The Sports Curmudgeon

If you are reading something I wrote, you must have more than a passing interest in sports. Therefore, you have to know already that major league baseball has returned to Washington DC this year after a 34-year hiatus. If that news item has escaped your awareness, let me welcome you back to the world of the conscious from your coma.

The baseball poets have gone into ecstatic – almost orgasmic – states as they have written about this glorious event. I won’t bother to cite any of the hundreds of articles and columns on this subject here because I don’t want to endorse that hyperbolic view of the world. I’d rather talk about the Washington Nationals – late of Montreal as the Expos – from a reality-based perspective.

Here is where the baseball poets and I seem to agree:

If baseball is indeed America’s national pastime, then having a team based in the capital of the nation is a good idea.

Montreal had not supported the Expos well for at least a decade and the team should have been contracted rather than leaving it there to die on the vine.

The Baltimore Orioles are not the “home team” for a significant fraction of the DC area baseball fans and their support for the Orioles over the years was more a “target of opportunity” than an “expression of passion”.

I believe that the baseball poets and I part company at that point. Here are some facts and some opinions from a dedicated sports fan – one who likes baseball and who has traveled to see games further than Baltimore in each of the last several years – about the Washington Nationals in specific and baseball in Washington in general.

The city of Washington DC including its surrounding suburbs is not a good sports town. I have taken a lot of shots at Atlanta and Miami over the years as bad sports towns and I have had not much good to say about New Orleans in that dimension either. Washington is not as bad as those three places, but it is a whole lot closer to them than it is to the really good sports towns in the US. Outside the core fan base for baseball in Washington, there are only two reasons why people will go to see the Nationals on a continuing basis starting in about July of this year and then in the coming years:

1. The team is really good and is a contender to win the World Series

2. The games themselves become “social status events” where it becomes advantageous for people to be seen at the game because it means they are “of the proper social status”.

If you don’t live in the DC area, it might be difficult for you to understand how important both of those conditions are to the fabric of this area.

This is a political town; losers go home. There is nothing good that comes from being identified with losers. So, it behooves the Nationals to be winners.

This is a political town where who you know is critically important and what parties you get invited to is an indication of your rank on the social ladder. Certain events attain social status and people go there not to see the event but to be seen at the event. This has been the status of the Washington Redskins’ games for at least 2 decades now and maybe for the last 35 years since Vince Lombardi came to town.

For the home opener, the Nationals had that aura of “status” around them. Tickets were sold out immediately upon availability; there were more VIPs in attendance than at anything short of a State of the Union Address. The Washington Post had that game as a front-page story AND then devoted eight additional full pages in the sports section to the game and the ceremony surrounding the game. And like it says in the song:

“Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word…”

You would never have imagined that anything was less than perfect on that evening if that is all you read and all you did was to tune into the local newscasts. Those local talking heads were so deep in the tank for this event that still photos of them almost looked like modern versions of The Adoration of the Magi.

There were more than 45,000 folks there for that game. Obviously, the Nationals aren’t going to draw those kinds of crowds every day; you have to expect a drop-off. But the crowds for the next two games averaged only 33,000; that’s more than a 25% drop and that means that there were tons of empty seats for the second home game of this incarnation of the Washington Nationals. I know, you can still say that’s a really nice crowd; and if you can get that every night you’ll draw over 2.5 million fans and that’s good for any team – especially one that has been playing to crowds of 5000 or less on more than a few occasions for the last 10 years.

But the Nationals aren’t going to draw 33,000 per game this year – this inaugural year I might remind you – unless they are within a few games of the playoffs for the entire season. Yesterday, they played to a crowd of less than 26,000. They’ve been home for a week and the crowd is down about 40%. And let me tell you some of the reasons behind my reality-based observations that you won’t read in anything that the baseball poets write.

RFK Stadium is a dreadful place to watch a baseball game – or any other sporting event for that matter. It is old and decrepit and in not such great repair. I don’t want to exaggerate here, but it is in a bad neighborhood. It is not the worst part of town and it is not the Black Hole of Calcutta, but this is not a prestigious address to borrow a phrase from the real estate moguls. Across the parking lot is the local hoosegow and none of those VIPs who were at the opening game and smiling broadly for the cameras and patting themselves on the back for being part of this great “event” lives anywhere near that stadium. The parking and road access to the stadium are OK, but nothing more than that; and if you don’t park in the lots, this is not a good area to be wandering around at night looking for your car. Oh yeah, you may indeed spend some time doing just that - - looking for your car.

