Should Astros fans be cheering for losses?

The Astros just took 2/3 from both the Rays and the Red Sox, bringing the Astros overall record to 39-43. If the Astros play above average baseball for the next two weeks, they very well could get their record to the .500 mark. If you are an Astros fan, you should think long and hard about whether or not this is a good thing or not.
If you wonder if I'm suggesting whether or not you should be cheering against your home town team, my response is that I will leave that for you to decide. But what I am saying is that I think that there might be good reasons to cheer against your home town club for the next two or three weeks.
In making this case, I operate under several key assumptions. First, no matter what happens for the remainder of the season, the Astros will not win the World Series. It would take a miracle for the Astros to win the Wild Card, and even if they did, I can fathom almost no possible scenario where the Astros beat teams like the Phillies or Cubs, much less the Red Sox, Rays, White Sox, or Yankees in the playoffs. It just isn't going to happen. The Astros don't have the arms to compete with those teams, and in the post season, pitching is what wins games. If you need evidence that pitching is what counts, remember that the Astros' '04 and '05 playoff runs were fueled by phenomenal pitching staffs and also remember that the '05 run occurred in spite of a generally anemic offense. Don't let the Astros recent success against the Red Sox and Rays fool you, both of those pitching staffs win out 90% of the time in a seven game playoff series against the Astros.
My second key assumption is an offshoot of the first: not only will the Astros not win the World Series, but the chances that they will make the playoffs are slim to none. Currently, the Astros trail the first place Cubs by 10 full games, and trail the Cardinals and Brewers by 7.5 and 5.5 games respectively. The Astros have almost no chance of catching the Cubs, and their catching the Cards and Brewers seem comparably slim. I also see the Mets, Marlins, and Braves all playing better baseball in the second half of the season so even if the Cards and Brewers were to faulter, it is likely that the Astros would face competition from one of, if not all of those teams for the Wild Card.
All of this information is relevant because if the Astros are still within double digits of the Wild Card at about the two week mark after the All Star break, there is no way that the Astros trade off any assets and start building for the future. Drayton has seen his team get hot in the second half too many times, and he is a bit too nieve to consider selling Roy or Jose Valverde with a team "in the race" (although 7 1/2 games hardly strikes me as in the thick of the race). Drayton very may well be right that the Astros could make some sort of run, but any sort of run will likely fall short of the needed number to win the Wild Card. More likely is the Astros end the year around .500.
Frankly, if we are going to finish at .500 with the players we have, I would assume see if we can land some prospects in return for Valverde (or if we get a fantastic offer, even Oswalt)and infuse the organization with some young hotshots so that the team might be a good team in two years. Seriously, if given the choice between being an around .500 team for the next three years or finishing 20 games under .500 for this and next season but then being a legitimate contender for the NL central the five years after that (which is what could happen if the Astros landed a couple of stud prospects in return for Valverde or Oswalt), which would you choose?
I'm not saying that you should cheer against the Astros to have a bad three week so that they start to build for next year, that's your decision. But whether it's in the Astros' long term best interest to be crappy for the next three weeks is a question worth thinking about.

All Publicity is Good Publicity? Not so much.

Grow Up, Ed

For Houston writers everywhere, Christmas came early this week. Shawn Chacon gave us a little gift when he threw little Ed Wade to the ground after Wade demanded that Chacon join him in Cecil Cooper’s office. Obviously, Chacon is a moron and an enormous waste of talent. I could have told you that before this incident as Chacon has always been known as an underachieving head case. But there is a more troubling aspect of this story that has been underreported by the local press (although the national press has picked it up) is Ed Wade’s role in the malay. Look, no one is excusing Chacon here, but the general manager of a major league baseball club actually got into a fight with a player. Wade admits that he “lost his temper” which I suppose is fine, we all make mistakes. But consider that during this exchange, the two men (tiny Ed Wade and not so tiny Shawn Chacon) stood chest to chest, clearly indicating that something was about to go down. Regardless of how hot the situation was, someone please explain to me how the hell Ed Wade doesn’t have the good sense to get the hell out of there and figure out what to do. If the fact that fighting one of your own players embarrasses both the individual (Wade) and the franchise (the Astros) were not reason enough to back down, one would think that Wade would have backed down so that he wouldn’t get his ass kicked. But neither of these reasons compelled Wade to withdraw himself from the situation, the two men ended up rolling around on the floor, and now the Astros are at the center of a national media circus for all the wrong reasons.

