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A Really Short History of Pro Football Offense in the XXIst Century

2012-02-02T17:14:00.002-05:00

The last running back to be named Most Valuable Player of the Super Bowl was Terrell Davis of the Broncos. That was in 1998, or XIV Super Bowls ago.

In football age, that many seasons is about three and one-half generations. Most of the Patriots and Giants were either children or teenagers when Davis won the award.

Nobody, not even themselves, can envision a scenario where a Giants or Patriots runner will keep that streak from reaching XV.

Because When Has the Real Estate Market Ever Steered You Wrong?

2012-02-01T12:03:00.002-05:00

The headline in the "Orange County Register" caught my eye. It rade "Real Estate Conditions Forecast Pats Win."

The article said that the commercial real estate brokerage of Jones Lang LaSalle has developed one of those foolproof has-nothing-to-do-with-football means of predicting the Super Bowl. According to the company, since Boston has a higher vacancy rate of commercial office space than does New York City, the Pats will beat the Giants. The firm said it had forecast last year's Super Bowl using this metric, and lo and behold the Packers had indeed defeated the Steelers.

I would have completely ignored this hooey except for one detail in the article. The Executive Chairman of Jones Lang LaSalle, the one member of the firm quoted, is none other than Roger Staubach, Hall of Fame quarterback. He went so far as to say that since the vacancy rate of offices in Boston was 10 percent higher than in New York, the Patriots would win the Super Bowl by 10 points.

So you be the judge. On the one hand, Staubach has a high level of football expertise. On the other, systems bettors die broke more quickly than other bettors no matter how much they know.

To Lose the Will for Free Shrimp Is to Lose the Will to Live

2012-01-31T15:57:00.002-05:00

Both Boston sports talk radio stations have emigrated to Indianapolis this week, part of that odd but apparently effective programming strategy of broadcasting from the Super Bowl host city without covering any Super Bowl events, then leaving town 48 hours before the game.

Early this morning, two of the hosts of one of the AM drive-time shows, the one that can be funny on occasion, were discussing the host city committee party for the media, which will be held this evening at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The hosts said they weren't going to attend.

These guys were missing a bet. Of the pre-Super Bowl parties to which media members are or can get invited to, the host city party, usually held on Tuesday, is by far the more jolly occasion. The vaunted Commissioner's Party on Friday night, quite the blowout back in the day and worth hitting as recently as the 1990s, has evolved into what essentially is the Republican National Convention with a buffet instead of speeches. If rubbing elbows and every other body part with an inchoate mass of old rich people is your idea of fun, well, start scrambling for your invitation.

The crowd is much less dense at the media party, the food is just as good, the drink just as free, and the locals of both sexes who have wangled themselves into the party in the mistaken belief it's an opportunity for social climbing tend to be way more physically attractive. All in all, it's a pleasant evening out to which you, the media member, is being treated. It's only POLITE to accept the host city's bread and salt. Also beer.

Morning radio personalities have to get up very early indeed, so I could understand why the two hosts weren't going. But the tone of their dismissal bothered me. They implicitly and then explicitly stated that the media party was an event for small-town boobs and small-time journalists, a fundamentally uncool event which any person with a decent respect for their own hipness would avoid as fervently as work at a Christian music format station.

Avoiding generally accepted social rituals is sometimes a wise decision. Avoiding them as a matter of policy makes you a person others will seek to avoid. Skippin Super Bowl parties, hype and fun while you're AT the Super Bowl isn't cool. It's just stupid.

Humor Is Lost on Some Crowds

2012-01-30T12:10:00.002-05:00

Today's New York Times and Boston Globe each had stories reporting that upon arriving in Indianapolis, Bill Belichick both expressed pleasure at being at the Super Bowl and made some mild pleasantries about that fact. The tone of both stories was of utter incredulity indicating each reporter felt it merited a headline along the lines of "LUCKY LINDY MAKES IT!!!"

Poor Bill. No, really. The more time passes, the more I feel the Pats' coach is a man stuck out of time in a world that cannot, no, refuses to make the slightest effort to understand him.

Start with the obvious. If Belichick's happy to be at the Super Bowl, it's because he's breathing. There is nobody, from team owner down to the most cynical sportswriter, who doesn't land at the airport of the host city and think "Hey, I'm at the Super Bowl. Cool!" That's because being at the Super Bowl is cool, and the coolness of the experience is in direct proportion to the amount of one's involvement in the event. Being a writer was cooler than being a fan who won tickets in some contest. Being a coach is about one million levels of coolness above sportswriting (How coaches feel when they LEAVE the Super Bowl is another story). Can't we accept that Belichick has human emotions even when he's on duty? So he's good at suppressing them. That doesn't mean they aren't in there somewhere.

As for being surprised Belichick made a funny or two, well, that indicates the reporters are prisoners of conventional wisdom, comedy-wise anyway. In my experience, Belichick was often humorous, or attempted to be humorous. This went unnoticed by many because in humor as in many other things, the Pats' coach is a man born out of his proper time.

Belichick's humor is subtle, dry and as understated as he can make it. Many legendary humorists (James Thurber comes to mind) were of that style. Like Thurber, most of 'em have been dead for some time. The wholly dominant style of comedy through most of Belichick's adult life, since "Animal House" in 1978, has been overstatement: the broad gag, the use of hyperbole, the ranting monologue dialed up to 11 for effect. Think "Bridesmaids," "Two & a Half Men" and the late Sam Kinison.

If a man has a Thurber sense of humor in a Kinison world, many of his jokes will move right past his audience. It's not that they don't get it. They don't even recognize it.

I yield to no man or woman in my appreciation of overblown, sophomoric to juvenile humor. But there's a place for wit as well as belly laughs in the comedy universe. Belichick should be congratulated for his contrarian approach to laughs, but it's not something he dreamed up for the Super Bowl. It's part of his personality that's always been there.

Now, if Tom Coughlin cracks jokes at HIS introductory press conference in Indy today, THEN you've got a front page story.

Hard Time

2012-01-28T13:00:00.003-05:00

T.F. Green and Newark Liberty airports are not destinations often thought of with longing. But that's how the Patriots and Giants are thinking of them today. The flight to Indianapolis tomorrow represents about a 90-minute escape from the disorienting limbo of the Super Bowl off-week.

It won't be until they check into their maximum security luxury hotels that the players will absorb the wretched truth that they've only exchanged limbos. Being closer to the Super Bowl in terms of three-dimensional space will not bring it any closer in the fourth dimension of time. There's an eternity of tedium left until kickoff.

By both circumstance and design, the Super Bowl is very different from every other NFL game. By far the biggest difference, the most real of all the so-called "distractions" is how much sitting/standing/lounging around is involved for the players. The world championship of professional football is a test of patience as much as it is of strength, skill and will.

Tom Brady, taking one for the team as usual, spewed forth the obligatory "we wish the game was today" bromide this week. But cliches get that way because they're true. That's how Brady does feel, that's how they all feel. And that Brady knows full well how much time he's got left to fill up before 6:30 p.m. February 5 only makes his longing more acute.

Every football fan knows the feeling of wistfulness, aggravation and disorientation that comes on the weekend of the Super Bowl offweek when it sinks in there's no game to watch -- unless you count the Pro and Seniors Bowls, which no one does. Magnify that feeling by about a trillion, and you almost halfway to imagining how the Pats and Giants all feel.

Want to imagine another good test of patience? Think of answering the same question 10,000 times in a week. By and large, players don't mind the obligatory time they must spend with the media at the Super Bowl. It's something to do besides review the tapes of the Pats/Giants last six games one more time. It's nice to have the world make a fuss over you, too. But they'd like it better if the media got together and agreed to ask every question only once and shared the answers.

"The Super Bowl," observed Drew Bledsoe, not usually known for wittiness, "is a place where you get tired of your own life story."

Coaches, who deep in their hearts would prefer playing one game a year for which the practiced incessantly, are grateful for the extra time the Super Bowl makes for planning, preparing, and fretting. Players aren't, unless they're dealing with an injury as Rob Gronkowski is. They're used to having three days of practice and a week of study before a game. A few, like Brady, get more out of the extra time. Most get little or none, and there's always one or two for whom the delay creates the paralysis of analysis.

At the 14 Super Bowls I was blessed enough to cover, by the Friday before the game I couldn't wait for it to be Sunday evening. That's a writer! Believe me, all my fellow scribes felt the same way. That sentiment was one of the very rare occasions where I believe that for a microsecond or two I had some distant inkling of what it was to be like one of the people I was covering.

Well, football players are supposed to be able to take it, including tedium. The real problem comes during the Bowl itself. The first item on Bill Belichick's Super Bowl game plans is a full discussion of just how much standing around there is AFTER kickoff. Halftime is longer. The commercial breaks are much longer, and there are more of them. Rest assured every replay will take twice as long as usual. No official wants to be the zebra who makes the call to decide a Super Bowl, let alone a wrong call that does. The waiting will be enforced on 90 men whose bodies contain more natural biochemical stimulant than could be produced by all the meth labs of Fresno in a decade.

Considering how awful that waiting must be, and considering how a sport built on repetition and routine makes its championship game as singular and different as possible, I always feel there's no bigger miracle in sports than Super Bowls which are well-played and dramatic contests. It speaks well of the contemporary NFL that 21st century Bowls have so often been memorable or at least diverting ones.

I do know this. If I possessed some way of measuring the collective psyches of football teams to determine which of two rivals was the group that was least easily bored, I'd never ever lose a bet on the Super Bowl.

When A Protest Falls Somewhere Besides the Rose Garden, Does It Make a Sound? No.

2012-01-25T17:05:00.002-05:00

Tim Thomas has a lot to answer for. Anyone who gives sports commentators an excuse to talk politics has committed a grave disservice to humanity.

There are two normal reactions to Thomas' decision to skip the White House ceremony honoring the Bruins for their 2011 Stanley Cup triumph because the goalie is EXTREMELY unhappy with the policies of President Barack Obama, and I had them both and in the proper order, that being a) who cares? and b) that's his business isn't it?. We got rights in this country, even Vezina Trophy winners.

It was sort of refreshing that the third Boston jock in history to skip a White House team ceremony had semi-coherent political motives for doing so. When Larry Bird stood up Ronald Reagan in 1984, a bad hangover was almost surely the reason. When Manny Ramirez stood up George W. Bush in 2008, well, your guess is as good as mine.

Then I had a third reaction, a mild bit of wistful sadness on behalf of Thomas himself. The Bruins' goalie was the only person affected in the slightest by his gesture of protest, and while it doubtless made him feel good and full of righteous satisfaction last Monday, in time he may come to see that day as the missed opportunity it was.

I assure you Barack Obama doesn't care that Thomas stood him up. Pols are very used to snubs, and millionaire professional athletes are not the demographic David Axelrod is counting on to sweep Obama into a second term come November. If Obama's a hockey fan, he's hiding it well. I don't think we've ever had a real hockey fan as President. Coolidge, perhaps?

Nor will those celebrating Thomas as a principled hero do so for very long. It is the nature of the overly political person that there's a new hero/outrage every day. Should Thomas let in three goals in a period next Tuesday against Ottawa, public opinion will not be concerned with his views on society.

All that will be left is that Thomas's teammates will have the memory of a pleasant ceremony where the President of the United States made a minor fuss over them while they had their picture taken, and he will not. And it's all due to a terrible if terribly common misunderstanding.

Like most of his fellow citizens, Thomas does not grasp that the President of the United States, any President, has two different and separate jobs in our political system. One, the big one, is the elected political leader of the executive branch of the U.S. government. THAT'S the Barack Obama Thomas is mad at.

The other Presidential job, less important but no less real, is our ceremonial Head of State, the individual who presides over rituals deemed important by our political system and society. Things like visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Memorial Day, or hosting the President of Horribledumpistan at state dinners or having little White House moments for Americans who have done a thing.

Some President long before Obama (Carter is the first one I remember, honoring the 1980 Olympic hockey team) decided that having champion sports teams at the White House would be one of those rituals. Like all damn fool political decisions, once it became a tradition, this ritual became impossible to get rid of, and I'm sure other Presidents have wished they could. They're kind of busy.

The point that escaped Thomas is that the ritual ceremonial Head of State President is not political in any sense of the word. He's a purely totemic figure created to satisfy demands of, uh, national etiquette is as good as a phrase as any. Protesting a President by avoiding one of those ceremonies, which has been done by noted figures whose politics lean both right and left, is protesting a person who in a sense is not in the room at the time of said event. It's a gesture without a target, let alone an audience.

All Thomas missed was an occasion where America, in the person of its elected-for-now ceremonial Head of State, expressed the opinion that it admires sports champions, and that he, Tim Thomas, was one. Plus there might have been lunch or at least snacks.

And as time passes, if he and his descendants aren't too busy polishing their sniper rifles and gold bars and cooking canned foods at the Thomas Family Compound near the Montana-Alberta border, Thomas might come to regret passing up that token of his accomplishments.

Lots of Big Hits Needed a Script Doctor

2012-01-23T16:01:00.002-05:00

If some focus group of groundlings had convinced Shakespeare the play needed a happy ending, "King Lear" would still have been a memorable drama. But it wouldn't be "King Lear."

If Bruce Springsteen gave a concert without multiple encores, it'd still be a great concert. But the audience would leave the building feeling more than a bit let down.

That's sort of how I feel about yesterday's AFC and NFC championship games. As football art goes, they offered their audiences all the catharsis one could want -- until their final scenes.

The Patriots beat the Ravens on a missed short field goal. The Giants beat the 49ers when they recovered a fumbled punt return. Those are the most and second-most anticlimactic ways thrilling football games CAN end. And I think only the most devout partisan fans of the two winners aren't at least a little downcast about the conclusions of two episodes of magnificently tense and melodramatic football, the very best the sport has to offer as a spectator experience.

Big plays of course, aren't necessarily good plays. The word big is value-neutral. But one (this one anyway) likes to see a close game determined by an action of the winners, not by a miscue on the part of the losers. It lessens the contest's value, including its historical value.

Super Bowl XXV was an outstanding game. But a game whose defining moment was a field goal missed is always going to be less celebrated in pro football lore and legend than a game defined by a field goal made -- such as Super Bowl XXXVI.

It's not that the endings of the two games are any aspersion on the winning teams. By definition, one-play games are games in which both teams turned in an effort worthy of a victory. But as a matter of aesthetics and out of pure human sympathy, I want a one-play game decided by a play that makes me cheer, not wince.

The AFC Championship Game in a Quote From Years Ago

2012-01-22T18:27:00.002-05:00

"Every time you line up for a field goal in the second half, you're closer to losing the game" -- Steve Young in his playing days.

Morning-Day-Night Tripleheaders Are Tough at My Age

2012-01-22T11:44:00.002-05:00

Hitting a bar to watch a big game with a bunch of diehard fans is an odd experience to check off the to-do list by 10 a.m., but I managed, after watching Tottenham Hotspur lose in extra time to Manchester City at the Kinsale by Government Center with the Spurs' Boston fan club. Any group which contains members who're having Buffalo wings at 9 a.m. is worth knowing.

So I need to regroup before the NFL comes on, and that will make my predictions briefer if not necessarily more accurate than is customary.

I never expect the Patriots to lose, and today is no exception. New England has more ability to win the muckers' game the Ravens want to play than Baltimore has to win the firehouse fast break game the Pats want to see. It's POSSIBLE Joe Flacco could hit two or three bombs for scores and upset that equation, but it's possible in the same sense Rick Santorum could have a major turnaround in Florida. Both are, as yet, purely theoretical possibilities unsupported by laboratory observations.

The NFC game is altogether more interesting, or rather, the forecasting I've sampled about the game is more interesting. It's as if nobody saw the 49ers-Saints game, or even knows its final score.

If I've heard one commentator babble on about the 49ers tough defense, I've heard a thousand. They're getting credit for a win they damn near turned into a loss all by themselves. Generating four turnovers is great, but it's not as great as allowing two 50-yard plus touchdown passes to lose leads in the fourth quarter is awful.

It is my belief, partially confirmed by observation, that road playoff victories are a significant indicator of success in subsequent playoff games. The Giants are the only team left, in fact the only team period, that's won a road playoff game this season. I don't see why they won't win another one, unless they too turn it over five times.

Oh, boy, a Patriots-Giants Super Bowl rematch. As far as Pats fans are concerned, that'd have to be the most annoying possible two weeks of Super hype.

Revis-No, Make That Delusionist History

2012-01-21T08:54:00.002-05:00

Deion Branch is has had a long and solid career as a step-above-competent NFL wide receiver. He's a swell fellow to boot. But as a propagandist, Branch is a dismal flop. He hasn't learned the important rule that to be convincing, falsehoods must contain an element of truth, about as much as the vermouth in a proper Martini.

Branch's comment this past week that the Patriots "have been underdogs all year" was straight bathtub gin, pure moonshine in both senses of the word. We all know athletes enjoy the feeling of being scorned and persecuted by a hostile world almost as much as Newt Gingrich does, but really, there's a limit. A member of the most successful pro football team of the 21st century saying they're underdogs is about a light year past said limit.

Let's recap the facts of public, especially sports commentariat, opinion about the Pats this season for Branch and that odd subset of fans (all teams have one) that gets off on feeling put upon. In the preseason, the Patriots were team most favored to be the AFC representative in the Super Bowl, narrowly leading the Steelers and, let's not let anyone forget the commentariat has its problems too, the Jets and Chargers. There was no one, not even Rex Ryan, who didn't pick New England to at least make the playoffs.

Last but not least, for tomorrow's game against the Ravens, the one Branch was talking about, Las Vegas, which works strictly on math, not emotion, has made the Pats seven point favorites. That's an awful lot of points for a disrespected underdog to be giving its presumably better regarded foe.

It is true that when the Pats' defense had its problems this season, many commentators and fans said those problems might cause the team to be less successful than they'd previously thought. It's extremely unlikely New England players only heard that criticism from the outside world. I'm willing to bet that opinion was a prominent feature of Bill Belichick's remarks in the locker room throughout November and December.

That's a far cry from dismissing the Pats' Super Bowl chances altogether, which nobody did except on those days when radio talk shows felt the calls weren't coming in fast enough. One wishes players and the public would learn to discriminate between honest opinion and obvious emotion manipulation.

Branch, of course, was trying to manipulate himself, and almost surely failing. He's too sharp not to know the Patriots were overdogs all season long, just as they've been for the past decade. They are among the overest overdogs in the history of the National Football League. But for reasons of policy, they refuse to admit the obvious.

Some of the greatest teams in sports history, like the Larry Bird Celtics if one wants a local example, reveled in their identity as overdogs and made that image work for them to help them win. Remember Derek Jeter telling Aaron Boone to trust the ghosts? That's overdogism doing its thing.

The Pats will never acknowledge being favorites. Belichick won't permit it. Deep down, the Pats' coach believes, and I'm not saying he's wrong, that pro football is such a difficult endeavor that it's fundamentally surprising when any team wins a game, let alone his own.

But not even Belichick was willing to shatter reality the way Branch did. Indeed, I believe that as much as is constitutionally able, the coach took the opposite tack.
On Friday, after accurately noting that the Ravens are a tough opponent, Belichick expressed satisfaction with the Pats' practices and readiness for the game.

That's as close as close as Bill Belichick can or will ever get to saying "We got this."

Decisions That Don't Work Are Not Always Bad Decisions -- Got That, Ed?!

2012-01-19T16:01:00.002-05:00

The oddest thing about Ed Reed's criticism of Joe Flacco is how inaccurate it was. Why it makes you think Hall of Fame defensive backs have some innate prejudice against quarterbacks, even their own.

As has been recounted quite a bit in Boston media this week, Reed said that Ravens QB Flacco got "rattled" in Baltimore's 20-13 playoff victory against the Texans. This was a mystifying choice of words. No one would use the word "stellar" to describe Flacco's play in that game, but "rattled" is le mot injuste.

Flacco spent almost the entire game unable to move the Baltimore offense more than about 12 yards a possession. He was sacked early and often, threw some incompletions lucky to hit the field turf and generated about a half's worth of three and outs. It took a modest fourth quarter rally by Flacco to allow him to finish with more passing yards than Tim Tebow had against the Patriots.

Still, Flacco's stone mediocre passing line of 14 for 27 good for 176 yards also contains two touchdown passes. Flacco neither fumbled nor threw an interception. For that matter, the Ravens had no turnovers and not a single penalty. No false starts, no holding, etc.

Those are not "rattled" numbers. Offenses led by "rattled" quarterbacks don't have penalty-free games. Flacco had the numbers of a competent quarterback facing a superior defense playing close or at its capabilities and making the best of that bad situation. Flacco did an excellent job of choosing the least worst option available on passing plays. Sacks are about 100 times less damaging to an offense than interceptions. Three and outs are about the same. They hurt, but they're flesh wounds compared to turnovers -- as the Texans themselves proved beyond reasonable doubt.

I think what Reed meant to say was that the Texans gave Flacco an unpleasant afternoon, and that he hoped his quarterback knows that 176 yards in the air isn't going to get it done in New England this Sunday. And that's when the fact that deep down Ed Reed hates all quarterbacks took control.

I wonder what Reed used to say about Kyle Boller?

Less Can Be More, But It's Hard to Do

2012-01-16T09:48:00.002-05:00

Statistical anomaly #1 of the NFL divisional playoff round: The Denver Broncos had more total yards losing 45-10 to the Patriots than the Baltimore Ravens gained in beating the Houston Texans 20-13, 252 for Saturday night's routees as compared to 227 for the team that'll be the Pats next opponent.

Statistical anomaly #2: The Patriots were the only one of the four winning teams that LOST the turnover margin, having two to the Broncos' one. Indeed, without turnovers, the Pats would be playing the Texans this Sunday, and the Saints would be packing for a trip to Green Bay, having beaten the 49ers 44-24.

Statistical anomaly # 3: The Ravens not only had no turnovers yesterday, they had no penalties. This is the anomaly I'm sure Bill Belichick will be stressing in meetings today. When a team does nothing to hurt itself, it can get away with long stretches of not doing much to help itself.

These anomalies are presented as a gentle counterpoint to the conventional wisdom through pro football and its followers, not just here in New England, either, that the Patriots are the prohibitive favorite to emerge as Super Bowl champions because of their Hall of Fame quarterback and unstoppable offense. I'm not at all sure conventional wisdom is incorrect. The Pats DO have a Hall of Fame quarterback, and their offense has been well-nigh unstoppable since Halloween. Those are helpful qualities in a football team.

But I can't help remembering that as of noon last Saturday, conventional wisdom was that the Pats were one of THREE strong favorites to become NFL champions, as all three teams having Hall of Fame quarterbacks and unstoppable offenses.

Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees are still on track for Canton, and the Packers and Saints' offenses weren't exactly stopped. They did get beat, though.

They Can Break All Those Who Break Even

2012-01-15T09:12:00.004-05:00

The best measure of how thoroughly (and ridiculously) the Patriots dismantled the Broncos last night is this: as terrible as Tim Tebow was, and he was very terrible indeed, he had far from the worst night of any Bronco player. He might not have made the top (or bottom, depending on your point of view) five. That poor defensive back number 30, whose name I omit because I watched with the sound off. When he wasn't getting hurt, he was getting beat. Alleged superstar-in-the-making Von Miller had to start a fight to get a camera on him.

The massacre continued the oddest trend of New England's 2011 season. Against mediocrity, the Pats are invincible. As a friendly poster on sportsjournalists.com noted this morning, the Patriots now have an 8-0 record against teams which finished the season with .500 records.

The significance of this statistic escapes me. I strongly suspect it has none, except as a continuation of the Belichick era trend in which New England hardly ever loses games it REALLY shouldn't lose. But it's notable just for the big number of games. I know there's parity and all, but to play about half your games against .500 teams is a fluke so large it qualifies as an accomplishment.

A Suggestion for Opinionators

2012-01-14T22:05:00.001-05:00

Before offering the absolute, definitive, we now the answer yards of words on Tim Tebow's NFL future, please consider the story of the quarterback whose team won the early game today.

If anyone was more buried by more people than Alex Smith, I don't remember it. For five straight seasons, yet. But this afternoon, he was all the quarterback any team could want. He was a champion.

May not be next Sunday. That's the point. There's a lot of market volatility in quarterback stocks.

Dull Prediction Department

2012-01-14T09:16:00.003-05:00

No sports forecast is both less interesting to its audience and more dangerous to the forecaster than predicting that the outcome of a rematch will closely resemble the course and outcome of the first meeting of the teams in question. Nevertheless, logic and instinct tell me that's what's going to happen in the Patriots-Broncos game.

There is a significant chance that Tim Tebow will come out and stink tonight and the Pats will win by a telephone number. I was in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida over the holidays, Tebow's high school home town and where He will come again some day to be a back-bench Republican congressman. I thus was forced to watch every play of the Broncos-Chiefs game, and I have never, with the possible exception of the playoff games of the 1985 Bears, seen a quarterback that helpless. Tebow just didn't know what he wanted to do, and so did less than nothing.

But that didn't happen in the first New England game, and I don't think it will happen again. I have resolved the Tebow issue to my own satisfaction. He's Mark Sanchez who runs. He's going to be very bad in any number of games and his team will lose. But he can beat you, too. There will be games, more of them, when he's a reason Denver wins. There are plenty of NFL quarterbacks I rate below both those guys.

Tebow had a more than decent game against New England last month. He had over 280 yards of offense. The Broncos scored 23 points, the exact same number they scored against the Steelers in regulation last Sunday, in Tebow's finest game as a passer. I suspect Denver will score in the 20-24 point range tonight. That's what most Patriots opponents have done, after all.

