Some minor rants and the Ultimate NFL Schedule

Well with baseball’s first week come and gone, and its second week well underway, it is time to have some fun with those little things that we let slip under the radar whilst enjoying the beginning to the penultimate season of Yankee Stadium. At least, I think it is. Can’t really remember. Heh.

Let’s get the nasty, barely sports nonsense out of the way first. I don’t really care to talk about this stuff, but I read some decent articles so I figure I’ll link you to those.

So, Don Imus is apparently a bigoted racist jerk, and while I don’t really care about him much, I have to say that this backlash against someone being insulting is a bit amazing. People are insulting all the time. Rosie O’Donnell is far more insulting to a far greater number of people than Don Imus is, and no one appears to give a crap. Imus made some disgusting, despicable remarks, and clearly he paid the price for it. But why does no one else (particularly people who glorify the kinds of remarks Imus made, in their “music”)? Jason Whitlock sums it all up perfectly in his article where he addresses the situation.

I also have to say, why do guys like this get jobs in the first place? Now that he said something utterly outrageous, the country is up in arms, but where was the country when he said all those things that were *almost* completely outrageous? Why do we have these guys in the first place? Why does Howard Stern still have a job? What, has he never said anything outrageous? It doesn’t make much sense why so many people have latched onto this one issue.

Finally, some people are, reasonably enough, claiming he should not have been fired because people in this country have the right to free speech. Admirable words, maybe, but while we have the right of free speech, we do not all have the privilege of a public radio show. That is something which one has to earn and if one commits some grievous offense, it can be taken away. I still don’t understand why this is different from the things he says every other day on his show, but if they want to fire him, it is their right.

Meanwhile, the Duke Lacrosse players were officially exonerated. The State district attorney not only declared them not guilty, he went so far as to declare them innocent. The subtle difference here being that he wasn’t simply dropping the case because he lacked evidence, he was dropping it because he had evidence: they were innocent. I wonder if Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the Black Panther party and the host of ESPN personalities who condemned them without thought are going to apologize. Um, well, I doubt it. Jemele Hill (known as the person who thinks Kobe is better than MJ) did, though, for which one can only respect her a little more. Still, the Kobe>MJ nonsense is hard to forget.

Now, returning to sports stories (and really, those previous ones were not sports stories...), people are up in arms about teams tanking to get a high pick in the NBA draft. This is the scenario, of course, because the draft will be absolutely loaded this year. The draft has been loaded before, and teams have tanked before. But this year, things have gotten more epic than Scott Stapp in “With Arms Wide Open”—err, well, more epic than he was attempting to appear. Anyway, people have been suggesting all manner of solutions and nostrums for this problem (two teams absolutely stinking in a game that you paid money to watch), but really, there is only one way you are ever going to fix this, and I’ll explain why:

Unlike football and baseball, where a team full of good players beats a team full of role players and a superduperstar, in the NBA you have to have that “franchise” player (I put franchise in quotes because the term is used a lot in sports outside of basketball, where it absolutely does not belong, but I don’t want to run down that excursus at the moment) as absolutely necessary to winning. The only exception to this in the last... forever... is the Piston team of ’04. Even there, you could make the argument that Ben Wallace was a defensive superstar, and they came out of the weak Eastern Conference and managed to win in the finals against the self-imploding Lakers who had three too many stars. Regardless, the point is that getting Greg Oden or Kevin Durant doesn’t just help a team, it makes a team. So teams will always tank, period, unless there isn’t an incentive to do so. As it is, you are basically telling the lazy bum who takes a smoke break every three minutes, plays video games when people aren’t watching, is gone too long for his lunch hour and delivers shoddy work even when he is focused: HERE’S A CHRISTMAS BONUS FOR SUCKING SO BADLY.

You need to take the weight out of the lottery. Period. Fourteen teams don’t make the playoffs (which is actually *less* than the number who do make the playoffs, meaning that it is actually harder to miss the playoffs than make them, but I could talk about this all day and I have been doing enough digressing); have them all get a one in fourteen chance of being number one, and a one in fourteen chance of being number fourteen. Of course, even then, this won’t stop tanking. Teams with little hope of making a dent in the playoffs will mutilate themselves to get out, just so they can get that shot at the next Patrick Ewing. The NBA will never truly make this go away. But two teams losing a few games to make sure they aren’t the #8 seed is better than half the league pretending to be injured.