The Astros were right to cut Chacon, but there should be consequences for Wade as well. I don’t know what they should be, but Wade acted like a fool by not being the mature one (which is his job) and as a result the franchise has been made the laughing stock of baseball. Grow up, Ed.

Rockets

If you look at the history of the NBA draft, you quickly realize that the success rate for draft picks, even at the very top of the draft, is remarkably low. As a result, it would be a mistake to get overly excited about the Rockets’ selection of Dante Greene and Joey Dorsey. I personally doubt that Dante Greene will ever turn into much of a player, but I suppose I could be wrong and given where the Rockets selected him I feel like they got pretty good value since you really won’t find many guys with as much potential as Greene that late in the draft. Along the same lines, I was very pleased to see the Rockets pick up Dorsey, particularly at 33. Dorsey is undersized (only 6’7’’) but the kid is beast on the defensive end. At today’s press conference, Dorsey (who is pretty damn funny) likened himself as “Ray Lewis with a basketball.” I like where his head is at so long as he never finds himself arraigned on first degree murder charges. Even if Dorsey ends up being below average (although if he tries I think he should be a decent role player in the league for a while), his presence should bring an end to people messing with Yao. Ain’t nobody going to mess with Joey.

All of that said, if you are going to take anything away from last nights draft, it should be that the Rockets have themselves a quality general manager in Daryl Moray. Moray turned the 25^th pick overall (Nicolas Batum of France) into Greene (who they wanted), Dorsey, and Memphis’ 09 second round pick. I was at Toyota Center for his press Conferences on draft night and yesterday afternoon and when he speaks it’s very clear who the smartest guy in the room is: him. The Rockets have a bright future as a franchise if Les will let him do his thing.

June 20, 2008: Break It Down, Uncle Drayton

At the beginning of the season, I wrote that I didn’t think that the Astros would be a very good ballclub. I was hardly the only one making this prediction. Houston’s expectations were decidedly low for this ballclub at the beginning of the season, and the Astros sub-par play in the first month of the season seemed to confirm that these expectations were well founded.

But then the Astros went on a tear and actually ran their record all the way to eight games over the .500 mark at one point. At one point (and it really wasn’t that long ago) the ‘Stros were within two games of the first place Chicago Cubs. Somewhere along the way, the Houston media and Astro fans started to believe that we were wrong and now that the team has lost 15-18 and finds itself in dead last in the NL Central (12 games back of the Cubs) people who at the beginning of the year expected incompetence now seem shocked and I don’t understand why.

Granted, this particular stretch of losses has been especially awful, even for the Astros, but during the winning streak did we all not expect the Astros to come back to earth? If not, we certainly should have. To use the words of the great Denny Green, the Astros “are what we thought they were.” The Astros success was a statistical anomaly which, over a long period of time, naturally corrected itself. The Astros are an average, about .500 ballclub and by the end of the season, I suspect that is exactly where they will find themselves.

Now that the Astros deficit in the Central has reached double digits, I think it’s time for the decision makers within the Astros organization (so general manager Ed Wade and Uncle Drayton) to take a good hard look at the product they are putting on the field. An objective look at the organization will reveal a terribly depleted farm system along with a baseball squad with no pitching. Brandon Backe might be a great guy, but he is not a very good pitcher, and the rest of the staff with the case of Wandy and Roy is made up of pretty mediocre arms as well. The pitching problem isn’t going away. Wandy will probably be around for the long haul, but Roy is probably either going to retire or go to another team when his contract expires in two years and the rest of the pitchers are either too old or too crappy to be around in the future. Making this problem more frightening is that the Astros have no viable pitching prospects at any level of their minor league system. None. Not even one.