There is, however, no way I can see the other end of what's necessary for a Denver victory, or even for a close game. The Broncos simply don't have what it takes to keep New England's offense from producing points at the pace to which it is accustomed. Denver doesn't force many turnovers, the key to 90 percent of all football upsets. Denver's pass defense had significant difficulties against the Steelers, facing of the NFL's seven best quarterbacks playing on one leg. Tonight they face one of the league's three best QBs with two legs. Not a promising vista, that.

If Tebow stinks, call it 45-3 New England. If he plays well, call it 38-28 New England. My best guess is around 37-20.

Satan's always tough at home.

Pundits Commit False Start on Unhappiness

2012-01-14T08:50:00.002-05:00

There has been a very odd strain of sports commentary around town this week. I just heard a fresh batch of it on the radio when I went to fill up the car with gas. Call it "preemptive bitching."

The theme, as expressed today in the Globe by Christopher Gasper, is that the heavily favored New England Patriots not only should defeat the Denver Broncos tonight, they'd damn well better. If they don't, it will indicate there's something fundamentally, deeply wrong with the franchise that has won 75 percent of its games over the last five years.

To get the full impact of this commentary, you need to listen to the radio. The tone of its advocates is cold, stern, angry even. I've heard it before, it's the exact same tone one of my high school math teachers used to talk to me about my horrible calculus grades. I was doing well in French and History, he'd say. So why couldn't I put in the effort to do well in calculus.

My teacher, a good guy, had it all backwards. I was putting in as much effort (don't ask how much) as in my other courses. My calculus grades weren't up to snuff because I didn't get calculus at all and never would. Effort and attitude had nothing to do with it. It was the same as trying to hit the curve ball.

So it is with the Pats tonight. I do not believe they will lose. In fact, I'll be startled if they do. But if it should happen, it won't be because of some inner moral weakness that strikes like clockwork in mid-January. It'll be for reasons that've been evident all year. Either the defense will fail to come up with the turnovers and red-zone stops that have saved its collective posterior throughout the regular season, the offense will find ways NOT to score 30 points or more, or both. Those possibilities have been baked into the cake of all 16 Pats' games so far, and three times they were realized.

Oh, one more reason. The Broncos could play a great game. See Jets v. Pats 2011. See Super Bowl XLII.

Winning NFL games is difficult. Winning playoff games is doubly so. Sure, plenty of them become blowouts. The teams that won those blowouts performed at or near peak capacity, and their foes did not. In other words, they happened just like regular season blowouts.

The Broncos have already won a playoff game. Logic says that gives them as much postseason credibility as all of the seven other teams still playing. So it strikes me as the height of misguided arrogance to state that it'll be solely the Patriots' fault if they win another one tonight. Failure's not always about you. Many times it's about what you're trying to do.

You Can't Coach Up Delusion

2012-01-07T10:07:00.002-05:00

Any trip to State College, Pennsylvania is a long and arduous one. That's a good thing for Bill O'Brien, as it means he still has time to tell Pennsylvania State University he won't be taking that head football coach job after all.

The semi-organized rebellion against O'Brien's appointment by former Penn State players should tell the Pats' assistant all he needs to know and send him running back to the cozy comfort of sideline screamfests with Tom Brady. The job he's been offered is a career and sanity-killer. He can't succeed. He shouldn't want to try. O'Brien may know more than enough football to beat Ohio State, but no coach ever lived who could beat Denial State.

That state is where Penn State football and Penn State the school obviously still live. The former Nittany Lions and their allies on fan message boards are angry because Penn State did not hire current assistant Tom Bradley or some other coach with ties to the school. It's as if November, 2011 never happened, and a successor to Joe Paterno is needed because JoePa retired of his own free will, not because he's at the center of the sickest scandal in college sports history.

The slightest effort at rational thought would show the O'Brien critics the folly of that stance. Anyone associated with Penn State football from the day Jerry Sandusky was hired until the day Paterno was fired cannot possibly be the next coach. He'd spend more time being deposed than in the film room. The school's unspoken recruiting pitch would be "we're keeping all our traditions -- except one, we hope."

But the anti-O'Brien crowd isn't capable of rational thought. The Sandusky charges, the cover-up and the firing of Paterno have fried their synapses. This is not really their fault. One of the experiences of their lives in which they have the most pride, an association that's as dear to them as family, has been revealed as having a considerable degree of culpability in monstrous crimes. That is a major burden for the human mind to bear.

So the Penn State folks who can't bear that burden are dropping it on O'Brien instead. If the school's coach was from its old boy network, then members of said network could more easily pretend that some people in that network enabled a child molester. O'Brien's presence will make that happy fantasy an impossibility. As a result, no matter how many games O'Brien wins at Penn State, there's going to be a significant subset of fans, faculty, administrators and alumni who hate him.

When those people look at O'Brien, they won't see a coach. They'll see a badge of shame with a headset. They'll see Reality.

Run away, Bill. Let some other ambitious leader of large young men become the unhappiest man in Happy Valley.

ESPN's Answer to "Matlock"

2012-01-05T11:38:00.003-05:00

I thought there could never be another television show I had less interest in watching than the cable news wallpapering of the Iowa caucuses.

Less than 24 hours later, the Orange Bowl was on. Wrong again.

The weirdest thing about the BCS system is that the Bs involved don't seem to grasp how much damage the system does to their individual brands. Back in the old days, every one of the big (then) New Year's Day bowl games had a chance to have an impact on the selection of a fictional/fraudulent national champion. Now, none of them do. They are all Runner-Up Bowls (you have to be old to remember that NFL invention). Some of them, like last night's Orange Bowl, don't reach that status. West Virginia and Clemson belonged in the Chick-Fil-A Bowl at best.

The Orange Bowl was an exhibition game between OK teams played three days after the traditional end of the college season. It's not a question of TV sports fans not wanting to watch it so much as it is the live possibility they'd never realize it was on in the first place. The Cotton Bowl is tomorrow night -- Friday, the night even old people like me have better things to do than the tube.

In the meantime, ESPN will spend hours and hours hyping the BCS title game for next Monday. Nothing wrong with that. But the ordinarily very shrewd gang down at Bristol can't or won't see that what goes for all the bowls goes for their broadcast partner, too. The BCS, because it has a "championship" game that is a faint but recognizable facsimile image of how a playoff would end, causes all the damage to the bowls in terms of audience and prestige that an actual playoff would -- without the compensating freight trains full of $50 bills the network and the schools would be riding on if there WAS a playoff.

I watched the Rose Bowl Monday. Hell of a game. I watched one quarter of the Fiesta Bowl, one drive of the Sugar Bowl, and none of the Orange Bowl. After a weekend of NFL playoff games, LSU and Alabama are going to have to improve on their first encounter if they expect me to hang around until the third quarter.

I bet that's a game plan more than a few football fans have for Monday night. You have to wonder about the point of a spectator sport that's working hard to make its ultimate game a spectator afterthought.

And I Forgot to Get Them Anything!

2011-12-25T15:07:00.002-05:00

If there's one thing that can be said about the Patriots 27-24 win over the Dolphins yesterday, it's that anything can be said about it.

New England's schizoid triumph was the most considerate of Christmas gifts to anyone holding an opinion about the team. Their hopes, fears, sneers or outright bafflement were all confirmed at one point or another in the contest.

If you think the Pats are headed for Super Bowl, there was plenty of evidence to support your belief, as long as you didn't start watching until about 2:45 p.m. If you think the Pats have been using Tom Brady's arm to skate on a film of ice atop Victoria Falls, and will plunge to their doom in their first playoff game, there was plenty for you to cite in any argument next week. You just had to leave for Grandma's house at halftime with no radio in your car.

If you watched the whole game, you can give up with a clear conscience and say "beats me." In the post-game press conference, this appeared to Bill Belichick's take. Always drained after a game, the coach looked stumped as well as emotionally spent. Hard to blame him.

Oh, well, I'm sure the Bills game will answer all our questions. At least, I'm sure many people will tell us it does.

The Best Lesson Plan Is to Ignore Them

2011-12-24T08:40:00.002-05:00

My former colleague Tony Massarotti had a column in this morning's wood pulp Globe arguing that the Patriots' game with the Dolphins today would offer valuable information about how good the Pats REALLY are heading to the playoffs. At this time of year, it's especially sad to see an auld acquaintance fall victim to the simplest, hoariest fallacies in the observation of sports -- that games all have some inner significance beyond the final score, and that today's result, properly interpreted, offers a canny glimpse of the future.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a game is just that. This afternoon's tilt at Gillette Stadium sure seems to fit that bill. As near as I can make out, its indicator of the future is that after it's over, the Pats will either be 12-3 or 11-4. Either way, that's a pretty Merry Christmas in the standings. Either way, the Pats' playoff outlook will remain the same -- reasonably bright, if it weren't how their last two trips turned out.

Sports commentators are particularly susceptible to the "hidden meaning" theory of games because, after all, they have to say SOMETHING about the damn contest when it's over, and in Tony's case, he has hours of time he's required to do so. I'm embarrassed/frightened to remember how many columns I cranked out for the Herald peering into the third-level post-constructionist significance of an event whose meaning was all on the surface, as in "Sox won last night."

The easiest way to debunk the Hidden Meaning Menace is to apply it to some other team but the one you root for or cover. Let's take the Packers' loss to the Chiefs last Sunday. Is there anyone on earth who honestly thinks that game had any lesson for us besides the obvious one that it's very difficult to go undefeated in the National Football League? Anybody want to venture the opinion that Romeo Crennel has showed the world how to stop Aaron Rodgers? Yeah, I'm sure some member of the NFL Network's Insane Studio Posse did so, but that doesn't count. I'm talking actual people here.

What made Tony's "my day to work today" piece particularly odd was the calendar. It was as if he'd put a jack o'lantern outside his house. To quote an old coach, the NFL future is now. There are two games left in the year. The Pats and 31 other teams are no longer works in progress. They are for better or worse what they are, to quote another coach. The only games that have "meaning" in the sportswriter sense of the word on the card today are the ones that effect who makes the playoffs. You want "meaning" watch the Jets and Giants today, or the Eagles and Cowboys, or even the Bills and Broncos.

Want to have a good time watching the home team. Watch the Pats. If they win be happy, if they lose, cuss briefly and go about your business. Give yourself a treat and treat three hours of competition for what it is, just another mundane, glorious ball game.

Hey, you deserve it. It's Christmas Eve.

DNP -- Coach's Decision

2011-12-23T16:20:00.002-05:00

A glance at the calendar informs me I have a few billion chores (many of them pleasant, like drinking Scotch and playing golf) and family obligations between now and January 2, 2012. This means the schedule of posting maintained here will be even more selective, the NICE word for lackadaisical.

If the spirit moves me tomorrow after the Pats game, or Christmas after the Celtics game, or during my week in the heart of Tebow Kingdom in Florida, there may be commentary. Or I may decide to rest my starting brain cells for the playoffs. I'm day to day.

I've got a Christmas. We'll take a look at it.

Turnovers Don't Stop the March of Time

2011-12-19T15:58:00.002-05:00

Perhaps the best way to consider the Patriots' win over the Broncos yesterday is to think of it as a living football history lesson, a three-hour, three-dimensional seminar on the evolution of offense.

The forward pass was legalized in 1906. For the next 50 years, teams still ran the ball far more often than they threw it, even at the highest skill level of the NFL. NFL teams with reputations for throwing the ball in those eras had some extraordinary athlete either throwing or catching the ball -- Sammy Baugh, Don Hutson, like that. Even so, their teams still ran more often than they threw.

Running was easier. It was simpler to teach, learn, and most of all, was less risky than passing. Remember that saying only three things can happen on a pass and two of them are bad? Ridiculous, right? Well, smart people in football believed it, and they weren't utterly wrong to do so. Most passers weren't very good. It was only by the mid-'50s that there were enough quality quarterbacks to supply a majority of NFL teams with decent passing, and there were only 12 NFL franchises.

Bit by bit, coaches noticed that passing the ball scored points more quickly than running it, and passing gradually become something close to an equal partner on offense. But even in the 1960s and '70s, what people think of as the start of pro football's modern era, coaches and players had an emotional preference for running the ball. The pre-merger NFL sneered at the old AFL's commitment to passing offense as an unmanly admission that its players weren't tough enough to run and try to stop the run the way Walter Camp intended. Check out the statistics from Super Bowls I-XI. The team that ran best won, one reason the Super Bowl developed its early reputation as the season's dullest game.

Then came the great holding deregulation of 1978, because blockers weren't able to stop defensive players on runs OR passes. And along came a chap named Bill Walsh, who divined that the changes had made passing easier than running, not simpler to teach and learn, but easier to succeed with, and actually less risky than running. Walsh's 49ers became the first team to win two NFL championships without a Hall of Fame running back, but not the last.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Football offense has totally reversed its priorities. EVERYBODY passes to score and runs to run time off the clock once they have scored. Teams that don't are anomalies, contrarian investors in scoreboard futures. They usually have an extraordinary athlete at running back, and a subpar passer at quarterback and/or their head coach has testosterone where his frontal lobes should be.

The Broncos are the ultimate contrarians. Their offense is built around Tim Tebow, a single wing tailback born into the wrong era of the pigskin continuum. Denver's offense is so outlandish, its success became a national sensation. Face it. Tim Tebow could be the same charismatic Christian role model he is right now. If he was winning games for Denver with a 90-plus passer rating, America's reaction would be "How nice for him. What channel are the Packers on today?"

As we saw yesterday, being anachronistic does not make the Broncos' offense unproductive. The damage it did to the New England defense in the first quarter was awesome to behold.

But all things being equal in pure talent, that is, if the other team has a passer as good as Tom Brady, running, no matter who good you are at it, IS riskier than passing. It is a form of trying to score points that is too influenced by outside variables, more damaged by turnovers, fatally damaged by playing from behind against a more conventional squad. When the money's on the table, the big plays in a game are passes. That won't be changed until the NFL changes its rules back to what they were decades ago, which of course will never happen.

Tebow can play quarterback in the NFL. Given health, he'll likely be a starter for quite some time. But he'll always be an anomaly, not a trend-setter. He's a curiosity now, and that's what he'll be five years from now.

Conventional wisdom gets that way because it's right at least 50.00001 percent of the time. Contrarian investors die by the bromide "the market can stay wrong longer than you can stay solvent."

Smart fish learn to swim downstream. The shortest distance between two points on the gridiron is the easiest path you can find.

If You Don't Toot That Horn, Nobody Else Will Do It for You

2011-12-18T20:44:00.000-05:00

Not that I'm a braggart by nature, or more accurately, not that I have many opportunities, but I must refer all readers to the preceding two posts of this blog and the NFL scoreboard of games played 12/18/11.
Don't fret. Specious reasoning and bad guesses will resume at their normal programming times.

Hunch Bettors Die Broker and Faster Than Most -- So What?

2011-12-18T08:34:00.002-05:00

The best evidence I have ever found for ignoring all sports forecasting is my own record at it. Not because that's record's uniquely horrible, it isn't. But season after season, sport after sport, decade after decade, I always seem to wind up with about a .500 record. I strongly suspect all other forecasters (at least the ones who makes their predictions public) do the same. In other words, it's an exercise in flipping coins, so why bother?

Of course I still make forecasts. They're an accepted, no, mandatory part of the American sports dialogue. I do try to avoid them unless I can use them to illustrate some larger point about the sport in question, I see an overlay that defies arithmetic and common sense, or, most dangerously, I just get a feeling, a hunch so strong it overwhelms me.

The guesses based on instinct sometimes end as badly as you'd expect. The 2011 Rams were not a team to watch this season unless you paid to do it. But instinct does occasionally hit one into the upper deck. I called Super Bowl XXXII Broncos 31-Packers 24, and you can look that up in the Herald files for the paper the morning of the game.

As doubtless readers have guessed, instinct is gnawing at my good sense this morning. It has all week, a week that in self-defense I've spent time thinking about the non-Tebow part of the NFL schedule.

I love the Eagles to beat the Jets today. Love it. If there was ever a team with the sort of twisted self-esteem needed for a useless salary drive, it's Philly. If there was ever a team with a penchant for falling into open manholes while walking down Easy Street, it's the Jets. Those are about the most ephemeral grounds for picking an NFL winner I can imagine. They consume my psyche nonetheless.

It's probably a good thing bookies open early Sunday morning are kind of hard to find here in Lexington.

Cheer Up, Bill! This'll Probably Be Your Only Shot at Being the Sentimental Favorite

2011-12-17T06:35:00.004-05:00

About a month ago, my thoughts on Tim Tebow were that he was going to alter about three hours of my life for the better. Back in April when the NFL schedule came out, I saw that the Pats were at Denver on December 18 and confidently expected it'd be one of the dullest games of the year. By November, I believed Tebow's ascension to the Broncos' quarterback position would make the game one of the more interesting ones on my home TV schedule, and I was duly grateful.

The game still promises to be an entertaining one, but the price I'm paying for it is far, far, far too high. Compared to being forced to endure the endless Tebow blah that now composes 110 percent of U.S. sports journalism, two on aisle 10th row orchestra for "Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway" would be a bargain.

It's hard to tell which set of Tebow bloviators are the worst, his fans or his critics. Skip Bayless has done everything but speculate as to how Tebow's upcoming win in the Iowa caucuses will impact the Broncos in the playoffs. On the other hand, the stat-minded football blogs who're all trying to become the pigskin Bill James are tying themselves into numerical knots attempting to prove that Tebow's undeniably subpar passing statistics are more important than the even more undeniable fact that before he became the starter the Broncos stunk, and now they're pretty good.

Add to this the irrelevant facts Tebow is both a demonstrative person and a devoutly religious one, and we have a perfect storm of what passes for news in the 21st century -- a barrage of thunderclaptraps, cloudbursts of bullshit, all accompanied by gales of superheated air which strip the branches off one's soul. Through no fault of his own (I blame Urban Meyer, who had four years to teach the kid to throw and didn't), an increasing number of fans now resent Tebow for his stirring comeback victories, because they turn up the volume on the noise that's driving them to distraction.

Hype is not the hypee's fault. Doesn't matter. Tebow may be blameless for the baggage he's forcing fans to carry, but nevertheless, many fans outside New England will be doing something Sunday they never imagined possible -- rooting like hell for Bill Belichick. Surely the only power capable of defeating football Virtue Made Man is the sport's embodiment of evil.

Ordinarily, I'd say that sentiment was a stone lock bet for Sunday. And if it was just Belichick vs. Tebow, it would be. One of the less remarked elements of Belichick's makeup is the part which sees football as a fan. I'm sure there's a part of him that reacted to Tebow's initial success just as I did, to wit "Well, something new under the sun. This'll be more fun than getting a game plan ready for Kyle Orton."

I also believe Belichick, like all successful coaches, is acutely aware of his public image and uses it to his advantage whenever he can. As any wrestling heel knows, villainy is both a good steady gig and more fun than playing the babyface. Stomping on America's Newest Sports Craze might give the Patriots the champion's essential arrogance they have notably lacked in an otherwise successful season.

I listened carefully to Belichick during his "Patriots All Access" segment last night, and two things were clear. One, he appreciates Tebow's talents. Two, he knows what those talents are, and therefore, we can infer he has a handle on how to neutralize them.

Showing a clip of a Tebow scramble, Belichick said, "See, there's a running back." Precisely. The mystery of Tebow the player vanishes once you stop thinking of him as a running quarterback and start seeing him as a running back who passes, or more accurately, as a single wing tailback running a 1940s offense.

The principles of defeating that offense are not secrets. They're in particularly dusty books in Belichick's football library. The principles of defeating the option offense the Broncos use with Tebow are not secrets, either. They're just ideas that've been forgotten because their past success made that offense obsolete at levels of football. And of course, the principles of containing a running quarterback are taught to every NFL defense in practice for many games each season.

Boiling down decades of football theory, those principles all rest on the same idea: Do your damn job. No matter what you see in front of you, follow your assignment and nothing else, even, no, especially if it appears to be running you right out of the play. Follow that rule, and the option gains maybe two yards a play. In theory, the Tebow-led Denver Broncos would never score.

In practice, defensive football players are cursed/blessed with a psychopathic level of aggression in action that makes not pursuing the ball cause serious stress. It's like turning into a skid or prudent portfolio management -- the superego knows the damn rules, but the id won't hear of them.

For six weeks in succession, other NFL defenses have come close to making theory reality against the Broncos -- until the fourth quarter, when human nature kicks in, whereupon Tebow and his mates lay another of those comebacks on them.

The Patriots are known for nothing if not discipline. In the usual order of things, I'd say the 7 1/2 points they're giving is an underlay Christmas present. Belichick has enough respect for Tebow to create a game plan designed to humiliate him rather than just win the game.

Unfortunately for Evil Genius Belichick, just like in the movies, his plans rest on the abilities of his helmeted henchmen. New England's defensive henchpeople have just finished making Don Orlovsky and Rex Grossman look like Dan Marino. Their role has become a bizarre mirror image of Tebow's role with Denver. Turn in a couple of big plays, then step aside and let the offense/defense win the game.

I never really expect the Patriots to lose. I have every confidence that Chief Henchman Tom Brady will generate the 30 or so points to which the Pats have become accustomed.

But I don't believe the 2011 Pats have the wherewithal to humiliate people. The Tebow bubble won't pop this week. I look for an even more irritating development, Tebow's nobility in a heroic loss where his passing stats resemble those of conventionally successful quarterbacks. This will force his admirers and detractors to completely trade the arguments they've been using the last two months, abandoning any pretense of intellectual honesty.

THERE'S your Lock of the Year.

Dr. Naismith, Please Call Drs. Smith, Marx and Keynes

2011-12-10T07:51:00.002-05:00

National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern cost his bosses, the guys who own NBA teams, a lot of money Thursday night. In fairness to Stern, it must be pointed out they wanted him to do it.

Stern's voiding of the three-team trade that was going to send Chris Paul to the Lakers, Pau Gasol to the Rockets, and Lamar Odom, Kevin Martin and a host of others back to the Hornets in return for Paul was one of those rare managerial actions that was wrongheaded to the point of idiocy from whatever perspective one chooses to look. The perspective that will bat cleanup some months from now is the one that could cost Stern the job to which he is megalomaniacally attached.

We'll dispense with the easiest perspective first, the lie Stern told yesterday and which he is advised not to repeat during the discovery process that seems sure to follow in this affair. Stern said he voided the deal in his role as steward of the NBA's trusteeship of the Hornets while it tries to sell the franchise because he thought they could a better trade for Paul.

Stern might not be lying. If so, he really must think Rajon Rondo is the berries, the next Isiah Thomas at least. But at a conservative estimate, everyone else who watches enough NBA ball to have an opinion believes the Hornets made out in historically fine fashion in that most difficult of activities, trading a superstar with one year left on his contract.

This statement also makes it very difficult for the Hornets to pursue trading Paul somewhere else. Why should other teams do business with a front office whose words are meaningless? What if their trade makes Dan Gilbert remember how mad he is at LeBron James, too?

And of course, if Paul is traded to, oh, I dunno, the Indiana Pacers, for LESS value than the Hornets got from the Lakers and Rockets, then general manager Dave Demps can look forward to the delightful experience of being asked to defend it; to the media and fans for sure, under oath perhaps.

Now for the real reason Stern blocked the trade. The NBA owners went through the lockout so that star players couldn't go to star franchises. One week after ending what cost many of them real money, they found out they hadn't accomplished that goal. So they're angry. Stern doesn't want them to be angry. So he acted.

Stern is also demented. The love of power has corrupted him beyond repair. He likes pushing around young extremely strong men who could, if it came to it, crush his skull with the shock waves in the air created by flexing their biceps.

Most of all, Stern and the owners have been self-destructive. Spite often works like that. In their effort to punish the Lakers for being successful, smart, and located in Los Angeles, they have damaged the value of the Hornets franchise they all own. Worse, they have damaged the value of their OWN franchises.

Hard as this is to believe, there ARE rich people interested in purchasing the New Orleans Hornets. The NBA has been dawdling because Stern, like fellow commish Bud Selig, is more interested in having the team owned by a compliant crony than in basic business principles. One has to believe those parties are recalculating their bids right now -- downwards. A basketball team whose best player is now likely to be out the door next season with no compensation, a team headed for 60 loss seasons as far as the eye can see, well, that team's not as attractive a proposition.

NBA teams, like all pro sports franchises, are an asset that exists in what's called a thin market. Transactions are rare. Many far larger companies in regular businesses get bought and sold each month than sports teams are in a year. The sale of any franchise helps set the market. That is, no matter how much the Boston Celtics are worth in theory, if the New Orleans Hornets get sold at a marked-down price, the Celtics' market value suffers. Maybe not dramatically, but suffer it will.

It's pleasant to contemplate how Dan Gilbert and his fellow spiteful rich fools have screwed themselves. It's almost sad to realize that they did so in the pursuit of a chimera. The so-called small market (the Clippers exist in an LA of an alternate universe) franchises will never achieve their goal of competitive balance, i.e., wins and money without working. Basketball won't let them.

I said for years, back during the last lockout in '98 in fact, that the owners were caught in a trap. The more restrictions they placed on player salaries, the more the players would decide what teams they wanted to play for on non-monetary grounds, such as sunshine, tax avoidance, and most of all, being on good teams. The Decision of LeBron was an economic inevitability. If it hadn't been him, it'd would've been some other superstar playing his own GM.

There is NO economic system short of slavery that'll allow for competitive balance in pro basketball. Look at history. The league has ALWAYS had one, two or at most three dominant teams, with all others having precisely no hope of ever winning a title. When the NBA had the reserve clause in the '50s and '60s, and players had no rights, the competitive imbalance was worst of all, as a glance at the ceiling of the Garden makes plain.

Basketball has five players a side, least of all team sports. Ergo, the importance of the best individual players is far greater than in any other sport. There's no system that'll prevent the team with Wilt, Russell, Kareem, Bird or Michael from beating your brains out.

