I flipped on ESPN in the middle of Chris Berman’s Swami Picks, saw his mustache and laughed uncontrollably. I don’t know the situation surrounding the facial hair. Maybe it’s a joke. Maybe he’s showing solidarity for a friend who just finished undergoing a successful session of chemo and can now grow hair again. (I’m assuming chemotherapy hinders your ability to grow facial hair. This is a question I hope I never know the answer to because 1) I obviously hope I never get cancer and 2) I can’t see a situation where I could ask someone who would know a definitive answer. If I’m talking to someone with cancer, I don’t want to bring up another thing that sucks about the situation. And if I’m talking to a doctor, I don’t want to seem like an idiot. I mean, really, it seems like it’s an obvious answer, but I just don’t know for sure. Of course, this logic didn’t stop me from asking a girl the other day if pregnant women get periods. She just furrowed her eyebrows at me for about 20 seconds then said, “Did you ever hear the phrase ‘I’m late’?” Now it all makes sense.) But maybe he’s serious. And if that’s the case, I just can’t buy in. As a man whose experimented successfully (depends on your definition of success) with facial hair in the past, it kills me to say this, but Boomer missed his facial hair window. He’s been on TV for 30 years clean-shaven. You can’t start now...at least not with a mustache. If he had a beard on and off over the past three decades, fine. Even if he had facial hair for a 2 year span in the early 80’s and it hasn’t made it’s way back since, then it’s OK. But you have to set that precedent. I’ve gone on job interviews with a full grown beard, fully aware that it would hurt my chances on landing the job, just to set this precedent. If you start a job with a beard, you can always shave it. But it’s difficult to go the other way. Even if an employer asked me to shave (which they have), I know I can grow it back 3 years down the road without causing much of a stir. It’s called thinking ahead. Sorry Boomer. You didn’t have the foresight 30 years ago and because of that, when it comes to facial hair, you’re like a pregnant woman. You’re too late. On that note, here are some games I like on opening weekend.
I have no numbers or research to back me up on this, but in week 1, you should always take road teams favored by three points.
Dolphins (minus 3) at Bills
If the Dolphins expect to make the playoffs this year, they have to win games like this. Despite how he looked in the preseason, I believe Chad Henne is going to be a top 10 quarterback in the near future. Plus, this is the first half of the season, so they still have Ronnie Brown.
Packers (minus 3) at Philly
I’ll jump on the bandwagon.
49ers (minus 3) at Seahawks
I really think the Seahawks are going to be one of the worst teams in the league. They have a coach who hasn't succeeded in the pros and they’re obviously revamping their roster midstream with that Housh move. Rebuilding year.
Titans (minus 6.5) vs Raiders
Michael Bush is the best back on the Raiders by far and if he can’t go, they are going to have trouble against a team that can control the clock like Tennessee.
Browns Money Line (+130) at Bucs
Eric Mangini/Mike Holmgren vs. Raheem Morris
Bengals Money Line (+175) at New England
I’ve never been in a car wreck, but everyone always says you start to feel it the next day. I’m getting my money in before Brady realizes he can’t move his neck tomorrow.
Lions (plus 6) at Bears
The Lions and Dolphins are my two picks to improve drastically this year. From what I’ve read about Ndamokoung Suh (sorry if I misspelled that) he should be a game changer. And Jay Cutler makes me appreciate the guy I’m going to talk about next so much more.
Saints (minus 5) vs Vikings
For some reason, I can’t bring myself to root against Brett Favre. I want to so bad, but I just can’t do it. He could beat the Steelers in the Super Bowl the next three years, retire seven more times, kick me in the gonads at each retirement press conference, and, if I ever get married, sleep with my wife, and I wouldn’t root against the guy. Now, I like the Saints tonight and I’m rooting for them to win the game, but I would love to see Favre throw for 300 and 4 TD’s in a losing effort. I can’t explain why, but he has built up so much clout in my mind, that it would take him 20 years of evil deeds to switch to a villain. There is no other current athlete like this. Kobe raped someone too early in his career. Lebron had “The Decision” and the even more infuriating elbow injury in the first round this past year. (He got off way too easy for this. He played the entire game without the elbow being a problem but in the closing seconds, he couldn’t manage to shoot one more free throw with his right hand? He shot the first one right handed and made it. I can see if he would have missed it horribly, but it went in. If he would have shot the second one right handed and missed, no problem. But he wanted that built-in excuse. He wanted the world to know that he was hurt, so when they lost he would have something to blame. Jordan would have never let anyone know he was hurt.) Polamalu is a nice guy and a great player, but he’s not enough of a character to draw much emotion from me. Roethlisberger would be close in the other direction (wouldn’t be able to do enough good to get me to not root against him) if he played on any team other than the Steelers. Jeter would be close, but he plays for the Yankees. Lisa Leslie was always a class act, but she played in the WNBA. JoePa is close if you want to count coaches. But it’s more that he is too fragile physically to perform any single act that would tarnish his legacy that badly and he’s going to die before he can rack up a long enough string of smaller offenses. So anyway, I’ll take the Saints but go Brett Favre.