These problems are fairly easy to diagnose, but curing them will be far more difficult. The fans will urge Drayton to spend more money on free agents, particularly arms, but he should resist this urge. The free agent pitching market these days is full of overpriced average pitchers and not a lot of good deals. Teams generally don’t let their aces get away, and on the rare occasion that an ace actually does become available, the Yankees or Red Sox snatch them up. Creating a solid pitching staff must be done from the ground up. To create a good, championship caliber pitching staff (and that should be the goal) the Astros need to stock the minor leagues with quality young arms and they need to develop them. Since the Astros have drafted horribly, this won’t be easy. But the organization needs to start repeating the minor league system right now, and that means putting Roy Oswalt on the trading block. If the Astros play it right, I truly believe that Roy O, even pitching as poorly as he has this season, commands a king’s ransom of prospects. Valverede might also command a few solid prospects if the market is right. If the right offers present themselves, the Astros must pull the trigger and sell, even if the product suffers in the short term. The time has come to break it down. It will be painful because doing so will mean that the Astros won’t be very good for a while, but frankly, the goal should not to be to make the playoffs but to win championships. Through free agency, the ‘Stros might be able to put some band-aids on these problems and put a decent product on the field for the next couple of seasons but as a fan, I would far rather suffer a few bad seasons to create a real, viable contender than continue going down this road of mediocrity. Break it down and rebuild it, Uncle Drayton.

June 10, 2008: You Can't Fix Stupid

June 10: You can’t fix stupid

One of the great things about sports is how stupid the athletes that play them often are. Two days ago, Cedric Benson was pulled over in Austin and charged with DUI. Since earlier in the month Ced also picked up a “boating while intoxicated” charge, the Bears cut the starting running back and former fourth overall pick.

In both cases, Benson maintains his innocence. But regardless of whether he was in fact innocent or not, he should go to prison for being such a f---ing moron. Look, I know athletes are stupid, but sometimes you can’t help but laugh over just how stupid they actually are. In 2005, the Bears used the fourth overall pick to draft Benson and after a lengthy holdout, Benson signed a $35 million contract with a three million dollar signing bonus. Needless to say, Cedric Benson had/ still has more money than he knows what to do with so I am here to ask if someone could please explain to me why on earth Cedric Benson does not have a full time driver who waits on him hand and foot. Seriously, I really don’t have any qualms about Cedric going out and having a few pops. Hell, I really don’t care if he goes out like some college frat boy on a mission to drink himself goofy. Take a bloody driver. Just take a driver. He can afford a full time limo no problem. But maybe he’s a cheap son of a bitch and doesn’t want to spend money, but I’d be willing to bet you my life that I can go out right this moment and find some high school kid that would drive Ced and his boys around for free at night just so he could tell his boys that he hangs with Cedric. It would take me ten minutes, maybe less.

A wise man once said you can’t fix stupid. He was right. Any person that stupid is pretty much hopeless. I’m not kidding, there comes a point where you just have to say “this guy is totally hopeless.” Since it seems that a lot of these hopeless people also happen to be exceptional athletes. Thus I propose a simple solution to the problem. If I were an NFL general manager and I was thinking about taking a player with a history of drunk driving, I would offer, no, I would contractually demand that the player not drive past 7 and instead use a driver that I would pay for. If the player says he won’t comply, I’d tell him thanks and walk away.

I recognize that this is might possibly be illegal and might be struck down by the courts as completely illegal since it would be discriminating against the hopelessly stupid, but I would roll the dice because if you can succesfully coax an idiot to agree to constantly have something closely resembling a babysitter, then you can sign total morons who can score touchdowns without getting arrested on a bi-monthly basis. They don’t go to prison and get to keep their money, the team gets touchdowns. It’s a total win-win.