And since those bygone days, superstars have always found ways to choose who they played for. Wilt was a master of making his employers wish he was elsewhere. Rick Barry averaged a lawsuit a franchise in his prime. The financial hurdles the owners want to place in front of free agents will be cleared easier than Edwin Moses used to do it.

No power on earth short of a gun is going to make players stay Cleveland Cavaliers longer than their rookie contracts make them. Or Sacramento Kings, or, well, you get the idea. Better the owners should've pursued the Lost Dutchman gold mine than competitive balance. More chance of a payoff. Or they could buy an NHL team. Always plenty of those on the market. Ask the Phoenix Coyotes what competitive balance does for them.

I've saved the best/most apocalyptic possibility for last. The NBA is now a partnership where some partners, the successful ones, now know they can't trust their other partners. That's not a situation that often ends well, but it does often end.

If I owned the Celtics, the Lakers, Knicks, or one of about seven other NBA teams, I'd be discreetly sounding out my fellow big-market partners on the following thesis: Do we really NEED these guys? Our teams drive the finances of the league. Why not just be our own league, and eliminate the free-riding panhandlers we find so irritating at meetings?

This almost surely won't happen. Sports team owners, by and large, are nowhere near as ruthless and creative in the sports business as they were/are in the businesses where they got rich to buy teams in the first place. But the distrust and resentment between partners Stern has created IS real, and it will have unforeseen consequences. Not totally unforeseen, mind you. We know they'll be bad ones.

In a way, I applaud Stern's move. It's a case study in the decline and fall of American capitalism. The NBA's capitalists would rather feed their ids with rage and spite than make money. Explains a lot about the front page of every morning's "Wall Street Journal."

Home Confinement for the Holidays, Part 1

2011-12-05T16:38:00.002-05:00

Was decking the halls yesterday afternoon when I had a Christmas fever vision.

Somewhere in New York City, there must be a warehouse where Rockefeller Center stores the decorations for its Christmas tree. Sometime around November 10, an employee of Rockefeller Center must be assigned to go out to the warehouse and spend eight hours a day until roughly Thanksgiving to make sure the decorations are still in working order.

That's 10 zillion strings of lights to test. From 9 to 5 every working day for two weeks or more, the street music of some neighborhood in Queens or the Bronx must echo to two cries of existential despair every 30 seconds. "God damn it, who tangled these things up? followed immediately by a plain "God damn it!!!"

Rockefeller Center is a big operation. They must have another employee whose job it is to drive to the hardware store for new ones.

It's a Christmas Miracle for Season Ticket Holders -- Thanks to Peyton Manning's Neck

2011-12-04T09:22:00.002-05:00

They're already out of the house and are either tailgating or stuck in traffic, but I just want to extend my very best wishes to the crowd at Gillette Stadium today. For the first time this season, they will watch pro football in the proper time frame -- after a 1 p.m. kickoff.

Enjoy watching a game both start and finish (barely) before nightfall. Enjoy the relative comfort of December sunlight/ Enjoy getting home before midnight. Enjoy not spending tomorrow in a zombie state during your department's biggest meetings of the year. Enjoy all the benefits of a return to yesteryear, when the NFL had the quaint notion that the paying customer came first, not those layabouts like me by our flatscreens. Sure it's just an accident, namely Manning's accident, you're getting this break, but dare to daydream!

I'd also tell you to enjoy the game, but I don't want to drift into pure fantasy.

Always Stick on 17, or Stuck on Exit 17 as the Case May Be

2011-12-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, back in the misty era of Pete Rozelle, the news that an NFL owner was involved with a casino, however tangentially, would've been the only story in the league. Tense meetings would've been held at the league office. Editorials and sports columnists would've looked most askance at the proposal. Back then, Bob Kraft would've walked around town surrounded in a cloud of moral disapproval from the great and good of the sports world.

Now, scarcely an eyebrow is raised at the idea Kraft would let Steve Wynn build a casino across from Gillette Stadium and the rest of the Patriotsland theme park on Route One. Oh, the Globe's upset, but that doesn't count. Gambling, like most fun stuff, causes the higher-ups of the Globe acute distress. It's more proof our community just isn't worthy of them.

There'll be no moral disapproval here of the idea of a casino next to a football stadium. They're both public entertainments. I don't go to casinos, because I find competing against arithmetic to be dull as well as unprofitable, but that's just me. There are the usual bleats from Foxboro residents that they don't want the ambiance of their quaint New England village sullied by more traffic, which can be put down in the category "our opening bid, Steve." Really, where does Foxboro FIND these clucks? How can a homeowner say with a straight face that they didn't bargain for all the congestion and other issues posed by the Patriots? They didn't see the stadium when first looking at the town? The Pats have been there for 41 years. THEY'RE among the town's oldest residents.

But I do wonder if excellent businessman Bob Kraft has really thought this one through. The core of Patriotsland is, after all, the Patriots. Many a promising conglomerate business empire has suffered from letting its pursuit of new opportunities interfere with the profitable operations of the engine pulling the whole train.

When I saw the headline in the Globe yesterday about the Kraft-Wynn deal, an image immediately popped into my head. It was my memory of driving over 128 here in Lexington at about 5:45 p.m. the night of the Monday night game against the Chiefs. All you could see on the southbound side were headlights and taillights, all part of the traffic snarl created by the addition of football fans to the regular rush hour horror. Lexington, I should point out, is approximately 30 miles by highway away from Gillette.

So I fear that the most lasting impact of a casino in Foxboro might be that Pats' fans will have to start leaving for home games on Friday mornings.

I've Grown Accustomed to His Face -- Took Less Than Six Minutes

2011-12-01T20:11:00.002-05:00

At 5:40 this evening, the Red Sox were introducing their new manager Bobby Valentine and I was watching TV. There was a lot of overlap between these activities.

From Channels 2 to 78 on my cable box, no fewer than eight of 'em had Valentine live. Three local news broadcasts, two local cable sports networks, one local cable news network, and two of ESPN's networks. I was afraid to go any higher, but I'm sure Valentine was on one of the food networks, too. Didn't he invent some sandwich?

The Red Sox hiring a manager is news. Not that much news, however. I covered managerial hiring and firing press conferences in my day, and in neither did much information emerge. They are boilerplate rituals, pure photo ops. Eight live remotes was eight too many. A simple head shot of a grinning (does that ever stop?) Valentine at six o'clock would've done nicely, thank you.

Makes me frightened for the coverage local news might give actually newsy and surprising sports news. If Danny Ainge DOES land Chris Paul, I'd take it as a personal favor if he did it the week between Christmas and New Year's. I'll be out of town.

Where Will They Put America's Stupid Ice Shows?

2011-11-26T08:11:00.003-05:00

Peace came to the NBA owners and players last night, more or less, and I think I speak for all America when I say, "Oh, really? That's nice."

There have been few big sports sports stories I and millions of others have ignored more thoroughly and efficiently than the NBA lockout, and it's pleasant to see our good judgment rewarded. Neither side in the dispute had the slightest intention of blowing up their season, but at the same time had to allow their dead-enders (every labor fight has 'em on both sides) to vent for awhile before serious business could be conducted.

Without seeing one detail of the tentative agreement reached between the league's owners and the player's union, I make the following confident assertion. It won't work, if we define "work" as creating a structure that'll allow the 15 or so hopeless case franchises to escape the basic laws of economics and the nature of the sport they're selling. It's a star-driven enterprise, and those are never normal businesses.

No matter how much or how little they're paid, no system short of indentured servitude is going to lessen the power of star players. The more rigid the salary structure, the more those stars will seek non-financial compensation a/k/a winning and living in nice places. In short, the Sacramento Kings will still suck and lose money hand over fist and there will be more Miami Heats were the players themselves are de facto general managers.

But enough of sordid commerce. Let's move on to the dire effects of sordid commerce on the jolly spectator sport it's selling. The one fact I did see about the new agreement is that the NBA will have a 66-game season beginning on Christmas Day.

Sixty-six times two is 132. Add 132 calendar days to December 25, 2011 and we get May 4, 2012. I don't know how much more than that the NBA can stretch its regular season calendar. The numbers in the preceding sentences of this paragraph already place Game Seven of the Finals somewhere very close to Independence Day. So essentially, we are looking at a season where NBA teams will play every other day. Unless the National Hockey League graciously steps aside and cancels its season, we are looking at a season with many, many back-to-back games for all teams, and likely a few back-to-back-to-backers.

That ought to put at least two Celtics on the injured list by Valentine's Day. Should we get up a pool on who'll they'll be? Dibs on KG!

The biological law of self-preservation insures that players will cope with the grind of the regular season the way they always have -- on-court loafing. As individuals and as teams, NBA players will take more nights off than ever before, and they can't really be blamed for it. Look for a great many games to be determined in the first quarter, especially games where the road team trails by over five points after 12 minutes. "Not our night" will become the unofficial NBA motto.

It takes a real lack of the biological imperative for self-preservation for a business to conduct a prolonged work stoppage for next to no reason and then present its product to consumers in a way designed to reinforce every single negative stereotype those consumers have about your product. "They don't care" has been said about the NBA regular season since I was a boy. It's a damn lie almost all the time. Now, it will be damn lie only some of the time. Sure makes me want to spend $150 or so on a ticket. Do I believe the Toronto Raptors woke up full of vim and vigor this morning? Do I feel lucky?

The NBA is operating under the delusion that because it operates an effective monopoly on pro basketball, it's a real monopoly, and can get away with customer abuse like this. But fans have options, more than ever before in terms of television viewing. Between the college bowl games, NFL playoffs, the NCAA basketball tournament, baseball starting and the NHL playoffs, there's not going to be much time in the NBA season when it's not up against high-stakes, large audience events in the battle for fan attention. 29-hour a day propaganda from ESPN can only do so much.

Some baseball franchises (Blue Jays, Dodgers) have never recovered from the damage of the 1994 strike. Some hockey franchises found their lost season a permanent blight on their finances. I wonder which NBA owners feel lucky this morning. I know some of them will be wrong.

Some Guy I Met at a Game One Night

2011-11-20T07:52:00.002-05:00

In the winter of 2004, it was my Herald duty one Friday evening to cover a Celtics game. Taking my end line press row seat, I for once recognized the fan seated next to me as near to the basket as the NBA allows. It was Mitt Romney, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This wasn't too surprising. Every Mormon I've ever met has been nuts for basketball, and I also knew Romney and Danny Ainge were friendly. Since I believe that off-duty pols have the same rights as off-duty sportwriters, I left Romney to watch the Celtics lose in peace. I did ponder how to encourage the Governor to leave his seat before Lucky the Leprechaun's acrobatics exhibition at the end of the third quarter, because God forbid something should go wrong that I'D have to cover. Even the headline "UNLUCKY!! Mascot Mashes Mitt!!" wouldn't have been worth about a 38-hour workday.

As I contemplated the etiquette governing gubernatorial safety, the other fans seated in the floor area of the Garden were not as considerate of Romney's privacy. During breaks in play, one or two would come over to Romney's seat to offer good wishes. They unanimously told him he was a swell guy doing a great job. Given the price of a Garden floor seat, that area of the state skews Republican.

This was when Romney did something I thought no pol ever could. He astonished me. Romney responded to the well-wishers by blowing them off. A tight grin, a nod, and no words were his responses. He followed these gestures by stating to ME, the total stranger who worked for a newspaper, that a) many of these well-wishers had been drinking and b) they'd turn on him in a heartbeat.

Romney's observations were true, of course. But they were also shocking. As an iron rule, pols love well-wishers and dote on those who praise them. It's a natural sentiment for anyone in a trade that draws such abuse. And above all, pols never, ever say or even imply that voters, any voters, are not the salt of the earth who contain the wisdom of the ages in each grain of salt. And if do say or imply it, it's to each other, not to an outsider.

In the same situation, basketball fan Barack Obama would have engaged the fans in lengthy conversations about Celtics' games of 1982. Basketball fan Bill Clinton would have made me give the first fan my seat so that Clinton could make the guy his newest BFF instead of watching the game. Noted misanthrope Richard Nixon would not have reacted as Romney did. It was antipolitical behavior.

I did not write about this at the time because, well, who cared? Certainly not the Herald sports department, or even me, really. But now Romney has a fine chance of being the next President of the United States, and under the rules of running for that office, any episode in Romney's life up to and including his driver's test for his first license is information that belongs in the public domain.

I will go no further than to say my little anecdote is excellent evidence that Mitt Romney is not like other politicians, as he lacks a common personality trait of the species. Whether the lack of that trait makes Romney a man of intellectual honesty who'll scorn mere popularity if his cause is just or a cynical S.O.B. who doesn't have much use for people once they can't help him, who knows? That's for the electorate to decide.

Judging from public opinion polls, a working majority of Republican voters have their suspicions on the question.

Bobby Valentine?!?!?

2011-11-19T07:27:00.002-05:00

The rumored new manager of the Boston Red Sox (or at least he was earlier in the week, after all Rumored New Manager was once Dale Sveum's title) has a solid and substantial resume. While I support Valentine's candidacy for its considerable promise of summer entertainment to come, were I a Red Sox fan, I'd be brooding on the implications of the franchise seeking out such a well-known personality to make out its lineup cards.

Experience suggests that when a baseball needing to make some changes hires a big name to be its new manager, it does so in large part because it has no idea of how to make more relevant changes. Making Valentine Skipper would be a prima facie admission that he will be leading a roster of the same old Gilligans in 2012, who it is hoped will just play a little better this time around.

That's not necessarily a daft plan, but it's a pretty passive one. To be frank, it is designed to delude the rubes among Sox followers, the crowd which believes the players need a good paddlin' for their failures of September, 2011. Since Valentine is voluble, colorful, and widely known, that crowd will assume, incorrectly, that he's also an iron disciplinarian, a thought that would never strike them about an obscure bench coach named manager who might actually BE a tough guy.

The theory that underperforming ball clubs only need the firm guidance of a no-nonsense manager who'll teach them to play "the right way" is an eternal fallacy, one generated from the anger fans and owners feel when their teams screw up. To disprove it, we need look no further than the bottom of the AL East standings.

The Orioles hired big name Buck Showalter, a man utterly without nonsense or any other engaging human trait, to bring a taste of the lash to their lousy team. Showalter would stress discipline, the fundamentals, etc. When the Orioles improved from horrible to mediocre in the stretch of 2010, loud were the cries that this approach had worked. Even the players said so. I read more than a few stories in spring training in 2011 about Baltimore's new regime of baseball correctness and the progress it would bring.

And of course, when the season began, the Orioles were still a lousy ball club. They may have been a hustling, fundamentally sound lousy team, but the latter adjective still dominated their description. Discipline cannot help bad relief pitchers get anyone out. Learning how to cover first base, while essential, won't get a starter's ERA below 5 if that's all the stuff the guy's got.

Discipline won't make Josh Beckett any less a cementhead nor Kevin Youkilis less prone to injury either. If the Sox really want their new manager, whomever it is, to succeed, they ought to get him some new players.

Minus Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke, Terry Francona's first season would probably not have gone so well.

Very Short Preview of AFC Playoff Seeding Race

2011-11-14T12:22:00.001-05:00

Number of total wins by the remaining seven opponents on the New England Patriots' schedule: 21.

Some Things Can't Be Coached or Recruited

2011-11-13T07:25:00.003-05:00

The most easily documented fact of NFL life is that kickers are better than ever. Placekickers get more accurate from longer distances on an almost yearly basis.

Back in 1987, my rookie year on the Pats' beat, coaches from several teams said that the over/under line on the distance that constituted a kick a guy ought to make from one you just hope he makes was 39 yards. That's laughable today. If a kicker can't make 50 percent from outside 50 yards he's flirting with unemployment.

Since pro football players were all once college football players, it stands to reason that out there somewhere, in fact on most campus somewheres, college placekickers are getting better than ever, too. I have no doubt they are -- just not at the schools where those kickers are most needed.

In successive weeks, two previously unbeaten teams, Alabama and Boise State, lost their first games and in all likelihood their chance to play in the BCS championship game because their kickers missed kicks that were not only makeable, but damn near inside the leather. This was the second straight year this happened to Boise.

Alabama and Boise are two of the nation's most successful programs, each under smart, maniacally detail-oriented coaches. I know Nick Saban thinks kicking is important. I'm sure Alabama scours the South for high school kickers. It probably scouts soccer teams. Within its recruiting universe I'm sure Boise does the same. Didn't seem to help this season.

So what gives? College football is played by college age people, so blunders and choking by all personnel are baked into the big game cake. The LSU and Alabama quarterbacks didn't exactly distinguish themselves in their big game. Boise running backs fumbled away two scoring drives yesterday. Having more time to think about what they do, why shouldn't kickers fail due to mental stress more often than other players?

Still, as I think back to the very top college teams of the past decade, I cannot recall one whose kicking game was considered a main element of its success. I can't name any of their kickers. And that memory hole, I think, is the tell as to why college powerhouses wind up with kicking that's weaker than the rest of their game. They don't need it.

Because college ball has more teams than the NFL, the laws of mathematical distribution mean that it has more talent mismatches, too. How many close games do Alabama or Boise play a season? One? Two? Three at most for sure. Football is a sport based on repetition. Placekickers on the best college teams don't get enough chances to know what it means to really matter. During the Boise game, one of the announcers noted that Boise's kicker had all of four (!!!!) field goal attempts in the 2011 season. His teammates were too good for his good, and their own.

Kickers on the top college teams are used to booting five to seven extra points and kicking off a lot under absolutely no pressure whatsoever. Then, all of a sudden, they're cast into the decisive role in a game their team absolutely must win, with the dreams of their teammates and entire school community riding on their performance. No wonder they fail. They are unfamiliar with the most important experience of their jobs.

There's really no point in scouting, recruiting or drafting a kicker unless said kicker plays for a team that needed those three points almost every week.

Saturday's Child Has Got to Go -- Saturday's Adults Even More So

2011-11-12T07:41:00.001-05:00

Corrupt is a verb as well as an adjective. That's the thought that keeps returning every time I think of Pennsylvania State University. What's destroying that school and the sport of college football isn't that college football is corrupt, but that it actively corrupts the people in it.

The RVs are lurching into the Beaver Stadium parking lots around now. Kickoff against Nebraska is at noon. The fans, alumni, students, hangers-on and media will be there 100,000 strong for what's going to be the Woodstock of social awkwardness. Imagine all the tailgaters. What on earth will they say to each other?

In the end, sports exist so that people can have fun. I sure wouldn't want to know anyone who could have fun at the Penn State game today, and I'm also sure almost all of them won't. They're just football fans, not cult members. So why are they there?

Those 100,000 are there because in a very small way, one so small and slow it's understandable they don't see or feel it, college football is corrupting them just as it ate the soul of their former hero, role model, and quasi-religious idol Joe Paterno. They're there because they can't imagine their lives without Penn State football. Multiply that sentiment by googolplex, and you have the mindset that led Paterno, who spent most of his life trying to do what he felt was right, to become at best a moral idiot and at worst a monster.

Representatives from the U.S. Dept. of Education will be on hand, but they won't be watching the game. I'd bet that officials of the Dept. of Justice are somewhere on campus, too. A lifetime of journalism experience and the ability to read a timeline tell me that much more horrible news is going to emanate from State College, Pa., worse than we know now, and what we know now is more than awful enough. The only way the events of Jerry Sandusky's career at Penn State make sense is if the football program had been covering up his sex abuse of children for much longer than the nine years (!!!) its indicted and unindicted officials have copped to.

Every person outside the players in the Penn State program has ruined their own lives, and a good thing, too. They deserve whatever comes their way. Hope those trips to the Outback Bowl were worth it. Paterno will spend his remaining years being deposed by hostile attorneys. Don't say that's not a harsh punishment unless it's happened to you. (It's happened to me, and I was just a witness).

It's not pleasant to see a person of accomplishment ruin his or her self. But that's what corrupting institutions do to them. Sadly but oddly, it was precisely because Penn State football thought itself above the corruption of regular old sleazy big time college ball that it completely succumbed to evil. Protecting the legend of Penn State the Virtuous, which in Paterno's mind was equal to protecting his own reputation, became a more virtuous act than actually protecting children. At a regular sleazy big school, Miami say, somebody would have had the good sense to say "hey, this could be bad for business. We better do something."

If college football isn't thinking that right now, everyone in the game from university presidents to public address announcers, then it'd be a mercy to put them all out of business. Even before this week, by far the biggest sports story in the U.S. in 2011 was the ongoing saga of how college football was rubbing the country's nose in its greed, stupidity and overall insult to the very idea of education. The frantic conference shuffles, the "scandals" at Ohio State and Miami that look like innocent outtakes from some '80s knockoff of "Animal House" today, the news that bowl games exist to allow Sun Belt hustlers to enrich themselves at the expense of athletic departments -- all those tales told a single saga. Here is an institution that's out of control. Here is an institution too sick to help itself.

As we now know, college football is an institution that can turn otherwise normal folks into monsters. Who needs an institution like that?

A sport that turns normal people into evil ones. A sport that turns smart people into really stupid ones. A sport that mocks the principles of the schools that have made it their master and cheats the men who play it. Some fun, huh?

At dozens of other FBS school stadiums today, fans will be firing up their tailgate grills without a care in the world besides their teams' defensive backfields. They'll be having fun. From the drunkest freshman to the oldest alum, close to 100 percent of them will be nice, normal folks who deserve the fun they get from college football. Close to 100 percent of them are horrified and sickened by the Penn State news, and wish with all their hearts there wasn't so much rot at the core of the sport they love.

And every time these nice normal people pull into the stadium parking lot, the rot grows a little larger and more malignant. I wish I could say that 2011 will go down in sports history as the year college football realized it was destroying itself. But I know better.

College football has a lot of self-destruction left to go. 2011 will go down as the year people really began to notice.

Joe Frazier: 1944-2011

2011-11-08T16:07:00.002-05:00

Without Joe Frazier, there would have been no Muhammad Ali, at least not the Ali we know.

Oh, Ali would still have been a world heavyweight champion, adored by hundreds of millions. He still would have been an athlete of actual historic significance, for his Muslim faith and draft resistance. But we wouldn't know if Ali was The Greatest, or even a great fighter at all.

Nobody's a great fighter until the confront and surmount suffering and cruelty, and there has never been a fighter who brought the suffering like Smokin' Joe. He entered the ring to hurt opponents, and if he was hurt in the process, well, that's what they were getting paid for.

Three times Ali and Frazier entered the ring. The first time, Ali learned, much to his surprise, that he COULD be hurt. The second time, Ali reacted with a display of masterful and occasionally legal ring cunning to win the narrowest of split decisions. The third time...

The third time was the greatest fight of all time. Boxing being what it is, that means the Thrilla in Manila was also a horrible thing to happen to its participants. Ali and Frazier took each other to the physical and mental limits of suffering. Ali won, if you want to call it that. Both men were physically wrecked as fighters ever after, and eventually physically wrecked period for reaching the ultimate heights of their awful, captivating trade.

Frazier was wrecked psychologically as well. He never forgave Ali for the evil taunting prior to the Thrilla. Ali used mental cruelty as a weapon akin to his jab. It was just part of the business for him. Those who wax poetic about Ali's greatness tend to ignore how essential a part of that greatness cruelty was.

Frazier, an honest straightforward club fighter with a champion's ability, couldn't let the hatred go. It was very depressing to talk to him 20 years after that fight and realize he never would, and that the memories of that night in Manila would torture him until the grave he found yesterday.

Parkinson's disease, almost 100 percent surely brought on by taking far too many punches, has ruined Ali's body. That's sad. But he remains a soul at peace, content in the knowledge he's loved.

Frazier couldn't come to terms with getting beat by a man he'd come to hate, long after both were well away from their sport. One reason Frazier never got the adulation bath ex-champs usually receive is that he didn't let people dunk him. Talk boxing with Joe, and you never got past the 14th round and the cosmic injustice of it all.

That's sadder. But sadness is as much or more a part of boxing as spit and sweat. I'd go so far as to say it's the sadness in boxing that makes its occasional awful glory possible.

Sadness is over for Joe Frazier. There's still plenty of glory left. Hope he let himself feel some of it before the sadness ended.

Midseason Historical Note

2011-11-07T15:55:00.000-05:00

After their first eight games of the 2010 NFL season, the Green Bay Packers had a 5-3 record. No team with that record has lost anything. Yet.

Will You Have the Pigskin With Mashed Potatoes and Gravy or the Pigskin Sichuan, Sir?

2011-11-06T08:49:00.003-05:00

Television provided us with about the best psychological test for football fans ever created last night. Separated by only one digit on the remote were two thrilling college football games, each decided on its final play. In one, undefeated LSU beat previously undefeated Alabama 9-6. In the other, undefeated Oklahoma State staged approximately five quarter rallies to take Kansas State 52-45.

One more detail. The first game went to overtime. The second game had 97 points in its regulation 60 minutes.

As noted, both games were superior football entertainment for neutral viewers who simply wanted drama for their time commitment. That's where the experiment comes in. Which of these polar opposite contests did fans like best? Was it the video game in real time and space, or the one where points were scored at the pace of Serie A Italian soccer?

Myself, I much preferred and watched much more of LSU-Alabama. But then, I PLAYED defense as a youth. What about everyone else?

The TV ratings will tell the tale, especially the ratings of the second halves of each game, because that will indicate an active choice by fans when it was clear what kind of games these were going to be. Due to the hype factor, I'm sure LSU-Alabama started off with a massive lead in total audience.

My guess, and to be honest, hope, is that LSU-Alabama maintained its lead and maybe even increased it as the night went on. If I'm right, the result poses a not-so-theoretical issue for the organization that'll play its games today.

The National Football League has spent more than 30 years altering its rules to fit a simple premise: fans want to see lots of touchdowns and high-scoring games. The NFL is phenomenally successful, and it's always hard to argue with success.

But what if the premise isn't really true? What if fans like to see good football of any kind, and aren't so concerned with how fast the scoreboard changes, as long as two teams play a competitive game to the best of their abilities?