I'll leave you with this:
Right in the Kisser
Showing posts with label NFL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NFL. Show all posts
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
1st and 5 (Encroachment)
The start of Summer used to be my favorite time of year: Blue skies, fresh cut grass, bird’s chirping, the Waterbury Open. It marked the longest amount of time before I had to start going to school again and there was no possibility of snow. But now, I’m 24 and not ambitious (or intelligent) enough for Law School, so that no longer plays a factor. And I live in Southern California, so, weather-wise, even Christmas Day is like Summer. Subsequently, September and the start of football season is my new favorite time of year. With that in mind, here are a five thoughts I have on the upcoming season: (It’s actually 4 football thoughts and one TV thought. I had a tough time coming up with material without giving away too many of my stances on individual players that matter. I still have a fantasy draft coming up and of the 8 people that read this blog, I think 7 of them are in the league. So with that said, here are 4 NFL thoughts and 1 TV thought without giving too much away as far as my fantasy beliefs on individual players (except Matt Leinart)):
1) I’d like to recognize the master of public relations, Roger Goodell, and his Big Ben suspension. I’ve been hearing some questioning as to why his suspension is most likely going to be reduced to 4 games instead of the initial 6. First, Goodell has set a precedent for shortening suspensions in the past with Michael Vick and Pacman Jones. So, you can’t play either the quarterback card or the race card. Second, it’s my belief that he never had the intention of suspending him for 6 games. In his mind, the offense only called for 4 games. He set it at 6 games initially to set Roethlisberger up for success and get him on the right step to public image recovery. Now he can say that Big Ben has realized the err of his ways and begun the path to turn his life around. In reality, behaving like the other 99.9999% of people who don’t rape girls for 3 months in no way deserves a suspension to be cut by a third. But by setting the suspension high in the first place, it gives Goodell the opportunity to release a statement saying how much Ben has reformed his life and is no longer an asshole. This helps not only Ben, but also the Steelers, a team with arguably the largest nationwide fan base (maybe behind the Cowboys), recover from an ugly offseason. Which, in turn, helps the NFL make more money. Goodell is pushing David Stern (who I believe won the 2008 NAACP Image Award for his work instituting the NBA dress code) for Marketing Commissioner of the Year.
2) Eli Manning is an enigma. He has the largest gap between ‘how interesting a person should be’ and ‘how interesting a person actually is’. He is the youngest sibling of the number one family of football (although I think the Colquitt’s could make an argument here). He was the number 1 overall pick in the draft. He refused to sign with the team that drafted him, forcing one of the biggest draft day deals in the past decade. He quarterbacked the Giants to the biggest Super Bowl upset in history. Yet, I have no emotional tie to the guy at all. And I know that we shouldn’t really have any emotional ties to professional athletes, but the fact of the matter is that we do. Except for Eli Manning. He could suffer a career ending injury tomorrow or win the MVP this year (30 to 1 by the way), and I wouldn’t care at all.
3) The NFC West has to be the worst division in sports. When a team led by Alex Smith is the heavy favorite to take the division this year, you know you’ve reached the bottom of the barrel. I’ve tried to buy into Charlie Whitehurst in Seattle, but it’s tough. The Rams are a couple years from relevance. And after catching his sideline interview in the Cardinals 2nd preseason game, I’m kind of rooting for Matt Leinart to do something. You could tell that he still thinks he hasn’t been given a fair shot. And really, this year he may be right. Switching starters after giving one guy 5 series against first team defenses and another guy 10+ series against second team defenses may not be fair. But, this is Leinart’s 5th year in the league and he’s already lost the starting job once in his career. If he doesn’t have it, then there’s no point in wasting the first four games of the season, then doing the inevitable and putting in Derek Anderson. You might as well start the season with Anderson. Either way, things aren’t looking bright.
On the plus side for Leinart, in retrospect it seems he was correct when he controversially decided to stay for his senior season at USC. At the time, he was coming off a Heisman winning year and would have potentially been the top quarterback drafted. Think about the ridicule he would be getting if he were the #1 overall pick and played like this. However, by staying the extra year at USC, he fell in the following year’s draft and avoided the pressure and scrutiny that comes with being the top pick. Although, any negative press would have been short-lived, as Leinart would soon have Purple Drank Russell to take the public ire away from his lackluster performance. And, of course, the other positive in staying 4 years at USC: he was able to hang with 98 Degrees front man Nick Lachey (and his tribal body art) for another year. If only he could bring this type of foresight to the west coast offense, this whole paragraph would be a mute point.