June 9, 2008: Of College Baseball

It is Sunday night. Game 2 of the NBA finals is being played as we speak. Am I watching? No. No I am not watching. Instead, I am sitting in the Reckling Park press box covering game two of the Rice-Texas A&M super regional. Of course, when I say covering, I use the term rather loosely. You see, while Rice does have one of the nicest press boxes you will ever see at a college baseball stadium (this is actually true and not just me being sarcastic), Reckling Park remains a college baseball stadium so even the best press box still only has room for a handful of people, namely real media with deadlines, the rest of us have been relegated to “overflow seating.” For me, that means sitting in the media hospitality area outside of the press box and luxury boxes with a host of other disgruntled media members watching the game on television. When I imagined how being a member of the press and covering a game would work (maybe I was naive to think that I would actually watch the event..). Making this particularly strange is that because I am watching the game on television, there is about a five second delay. So every time something happens, the crowd reacts to the play in real time, and then about five seconds later, we get to see what happened. This is generally pretty annoying, but I have parlayed it into twenty dollars by betting with my esteemed colleagues on what the crowds cheers are a reaction to (I make my money on Rice walks…). Anyway, I am generally pretty bitter that I am missing game two and I decided that I hate college baseball because of it. Since this is a totally irrational, I decided to do something of a cost benefit analysis to figure out if my hatred of college baseball is based on any sort of rational logic.

Cons

--PIIIING!!!! Unlike the pro game, college baseball players use aluminum bats. This sucks for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the painfully obnoxious sound that the bat makes on contact (so much for the “crack of the bat”). But beyond just being unpleasing to my ears, the metal bat influences virtually every single aspect of the game. Metal bats create cheap home runs and cheap hits. A good pitch in on the hands will break a wooden bat and create a weak grounder, but in the college game the bat won’t break and often what would have been a nubber to the third baseman turns into a bloop single. Along those same lines, would be weak fly balls often turn into home runs. Oh, and I almost left out that one of these days, a pitcher is going to be killed when he gets hit in the head with a line drive that comes smoking off of one of these metal tennis rackets that they hit with. I actually admire any pitcher willing to stand in the box and throw to a giant first baseman holding one of those sticks. I truly would be afraid to do it. I think that baseball should go back to wood bats regardless of level of play, but I understand why metal bats make sense from high school on down to tee ball (the kids are weaker, wood bats are often too heavy etc etc) but the arguments proponents of aluminum pose are not applicable to the college game any longer (if they ever were at all). Today’s college athletes are big and strong and absolutely can handle the wood stick. I don’t really know how the NCAA justifies allowing aluminum to itself, but someone is actually going to get killed and that’s a shame because anyone with half a brain can see that a change is needed right now for safety reasons. So why no change? The NCAA claims that wood bats are too expensive, but I don’t buy it since most major division one programs are sponsored by a bat maker like TPX (which is owned by Louisville Slugger) or Easton and get their bats for free. Thus I think the reason for the change lies more in the fact that the makers of aluminum bats make big money selling the bats that kids see in the college world series to high school and little league players. The college world series is the only major showcase of aluminum bats, and as a result the sponsors are understandably reluctant to allow for a change.

--The games are too long. Yesterdays game lasted almost four hours, and today’s is moving at a snails pace. This is largely a product of the fact that too many runs get scored, and this is largely a result of metal bats. But too long is too long. Also, I would like the score lines to look like baseball scores instead of football scores. But maybe that’s just me.

Pros

--The season is relatively short. Actually, its pretty long (over 50 games) but all but the most die hard college baseball fans (if those exist..) don’t start paying attention until the conference tournaments. I personally glance at the conference tournament brackets to see how Texas and Rice are positioned, read the papers for scores during the regionals, and apparently I know cover the super regionals. Omaha is always fun, particularly if Rice and Texas are involved.

--ESPN has a great College World Series Jingle which they have stuck with for as long as I can remember (“back home in Omaha”).