So is it time to declare the Sports Illustrated cover jinx a scientific fact? Mere weeks after they have a story about global warming, the entire U.S.A. freezes over in April. I'm not sure how we can continue to call it coincidence. Seriously, why has no one taken this up? We should put the impending nuclear doom of the world on there. We should put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the cover. We should put George Bush on the cover. We should put Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton on the cover. We should put taxes on the cover. We’d get rid of all of our problems in a few months.

The NFL schedule was released recently, and since I, the Sports Maunderer, have the benefit of both a terrible memory and a relative lack of interest in such things, I can honestly say I remember absolutely none of the games outside of the Pats/Colts game on November Fourth, and the fact that the Titans play two road MNF games. Better than this, however, I will now give you a dream schedule of one game a week that would have been better than the 16 games a week the NFL managed to come up with.

Week 1: Giants at Pittsburgh: A battle of the two most overrated young QBs in the game!

Week 2: Falcons at Anybody: At battle between the most overrated QB in the league, and his better judgment!

Week 3: Colts at Bears: Let’s see who wins now that Rex Grossman has two more games of experience, Mr. Peyton Manning.

Week 4: Pats at Colts: Duh.

Week 5: Colts at Pats: Well this is strictly forbidden by the scheduling (they aren’t in the same division) but seriously, you know you’d watch two weeks in a row.

Week 6: Bengals at Ravens: Not only is it a juicy divisional matchup, but thanks to the NFL’s new hardline policy against criminals, both teams might actually be able to field starting lineups!

Week 7: Patriots at Chargers: Let’s see if Norv Turner can mismanage a game as horrifically as Marty Schottenheimer.

Week 8: Titans at Texans: Vince Young in Texas again, plus I just want the Titans to have an easy game.

Week 9: Raiders at Titans: I just want to see the Titans have an easy—I mean, there is some really bad blood between these teams, because the Titans offensive coordinator is Norman Chow, who once worked for USC, which is a college from the same state as Oakland, so... yeah okay I’ve got nothing. You have seen through my bias. Aren’t you a regular Columbo.

Week 10: Whoever picked Brady Quinn *at* Whoever picked Jamarcus Russel: The Sugar Bowl all over again!

Week 11: Cowboys at Eagles: If I need to explain this one, the act succeeding my explanation will be me jumping into a giant blender.

Week 12: Jets at Patriots: Ooh, the soap opera of two fat old men not getting along! (Okay, So Mangini is really the only fat one... but Belichick must use some type of alien technology to siphon his fat away and stick it onto his assistants. Really. Charlie Weis, Romeo Crenel, Eric Mangini? These guys are all as big as two people, and Weis might be pushing 2.5)

Week 13: Patriots at Jets: Not only is this another juicy game (people will be talking about the fixed handshake from the previous week all day) but it’s actually legal, since these teams *are* in the same division!

Week 14: Browns at Raiders: Time to see who wins the #1 pick for 2008.

Week 15: Saints at Colts: If anyone ever holds a play to less than seven yards, I’d be shocked.

Week 16: Colts at Broncos: Time for the annual Peyton Manning beatdown of Denver’s pass defense!

Week 17: Browns at Titans: Hey, I can dream, right?


One last note: The Suns apparently can’t play defense. How is this possible? Shawn Marion is a Defensive Player of the Year candidate, but he isn’t even the best defender on his own team; that is Raja Bell. So with two defenders that good, you’d think they would be slightly better. Sure, Amare and Steve couldn’t guard me, but still, you’d think two great defenders would keep their defense from smelling like feet wrapped in leathery burnt bacon.

Not sure what’s up next time, so you and I will likely both be shocked come next column; until that dreaded day,

The Sports Maunderer

P.S. Europe reappeared.

Dangit.