NY Giants World Champs!

Yesterday's Super Bowl shocked the hell out of me. Not just because of the Pats loss and poor, arrogant coaching calls (going for it on 4 & 13 instead of kicking a field goal and airing it out with 30 secs on the clock and 3 timeouts), but even more because of the title "World Champions" bestowed upon the Giants. How annoyingly arrogant.

I watched baseball dub World Series winners "World Champions" for years, despite the strength of teams in places like Japan. Finally, they did away that title after Japan won the real world title in world-wide contest a few years ago. Hell, the U.S. didn't even make the playoffs! In fact, Canada--who cares about baseball about as much as Bush cares about the economy--beat us!

In sports like basketball and football, though, our winners are still "world champions." Really? We've been getting killed in world basketball tournaments, mostly because half of what happens in the NBA is called and our fundamentals are so bad. Guess what? Running from half-court with the ball or even the key, into a slam dunk is actually traveling. In football, some Canadian teams might very well give us a run for our money. They play a much tougher game there (to be expected from the folks who invented a sport like hockey and whose national sport is lacrosse). The goalpost is at the front of the endzone and is unpadded; you hit it hard, you just go down. The field is like 20 yards longer. You only get 3 downs, not 4. Defense lines up a yard off the ball, not on top of it, making it much harder to run. You can hit the quarterback. You can bump receivers. Plus, if we had to play in Canada in the winter... well, when Green Bay is considered Florida, you've got trouble...

When will we stop the arrogance of calling our teams "world champs?"

NBC Sports Marathon and TV Appearance

I was watching NBC over the weekend, just to have something on while I did some work. (ALWAYS seem to be working these days...) They showed their sports. They started with Snowboarding, switched to golf, went to tennis, then to Texas Hold 'em Poker, then to hot shot skiing, then to horseracing, then to hockey. Most of what they showed, they didn't show all of. My question: Who the hell is the golf-snowboarding-tennis-texas hold 'em crowd? What the hell do any of these sports after to do with each other? Oh yeah, they also threw in some figure skating. If you're into golf-horseracing-tennis-texas hold 'em-tennis, check out NBC this weekend! I'll be throwing in a DVD, myself...

Did WGN news yesterday. Feel free to give me feedback so I can improve for future TV appearances.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWX3UL0RSHY

Also, my dating advice column "Lunch is Not a Date" debuts in WASSUP! LOCAL, a Chicago area magazine (monthly) with a circulation of 95,000. I'll post the column here when it comes out. They don't put it on their site.

Well, back to work...

Peyton Manning

Peyton Manning will not win a Superbowl. Sorry Indy fans, but it just won't happen. At least not the way he's playing right now.

Is Manning one of the best QB's ever? Yup. Is he a hall-of-famer? Ah, if he's one of the best... of course. So why won't he win?

Football today is not football of yester-year. Back when Unitas played football, players played just against each other. It was eleven guys on the field versus another eleven guys on the field. Manning would win titles back then, no doubt. That's his game. It's his mojo, his calling. He gets to the line, he sees the defensive scheme, he makes the call.

Today, football is something like forty-four coaches, a dozen statiticians, fifty-six assistant coaches... you get the idea, versus all the same positions on the other team. In the playoffs, Manning gets head-faked. Statiticians have a year of stats to know what he's going to do if they show certains schemes. They draw him into making the call they want, and he takes the bait. It's why he not only loses playoff games but why he often falls far behind and even loses big.

At the end of the season, the best teams with the best players, coaches and statiticians are left. Each week of the plaoyffs, the better and better of these groups are left standing. Manning doesn't use his coaches or statiticians much. He can beat the other guys on the field. It's all the other people on the field that he can't beat and he doesn't account for them.

That is why Manning will never get a title, unless, of course, he starts to listen.