I have no doubt that the NFL's reaction to evidence indicating the latter proposition would be to ignore it. But if there's one form of evidence the NFL finds impossible to ignore, it's the Nielsens.

Remain Calm, or at Least Try to Panic a Little More Quietly

2011-11-03T14:49:00.003-05:00

The blackout of New England created by the storm last Saturday night (partially responsible for the content gap of this blog) apparently extended to all knowledge of the National Football League. Oh, there's been plenty of heat among fans and opinion-mongers since the Patriots lost to the Steelers. Light? Not even a candle's worth.

Because it is played only once a week, pro football generates much more straight-line projection analysis and reaction than do other sports. That is, a loss is usually felt to indicate a future filled with losses, and a victory means an unbroken string of triumphs leading straight to the next Super Bowl. That straight-line projection has a perfect record of failure in football forecasting has never and will never change this tendency. When evidence grapples with the sillier depths of the psyche, evidence gets hit with the folding chair every time.

But there's silly, and then there's loony. The assumption that the Pats' win over the Cowboys meant the New England defense had turned the corner was silly. The reaction to the Pittsburgh loss has been full metal moronic. A one-score defeat on the road to a team with a record of success in the past decade second only to that of the Pats themselves is said to indicate the past decade didn't exist. We've only imagined every game played since Super Bowl XXXIX, because in the meantime, the Patriots have stunk, and Bill Belichick has been at best a bungler at both personnel selection and technical coaching.

The Pats haven't been perfect this season. Nor has Belichick. I understand why the coach might want to fire most of his defensive backs, but he might've been better advised to have replacements in mind when he made them redundant.

Still, New England is 5-2. They're tied for first in the AFC East. If they might be a tad weaker than in previous seasons, it's just a tad, and that weakness may well be statistical white noise that'll get erased by December.

After about the ninth talk show rant about Belichick's drafting I heard between Sunday and Tuesday (hey, all the entertainment in the house was a battery-powered radio
), it occurred to me to do something I have always hated -- research. I had to wait for power, but here it is.

New England's regular season record since Super Bowl XXXIX: 77 wins -- 26 losses. Five division titles in six seasons and counting. One Super Bowl appearance. Two AFC title game appearances.

No doubt about it. The presiding genius responsible for those shameful figures has to be another Matt Millen. Pity to see the game pass Belichick by like that.

It's OK to be emotional about sports. Otherwise, why follow them? But "emotional" should not always mean "emotional breakdown." When Rudyard Kipling wrote that triumph and disaster should be always met the same, he didn't mean people should freak out over both of them.

It always puzzles me that followers of sports do not really believe in the best-known and oldest cliches of their sports. Go on Twitter and follow a few baseball writers. Do they seem like people who feel "it's a long season?" Every day is the end of the known horsehide universe.

Football's no different. Straight-line projection analysis ignores the possibility that a football takes funny bounces -- a cliche used to illustrate the sport's inherent random, no, chaotic nature. Of all the sports, football should have the most judicious fans and media. It has just the opposite.

It's probably not so much fun to evaluate the last two Patriots games with the following two sentences. Tom Brady remains a really good quarterback. The Pittsburgh Steelers remain a very tough team to play. But it would be accurate. Doesn't that matter?

I recognize that it's far more difficult to fill up a newspaper column or four hours of radio or two beers worth of barroom argument with those two sentences. But I'd sure like to see a few people try.

Any Given Saturdays Must Be Eliminated for The Good of the TV Contract

2011-10-23T06:46:00.001-05:00

There were a couple of big upsets in college football yesterday. Oklahoma lost to Texas Tech and Michigan State beat Wisconsin. Both games were thrilling, Michigan State winning on a Hail Mary. Both games were on ESPN networks, too. Huzzahs all-around at Walt Disney Co.!

Or so you'd think, and you'd be incorrect. This morning, a rerun of ESPN's college wrapup show revealed that horrendous commentators Mark May and Lou Holtz were VERY disappointed in the beaten favorites. Praise for the gallant underdogs was perfunctory. Condemnation of the teams that, according to ESPN and several polls, SHOULD have won was heartfelt and lengthy.

Holtz, May and the host whose name I have no intention of catching then went on to the subject that really warmed their hearts, the upcoming game between undefeated teams LSU and Alabama on November 5. Let two weeks of hype begin, hype that seemed very odd from a business perspective as ESPN won't be showing that tilt. It'll be on CBS, directly opposite ESPN's nine game broadcasts that afternoon.

Logic, even the logic of profit and loss, is as much a stranger to college football as honesty. Holtz and May, products of a system they'll never be able to view from the outside, gave a splendid example of the mindset that has made their sport what it is -- ugly graffiti on the walls of civilized society, an insult to the ideals of sports and indeed of the United States of America.

Any sports enterprise where upsets are seen as bad for business should be regarded with the utmost suspicion. As May and Holtz demonstrated, that's just where FBS college football is right now. Despite years and years of evidence that upsets are good for sports business, here's a game where there's an institutional bias in favor of overdogs.

The phrase "should win out" is the one most often blatted by college football commentators each and every weekend. That's not-so-subconscious pulling for the chalk to win every contest. It's particularly weird when uttered, as it often is, in like the second week of the season. The cynical might think this is because many college commentators (and coaches and writers who vote in the polls) just want the season to validate their preseason opinions. They'd be right, but they also wouldn't be cynical enough.

Try as I might, I can think of only one other sports/entertainment enterprise where favorites are supposed to rule, where the top competitors are only allowed to lose to each other and where procedures are bent on a consistent basis to make sure that happens. That would be pro wrestling, which even its fans know is an enjoyable racket and nothing more.

That's all big college football is, too. It's a rigged system to allow a small minority of college athletic departments to rake off major dough from television networks. It's entertaining as can be, but sports as defined by "honest competition to determine an outcome" it isn't. If the demented scramble among schools to find the most lucrative bucket shop, er, BCS conference that'll have 'em doesn't prove that to the sports' audience, nothing will.

I can understand and sympathize with fans of individual big power schools. Rooting for Alabama, Ohio State, etc. is a natural organic fan experience. Rooting for the system in which these teams operate, however, baffles me. Many fans and commentators do. They prefer a system in which their own interests (a playoff and paying athletes openly could only benefit the sport as a fan experience) finish well below Iowa State in the standings every year.

But then, that's how rackets get rich. They convince the suckers being cheated is in their own best interests.

History Repeats Itself, Only Taller

2011-10-22T07:54:00.002-05:00

The most interesting, which isn't the same thing as "likely to be a good," game on the NFL card this weekend will not be broadcast here during the Patriots' bye week. So we won't get to see Tim Tebow start for the Broncos against the Dolphins. It's a fascinating plot twist when a quarterback's coach and head of the front office are more or less openly hoping he'll fail.

Then again, for New Englanders, that show is a rerun, make that remake. We saw it all over 20 years ago. Subtract about nine inches, 60 pounds, and piety, and Tebow is Doug Flutie in the NFL of the '80s.

As quarterbacks, Flutie and Tebow share eerie similarities. Each was a college megastar at the position, an all-time great. Flutie had and Tebow has flaws in their passing techniques leading to that greatest of NFL throwing sins -- inaccuracy. Before they entered the league, it was widely stated by NFL insiders that neither man would do at the position.

But Flutie had and Tebow has the ineffable knack of generating thrilling big plays, scores and victories despite their gentlemen's Cs at their position's most vital skill. Fans adore thrills and see big plays as the quarterback's most important ability. So New England fans clamored for Flutie to start over more conventional QBs. So did Denver fans. Raymond Berry resisted this call as long as he could. So did John Fox.

One difference was the bankrupt Sullivan family was eager to have Flutie starting as a revenue stream, while John Elway, calling the shots in Denver, would pretty much like to ship Tebow out of his franchise and consciousness. I pity all Bronco QBs as long as Elway is in charge of player assessment. How can they not come up short of HIS vision of what a quarterback should be?

Eventually, Berry let Flutie start in the hopes the flaws he saw would cause Flutie to cure the fans' fever and Flutie would basically play himself out of the lineup. Unfortunately for the coach, Flutie's negatives took over a season to gain a narrow victory over his positives, and by the time the final gun went off, Berry's bosses were looking to replace HIM.

Tebow is luckier. The Broncos aren't a playoff contender as Flutie's Pats were in 1988. Any big play positives he creates are liable to be the only ones Denver turns in, given Sunday after given Sunday. Fox may shudder at the interceptions and three-and-outs that Tebow will also create, but promoting Tebow does allow him to ignore the quarterback position for a time to focus on the approximately 52 other problems on the Broncos' roster that need fixing.

There's also this. Flutie was a pro football quarterback for 20 years. Yes, much of that was in Canada, but the checks cleared in that country, too. Given a chance, Tebow might do just as well, better even. It would be nice to see the NFL chattering classes and "insiders" take one of their conventional wisdoms in the shorts.

Coaches aren't wrong to value consistency over big plays and "intangibles." The whole point of coaching is to try and make football as predictable as possible.

Fans aren't wrong to prefer the Fluties and Tebows over the Grossmans and Ortons either. Big plays win games. And the maximum possible amount of predictably in football isn't very much at all.

A Baseball Conundrum

2011-10-17T16:43:00.002-05:00

Jon Lester, John Lackey and Josh Beckett have been pilloried by the entire known baseball universe for the crime of goofing off in the clubhouse during games when they weren't scheduled to pitch.

And yet, it is common baseball practice for teams to send the starting pitcher of the first game of a road trip the last day of the previous home stand, so the pitcher can better prepare himself psychologically and be free of the distractions of well, watching a game in which he's not going to pitch.

Or do teams do that so the pitcher's teammates don't SEE him drinking beer, eating chicken and playing video games?

(Very) Brief Thought on Patriots 20-Cowboys 16

2011-10-17T15:06:00.001-05:00

When a defensive line plays well, the rest of the defense almost always has a good game, too.

When a defensive line doesn't play well, the rest of the defense cannot.

Easy to Be Hard -- Too Easy

2011-10-16T08:06:00.002-05:00

No doubt about it, I was a trifle harsh on my old colleagues Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti yesterday. Too harsh perhaps on two people who are merely responding to the financial and prestige incentives of their new trade. Probably if I didn't know them, I wouldn't take their participation in a medium built for fraud so personally.

The idiocy of talk radio in Jacksonville, Florida (where the hosts make Felger and Mazz seem like Edward R. Murrow and Charlie Rose) only amuses me. But that's because I don't know what they're talking about, not being too up on Florida State recruiting, and can appreciate the absurdity of the genre as an especially twisted form of performance art.

In Boston, it's different. I know everybody, and I know what they're talking about. And when two people who I really did admire as co-workers indulge in the things about sports journalism and journalism in general I most dislike, including pointless speculation, a glory in rumor for its own sake and above all personal meanness, it offends and saddens me. Going after Heidi Watney crossed a line for me, in the original meaning of the word "deadline." (Look it up). That's why I got so angry. Women sports journalists have to put up with endless crap in their lives, and contributing to that crap makes one a compete jerk.

It was not, BTW, spiteful or pointless of Bob Hohler to write about Terry Francona and pain pills. He got information, checked it out with the subject, and got the subject on the record. That's Hohler's job. That's journalism. Journalism is not always a job that makes you feel good about yourself, because it often involves dealing with stuff that doesn't make you feel good about your fellow humans. If you can't deal with that, it's not the business for you.

I am increasingly of the opinion that sports talk radio is not the business for anyone who was ever involved in sports journalism. It is, as John Henry accurately observed, part of the entertainment industry, not journalism at all. The entertainment industry is a fine business, most of it. But I don't really think talking about sports should qualify as one of the performing arts. It's bad for the performers.

Michael and Tony were excellent beat writers, the most demanding position in a sports section. Glenn Ordway was an outstanding basketball announcer. Gerry Callahan was and occasionally still is a superb columnist. All four now work in a field where one is richly rewarded for trafficking in innuendo, insult, and all around unpleasant behavior. That's what makes me angry and sad, and it's why I prefer neither to listen to nor think about sports talk radio in this burg.

I did know these men. I liked them. And I'm terribly afraid they are messengers who have become their medium.

DVDS of the 1993 Season Are On Sale in the Lobby After the Concert, Uh, Game

2011-10-16T07:01:00.002-05:00

The Dallas Cowboys will play the Patriots at Foxboro today. The sight of the Cowboys on my TV will evoke the same sentiment it has since about 2002. What's the word for anti-nostalgia, anyway?

The Cowboys create the same sort of vague depression about entertainment and life itself I feel when I hear the frequent advertisements for former big rock acts that are on extremely ill-advised tours, usually with one or at most two of the original band members still performing, the rest being too bored, alienated, or dead to participate. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend's kid touring with a performance of "Tommy" is the particular act that comes to mind this morning. Rest assured, when casinos are built here, there will be many of these acts performing. What could be worse than having been a megastar, and now you're not big enough for Vegas?

In essence, formerly superior performers who just don't have anything new to contribute (and why should they? What's Daltrey got left to prove) are reduced to being their own cover bands. Work is work.

Isn't that exactly what the 21st century Cowboys are, a cover band of the first team Jerry Jones assembled in the early 1990s? And just like any cover band, the more diligently they try to resemble the original, the more spectacularly they make clear the gap in ability between themselves and said original. While the Patriots have quite successfully reinvented themselves between 2003 and 2011 (keeping Tom Brady helps there), the Cowboys are a succession of looks like but not quite -- Tony Romo-Troy Aikman, Dez Bryant-Michael Irvin, etc. Jones, a shrewd man, can't see any way to achieve success except to try and repeat what used to work for him. Whole industries go bust that way.

Readers tend to skim on Sunday morning, so I'll close with the following important reminder. When I wrote that the Cowboys resemble a cover band, it did NOT, repeat NOT mean I think they're going to cover this afternoon.

Long Time, First Time Too Many

2011-10-15T06:35:00.003-05:00

John Henry is very rich. Doesn't he own an iPod?

The principal owner of the Boston Red Sox would have been better served had be been listening to music yesterday instead of sports talk radio. The soothing tones of Metallica would have kept his blood pressure down (to the extent it ever gets above 50 systolic, I mean look at the guy). Far more importantly, he wouldn't have acted on understandable wrath and popped into the studio to confront Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti.

As a financial whiz, Henry is supposed to understand the concept of the risk-reward ratio. By going on the air, Henry took all the risks while his two tormentors reaped all the rewards. The talk show hosts are the toasts of their organization. What did Henry get for his pains? More trouble, that's all.

I admire Henry's nerve and instincts for confronting Felger and Mazz. I question his judgment. The reason most athletes and other sports personnel curse their media critics in private and almost never call them out in public is that bitter experience teaches there's no percentage in that transaction -- especially in the wake of failure.

I didn't catch Henry's appearance on the air. For one thing, I have a tape deck in my car, and the choice between Miles Davis and Felger is a pretty easy one. For another, I can't listen to Felger and Mazz for the same reason Henry sought them out. The show operated by two of my former co-workers, who were good sportswriters in their day and were good teammates, is despicable swill aimed at whatever denominator is below the lowest common. That's why it's also the hottest show in town. In radio, shit gives off the sweet smell of success.

(Felger at least had the good grace to express regrets, but trafficking in rumors about the sex life of Heidi Watney was the act of a cad. Maybe cousin Nick will challenge Mike to a duel, five irons at 10 paces.)

By all second-hand accounts, Henry didn't come off TOO badly in the impromptu interview. All that went wrong was that he said he'd been against signing Carl Crawford, with whom he's still stuck for six seasons, to whom he still owes $120 million and whose revival is kind of essential to future Red Sox success. That's "all." I wonder if Henry ever talked about any of the securities in his portfolios that way. I also wonder if he ever let subordinates in his financial business talk him into a $140 million deal that didn't feel right to him. If so, how'd he get so rich?

Henry also denied that he or any of the other Red Sox owners were sources for the leaks about Terry Francona in Bob Hohler's story in the Globe. People in the grip of deep emotion are seldom good liars. I am willing to believe that Henry is telling the truth as he understands it. I am not so willing to believe what he understands IS the truth. Even if I were, Henry's denial begs the question "If not you guys, then who?" Who's the snake in the asphalt of Yawkey Way? It is not reassuring to be told that Red Sox ownership has lost control of its franchise to the extent that it's every rat for himself over there.

Worst of all from Henry's perspective, confronting his critics will not accomplish his goal of lowering their volume. That's how talk radio or any other media works. Having seen that they've drawn blood, Felger and Mazz will redouble their efforts at lurid speculation and borderline libelous claims, something Felger in particular is very good at and which will eventually blow up his own career for him.

When I was a member of the media, all I asked was that the subjects of my stories were themselves in all their human glory and futility. Spin is part of the business, but underneath it, I hoped the people I wrote about revealed a bit of the man or woman within. Henry did that in spades yesterday, and the part of me that's still sportswriter (a pretty big part), applauds him for it.

But the part of me that's just a bystander now, neither fan nor media member (a part that grows bigger every day), feels nothing but regret for Henry. I see where the story of the collapse of 2011 is going for him, and it's not a good place at all. Too bad. He's an odd duck, as most accomplished persons are, but I always kind of liked Henry. Trust? No. I can like people without trusting them. I'm not in talk radio, so I don't need to function in a two-dimensional universe.

Sympathy tells me to hope Henry feels better after getting it all off his chest yesterday. Rationality tells me he shouldn't.

America's Snitches' Team

2011-10-12T16:28:00.005-05:00

Bob Hohler of the Globe is a good reporter, more than good enough to have mastered reporting's primary skill -- knowing just which persons involved in a story are eager to explain why what happened wasn't really their fault. When it came to the Boston Red Sox organization, that was evidently a long list.

Given the poltroon's privilege of anonymity (it's essential in journalism, but that doesn't make it any nicer), lots of folks were happy to discuss the Sox collapse of September 2011 in vivid and excruciating detail, some of which might even be true. Hohler's also a real straight shooter, so I'll bet that somewhere in his heart, he wished his story could have the following headline and by line.

"Why you should keep buying things from us in 2012," by John Henry and Friends.

Strike that. It's obvious from the story that nobody on the Red Sox has any friends, at least not any others on the team or in the organization. Nobody who told those tales has much if any decency either. And if, as I'd be willing to bet significant money, the sources for Hohler's story were senior members of management and those with equity in the franchise, they don't have too many smarts.

Let's deal with the despicable first. Accusing Terry Francona of prescription drug abuse and saying his marriage was affecting his work is beneath comment, beyond my poor capacity to sufficiently abuse and just plain stupid. When it comes to baseball, there are basically two kinds of marriages. Ones where the wife can take being alone an awful lot of the time, and marriages with problems. That's just a sad fact of the business, and it applies to baseball writers as much as anyone.

As for substance abuse causing a manager to make poor decision and "lose control of the team," well, I don't know. Maybe Billy Martin, Earl Weaver and I will get together for a beer tonight and discuss the issue. The Raging Alcoholic wing of the Hall of Fame, should it ever get built, will be a large annex.

Here's even more stupid. Francona is well liked, not just by fans, but in the tiny inbred world of his sport, too. His version of events, delivered in private, will carry more weight than Hohler's story, even if every word of it was gospel truth. The Sox ownership/management team will now be doing business with peers who have reason to believe they're dealing with deceitful and nasty people. There will be a surcharge for that suspicion.

Penultimate stupidity. The villians of Hohler's piece, John Lackey, Jon Lester and Josh Beckett, are also multimillion dollar long term investments of the sources who dissed them. They can only be replaced at a cost of hundreds of million of dollars and several lost seasons. Tim Wakefield for Opening Day pitcher, anyone?

The Sox are stuck with Lester and Beckett, and probably Lackey, too. I don't think many teams would trade for him if the Sox assumed his whole salary and threw in Adrian Gonzalez. They can't win without Lester and Beckett pitching well, as September proved. Why then in the name of Abner Doubleday and Peter Drucker did management go out of its way to paint them as twirling cancers? Rest assured, both pitchers have agents, and those agents were quick to assure them that they are valuable commodities whose paychecks will keep flowing come what may. In short, Lester and Beckett have the whip hand in their relationships with their employer. What point did blackening their reputations prove? How did it increase the value of the Red Sox as an investment?

Ultimate stupidity. Through their own anonymous words, the Red Sox as an organization stand revealed as a place where there's no one you can trust, or should trust. Since the franchise is now searching for both a manager and general manager, this could impede recruiting -- at least recruiting of anyone worth a damn.

There are hundreds of proverbial good baseball men for every job in baseball, let alone the glamorous big-paying ones. The line of applicants for both Sox positions will doubtless metaphorically stretch around Fenway Park and all the back to Charlestown. But the list of applicants who might make a difference in the job is apt to be shorter.

If I'm a potential manager or general manager with the slightest confidence in my own abilities, here's how I see the Red Sox. It's a place where you can't turn your back on your employees or your employers, where you're expected to stay in the background in success and stand front and center in failure, and oh, yes, when failure comes, as is inevitable, the franchise will do its best to make you unemployable anywhere else, out of the spiteful cruelty at which true cowards excel.

I'm thinking, you know, maybe I'll just wait for that cushy Astros job to open up.

J?-E?-T?-S? Jets? Jets? Jets?

2011-10-09T08:50:00.002-05:00

Of all the many things in sports I do not understand and have given up trying, the New York Jets rank first in degree of difficulty.

I look at the Jets and see nothing I like except their record. By every rational means of evaluating a football team I have been taught, Rex Ryan's bunch looks, sounds, and feels like a perpetual 5-11 squad, a noisier version of the Seahawks. They're a running team that often can't run and a blitzing team that seldom gets meaningful quarterback pressure. Approximately one out of every three games, their quarterback looks like that poor Florida freshman did against LSU yesterday, simply unprepared for and incapable of competing.

When the Jets lose, they often get massacred in "please stop this mismatch" style. Every loss is followed by what most NFL franchises would regard as deplorable discord. Egotism appears to be encouraged as a lifestyle choice.

The Jets always look as if disaster is their manifest destiny. It SHOULD be their manifest destiny. So how come destiny has yet to make their scene?

This team that damn well should be a dismal failure has excelled for the past two years at what are two of the most difficult feats in the NFL, winning road playoff games and beating the New England Patriots. They've gone 4-2 at the former, and 3-2 at the latter. Everything I know about pro football tells me this is impossible. And yet, there it is on the record.

I have drawn two possible conclusions about this conundrum. Underneath the bluster and all-around weirdness, Ryan might be one hell of a good coach. The other more logical conclusion is that destiny is merely taking its own sweet time, the better to REALLY cast the Jets into the outer darkness of the NFL when it finally shows up.

Logic also says the Pats beat the Jets by 17 or more this afternoon. Logic, however, has also been a stranger as far as the Jets are concerned. If New York wins again, I won't know whether or not to be surprised.

Al Davis 1929-2011

2011-10-09T07:40:00.002-05:00

Al Davis was seldom what most would call a good man, and almost never what anyone would call a nice one. That's probably why within the narrow confines of the National Football League, Davis was one of the greatest men in its history.

Davis was pro football without the mask on. He stripped whatever was left of the "building character" Victorian moralistic nonsense the game took from its college origins and left its essence out for all to see. He was ruthless, exploitative and untrustworthy. But he was no hypocrite. Davis and the Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland/and maybe Los Angeles again Raiders he essentially founded and built in his own image were a constant statement that football is a cruel, ruthless, exploitative game and ergo people with those character traits have a two-step start on the field.

Football is violence inadequately controlled by rules. Davis sought out football players with a take 'em or leave 'em approach to all rules. Some were free spirits. Some had demons. Some were flat out sociopaths. In the glory days, which lasted a very long time, pretty much 40 years, all were good at beating other people up.

All NFL teams are like that now, of course. Have been for a long time, too, which is one reason the Raiders sank back into the mire in last decade. Astonishing as it may be to contemplate for those under 40, when Davis began his career in evil genuisry, they weren't. Teams still looked for players who'd make a favorable impression on pledges down at the frat house. They wanted good citizens, i.e, malleable order-takers, if possible white order-takers.

I should note that I actually had brief social contacts with some of the Raiders of the early '70s and they weren't that much different than anyone else, just bigger. Davis was good at finding players who wanted to live inside society's white lines, too. But he deliberately chose to push his outcasts to the center of the team's image. This is football, it's kind of bent, the Raiders said. Get over it.

Davis made the NFL throw a false image into the dustbin of history. He sued the NFL to move to L.A., won, and threw Pete Rozelle's idea that the league was a cooperative venture among like-minded businessmen into the dustbin, too. The tombstones of the St. Louis Cardinals, Los Angeles Rams and Houston Oilers are his monuments, just like the Raiders three Lombardi Trophies.

Perhaps it's a bad thing that NFL fans now know that if their team's owner has to choose between them and more money, they're going to lose. The fact Davis was able to move the Raiders BACK to Oakland indicates that fans are too far gone to care that they know.

Perhaps it's a bad thing that Davis pushed the cruel reality of the sport of football into people's faces, too. I don't think so. To truly love a person or thing, one has to acknowledge what he/she/it is really like. Otherwise, it's not love, just a preteen crush.

Al Davis was not an admirable man. But within the world he chose for himself, he sure was an important one.

Congratulations, You %#$@!*

2011-10-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

I'm still enough of a Philadelphia fan to feel that the very worst sort of defeat is one where the only possible response is good sportsmanship. The Phillies loss to the Cardinals in the divisional series last night falls squarely into that revolting category.

A 1-0 loss doesn't leave much in the way of second-guessing or bitching. It's pretty obvious why your team lost. The 2011 Phillies won an inordinately large number of the enormous number (77) of regular season games where they scored three runs or less. In the playoffs, where pitchers like Chris Carpenter lurk at every turn, this is not a formula for success. Ryan Howard's apparent Achilles injury on the season's last at-bat was a horrible but apt summary of how the Phils contributed to their own defeat.

