The Sports Curmudgeon

Before the guests arrive and the football games commence – and prior to cooking and devouring the turkey – let me make a few football observations as a way to avoid any temptation to turn on the TV and accidentally channel surf through the Macy’s Parade.

There is one game today that ought to be pretty good and it’s the early one for a change. The Packers/Lions game is meaningful in the sense that the Lions need the game to hold onto their place in the NFC playoff race and the Packers are just flat out on a roll. Normally, the early game on Thanksgiving is a snoozer because the Lions have been so bad for the last decade or so, but today is different. Even with a Lions’ win, the Packers are still comfortably in control of the NFC North; but if the Packers win, they are a mortal lock certainty to win the division and make the playoffs. The short week of preparation for today’s game favors the Lions because they were at home last week and did not have to travel after their game last week in order to start their prep work for today.

The Broncos/Bears game later this weekend should be interesting too. These teams define “inconsistency” and both teams need the game. It should be close.

Perhaps the game most important to both teams on the NFL schedule this weekend is the Redskins/Bucs game. A Redskins’ loss could have them looking up at as much as a two game deficit to make the playoffs and there will be only 5 games left to play. The Bucs lead their division at the moment but not by a sufficient margin that they can put it on cruise control. This game should be close too.

The Eagles/Pats game might be interesting in a macabre sort of way. The over/under for the game is 51; it might be interesting to see if the Pats can make the over all by themselves. It could happen. Just to show you how the oddsmakers view the likelihood of an Eagles’ win here, the Pats are -3000 on the money line. As a reminder, that means that you have to wager $3K to win $100 if you want the Pats to win the game without laying the spread. I know about the old “on any given Sunday” adage, but the oddsmakers don’t seem to believe that the Eagles are the team to pull that off on this particular Sunday.

At the other end of the NFL schedule spectrum, the Raiders/Chiefs game might wind up as a 9-6 affair. There was a time when the games between these two teams were events for which you circled the dates on your calendar. It has not been so for a few years now and is certainly not the case for this weekend.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Adrian Peterson practiced earlier this week and could well play this Sunday. That sounds like good news for the Vikes but other reports say he has a partial tear of his lateral collateral ligament in his knee. The Vikings have lost 6 games already and would need to run the table to have a shot at the playoffs this year so you have to ask why they would even think of risking such a valuable future asset by rushing him back to the field only two weeks after incurring that partial ligament tear. Are you kidding me?

In a totally different vein, I want to recommend a column to you by Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It is a laugh out loud funny column about bear hunting - - if you are a bear, any column about bear hunting is unlikely to cause laughter, but I assume that readers here are more hominid-like than ursine.

In college football, this is another weekend full of rivalry games. In addition, Missouri/Kansas and West Virginia/UConn will have significant impact on the selection processes for the major bowl games and possibly even the BCS Championship Game. Virginia/Virginia Tech and BYU/Utah and Georgia/Georgia Tech and Clemson/South Carolina all have spreads of 4 points or less. These are usually good games even when one team is waaay better than the other, so this year they should be really good ones.

And in that mix, Hawaii/Boise State may be the most exciting game of them all. And the winner might just play in one of the BCS games …

The NASCAR season is finally over; like the NBA, it seems to go on forever and ever and ever and… The TV ratings overall – and more importantly the TV ratings for the races in the “Chase for the Cup” – were down this year for the second consecutive year. The total drop from 2005 is more than 20% and that’s significant. For the last six months, NASCAR has bombarded us with the slogan that “every lap matters”. Well the verdict is in; fewer people this year cared enough about every lap to bother to tune in to watch them.

In the world of boxing, I see that Vladimir Klitschko and Sultan Ibragimov will fight next February in some kind of heavyweight title unification bout. If you can spell both of these fighters’ names without peeking, you are definitely smarter than a fifth grader - - except for the fact that most fifth graders are smart enough not to care about boxing or either of these jamokes.

According to an item in the Vancouver Sun, some prostitutes have filed an application to open a “co-op” bordello contemporaneous with the 2010 Winter Olympics in tat part of the world. Clearly from a customer perspective, there are significant benefits to frequenting a “co-op bordello” as opposed to a “cop bordello”; that should be pretty clear. Now if the city fathers in Vancouver seem to be moving toward an approval in this matter, I can’t wait to hear from the pooh-bahs at the IOC. I don’t know how they could oppose such a thing; after all, they keep telling us that the Olympics are supposed to bring people together…

Finally, here’s an observation from Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle about those pooh-bahs at the IOC:

“Jacques “Dream World” Rogge, IOC president, says before the Olympic medals forfeited by people like Marion Jones are passed along to the runners-up, he wants to be sure the new recipients aren’t also drug-tainted. Jacques, in looking for honest Olympians, joins fellow eternal searchers Diogenes and O.J. Simpson.”

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