Yes, the baseball poets are right; there is indeed a Metro stop nearby RFK stadium – just as there will be one nearby the planned new stadium. That should resolve things. Except if you don’t live in the DC area, you cannot appreciate the lunkheadedness of the people who run Metro. After the opening night game, there were lines a block long at the nearby Metro station that patrons said took two hours to traverse (I wasn’t there so I don’t know if that is an exaggeration or not). The Metro spokesthing never thought to apologize for this or to say that they would do something about it in the future. No, the official Metro response from spokesthing, Lisa Farbstein, was that there were 17 trains each of which had 8 cars that went through the station after the game and Metro was not planning to add any capacity. Before you ask, yes, the Metro folks continually ponder why people are not fully enthralled with Metro customer service…

Up until the day of the opening game, it was not 100% certain that there would be Metro service after the game. You see, in Washington DC, the Metro trains do not run after a certain hour and if the game had gone deep into extra innings, people might have left after the last train had left the station – presumably without the block long lines. And Metro said it wasn’t going to run trains later than normal unless the team found a way to pay for the added service at the rate of tens of thousands of dollars per hour. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the community spirit and élan that underlies the dedication to bring baseball back to DC and keep it here.

Where were the local politicos who took credit for all this during this transportation mess? Let’s just say they were not orating and emoting about the need to make this work to nearly the same degree they orated and emoted about the glories of baseball in DC.

Now, about that new stadium, which will indeed give the Nationals another bump in popularity if – notice I said “if” and not “when” – it gets built. It was about 4 months ago when MLB put the Nationals here in DC and we went through the political machinations over funding a stadium and all that. The money has not yet been borrowed and there are still political maneuverings going on related to the new stadium funding. They have chosen a stadium architect who is off on a tangent already worrying about the “theme” of the structure and the “statement” it should make. He wants to use a lot of glass to symbolize “the transparency of democracy”. Here’s what he needs to do. He needs to build a stadium that has easy access for fans and good sight lines and spacious accommodations for things like eating and parking and relieving oneself. The “statement” the stadium should make is this:

This is a comfortable place to watch a ball game at a reasonable cost!

I am confident that the stadium that was “proposed” to the MLB owners will never be built in terms of it being “state of the art” and “a destination”. I’m not 100% confident that any new stadium will ever be built but I am certain that if something new is built it will not be ready within the two-year window that was proposed to the MLB owners. And without a new stadium that is at least as nice as Camden Yards, the Washington Nationals cannot survive in this town and the franchise will die. Around here, that’s called being left “twisting in the wind” in the parlance of former Watergate figure John Ehrlichman.

The hyperbole fever from the baseball poets has spread already into the Nationals’ clubhouse. Manager Frank Robinson complained earlier this week that the Nationals were not getting sufficient coverage on ESPN SportsCenter. Excuse me? Every time I look in, there is something about the Nationals and their new home and their stupid new mascot. They may not be given the time and exposure of the Yankees or the Red Sox, but they get more time on the air than the Los Angeles Dodgers and – as of this morning – the Dodgers have the best record in the major leagues.

Memo to Frank Robinson:

1. Your team has gotten far more coverage everywhere than its accomplishments on the field have earned.

2. Ask yourself how fans of the Pittsburgh Pirates must feel if you think your team has been ignored.

3. The Nationals are only interesting now because of their novelty so they will get less coverage come June – unless you keep them hot in the pennant race. Deal with it.

4. Attendance is heading down – never to get all the way down to the ”Montreal level” to be sure – but only the guys in your clubhouse can do anything to stop that. Don’t look to the media and the baseball poets for someone to blame when you are playing to crowds of 15,000.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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If the US Congress could figure out a way to collect one penny for every word written about the upcoming NFL Draft and about the myriad mock drafts and about players moving up on draft boards and about other players sliding down to lower rounds, they would resolve the Social Security liquidity problem overnight. After all, the Congress only needs to come up with a couple of trillion dollars to solve that mess. Notwithstanding the glut of words here, I will add to the cacophony but with a small difference.

I will not do a mock draft. I won’t pretend to have interviewed NFL GMs or coaches or “unidentified league sources”. I won’t tell you that I went to the combine in Indianapolis or to any private workouts around the country. And most of all, I won’t tell you that I have these mysterious and shadowy friends and colleagues around the country who have done all those things and funneled the information back to me. I don’t; and so, they didn’t.

