There’s a feeling that’s sat next to me all season as I’ve watch my beloved Giants from strong start to an almost complete meltdown to a rebranding of themselves as tough-as-nails fourth quarter warriors. It’s an odd feeling but I wouldn’t say a negative one. What is this team? I don’t mean these past few weeks or even this season. Going back a few years – what is this team?

This is a team without a personality or flavor… usually elite as a pass rushing unit combined with what is probably among the worst secondaries in the league, six or so years running. The Giants are team that occasionally gets superb years out of cast-offs like Ahmad Bradshaw but still can’t convince Brandon Jacobs to run like he weighs 260 lbs. This is a team that literally can’t find enough space for all their phenomenal defensive line talent (notably lining up Jason Pierre-Paul at tackle to make room) but hasn’t drafted an all-pro linebacker since Jessie Armstead in 1993. This is a team that, in 2003, drafted what turned out to be the best quarterback in the draft but packaged him with other picks (one of which became Shawne Merriman) in order to get a lesser quarterback with more name recognition.

And, yet, it’s all almost genius in its own way, isn’t it?

We’ve now won two Super Bowls in four years, which is a very, very impressive feat given that this team really isn’t very good. Or are they? Seriously, what is this team?

This is the era of Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning. My thoughts one the latter are more complicated so we’ll start with the coach.

Tom Coughlin

A mere three years after taking his team to the Super Bowl, Coach Jim Fassel was unceremoniously fired following the abortion that was the Giants 39-38 playoff loss to the 49ers in 2002 and the injury-wracked 2003 season. The line on Fassel was always that he was too friendly to his players, led a sloppy show and most importantly of all, that his players lacked discipline. I like that word discipline a lot – it covers all manner of sins when discussing the failings of a football team without really meaning anything. It’s as if these players – these unbelievably fast, strong machines with bodies carved out of wood immediately devolve into freshmen at a fraternity kegger without a stern, business-like coach to keep them honest.

Enter Tom Coughlin, a man who’s primary claim to fame up until that moment had been his leading the Jacksonville Jaguars to an entirely improbable AFC Championship performance for the perception around the league that he didn’t take any guff from his players. Almost immediately Coughlin alienated veterans Michael Strahan and Tiki Barber with his dogmatic approach of instilling discipline through mandatory fines for being late to meetings and two-a-day practices designed to, I don’t even know, kill the players, I guess. For this, of course, the old grumpy white guy sports media could not praise him enough. Discipline was the watchword of the new Coughlin administration in Giants land.

There’s a funny thing about discipline in football. Unlike most of the other bullshit intangibles sports guys like to mouth off about, discipline is more or less a measurable quantity. A disciplined team should not get hit with penalties. While it’s not fair to look at one year and say whichever team got the least number of penalty yards was the most disciplined, over a period of years it gives a fair assessment of the culture of a team. Over the last seven years the Giants have ranked 13th, 16th, 19th, 27th, 11th, 26th, 27^th and penalty yards where higher is better, out of 32 teams. I want you to read those numbers again. Not once did the Giants even luck into accidentally being a disciplined team.

Besides demonstrably failing at the one thing which was supposed to be his strength, Coughlin is among the least creative play-callers and formation designers in football. Coughlin calls a solid, unspectacular game that rarely embraces the particular strengths of the team and has not substantively changed at all during Coughlin’s eight-year tenure. Now, I’m not saying I want Coughlin to jump on every idiotic bandwagon that rolls through the NFL (I’m looking at you, Wildcat formation) but Coughlin is just an old-school guy locked fast in an outmoded way of thinking, especially offensively.

I was, for example, shocked – fucking shocked – to learn that Brandon Jacobs holds the team record for rushing touchdowns with 52. Of these 52 touchdowns, 27 of them , or a little over 50%, have come from rushes within 2 yards. This is despite the fact that Jacobs fails in short yardage situations 20% more often than the average running back. Any average NFL running back would have more luck scoring in short yardage situations and yet Coughlin has been beating his head against that same brick wall – not for one year, not two… seven years. In seven years Coughlin has not learned this blatantly obvious lesson. For what its worth, of Ahmad Bradshaw’s 18 touchdowns, only 17% have come from within 2 yards.

Coughlin will, from now on, receive favorable comparisons to a lot of great coaches… Parcells, Belichick, etc. But I found a piece in particular that had a comparison I really like: Coughlin is Tim Tebow. While that author meant it as a compliment: “When the critics put his back against the wall and put his job in jeopardy all he does in win,” I don’t. I mean it in the least complimentary way possible. In the same way that Tebow is lauded with credit that belongs to others (namely, his defense) and in the same way that Tebow manages to fall ass-backwards into dramatic, memorable wins, then yes, Coughlin is the Tebow of coaches. The problem with this Super Bowl is what it means for the Giants long-term. Somehow, Tom Coughlin is a multi-Super Bowl winning coach, which means it’s going to be some time before we’re able to get rid of him. Which means, the Giants yearly ritual of starting strong before running the gamut from mediocrity to more than one complete collapse in the second half of the year will continue indefinitely. Indeed, the Giants have never – not once – done as well or better in the second half of the season as they did during the first under Tom Coughlin. They are 47-17 through the first 8 games under Coughlin and 28-36 in the second 8.

Kevin Gilbride and Tom Coughlin are not the worst offensive minds in football, but they might be the worst to have ever received their particularly egregious brand of extended tenure.

Eli Manning

Eli Manning constantly makes us question the nature of what it is to be great. Eli is not a great quarterback. In 2010, I had him ranked 12^th best in the league, this year I would say he cracked the top 10, but not the top five. He vacillates between mediocre and far more often simply “good.” He will occasionally ratchet that up to “very good” and that above all else is what’s so maddening about him and why I’m not sure what to make of him as a player, or how I feel about him as my team’s quarterback, both historically and moving forward.

I never understood what it was that people liked so much about a player being “clutch.” First of all, as a person who tried not to blindly ignore observable facts, I’m a scion of the idea that while clutch performances exist, clutch players do not. Though, more to the point, listening to sports talk radio guys laud players for having that “extra gear” they can shift into “when it counts,” I’m left wondering why anyone would want that. If a guy has an “extra gear” shouldn’t we be pissed he isn’t using it all the time? Doesn’t that imply “clutch” players aren’t always trying their hardest?

Eli isn’t exactly considered “clutch” but much has been made of how much better he played this year in the 4^th quarter. While others congratulate him for that, it drives me nuts. Eli clearly has all of the tools, both physical and in his surrounding personnel to be an elite quarterback but he’s held back by bad decision-making. He throws way too many stupid passes and a lot of them are picked off. Watching him these last few weeks, though, really drives home – he fucking could be the best quarterback in the league, but he just isn’t. Why? I honestly have no clue. Maybe he’s just not driven by that phantom desire for greatness. Maybe he realizes he’s going to luck into a shot at the Super Bowl every four years and the years when the team really is great – like in 2008 – they don’t actually make it past the first round.

Now, however, we have to endure the interminable questions of whether Eli is better than his brother Peyton. Peyton Manning, for my money was, up until probably three years ago the unquestioned greatest quarterback of all time. With the good statistical years Brady had in the championship days giving way to some absolutely stupid performances since 2007, I think the gap has closed such that either one has a fair argument for the crown.

The Eli vs. Peyton debate is different, though, and more insidious. It says something about us and what we believe “greatness” is. Peyton Manning is not only a great athlete, but a brilliant football tactician who basically served as his team’s de facto offensive coordinator. Without him, a 10-6 Indianapolis team only two years removed from a Super Bowl win with roughly the same roster descended to the unquestioned worst team in the NFL in 2010. Peyton’s credentials should be absolutely beyond reproach and yet the question will be asked over and over again – is Eli better than his brother because he has more championships.

