The First Post Since ‘That’ Game December 5, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Football, Los Angeles.add a comment
Okay. Here’s how you know I’ve officially settled in Los Angeles. Because everyone I know out here gave me the same look on Tuesday. That same wide-eyed look that Jack Palance gets from the saloon he walks into. That slightly on edge, deer who might have heard a hunter look in their eyes that wait anxiously for Mike Rosolio to pull a Billy Costigan with his cranberry juice. I have nothing more to say about that game, other than we almost beat the greatest team ever assembled. Plain and simple. The horseshoes and hand grenades thing is true, and no one will remember it, except in Baltimore, where it could live on in Namath infamy. The only way it could get worse is if Pittsburgh is the team that knocks them off this weekend in Foxboro. Luckily, I think there’s no shot in hell of that happening. If it does, I guarantee I will throw up. Everywhere.
The ultimate upside from the ultimate optimist (who had to drive 30 miles out to Malibu and stare into the black of the Pacific Ocean for an hour to fashion said optimism) is that the Ravens might need that much of an overhaul. Granted, everyone played above and beyond themselves. Ed Reed was a terror, the fumble on the return being his only blemish. Willis McGahee played like his forty million dollar contract was on a string in front of him. Haloti Ngata had his Adrian Peterson-like coming out party as the best defensive tackle in the league. Samari Rolle showed a physical side that I’ve never seen before, even back to his Tennessee days (lesson to all young corners; have seizures and you can tackle). And crazy young guards Jason Brown and Ben Grubbs beat all-pros Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork and Ty Warren into submission. With a fourth place schedule next season, precisely no expectations, and no superhuman Pats team next year (they won’t be like this ever again), the Ravens are a lot closer to contention in 2008 than previously thought.
So two schools of thought for 2007: either Baltimore is screwed for the rest of the season (which wouldn’t surprise me considering the staggering frustration level and the black cloud officially checking in over Charm City) or they realize they’re a lot closer than previously expected and go on a rampage, destroying Indy, Miami, Seattle, and Pittsburgh along the way. Either is possible, and we won’t know which one until kickoff against the Colts. But this team will absolutely cover this week. And might do a whole lot more before this done season is actually done.
The Biggest Trade of All Time July 18, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Common Sense, Football.add a comment
There’s a reason so many people play fantasy football and Madden more than their equivalents in baseball, basketball, and hockey. A huge part is the draft, which is treated like a college graduation and taken about as seriously as a heart attack. Honestly, this is the adult equivalent of playing dress up, it really is. You’ve got the guy whose office you’re using, doing the “it’s my house, so I get the sweet chair” move, the acting commissioner of your league, who’s having a good time until someone a) takes too long to make a pick; or b) grabs the player he wanted just before him. Then he’s Pol Pot. Everyone’s wearing a player’s jersey that might as well be a big sign that says, “If you want to piss me off, pick this guy.” It’s a day that begins with so much promise and everyone pissed at each other at the end. Like in fantasy baseball (and other sports), you get to make the decision. This is the major reason people get into fantasy sports; they get to simulate running a team just like the pros.
But something makes football different…and it’s that Fantasy is not like the pros.
The General Managers in the NFL are the best in all of sports. No team, regardless of owner or fanbase or anything, has any financial advantage; even playing field means Dan Snyder can’t buy every free agent every year, although he tries. It’s not that hard being Brian Cashman or any big-market baseball GM. Just go get a player. That’s the first thing you do in a franchise for Madden: go get all the free agents who didn’t sign before the game came out. In the NFL, there also are almost never blockbuster trades. The NBA sees superstars changing uniforms all the time and often, one side gets, to use a technical term, fucked. You’ve got Kareen Abdul Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Robert Parrish and the pick that became Kevin McHale all changing hands for virtually nothing. Baseball’s Red Sox sold the Babe and the Edmonton Oilers gave Wayne Gretzky away to promote hockey in the sun belt. That hardly ever happens in the NFL, because these guys are too smart and too good at evaluating scenarios and players in the draft.
The biggest trade in history was just set in stone yesterday, a mere six years after the fact. The #1 choice in the 2001 draft for the #5 and two others.