Here’s the deal. I watch a lot of college football games because I like college football despite the NCAA and the BCS contrivance to frustrate the way I think they should crown a national champion. And what I do is to keep a notepad by my side as I watch so that I can make notes on players I see who impress me with their play. Now that the 2005 NFL Draft is about to happen, I have scooped up those notes and I’m trying to read my handwriting to decipher what they say.

There are obviously several biases built into the background here. Only major colleges tend to be on TV. There may indeed be a fabulous punter at the Colorado School of Mines; I would never see him. There may be someone on my list who played the single best game of his life on the day I caught his act on TV so I wrote down the name of a guy who really has no shot at the NFL. Conversely, I may miss first round picks even when I saw them play because they had an off day.

So, if you are in an NFL Draft Pool, do not use this information as the basis for your picks. I have no idea how the draft order will go. Neither do lots of other writers, only they won’t admit it. In fact, sometimes the teams have no idea what they are doing either. A long-term reader sent me this item without a citation so I don’t know if he got it somewhere or did the research himself.

“In the first NFL draft, there were nine teams and nine rounds in the draft. The Chicago Bears had two draft picks who wound up in the pro football Hall of Fame. The Philadelphia Eagles took nine players who never played in a single NFL game.”

This “factoid” is important for you to remember as you are watching the draft on TV this weekend. No matter what team drafts which player, the coach or the GM or the owner will go on TV with one of the talking hair-dos and say that they just drafted the guy they had rated the highest all along in this position. So, the teams never make any selection mistakes and no other team ever outmaneuvered them in getting key players. Yet we know that there will be first round picks who “underachieve” and others who just plain stink out the joint. But according to the coaches/GMs that’s who they wanted from the outset.

Quarterbacks:

I saw and I liked both Alex Smith and Aaron Rodgers. I think Smith played – and excelled – in a “quirky” offensive system and so he might need a bit more time to learn the NFL game because I doubt that the Utah “spread ‘em out and run around offense” is about to become an NFL staple. On the other hand, if intelligence is really valuable for a QB, I wrote down something from a graphic they had on the screen relative to Alex Smith; he graduated in 2.5 years with a 3.7 GPA and a major in economics. Hello? That is a scholar athlete.

I also made a note about Kyle Orton who was touted as a potential Heisman Trophy winner. Here’s what I wrote:

“Overrated. Overhyped. Cannot possibly be the best college football player in the country. Looks like somebody to have on speed dial to sign as an undrafted free agent when the last pick is made.”

I did make a positive note about one QB who seems not to have gotten much ink in recent weeks. I liked Charlie Frye from Akron University based on his play in one of the myriad All-Star Games [I didn’t write down which one.]. This kid can throw a football and he looked plenty agile back there in the pocket. I am often leery of QBs who don’t get to play much against big time defenses but this kid has good physical tools. I’d take him long before I took Kyle Orton. And wouldn’t the headline writers in local papers in NFL cities love to say that a Charlie Frye led team “Fryed” their opponent some time in the future?

Running Backs:

I liked Cedric Benson from Texas last year but he decided to stay in school. He is big and strong and runs over people. He’s fast enough to find a hole and make a nice gain, but I don’t see him breaking off many 75-yard runs in the NFL. If the Miami Dolphins are really nostalgic for a Ricky Williams type runner, here is Benson who went to Texas and has dreadlocks and…

I think KJ Harris from West Virginia is worth taking in the middle rounds of the draft. My notes here say that he plays hard and finishes off runs with authority.

Of course, I liked the tandem of Cadillac Williams and Ronnie Brown from Auburn. If you saw Auburn play and didn’t like these two guys, that means you went to Alabama. I prefer Brown as an NFL prospect because he runs faster and he caught a couple of nice passes in whatever game I saw while making notes here.

Two other running backs of less notoriety that made their way to my notepad were Clatrick Fason (Florida) and Eric Shelton (Louisville). My notes say that Fason is “workmanlike” and “doesn’t seem to be doing much out there but he always gains yardage”. Shelton simply got this note, “looks awfully good to me”.

Fullbacks:

I have only two players noted here and I have no idea if either of them has come to the attention of any NFL teams because these guys got my attention mainly for their blocking. Paul Jefferson (Penn State) “knocks people down” and Keith Joseph (Texas A&M) is “a battering ram who looks like he weighs as much as a Budweiser Clydesdale”. I can’t believe either of these guys will go early in the draft, but teams looking for blockers in the backfield might think about either of them.