The answer should be, of course, FUCKING NO, MORON, HE’S NOT BETTER! But it’s not, and this becomes the insidious referendum on greatness I referred to earlier. Somehow, all the work – all the fantastic, unprecedented work Peyton Manning has done gets erased by a lucky two months for the Giants. This is the same impulse that lets us look at a Donald Trump on the one hand and a hardworking family man laid off and on unemployment on the other and declare one a success and one a failure without in any contextualizing the reality that lead to their respective places in the world.

We don’t care about the journey, we count up the Super Bowl rings or we tabulate a guy’s bank account and we declare a winner. And it’s fucked up.

Why do we bother keeping track of these athletes statistics to the third decimal place if we intend to ignore them? Joe Montana is better than Dan Marino. Why? Well, Joe Montana has four rings. Well, Joe Montana also had Ronnie Lott and Jerry Rice. Joe Montana had a better tactician for a coach. You know, they guy who invented the offense they were using. Forget a nuanced examination the facts, let’s get something quick and dirty, like Super Bowl wins and move on.

Eli Manning is the living embodiment, for and against, of all of our worst and most reactionary impulses. I’ve never thought he was good enough to be a Championship quarterback, even after 2007 – a Super Bowl victory I thought belonged to the Giants line and Steve Spagnuolo and, in my head, only incidentally involved Eli. But tonight, having watched my team hoist their second trophy in four years? I don’t have the slightest clue what to think anymore. He must be a championship caliber quarterback but, if he is, than that designation has been devalued.

Eli Manning could be one of the greats, but now that his legacy in that regard is sort of locked in, I have a hard time believing he’s going to be pushing himself much harder to achieve that Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady level of elite since his place in their company has been, right or wrong, guaranteed by the number of rings he’s now won even if that ring belongs a lot more to Jason Pierre-Paul, Hakeem Nicks and Chris Snee than it does to him.

The Super Bowl is meant to be the culmination of a long process of planning and execution. You amass the pieces over a period of years and when the moment is right, with a little bit of luck you charge at the prize against your elite peers. The Giants, however, are more like this constant rebuilding projects with these short, staccato burst of greatness that just happened to be timed correctly. I don’t believe in the idea of sports momentum but having watching the Giants these past few weeks it’s definitely hard to say I’m as steadfast an un-believer as I once was. Similarly, I don’t ever believe a team “owns” another team but damned if it doesn’t seem like the Giants own the Patriots in a big spot.

Last night’s Bowl victory is probably not the start of a long dynasty. If anything, it’s as likely to make the Giants complacent and lazy but it feels wonderful for now just the same.

The magic of sports is that since it’s not pre-determined, the best team doesn’t always, or even usually win. Last night, the best team did not win. I just wonder about the way we experience sports, rationalize it, drench it in hindsight bias and devalue the achievements of people just because they didn’t achieve the one moment the one time. The fact that less than great men are capable of great moments should be a sign of hope to all of us who are not, strictly speaking great. But if we are all defined by a few moments when we were at our best or worst than we risk losing the flavor of what real life actually is. Sports it’s supposed to be this amplified competition that reflects real life so I for one, even as a Giants fan, refuse to be taken in by the hype. I know I’m going to have to have the same argument over and over again with other Giants fans explaining how I could possibly not see the obvious greatness of Eli Manning. Those late game picks may be long forgotten memories to them but I remember the failures – the late season swoons and one game doesn’t erase all that. Eli is not any one narrative — they are all right and they are all wrong in equal measure. One game doesn’t change who he is as a person or a professional.

I thank you, Eli Manning and the Giants, for the championships, the fun and the moments of joy but you still suck.

Fair enough. But before this particular runaway bandwagon crashes the gates of Canton, I’d like to ask a question: is Belichick really a Hall of Famer?

Let’s consider a few brief facts.

• He cheated. Yes he did. Stone cold busted. (Apologists can argue that what he was doing was no big deal if they like. But as bad as I detest the guy, I respect the hell out of his ability. He’s brilliant and even the slightest edge is something he can make hay with. Also, if it didn’t give him an advantage, why did he risk the punishment that was going to attend getting caught? Smart people simply do not bet high-risk/no-reward propositions.)
• One of his protégés, Skippy McDaniel, replicated the same crime when he was head coach in Denver. And got busted. This doesn’t automatically reflect on Belichick, but it does suggest something systematic, something programmatic, doesn’t it? Which means we might be skeptical about any claims that what the Pats got nailed for was a one-off.
• Most critically: Belichick has won three championships, but none of them since his cheating was exposed.

The Patriots might win Sunday, and if they do then it takes some steam out of the question I’m posing. But:

• if the Giants win, and
• if Belichick never wins another title (which would be consistent with what has historically characterized the careers of most NFL championship coaches more than a few years removed from Super Bowl wins), and
• if you had a Hall of Fame vote…

…would you cast it for Bill Belichick, whose résumé would, at the time of consideration, include zero Super Bowl wins that you could assume were clean?

I don’t know. I might vote for him eventually, but not on the first ballot. And maybe never, because I’m one of these self-righteous dinosaurs who thinks that sportsmanship and ethics matter.

What do you think?

Had the last few months not happened we’d now be anointing JoePa for sainthood. As you’ve been told so many times before, and are now hearing all over again, he was all that was good and true in collegiate athletics, a man who did things the right way, etc. The thing is, that’s a woefully simplistic commentary on Paterno and how he did business. Also, the last few months did happen. So we now find ourselves needing to address Paterno’s legacy in two parts. Let’s do the ugly bit first.

1: Paterno and the Sandusky Scandal

There is no pretending it didn’t happen. There is no excusing Paterno’s failure to make an end of it. And in my book, there is no forgiving it. Paterno, for whatever reason, abetted the actions of a serial pedophile and rapist. These are the facts of the matter.

That said, we’re dealing with human behaviors here, which means unimaginable complexity. In a comment on Brian’s post the other day, my friend and colleague Marti Smith offered some thoughts toward perhaps explaining why Paterno didn’t do anything and everything necessary to end Jerry Sandusky’s victimization of children. Her remarks were, I think, insightful and helpful, and it’s always important to understand that explaining and excusing are different things. Nobody here is excusing (except the occasional dimwit commenter or PSU alum).

Paterno’s own remarks, toward the end, illustrate the conflict he must have felt. On the one hand, what he was being told was no doubt unspeakable for a man of his generation and upbringing. On the other, men of his generation and upbringing were organizational men, and one behaved according to the rules of the system when it was transgressed. This would have been a basic assumption for Paterno, I imagine.

When that system failed, I imagine he might have reacted as I would if, sometime this afternoon, the law of gravity were to suddenly stop working. This doesn’t make it okay, though. I’d be obliged to improvise, grabbing something and hanging on, lest I float into space. And when the system failed in the Sandusky affair, Paterno was likewise obliged to improvise. He had all the power one would have ever needed.

His failure to do so resulted in what I believe is probably the second greatest fall from grace in the history of American sports culture (behind OJ – and we might well argue that Paterno’s crash was the worse of the two). He paid for his crime with his reputation and his death last night assures that he will have no chance to repair it.

2: The Saint in the Swamp: Joe Paterno and College Football

Joe Paterno won more games than any coach in college football history. And for all those decades of victorious Saturday afternoons and national titles (and should-have-been national titles) there was never even the slightest whiff of impropriety. Well, mostly. He recruited clean and brooked very little nonsense from his players (up until some off-field issues in recent years, anyhow). By the standards of big-money intercollegiate athletics Joe Paterno was Mother Teresa.

The problem with that, and accordingly the problem I have with attempts to canonize any college athletics figure, is that the system itself is corrupt to the core. I can spend quite a bit of time delineating a long list of specific indictments, but in the end it all boils down to one simple fact: revenue-generating university sports are, in every way, the antithesis of what a university should be. Universities are about cultivating minds and spirits in ways that enrich the society, that advance the store of human knowledge, that exalt the potential of the intellect to accelerate the evolution of the species.