But the point is, they didn't contribute that much. The Cardinals won fair, square and impressively. They beat Cliff Lee, they beat Roy Oswalt and they beat Roy Halladay with all the money on the table. Whatever honors Carpenter has or will win in his distinguished pitching career, he'll never get a better tribute than he got last night. Tony La Russa, whose plaque in Cooperstown should show him waving to the bullpen, let him pitch a complete game in an elimination game.

Losing hurts. One would think just getting beat would hurt less, but that's not the case. I mock fans, especially Boston ones, for believing every game is determined by what the home team does or doesn't do, but I understand where they're coming from. It's a defense mechanism. Blaming a loss on your side's flaws carries the implicit assumption that if your side just corrects those flaws, it will win next time out. It's less discouraging to say "our pitchers shouldn't drink beer in the clubhouse" than "you know, those Yanks are tough."

This privilege is denied any rational Phillies fan (hey, there are at least six I know of). My team ran into a difficult opponent on a hot streak and got whupped. I'm enough of a fan to hate it, and still enough of a sportswriter to admire the Cards for their accomplishment. Presto, the worst of both worlds.

It's a curse sometimes, not being able to curse at fate.

My Life As Told By Bill Belichick

2011-10-05T07:05:00.002-05:00

Had a knee.

The doctors took a look at it.

Had a procedure.

Was not present at the part of work available to the media yesterday and today.

Listed as questionable, but then I always was.

We're just focusing on the Jets right now.

Nobody Spent Much Time Thinking About Pete Sampras' Return of Serve

2011-10-02T18:56:00.003-05:00

A football team that scores more than 30 points in every game has perforce reduced the role of its defense from that of a 50-50 partner to one of those unknown (but well-rewarded) guys who went into the Yankees with George Steinbrenner. A turnover here and there, forcing a punt every couple of quarters, and its work is done, thank you. Hell, that defense only only has to do half its own job. It can give up eight yards a carry, and sooner or later, the other team will stop running as surely as if they had held them to negative yardage

Of course, very few football teams DO score 30 or more in every game. Eventually, therefore, it's likely the defense of the 2011 New England Patriots actually will become a horrid liability. But today wasn't eventually. So I'm content to let the coaches yell at the defense. They get paid to do it.

Wonder if Shoeless Joe Ran Out Every Pop-Up

2011-10-01T07:53:00.001-05:00

An idle thought just struck me by way of P.S. to my last post. In my lifetime, the baseball player who best exemplified everything Boston fans say they want in a sports hero -- the original unparalleled dirt dog, the guy who said the stat he most cared about was all the wins he'd been in -- was Pete Rose.

Which goes to show there's many more than one kind of motivation.

There Is No I in "Team" But There Are Several in "Idiotic"

2011-10-01T06:13:00.002-05:00

As we sat in traffic Thursday evening contemplating the baseball universe, my son Josh had a question.

"You've been to them Dad. Are the other big pro sports town as obsessed and hung up on the idea of team as people are here in Boston?"

I was proud. Unlike me, Josh is a lifelong Boston resident. It takes insight for such a person to put their finger on a universal civic psychosis.

My answer came quickly. "No, not really. They're meaner in Philly, lots meaner, but don't look for motives when teams fail. They just boo. And they take it out on individual players more than the group."

I call (and have done so for decades) the local reaction to both sports failure and success the Chip Hilton Syndrome, after the sports books for boys series of my youth. In Boston, professional sports teams are held to a standard of sports behavior that was a myth in the 1930s, let alone today. It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you look like you're playing the game. Present a cheerful, brave and especially reverent image about your sport and Boston fans think victory is the inevitable result. Doing so kept Trot Nixon popular through several very unproductive seasons.

Losing, like say a historic September gag job, MUST be the result of violations of the sports code of morals. Athletes and teams fail because they're bad, not because they played badly.

The most extreme case of this fallacy is the oldest. When Ted Williams was on good Red Sox teams that couldn't quite beat better Yankees teams, and blew a World Series, he was the problem. Williams was "selfish" because he walked too much. This was a minority view, but that even existed at all doesn't speak well of our fair city's sports history.

The truth that it's hard to win in professional sports, and that's why most teams don't escapes this burg. So does the truth that professional sports are hard to play well. Above all, Boston won't acknowledge that the first two truths make pro teams collections of gifted men with an odd bipolar syndrome in which total self-confidence and neurotic insecurity wage a constant war for control of their psyches. This leads to less than ideal group dynamics in adversity.

Look, it's simple. There is "bad" behavior as defined by Boston fans and oh boy especially media in every locker room and clubhouse of every team every day. When the team is winning, it ignores it. When it loses, it doesn't. Defeat makes everybody unhappy and crabby. Since defeat makes fans unhappy and crabby, you'd think they'd get that.

Pitchers drinking beer in the clubhouse on their off days? Somewhere Mickey Mantle and Grover Cleveland Alexander are shocked. I can top what is allegedly the player behavior that got Terry Francona separated from the Red Sox. How about a player drinking beer in the clubhouse during a game in which he pitched?

In the summer of 2004 in Anaheim, Derek Lowe got knocked out of a game in short order. Things hadn't been going well for Derek, or the team for that matter. When reporters came into the clubhouse after the game, Lowe was at his locker. He was glassy-eyed full-on shattered, so much so several coaches suggested he not talk to us.

Three months later, Derek Lowe was among the heroes of the greatest playoff comeback in baseball history and a member of the first Red Sox world championship team in 86 years. I submit that if drinking in the clubhouse didn't affect that team, it didn't affect the 2011 squad much either.

Was there griping in this summer's Sox clubhouse? I say yes because there's been griping in every clubhouse since there have been clubhouses. I'll bet the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings bitched about their travel schedule. Bitching is one of those things ballplayers do to pass all that daily downtime. It's white noise.

Was some of that griping about John Lackey and Carl Crawford. It'd be weird if it wasn't. Use empathy here, reader. Imagine if at your place of employment a couple of new workers at the very job you have were brought in and paid three times what you make and then they began screwing up all the time. Would you be friends with them? Would you complain behind their backs? Be honest, now.

The prosaic facts of the Great Choke of 2011 are only slightly psychological. They start with performance, with known weaknesses of good players getting the best of them at the worst possible time. When Jon Lester fails, he struggles with control. Josh Beckett tends to wear down as a season goes on. David Ortiz had proven he can go a month with an extra base hit in the last two seasons. And so on.

Slumps are contagious. Locked together in small spaces (dugouts, clubhouses, buses, airplanes) nearly every waking hour, the Sox, like all slumping teams, saw their collective neurotic insecurities rout their collective self-confidence by a score of about 17-2. And then the losing began in earnest. It may satisfy fans, media, and ass-covering front office types to say Boston's lost September was because the team didn't care enough or try enough, but when good teams slump/choke, it's almost always because they cared too much and tried too hard. Baseball is not a game that surrenders to simple willpower.

The moronic morality play concept of sports does a disservice to the more interesting reality of how games are won or lost. It's also fraudulent as morality. Many a nice guy has indeed finished last. They were still nice, they just didn't play very well. A guy's ERA is not shorthand for the state of his soul.

Games are played by human beings, complex, difficult, unusual human beings. Demanding that athletes show no flaws is to demand they deny their humanity. And as Abraham Lincoln once noted, people with damned few vices tend to have damned few virtues.

What's the Sabermetric Acronym for Cowardice?

2011-09-30T17:01:00.004-05:00

Confronted with catastrophe, the Boston Red Sox, eager to boast of their status as a 21st century baseball franchise run on the most rigorous statistical and business school analytics, reverted to the oldest, stalest, most futile decision in the sport -- they dumped their manager.

And because this IS the Henry-Lucchino-Werner Red Sox, Terry Francona can't be let go with a "it was just time for a change after eight great years." No, there has be some professional character assassination thrown in, because otherwise, people might think that the men who assembled the team that had the worst stretch collapse in baseball history bore some responsibility for its failure.

I just turned off Channel Five, where Mike Lynch presented the following time line. Theo Epstein is alleged to have told ownership BEFORE September that Francona had lost control of the clubhouse (whatever that means, nobody's ever given me a definition) and he couldn't work with him any more. Then, again according the timeline, ownership voted to let Francona go two weeks ago.

Let me be blunt. I think that's a lie, and the person or persons who fed Lynch that story are liars. In fact, it's the exact same lie the Sox told about Francona's predecessor back in 2003. We didn't fire Grady for leaving Pedro in too long in Game Seven. We'd been unhappy with him since June. That was obvious bull, and so is this. It is revisionist history that'd make Stalin proud. Look for Tito's picture to be erased from those 2004 and 2007 championship videos that'll be hawked on the team Web site come Christmastime.

Owners and general managers outrank managers. If the manager is doing or not doing something and they're displeased, they can and should tell him what they want, not sit and stew and let a bad situation get worse.

And of course, that's just what owners and general managers DO do, at least in my experience. Multizillionaires and GMs with their jobs on the line are unwilling to suffer in silence. Except, apparently, Henry, Epstein et. al. They'd rather bitch behind a guy's back after they fire him. That's the kind of behavior that gets a person's ass kicked for them in junior high, and you know, I bet a few of the Sox management team are familiar with that very scenario.

I will believe the story on Channel Five only if Terry Francona himself confirms it. And even if it were true, the people who told it stand revealed as cowards. If you think a manager is hurting your ballclub, you have a moral duty to the franchise, its players and its fans to fire the skipper immediately and stand the gaff.

But the story's not true. At best, it's one part truth to one trillion parts spin. And leaking it reveals the Sox top brass as folks one wouldn't consider having in one's home. Firing Francona is not by itself a good or bad deed. At worst, it's just another of the lengthening list of mistakes of 2011.

But the little morality tale I was fed on TV, that has weight. The people who told it, and there couldn't be anybody but Henry & Co. who did, are despicable excuses for humans. Decent people should cross the street to avoid them.

Red Sox fans, it's not your fault the people who run your team are such sneaky shits. Go on ahead and keep on rooting for the home team. You might want to reconsider giving the sneaks so much of your money, though.

If Wishes Were Third Starters, the Royals Would Make the Playoffs, Too

2011-09-24T06:43:00.002-05:00

When a man is whistling past a graveyard, the identity of the tune he's chosen doesn't matter much. Still, one could have hoped for a little more originality from Theo Epstein than that uneasy listening ballad, "the playoffs are a whole new season."

No kidding. The general manager of the Boston Red Sox is hanging his hat on the fact that nine game leads are hard to blow in one month no matter how poorly you play, and that somehow, someway, the Red Sox will wake up the morning of the first game of the ALDS in possession of their former identity as baseball's best team as viewed by sportswriters and anonymous scouts in notes columns.

"No one will remember April," Epstein, "No one will remember what happened the last two weeks. What people will remember is what happens next." He went on to say just a win or two, and the Sox would again be a "dangerous team."

Well, Epstein had to say something, and "boy, we've really stunk lately" would not have been les mots juste. General managers have the same duty to spin as Presidential press secretaries. I have enough respect for Epstein to believe he didn't believe a word he said. Spin's OK, as long as the spinner doesn't think it's true. What that happens, the organization in question is doomed.

The problem with Epstein's cliche is that it's not absolutely true. Yes, what happens in the playoffs will determine how Boston fans recall 2011 come November. But the memory of the Sox' slump will stick in many minds when the playoffs are going on. Most of those minds will belong to American League ballplayers, most especially including those in Red Sox uniforms.

Videotape never forgets. Reruns of the Orioles series are almost surely the highest-rated program in the Detroit Tigers and Texas Rangers clubhouses. And since players are human beings, albeit unusual ones, failure tends to stick in their minds longer than success. That's how slumps get created in the first place. If Epstein thinks the Sox are going to enter the playoffs full of vim and swagger because they pick off a few wins from Triple A Yankee squads this weekend, he's delusional. At best, the Sox will enter the postseason in a mood of grim, frustrated desperation. I'm not sure that's the best frame of mind in which to pick up Justin Verlander's fastball or to try and slip one past Josh Hamilton.

As noted, spin is spin. But spin can't be all cliche and bluster. It needs the icing of facts on top to taste good. About the only facts the Sox have on their spin now are arithmetical. The numbers say there's not enough time for them to be caught in the wild card race. The payroll says they can't be this bad for too much longer.

Of course, that last argument has a hole in it. The Sox don't have to be bad for too much longer, do they?

Bend But Try Not to Break More than Three-Four Times a Game

2011-09-19T15:23:00.003-05:00

If you have a loved one, friend, acquaintance or total stranger tell you this week that the New England Patriots' defense is in terrible shape because of all the yards it has given up the past two weeks, pay them no nevermind.

If, alas but inevitable, you read or hear a sports reporter or commentator express the same sentiment, you should consider debookmarking them and/or changing the channel.

The Patriots defense is not terrible. I'd say it's average, not in the sense of performance so much, but as being totally representative of how defense has been and will be played in the Year of Our NFL Rules Committee 2011. The best NFL defenses will be measured not in yards allowed, or even so much in points allowed, as by how well they adjust to the fact that defense essentially has become an illegal activity.

Three decades plus of annual tweaking of football's rules to bolster offense and hamper defense has borne its fruit, a bitter fruit indeed for under bettors. We have reached the point where the very essences of defensive football are the stuff 15-yard penalties are made of.

Strong techniques for man-to-man pass defense? Almost completely illegal. Hitting the quarterback? Roger Goodell will see you at the Hague for your war crimes trial. Tackling itself, fundamental number one? Getting more illegal by the moment. In a sport built on violent collisions and instantaneous decisions and reactions, one side of the ball is being told "think hard before you hit anyone." This has had a predictable effect. Defenses suck. Or rather, defenses suck when the cost of sucking isn't prohibitive.

The NFL statistics of the first two weeks of the season, not just the Pats' but every teams' shriek of a nasty cost-benefit triage analysis by defenses. Essentially, yards surrendered don't matter, because nothing that happens between the 20 yard lines matter -- except turnovers. The standard defensive game plan has become quite simplified. Try for turnovers between the 20s. Play aggressive defense in your own red zone and hope the end line plays a great free safety for you passing downs. Rush five, six, seven men frequently when the other guys are inside their own 20 in hopes of creating catastrophic turnovers.

Three-hundred yards passing is the new 200 yards passing for quarterbacks. Statistics always showed 300 yard games were not a significant indicator of who won or lost. That's more true now. Four hundred is the new 300. Tom Brady remains the only QB to win any 400 yard passing games this season. Cam Newton's 0-2.

An increase in points allowed is an inevitable byproduct of all those yards. But remember, your side, unless its the Seahawks, will be scoring more in its turn. At the pinnacle of NFL defensive dominance in the 1970s, teams averaged about 20 points a game. For the Pats in 2011 to allow 22.5 points a game is probably BETTER than average, not worse.

Against the Chargers, the Patriots got their mitts on three turnovers and had a goal-line stand that held San Diego without a point on the possession. I suggest that come December, that will be rightly seen as just about as well as an NFL defense can play this season -- since that's about as well as defenses are allowed to play.

A Coach's Message Seeks Its Medium

2011-09-17T05:56:00.003-05:00

The most surprising thing I learned from the NFL Network documentary on Bill Belichick was how much of what of what it showed us about the coach was stuff I already knew about him.

Belichick adores Ed Reed as a football player? I heard him soliloquize about Reed's excellence as a safety the week before a Pats-Ravens game way back in 2003. One of the parts of covering the Pats
I found most enjoyable was detecting when Belichick's praise for an opposing team or player moved out of boilerplate and into genuine admiration/anxiety. You had to listen, because it was all a matter of a change in vocal tone, but anyone paying attention could tell the difference.

Belichick has profound and profoundly mixed emotions about his experiences as Bill Parcells' chief henchman with the Giants, Pats and Jets? No kidding. First, who wouldn't? I'm fond of Parcells, but I'd rather work for Josef Stalin, thanks. Second, I've heard those mixed emotions in Belichick's voice every time he discussed his past coaching experiences, especially his Giants' experiences.

The slightest effort at empathy shows why. You, the dedicated, ambitious young defensive coach will have the opportunity to coach one of the two or three best defensive players ever to live. However, he's Lawrence Taylor. See why memories of that time might not all be sweet nostalgia?

Belichick sleepwalks through the conference call with out-of-town writers? You bet. So does every other coach. I was in on maybe 200 of those things in my life. They are drudgery for both sides, and believe me, Belichick is far from the least communicative coach in that forum. Once, the Pats' beat writers actually hung up on Don Shula.

And so it went through an engrossing hour of television. NFL Network did a wonderful job of capturing Belichick's existence. But it didn't break new ground, not for me. I won't be surprised when he shows up at Randy Moss' Halloween party next week. I know, and more, have written, that Belichick works very hard at surprising his players, both professionally and personally, because the coach understands that in a sport built on endless repetition o the dullest elements of both blue and white collar labor, boredom is a more dangerous opponent than Peyton Manning.

So the question is, if I am not surprised by the Belichick portrayed in this documentary based on much less personal exposure to the man, why are others? How come everyone doesn't know this, especially since the only reason I was around Belichick was that I was getting paid, in part, to tell people what he's like?

Besides any personal professional failings (nobody bats 1.000 in columnizing, but nobody bats .000 either) there are three reasons why I believe Belichick's public image is so at odds with his actual self. The most obvious one is that we live in a shorthand age. Once a caricature of a well-known person gets wide circulation, it's almost impossible to alter the false perception. There is just enough truth in the idea of Belichick as the grim, brooding evil genius of the NFL, guarding his alchemist's secrets with his life to make that image stick. And frankly, he plays off it. The man wears a hooded sweatshirt, the better to portray himself as blocking out the world.

How did the image get circulated in the first place? That's where my former profession comes in. Most of what the world sees, reads or hears about Belichick comes from two places -- the Wednesday press conference, and the post-game press conference. For different reasons, each is about the worst possible place to learn anything from Belichick's words and/or body language.

In NFL coverage, Wednesday is TV sound bite day. It is the best-attended and therefore least informative press conference Belichick or any coach gives all week. The coach cannot develop a train of thought, thereby revealing his thought processes, because the questions jump from topic to topic based on the angles each news outlet came determined to exploit. Belichick doesn't think in bites, sound or otherwise. When he offers them, they're terse because they're stilted. They don't come naturally to Bill the way they do to a Rex Ryan.

Post-game, Belichick is even more terse. That's because, like almost every other NFL coach, he's spent. The emotional and intellectual effort of directing the three-hour chaos of a football game has wrung him out, win or lose. It's not that he's not happy when the Pats win -- he just doesn't have the energy to display it, or even feel it too deeply.

Here's a mistake I did make covering Belichick, but at least I learned from it. He was my assigned column after Super Bowl XXXVIII when the Pats beat the Panthers. To my mind, 2003 was and will always remain Belichick's best coaching season ever. He took a team that didn't have enough healthy players to practice with on October 1 and won 15 straight games with it.

There were about one-third as many reporters around Belichick's podium as there usually are for the winning Super Bowl coach. Journalists fall for images as much as fans do. I attempted to get Belichick to express some modicum of personal professional pride for his own work.

He wouldn't. He repeatedly mumbled about how happy he was for the players in a voice fit for reciting the U.S. tax code. At the time, I thought, and my column pretty said, "here's a man who won't give anything up." My bad. There was a man who couldn't give anything up, because he had nothing left to give. It was all out on the floor of Reliant Stadium.

So people see a guy on Wednesday essentially speaking a foreign language, and people see the same guy on Sunday, and he's incapable of showing emotion, and they draw the logical but incorrect assumption he has no emotion but a vague hostility to the universe.

That's not Belichick's fault. It's not really the media's fault. ESPN HAS to be a sound-bite world. Otherwise, its world wouldn't fit in its allotted time. Time is the word I think best expresses why the reality of Bill Belichick is hidden to so many people. He's in the wrong one.

Belichick is never happier or more revealing than when's he talking pure football. If he'd only coached in the leather helmet era, he'd have been as beloved as that master self-publicist Knute Rockne. Give the Pats' coach a few cross-country train trips to draw up plays on cocktail napkins in the club car to an audience of scribes in fedoras, and there'd be no Coach/Sorcerer Hoodie out there in the minds of football fans. Belichick would be seen for what he is -- a scholar of and artist at a sport where study is common, but art rare.

Why is that throwback jersies are very popular, but throwback human beings are always misunderstood?

The Most Unnecessary Pep Talk in Football History

2011-09-15T11:11:00.002-05:00

That came yesterday when Tom Brady advised Patriots fans to get a head start on their drinking before filing into Gillette Stadium to watch the Pats play the Chargers on Sunday. What came after Brady's minor pleasantry was unneccessary, deplorable, and moronic.

The quarterback was subjected to a wave of criticism, much of it, alas, from members of my former profession, for talking about the drinking of alcoholic beverages in an approving way. How dare he! What of the children? Doesn't Brady know he's a role model?

Kids, if you're reading this, Brady SHOULD be your role model. You become a rich football hero and marry a supermodel and your folks will be proud, guaranteed.

All Brady did was acknowledge the universal truth (outside of Brigham Young home games) that football fans like to, and have always liked to, bend the elbow a bit out in the parking lots prior to kickoff. Also after the game, and if the lines too long in the stadium, during the game. In short, football and drinking have been partners since Princeton-Rutgers in 1869, for which the National Football League is very grateful. Many countries don't have GDP equal to the sum Anheuser-Busch InBev laid on the NFL to be its official beer sponsor.

What Brady did to make folks mad was fail to be a hypocrite. He implied it was humorous that football fans drink, rather than indicating his extreme disapproval of their bad habit. You wouldn't catch a TV news anchor making the same mistake, no sir. Hypocrisy has become the H following the five Ws of journalism. Facts and reality bother people. Then they get too upset to buy stuff from your advertisers.

In my career, I dealt with my share of drunk fans at venues of all sports. It's not pleasant. People shouldn't get drunk at ballgames. But in my experience, relatively few do. Most drink a mite, but only as a spur to their real drug of choice talking/arguing with other fans. Again in my experience, the vast majority of fans drink way, way more watching games on television at home or in public places than if they paid for a ticket.

So it was perfectly okay for Brady to josh Pats fans about having a few belts. It was perfectly idiotic for anyone in sports media to bash him for doing so. Do you guys/gals WANT to spend a working life without any good quotes? Then keep up the hypocritical moralizing.

Here's the Michael Gee course on Jock Media Relations, offered free to any athletes who wander upon my corner of the Internet. It's a very short course. There are only two lessons, one on each recommended method of handling yourself.

1. The Full Steve Carlton. Say nothing. Clam up and stay clammed your whole career. For extra credit, fail to show up for your own retirement ceremony.

2. Be a robot. Speak nothing but the blandest, most banal cliches about your sport, your life, and life in general. Never show wit, anger, or any other of the qualities that make human existence worthwhile. And for God's sake, never, ever say anything that implies what you do offers anyone on earth any pleasure or fun, especially to yourself.

Tom Brady really enjoys being a football hero. That was his real sin yesterday.

NFL Statistical Anomaly of the Week Nominee #3

2011-09-13T15:08:00.002-05:00

Of the 32 teams who played in the 2011 season's opening week, one and only one had an offense with both a quarterback who passed for 300 or more yards and a running back who rushed for 100 or more yards.

That was the Atlanta Falcons, who lost to the Bears 30-12.

NFL Statistical Anomaly of the Week Nominee #2

2011-09-13T08:10:00.003-05:00

Four NFL quarterbacks had over 400 yards passing in their first game of the 2011 season. All but one of them was on the losing team (Chad Henne, Drew Brees, Cam Newton). And Tom Brady had to throw for over 500 yards to get the the win!

NFL Statistical Anomaly of the Week Nominee #1

2011-09-13T08:01:00.002-05:00

The Patriots and Dolphins had a combined 1137 yards from scrimmage in last night's 38-24 New England victory.

There were also 10 punts in the game. One hopes the two defenses enjoyed their double-digit moral victories, but I bet they didn't.

Teamwork in Action

2011-09-11T09:39:00.001-05:00

Daniel Bard has made more money for Jonathan Papelbon since July 4 than an army of Scott Boras clones could have.

Nostalgia for Horror? No, Thanks

2011-09-11T08:48:00.002-05:00

If the ceremonies and 40 (!) or so TV programs today commemorating the 10th anniversary terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon do anything at all to bring a measure of comfort to the survivors of those crimes and the loved ones of those who died, then they will have justified themselves. But count me out.

I see no need to set aside time to remember something I'm in no danger of forgetting. And I see no chance at all that the commemorations will deal with the real truths of that day and what's happened since. Deep down, all Americans know these truths. Our inability to confront them is what will be on display today. Since the Puritans, fraudulent piety has been one of our primary national coping mechanisms.

It's a short story. September 11, 2001 happened because we, the American people as a society, dropped the ball. And we've been kicking the ball around the right field corner ever since. From blithe unconcern with a remote but real chance of catastrophe (we let people carry knives on airplanes?!?! I didn't believe that was true when I first heard it.) we seamlessly morphed into a mindset where fear hit for the cycle on a daily basis. Fear might be the only basis for decision-making that's worse than blind happy ignorance.

The consequences of letting fear and its partner anger make our choices for us are too well-known to recount here. We changed for the worse in just about every way you care to name. To me anyway, nothing indicates the difference between the U.S. in September, 2001 and September, 2011 than the group identity of two sets of civil servants who'll be lauded to the heavens today, and rightly so.

The First Responders. The heroes of 9/11. New York City cops and firefighters. You still see plenty of people wearing NYPD and NYFD commemorative clothing, baseball caps, T-shirts, etc.

