Football
drorzel | October 24, 2006Easterbrook on Tiki Barber:
At this point Tiki Barber, TTNY ("The Toast of New York"), should replace Brett Favre as the most admired player in the NFL, and as the one who exemplifies the best of football culture. This guy plays amazingly well -- last night when the Giants needed power running, he even did that. Barber has played at a high level for a long time. He never complains, refuses to blame others and never whines about his contract. He's well-read and well-informed. He radiates the fact that he knows football is just entertainment, that there are a thousand things in the world that…
drorzel | September 25, 2006We get the Sunday New York Times delivered every week (which accounts for the higher-than-usual number of stories from the Times that I link on Sundays...), and I read most of it, but I usually run out of steam before I get to the Magazine, unless the cover story really grabs me. This week was one of those times, with their profile of Michael Oher. I'm bothered by this particular story, in a way that's a little hard to explain, so I'm going to babble about it here a bit, and see where that leads.
On the surface, it's a really heartwarming story. Michael Oher is a poor black kid from the slums…
drorzel | September 18, 2006I root for the Giants, and Kate roots for the Patriots, and at times in the last few years, it's seemed like they had a zero-sum relationship. When the Giants win, the Pats lose, and when the Pats are playing well, the Giants look awful.
Yesterday wasn't zero-sum, but the games were practically mirror images of one another. The Giants were dog-awful for three quarters, giving up sacks and stupid penalties, and appearing to have made their shaky secondary worse in the off-season. And then, they mounted a huge comeback, scoring seventeen points in the fourth quarter to force overtime, then…
drorzel | September 17, 2006So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired.
The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about science for Slate. Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad. His knowledge of the subject always seems to operate at the Star Trek sort of level-- like he's read the glossary of a…
drorzel | September 17, 2006Does including his middle name make USC quarterback John David Booty sound more or less like a porn star?
(Yesterday was the inauguration for our new college president, so it was a long day, and I'm a little punchy watching SportsCenter...)
drorzel | September 12, 2006When Redskins running back and noted NFL whack job Clinton Portis got injured in a preseason game, he generated a lot of buzz with a press-conference rant about how stupid it is to make players go through pre-season games at all. The sports punditocracy kept the topic alive for pretty much the whole rest of the pre-season, with a good number of commentators agreeing with Portis that there's really no need for veteran players to play pre-season games.
A quick scan of the weekend's games might suggest differently. Sloppy play abounded. The Seahawks and Lions didn't manage anything other than…
drorzel | September 10, 2006The NFL season starts in earnest today, and it's about damn time. Granted, the early afternoon offerings on our local cable system-- Jets/Titans and Eagles/Texans-- probably don't really qualify as "football," and the late afternoon Cowboys/Jaguars game is interesting only insofar as either Terrell Owens or Bill Parcells might explode at any moment, but it's the principle of the thing.
Also, they serve as a useful warm-up for the real attraction of the day, namely this evening's Manning Bowl pitting my Giants and quarterback Eli Manning against the Colts, quarterbacked by his older brother…
drorzel | September 5, 2006On Inside Higher Ed this morning:
The University of Florida has distributed several thousand T-shirts in which Roman numerals intended to indicate 2006 (MMVI) in fact indicate 26 (XXVI). After discovering the mistake, the university will have many thousands of other T-shirts redone, The Gainesville Sun reported.
But, hey, the football team is supposed to be pretty good.
drorzel | August 18, 2006Lately, I've taken to putting ESPN's Mike and Mike show on the tv in the morning while I make breakfast and do my morning exercises. It's sort of interesting to watch people doing a radio show on tv, I enjoy their shtick, and now that the NFL season is nearly upon us, it actually sort of resembles interesting sports programming (in mid-July, even PTI is nearly unwatchable).
The down side of the rapid approach of the NFL, though, is the wall-to-wall coverage of Terrell Owens-- Is he really injured? Did he practice? Did Bill Parcells make him practice? What did he have for breakfast? Did he…
drorzel | April 25, 2006The NFL Draft is this weekend, and ESPN is entering their 57th day of intense, round-the-clock coverage of the draft. I have one simple thing to say to them: Stop. You're hurting America.
This isn't even a real sports story-- this is a fantasy sports story. This is like college basketball recruiting, only even less interesting-- half of the guys who go in the first round won't pan out, and half of the superstars of tomorrow will be little-regarded sixth-round picks who go on to win multiple Super Bowl MVP awards. The draft is meaningful only in the spherical, frictionless, eleven-dimensional…
drorzel | February 6, 2006The Steelers won the super Bowl last night, in a game that didn't hold any rooting interest for me. As a result, I spent most of it doing other things-- making gourmet fried stuff (about which more later), marking a big stack of homework assignments, and writing today's lecture (solutions of the time-independent Schroedinger equation! Whee!).
Happily, Scott Eric Kaufman has a recap, and Fred Clark has the halftime show covered. Oh, and if you want football talk, Jim Henley has a partisan take.