University sports, though, breed an apartness between the star athlete and the mere student, insisting that intellectual genius bow down to the primacy of the jock. Said jock may be a genuine scholar-athlete but is in too many cases a challenge that the athletic department has to sneak through the side corridors and and back alleys of NCAA eligibility requirements. Big-money sports add literally nothing to the legitimate mission of a university and ethically they have as much place on campus as a Provost-administered prostitution ring.

None of this is terribly easy for me to think about because I love sports. I lament the state of my Wake Forest basketball team and cautiously hope that things are on the way up for my Buff football team. I watch March Madness with as much excitement as the next guy and bitch to no end about the charade that is the BCS. All three of the universities that have awarded me degrees are in major conferences (ACC, Big 12, Pac 12) and two more where I have served as a professor play D-1 in some sports. So there’s a part of me that feels like a hypocrite, and that’s a feeling I don’t care for.

But at least I recognize my inconsistencies. I’ll always remember a letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register one Sunday in the late ’80s. I was an MA student at Iowa State and the Big Peach was a ritual during my two years there. The University of Iowa had, as I recall, brought in a new president and said president was proposing some big, if not radical reforms to its athletic programs, all aimed at better integrating its NCAA sports into a proper understanding of the purpose of a university.

Reaction was swift and predictable. One Hawkeye fan wrote something to the effect of “if we aren’t careful we might end up like Northwestern.” Yes. The gods forbid that Iowa City turn out to be like those yutzes up in Evanston, who are, you know, one of America’s premier academic institutions. I do not recall any subsequent letters to the editor calling that writer out for being an anti-intellectual jock sniffer, which only added to my disappointment.

That, friends, is the context in which all eulogies for the late Coach Paterno exist. The Sandusky scandal notwithstanding for a moment, perhaps the thing that can be said for JoePa is that he was the best a profoundly corrupt system can possibly hope for. This is not mild praise, mind you, because corrupt systems corrupt those that exist within them. Still, given what I said above, it’s also like being acclaimed as the most compassionate pimp in the entire slum.

Of course, all the comment on the life and times of Joe Paterno emerge from another context, and this one is equally important. Here in America, Hollywood has crafted four boxes into which all human beings can be neatly dumped: heroes, villains, victims and pawns. You’re great, you’re evil, you’re an unfortunate plot hook or you really, honestly, do not matter. We are not comfortable with figures who cross these boundaries. Take another great, but flawed college coaching icon, Bob Knight. He is unquestionably one of the greatest basketball minds in NCAA history. He is also, unquestionably, one of the biggest bullies and most arrogant douchebags in NCAA history. Is he a genius or is he an asshole? Well, yes. Yes he is.

In the Paterno movie Jerry Sandusky is clearly a villain. For a lot of people, so are the members of the Board of Trustees. The kids Sandusky raped – victims. The university’s faculty? Its world-renowned scholars? The students who were back in the dorms studying instead out destroying things as the story unfolded? Pawns. If you’re nodding and agreeing with me, you’re one, too.

What we’ll be seeing as the mourning period for Paterno unfolds is less about a clear-minded assessment of the facts and more about crafting a narrative. Think of it as hundreds and thousands of people subconsciously collaborating on a Hollywood script for a blockbuster about the coach’s life. In order to sell it to the studio, though, we have to make sure it speaks to the deep psychological tropes by which the masses make meaning out of life. In other words, this isn’t an investigation, it’s a ritual. The audience won’t be comfortable putting a man they felt so positively about for so many decades, the grandfatherly icon meeting with students on his lawn, in the villain box. The pawn box is right out. Which leaves us with hero box and the victim box. As you read what people have to say today and in the coming days, think about this.

In the end, it’s nearly impossible to be a saint in a swamp. Too many Americans seek to iconize those who come closest, but others of us have a better solution: drain the goddamned swamp.

The five are fired football coach Joe Paterno, former president Graham Spanier (who remains a tenured faculty member, as does Paterno), assistant coach Mike McQueary (who is on paid leave), former vice president for finance Gary Schultz (who resigned), and former athletic director Tim Curley (who is also on leave). The latter two are facing criminal charges of perjury and failure to report alleged sexual abuse. Penn State is reportedly paying for their legal defense, as well.

Pennsylvania’s freshly minted public records law, which was revamped and updated in 2008 and took effect January 1, 2009, does not mandate the disclosure of all public employee salaries. Michigan, to its credit, does, as it should. In fact, Michigan’s freedom of information law specifically states that public universities, school districts and community colleges “shall upon request make available to the public the salary records of an employee or other official of the institution of higher education, school district, intermediate school district, or community college.” Taxpayers fund, at least partially, state located public universities. And what these employees are being paid should be available to the public.

The four “state related institutions” listed in Pennsylvania’s statute are Penn State, Temple, the University of Pittsburgh and Lincoln University. (The University of Pennsylvania – aka Penn – is a private university founded by Ben Franklin).

The law requires that by May 30 every year these four universities have to report their IRS Form 990s, the salaries of the officers and directors, and the highest 25 salaries paid to employees of the institution who were not included in the list of officers and directors. Spanier made $813,855 in 2009. Paterno’s pay was more than $1 million, which is not unusual for football and basketball coaches at schools like Penn State. What the others made is anybody’s guess.

What is unusual, or at least unconscionable, is Penn State’s refusal to release salary information. Penn State is a public university supported, at least in part, by its tuition-paying students and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. It should reconsider its stand on this and opt for transparency. The school will be in the crosshairs as a defendant in a whole lot of civil lawsuits as the alleged victims and their families  sue for millions in damages. Penn State is more collectable than Jerry Sandusky.

Several key officials apparently kept a dirty little secret for years. Transparency now is a small step in a positive direction.

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Most of you know the basics. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s. Olympic greatness. Sonny Liston. Draft dodger. Muslim. One of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history.

Social activist. Global icon. The Greatest.

And for one working class white kid growing up in the North Carolina outback, his very first African-American role model.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

No Viet Cong ever called Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali a nigger, but a lot of people I grew up with (including very close family members, I’m ashamed to say) sure did. Ali was everything that terrified the white South. He was physically dominating (with all the undercurrents that implies). He was “uppity” incarnate. He was unAmerican for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was the devil for converting to Islam. And deep down, the part that scared them the worst was this: they understood, I think, that he was smarter than they were, too.

The problem was, I never believed that I was supposed to hate him. Maybe it was my age – I wasn’t quite old enough to take offense at the Vietnam thing. All I really knew about the war was what I saw on television, and every night they’d show the number of boys killed that day in the fighting. I don’t recall thinking about this in anything like deep, philosophical terms, but if I had I imagine I might have figured Vietnam was well worth dodging.

As for the Islam thing, well, all us crackers were afraid of blacks. Especially crowds of them demanding stuff. But … even if I was young and ignorant and irrationally afraid of blacks, I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t seem to asking for anything unreasonable and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Maybe I thought that if we met he’d like me, too.

But I was just a kid. All I really knew was what I saw: Ali was brilliant. He was objectively the best fighter alive and he was also fun. His charisma didn’t just fill the room, it overwhelmed the entire world. You could feel it, almost tangibly, even through the little 13″ black and white TV in our living room in Wallburg, NC. He said he was the greatest and it was obviously so, especially for a smart-aleck kid from the “it ain’t bragging if it’s true” school of thought.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

Today Muhammad Ali, the most famous man in the world, turns 70, and we as a nation, as a species, are better for knowing him. It’s even more certain that I’m a better person because of the courage and verve with which he lived his life.

A life that I hope is nowhere near over. Happy Birthday, Champ.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

It was as thorough a beatdown as we have seen. And Timmy was completely overmatched.

So what did the Tebowistas learn? Nothing, probably.

The Tebowistas did not see the same game the rest of of saw. Last night, one analyst on ESPN was talking about all the dropped passes by Bronco recievers. As a general rule, QBs don’t worry about dropped passes, because for every one that is waist high and perfect that the reciever doesn’t catch, there is another at shoe lace level that a receiver does catch. At any rate, if Tebow’s receivers had caught all those bad balls, it wouldn’t have mattered much. His QB rating might have reached the twenties, where it lived all season, rather than the wretched 9.5 he achieved. Exactly 1/10th of Brady’s rating, 95.1.