Everyone thought San Diego was out of their goddamn mind, namely because they were 1-15 and the absolute doormat of the league. While Cleveland, Houston, and Oakland have all had abysmal years since then, none of them were as bad as San Diego was. Everyone and their mother bet against them, they were a sure thing every week. Even Dan Fouts was giving the points. If you liked money, you bet against San Diego in 2000. This team is so bad…and a player no one has ever seen before was sitting there…the amazing Michael Vick was a phone call away from being a Charger.
The trade itself was, frankly, even. LaDainian Tomlinson for Michael Vick (the other picks didn’t really pan out). Tomlinson is arguably the best player in the game and Vick single handedly made the Falcons competitive. I don’t really include Drew Brees in the trade, even though I could, since not taking Vick allowed the Chargers to take a cheaper quarterback later. Brees, for the record, is the fifth best quarterback in the game.
Fast forward to now, with Michael Vick getting indicted. Everyone ran over to the Chargers and declared a winner. But the issue goes way beyond that…not for the teams, but for Vick himself.
If the San Diego Chargers had drafted Michael Vick, he would not be getting indicted right now.
I’ve never been to Atlanta, but I have seen a map. It’s the only major metropolis for hundreds of miles, surrounded entirely by the deepest of the Deep South. You often hear people from rural areas say, “We had to make our own fun.” Usually, this means tire swings and throwin’ a makeshift boat in a crick. But if you’ve got a few million dollars, the options open up (it is important to know that Vick’s puppy fights started his rookie year, right after he got the first big paycheck). Make no mistake, Michael Vick is straight country having grown up in Virginia, and Atlanta isn’t some Southern Jonestown where Yankees walk in Wall Street suits and out the other side with tattered suspenders and nothing else on. Vick could have gone a lot of places and still be down with the whole dogfighting thing.
But not San Diego.
The city also known as The Whale’s Vagina is an absolute paradise. Ridiculous beaches with ridiculous surfing and the hottest surfer chicks you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s like Miami, but cleaner. It’s like LA, but about 20 degrees cooler in August. It’s like Gary, Indiana, but not hell on Earth. Everyone I know there says they will never leave, not even for vacation. Michael Vick would have been the king of San Diego and all of Southern California. He’d have a huge beachfront house and roll up to Los Angeles for the club scene and have hundreds of millions of ways to spend his hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plus, if he ever wanted to gamble, Vegas is right there. If he ever had a bloodlust, he could always drive down to Tijuana and bet on cockfights. It’s in Mexico, so no one would have cared or known about it. They’re chickens, and don’t tell PETA, but people don’t give a shit about animals they eat. Plus, he could nail a couple transsexual hookers and do lines of crushed-up over the counter Vicodin while he was watching (that’s Baja multitasking).
They say the draft is the most important day of a player’s life, and this has never been more true than it is for Michael Vick. Bet the Falcons wish they still had Matt Schaub…speaking of which:
If you like money, bet against Atlanta in 2007.
Follow the Worldwide Leader June 20, 2006
Posted by rosolio in Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey, TV.add a comment
First, we are going to open with a disclaimer: I am as addicted to ESPN as anyone else. I check the website a hundred times a day. Upon moving to the midwest and being out of the range of my beloved PTI, I’ve begun downloading the podcast and listening a day late. I have this weird feeling that watching a Stanley Cup Playoff game on OLN somehow isn’t as valid as if it was on ESPN, even though it’s the exact same people with the exact same haircuts. ESPN, a jewel in the crown of the Disney empire, has an absolute hidden monopoly on everything revolving around sports.
The term ‘Empire’ carries fantastically negative connotations. It feels weird to write ‘Empire’ and not capitalize it. This is due to the fact that most are not recognized as Empires until it becomes evil. ESPN has not always been bad, but it is this author’s intention to, at least in some way, shine light on a negative trend that is spiraling uncontrollably toward disaster. Picture a volkswagen on fire careening down a street in San Francisco toward a crowded intersection. A little intense, but so is Around The Horn.
Like it was written in Revelation, the sports apocalypse starts with a positive event (I clearly follow the bible intently…anyway). Pardon the Interruption features two of the greatest sports writers (frankly, two of the greatest columnists regardless of subject) this country has to offer: the Old Tyme [sic] sportsfan Tony Kornheiser and the plugged-in, X’s and O’s Michael Wilbon. The idea was that these two very different, but very smart, writers would address the various events of the sports day and argue their opinions. Part of the appeal was that these two colleagues are very good friends, and the dynamic in a way simulates any group of fans discussing the same topics. They don’t claim to be experts, but neither do we, really. I can get in a trench war over whether the 2000 Ravens or 1985 Bears had a more fearsome defense, but unless I’m arguing with Buddy Ryan, neither I nor my adversary has any actual cred that makes us ‘right’. It’s still fun to debate, however, and that’s why PTI is so great.
