I disagree. He is not well informed. He often struggles to know what your average sports fan already knows. Ty Willingham being 8-0 a few years back for example. I dont care at all about college football, but around here any casual sports fan would remember that. He doesnt really know anything about the entire NFL outside of the Bears, as evidenced by him agreeing with Terry that Baltimore's defense is in a top 5 discussion(in reality it will probably finish in the bottom 10), and he is woefully underprepared when dissecting upcoming teams, and in the case of the Jags game, even bragged about his ignorance of their team.

He also has an extremely annoying tendency of reading 1500 word columns word for word on the air. Thats not doing the radio basics very well. Its annoying as fuck and makes people want to tune out.

Mac does the radio basics way better, even if he speaks slightly worse than Bernsie. He understands what people care about and what they dont, and with a few exceptions, he usually tries to stick to the stuff people cares about. He knows that your average chicago sports fan doesn't give a shit about PSU or Lance Armstrong. Dan probably knows that too but being a sanctimonious dick is more important than pleasing his audience. Part of these flaws are what you correctly labeled as being an irritating douche, part of them are not. I disagree that the right partner would alieviate most of these flaws of Bernsie's though. I cant envision a day when he comes off as anything other than a wannbe intellectual(he's not even intelligent enough to be called a pseudo-intellectual), smug, underinformed asshole. And he's not nearly as clever or funny as you and him think he is.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

I agree with most of this but would add that I believe Bernstein does have a talent for making others perceive him as smart even if he is not nearly as intelligent as some believe. Many of his arguments are ridiculous and contradictory, yes. However, he does manage to have a following of people who hang on his every word and lick his ass at every opportunity. I will admit that while I find - perhaps even the majority - of his throughts to be reaches and semantical arguments, I do look forward to his analysis of games and wonder what his take will be. In this regard, I do find him to be talented in at least appearing analytical.

Have I ever felt this way about Terry Boers? Not once. But Terry Boers has the same self-righteous and asinine comments toward the view of others as Bernstein does. It is laughable that he criticizes anyone given his own lack of thought, and deep down, he knows this. It is why he can't complete a coherent thought around Bernstein. He knows that one slip of the tongue, and he could be on the "wrong" end of the argument. I don't like either one of them, but in my eyes Bernstein certainly has more credibility than Boers, and it makes his criticism of others at least more plausible. Terry Boers is the epitome of misplaced arrogance.

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^^ I think this is why so many years ago Ditka called him out exactly as he should have. "You would be the guy..." Who you crappin Terry. That is so lost on most that Terry was full of shit and a boob years ago.

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Elections have consequences.

I guess I never got much of an arrogant vibe from boers. I think he would admit that he doesn't know much about football. He thinks he knows more about basketball than he does, but so do both of them. Bernsie will emphasize something like "The smart, good, defensive teams will stop the initial screen roll that the other team uses to setup its half court, and unless they have a spectacular iso player, the offense will struggle.". Um.. no shit. That's not basketball analysis. Thats common fucking sense. The obvious follow up question, one that another Bernsie-type who actually knows his shit would ask, is how do they stop that pick n roll. Is it better to coach the guard to chase over the top, or to go underneath? This obviously depends on your personell, and how slow footed your big is. With the Bulls you want to chase over the top because Noah is agile enough to go out 15-17 feet and still recover on the way to the rim. Also one thing Thibs has brought to the league in this scenario is the use of overloading the strong side after the pick, and using wing players to force the ball back out to the perimeter. Telling me "You gotta stop the pick n roll!" isn't telling me anything.

I got kind off topic there, but it's irritating to me that people percieve Bernsie to be an educated and well-informed sports fan. He just isn't. And I agree with you that that is the perception. He comes off as a guy that reads a blog from a sports analytical website, and then goes into the show using that as his narrative, except he clearly is often incapable of extrapolating on that narrative because it isn't actually his idea or narrative.

I've said this before, but I think the few times that Boers come up with an original thought, or even an unoriginal one that challenges Bernsie, he usually comes out at least even, and often better than Bernsie. September baseball seemed to reinforce this, at least to me. Also the whole Roger Goodell thing from yesterday. Boers sees the red flags popping up from Goodell's side of it, and Bernsie doesn't.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

I can't figure out why Boers takes shots at stutterers, like Dan Hampton, when he constantly fumbles through the English language.

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way

Don't you you think McNeil is, in a sense, more likeable for that reason? And he's always had better results. It probably upsets Bernstein that he can't bully Mac...maybe that's why he tries to give it to Meat so often. Bernstein withholds stuff with McNeil, agrees with him a lot, where you wouldn't think he would. I think some of it is calculated bravado. It's why I don't think he'd have the balls to take things over. He doesn't know for sure if he'd win. I agree that time, age, and McNeil's past works against him but it might not be enough, and Bernstein knows it.

Grover Dill mean but funny. Terry could be Farkus.

I don't know who would win any type of "war" in the long run, but I agree that Bernstein wouldn't push Mcneil too far for this reason: Mcneil doesn't take shit. He will for a bit, but he just wouldn't allow himself to be bullied too far. He would eventually get pissed. Bernstein is a classic bully - he picks on weak, insecure guys like Spiegel, Schuster, and the newspaper guys who he never has to confront. I don't agree with Mcneil on many things, but his past alone tells us he wouldn't take too much shit. It also helps that Mcneil has some political capital that producers and others don't.

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I love when Dan calls us all stupid for not embracing the same middlebrow crap that he does. FiveThirtyEight is electoral coverage for people too stupid to understand Princeton Election Consortium. IF YOU DON'T YET OWN THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MALCOLM GLADWELL, YOU ARE DANGEROUSLY UNDERINFORMED ABOUT MAVENS.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

Ironic that Bernstein likes this guy. He has a tweet that sums up Bernstein pretty well:

@fivethirtyeight wrote:

"The surest sign that you're a hack is that you think everyone else is a hack."

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Yeah. This thing. How the hell was Dan missing the fact that it's an utter dog and pony show to have the previous powerful representative of ownership yell at you instead of the current powerful representative of ownership? I mean, DUH. Dan tried to cover by saying "well, they don't talk to each other much." Well, okay, but obviously they talked to each other now when Goodell called in this obvious favor. Paul Tagliabue is not a third party. Come on.

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The Goodell stuff is the least surprising thing ever. Dan's never met a labor-busting plutocrat he wouldn't apologize for.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

"I, too, feel you should be suspended forever and possibly killed."

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