What did the rest of us learn?

1. Tebow is not, and will likely never be a top-tier NFL quarterback. He is too inaccurate, his throws too wobbly, and his motion too elongated. He will continue to miss receivers and to fumble, as rushers strip him from the back side over and over and over.

2. Tebow is better than most of us ever thought he would be. He’s strong, has excellent judgment, and can read defenses, particularly when his scrambling causes coverages to break down. He is a lot of fun to watch.

3. Maybe Kyle Orton wasn’t so bad either. Yesterday was not all Tim’s fault.  The O line was absolutely woeful. Orton looked very bad behind that line, and Tebow looked worse. Once the Patriots established a lead and the Broncos needed to pass to catch up, the team’s line deficiency was completely exposed. Nor was the defense as good as advertised. For the second time in a month, a defense that looked good against the mediocre teams on the Broncs’ schedule proved to be about as effective as rice paper against a competent offense. The Patriots scored 45 and could have scored 65 had they wanted. Even us T-bow haters can’t reasonably expect a first year QB to overcome that.

4. The Tebow offense is probably not destined for a lot of success in the NFL. Every decade or so, someone tries some version of this, has some initial success, and we all get excited. Then the defenses watch a little film and it’s over. It may be over now for the Denver Broncos.

5.  John Elway is seriously screwed–his team has frittered away a good draft position and is stuck with the worst QB in the league. Now what, boys? Of course, it may not matter because they may still be able to fill the stands and sell a trillion jerseys to the true believers, but Elway came back to lead his team to the promised land. Instead it looks like it’s forty years in the wilderness.

6. John Fox deserves what he gets. He pandered to the masses putting in this offense and running Orton out of town. “…whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Galatians 6:7)  Oh well, at least Tim’s not completing passes to the other guys like his last QB, Jake the Shake Delhomme.

7. Even Jesus loves Tom Brady more than Tim Tebow. Well, duh.

Yep, the BS BCS fails again. Which it always does. But not everyone hates it. I mean, all the corrupt people who profit from it love the system. But there are regular fans who defend it, as well. I have a friend, for instance – let’s call him Bob – who staunchly believes that a tournament to determine the D1 national football champion wouldn’t be any better than the BCS. I think he’s nuts, but he’s a very smart guy. He points to the flaws in playoff systems (for instance, for those who hated last night’s rematch, he notes that the most recent NY Giant Super Bowl win was a rematch and that the Patriots had won the first meeting). And we can sit Old Chicago with fine microbrew and argue for hours, I’m sure. 

But the more I think about the issue, the more I’ve wondered about the underlying assumptions and premises of Bob’s argument. My line of thought is a tad wonky – sorry, I can’t help myself – but I think if you examine some logical conclusions you can quickly get to the core of what’s wrong with his position.

So, let’s get on with it. I do not believe you can hold Bob’s opinion unless the following three statements are true in your head.

1. The best team doesn’t always win.
2. On the whole, expert opinions can be as valid as the results on the field (perhaps even more valid) when it comes to identifying the best team.
3. The champion should be the best team.

Personally, I agree with #1. Anybody who knows anything at all about sports agrees with #1. I mean, Villanova over Georgetown? NC State over Phi Slamma Jamma? The Miracle on Ice? (Play that game 100 times and the Russians win 99 of them.) And how many times out of 100 does Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson, do you think? Jets over the Colts in Super Bowl III? Chaminade over UVa? The list goes on and on. So I don’t think there’s anything controversial about posit #1.

If #1 is true, then you might argue that #2 follows logically. The previous paragraph, I think, illustrates the point neatly. Still, that word “best” is a thicket of warring subjectivities, and this whole process requires us to make peace with a definition of “best” that includes “the team that lost.”

The assumptions above, taken together, play out into a series of implications and logical conclusions, chiefly this one: champions should be the best and “best” can only be reliably decided by experts. Ergo, while the BCS may not have it 100% right, they’re on the right track philosophically. The uncomfortable piece of this model is that the final score is, at most, only one criterion among many to be considered.

It gets iffier. There is no rational reason why this principle should apply only to the context of a season. On the contrary, outlying results are far more likely in one-offs than over the course of several games. There are plenty of cases where a clearly inferior team jumps up and bites a heavy favorite, but excellence asserts itself as more games are played. Earlier this season the St. Louis Rams took out the New Orleans Saints. Then the Kansas City Chiefs ended Green Bay’s unbeaten run. Anybody arguing that the Chefs and the Lambs are the better teams? Anybody? Bueller?

So if the goal is to identify and reward the best team at the end of the season, then aren’t we obliged to apply the same criteria throughout the season? Shouldn’t regular season results employ some mechanism that mitigates against the misleading impact of single-game upsets? How much cleaner would the conclusion of the 2011-12 season have been if a panel of judges in Ames, Iowa, on November 18, been empowered to take into account previous performance, the unusually amped up environment of a national TV, Friday night road trap game, and the fact that two members of the OSU athletic department had been tragically killed just a day earlier? The panel could have declared the Cowboys the winners and then we’d have the BCS final match-up that we should have had.

In other words, the problem isn’t that the BCS doesn’t work. It’s that it’s hamstrung because it’s only being used halfway. In order to really maximize the system you have to go all-in.

Your initial reaction is probably that this is all absolutely ridiculous. And I agree. But it’s a logical implication of the philosophy used to justify the BCS.

Put another way, instead of relying on scores to tell us who was best, college football needs to be more aggressive in instituting the kind of system used in Olympic Ice Dancing.

Either that, or we let go of the eternally subjective rat’s nest that is “best” and implement a system that emphasizes “winning.”

Discuss….

And that’s OK. It’s clear now that Tim is a fungible NFL quarterback. He threw for 316 yards (yes, yes, John 3:16 and all that) last week against a pretty good defense. 300 yards is 300 yards. The guy threw for 300 yards against a quality NFL defense. I was wrong. He is an NFL quarterback. A great one? Probably not. But Bobby Douglass had an eleven-year career. His teams went 13-31-1. His passing stats were never very good, but he was famous for setting up a quarterback rushing record which stood for over thirty years. That may well be what we see from Tebow: a solid career with a few bright and shining moments, and a bucket full of rushing records. If you’re a Denver fan,having Tebow as a QB probably condemns you to perpetual mediocrity, because 8 and 8 teams exist in NFL purgatory–not good enough to go to the SB and too good for high draft picks, but it sounds as if most Denverarians are OK with that. Good for them. There aren’t enough Staffords and Lucks to go around anyway.

One more thought on his Tebowness. I watched part of that game with a high school coach from southern California who coaches for a Catholic school and is devout himself. And he made a pretty darn good point. Many of those who don’t like Tebow don’t like him not because of his football skills, but because we don’t like his aggressive stance on religion (and the fact that he jumped several queues to get to where he is due to the evangelical-good-old-boy network.) But is Tebow’s stance on religion more objectionable than Roethlisberger’s off-field behavior. Probably not. Tebow may be a pain, but to the best of my knowledge he hasn’t been accused of sexual assault. Twice.

Tebow is probably not the great quarterback his believers think he is. But then again, he clearly not the disaster I thought he was going to be. And all things considered, maybe he’s not so bad for football either.

Reporter asks question that he/she knows will not get an answer.

Player/coach doesn’t answer question.

Reporter pretends that player/coach answered question, thanks player/coach, kicks it back to the guys in the studio/booth.

Can we just stop with the charade already? Just now, on the Giants/Falcons halftime show, they cut to John Lynch in Denver, where he asked Broncos head coach John Fox about the rumors that backup quarterback Brady Quinn was getting reps in practice this week. How short a leash will Tim Tebow be on, coach?

Anybody reading this blog could have scripted the non-answer.