Wide Receivers:

Of course Braylon Edwards (Michigan) and Mike Williams (USC) will be guys taken early in this year’s draft. Here’s a note on Edwards I took from a screen graphic during a Michigan game. Edwards had a 3.3GPA with a major in African American Studies. That’s impressive because most players don’t get their GPA flashed on the screen and most of them are in majors whose titles announce very boldly that they have been concocted solely for the purpose of keeping athletes eligible.

I did see South Carolina play last year but I made no notes about Troy Williamson who is getting a lot of attention about now. Hi Ho!

I made this note about Fred Gibson (Georgia), “Tall, long strides, fast, good hands. But a BAD blocker”. Maybe that’s why he isn’t being mentioned as an early pick as a WR?

Tight Ends:

I have two guys listed here. One is named Alex Smith but he is not the quarterback from Utah so let me call him “The Other Alex Smith”. He is from Stanford and he is big but he is still fast for a TE. He catches the ball well and is a good enough blocker who can probably be taught to be better.

The other guy is Bill Bajema (Oklahoma State). They had a graphic on him that said he carried a 3.7 GPA as a Pre-Med student so I started to watch him more closely than I had before. He is big; he is a good run blocker and he can catch. But he is not – repeat not – a deep threat in the NFL. So if a team is looking for a TE that will “stretch the defense” they need to look elsewhere. If they are looking for a guy to help in the running game and someone who can catch short passes to maintain possession and maybe score in the short red-zone passing game, maybe he is a guy to take later in the draft.

Offensive Linemen:

Let me be sure you understand that I do not try to project where a player in college on the offensive line might make a career in the NFL. There are too many examples of college tackles who became guards and vice versa for me to worry about that. I know that offensive linemen need to be big and strong and agile and that is what I look for. So, let me begin by saying that several folks say that Alex Barron (Florida State) is the best OL in the draft this year. I saw FSU play at least twice and probably four times last year and I do not have his name anywhere in my notes. So, basically, I don’t know Alex Barron from Alec Baldwin – except to say that I am 100% certain that Alec Baldwin would be a disaster as an offensive lineman in the NFL.

I was watching a Washington State football game last year and noticed an OL who was huge. He looked as if he was 7 feet tall weighed 400 lbs and had arms long enough to scratch his ankles without bending at the waist. So I looked carefully and his name is – honest, I’m not making this up – Sam Lightbody. [According to the WSU website, he is 6’9” tall and weighs 355 lbs.] I started watching him and he is a decent blocker with one major problem. In a footrace with a glacier, the glacier would be a 2-5 favorite. But he is big and he is strong and you can’t teach those things; so maybe he’s a guy for a team to look at in the late rounds of the draft.

I have a note here from the Senior Bowl that Khalif Barnes (University of Washington) is very strong and has good blocking technique. The announcers said he was coming back from an injury and I don’t know what that meant. If he injured his knee or something like that, then I’d wait a long time to take him in the draft; if he had a hamstring pull, then I’d assume that could be healed by the time next football season rolled around.

I have a note here that Scott Murczkowski (Bowling Green) is a really good blocker for running plays as a center and that he seems to help out well on pass blocking. I don’t know if he is even eligible for this year’s NFL draft, but my notes here say “mid-round pick”.

My note regarding Evan Mathis (Alabama) is “big, quick, strong blocker”. At some other time I wrote down, “pulls to lead sweeps to his side and the other side well”. How do I know that was written at some other time? It is written in a different color of ink.

I saw Oklahoma play a couple of times last year and I was impressed with Jammal Brown more than once. He is a good drive blocker who pulls well to lead sweeps to either side of the field. And he’s a good pass blocker too.

Defensive Linemen:

I just want to put down my comments here with regard to defensive linemen that I saw last season. None of them made me write anything down to make it look like this would be a graduating class full of star defensive linemen. And come to think of it, there isn’t a lot of “buzz” among the draft-geeks about defensive linemen this year.

Matt Roth (Iowa): “very active and aggressive in pass situations”. That surely has to beat “passive” or “corpse-like”, no?

Jon Babineaux (Iowa): “great hustle and desire, never quits on a play”. How did someone with that kind of name end up in Iowa instead of at LSU?

Dan Cody (Oklahoma): “very quick and very fast, might be OK as an inside pass rusher”. Shouldn’t the Buffalo Bills be very interested in anyone named Cody?

Marcus Spears (LSU): “very big, very strong, very slow” “use him to plug the middle against the run”. In a 100-meter race between him and Sam Lightbody (see above), there might never be a winner.