--Comically bad coaching. Get this. In the bottom of the 4^th inning, Texas A&M seized the lead and loaded the bases with two outs and their five hole hitter set to bat. Rather than let one of the best hitters on the team possibly bust the game wide open with a single (which would have scored two and given the Aggies a three run lead) or a double (which would probably have cleared the bases, giving them a four run lead) Aggie Coach Rob Childress called a triple steal, i.e. the Aggies tried to steal home. The play was surprisingly close, but the runner was thrown out at the plate ending the inning with the five hole hitter not having taken the bat off of his shoulder. Better yet, when I asked Childress about the call in the press conference, he actually defended the move as a “smart, aggressive baseball play.” I’m here to tell you that it was not a “smart baseball play” but rather one of the single stupidest moves I’ve ever seen. I practically expected Rice manager Wayne Graham to list Childress when he was naming players that came up big for his team.

--Rice is a power in college baseball. I like any sport where a school like Colgate (small, academic power traditionally awful at sports) can consistently compete for a national championship. Go Owls!

--College baseball is the only sport where players get drafted before the end of their season and the way that the major league baseball draft is set up, players can get drafted in multiple years if they don’t sign. I don’t know what intrigues me about this; I just think it’s interesting. 12 Rice players were selected in this year’s draft, and I suspect at least half of them will be back. But consider that right at the apex of the college baseball post season, these players find out where they were drafted. Can you imagine the various emotions that this must set off, with some knowing that they are about to make the big bucks while other teammates might be bitter because they didn’t get drafted at all.

I suppose college baseball really isn’t worth hating, and might even be worth following in the post season, even if you do have to listen to that awful PIIING. Where else can you see the “triple steal” attempted without the manager being fired immediately following the game?

2/24/08: Watch the NBA

Last column, I complained about the fact that most sports fans, even the serious ones, don’t really follow the NBA (except for their favorite team) until the playoffs. But, at least this year, you should. Here is why.
First, the Rockets have won 12 games in a row running their overall record to 35-20. They are only three games back of the Western Conference leading Lakers. But despite all of the Rockets recent success, they remain in 7th place in the West. Yep, that was not a typo. The Rockets could legitimately miss the playoffs but they could just as easily be the number one seed. Denver and Golden State are currently tied for the eighth and final playoff spot (if the season ended today, Golden State would get the spot) and they are only five games back of the Lakers. A 50 win basketball team could actually not make the playoffs this season.
My other reason to watch more basketball is Kobe Bryant. I know he isn’t exactly the warmest guy on the planet, but if you don’t watch Kobe Bryant every time the Lakers play a national TV game (which will be a lot now that Los Angeles landed Pau Gasol), you are missing out on by far the best player since Jordan. If Kobe Bryant wins two more rings, Bryant will belong in the “greatest player of all time” debate. There is literally nothing he cannot do. I cannot think of anything that Kobe Bryant does not do exceptionally on a basketball court. There are a handful of guys in the league right now that can score like Jordan did, and Bryant is one of them, but what sets Kobe apart from the current pack of stars and what makes the Jordan comparison so interesting is the fact that Kobe plays defense like Jordan did. Kobe never lets up, ever. What separated Jordan from the other superstars of his day was his intensity. Jordan’s intensity never fluctuated on the offensive or defensive ends and game to game, no one worked harder. I think Kobe might have that same drive. Granted, he has been pretty immature in handling certain situations in the past, namely Shaq, but when I listen to him talk I’m struck by how Jordanesq he sounds and acts. Like Jordan, Bryant works harder than ANYONE. This past off-season Bryant made 1000 shots every day. I didn’t say he took 1000 shots, I said he made 1000. “You don’t practice taking shots, you practice making them” said Kobe.
The most telling evidence of Bryant’s transformation into the sort of modern Jordan might be the way his teammates talk about him. One of the things that shapes my memory of Jordan was the way that his teammates revered him. Whenever you heard a guy like Tony Kukok or Steve Kerr talk, they always talked about how hard Jordan works and how much he expected of them. If you watched the Bulls regularly, and most big NBA fans did when he played for them, you would occasionally see Jordan pull a teammate aside and sternly talk to them, almost like a father talking to a son. Even Pippen occasionally heard it from Jordan if he made a mistake. I feel like Kobe is starting to develop that same sort of presence. If you listen to any of the Lakers, you will hear about how hard he works and how much he pushes the team to succeed. And as Jordan once did, Kobe occasionally pulls a teammate aside to impart some of his paternal wisdom upon them.
So while you might be reluctant to embrace Bryant for a host of reasons, you might consider doing so because Bryant is a once in a generation talent.
Watch the NBA, watch the Rockets, and watch Kobe Bryant because it is turning out to be one hell of an interesting season.