Most post-game interviews these days go like this:

Reporter: Congratulations on the win, Mark. The Tigers’ defensive line put a lot of pressure on you in the second half. How did you adjust to it?

QB: I’d like to thank my lord and personal savior Jesus Christ.

Reporter: Do you think the Tigers were distracted by their injuries – they actually had four seventh graders starting in the secondary today.

QB: You know, Janice, they’re a great team and we have a lot of respect for Coach Johnson and his staff. We knew they were going to give us a fight today and they did.

Reporter: Something I know our viewers are wondering about. During the third quarter an al Qaeda suicide bomber detonated himself in the south stands, killing 300 people. Did that throw you off your timing?

QB: Coach Harris has been working with us on keeping our focus no matter what. We were just blessed today and we executed our game plan. I’d like to say a huge thanks to the brave men and women of our armed forces who are out there making the ultimate sacrifice every day.

Reporter: Thanks, Mark. Great game.

QB: Thank you.

Honestly, the post-game interview deserves its own Emmy category.

And now, back to the game….

“If you want a game where guys can cheap-shot people and not face retribution, I’m not sure that’s a healthy evolution,” he said Thursday. “The speed of the game, I love how the game’s evolved in terms of how it’s played. But you’re seeing where there is no accountability.”

According to numbers provided by the NHL, fighting is down significantly this season. Through play Wednesday, there was an average of 0.8 fighting majors per game compared with 1.2 at the same point last year.

“To me, it’s a dangerous turn in our game,” Burke said.

Yep. All that fighting? It was to keep things safe. Like back in the NHL BC (Before Concussions). Jesse Spector of The Sporting News has no idea what Burke is talking about, and the AP story quoted above rather admirably cuts to the chase:

Burke’s comments come at a time when the sport has been forced to do some soul-searching. Tough guys Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak died in a short span over the summer and Boston University doctors found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative neurological condition, in Boogaard’s brain, as they have with other former fighters.

Yep, back in the good old days Burke’s idea of noble thuggery kept the game safe. Like in 2004 when Vancouver forward (and Burke employee, we might note) Todd Bertuzzi maimed Steve Moore and ended his career in the middle of the ice. The Canucks were upset at a Moore hit on Markus Näslund from a previous game, a hit that the league ruled was legal. (It’s possible that the hit might, given recent rules changes, now be deemed illegal, but at the time the refs on the ice and the disciplinarians at home office thought it was clean.)

Before any of you Jurassic types try and suggest that hey, the Moore thing happened because fighting had been taken out of the equation, before you try and say that in the god old days an enforcer would have dealt with Moore mano a mano and all would have been peachy, you might want to review the record.

…on March 8, 2004, during another rematch between the Avalanche and Canucks, things went differently. In the first period, Moore fought Vancouver player Matt Cooke in a fairly even brawl, and served the 5-minute penalty for fighting.

That was the game where Bertuzzi tried to kill Moore. So no, the Code didn’t solve anything.

Burke, Bertuzzi, then-Canuck player Brad May, then-coach Marc Crawford and the Vancouver organization are all defendants in a suit brought by Moore that is, as best I can tell, still unresolved. With any luck, though, all defendants will wind up destitute and homeless.

Let’s be clear about something. Burke would have you believe that the Code of the North keeps everybody honest. There is no evidence, now or in the history of the game, that this is true, but dogma is immune to the corrosive influence of facts. What was going on with Steve Moore wasn’t about disincentivizing cheap shots. It was about intimidation and rank tribalism. You hit one of ours, clean or otherwise, and one of yours dies.

But hey, in the interest of examining the premise, let’s engage in some willing suspension of disbelief and pretend for a second that Burke is in fact concerned about preventing cheap shots. His theory is that the Hatfields and McCoys had it right all along and that the system was working fine. An alternate theory might suggest that you deal with cheap shots via an official disciplinary process that is guaranteed to work if followed strictly.

It goes like this: a guy takes a cheap shot, he gets penalized. If it’s a bad cheap shot he’s out of the game. Then you review the play after the game. First offender, no real harm, he gets a warning. Repeat offender, he sits three games. Then 10. Then 25. Then a season. Cheap shot that injures an opponent? The offender is suspended until the opponent can return to the ice, plus three games. Then 10. Etc.

Of course, nobody gets paid while they’re suspended. This approach is guaranteed to clean up the game and eliminate cheap shots, for one of two reasons. Either the thugs get the message and cut it out, or they’re not on the ice to do it again. Regardless, clean game, no need for enforcers. By the way, the league is reviewing every questionable encounter in every game, so even if the ref doesn’t see it when it happens, justice will still find you.

Burke pays a lot of lip service to “accountability.” I believe in accountability. But I think players ought to be accountable to the rules, to the officials, to the league, to the game, and not to an opposing goon’s primitive sense of mob justice.

I say all this as a former athlete who has, from time to time, been the enforcer. In soccer and basketball, two games I have played a lot of in my day, you get dirty players who will take shots that in some cases pose the risk of extensive injury. When it has happened to me or my teammates, there have been several occasions where later in the game I flat laid the offending thug out. Never start it, was my motto, but always finish it. Had I been a hockey player I’d have been in my share of fights. Since there’s no fighting in the sports I played, I had to cultivate other tactics for keeping opponents honest.

The thing is, I only did these things in cases where the officials refused to take action. Never once did I retaliate against an opponent who had been dealt with by legal means. Ever.

Which leads us back around to the people who run the NHL. People who tend to be clueless idiot fossils in the Burkian mode. Oh, I know, they’ve changed the rules on hits to the head in the last couple of years, but you have to be a premiere class doofus to think that’s a result of anything besides marketing concerns and a fear of litigation. How much money do you think Sidney Crosby’s extended absence due to a concussion cost the league? As we learn more about the effects of unchecked (if you’ll pardon the expression) mayhem on athletes and as we get more and more incriminating autopsy reports on guys like Boogaard, Rypien and Belak, how much money you think will be going out the door in settlements?

Right. I’d like for the league to do the right thing for the right reasons, but I’ll settle for them doing the right thing for the basest of reasons if it results in a more exciting product on the ice and healthier athletes off the ice.

Meanwhile, as long as Brian Burke is standing tall for The Code, are we all okay with sending somebody out there to give him the Steve Moore treatment?

On Nov. 8, the [student] newspaper published a full-frontal photo of a streaker who ran onto the field during that weekend’s home football game. The decision prompted outcry from some readers and from university administrators who said it was “in very poor taste.”

If this photo was so controversial and in “very poor taste,” why did the university require two months to decide to give Isom four hours to clean out his office and get outta Dodge?

No doubt lawyers were consulted. After the photo was published, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Virginia Hardy, presaged what would come to pass:

We will be having conversations with those who were involved in this decision in an effort to make it a learning experience. The goal will be to further the students’ understanding that with the freedom of the press comes a certain level of responsibility about what is appropriate and effective in order to get their message across.

Learning experience my ass. The goal of the lesson being taught here is to warn student journalists and their advisers to not cross the university when it comes to maligning its image.

First Amendment be damned; protect the good name of the university — and its abilities to maintain a flack-polished, positive public image so that it can recruit and retain students and faculty and continue to raise money for the university’s endowment and other needs.

I wonder what Sandra Mims-Rowe, retired editor of The Daily Oregonian and a six-time Pulitzer Prize receipient; Dan Neil of The Los Angeles Times, another Pulitzer Prize recipient; Margaret O’Connor, former photo editor of The New York Times and two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, and Rick Atkinson, journalist, author and three-time Pulitzer recipient, think about canning the adviser. These distinguished journalists are graduates of East Carolina University touted on the university’s website.

The university’s blunt message to student reporters and editors (and future student media advisers) is obvious: Journalism is about maintaining others’ standards of taste rather than their own editorial judgments on how to depict reality. In other words, protect the university’s image.