Darryl Shropshire (So. Carolina): “low center of gravity, good against the run”. I may have been in my “polite mode” when I wrote that because “low center of gravity” could be a euphemism for “very huge ass”. I just don’t remember…

Tom Bulman (Boston College): “VERY strong and aggressive with blockers but slower than Gilbert Brown on a bum leg”.

Linebackers:

Normally, I have a bunch of entries in this category; but this year, I have only two. And one of them is a lukewarm recommendation.

Derrick Johnson (Texas) is a fumble causing machine having set the NCAA record for forced fumbles in a season. He is “very fast” and “big enough to take on blockers”. He sometimes misses plays because he overruns them or tries for the spectacular hit. That’s not good to be sure, but it beats missing the play because there was no way on this – or any other – planet that he could have gotten there in time to make the play.

Channing Crowder (Florida) is big and can rush the passer as well as he plays the run. He is also fast enough to do some pass coverage too. The problem here is that the announcers kept referring to his “off-field issues” and that always makes me stop and think because some really talented players [Lawrence Phillips just to name one] have been useless at the pro level because of “off-field issues”.

Defensive Backs:

Antrell Rolle (Miami) is big and fast and very physical. He played CB at Miami but might be a better safety in the NFL. Given that his older brother, Samari Rolle, has been a solid NFL player for a while now, that’s a good sign because you might assume that Antrell has learned something about what it means to play at that level from his brother.

Carlos Rogers (Auburn) is very athletic and very fast. He’s not very big and does not play a physical game but has really good “closing speed” to the ball once it is in the air. He is a prototype cornerback in the NFL.

Justin Fraley (Minnesota) was very impressive in the Hula Bowl. He is a big hitter who covers well.

Erik Green (VA Tech) is also a physical back who hits well and could be a good safety prospect in the NFL.

Special Teams:

I have exactly zero kickers or punters on my notepad for last year. Obviously, some teams will take some players in that category, but nothing moved me to pick up my pen and write down any notes.

OK, there it is. These are the collected impressions of a sports fan who watches a whole lot of college football. Now when you watch the NFL Draft coverage on ESPN this weekend you may see some of these guys mentioned by people who actually get paid to form opinions on these kinds of things. But don’t focus on that. Try to focus on the answer to the following question:

Whose hairline looks more like Eddie Munster’s? Billy Donovan or Mel Kiper, Jr.?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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I actually checked in to see The Masters this afternoon because I wondered if there was going to be some kind of dramatic event there that would call down the rhetorical lightening bolts from the sky starting this evening. It sounded like the voice over commentary for the Pope’s funeral - - and mind you, the level of solemnity in the golf telecast was possibly a bit greater than for the Pope’s funeral. I found myself talking to my television set – fortunately my long-suffering wife was out shopping at a crafts fair and did not hear me so I was spared her lecture on the futility of such behavior – and I started telling the announcers what to tell me and how to do it. And that got my mind off on a tangent thinking about what I’d like to tell lots of other sports announcers about what to tell me and how to say it. So now, I’m going to do that…

And by the way, I heard those snarky remarks from the peanut gallery about my mind always being off on a tangent and how much of my contact with reality comes via long distance radio communication with the Earth. Please keep such commentaries to yourselves in the future…

My most fervent request for announcers – the ones in the studio or at the games – goes to the guys who do college basketball. All of them seem to suffer from this problem to some degree and some of them have a case that is terminally annoying. Gentlemen, please stop slurping the coaches of college basketball teams. You know, some of them actually make mistakes once in a while; not every loss is due to player error; sometimes a coach makes a bad decision. Think about it, if all these coaches are such geniuses, how come one of them loses each and every game. Praise them when they do something praiseworthy because there’s nothing at all wrong with that, but when they do something mundane, please do not make it sound as if they have just communed with that obelisk of insight and understanding that kept showing up throughout the movie, 2001 – A Space Odyssey.

Billy Packer is one of the serial offenders here. I am certain that no coach at any ACC school has ever done something boneheaded and the only time any other coach might come in for the mildest form of rebuke is when they are not able to match wits with one of the ACC certified geniuses. Regarding players, Packer is a scold. When trying to set the scene for a college basketball game – particularly late in the season – he tends to put it right up there with that which will solve world hunger. I really think he needs to take a year off and take up a hobby that will focus his attention on something other than college basketball and then try to come back in some reinvented form. Maybe he could use Al Gore as his guide to find a new focal point?