In just about every U.S. political jurisdiction, city, town or state, there's a political opinion today, often that of the majority, that yesteryear's First Responders have a new identity. They are part of the Greedy Public Employee Unions sucking the blood from the self-reliant taxpayers. The inconvenience of taxation to pay for public services generates as much or more anger than the memory of a horrible atrocity and its perpetrators. Anger has that way of taking over, doesn't it? Anger and fear breed selfishness, which breeds further fear, and so on down, and I do mean down, the line.

A society that tells people it pays to be heroes if necessary that they cost too much is not on the march to further peace and prosperity. Neither is a society that knows full well its leadership, public and private, has screwed the pooch six ways from Sunday for ten years yet lacks the willpower to find really new leaders. It's hard to escape the conclusion that the "healing" in the preceding decade has been nothing more than Blind Happy Ignorance getting some share of the national psyche back from Fear and Anger. I'd say it's about 50-50 now.

The United States of America sits at an unhappy medium most uncool.

My Lock of the Year -- It'll Get Dark Earlier Later in the Season

2011-09-03T06:22:00.002-05:00

Preseason predictions of any sport are best understood as cult rituals rather than as actual forecasts. Fans and editors expect them and would miss them if they weren't around although groups are at least dimly aware that they represent wild guesswork even if offered by the most knowledgeable observers.

Jon Gruden knows much more about football than I do. However, his assertion that the Houston Texans are a team to be reckoned with in the 2011 NFL season has no more validity than my thought that the Texans, as they used to say about Brazil, are the team of the future and always will be. At least I have history on my side.

My old pal Peter King knows much more about the NFL than I do. His predecessor as Sports Illustrated main man on pro football, Paul Zimmerman, knew more than Peter does. Knowledge is no guarantee of wisdom. In my ignorance, I knew enough as a sportswriter NEVER to publish those insanely detailed NFL preseason predictions King and Zimmerman have combined to crank out for decades. The won-loss record of 32 teams? Scores of every playoff game? Why give readers looking for reasons to think you're a dope (and there always a good number of those) so many opportunities to have their suspicions confirmed?

Anyone who has seen one football game knows injuries or the lack of same, has the most influence on any NFL team's performance. Who gets hurt when and how badly is what Las Vegas wants to know when it thinks football. But injuries cannot be forecast. We know people will be killed by lightning each summer. But we don't go around telling neighbors they're going to draw the black spot.

So football predictions are an exercise in futility. That's why Vegas likes to see people come to town and make them. I think that's why fans like reading them. Even if a forecaster disses their team, they can take comfort in the fact said forecaster is bound to have made a few horrendous calls about the upcoming season, and their team might be one of 'em. For many fans, like those in Denver say, that's about all the grounds for optimism they've got.

The prudent (oh, all right, cowardly, I admit it) prognosticator makes damage control their top priority. Broad strokes are always the best strokes when painting the future. When you have a hunch, tell people. Don't depend on exhibition game film or personnel changes. Remember that inertia is every bit as powerful in physics as is momentum. And try to keep it short, which I already forgot. But here are my best guesses anyway. Yeah, they're obvious. What's it to ya?

Teams that were really good last year and will be this year, too: Patriots, Packers, Steelers, Falcons, Ravens.

Teams that were really good last year and could go either way, but most likely down a bit: Jets, Bears.

Team most likely to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated with a headline starting "What's Wrong" by Halloween: Eagles.

Team that I cannot understand why other people are picking as a Super Bowl contender: Chargers

Weakest team that'll make the playoffs: Colts (have you seen the other three AFC South squads? That division is like one of those soccer World Cup European qualifying groups that has Andorra and San Marino in it).

Teams most likely to win five games fewer than they did in 2010: Seahawks, Chiefs.

Teams most likely to win two or more games MORE than they did in 2010: Rams, Saints.

The Andrew Luck Derby: Broncos, Browns, and I'd say Panthers if they hadn't already drafted Cam Newton.

Since you must know, teams in the Super Bowl next February: Patriots and Saints. Bet the over.

My favorite preseason pick by somebody else: The September issue of "Sports Illustrated for Kids" chose the Arizona Cardinals to win the NFC West. Either Kevin Kolb's mom is an editor there, or it's BY kids, too -- kids from Scottsdale.

Infantilism Is the Real National Pastime

2011-08-31T16:02:00.002-05:00

Last night's Red Sox-Yankees game proved beyond a doubt that there's a major error in the recording of baseball history. Let's set the record straight.

The late Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella was brutally misquoted when he made his most famous comment on the sport.

What Campy REALLY said was "It's a man's game, but you have to have a lot of spoiled rotten little boy with serious emotional control issues to play it."

The Plot of "A Chorus Line" With Added Knee Injuries

2011-08-20T06:23:00.003-05:00

Preseason NFL football is when Vince Lombardi is wrong. Winning isn't everything. It isn't even in second place behind nobody on your team getting hurt. Among the less imaginative fans and media types, this leads to terrible confusion. They can't cope with moving out of football's usual zero-sum universe.

This leads to one of two false reactions to August football. A big win or bad loss, as the Patriots-Bucs game was last Thursday night depending on your point of view, is seen in one of two ways. The most unsophisticated observers declare it an inevitable foreshadowing of triumph or disaster in the regular season. The guys just wise enough to be really foolish deride all preseason games as meaningless.

Exhibition games are NOT meaningless. Their scores are, but they're not. They are the four most important practices any pro team has all season long. For players ranked from 30-90 on the preseason roster, they are the most crucial nights of their careers, many of which just started in late July. Screw up in front of Don Criqui and Randy Cross, and said career might well be over. Some careers will be over even if the player in question doesn't screw up, as the cruel arithmetic of the roster rules kicks in.

For those guys, preseason games mean more than the Super Bowl. They're playing for big paychecks, not some hideous ring. In terms of technical virtuosity and tradecraft, the fourth quarters of most August games resemble the First Battle of Bull Run. The confusion shouldn't hide the desperation of the participants. If one likes to see athletes compete for high stakes, and I do, then it's when the scrubs come in that exhibition games become most fascinating. The part when the starters play is the dull predictable section. I mean, it's nice to see that Tom Brady can still play football, but I didn't really fear he'd forgotten how since January.

Practice, however desperate, however important, is still just practice. It is has limited to no predictive value. If the Bucs' offensive line continues to play as if on an Oxy binge the way it did against New England, Tampa Bay not only will go 0-16, it'll go through 23 quarterbacks doing so. That's not gonna happen. Chalk it up to a bad, bad practice.

On the other hand, the Patriots have been magnificent in their two preseason wins. Anyone would say they appear to be a team that must be considered one of the favorites to reach the Super Bowl.

No kidding. That's also what anyone would have said before training camp began. That's what the Patriots ARE. They were 14-2 last year, and that team's only real problem was that the Jets played magnificently against them in their playoff game. That's not an issue practice can remedy. The dilemma confronting the Pats is that they've got to wait until January before they can. Having "something to prove in the playoffs" incrementally hampers the focus needed to win regular season road games in outposts of the damned like Buffalo and Washington. Pro football is a game of increments, a/k/a inches.

In August, the above two sentences are nothing more than a passing cloud on the sunny, warm, no humidity summer which the Pats are enjoying (by December, they could become a nasty front, but maybe not, too). Success, even successful practices, is hard to achieve in pro football. It should be enjoyed for what it is -- in New England's case, it's the absence of any horrible surprises. Pats fans should feel as this Phillies fan did in April, 2010. "Oh, so that Halliday is going to keep on being a good pitcher." Fandom and paranoia are inseparable. It's always a welcome moment when facts rout fear.

So for the next Patriots' exhibition game, as it's on a Saturday night, and all of us can stay can up late to watch, let me propose the following TV schedule. First, watch for as long as the starters play, hoping with all one's heart they all leave the field by coach's decision and under their own power. Then turn off the set or switch to the Red Sox or some other game and grab a beer and a snack.

Return to the broadcast for the fourth quarter. That's when the true drama will be in full swing.

No Honor Among Pretentious Thieves With Advanced Degrees

2011-08-17T16:32:00.003-05:00

Nevin Shapiro was a wealthy real estate developer, or so the University of Miami chose to believe. Shapiro, for reasons related to the fact he was deeply pathetic person, gave oodles of money to the Miami athletic department. He got a plaque with his name on it outside a meeting room and a picture with Miami President Donna Shalala looking mighty pleased to make Shapiro's acquaintance.

As it turns out, Shapiro was actually a crook, a swindler running a Ponzi scheme. When the scheme collapsed as they always do thanks to arithmetic, Shapiro got caught and is currently serving a lengthy federal prison term.

As it further turns out, Shapiro, being even more deeply pathetic than can be imagined from the information in the first two paragraphs of this post, decided to cut out the middle man and start giving money directly to Miami football and basketball players, as well as treating them to Kristal nights at fancy night spots, hookers, Escalades, and yacht rides (You got tattoos! Hang your heads in shame, Ohio State Buckeyes!). Shocked to find out Miami and its jocks don't love him anymore now that's he broke and in the sneezer, Shapiro has blown the whistle on his hobby to Yahoo! Sports.

It's a megascandal among the innocents (and there are a great of them, especially among glorious guardians of good like NPR and the New York Times sports section) who think that breaking the rules in college sports is a) profoundly shocking behavior by our nation's institutions of higher learning and b) news. The fact that "scandals" such as this one have been taking place with the regularity of the tides in college football since approximately the first Rose Bowl (1902) and in college basketball since the invention of the jump shot always fails to register with the innocents. The fact that athletics is merely the most blatantly corrupt part of higher education in its relentless season for more money, different in kind but not degree from, say, the engineering school, REALLY fails to register. When you're part of a system, individuals are the only things that can fail. The system must be perfect.

As always, my reaction to another college sports disgrace is pretty much hilarity, along with a sneaking admiration for the Miami jocks for not selling themselves cheap. College football is currently engaged in a frantic free-for-all where schools are speed-dating conferences in an orgiastic pursuit of more television revenue. Why should their athletes' motivations be any different?

Beyond the low comedy and the Escalades, the Miami "scandal" reminds me that big money college sports has evolved way past simple corruption. Its morals and economics have become so nonsensical as to have moved to pure absurdity.

Consider this: Suppose Shapiro hadn't been a swindler, just an honest rich chump. If he had merely given those oodles of dough to Miami athletics, he'd still be a pillar of the community. But give money to Miami ATHLETES, and he'd be a lowlife slimeball no matter how he made his fortune. Is there really that much different between those two nouns as to make one activity philanthropy and the other an antisocial act?

I know this though. College football and basketball have some business plan. Imagine running an operation were not only do other people pay your employees, but they'll give you even more money just for the chance to do it.

All Statistics Are Important Except the One Used to Keep Score

2011-08-14T08:07:00.002-05:00

Sean Forman, creator of the invaluable Web site baseball-reference.com, has an unfortunate article in "The New York Times" this morning arguing that Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies is really not that good of a hitter even though he leads the National League in RBI. By an unhappy coincidence for the author, another story in the same sports section is about how Howard had a homer and four RBI in a Phillies win last night.

Forman's article isn't really about Howard per se. It's the sluggers' statistics he's mad at, not the slugger himself. Forman is at war with the RBI, a venerable measurement of batting success that baseball quants just can't stand -- especially the fact that hitters who get lots of RBI become very famous and even more very well-paid. Like all ideologues, Forman has become a slave to his theories. In this case, it's the theory that new statistics which DO serve to advance the cause of baseball knowledge actually prove that nobody in baseball has known what the hell they're doing for the past 150 years.

Forman successfully makes the case that Howard makes a great many outs as a hitter, especially strikeouts. This comes as no news to Phillies fans, or to anyone who can read another old-fashioned stat, Howard's batting average. He glosses over Howard's impressive home run totals for the past five and two-thirds seasons, as homers ARE valued by the new stat crowd (one is tempted to say almost as valued as walks, but that'd be unfair). Then we get to the crux of Forman's complaint.

"Howard is very good at what he does. But the trouble with RBI is that they give too much credit to the player, and not enough to the players being driven in."

OK. That's a position. There is, however, a statistic that does give credit to the players being driven in. It's been around for awhile, too, and is called Runs Scored. And while Forman doesn't say this in his piece, it is a prime tenet of the new statistical faith that Runs Scored is also an obsolete and inaccurate measurement of player worth, as it fails to account for the role played by the batter who drove in the scorer.

Catch-22, or considering the people making the argument, Catch-22.437251. Entranced by the metrics they have created to more accurately measure a batter's ability to hit for power and avoid outs (which I note generally involve tweaking old stats), the quants have denigrated the most important stat of all -- runs. Runs, and nothing but runs, determine who wins or loses. There is nothing a batter can do that's more important than being involved in the creation of a run.

Forman states, again accurately, that one reason Howard the cleanup hitter has so many RBI is that the Phillies' one-three hitters in the lineup don't hit for the same power and create as many RBI as the Red Sox one-three hitters, especially Jacoby Ellsbury and Dustin Pedroia (the quant beau ideal, and he is a hell of a player), do. This fact, however, would seem to make Howard's ability MORE valuable to the Phillies, not less. If he doesn't drive those guys in, then the offense is dependent on Raul Ibanez enjoying one of his triennial hot streaks.

Judging by the contract the Phils gave Howard, the club's management agrees with me.

Truth be told, Howard is merely an extreme example of the flaws and virtues of a type of player who's been around since the creation of the lively ball. He's a low-average, high-production slugger with a penchant for striking out. Such players, if they've been able to string as many years together as Howard has, have ALWAYS been paid large sums for their skills. Or to quote a classic of the genre, Ralph Kiner: "Singles hitters drive Chevys, and home run hitters drive Cadillacs."

To assume that the RBI is overrated as a means of evaluating talent is to assume that everyone making financial decisions in baseball for close to a century has been an idiot. I'm sorry. Markets don't work that way. Everybody making investments makes an idiotic decision at least once, but idiocy is not consistent and universal. Somebody has to be right once in awhile. The National League standings currently indicate that Philadelphia's management has handled its portfolio quite nicely, thank you.

If Forman's essay had simply taken on the RBI as a statistic, I wouldn't have bothered to respond. But he didn't, preferring what I regard as the most unpleasant and specious means of argument used by the sabermetric crowd, attacks on individual players, and they're always big stars, which carry the message "This guy's not nearly as good as you think he is" to justify wading into a dense fog of acronyms and numbers nobody would read if the player's name weren't attached to the story. It's remarkable how many players who I'll bet Forman my house are first ballot Hall of Famers someday just don't measure up according to the statistics created by people who say they love baseball. Derek Jeter, Ichiro, oh, it's a long list.

You'd think that anomaly might cause the quants to ask if numbers are the only means of evaluating what happens in baseball. You'd be wrong, but it'd be nice if the saber crowd give itself the same rigorous analysis it gives box scores.

Ryan Howard is a big star because home runs and RBI win ballgames. It's as simple as that. No ratio, acronym or numerical concept ever invented will alter the fact runs are what count.

Do you know how expensive it would be to alter scoreboards so they could display digits after the decimal point?

Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak, or Hamburg as the Case May Be

2011-08-13T07:09:00.002-05:00

Every August, when NFL exhibition games begin, there is a flurry of negative commentary, some of it actually from the victims of the crime, that season ticket-holders get ripped off by being forced to pay full regular season prices for two exhibition games that all fans know are merely extra-intense practice sessions.

There are some fans, just as there are some sportswriters, who pay close attention to the performances of the bottom fourth of the roster guys in the fourth quarters of these blindfolded skirmishes, but in each case, these are people operating under the delusion they have what it takes to be assistant coaches. But most ticket holders resent what they're forced to pay for exhibition games. They don't see it as a crime, since it isn't, but as an onerous surcharge, much like the baggage fees charged by airlines. It is accepted as a necessity for getting into the real games, but nobody likes paying more for something than it's worth.

I wonder why teams don't try the exact opposite marketing approach. Say a season ticket package at Gillette Stadium costs $100 per game for 10 games, eight real and two exhibitions. (We use this imaginary figure because I am not good at math). That's $1000. What if long ago the Pats had marketed the very same package this way: We sell you eight regular season game tickets for $125 each AND we throw in two exhibition game tickets to the same seats absolutely free! A surcharge would instead be seen as a form of rebate! There's nothing more consumer-friendly than the word "free."

It is surely too late for any settled NFL franchise to try this gimmick now. People get used to things, and human nature being what it is, the change would be criticized as a big ticket price increase even though the cost to the customer would be exactly the same. But when some team finally pulls up stakes and heads for Los Angeles, they really ought to give this idea a shot, in the interest of marketing science.

Subliminal Truth in Advertising

2011-08-09T07:08:00.003-05:00

Spent last week in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, where early August is when the second-most popular sport in the region, talking about the next football season, reaches the intense screech of crickets the night before the first frost. Football is to Florida in August is what baseball is to New England in February. Talking about it offers a faint hope that the godawful heat and humidity/cold and snow will end in the speaker's lifetime.

Capitalizing on the post-lockout moment, the Jacksonville Jaguars are trying to horn their way into the buzz with a massive TV advertising buy in which the same commercial is repeated dozens of times each day. And my but it's a strange one.

Members of the Jaguar organization, starting with owner Wayne Weaver and continuing through coaches, players and random office personnel, stare gravely into the the camera and state in their most serious/threatening tone of voice, "It's go time." This goes on for 30 seconds. No music, no video of Jaguar touchdowns, not even the faintest attempt at conveying a pep rally atmosphere. Just the slogan, treated by the speakers as somewhat more intense a message than "Remember the Alamo!"

What is sadly obvious about the ad, of course, is that it's not about the Jaguars themselves. Floridians have their quirks, but they sure know football, and therefore know that the likelihood of the Jags going anywhere on the playing field is about the same as that of the Bills, 49ers or Texans. The slogan is for the audience, a veiled way of saying "go to our games, damn it!" in a more macho fashion than mere pleading. The good people of Jacksonville are being urged to spend their money (the recession has been brutal there, and since the two biggest employers are the military and health care, it's sure to get worse) on their lackluster NFL franchise as a matter of personal and civic pride. "Show 'em, Jacksonville. We're a real team in a real NFL city!"

Tough love as a marketing message falls way short of "Super Bowl, here we come!" The Jaguars are to be commended for their honesty in eschewing the latter pitch. But the history of sports since about 1950 indicates that when a franchise with box office problems hits the civic pride button, the end is nigh. I predict that Jacksonville will soon enter Stage Two, lengthy futile negotiations with city officials who will offer ever more implausible "rescue plans" calling for money nobody has.

And sometime after that, maybe next season, maybe a few seasons away, the slogan of the Jacksonville Jaguars will become "It's Go Away Time!"

One Man's Trash Is Another Man's....

2011-07-28T17:20:00.003-05:00

The explanation that makes the most sense is that some HBO executive called Bill Belichick last night and told the Patriots' coach the network was too going to make a season of "Hard Knocks" this month, but that they were only going to pick a team they KNEW would be as weirdly entertaining as the Jets had been.

Otherwise, Belichick's driving around the NFL neighborhood to pick up well-known veterans whose teams had left them out on the curb is a puzzler. It would seem to violate one of Belichick's main tenets of existence -- don't borrow trouble, even at a zero interest rate, unless the potential reward of your leveraged investment is great indeed, as in Hall of Fame-type season big.

Chad Ochocinco? OK. It's a little odd, but just quirky odd, not disturbing odd. Ochocinco is a professional character, but he's a cheerful exhibitionist, not a malicious one. Like all wide receivers, he has a tendency to take his behavior further out on the edge the less he gets the ball thrown his way, but really, silly touchdown celebrations are about the worst sin on his pro football resume. I don't think Chad has much left in the tank, but if Belichick disagrees, and he does, I'm not prepared to argue the point with him.

Albert Haynesworth? No. Sorry, I'm off that bus. There is in my opinion no good that can come out of acquiring a player who's awaiting trial on criminal charges. Haynesworth is evidently a sociopath with anger issues. That's not necessarily a handicap at his trade, more of a job description, but the 2009 and 2010 seasons indicate Haynesworth is a LAZY sociopath. What good is that to New England?

Haynesworth came cheap. That's a plus. Once upon a time he was an All-Pro. That's a plus, too. But pro ball is like fairy tales in this respect: once upon a time usually means a time that now is only imaginary. For the past two years, Haynesworth has been a useless tub of coach-killing goo. Belichick has the utmost professional regard for Mike Shanahan, the coach who couldn't wait to haul Haynesworth out of the garage for pickup. That makes this trade all the more difficult to fathom.

If either or both of these midnight discount acquisitions can play even a little bit, the Patriots' 2011 prospects, already bright, will cast an additional glow. If not, all that will glow is the top of Belichick's head.

Way back when, a magic and fantasy paraphenalia and book store in Lexington went out of business. My son was a steady customer in elementary school, so this had to be in Bill Clinton's first term. Alice and I went on the last day to say goodbye, and the proprietor pointed to a lovely, sturdy wall bookshelf unit and said it was ours for 20 bucks.

We have lots of books. We needed a bookshelf. We didn't have much money to toss around on furniture. A sale was made.

Then we tried to move the thing. It only took a half hour of inch-by-inch lifting to get in the car, and 40 minutes of sweat and strain to get it OUT of the car and into the garage. Up any stairs? Forget it. Which we did. The shelf unit is still out in the back of garage, a useless bargain that's too heavy to even get rid of. I just went out and looked at it, and I swear Albert Haynesworth's face was smiling at me.

Oh, well. I heard Belichick say once that training camp gets boring for everybody. That won't be a problem for him now.

The Deal Is Never Art

2011-07-21T15:36:00.002-05:00

It's becoming more and more clear to me that one reason I stopped prospering in sports journalism is that I lack the capacity to express shock and surprise at events which are utterly unsurprising, let alone shocking.

The frantic burst of "breaking news" accompanying the endgame of the NFL lockout makes me damn glad I lack it, however. Who would ever imagine that a $10 billion per annum business agreement involving the settlement of a number of U.S. civil actions and the finer points of antitrust and labor law might have some loose ends it's not so easy to wrap up? Is the possibility of canceling the Hall of Fame game really that traumatic to the NFL Network? I guarantee you that if the delay in signing a new CBA kills that London exhibition game, players and management for both teams that have to play it will be delighted.

Whether it takes another day, week or fortnight, the deal will be done. The regular season, which is all any sane fan cares about, will begin as scheduled, barring an outbreak of mad cow disease among the negotiators. And when the happy day arrives that the CBA IS official, fans should spare a thought for Gene Upshaw, Paul Tagliabue and the players and owners who came up with the old CBA back in 2006. There's no such thing as a perfect deal for both sides. The old CBA was the next best thing, though. It was written with structural give in it. The CBS was supple enough that it could be altered for a new deal which both sides found acceptable without turning the whole contract upside down.

The compromise on revenue that fueled the 2011 negotiations was profoundly simple. The players agreed to a smaller slice of the revenue pie in return for the owners tossing an off-the-top skim back into the pie. Given the facts there's STILL nothing good on TV (or at least, nothing else people like as much) and that one TV network will always be last in the ratings, looking for help, the pie should grow briskly enough to erase the players' concession and then some.

I'm sure both players and owners were irresponsible and pigheaded during the 2011 lockout. Who wouldn't be with that much money on the table? But at least both sides had the common sense to recognize they were divvying up the take from a growing concern. Profit breeds compromise, or should.

Dick Williams

2011-07-08T12:05:00.002-05:00

Only met Dick Williams once, at a party thrown by Major League Baseball in the 1990s. It was an oft-told tale among baseball writers that Williams was murder to deal with when he was a manager, but on this evening, he was charming, gracious, and told swell baseball stories of yesteryear. Of course, we'd been drinking, and he wasn't a manager any more.

But anyone remotely familiar with the sport ranks Williams among the best at the peculiar and man-killing trade of managing there ever was. There are two incidents, one very famous, one much less so, that illustrate how he earned that rating.

The members of Williams' baseball generation usually say he was the best pure in-game manager they'd ever seen. Exhibit A is Game Three of the 1972 World Series. Oakland A's down to the Cincinnati Reds 1-0 in the late innings. Reds have men on second and third, two out, and a three-two count on the batter, who happened to be Johnny Bench.

Williams strode to the mound for a prolonged conference, which ended with a pantomime argument with the reliever in which Williams vigorously and repeatedly gestured at first base, them stomped back to the dugout in obvious dudgeon at having to employ such an insubordinate dolt of a twirler.

The catcher stood up and moved to the first base side of home plate. The insubordinate dolt in question, who happened to be Rollie Fingers, wound up and threw one right down the middle as the catcher leapt to grab it. Bench just stood there, as who wouldn't? Strike three, inning over.

Contemplate for one second the enormous ego and even more enormous courage it'd take for a skipper to pull that stunt in May, let alone in the Series. Williams didn't just fool a Hall of Fame hitter with his move, he fooled the whole country.

OK, that's a very famous Williams story, probably the most famous. Here's one that's less celebrated. I heard Ken Harrelson tell it many years ago, and I hope he and you will excuse me for paraphrasing in quotation marks.

"People forget," Hawk said, discussing the 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox, "how many bad, bad losses we had coming down the stretch in September. One night, against Kansas City I think, we blew a lead, made some errors, I struck out three times, and the clubhouse was just awful. Guys were crying by their lockers."

"Now, before I get to the next part," Hawk went on, "You have to remember just how mean and sarcastic and demanding Dick Williams was. He came out of his office and into the clubhouse before the reporters got there and just said 'Fellas, forget it. It's just another fuckin' ballgame."

"We looked at each other and thought, here's a rookie manager with a team in a pennant race, and he can do that after we lose. We're going to be all right."

And so they were.

Williams always said he couldn't manage modern day players. Is it wrong in eulogy to violently disagree with the one you're eulogizing? I have to.