The university is wrong here: Publishing photos of a person who streaked nude across Bagwell Field at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium in a game against the University of Southern Mississippi is news occurring in a public forum. Security staffers tackled the man at the 50-yard line. The photos depicted that. Thus the photos provided a visual account of how security staffers handled themselves in a difficult situation. That’s what newspapers do: Hold government (in this case, the university) accountable for its actions.

The editor, Cailtin Hale, defended the newspaper’s decision:

This decision was made because we felt that our audience, which is primarily the ECU student body, should have access to unedited and factual photos of the streaking incident at last Saturday’s ECU football game. While the photos may be seen as offensive to some, the photos were not meant to be seen as sexually suggestive or insulting, but instead an accurate account of Saturday’s events. [emphasis added]

But the newspaper’s editors did not stop with merely publishing controversial photos. This is a cops and courts story: The paper followed the court case, covering the arrest of the person accused of being the streaker, and doing a follow-up on the court appearance in which the accused was given back his clothes and allowed to apologize to the court.

But all this doesn’t hand Isom, the student media adviser since 2008, his job back.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said firing a man who has advised student publications professionally since 1994 raises First Amendment concerns. From a center press release:

“There’s no camouflaging what this is, which is retaliation for an editorial judgment made by the students that was completely within the students’ authority to make,” LoMonte said. “They’re clearly punishing the adviser for something he not only didn’t control, but legally couldn’t control.”

Isom said he has no problem fighting his termination, and isn’t ruling out legal action against the university.

“If I was not willing to stand up for a First Amendment issue, then I wouldn’t have been advising them the way that I was advising them,” he said. “I would have told them, ‘Yeah, don’t run any controversial pictures, don’t make anybody mad.’”

In my teaching career, I have advised three collegiate newspapers. Students occasionally err in judgment. Such errors in student judgment are the cost universities must bear if they offer journalism programs and encourage independent student newspapers. But not all decisions universities find appalling are errors in student judgments.

This ECU case was not an error in judgment by editor Hale and her staff. They captured a reality that occurred in full view of fans sitting in a 50,000-person stadium. I would have been disappointed in a judgment to not run photos of an event with so many witnesses.

Isom should sue. He did nothing that warranted the university stripping him of his job and his reputation. The university should save itself the cost of defending against the lawsuit and hire him back. Immediately.

Then again, this is the university that graduated Vince and Linda McMahon, founders and chief executives of World Wrestling Entertainment. Maybe the university prefers to wrestle in the mud of public opinion.

With apologies to Pete Seger

Where have all the Tebows gone?
Zero passing
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Can’t pass at all

Where have all the Tebows gone?
Corners picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

I know, I know, this is mean-spirited. But I was pretty darn gracious when he was winning, and even posited that maybe he would be successful. I tried to make the case for Tebow. Alas, the players in the NFL are just too big and too good for the only offense Tebow can run to work.

And too well coached. At the college level, Georgia Tech wins about 80% of its regular season games, but never wins a bowl game. The reason is simple–when opponents have a week to prepare, GT’s offense is baffling. But with a month to prepare, it’s athletes vs. athletes, and GT gets creamed (even by a team from the cream puff PAC-12.) The Broncos had some success for a few weeks, but the pros are far more sophisticated than college, and it didn’t take defenses long to figure Denver’s offense out. And of course, under pressure, Tim reverted to the same bad habits that he had in college–giving up on plays too early and throwing off his back foot. Although I am sure the same idiots are still calling into Denver talk radio and making excuses, and accusing John Fox of bad play calling, the Tebow experiment is over.

And by finishing 8-8, Denver ensured it won’t get a real quarterback in the draft.

I’ve written some lately about the NBA, which despite all its flaws is still my favorite North American professional sports league. (My favorite pro league anywhere, of course, is the English Premiership, the greatest soccer league in the world.) In particular, I’ve pondered The League’s structural issues vis a vis its big vs. small markets, and let’s be clear in understanding that the new labor deal did not fix those problems. It merely swept them under the rug for a few years where they can fester, multiply and grow really big teeth. The next labor conflict is going to be a monster bitch with ‘roid rage, and ain’t nobody interested in my ideas about what has to happen structurally to solve things long term. My on-court rules change proposals are equally doomed.

Part of what I’ve talked about is the freedom of movement question. Put briefly, the players want as much mobility as they can get (they’d love pure free agency, like what you have in pro leagues everywhere else in the world). Part of the motivation is obviously financial – more freedom means they can twist the owners for more money. But part of it – a huge part – is cultural. Some places are cooler to live than others. This matters more than you might imagine.

I’ve heard the question posed as to why the NBA has such nasty issues with its small vs. large markets when the NFL has very few such issues at all. At a casual glance this might seem like a good question, but the truth is that the NFL is so damned huge it doesn’t matter who plays in the Super Bowl. Indianapolis vs. New Orleans? Man, what a great game that was for everybody (except the Colts, anyway). But an NBA Finals between the Pacers and Hornets? David Stern’s heart just seized up a little bit.

Okay, fine, the league does better when its alpha markets succeed. But why do hoops players seem so much more destination-conscious than football players? A-Pete has no problems living in Minny. The greatest QB alive, in the estimation of many analysts and fans, seems to love Indianapolis. And so on. Meanwhile, the Cavaliers were unable to lure top-flight free agents to Cleveland even with the promise of max contracts and the chance to play with best hoops player on the planet.

WTF?

The difference between the leagues is cultural, and the differences are profound. Bear with me as I oversimplify just a tad to make a point. In essence, basketball is an urban sport, whereas football is a suburban and rural sport. Basketball thrives in city environments where space is at a premium. You can play full-on hoops on a few dozen square feet of asphalt or concrete, but you can’t really play football under those conditions. Football requires more room. Fields and dirt and, ideally, grass. Which means the further you get from a city center, the better your chances of finding the right conditions.

So many of your great high school basketball programs? Inner city. Great football programs, on the other hand, usually crop up out in the ‘burbs. I’m generalizing, like I say, but I’m also describing a clear tendency that I think we all recognize when we see it.

But what does this have to do with football players being willing to move to Cincinnati? At the risk of offending, there are a lot of corn-fed white boys who grew up playing football so far out in the sticks that a place like Kansas City actually seems exciting to them. It IS a big city. Meanwhile, if you’re an inner city kid, used to the pulse of a big city, a night on the town in Nashville might as well be a camping trip.

It’s not a racial thing, either, although it might seem that way. Plenty of young black men play football and seem just fine living in places like Charlotte and Jacksonville. But most of them, I’m guessing, didn’t grow up in urban environments (where they would have had a hard time finding a place to develop their blocking and tackling skills). When was the last time you heard a player, black, white or otherwise, pitching a hissy about a smaller market and booking time on ESPN to announce his Decision to take his talents to South Beach? Hell, when was the last time any NFL player made a lot of noise about the Dolphins? In football, this seems not to even intrude on the players’ awareness.

What this adds up to is that the NBA’s player movement issue goes well beyond money, and it won’t be solved by any amount of salary capping, luxury taxing or revenue sharing. Remember – LeBron, D-Wade and Bosh all took less money to play in Miami. Remember that the next time you hear somebody telling you that all they care about is money.

As the NBA brain trust begins planning for the next labor conflict, which I think is due in about six years, it needs to take these cultural concerns into account. What it does about them I don’t know, but the problems are profound.

Heretofore I’ve talked in terms of small markets and large markets, but in truth there are three kinds of NBA markets right now. It might be fun, if not outright instructive, to have a look at the categories.