4) In my mind, I’ve had a recent revelation when it comes to gambling. Now, this may end up not working or it may be the way everyone else already approaches wagering, but it’s new and exciting to me. In a previous post, I discussed my plans to force a love affair with the Premier League. Well, my efforts to dive in head first have, of course, including betting. And three weeks in, I’ve been cleaning up. My first inclination (and probably the correct inclination) is that my winnings have been luck and things will even out over time like always. But, then I had a couple beers and a more philosophical answer started to swirl around my mind. I had no preconceived thoughts on any of these teams. I didn’t know (or care) what Didier Drogba did 3 years ago. Which team won the title in 2006 means nothing to me. All I’ve been looking at is the most recent data: the statistics from last year and the first few games this year. The facts that Liverpool hasn’t shown me much and Man City and Arsenal have looked solid are all I have to go by.
I started to think about NFL bets. I’ve been looking too far into the past. Pittsburgh always beats Cincinnati; that’s just the way it is. Going into last year, they won nine of the previous eleven match-ups. I had that thought in the back of my mind for their two games last year. I knew that the Steelers were without Polamalu and couldn’t stop anyone. And I knew that the Bengals found a running game with Cedric Benson and had looked good all year. But come on. It’s the Steelers. They’ll pull it together against the Bengals. Looking back on this, it seems idiotic and it is idiotic. It just took me a while (and an undisclosed amount of monetary losses) to figure this out. It isn’t that I have too much information, it’s just that I use the wrong information. So that’s what I’m going to change this year. If the Lions have played well for a few weeks and the Vikings haven’t, I’ll take the points. And if this doesn’t work, I’ll start betting against the Pakistani cricket team.
5) I was excited to see AMC’s gruesome twosome Breaking Bad and Mad Men roll at the Emmys. When Breaking Bad first came out, it had one the best premises for a TV show that I can remember (If you don’t know, it’s about a high school chemistry teacher who gets diagnosed with cancer and begins manufacturing meth so he can leave his family the money when he dies.) But I didn’t see how they could make it into a lasting series without it feeling drawn out. I mean the guy has terminal cancer, if he just makes a miraculous recovery then I’m out. But thats exactly what happened and the show has gotten better because of it. Now he’s too deep into the game to get out and the end that he initially planned on (death by cancer) isn’t going to happen. It’s a ridiculously good TV show and it took home the two dramatic actor awards. I heard about halfway through this last season that Aaron Paul (plays the chemistry teacher’s former student/ drug connoisseur/ side kick/ best friend/ love interest (I made that last one up)) had entered he Emmy discussion and I wasn’t sure what the buzz was about. Then I started to pay attention more to his role. He deserves whatever accolades he gets. Just this past season he went from a guy coping with the death of his girlfriend, to a rehab patient, back to a drug dealer/manufacturer, and finally to a killer in the season finale. I’m a huge proponent of Mad Men, but Breaking Bad takes it to another level.
1) I’d like to recognize the master of public relations, Roger Goodell, and his Big Ben suspension. I’ve been hearing some questioning as to why his suspension is most likely going to be reduced to 4 games instead of the initial 6. First, Goodell has set a precedent for shortening suspensions in the past with Michael Vick and Pacman Jones. So, you can’t play either the quarterback card or the race card. Second, it’s my belief that he never had the intention of suspending him for 6 games. In his mind, the offense only called for 4 games. He set it at 6 games initially to set Roethlisberger up for success and get him on the right step to public image recovery. Now he can say that Big Ben has realized the err of his ways and begun the path to turn his life around. In reality, behaving like the other 99.9999% of people who don’t rape girls for 3 months in no way deserves a suspension to be cut by a third. But by setting the suspension high in the first place, it gives Goodell the opportunity to release a statement saying how much Ben has reformed his life and is no longer an asshole. This helps not only Ben, but also the Steelers, a team with arguably the largest nationwide fan base (maybe behind the Cowboys), recover from an ugly offseason. Which, in turn, helps the NFL make more money. Goodell is pushing David Stern (who I believe won the 2008 NAACP Image Award for his work instituting the NBA dress code) for Marketing Commissioner of the Year.
2) Eli Manning is an enigma. He has the largest gap between ‘how interesting a person should be’ and ‘how interesting a person actually is’. He is the youngest sibling of the number one family of football (although I think the Colquitt’s could make an argument here). He was the number 1 overall pick in the draft. He refused to sign with the team that drafted him, forcing one of the biggest draft day deals in the past decade. He quarterbacked the Giants to the biggest Super Bowl upset in history. Yet, I have no emotional tie to the guy at all. And I know that we shouldn’t really have any emotional ties to professional athletes, but the fact of the matter is that we do. Except for Eli Manning. He could suffer a career ending injury tomorrow or win the MVP this year (30 to 1 by the way), and I wouldn’t care at all.