2/15/08

11 days have passed since my last post. If that much time passes between columns it normally means that I have a bad case of writers block, but I don’t really think that is the case here. I mean it sort of is, but at the same time, it really is not. You see, if I have writers block it usually means that there is no shortage of stories to write about but I just can’t write about any of them well. But this is February, the most boring month of the sports year. The NFL season ended, and now there is only regular season basketball and hockey and pre-spring training baseball. I could write about steroids, but I don’t think I will because I’m tired of watching the Roger Clemens v. the world soap opera unfold. I don’t care that Brian McNamee (allegedly) injected Clemens’ wife with HGH before they posed for the SI swimsuit issue. I think Roger Clemens took steroids. All that I have gleaned from the Congressional hearings is that many members of the United States Congress lack anything resembling the ability to articulate in an intelligent fashion. If you complain that many athletes don’t have what you might call a firm grasp of how to properly speak the English language, I think you should seriously consider giving athletes a temporary break and ripping on some of the members of the United States house of representatives. Athletes play sports for a living, while some of those idiotic members of Congress supposedly write laws. All things being equal, I would absolutely take Allen Iverson in an academic decathlon against a few members of the House.
The Rockets have won eight in a row but I can’t write about that because most of you won’t read about actual sports until the playoffs unless football is involved. Many of you might enjoy a column on Shaq desperately attempting to get into shape so that he can keep up with Steve Nash without keeling over and dying on the floor, but I think that Shaq is damaged goods and until I see the Daddy moving up and down the floor for the first time, I will assume that the Heat made out like bandits getting Marion for the overweight, oft injured diesel.
I have NHL observation regarding Richard Zednik’s injury. Seeing Zednik take a skate to the jugular is the most frightening injury that I have witnessed in my lifetime. The image of Zednik desperately skating over to the bench leaving a trail of blood behind him gives me Goosebumps. The Panthers deserve credit for keeping excellent doctors on sight because had the medical personnel not acted so well, Zednik may well be dead.
Beyond that, I really don’t have a lot of compelling stuff to write about. I could subject you to a pathetic, time filling ploy like Sportscenter’s “Greatest Highlight ever” segment, but I figure that you already have to see enough of that garbage on ESPN so I will just stop writing. I only wish to recommend that this might be a good time to read a book or take your wife out to dinner because during the month of February, compelling sport stories are on vacation.