Category 1: The Riviera

The destination. The big time. The brightest lights, the fastest women, red velvet ropes and fountains overflowing with Cristall. These cities combine unparalleled night life with a top-notch commitment to winning (luxury tax? Here, let me light that cigar with a C-note). At the end of the year you either won the title or you came up short of your goal. (Granted, the Knicks always come up short and the Heat are nouveau riche, but expectations are expectations regardless.) If you grew up a competitive athlete who thrived on the energy, the vibe of the city, this is where you have to be. There aren’t many Riviera teams:

• LA (Lakers)
• Miami
• Boston
• New York

Category 2: The Career Town

You know how regular people sometimes move to a new city for a job, even if that city is really nothing special? Happens to hoops players, too. These cities and organizations are less desirable than the Riviera. Maybe smaller. Fewer bright lights. The women aren’t quite as hot and the nightclubs close up a little earlier, especially on a Monday night. The organizations often can’t afford to pay the luxury tax so you’re going to have to be resourceful. Your team probably doesn’t realistically expect to contend for the title – your measure of success may be simply making the playoffs. But you’d still go there if the money was right or if there was an anchor player who you might build a winner around, somebody like Tim Duncan or Dirk Nowitzki or Kevin Durant or Blake Griffin. These cities:

• Chicago*
• LA (Clippers)*
• Brooklyn*
• Dallas
• Denver
• Detroit
• Houston
• Phoenix
• Portland
• San Antonio**
• Atlanta
• Golden State
• Oklahoma City**
• Orlando
• Philadelphia
• Toronto
• Washington

* These are tough. Chicago is a huge city, although it’s not really a sexy one. There’s a good argument to be made that it ought to be a fringe Riviera market. The Clippers are in LA, but they’re the Clippers. Now, though, they have Griffin and CP3 and a set of rules that forces their cheap-ass owner to devote a certain amount of cash to salaries. Within the next couple of years they may evolve into a Riviera team. And the jury is out on Brooklyn. Great new location, rich/ambitious owner. Maybe they become a Riviera outfit, too, but it’s too early to tell.

** My gut tells me that these two are masquerading anomalies. Tim Duncan’s decision to stay in SA made them a viable franchise and if Durant stays in OKC the same will be true for the duration of his career. Without the lucky break of a freak star deciding he liked the slower pace of life, though, these teams quickly drop out of the Career Town category and into…

Category 3: Siberia

Hells no. If you’re there it’s because you’re stuck there. You got drafted and your free agency hasn’t kicked in or you’re just not good enough to get the attention of a better franchise. Or you’re just one of those miserable bastards drawing a check. Even then, though, you’d rather be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Who are we talking about?

• Charlotte
• Cleveland
• Indianapolis
• Memphis
• Milwaukee
• Minneapolis
• New Orleans
• Sacramento
• Salt Lake City

The news for the owners is that nothing they’re ever going to be able to do will make SLC cool. Yeah, you get the occasional Stockton or Malone who’s okay with that, but there aren’t enough of those guys to go around to make all of your cities viable. And it’s hard to build any kind of continuity around a sham. The fans know when a player is biding his time. Trust me, I live in Denver and Melo was counting the seconds until his escape, despite the fact that the 5280 is one of the most desirable cities to live in the entire nation.

For everybody except the kid who grew up in the big city and sees everything else as Bumfuck.

Televangelist Pat Robertson doesn’t mince words when it comes to faith and this time is no exception. The outspoken faith-keeper blasted Saturday Night Live‘s recent skit of Denver Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow on Monday, calling the parody a “disgusting” attack on Christianity.

 “There’s an anti-Christian bigotry that is just disgusting and I think Saturday Night Live did a parody of that, had Jesus come in,” Robertson said.

Robertson even went on to suggest that if SNL had done a similar parody mocking Muslims, there would be “bodies on the street.”

This morning it was reported that Pat Robertson slammed the SNL skit making fun of Tebow and chalked up much of the anti-Tebow sentiment to “anti-Christian” bigotry. And he’s right.

There are two basic reasons not to like Tebow. First, he’s not a conventional quarterback. His motion takes a week to complete and the resulting throw is pathetic. I’ve seen better velocity on stuff coming out of freshmen’s mouths after a frat party.

But the other reason is that he pushes his religion in his our faces, a habit evangelicals feel is completely appropriate and indeed required by their religion, and the rest of us feel is invasive and annoying–just like the way Islam forces itself on people in Saudi Arabia. I know both evangelicals and Muslims feel they are doing us a favor and saving us from ourselves, but I don’t want to be saved from myself. (And no, I am not comfortable with my fellow liberals trying to save poor people from themselves either.)

So yes, it’s true. Part of the reason I don’t like Tebow is that he sticks his Christianity in my face. If you want to call that bigotry, OK. That’s not quite the right definition of the word, but Pat’s not the sharpest thorn on the crown. Of course, what Robertson didn’t say, and is also contributing to the whole thing: Tebow only has his job in the pros because of pro-Christian bigotry. He never would have gotten past third string without it.

Nonetheless, I like to think I am better than Pat Robertson (not a very high bar) and his closed-minded ilk, and when I evaluate Tebow on his merits, I come out thinking he’s not a bad quarterback. No, Tebow doesn’t look like a quarterback, but Ryan Leaf did look like one, and see where that got us. Quarterbacking is about a lot more than having a cannon sewn to your shoulder. It’s also about vision and anticipation, and Tebow seems to be pretty good at that. My rookie quarterback, Caleb “Heinous” Hanie, is throwing three or four picks a game. Tebow isn’t, because he only throws to wide open recievers. At least he knows what he can’t do.

And the hoopla about Brady schooling Tebow yesterday is nonsense. Brady doesn’t play Tebow, his cornerbacks do. And Tebow doesn’t play Brady, Von Miller does. The truth is Tebow had a pretty good game, with almost three hundred yards of offense.

No I don’t buy all that hyperventilated nonsense of fools like Skip Bayless (“HE’S A BALLER. HE’S A BALLER”) who believes Tebow is the second coming of Sammy Baugh (or Fran Tarkenton or Steve Young or somebody.) Tebow may very well go to the Pro Bowl, but if he does that will say more about the Pro Bowl than it does about his prowess as a quarterback.

At best, I still think Tebow is Bobby Douglass without the arm. But even that is better than I expected.

Wrong idea, eh?  Were I a talented black athlete, I wonder if all those Confederate flags that still fly along the road side would bother me. Or the fact  that UM has not been particularly successful in retiring  its mascot “Colonel Reb.”  In case you’ve never seen a UM football game, and they’re dreadful so there’s no reason you’d want to, Colonel Reb is a goateed plantation owner. I kid you not. Nah, I am sure as a young black man it wouldn’t bother me one bit to have a plantation owner standing on the sidelines yelling “Run, boy, run!” Nor would it probably bother me that the replacement mascot is named the “Rebel Black Bear” or that most students have refused to adopt the bear and instead have started using Ackbar (the rebel leader from Star Wars, get it?)

Of course, the local press has said that the coach is full of it.

No doubt. Despite being in a hotbed of football talent and playing in the most prestigious football conference in America, the University of Mississippi this year was 2 and 10, and the 107th best football team in America.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was lamenting what looked (at the time) like the end of the road for the NBA 2011-12 season, I explained that the league was facing an especially nasty confound. You had three factions (players, big market owners and small market owners), and there was simply no common ground between two of them (the players and the small market owners). When all the motivations were factored in, it was simply hard to imagine a long-term accord that served everyone. Now that the parties have settled, I’m looking at the new collective bargaining agreement and trying to understand how it’s anything more than a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.

I see how the players won. They gave back a few percent of revenue but prevailed on several critical structural issues. The big market owners (BMOs) have to deal with some new luxury tax issues but they’re still positioned to spend big and dominate the league. The faction that was the problem all along – the small market owners (SMOs) – seem to have emerged just as screwed as they were going in, maybe moreso.

The free agent and trade chatter in recent days proves the point. Chris Paul is angling to escape New Orleans. Dwight Howard is going to leverage his way out of Orlando. The Nets, the Lakers, the Celtics, the Knicks and the Clippers are the main suitors for these talents, with SMOs being just as out in the cold as they have been for years. My own Denver Nuggets have massive amounts of salary cap space, but there isn’t even a whisper of a chance that any premier players are headed this way.