And by the way, I wish all of the game analysts would try telling a bit more of the truth about themselves too. Look guys, if you see a coach stand up to signal to his team on the floor that he wants a time out at half-court, you should not start saying how smart it would be for him to ask for time out at this exact moment and then pretend to be shocked and amazed that (a) he actually did that and (b) that you and he were on the same wavelength. You saw him signal to the players on the floor and went into your shtick; that all it is.

I don’t have anything against John Calipari, but other than a short run at UMass when his teams did very well, he has not been a howling success. But to listen to the “analysts” tell it, he is a genius who got jobbed by the NCAA Selection Committee. Really? So, how much commentary did you hear from these “analysts” about how Memphis did in the NIT and their quest to be #66? Let me give you a hint, their journey was a short one and it ended well short of NYC.

Notre Dame was also hosed over by the NCAA Selection Committee if you listen to the analysts and pundits. Mike Brey is a fine coach there and he has a couple of kids who can play. But he is not a genius or a force majeure; his NIT quest lasted one game and it was a home loss to Holy Cross. In case the analysts and pundits didn’t know this about Holy Cross, Bob Cousy is no longer the point guard there…

I heard Dick Vitale say that Rick Barnes at Texas is one of the “great young basketball minds” of our day. Problem is that Vitale says that about at least five coaches a year and it’s not always the same ones. Something does not compute here. And let’s be clear about this, Dick Vitale raises his voice and speaks in exclamation points when he explains to me how Tuesday came after Monday this week. Presentational style and volume do not prove a point. If I tell you the Earth is flat and you are polite enough not to tell me I am dumber than doggy dooty but merely express some incredulity, my saying the same thing louder does not make the Earth flat. Keep that in mind as Vitale keeps yelling at you with his pronouncements; it can be very illuminating.

Brent Mussberger is another master of contrived exuberance. I do not need to hear from him how a third and three at the 50-yard line with 9 minutes left to play in the first quarter of a college football game could be a pivotal play in the entire game and will surely determine field position for the rest of the first half. Relax, Brent, there’s lots of football left to play and this is an early third down situation; if these teams are well-matched – meaning that there is some reason to be exuberant at all because the final score won’t be anything like 72-6 – you’ll have LOTS more of these as the day wears on. Save the hyperbole and manufactured drama for some time when it might actually add something to an otherwise dreary contest.

When I hear that avuncular chuckle from Vern Lundquist over some goofy remark made by his “runnin’ buddy”, Bill Raftery, I am reminded of the shopping mall Santa Claus who is getting just a bit too much enjoyment from those little kiddies sitting on his lap. I’d like to hear that a whole lot less if that is possible.

Lots of people love Dick Enberg. I think he’s OK and I also think that his best days are in the rear view mirror of his life. His signature call is, “Oh my …” That was fine for the first 10 years of its existence but two things have happened to that call and Dick Enberg in the last 10 years. First of all, Enberg uses that line much more frequently than he used to so he has cheapened the currency of his amazement. And secondly, he is now amazed and surprised by some of the simplest things. Dick, there are guys who can hit a 25 foot jump shot; it is not something that rivals direct communication with a civilization from another galaxy in terms of amazement. Cut back on the caffeine, my man.

I enjoy John Madden on TV - - except when he goes off on his canonization program for Brett Favre. Talk about overdoing it just a bit, I sometimes find myself telling Madden – through the TV of course where I get my lecture from my long-suffering wife – that he and Favre need to get a room. I don’t need to hear any more of that because I already agree that Favre is a Hall of Fame QB and a player that should be long remembered in the lore of the NFL.

I only need to put the words “Tim McCarver” and “minutia” on the same page of text and you immediately understand what I would like him to know. Enough already! It’s a baseball game; it is not the solution to the equations that derive Unified Field Theory.

Don’t even get me started on the NFL Pre-Game shows. I don’t know if Terry Bradshaw is dumber than Paris Hilton or if he has a shtick down pat. Here’s what I do know; it’s old and tired either way. Dan Marino needs coaching on how to appear on the set of the show without looking as if he just got an icicle jammed up his butt. He need not convey to the viewer so clearly that he is not comfortable and might prefer to have a screaming case of jock itch than to be where he is at that moment. I would dearly love for Michael Irvin to be looking for a job right this moment.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again here. There is an announcing tandem doing college basketball games on CBS that I get to hear infrequently here in DC. But when they do early round games in the NCAA tournament, I always enjoy them. I think they are the best tandem doing college basketball and I do not understand why the suits at CBS do not move Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel waaay up the food chain at CBS. Maybe next year?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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