2/4/08: Reaction to Super Bowl

Eli Manning outplayed Tom Brady and Tom Coughlin out coached Bill Belicheck in the Super Bowl. This is the stunning reality of what happened last night in the Super Bowl. I don’t know that I could ever possibly express how absolutely dumbfounded at the reality of this statement. I wrote my last column about this and I feel the need to re-express the absolute fact that the Giants were quite simply not a very good football team before they played the Patriots during week seventeen at which point they transformed into one hell of a good football team despite the fact that they had the same players in the game. I find this to be quite confusing, but I won’t dwell on it since my entire last post did exactly that. I have to do a lot of reading about the various religions of the world but a couple of things stood out to me from last night’s game.
1. The completion from Manning to David Tyree on the Giants last drive will be an iconic, signature play for years to come. I don’t hesitate one bit making the assertion that it belongs in the same conversation as Dwight Clarks catch or the immaculate reception. It was, quite simply, a breathtaking play to watch. I still have no idea how on earth Eli Manning got away from the entire Patriots defensive line but he did. The throw he made was actually ludicrous, and how David Tyree made that catch will boggle my mind for years to come. Rodney Harrison was literally on top of him. I don’t even know how to describe the magnitude of that play except to say that it gave me the chills when I saw it live and I didn’t really care who won the game. That being said, the play never should have happened because on that same drive Eli Manning made an awful through that Assante Samuel should have intercepted easily. I don’t know if people have dwelled enough on the magnitude of Samuel not converting that interception. It cost New England the game. If he converts that extremely routine interception, the Patriots win. But of course he didn’t and then Tyree made his miracle catch, and then finally Plexico caught his pass, and that was all she wrote for New England.
2. Now we have to listen to the Dolphins say “I told you so.” Great.
3. This is all I have for now, but did anyone see that Jeremy Shockey had like five beers in front of him when they showed him in the Press Box. I loved that. On one hand you had the repeated zooming in on Peyton Manning, who was standing in a corner of the press box by himself looking like a crazed lunatic watching the game, and then they pan to Shockey, who is wearing a white t-shirt and is drinking a beer. I cannot describe to you how funny I find this.4. Contextually, I think this game very well may have been the biggest upset of all time. Think about it, the Patriots were poised to become they greatest team of all time. Tom Brady just had the greatest individual season by a quarterback ever. The Pats were a double digit favorite and the Giants beat them in the Super Bowl. I recognize that there may have been more unlikely upsets, but given the historical implications that the game had for the Patriots, I can’t imagine an upset that was more significant.

1/21/08: I was Wrong About Eli Manning

In the days leading up to the New England-New York game played in week 17, I openly criticized the game as meaningless and called the Giants fools for playing their boys in a game that had no playoff implications. I recognize that there were days when teams played for pride and the love of winning, but in today’s NFL, there are no moral victories. I still believe this. But I was clearly wrong when I criticized Tom Coughlin and the Giants for approaching the week 17 match-up like a playoff game. I still think that the decision was insane, but something happened to Eli Manning and the Giants that game because that night they played like a Super Bowl caliber football team and they haven’t stopped since and frankly I can’t quite adjust quickly enough to analyze the team with any sense of how good or not good they are. This will probably offend a few sensitive types, but the Giants are the girl in high school who was average looking for the first three years but suddenly one day it dawns on you that she looks pretty damn good at school one day. This observation puts you on alert and you start paying closer attention to the way she looks to see if it is a fluke or not and during this period you inevitably try to convince yourself that she really isn’t that attractive and that she isn’t worth your romantic interest (past friendship, of course). If you were moderately cool in high school, it was these buy low sell high type women that could boost you to the next level socially (whatever that means….but don’t lie you thought their were “cool kids” in high school too) because if you were smart enough to court the young lady while she was still humble and hadn’t yet acquired a grossly inflated self image you just might land one hell of an attractive girl. But if you were like me, rather than trusting what you see after a couple of days, you waffled and by the time you actually realized that you were right and hadn’t been hallucinating when you first noticed her random hotness, some stud was dating her and she had become too cool to speak to you. For me, the Giants are that girl. I should have trusted what I saw week seventeen when Eli and the Giants played phenomenally against the best team to play in the NFL in one hell of a long time. That game Eli Manning threw four touchdown passes and threw for 251 yards, and he did it without looking like the wheels might come flying off any second. In the past, Eli Manning put up what appeared to be good passing yardage and touchdown numbers but the numbers never told the whole tale because he would accumulate his touchdowns and yards in bunches. Every 3 weeks Eli would play an unreal game where he might throw for four touchdowns, but the next week he would throw five interceptions and even when he was playing well, watching him didn’t inspire confidence. Eli Manning transformed into a completely different player in that Patriots game. It isn’t that his numbers were spectacular, Eli has played statistically awing games in the past, it was how he looked. I can’t really describe it to you, but if you have watched Eli in the past and you see him now, you know exactly what I am talking about. Eli was always an interception waiting to happen and whenever something good happened all it meant was that he was due to make a catastrophic decision. Now, for whatever reason, when I see him drop back to pass I wonder which receiver he will find. He seems methodical, in touch with his surroundings. A lot of you will probably respond something along the lines of “Eli was always this way you just didn’t notice and now that he wins a few games you are jumping on the bandwagon.” But that kind of statement is simply wrong. This is not the case of an unsung, underrated player that was a star but nobody noticed until he got a chance on the national stage. When the Miami Heat won the title a few years back, Dwayne Wade fit the criteria of a guy that was really really good but people didn’t recognize it until he was in the big time. Eli Manning was not a good quarterback. He simply was not, and if you ever watched him you knew that after about three games. But now, he is and frankly I’ve never seen a team, or a player change so rapidly from just barely decent to really really good like the Giants and Eli Manning have since they played the Patriots during the final game of the regular season. And no one saw this coming. The Giants were not a really talented team waiting to explode, the Giants were an average football team and they played like one. And now something is different and they are quite good. And for me the most troubling thing is that the only reason I can think that the Giants have improved so much is that they gained confidence when they just barely lost to the Patriots and that means that in the modern world of sports, there are moral victories and they DO MATTER and this reality could make things very complicated.