And that’s not the worst of it for the SMOs. Thanks to one of those structural issues, there’s not only a salary cap, but a salary floor – even the least profitable small market franchise has to spend 85% of the cap max on player salaries this season and next and 90% thereafter. Bill Simmons explains some of the implications in excruciating detail, and his analysis is well worth the read. The short version goes like this: the new salary structure is going to assure that a lot of players make more than they’re worth. And a lot of those bad contracts are going to land on SMOs, who can’t attract the top talent but have to pony up the cash anyway.

Say you’re the GM of the New Sactowaukee Grizcats, for instance. No franchise players are coming your way at any price. But you have to dedicate around $49.3M to salaries minimum, even if the players who will sign with you suck. And, by the way, you won’t be competing for any titles.

Congratulations, SMOs. Oh, and by the way, this is the hose job you got when the players didn’t have any leverage. As Simmons explains, just wait and see what happens in six years, when either side can opt out.

The players could exact their revenge six years from now, if the league is booming and the owners have a vested interest in NOT missing a single game. Hmmmm … guess who will have the leverage at that point? I could see the players threatening to strike before the 2017 playoffs unless they get a better deal. I could also see the owners quickly caving — because again, you never want things to stop when you’re makingmoney — with everything getting briskly resolved and the players gaining an appropriate raise. That’s how big business works. It’s all about the leverage. This time around, the players didn’t have enough of it.

To sum up, then, my point has been that SMOs can’t be competitive. At best, they’re like the “jobbers” of pro wrestling. They’re there for one reason only – to lose to the superstars.

Ultimately, what the league needs is an operating dynamic that makes everyone happy and that allows everyone to be competitive. This means:

• Players enjoy freedom of movement – if the superstars want to congregate in sexy hotspots like NYC, LA and South Beach, so be it.
• Big market owners can spend to win and reap the benefits of their investments.
• Small markets can be competitive at the highest levels even though they can’t outspend the big markets or attract top players drawn to the big city nightlife.

How might this be accomplished? One thing is for sure, it won’t be a function of salary structures and CBAs. I explained in the last post what those problems are. What’s left? Simple: the rules. The laws dictating how the game is played on the court.

And the truth is that quite a lot can be accomplished relatively simply. The rules at present are as pro-prima donna as it gets. They favor isolations and make it very hard to defend a good two-superstar pick-and-roll system. How often do we hear about a player “taking over the game down the stretch”? That answer is closely related to how the game is marketed. We’re not encouraged to tune in as the Lakers face the Heat. We’re enticed by Kobe and the Lakers versus Miami’s Big Three. The Hornets don’t play the Clips, CP3 takes on Blake Griffin. The league has engineered its entire product around individuals, and it’s hard for me not to laugh myself just a little silly when the very star system they live by turns around and bites them in the ass, as it does every time a diva like Carmelo or LeBron holds a city hostage before finally taking their talents somewhere the lights shine a little brighter.

Want to minimize the impact that the divas can exert? Want to let them play by their rules but create a space where Toronto can compete on a level playing field? Sure. Change the rules to make it a team sport. Eliminate all the rules that limit what a defense can do, for instance. No more defensive three second calls. If the best way to take away the other team’s star post player is to pack the whole roster in the lane, fine.

A player like Carmelo benefits because he can hold the ball all night. You could implement something like the six-second call used in the NCAA at the NBA level. So hypothetically, you might implement a rule that no offensive player can possess the ball for more than five seconds without shooting or passing. That’s a little more gimmicky than I tend to like, but you could do it, and the sum of these rules would play to the strengths of an offense that was team-minded and it would put a crimp in the mojo of your superstar ball-hogs. New Sactowaukee may not be able to put the best player on the court, but they could perhaps put the best team on the court. Yes, talent and results do correlate, but hoops is one of those games where the whole can be more than the sum of the parts.

I don’t pretend to have a comprehensive answer here, and parts of what we might propose may not work in practice. But in principle, what the small markets of the NBA need is a competitive structure that increases their viability in the face of increasing player power that challenges the integrity of the game, both on and off the court.

It might work. If you’re a small market owner, it beats the hell out of where you’re going to be when the players opt out in six years.

• Tim Tebow, late in the first half, finally completes his first pass. Guy at next table, vibrating with excitement, says to friend “they talk about Tebow being a football player, but that’s the great quarterback!”
• Tim Tebow runs for a couple of yards. Nearby fan to companion: “They should let Tebow call his own plays!!”
• In overtime, the offensive line opens a nice hole and Willis McGahee hits it for a big gainer. Broncos fan, as McGahee is running: “TEBOW!!!!!!”

Some interesting statistics:

• Denver’s record in 2011 with Tim Tebow as a starter: 5-1.
• Combined record of teams Denver has beaten in 2011 with Tim Tebow as the starter: 24-30.
• Average points surrendered by Denver defense in those wins: 15.
• Average points scored per team per game, NFL, 2011: 21.85.
• Tim Tebow Passer Rating: 78.4 (ranks 24th in league).
• Tim Tebow QBR: 36.2 (ranks 30th in the league).

Some random observations, apropos of nothing, really:

• It is one thing to win because of a player. It’s another thing entirely to win despite that player.
• It’s good when a QB makes a precision throw for a completion. However, every practice squad quarterback in the league can make that same precision throw. The difference between star and practice squad is the ability to do it consistently.
• Those who dismiss objective flaws in a player’s game by saying “he’s a winner” are suggesting that success has nothing to do with, you know, ability. Perhaps people who lack ability themselves have a vested interest in this being true. Hard to say.
• So much talk about late comebacks. So little talk about the ineptitude earlier in the game that necessitated the comeback.

I, and most people who think they know something about football, have been pretty vocal about the fact that Tebow sucks as a quarterback. The people who disagree with us insist his intangibles make up for his lack of tangibles, an argument so absurd that we have trouble getting our heads around it. If tangibles don’t matter, maybe I should not have been so quick to dismiss a career as a porn star.

Of course, what drives most of us crazy is that the people who are making the argument for Tebow happen to be not only white, but bat-shit crazy evangelicals, raising the suspicion in our minds that maybe this isn’t about football and logic at all, but about racism or religion. After all, for years after blacks were finally allowed to play professional football they weren’t allowed to play quarterback because they lacked intangibles like intelligence, unlike white quarterbacks like Terry Bradshaw and Kerry Collins, the latter of whom was so smart that he thought his offensive line (the guys charged with protecting him) would enjoy hearing racist jokes. But Kerry failed to notice his O-line was black, and the next game they looked less like football players and more like matadors letting bulls rush by. In other words, the intelligence thing was yet another bit of back door discrimination.

And evangelicals really do believe that God intercedes actively and continuously in daily events, meaning there’s no reason not to believe that he would stick out a heavenly toe to trip a cornerback if it meant one of Timmy’s recievers could get open. Of course that still leaves the problem that Tim is about as accurate as a forty-four magnum handgun with a sawed-off barrel, that is to say, not at all. So there’s no guarantee that Tim could hit said reciever if he stood all by himself in the middle of the field while God smote every defender in sight.

But tonight, having watched Tebow’s crew win another game they should not have won, I am rethinking my position. No, I still don’t think God, were he or she to exist, would bother to rig a professional sports game for the benefit of a handful of fans. Nor do I believe that if she were to do so, she would do it for evangelicals, who are about as obnoxious as you can get and not be a coach for Penn State. And I certainly don’t believe that Tebow can throw or ever will be able to.

But what I am rethinking is my belief that you have to be able to throw to be a quarterback. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by listening to thousands of hours of ESPN and the like where broadcasters drone on about “this is quarterback’s league” and “you must have an elite quarterback to win.” Because obviously, that ain’t true. Philip Rivers can throw a football through a donut at sixty yards and what good has that done the Chargers? Tebow throws like my sister and he’s 4 and 1.

Maybe the fact that Matt Millen, the one human being who has proved beyond all doubt that he knows absolutely nothing about football, can get a job as an expert should have tipped me off.

In other words, Tebow is fine. It’s football that’s fucked.