An Embarrassment of Giving Somebody Else Riches

2011-07-05T07:25:00.002-05:00

When a ballplayer is in a vicious slump, his team's management has two options. Plan A is to keep putting the slumper out there and hope he works his way out of it ASAP. Plan B is to set the slumper on the bench and hope a few days off regroove the guy somehow.

When said ballplayer is a starting pitcher, like, oh, John Lackey, management's options, not good to begin with, become more onerous. Plan A tends to result in lost games until the slump fever breaks. Plan B requires that the team find another starting pitcher somewhere in the organization. That is, some pitcher will receive a promotion from the bullpen or minors which they may or may not be able to justify.

Another nasty difference. By and large, batting slumps DO end. Hitters tend to hit what they usually hit until age or injury erodes their skills for keeps. The Sox kept David Ortiz plugging away during two frightful slumps in 2009 and 2010, and were right to do so.

Pitching slumps can be permanent. History is full of hurlers who all of a sudden couldn't get out of the fourth inning without a police escort. It usually has something to do with fastball velocity. In the most lethal cases, the pitcher's self-confidence/arrogance that is essential to his success is shot. It is very difficult not to conclude Lackey is in the midst of just such an existential crisis, one for which American League hitters are very grateful.

Long-distance psychoanalysis is specious. Analyzing the psyches of ballplayers is hard for real doctors. Athletes are doers, not ponderers. They aren't used to thinking in terms of thinking about themselves.

But circumstantial evidence shrieks that Lackey's issues on the mound are somehow related to the fact that this once-competent major league starter is getting paid by the Red Sox as if he was and is a perennial All-Star. This led to some problems last year. As Lackey, who, face it, is not a sympathetic personality, noted several times, he has pretty much the same pitcher in 2010 as he'd always been. He didn't understand why all of a sudden fans and media felt that wasn't good enough. Perhaps he has direct deposit, and doesn't see the numbers on his paycheck.

Should the 2010 Lackey return this season, he'd be a hero, at least compared to his 2011 self. And there, I think, we may find his problem. As has been known since the barnstorming days fo the Cincinnati Red Stockings, trying too hard is almost always what turns a bad patch into a classic slump. By trying to be a megasalaried hero instead of the acceptable number three starter that used to be his destiny, Lackey has transformed himself into a bum.

That's a sad story, no matter how unsympathetic a protagonist Lackey is. It's also worth contrasting Lackey's decline with another Red Sox who signed an overvalued contract, J. D. Drew.

Drew got five years at $14 million a year. That was way too much money for a player with Drew's resume, which was "very good when healthy, never healthy." As a member of the Red Sox, Drew, much to frustration of many fans, lived up to that billing exactly. Now that he's getting old, Drew's injuries are more frequent, and his bat less potent.

But Drew didn't fall off the table when he got overpaid. He was the same guy. The Sox didn't get what they paid for, but they got what they should have paid for. Anyone unhappy with what Drew has contributed to the Sox during his stay in Boston should address their complaints to the front office, not Drew's clubhouse locker.

I don't know either Drew or Lackey at all. This could be pure moonshine. They might hate each other. But I can't help thinking that if I were Terry Francona, I might encourage them to have a nice long chat.

A Ray of Hope for the Republic on Independence Day

2011-07-04T07:57:00.002-05:00

Maybe it's just me. It often is, after all. But watching both the selection show on TBS and the Baseball Tonight crowd on ESPN, as well as sampling print media and the Internet night this morning, leaves the distinct impression that our national pastime, and hence nation, may have given up on that most pointless, irritating and stupid of artificial arguments, the "All-Star team selection controversy."

Not even C. C. Sabathia is too upset he didn't make the American League All-Star roster. I have yet to see anyone point out that according to the votes of baseball fans, the 2011 Milwaukee Brewers are fielding one of the greatest lineups in history. Fading immortal Derek Jeter elected to start almost by acclamation while fading immortal Ichiro Suzuki (for years the leading vote-getter) doesn't make the team? Illogical and who cares?

Could it be that the baseball world has come to see the Midsummer Classic for what it is, a classic publicity gimmick? The All-Star game was invented, by a sportswriter no less, as a marketing ploy for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and for a sport which was on the verge of financial collapse due to the Depression. It worked brilliantly for many years, less brilliantly for many more years after than, and as all human inventions must, has become what Madison Avenue and television call a "mature" event, "mature" meaning "maybe your grandfather still cares."

The tell that the All-Star Game had run its course as a sports event that held meaning for its audience was of course when Bud Selig gave the game a reward -- World Series home field advantage to the winning team. This reward is too nebulous to have meaning for the All-Stars themselves ($250,000 a man winner-take-all, on the other hand, then you'd see some double plays broken up). Therefore, it has no meaning to the audience. Fans take their cue on how to feel about a game from the people in it.

Not that the All-Star Game isn't fun, at least for three innings or so, until one loses track of who's playing. Publicity gimmicks are supposed to be fun, and as noted, the Game in its day was the best publicity gimmick baseball had besides Babe Ruth, the ultimate human brand in sports. The idea of an exhibition game of the sport's best players retains just enough of its inherent appeal to keep the event viable.

But care about it? Not even your grandfather. And that's a good thing. The All-Star Game is no longer news as we define sports news. I'd argue, however, that a game which offers the spectators pleasure without requiring anyone provide ancillary hysteria IS news.

In the doesn't-happen-every-day department "Man Bites Dog" has nothing on "Hype Strikes Out."

Life Without Math Only SOUNDS Like a Good Idea

2011-07-02T07:40:00.002-05:00

Were I a sports editor at a major newspaper, Web site or periodical (and God forbid all three, I haven't sinned that much) I would require each and every reporter covering a professional sport to take an introductory finance and economics course at the nearest business school. This would limit, if not eliminate, the utter bushwah that gets published, posted, tweeted, etc. every time there's an argument about money in sports, which is of course every day.

Case in point, the NFL lockout. The breathless reporting on negotiations and litigation in this dispute has mostly been a fevered scrutinizing of the bark on the trees as the reporters remain lost in the forest. We don't need economics or even arithmetic to get a handle on this story. A little empathy and common sense will do.

First, the empathy. Dear reader, how hard would YOU fight for a share of the divvy of 10 billion bucks per annum? It's easy to say that such a sum can be sensibly and fairly divided without any fuss. It often is said. And if human beings weren't involved, it might be true.

We have here a business dispute over a huge sum of money between two partners who have excellent reasons to distrust each other. One partner is an entity of 32 incredibly willful and arrogant individuals. The other is an entity of about 1600 just as willful and arrogant individuals. Do we begin to see why the two sides might find it difficult to reach agreement?

Always envious of the NFL, the NBA had embarked on its own lockout. I have no intention of thinking about it for quite some time after this post is done. I usually lock the NBA out of my brain from the solstice until about Columbus Day, and see no reason to change that policy. But I will say this. Anyone credulous enough to repeat the NBA owners claims that they're losing money hand over fist is the dream date of all three-card monte entrepreneurs.

As a rule, when businesses lose money consistently, their owners get rid of them. They either sell out or shut the puppy down. If pro basketball franchises were doing as poorly as they say they are, the evidence would be a significantly high number of franchises being sold at (and this is the key) lower and lower prices.

Nothing of the sort has taken place. Franchises have relocated to get more and better public subsidies, but none have folded, and none have changed hands at bargain prices. It is thus safe to develop the working hypothesis that the "losses" claimed by the owners are just more evidence that accounting has evolved into a branch of the creative arts, with the spreadsheet being to the accountant what the canvas was for Jackson Pollock.

NBA players are gifted, driven men who unfortunately appear to be pretty much helpless in life when they're not wearing shorts. Otherwise, they'd react to the lockout by finding a few tame multimillionaires desiring publicity, a few underutilized arenas around major U.S. population centers (there are at least five within 90 minutes of Boston) and start their own damn league. They won't, of course, because to them as to most of us, money means security, and new sports leagues are about the only area of sports business where owners DO take on the risks of capitalism.

I covered my share of sports work stoppages. I understand why reporters hate them. If there's no NFL, just exactly what is John Clayton supposed to do? And why exactly is ESPN supposed to pay him for it? But that's no excuse for being so damn frenzied about each twist in the story. NFL fans love the sport as much as do NFL reporters. They also, however, know that it is July. A football-less September would find them frenzied. Now, not really. No matter how hard a reporter tries, he or she will never convince fans that a canceled exhibition game is of any importance to anyone on earth.

I understand why NBA reporters jumped to the worst-case "there will be no season" scenario on Day One of their lockout, too. Otherwise, no one would pay the slightest attention to their reporting. People intuitively grasp that a labor conflict is a phony war indeed until it starts to cost both sides money, a state which the NBA won't reach for months yet.

But it's REALLY in the interests of NBA owners and players to put the doomsday scenario out there. Customer anxiety is one of the big weapons in sports labor negotiations. It's a weapon that tends to blow up both sides, but hey, you go to war with you have.

Remember how dire the statements were back in February from Roger Goodell and DeMarques Smith, when NFL lockout was getting started? Now that the bargaining is down to real numbers, they're BFF.

NBA reporters ought to remember. It might help them to realize they're getting played.

Lineup Question

2011-06-30T04:59:00.000-05:00

So does John Lackey play right field today? Or does Francona put him at first base instead?

Santa Claus Begs to Differ

2011-06-28T11:16:00.003-05:00

Some guy named John Gonzalez wrote an article for "Philadelphia" magazine saying that Boston sports fans have become the most obnoxious in the U.S. How to be a click-whore, John. How to be a wildly inaccurate and incompetent click-whore.

As a former Philly resident, there was only one constant in the sports universe. We were the worst, most obnoxious and borderline sociopathic group of fans in the U.S. and all other known points of physical space. When it comes to people to avoid at a big game, it was Philly first and the rest nowhere. As a trip to the Lincoln Financial Field parking lot before an Eagles game reveals, this is as true today as it was back in my wayward youth, when Philly teams were, with the exception of teams with Wilt Chamberlain on them, always terrible (Such a trip will do more to put you off alcohol than any 12-step program, too).

Everybody's good at something, and Philadelphia excels at fan rabbledom. Always has. Always will. The idea that Boston fans are more obnoxious because they're a little smug because their teams are winning is laughable. "Smug" is not grounds for arrest, and arrests are as much a part of the Philly sports experience as the boo.

Gonzalez may not get out much. My real concern is not for him, as contrarianism is easy to sell to editors, but for the publication he wrote for, which has disgraced its very name.

Whatever happened to local boosterism as a first principle of publishing?Does "Philadelphia" magazine have no civic pride whatsoever? What's next, a "Cheesestakes Suck" piece?

Fellas, nobody's going to want to advertise in a city magazine that says its sports fans AREN'T the worst ones going.

10 Ninths of a Team Becomes Nine Tenths

2011-06-26T06:54:00.002-05:00

The Red Sox organization got off to a record early start for its annual bitching about interleague play in 2011. Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo spent about a half-inning talking about how they wished baseball would get rid of interleague games during an early May broadcast before such games had actually begun.

Now that the Sox are on their annual road trip to National League cities, expect that bitching to move up to gale force whining, especially since the team dropped the first two games on the trip to the Pirates. No DH! Our pitchers have stand close to other pitchers' pitches! That'll be a sackcloth sweatshirt Terry Francona is wearing this week.

The record shows that Boston has more than held its own playing by National League rules in the past decade, which is what you'd expect considered how good a team the Sox have been in that time. Won't stop the whining, though. Francona, an astonishingly reasonable man for a big league manager most days, is haunted by the notion one of his invaluable starting pitchers, or worse, his late-inning relievers, will hurt themselves attempting to perform exotic athletic feats like swinging a bat or sliding (not that they're allowed to do the latter).

And, of course, playing without a DH forces the Sox to either bench David Ortiz or put Adrian Gonzalez in the outfield where (and this is a real night sweat fear) he could get hurt somehow. It's not nice to mock the anxieties of others, so we won't point out that first baseman Albert Pujols got put on the DL for an injury he suffered fielding his position.

Boston fans, more than any other American League fans, have been conditioned by their team to hate National League rules, too. Me, I prefer them. Not for some theoretical athletic ideal, but because in the 21st century anything that makes baseball games go faster is perforce a good idea. It baffles me when fans think otherwise. Tennis fans always root for tennis matches to go longer, but in tennis, the longer the match the more dramatic it is. The same sure cannot be said for baseball games.

It's worth remembering that the DH, just like interleague play, is a gimmick adapted by the American League to sell tickets, the league's reaction to the terrible drop in attendance it suffered in the late '60s when the Yankee dynasty hit the skids. Baseball's attitude towards problems is very much akin to that of Republican congressmen. The latter feel there's no dilemma tax cuts can't solve. Baseball feels the same about home runs.

Critics of National League rules point out accurately that no other level of baseball uses them. There are good reasons for that, but they have nothing to do with the quality of the game as an artistic endeavor.

Youth and high school leagues, where pitchers often bat because they're the best athletes, use the DH to get more kids into the games, one of their self-defined missions. Colleges and the minors use the DH because of their roles as big league prep schools. Major league teams don't like the idea of young pitchers having to throw. You can imagine how they feel about them batting and base running.

No American League team has so loved or benefited from the DH as have the Sox. They were the first team to sign a pure DH, Orlando Cepeda, when the rule was instituted (BTW, there were some pretty studly 1973 DHs -- Frank Robinson and Tony Oliva, to name two). The franchise has always had a sweet tooth for big slow lugs who could hit the ball to Cambridge. The DH allowed the Sox to gorge on those types. Credit to Boston for immediately grasping that the DH allows a team to field a lineup with TWO first basemen.

So now the Sox spend a week down to one first baseman. This is a pretty weak excuse for an excuse if you ask me. Is the absence of David Ortiz an explanation of why other guys have been unable to get the ball out of the infield if they see a teammate standing on second base? It is a fundamental tenet of sabermetrics that it isn't.

Adaptability to circumstance is one of the marks of a superior team in any sport, or so Bill Belichick believes, anyway. Whining at circumstance is tedious to listen to from anyone, let alone the unstoppable dynamo the 2011 Sox are supposed to be and on occasion have been.

As long as sluggers make more money than utility infielders, the Players' Association will make sure the DH is with us. As long as baseball remains stubbornly infatuated with past practices, the National League won't adapt it. And as long as attendance figures show that most fans adore interleague play, it's not going away, either. I suggest we all get over it.

If I've had to deal with 3 1/2 hour ball games as a matter of course in my life, Jon Lester can swing a goddamn bat once every five days for two weeks.

But if he doesn't want to slide, that's OK. I'm no radical.

What Have You Done for Them Lately?

2011-06-25T10:25:00.003-05:00

Amid the bazillions of words expended on Boston sports since the Bruins won the Stanley Cup, there is one observation I have yet to read. I can't believe it's my original insight, since it's a screamingly obvious fact, so I apologize in advance to anyone who already made the statement to come in the next paragraph, and remind them that's it's not plagiarism if you didn't see it, just a lack of originality.

The New England Patriots are now the Boston professional sports franchise that has gone the longest without a championship. Those losers haven't got their hands on a trophy since February, 2005.

So by the always fraudulent but increasingly common means by which sports teams are measured by fans and media, the Patriots are Boston's sports in crisis. All they've done is win more games than any other NFL team from 2005-2010.

Is it too much to ask that if the Patriots reflect the quality of problems facing the Boston sports community, said community undertakes a minor change of tone? Common decency, not to mention common sense, would seem to require that fans and commentators put a lid on the bitching for a good long while, no matter how trying they find John Lackey.

Yours truly is not the sort to urge folks to wear a happy face all the time. But crabby faces look particularly stupid right now.

Scoop or False Start? I Dunno

2011-06-19T10:39:00.002-05:00

On November 7, 1918, the United Press wire service had a big exclusive story -- the biggest you could imagine. The service ran a news flash that World War I had ended. They weren't QUITE right.

It was all very embarrassing to the UP, especially after the flash set off giddy celebrations in many U.S. cities that turned Vancouver when the joyous crowds learned the war was in fact not over. It didn't end for four more days.

Almost 100 years later, this incident, a huge scandal at the time, is forgotten. Close enough, we think. UP jumped the gun, but it's easy to see how. It was a known fact Germany was negotiating with the Allies for an armistice. Some trusted source said to a reporter "this is a done deal." Some editor with more zeal than prudence said, "we have the scoop" (In the competition between wire services, being first with a story by seconds was a big deal). And it wasn't as if UP was ALL wrong. The war was in the process of ending, and that process was not going to reverse itself. But "the war will end soon" isn't really much of a story, let alone a scoop.

A couple weeks ago, Bill Burt of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune wrote that he had learned the NFL lockout would end very, very soon, the implication being within a day or two at the most. As of this writing, Burt has UP'd himself. The lockout goes on. Burt's trusted source was overly impulsive and assertive. So was the Eagle-Trib.

But it would be the upset of the sports year if Burt doesn't wind up with the semi-vindication of the United Press. Every indication, including Burt's own story, is that the owners and players will reach a settlement before the league's 2011 schedule is disrupted by so much as a day. The latest tell, the reports that an owners' meeting will be devoted to convincing some owners that the deal is a good one for them, is one I regard as conclusive. When one party begins dickering with itself, then there's a deal on the table the other side is willing to sign. In regular labor negotiations, it's always the union that has to convince its members it got the most it could, but sports economics are often upside-down.

I do not want to minimize the possibility the two sides could screw this up at any moment. Arrogance and belligerence are kind of necessary traits for both moguls and players, even if they're bad for business at times. Emotion could trump arithmetic yet.

But it doesn't feel like it. And it hasn't felt like it since the lockout began. Neither side has given off the vibes that they're seeking total war. It appears to have occurred to both that legal war has two elements in common with the real thing. They each cost way more than one thinks when they start, and they always always last ever so much longer than one expects.

So my guess is Burt will achieve partial vindication sometime between Bastille Day and the end of July. I know it's not much consolation, Bill, but the UP, then UPI, lasted many years past November 7, 1918.

It Happens Every June, Except Sometines in May

2011-06-18T07:11:00.002-05:00

Turned on the Red Sox game last night, and in the course of some Brewer's "quality at-bat," that wonderful euphemism for "sure is hitting a lot of foul balls here," a familiar seasonal emotion came over me. Part ennui, part frustration, part bewilderment, it could best be expressed by the following exclamation -- "Can't you guys DO something out there?!"

Not even Roger Angell would deny that baseball is a slow game. This in no way prevents it from being a wonderful lovable game, most of the year. But never does baseball seem quite so slow, and never does that slowness seem quite so irritating, as in the first week following the end of the NHL and NBA playoffs. And the more attention a fan paid to those playoffs, the more tedious baseball appears to be.

Here in Boston, we paid quite a lot of attention to the playoffs. Accordingly, my tolerance for relief pitchers who nibble away to 3-2 counts, never high, was somewhere below the price of Greek government bonds last night.

This isn't a permanent condition. It's an illness of the calendar like pollen allergies. It's beyond the power of the human psyche to go from the frenetic universe of the winter sports played with all the money on the table to the measured activity of not-quite midseason baseball, a world so lacking in definition that the freakin' Pirates still have hope. Nobody can shift gears from the mindset expressed by Jack Edwards to that expressed by Joe Castiglione without a certain amount of grinding in the frontal lobes.

I've committed myself to basketball and hockey and their speeds for some months now. Getting back to baseball speed requires a period of adjustment. Getting back to a sport that's not at its climactic moments requires even more adjustment.

Baseball is even slower in October than it is in June, as the high stakes of the playoffs make every player and manager very very very careful about what they're doing. But in October, six foul balls on a 3-2 count aren't an irritating bore, they're an excruciating emotional torture. Hockey and basketball are just as fast in February as they are in May, but they don't feel that way. After the Super Bowl, what's duller than regular season NHL and NBA action, when players appear as uninterested as I am? Golf is about 1000 times slower than baseball, but the US Open doesn't FEEL slow -- because it involves athletes competing for one of the biggest prizes in their game. The fan feels the commitment more than the action or lack of same.

My seasonal malady is a man-made illness, a product of the sports industrialization that began around 1965 or so. Once upon a time, in my lifetime even, there were gaps in the sports calendar. The NBA and NHL playoffs ended in March and early April. Football ended on January 1, baseball in early October. Fans were given time to adjust their spiritual body clocks. They had no choice but to follow each sport from its beginning to end.

Now, it's a rare weekend where somebody in some game is not playing for some championship or other. Even dull old late June has Wimbledon. Quite unwittingly, sports have bred consumers who are high-stakes adrenaline junkies. And the need to feed that jones has become an increasingly big part of sports business. Nobody is out there saying they WANT more teams in the baseball playoffs. But Bud Selig can't think of any way of keeping his customers happy but upping the dose on their possible elimination fix. Mark my words, the NCAA tournament will eventually give up and let EVERY team in the field, then push back the start to Valentine's Day.

High-stakes withdrawal only lasts about a week. Soon, I'll be able to listen to Don and Jerry babble about cab rides in Detroit without feeling homicidal or even considering such dialogue as a reflection of the origins of the word "pastime." But for today, I'm left with a dilemma that doesn't make me feel too good about myself.

If Rory McIlroy doesn't start blowing it, I'm going to be one bored sports consumer this weekend.

You Can't Go Home Team Again

2011-06-14T14:54:00.002-05:00

It wasn't needed, but last night there was another reminder that I'll never return to being a normal sports fan no matter how far away my experience in sports writing gets.

A neighbor came over to watch the Bruins game, because I have HD and he doesn't. It was a jolly occasion, especially for him when the Bruins scored those four first period goals. He couldn't tear himself away from the subsequent increasingly random action on the ice, reveling in the blowout so thoroughly he wouldn't get up to get another beer unless a commercial came on or Pierre McGuire was bellowing bromides in our ears.

Typical, natural home fan behavior. Blowouts in must-win games are rare, so they should be and are cherished and savored. My reaction, sad to report, was a little different.

Now, while I do not consider myself to have a major rooting interest in the Stanley Cup final, to the extent I have one, it's for Boston. Many people I know well, like my children, are Bruins fans, and I'd like to see them happy. Over the years, I've developed quite a respect for the loyalty and knowledge of their sport the Bruins fan base has shown through thin and until lately thinner. Besides, the performance of the Vancouver Canucks, to put it delicately, has not been of a nature to inspire admiration among neutral observers.

Yet, once it was obvious what the game's outcome was going to be, I lost interest in watching it. I was bored and restless through the second period, let alone the third. Learned behavior triumphed over sentiment more thoroughly than the Bruins triumphed.

Sports writers are fond of blowouts. Routs allow the writer to stop watching the game and start thinking and (even better) writing about it. The longer one has to write, the theoretically better and in reality less painful said writing will be.

My brain saw the fourth Boston goal and flashed an instruction. "Time to stop watching now. Go write a blog post or something." Sick this may be, but I hadn't had company, that's what I'd have done.

But my restless boredom was more than that. I've been spoiled for rooting, because only close games stir my cerebral cortex anymore. I'm a human drama of athletic competition junkie now, and if the game in any sport doesn't wring my emotions, or at least is good enough to wring fan's emotions raw and dry, well, maybe it's time to see if there's another game on, which there always is. I have traded the Thrill of Victory for the Thrill of Thrill Itself. There's a vampirish quality to that attitude I don't much care for, but I'm stuck with it.

As noted earlier, if (and I'm very tempted to say when, based on facts currently in evidence), the Bruins win tomorrow night, I will be happy for a great many other people. That's nice. But it's not nearly the same thing as being happy just because the Bruins won. Second-hand smoke, meet second-hand fandom.

Requiem for an Instantly Forgotten Champion

2011-06-13T15:07:00.002-05:00

Pity the Dallas Mavericks. They won an NBA title last night without ever gaining control of their own story.

Had the Mavericks defeated any of the 28 NBA teams except the one they played in the Finals, the basketball world would now be commemorating their triumph in odes to a heroic overcoming of a not-entirely undeserved reputation for post-season chokes. Prose poems to Dallas' two veteran Hall of Fame players (Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd) and one damn good veteran player Shawn Marion finally winning their first titles would be taking up entirely too much space on the Internet at this very moment.

But the Mavericks defeated the Miami Heat, the one opponent guaranteed to render Dallas as the least-discussed championship team since the Sonics and Bullets of the late '70s. The Heat failed dismally on the court, but succeeded magnificently in making basketball fans and media view the Finals, no, the entire 2010-2011 season, as THEIR story. And nobody fell harder for that idea than the many persons who were rooting against Miami all year long because they found LeBron James' methods of choosing an employer distasteful.

So for months to come, and it could be many months if there's an NBA lockout, Mark Cuban is going to be about the only person talking about the Finals in terms of Dallas accomplishing something. Everyone else who cares enough to think about it is going to be discussing the event in terms of Miami's failure -- especially James' failure. This will be done with rue or glee, but the fact that it will be done so often is very discouraging.

James DID fail. He played like a marginal All-Star reserve in a series where his team needed the superstar ESPN tells you James is and sometimes actually is. The Heat's experiment in front office by player did not deliver the title those players expected and promised. Failure. But some players infinitely greater than James, Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan to name two, can testify that winning a first title often takes longer than a superstar expects, if he gets to win one at all.

Everyone loves seeing pompous bastards step atop the old banana peel. That's human nature, and I don't begrudge belly laughs at Miami's expense. But it also should be human nature to give champions their due. Letting losers dictate our collective sports narrative is a mug's game. I fear we are in for a summer of more LeBron obsession than there was last summer, which in 2010 I would have found a simply impossible concept. In the meantime, the Mavs will get their parade and will sink from sight.

It is a tenet of sportswriting that the loser's locker room is always the best story. The older I get, the more I disagree. Anybody can lose, and most bodies do. Championships are rarer than losses, and therefore more newsworthy by the very definition of news. They also interest me more. What DID turn the Mavericks into ferocious winners after they blew a humongous lead in first round game against Portland? Beats me, and I bet them too, but it would be nice if someone tried to find the answer.

