An Analogy

Having Tim Tebow on your team is like being the only country with nuclear weapons. You're glad it's you, but it's still kinda creepy.

Your SEC Champion Florida Gators

Your SEC Champion Florida Gators

The creepily impressive football machine has led the Gators to an SEC championship! Bring on the Okies! The preceding assumes the computers cooperate, of course.

Jacksonville versus Houston on MNF

Jacksonville versus Houston on MNF

Tune in now! The Jaguars are putting on a clinic for the entire country on the fine art of sucking at football.

FSU Safety accepts Rhodes scholarship.

FSU Safety accepts Rhodes scholarship.

You won't see me sending many kudos out to the Maroon rejects out in Tallahassee, but when somebody juggles being a Division 1A (Sorry, Football Bowl Subdivision) football player with pulling off a Rhodes scholarship, that deserves notice. I won't feel too bad when he goes to Med School at UF.

Can we please find a buyer for FC Dallas?

Can we please find a buyer for FC Dallas?

I have to say I am getting pretty frustrated with the ownership of FCD.

First, Kenny Cooper seems likely to move on, possibly to Eintracht Frankfurt in the German Bundesliga. As sad as it is, it is an understandable move, but what is galling is the ownership's apparent refusal to offer more than $325,000 to $350,000 per season, when he has clearly produced like a Designated Player.

Of course, it doesn't end there. FC Dallas is also currently engaged in a public spat with Defensive midfielder Pablo Richetti, who is claiming for the second offseason in a row that the team has not followed up on verbal promises to rework his contract if he played well. Richetti has been the defensive anchor for Dallas, has shown the ability to begin the attack from the back with smart passes. Throw in the fact that he is the clear leader on the field, and you have someone who has earned a raise. I think it's also no surprise that we have heard similar complaints from several other players, including former Hoop and MLS All-Star Juan Toja.

To throw further fuel on the fire, consider the Hunts' other MLS team, the recently crowned champions Columbus Crew, who may lose their coach, two-time MLS Cup champion and NCAA champion Sigi Schmid because he has had the unmitigated GALL to ask for a contract approaching the amount the Hunts paid for FCD's own resident no-pro-experience, never-closed-the-deal-at-SMU, kick-my-nuts-in-an-infomercial Schellas Hyndman. The Crew may also lose MLS MVP and assist leader Guillermo Barros Schelotto because the Crew no longer have enough MLS "allocation" funny money to avoid having to pay Schelotto the whopping 200 grand out-of-pocket it would take to keep him.

Congratulations, boys, your Dad would be proud.

Back to Basics

This post should start a new and (very?) occasional series of posts that come to me when I realize a forum response I think I'd want to write is careening off the rails, both in regards to length and content; here we go.

There are apparently four new American Football ("Gridiron") leagues planning to start up in the next year, and I have to admit I'd only heard of the first two on the list:

• -The UFL, planning to play in the Fall on Friday nights, and backed by, among others, Dallas Mavericks and would-be Chicago Cubs owner Mark Cuban.
• -The AAFL, which plans to play in spring in or near college towns, have territorial rights for teams to grab players from nearby schools, and require those players to have college degrees.
• -The New USFL, which somehow claims to be a direct descendant of the 1980s experiment that brought us Herschel Walker, Steve Young, and three-dollar antitrust judgments. The new league seems to care about as much for the traditions of the game as WWE's XFL did.
  
• -The UNGL, which had its Wikipedia page deleted and has logos, but no team locations or names. This one is just confusing and looks more like some graphic designer's fantasy league than a legitimate organization.

I think one of these leagues (I'll nominate UFL as it's the only one I think might play more than one season's worth of games) should take a few small steps back towards gridiron's heritage (including its distant shared ancestry with soccer) and get away from the overly coach-centric mentality the NFL has developed. Obviously, no one wants to return to the bad old days of inadequate protective gear and no substitutes, but there's a chance here for legitimate product differentiation that I for one would appreciate, especially since none of these leagues will be attracting top talent, especially if they all somehow managed to be active at the same time. Namely, I would recommend the following:

1. No TV timeouts. If there's no on-field reason to stop, then for god's sake don't stop. Gridiron already gives you plenty of chances to go to commercial. The timeouts that occur immediately after the kickoff after a score (i.e. ONE play after you got back from the last commercial break) are particularly galling and slow the game down.
2. No telecommunications gear in the helmets. When you do that, you might as well give the coaches a couple of Joysticks and mount electric motors to the players asses. If you can't get your play in with hand signals or a messenger guard, then let the QB call the damn thing.
3. Only players can call timeouts. The game is supposed to be 11v11. At least keep it that way on the field.
4. Strangely enough, I am a fan of instant replay in Gridiron, as the stop-start nature of the game allows it to be used with minimal disruption, but have the reviews done by the officials, as in college, and not via coaches' challenges. If I want to see a contest between two grumpy, middle-aged assholes, I'll watch chess. This is supposed to be a sport. This would also allow institutionalization of the unwritten rule that only significant plays should challenged (e.g. scoring plays, 1st down conversions, and turnovers).

I'm sure I'll think of more as the NFL and College seasons unfold, but there's a start. I'm open to suggestions.

Blogging from my smartphone

While I test this method of blogging, I also want to note that match reports for every single match are just not a realistic option for the immediate future, mostly because I don't want to do them. Also, we're about to enter the window where where we have two soccer leagues and two football leagues going on at the same time, and I almost pooped my pants.

I plan to keep this blog around though, just so I have diary of sorts for my sports related thoughts. Stay tuned, just maybe not too attentively.