1/8/08 in favor of a BCS title game

A lifelong diehard college football fan, I rarely complain about the sport. I’ve put up with cheating scandals, bad referees and a pitiful system without so much as a peep for quite a while. I’ve even defended the bowl system before. But I’ve had enough. I just endured 32 mostly thoroughly crappy bowl games. And you read that last sentence correctly. I said endured…not enjoyed. The most entertaining bowl game I watched, and God knows I watched a lot of them, took place on New Years day between Florida and Michigan with Michigan knocking off the Gators in a high scoring affair. The thing is, even during that game, I found myself changing the channel early and often to the NHL’s winter classic, which, if you missed it, was unbelievable. This isn’t a criticism of the teams per say and it really isn’t even a criticism of the bowls themselves. If you want to have the bowl games, if schools make money of them, if you think it’s good for smaller teams to get to play…whatever the reason, I really don’t care. It’s fine.
Here is what I do care about though. I care that college football deprives the sport of any sort of true closure at the end of most years by simply refusing to allow championship caliber contenders to play it out on the field. It infuriates me that I have to sit here and make a cast that LSU may or may not have been the best team in the country this past season, it is absolutely insane. The beauty of sport lies in the absolutes. In a world of gray outcomes, sport provides people with black and white results. Teams go out and they play games and when the game ends, one team wins and one team loses.. Sport represents the purest meritocracy we have in America because in sports you are not supposed to be able to hide. The best teams show they are the best teams by winning. Will someone please make an absolutely convincing argument that LSU could beat USC right now on a neutral field? The fact of the matter is, I can make legitimate argument that LSU, USC, and Georgia respectively is the best team in the country. I have one question. The season ended yesterday, so how the hell can that be?
I recognize that I’m preaching to the choir here, but I’m literally getting to the point where college football is so backward, so absolutely wrong that I’m considering just blowing it off. Now there is no chance that this is going to happen, because I love the game, but if I was smart I, I would because at the end of the day what do I get out in return for all of the hours I spend watching all the pre-game shows and all the games and spending all the money on all the gear. I don’t even get a national champion. I get nothing. I get speculation, I get confusion. I get BS. The Pac 10 and the Big 10 need to get their you know what together and recognize for the good of the bloody sport and for the sake of my sanity that a playoff needs to happen. The Pac 10 screwed one of its own teams out of a possible national title this year by opposing any sort of a playoff vehemently. And the Big 10 might not have looked so crappy (3-5 in their bowl games) had they lobbied for an expansive playoff because Michigan might have made some noise with the kind of ball they were playing at the end of the year. There is no reasonable argument for not having a playoff. I challenge the NCAA to tell the athletic directors to shove it and give the fans (who are the lifeblood of the sport) what they want, what they demand, and what they deserve….a clear national champion.