Well, if it's any consolation to the Mavs, Cuban is not a man who suffers anonymity lightly. His Finals code of silence is definitely over, as witnessed by his statement that giving players championship rings was too "old school" and that Cuban felt it was "time to take up a notch" when it came to commemorative title keepsakes.

Does Neiman-Marcus make jewel-encrusted grandfather clocks? If not, it might now.

The Scoreboard Has No Memory -- And Neither Do Fans

2011-06-11T10:00:00.002-05:00

The only comment I find relevant to the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was uttered 50 years ago about an entirely different event.

"Lucky for you guys it was match play and not medal" -- Bob Hope to Bill Mazeroski several months after the 1960 World Series.

The Vancouver Canucks lost two games to the Bruins in which, let's face it, they picked up their ball and put in their collective pocket sometime in the middle of the second period. No matter. By the eyeball test, Boston has appeared to be the superior team in the series by a significant margin. The Bruins, for instance, had the only road lead either team has managed to acquire back in Game Two. REALLY no matter.

Boston's one down with two to play. Hardly an insuperable margin in either golf or hockey, but a sticky situation all the same. And anyone who tells you the Bruins have really been, as opposed to looking like, the better team in this series is full of it. They don't even know how to keep score.

Cold Slows The Thought Process -- Thankfully

2011-06-04T08:05:00.002-05:00

One of hockey's great charms is that there's so little to say about it when it's over. The insane speed of the sport means that participants and observers can have only the most vague impressions of what happened on the ice. It's not unusual for the individual who scored a winning goal to be unaware of the fact until informed by some teammate. Beyond "good game" or "bad game" post-game analysis is essentially pure speculation, or to use the technical term, hooey.

Of course, if you're a working sportswriter, that's not exactly a charm. I felt more than a twinge of pity for my former colleagues out in Vancouver yesterday as I imagined them working on second-day follow-up stories to a 1-0 game. That's the THIRD set of analyses, second-guesses, individual stories on players who increasingly can't remember what the hell they were thinking when X, Y and Z happened, etc. Hockey just isn't built for the traditional patterns of U.S. sportswriting. It's too mysterious.

Way back in 1990, when I first became a Herald columnist and realized I was going to at least have to be able to fake some expertise about the sport, I undertook a course of study. I confessed my ignorance to Bruins players, coaches, and executives and begged to be enlightened. Every time something came up I didn't understand, I asked a question. I'm sure most of them were very stupid.

Or perhaps not. The Bruins and all the other NHL folks I questioned could not have been more gracious instructors. (Here's a journalism tip I've always found useful. People are much more eager to answer questions and do so truthfully when the questioner admits they know less than the person they're questioning). But it was striking how often my little seminars went as follows.

Me: "I've noticed X while I'm watching the games."

Bruin: "Yes, that's a known fact about hockey."

Me: "How come X happens?"

Bruin: "Nobody knows."

This dialogue is probably the main reason I came to love hockey. A big-time professional sport whose big-money, cutthroat competitive personnel accepted that the heart of said sport was unknowable? How delightful. What I wouldn't give for all the other sports to adopt the same attitude.

I mean, about the oldest cliche in football is that the ball takes funny bounces. When's the last time you heard anyone in the NFL say, or even hint, at that truth? Random chance is a loathed and feared enemy, whose name must not be uttered aloud. Baseball has gone so far down this path there's a large and growing subset of fans who don't feel the need to even watch it. Just give them a printout page of numbers and they know more about the game than John McGraw ever did.

It's not that hockey eschews the scientific method. The Bruins and Canucks watched videotape until their eyes bled the last two days. Practices were conducted on the principle each team can control its own performance. Which is true, up to a point. What separates hockey from the other games is that the people in it accept the idea there's a point in their game where rationality stops and instinct and happenstance take over. More importantly, they accept that beyond that point is usually where games get won and lost.

In other, less highfalutin' words, hockey is the sport where the idea of "go out there, do your best, and let's see what happens" is most honored. As anyone knows who's ever attended a game, hockey is chaotic. So's football, but football's built on attempting to control chaos. Hockey's built on accepting and living with it.

This makes, or should make, hockey playoff commentary simple. Odds are, what happened in the last game, or the last period, will have little influence on what's happening now. Odds are, tonight's Game Two will bear no resemblance to Game One, no matter who wins it. So why speculate now? Why indeed even commentate today? The game'll start soon enough, and we'll have a new set of mysteries to ponder.

For the same of my former colleagues, however, I do hope that whichever player scores the winning goal tonight will know how the hell he did it.

So Why Hasn't Tijuana A&M won the BCS Every Year?

2011-05-31T19:17:00.003-05:00

If the gang at the Onion went out drinking with the folks from South Park and they started thinking about college football, they could never have come up with a crueler, more accurate, more hilarious satire of college football than the "scandal" at Ohio State which resulted in the resignation of coach Jim Tressel.

Try to say this sentence aloud without laughing. Players were trading in memorabilia for tattoos. Now add the following sentence. That's a serious NCAA rules violation. Cap off the paragraph with this one. Tressel KNEW that, and tried to cover up the misdeed.

Can't do it, can you? You shouldn't worry. There is no other possible reaction but derision and scorn, the just laughter normal humans have at the expense of the pretentious and foolish (so often one and the same). What stronger evidence can there ever be that everyone in college football -- players, coaches, administrators, college presidents, Lee Corso -- is at bottom an idiot? Or rather, is someone driven idiotic by greed and hypocrisy.

You traded something of cash value for a tattoo? Dude, don't they have finance classes at OSU? A tattoo has got to be the ultimate nonliquid asset. I have respect for guys who ignore NCAA rules to get their hands on money or a sweet ride. At this point in 21st century America, getting an under-the-table tattoo is about like getting an under-the-table necktie. Limited imagination is a terrible thing to waste a mind with.

Mr. President, Mr. AD, Coach: You covered up THIS crime? Wasn't this the one to throw to the NCAA wolves so that the stories about the cars, cash, and the infinite number of violations everyone knows but couldn't prove Ohio State had done never saw the light of day? Here was a gift from the god of thieves, a set of patsies and scapegoats made to order. The nature of the violation itself has America thinking, "Gosh, these players are dumb." The nature of your actions has our nation thinking "not as dumb as the adults in Columbus, though."

As for the NCAA, laughter has been the only alternative to weeping for many decades. Imagine being a grown man whose job in life is worrying about where some tackle got that dragon on his buttocks. Imagine being at the meeting where tattoos were defined as an illegal payment. Didn't anyone say, "if kids are dumb enough to trade jerseys for tattoos, let 'em." It surely falls into what the great 19th century Tammany Hall leader George Washington Plunkitt called "honest graft." Nobody gets rich off of GETTING a tattoo.

Of course, the way the Ohio State deal has been going, maybe players were shaving points for tattoos. Which would be even funnier.

I like college football. I like college basketball. What helps me most to like is the fact I know it's all crooked, and I don't care. The leaders of men molding student-athletes. They've all got their hands in each other's pockets looking for the wallets. It's morality as slapstick comedy.

The stuffier the shirt, the funnier it is when its wearer falls into the open manhole. Doesn't come any stuffier than Ohio State. Or Jim Tressel.

I wonder. Does the sousaphone player in the marching band who dots the script "i" before every home game have any tattoos? And if so, how'd he get 'em?

Thought During Several Memorial Day Marathons

2011-05-28T11:15:00.001-05:00

Does Turner Broadcasting Systems Inc. still pay cash residuals to Dick Wolf, or has it reached the point where they've run so many reruns of so many episodes of all the Law & Order series that it's most cost and tax-effective for both parties just to give Wolf more and more stock in the company?

Less Self-Interested Scheduling Note

2011-05-26T18:27:00.002-05:00

The Sox played the Indians in a day game in Cleveland yesterday. This afternoon, they played a day game against the Tigers in Detroit.

When, one wonders, was the last time Boston (or pretty much any other team) played back-to-back weekday regular season day games, let alone in two different cities on a road trip? I'm guessing Pinky Higgins had to be the manager when it happened. Or maybe Ted Williams caught the game on the radio at his air base in Korea.

Truth to tell, I wouldn't be surprised if both those guesses are way off, and the last time it happened, Lefty Grove started the second game.

Hoist on My Own Programming Petard

2011-05-24T14:46:00.002-05:00

Sportswriters grudgingly accept night baseball games as a precondition of their employment. They dislike Saturday night baseball games, and positively loath the Sunday night games created by ESPN.

The reasons for the latter two are not hard to guess. Nobody much cares for the three-to-midnight shift in any line of work, and on the weekends, it's really no fun, with the added fillip of early Saturday night deadlines for Sunday editions thrown in. Saturday-Sunday day games evoke memories of childhood trips to the old ballpark. Saturday-Sunday night games evoke the unpleasant truth one is a particularly minute cog in the vast and ever-expanding sports marketing machine.

Because television ratings are higher at night than in the daytime, because the Red Sox are popular and largely own their own cable network, and because ESPN is located in Bristol, Connecticut, I covered my unhappy fair share of weekend night games -- thinking dark thoughts about television broadcasting companies every moment from the sixth inning on the final out, with added extra dark thoughts on the drive home. No harm done. One good thing about misanthropy as a world view. Random events don't get you down too much. You're already down.

Unknown to them, the mass media moguls were planning their revenge for my effrontery. This weekend, the Sox were at home at Fenway against the Cubs. This weekend, my daughter graduated from BU. Many of her relatives were in town for the occasion. A full two days of activities on the BU cement, I mean, campus were on the schedule for each afternoon.

I figured the most convenient thing was going to be parking at, oh, Worcester and taking public transportation from there. Then I checked the MLB Web site. The Sox and Cubs were playing night games both on Saturday and Sunday.

Since of course the games were sellouts, there was only one, or rather two, explanations from my delivery from parking and directions-giving hell. And I owe them a public (if you call this public) expression of gratitude. I must write words guaranteed to turn to ashes in the mouth of any sports fan, let alone any sportswriter, former or previous.

Thank you, Fox Sports. Thank you, ESPN.

God, I feel so soiled.

Belated Thoughts on an Early Exit

2011-05-14T07:29:00.002-05:00

In the final 29 minutes of their next-to-last game of the 2011 season, the Boston Celtics scored 37 points. In the final 4:29 of their last game, the Boston Celtics scored no points at all.

So can we please, please, please stop hearing about Kendrick Perkins? Granting that the Celtics would be marginally better with him then without him, are there any sentient carbon-based life forms that think Perk could have addressed the problem indicated in the first paragraph of this post?

I (and many others) underestimated the Miami Heat because I (we) did not give them enough credit for their defense. Won't make that mistake again. But scoring collapses of the magnitude suffered by the Celtics are always murder-suicide pacts. The Celtics could neither execute their half-court offense (see end of regulation, Game Four) nor could their Hall of Famers create individual scores when the Heat asserted themselves down the stretch.

Well, the Hall of Famers are getting old. And Rajon Rondo was playing with one arm. But we know for sure that the Hall of Famers will continue to get old, and it is foolish in the extreme not to expect that an NBA team will reach the playoffs without at least one important starter either out with or limited by an injury.

The Celtics WILL reach the playoffs next year, if there is a next year in the NBA. If Danny Ainge does nothing at all this summer, the Celts will win 50 plus games and the Atlantic Division. It is a rule of both international relations and sports that great powers in decline take longer to decline than most folks expect. Look West and gaze upon the Dallas Mavericks, a power considered washed up by one and all is doing quite nicely, thank you, in 2011.

So the "doom is nigh" riff on the Celts strikes me as premature. Apparently it struck Doc Rivers the same way. While I do not subscribe to the theory that Rivers' presence as coach will make free agents eager to enlist with the Boston franchise (players influence other players, and pretty much no one else does), I do not think Rivers would have re-enlisted himself if he thought he was signing up for a five-year waterslide ride at the Lottery Land theme park.

Return to paragraph one. It shrieks that what the Celtics need to remain a legitimate championship contender, which they were, Heat loss and all, is a player who will provide one more serious individual scoring threat to compensate for the gradual decline of the Big Graying Three. This was, of course, supposed to be Jeff Green, but so far, the problem with the Kendrick Perkins trade hasn't been so much that Perkins isn't in Boston anymore, but that Green is.

So the search will begin anew. And it is a search that is likely to start and end in the riskiest form of NBA talent acquisition there is -- riffling through the discard pile. The Celtics' best shot of acquiring a player of real value lies in choosing from the players other teams have given up on -- the coach-haters, the guys who tweet mean things about teammates, the players with a knack for late-night beefs with the law.

I'd make the odds at such a pickup working for the Celts as very, very long. But not prohibitive. After all, the guy who has been hands down the best performer in the 2011 playoffs, Zach Randolph, is like the computer-generated composite sketch of just such a hard case, available to whatever franchise was willing to risk working with high explosives in the locker room.

If there's one NBA coach who might be very good at ascertaining which of those fallen souls can be redeemed, and who could get through a season without losing his sanity if said soul achieved only partial redemption, it's Rivers. We note, however, that he demanded and got top dollar to participate in the Celtics of Tomorrow. For a high-risk investment of time, he wanted his high reward up front.

Seve

2011-05-07T07:03:00.002-05:00

Seve Ballesteros, who died last night at the age of 54, was, hands down, the most enjoyable professional golfer to watch in my lifetime.

By watch, I mean be there in person and follow around for 18 holes. TV didn't come close to capturing what Ballesteros did. The reason golf commentators are always saying "this is a really difficult shot" when on the tube it appears a golfer is maybe three feet off the fairway or green is that they can see the difficulty, and television can't show it. Maybe 3-D will change that someday.

But walking with Ballesteros, even when he was winning tournaments, was to see a golfer confronting difficulty, make that impossibility. Thanks to driving the ball no more accurately than any 15 handicapper, a walk with Seve was a tour of parts unknown. He had to be the best golfer ever at hitting shots that can't be hit, since he was the best golfer at creating those impossibilities in the first place.

Exhibit A of course is the approach shot Ballesteros hit to make a birdie in one of his Open championship victories after his drive landed in one of the parking lots. For those of you who've never been to a golf tournament, they put the parking lots a very long way from the playing field. In a documentary on Ballesteros recently shown on the Golf Channel, Tom Lehman recalled his singles match with Seve in the 1995 Ryder Cup at Oak Hill. Ballesteros had nothing that day in terms of a swing. He failed to hit a fairway off the tee for his first nine holes. He was also even after nine, however, stealing pars with that most seldom-used of human attributes, creative imagination.

My own recollection is of walking part of a round with Ballesteros at the 1988 U.S. Open at the Country Club. Like all Open courses, it was set up on the principle that missing the fairway should equal missing par. More often than not, Ballesteros wound find his ball in parts of Brookline that could've been designated National Wilderness Areas. That's when the fun began. The spectator began to think "What's he gonna do now?" The spectator couldn't help identifying with Ballesteros as he attempted to deal with potential disaster. The spectator had been there before.

Almost nobody who watches golf doesn't also play golf. Most golfers, me most especially included, suck. It's a hard game. One of the reasons we suck is that we keep hitting the damn ball in the places Ballesteros did. The shots he faced are the shots that hackers ruefully remember after each round. That's because they then go on to put a snowman (8 for you nongolfers). Ballesteros made pars. He mastered disaster better than any golfer before or since.

Watching the latest Oklahoma State dropout on Tour hit 340 yard drives and short irons into the greens on par 5s is impressive. It's not, to me anyway, especially entertaining. And it surely doesn't make one identify with the athlete. Quite the reverse. We hacks know that's a different sport than ours.

I don't want to exaggerate here. Ballesteros hit the ball a long way. Ballesteros had all the dull technical merits of his trade. He was a pro, playing that different sport. But more often than any of his peers, Ballesteros had to come down from Olympus and play the goddamn, baffling, hateful sport we hacks play if he was going to win. And that was when he was his very best. He was a Genius Hack, if you will. He was not just a champion, he was in a very real way THE champion for all the poor suffering devils out on the world's driving ranges beating their souls against the implacable impossibility of golf.

Add good looks and a winning personality and it's no wonder Seve was a star beyond his considerable accomplishments. Those include, BTW, being the person most responsible for turning the Ryder Cup from an afterthought into the delightfully cutthroat high-stakes popular success it is today. Gamesmanship was a club in his bag, and while golf frowns on its practice, it's pretty much universally in play in every weekend foursome.

Golf of all the sports takes itself the most seriously -- a pity, since it's so much fun to play. Ballesteros made it fun for spectators, which when you get down to it is one of the primary job skills of any professional athlete. I do not wish to violate his memory by dragging a little too much heaviness into what's meant to be a happy memory to mark a very sad occasion.

But I can't help saying that if real life shares one thing with golf, it's this. Both feature a great many trouble shots. May we all find a touch of Seve's imagination when addressing the ball, wherever it lies.

Opinion, Not Fact

2011-05-01T08:27:00.002-05:00

Without making a formal prediction, let me just say I will be very surprised if the Celtics do not eliminate the Heat in their playoff series, and somewhat less but still surprised if the series goes the limit.

Close study of Miami's opening-round victory over the 76ers reveals that the Heat's end-of-game problem remains critical. When Miami needs a basket, it still also needs a clue. Dwayne Wade and LeBron James spend precious and interminable seconds staring at the defense deciding which of them will go one-on-one against three guys, while their teammates just stare, occasionally throwing up the odd (in both senses) three-point attempt to remind themselves they're still on the court.

As a formula for failure against a capable defensive team, that one's tough to improve upon. And I haven't even gotten to Rajon Rondo yet.

Hoarders of Foxboro

2011-04-30T06:37:00.002-05:00

Consider the following scouting report on a quarterback: Big slow and unnimble, Howitzer arm and outstanding release. Compiled passing statistics so gaudy as to approach poor taste. Has a reputation for throwing soul- and game-destroying interceptions at the worst possible moments.

Remind you of anyone? Looked at one way, Ryan Mallett is Drew Bledsoe, only not quite as good or (reportedly) smart. Only nostalgia for past anxieties could explain why Bill Belichick made Mallett a third-round draft choice last night.

Ah, but let's throw the cherries on the Mallett sundae. He sank through the draft's first two and a half rounds faster than the anchor on the USS Nimitz because of rumors he has or has had a serious drug problem. Now Belichick's pick seems flat out nuts, doesn't it?

Maybe. But we could also add "drug rumors" to the scouting report in the first paragraph and you know which past quarterback in an NFL draft we'd have? Dan Marino, that's who.

Mallett's not going to be another Marino. He'll be lucky to become another Bledsoe (Bledsoe critics, nobody lasts over a decade as an NFL starter without being a pretty good player). But even the slightest nanopercentage of a chance Mallett might become a competent NFL QB made his selection irresistible to Belichick. The man was an economics major. He knows you can't sell high without first buying low. Having purchased the ultimate quarterback bargain in a past draft (Tom Brady in the sixth round is akin to buying a Matisse for 20 bucks at the yard sale down the street), we shouldn't be startled when Belichick uses that same investment strategy once again.

On the NFL Network before the draft, Mike Mayock cited a stat to the effect that around 10 percent of third round picks ever become starters. Say the odds on a third-round QB (BTW, the round Joe Montana was selected) are worse. Make it 20-1. The payout on having a quarterback with the ability to start is infinitely higher. You can't really put a pari-mutual figure on it, but 1000 for every one wagered will do for a round number. Phil Ivey says Mallett is a value bet. So does Warren Buffett. So do I.

Mallett could fail completely and humiliatingly with the Patriots, and it won't the cost the franchise a thing except some personal embarrassment for Belichick -- something he absolutely could not care less about. On the other hand, Mallett might not fail. Even limited success, such as rising to the level of a good backup/marginal starter, would make the Arkansas quarterback a phenomenally valuable asset for the New England franchise. Such QBs are always in demand, as there are always franchises whose starting quarterback options aren't even marginal.

If Mallett ISN'T a cementhead or has a head addled by substance abuse, he ought to recognize he's been handed about the best situation imaginable. In effect, he will get paid decent money to attend Quarterback Graduate School for three or for years. It might also do him a world of good to be, for the first time in his life, on a team that doesn't need him. Being a football hero is like being any other kind of hero. As Coach Sophocles once noted, hubris is the prime occupational hazard.

If Mallett needs an incentive to study, I suggest he make a quick trip to Kansas City and take a gander at what Matt Cassel, the last MQA of the Belichick School, is driving these days.

Draft analysis is simple, not to mention simple-minded. Whenever a team makes a selection that wasn't predicted long in advance by most commentators, that pick is called a gamble. Ha! Picking Mallett was about as much of a gamble for Belichick as it is for banks to borrow money at no interest from the Federal Reserve to speculate in petroleum futures.

Come to think of it, if Belichick had used that economics degree to be a banker, the Global Financial Crisis probably wouldn't have happened.

Money Is a Leading Cause of Voluntary Bipolar Disorder

2011-04-23T06:53:00.003-05:00

Maybe it's just me, but I doubt it. I've been around for a few March and Aprils now, it is is my firm impression that the amount of pre-NFL draft hooey presented on ESPN's many networks and on the Internet has been close to double what it's been in previous winters and early springs. I omit the NFL Network. What the hell else is it supposed to talk about?

(Class, I am old enough to remember when the draft was on a Tuesday afternoon in January the week after the week after the Super Bowl. Despite losing three months of scouting and evaluation time, teams' records in picking good players didn't change a bit. Smart teams got more good ones than busts, dumb ones the reverse. There's a lesson there for draft "experts." Something about the paralysis of analysis.)

The increase in coverage is what psychologists call compensation. The pro football community, especially that part of the community with a financial interest in it, is weirding out about the draft more than usual because it's all they've got left. Technically speaking, the rest of the National Football League does not exist except in U.S. District Court, where the commissioner is not Roger Goodell, but Judge Susan Richards Nelson. When Nelson told the owners and players to resume mediation in their labor dispute rather than pester her with briefs and motions, they did it. She rules the roost.

As a football fan, this state of affairs has bothered me not at all. It's April!!!! ESPN runs that sad little graphic on Sportscenter saying this is Day Whatever of the Lockout, as if it was the Iranian hostage crisis, at a time when almost nothing happens in football anyway.

Here's a list of what football's missed so far in 2011:
1. Players have been unable to earn their offseason weightlifting bonuses and have been forced to go to gyms where actual people exercise.
2. The Redskins have been prevented from making their annual boneheaded veteran player acquisition.
3. There is no three.

For doubtless excellent legal reasons, the draft is the one NFL activity allowed to go on during the lockout. This explains the frenzy of predraft babble. It would terrify anyone of a financial bent to contemplate how much money ESPN stands to lose if by some catastrophic failure of intelligence (which in pro sports is hardly inconceivable) the 2011 season is shortened or Mammon forbid canceled altogether as a result of labor strife. And think of the bookies!! Oh, the lack of humanity!!!

So those who can't imagine life with the NFL, particularly the bill paying part of life, are clinging to the draft with desperate fingers. It is the one indication they have that pro football is indeed going to conduct business as usual this year.

Or almost as usual. When players are drafted, they are then locked out. This would seem to prevent what is the most significant part of the draft for a player -- the receiving of money for becoming a professional. What's the point of signing a contract when it automatically makes you part of a group your employer is refusing to employ?

This anomaly has not escaped the potential rookies, or at least some of them. Von Miller, the superior linebacker from Texas A&M, was invited to join the players' lawsuit against the league, and happily did so, although honesty forces me to note that Miller's reasons had more to do with ego than finance -- he was flattered to be considered a peer of the other plaintiffs.

Miller's ambivalent status leads me to dream of what would be the most and let's face it only interesting event at the draft's live TV show in its history. Some team selects Miller in the first round (this is considered a cinch). Miller comes to the podium to shake hands with Goodell. League officials hand Miller a jersey with a one on it and a cap.

Miller hands Goodell a subpoena.

Pitching Postscript

2011-04-23T06:48:00.001-05:00

One week ago, almost to the hour, it was posited by yours truly that the Red Sox starting pitchers had sucked in the first two weeks of the 2011 season, and until they got better, the team wouldn't.

Validating this premise with the speed and efficiency of a science demonstration in the old "Mr. Wizard" kid's TV show of the '50s, the Red Sox starting pitchers got a lot better right away and continued to do the rest of the week. Lo and behold, the team got way better, too, winning six of seven games despite the fact that none of their other early troubles (hitting with men on base, a National Leaguesque bottom of the order) were mitigated in the slightest.

Baseball can be a subtle sport. But not as often as it can be a simple one.

Always Suspected I Got Into the Wrong End of the Business

2011-04-17T07:04:00.000-05:00

Because I awoke early this morning, I learned something. The latest newspaper delivery guy for my neighborhood (it's a high-turnover position) drives a Cadillac!!!

Print lives, man! What's Arianna Huffington's ride, anyway?

Tito Tells My Statistics to Shut Up

2011-04-16T07:45:00.002-05:00

OK, so much for the jackrabbit start angle for this season.

The following pitching line suggests we'll be throwing out a few more pennant fever angles in Boston in 2011.

GS IP H ER BB K WHIP ERA
12 63 70 47 30 38 1.58 6.71

As I'll bet some have guessed, that's the total pitching line for the Red Sox starting rotation. It is beyond dreadful, especially considering it includes one shutout win and one 1-0 loss. Daisuke Matsuzaka and John Lackey have gotten most of the abuse for this catastrophic overture, but Clay Buchholz's individual stats are not just the rotation's median, they're damn close to its atrocious average, too.

If those numbers don't stop resembling the chart for petroleum futures prices, nothing else that happens to the Red Sox will matter much. Carl Crawford can hit .400 for a month instead of .150. Adrian Gonzalez can hit a home run every three games. And the score will still be something like 5-4 in the fifth, night after night.

When applied to starting pitchers, the word "stopper" works both ways.

Unless this changes, nothing else much