3) The NFC West has to be the worst division in sports. When a team led by Alex Smith is the heavy favorite to take the division this year, you know you’ve reached the bottom of the barrel. I’ve tried to buy into Charlie Whitehurst in Seattle, but it’s tough. The Rams are a couple years from relevance. And after catching his sideline interview in the Cardinals 2nd preseason game, I’m kind of rooting for Matt Leinart to do something. You could tell that he still thinks he hasn’t been given a fair shot. And really, this year he may be right. Switching starters after giving one guy 5 series against first team defenses and another guy 10+ series against second team defenses may not be fair. But, this is Leinart’s 5th year in the league and he’s already lost the starting job once in his career. If he doesn’t have it, then there’s no point in wasting the first four games of the season, then doing the inevitable and putting in Derek Anderson. You might as well start the season with Anderson. Either way, things aren’t looking bright.
On the plus side for Leinart, in retrospect it seems he was correct when he controversially decided to stay for his senior season at USC. At the time, he was coming off a Heisman winning year and would have potentially been the top quarterback drafted. Think about the ridicule he would be getting if he were the #1 overall pick and played like this. However, by staying the extra year at USC, he fell in the following year’s draft and avoided the pressure and scrutiny that comes with being the top pick. Although, any negative press would have been short-lived, as Leinart would soon have Purple Drank Russell to take the public ire away from his lackluster performance. And, of course, the other positive in staying 4 years at USC: he was able to hang with 98 Degrees front man Nick Lachey (and his tribal body art) for another year. If only he could bring this type of foresight to the west coast offense, this whole paragraph would be a mute point.
4) In my mind, I’ve had a recent revelation when it comes to gambling. Now, this may end up not working or it may be the way everyone else already approaches wagering, but it’s new and exciting to me. In a previous post, I discussed my plans to force a love affair with the Premier League. Well, my efforts to dive in head first have, of course, including betting. And three weeks in, I’ve been cleaning up. My first inclination (and probably the correct inclination) is that my winnings have been luck and things will even out over time like always. But, then I had a couple beers and a more philosophical answer started to swirl around my mind. I had no preconceived thoughts on any of these teams. I didn’t know (or care) what Didier Drogba did 3 years ago. Which team won the title in 2006 means nothing to me. All I’ve been looking at is the most recent data: the statistics from last year and the first few games this year. The facts that Liverpool hasn’t shown me much and Man City and Arsenal have looked solid are all I have to go by.
I started to think about NFL bets. I’ve been looking too far into the past. Pittsburgh always beats Cincinnati; that’s just the way it is. Going into last year, they won nine of the previous eleven match-ups. I had that thought in the back of my mind for their two games last year. I knew that the Steelers were without Polamalu and couldn’t stop anyone. And I knew that the Bengals found a running game with Cedric Benson and had looked good all year. But come on. It’s the Steelers. They’ll pull it together against the Bengals. Looking back on this, it seems idiotic and it is idiotic. It just took me a while (and an undisclosed amount of monetary losses) to figure this out. It isn’t that I have too much information, it’s just that I use the wrong information. So that’s what I’m going to change this year. If the Lions have played well for a few weeks and the Vikings haven’t, I’ll take the points. And if this doesn’t work, I’ll start betting against the Pakistani cricket team.
5) I was excited to see AMC’s gruesome twosome Breaking Bad and Mad Men roll at the Emmys. When Breaking Bad first came out, it had one the best premises for a TV show that I can remember (If you don’t know, it’s about a high school chemistry teacher who gets diagnosed with cancer and begins manufacturing meth so he can leave his family the money when he dies.) But I didn’t see how they could make it into a lasting series without it feeling drawn out. I mean the guy has terminal cancer, if he just makes a miraculous recovery then I’m out. But thats exactly what happened and the show has gotten better because of it. Now he’s too deep into the game to get out and the end that he initially planned on (death by cancer) isn’t going to happen. It’s a ridiculously good TV show and it took home the two dramatic actor awards. I heard about halfway through this last season that Aaron Paul (plays the chemistry teacher’s former student/ drug connoisseur/ side kick/ best friend/ love interest (I made that last one up)) had entered he Emmy discussion and I wasn’t sure what the buzz was about. Then I started to pay attention more to his role. He deserves whatever accolades he gets. Just this past season he went from a guy coping with the death of his girlfriend, to a rehab patient, back to a drug dealer/manufacturer, and finally to a killer in the season finale. I’m a huge proponent of Mad Men, but Breaking Bad takes it to another level.
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