Dave In Champaign wrote:
Irish Boy wrote:
Dave In Champaign wrote:
Irish Boy wrote:
By the way, when being blocked, Shea McClellan is fucking useless. Fire Phil Emery.
Haven't you been listening? Defensive linemen are
so fast these days, no tackle* can block them one-on-one!
*Unless the tackle were LeBron James, or something like thatWhen he only watches Bears games and thus sees nothing but Julius Peppers and Gabe Carimi, I can see how he'd think that.
This is it in a nutshell. Dan talks about baseball as if he just completed a stats postdoc at Stanford, but he won't take five minutes every Monday to glance at FO or PFF. He swoons over Bowen dropping mundane terms like "landmark," but he won't take the time to hit Smart Football so he can recognize all that stuff himself. He regularly says really dumb shit, like "what did Sid Gillman run?" and yells at meatballs that the 46 is defunct, even though the Jets and Ravens run it all the time. In a vacuum, none of that is a big deal; sports media (and sports radio in particular) are populated by all manner of simpletons. The difference is that despite all that ignorance, Dan still puts on his talking-to-a-five-year-old voice and explains terms like "stack-and-shed" and "flips [his] hips" like he's performing a public service to all us rubes. Until he evinces any awareness that there exist 31 teams that don't play at Soldier Field, most anything Dan says about the NFL can be safely ignored.
In his candid moments he acknowledges that he doesn't know much about football. Then he goes back to mocking the rubes.
SpiralStairs wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
And no better way to end it than to talk about ratings!
I actually thought those numbers were pretty interesting. I know this has probably been said elsewhere but Roger Goodell must cream his jeans just thinking about how popular fantasy football has become. Before I started playing fantasy in 2006 I might watch a couple of NFL games a month, now I don't think twice about spending close to 12 hours on a Sunday consuming all things NFL.
If I were Roger Goodell, my main concerns would be 1.) NFL Network has been a financial mistake, though no one will acknowledge it as such; 2.) a much larger than acknowledged percentage of the value of the league is tied up in handouts from states and municipalities which might not be around now that no one has any money; and the ticking CTE timebomb, which regardless of the science of it threatens to cut away a healthy amount of the mushy fandom at the margins.
Actually, Goodell faces the same problem that all businesses that are at the very top of their market face: what do you do when there really isn't anywhere to go but down? I'm not saying the NFL will turn into the NHL -- I doubt it will be supplanted from the top spot in American sportsdom for a long, long time -- but I expect that by 2020 or so the league is going to start really feeling some of these effects, to the point that its dominance will not go completely unquestioned.