback evaluation. A lot of people argue they mean very little. And I don’t think they’re wrong. Rings are nice, but they don’t automatically make a great quarterback. Tom Brady isn’t one of the best just because he has three rings, and the media readily puts Rodgers and Brees over Roethlisberger, who also has two rings. So keep in mind, this article is not meant to say that if Eli wins two rings, he should be vaulted into the Top 3 QB discussion. I’m not saying that if he wins, he’s the best Manning in history (besides Clippers legend Danny Manning. That guy’s game was sweeeeeet).

What I am saying is Eli has gotten a bum rap for most of his career. Whether it’s a result of who his brother is, or how he muscled his way to New York over San Diego, Eli has always been regarded as a quarterback who isn’t quite good enough. But he is good enough. He is a quarterback with a 7-3 playoff record. And if he wins a second ring on February 5th, that box should be ripped open. Even if he doesn’t win, he should at least remove the duct tape.

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by | January 21, 2012 · 12:38 pm

I know who is going to the Super Bowl! (SPOILERS)

So far I’m 4-4 predicting games in the playoffs.  If I was picking against the spread it would be one thing, but to lose so many of these games straight up might call into question how it is that I’m qualified to talk about football.  Well the answer is simple: straight cash homey.  I paid some money to some shady people (wordpress) and now I get to say what I want!

There are certain trends that I’ve noticed when it comes to picking football games.  If your favorite team is a defensive team you will often be skeptical of teams like the Saints or Patriots, but if your team can air it out you will always have lingering questions about any team lead by Alex Smith or Joe Flacco.  Most people have a very specific idea in their head for how teams should win football games and when other teams don’t meet those requirements, even if they win all the time, pundits won’t pick them in big games. 

Another trend is odd scores.  If someone has a score in mind they will often add a few field goals to each side.  So a 28 to 10 prediction becomes 34-13.  It’s also hip to be completely sure about something that realistically you have no control over.  “I guarantee you that Flacco is going to absorb all the criticism this week and come out and play the game of his life!”  Really, going to guarantee that?  What if the offensive line doesn’t block well?  What if he eats a bad tuna sandwich the night before?  And why am I arguing with a hypothetical statement made by a hypothetical person?

If one home team and one road team wins, no matter which ones they are, there will be a great Super Bowl Storyline.  If it is the Patriots vs. the Giants there will be an epic re-match of  XLII and if it is the Ravens and 49ers we will have the second Harbowl, this one a tad more important than the first.

These are two of the hardest championship games to pick in recent memory.  Here are my irrelevant picks!

New York @ San Francisco – I have picked against the Giants in both rounds, and I picked against the 49ers last week so this game has become the “Ben Van Iten doesn’t believe in us bowl”.  I don’t have the clip available but I think that’s what Tom Coughlin called it in a press conference this week.  At the start of the playoffs I said that the Giants can’t run the table with an inconsistent quarterback and I might have to eat my words before this is all said and done.  But I still stand by my theory that he is due for a bad game.  Eli Manning threw 16 interceptions during the regular season, the most of any of the quarterbacks remaining (even as of last week) and I think he will throw two of them on Sunday.  Despite Alex Smith’s performance last week I’m still not crazy about either of these quarterbacks, but I think Alex will not make any key mistakes because he won’t have to do as much.  The Niners pass rush is on the same level as the Giants, but the only difference is they will be able to run the ball enough where New York’s sack artists won’t be on the field every down.  Giants won’t be able to run on this defense, and no balance means no Super Bowl trip.  49ers 23, Giants 17.  Alex Smith goes to the Super Bowl.  Pass the vodka.   

Baltimore @ New England – I have gone back and forth on this one all week.  This appalls most people, but I actually like the Patriots.  I like how Belichick has turned press conferences into this bizarre game where he is simultaneously rude and humble the entire time.  It’s genius.  And I like the way this team won their Super Bowls.  They didn’t explode the cap and disband their teams; they drafted well, made key veteran signings, and spied on people!  It’s awesome.  Lately though the Patriots mystique is starting to fade a little, however.  They have lost home playoff games the last few years, and I think this is going to be another one.  The Pats have no legit deep threat, and against most teams that is not going to be an issue because let’s face it…most defenses are so terrible that Brady and his tight end circus is going to be enough.  But if you can’t stretch this Baltimore defense, if you are going to play the whole game in a 10 to 15 yard window, they are going to suffocate you.  And as I wrote this week, Flacco isn’t as bad as some people think he is.  This defense is going to give him an opportunity to make some plays and I have a weird feeling that he is going to make them.  New England loses a close one at home, and the window to win another title with Brady grows a little smaller.  Ravens 27, Patriots 24.

How do you think the games will go?  Let me know what an idiot I am in the comments section.

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