The problem is that ESPN, through the Nielsen ratings and internet buzz, saw that they had a gigantic hit on their hands; a lively, opinionated sportspage that contrasted directly with the objective, just the facts ma’am Sportscenter. The suits at Team Rodent completely missed the boat as to why PTI is so popular. Rather than seeing the everyday banter of the show, the producers instead took the ratings to mean that audiences wanted to see people fight.
Around the Horn soon premiered: the Game of Competitive Banter. Aside from being advertised as a competition and the constant ad hominem attacks from the ‘contestants’, the show’s real flaw was that through the assignment of points, someone was going to be decided to have been right. Former host Max Kellerman wasn’t shy about mentioning his New York bias, and it showed in his assignment of points. The show has improved with current host Tony Reali as it seems that points are assigned based on argument and stat inclusion. But there are three types of lies, and the show still yielded a winner.
Dozens of other headache-inducing shows and segments featuring talking heads yelling at each other soon followed, but that wasn’t the real problem. The charm of PTI was that Kornheiser and Wilbon would occassionally take ludicrously bold sides, because the idea was to facilitate discussion, and plus it can be funny. It was because of this reason that asinine segments such as the Budweiser Hot Seat came to pass. Dan Patrick would ask pointed and directly controversial questions to athletes and sports personalities, seemingly begging for the person to slip and say something controversial. A classic example occurred with Jeremy Roenick. After being asked about the fans who claim they’ll never watch hockey again after the lockout, Roenick answered very honestly, “Hey, if they don’t want to watch, whatever, good riddance.” Following the interview, a thousand online and televised segments announced that “Roenick does not care about fans!” Patrick claimed total ignorance of the situation, but he threw the bear trap down and Roenick stepped into it. It is also worth mentioning that the rise of PTI changed Patrick’s radio program, which went from witty banter between he and ex-pitcher Rob Dibble, to Patrick’s controversy-stirring rants defended oh so smugly with the “It’s just my opinion” defense.
Patrick is right, it is just his opinion. He’s just another guy, with no more cred than someone working at Walgreens. He’s never stepped on a field of any kind. And that’s why I cut him a lot of slack and listened loyally to his show. I also listened to Colin Cowherd, who followed a similarly abrasive formula.
And then it became clear to me. Cowherd was on one of his rants, screaming about why Americans love the frontrunners and hate underdogs. This is completely insane, of course, as anyone outside of the five boroughs would say that the Miracle on Ice was a greater event than the 2000 Yankees rolling over everyone on the way to a title. His logic was that more people watch when the Yankees and Dukies and Fighting Irish are playing. He also supports Rush Limbaugh, which is a great way to retain listeners, because he makes a lot of money. It’s debatable as to whether Cowherd even likes sports; he certainly hates athletes and reminds his audience daily of all the reasons you should hate them. The problem with The Herd, and it took a long time to decipher, was that Cowherd wasn’t telling you what he thought. He was telling you what YOU thought. And as I looked more and more, I saw a thousand examples all over the place where ESPN was dictating the sports world by telling people what they were thinking.
What?
There is a lot of great stuff on ESPN. Mike & Mike on ESPN radio is great, PTI is great, Chris Mortensen simply has more information than every other football reporter on the planet, and Bill Simmons relates to more fans my age than anyone else out there.
But ESPN waxes poetic about how outraged America is over Barry Bonds and then unleashes a Bonds reality show. They create the Minnesota Vikings Love Boat Scandal; you mean insanely rich people fuck insanely hot strippers on boats? Whaaaaat? Or the Randy Moss mooning incident, or the constant Terrell Owens coverage, or entire days dedicated to the Yankees and Red Sox who play 30 times a season.
ESPN does all of this under the guise of “We’re giving the people what they want.” The reality is closer to this, “We’re telling the people want they want and then giving it to them.”
That’s what media has become. We dreamed of it becoming more inclusive with added interactivity and all of that, but instead of us reaching to them, they’ve reached us. Through weblogs and focus groups and polls, they can monitor their progress. Based on the fact that I checked ESPN.com three times while writing this, they’re doing a pretty good job.
