5 Sports Fixes

Five sports fixes that should occur immediately:

1 – Eliminate the extra point in football.  Completely worthless play.  The game is already long enough with all the replays, why keep a play that is not interesting at all and has a 99 percent success rate?  Seven points for a TD, or you can take 6 points and go for two.  Fixed.  Done.  Next.

2  - Touchless icing in the NHL.  The NHL is the only place that touch up icing still exists, raising injury risk and just being completely needless.

3 – Install more instant replay in baseball. No sport has more blown calls that can be clearly rectified by replay.  The games are already, what, four hours?  What’s another ten minutes to get it right?

4 – Speed up, already. Speaking of slow baseball games, keep the batter in the box and let’s have a pitch every fifteen seconds, minimum.  Rules to speed up the game already exist.  Enforce them. 

5 – Eliminate flopping in the NBA by calling a technical foul for obvious flops.  The NHL penalizes flopping, the NBA should follow suit.  You should not have to fall down to draw an offensive foul.  These are grown men, probably the best athletes on the planet, let them bang and get the Miami Heat, I mean floppers, out of the game. 

I just made the entire sports world better in about six minutes.  Don’t you feel better?  

Overrated, CLAP CLAP CLAP.

Imagine there's this guy at work.  He's been there forever and you're new.   A coworker pulls you aside and tells you about him . . . when he joined the corporation, everyone thought he sucked.  Took a while for him to get his chance.  And with it, he did great on a few projects.  Saved the company a few times.  Heck, in 1996, they were the best company in the country.  But for every awesome project, he would blow one.  He cost them best company status several times in the last decade or so.  But hey, he's been there forever, he's never called in sick, and he's got to retire any day now.  I mean, he's been hanging on for years . . . 

Would you call this employee one of the best ever?  

If I put up a picture of Favre, the NFL would probably fine, sue, and waterboard me.
So here is a totally random, Viking-related picture.

That sums up Brett Favre.  Full disclosure here . . . I am a Bears fan.  He has done his fair share of slicing and dicing my team up over the years.  But when I look clearly at Brett Favre's career, and his records, and how the media gushes over him, I can't help but think he doesn't pass the smell test.  He's vastly overrated.  

I'm not saying he isn't great.  But in the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) discussion, he's a nonfactor.  In the NFL, the number one way you grade a QB is how may titles they won, and how good they are in the clutch.  Brett Favre's lone title came in 1996.  He wasn't even the MVP . . . he rode a stellar defense led by Reggie White, and a special teams unit that was so good, Desmond Howard was the Super Bowl MVP.  

I don't need to quote a bunch of career numbers.  I know he's got the most of everything in history . . . TD's, completions, games in a row, yadda yadda.  He's also got the one record that the media doesn't seem to enjoy mentioning . . . INTERCEPTIONS.  And here's one stat that isn't official . . . interceptions at the worst possible time in big games.  

Look no further than last year, or his last year with the Packers, or how the heavily favored Packers got handled by the Broncos in Favre's only other Super Bowl appearance.  Or how when Favre throws interceptions it's because he is a "gunslinger" and not a bad quarterback.  Why isn't Rex Grossman a gunslinger?  How about any other guys that throw 20 plus INT's in a season? Cutler?  Eli Manning?  Because for some reason, ESPN has changed the statistic to "gunslings" for Brett Favre, and "terrible plays" for everyone else.  

When someone mentions Manning, Brady, Brees of this era . . . what comes to mind?  Titles.  Don't let them get the ball with the game on the line.  How about Favre's peers?  Elway?  Aikman?  Now think of Favre . . . bonehead interceptions.  The retirement flip flopping every offseason.  Wrangler jeans.  The occasional sext of his wang.  

Favre is a tough SOB.  He can take a hit, on the field and in the press.  He's one of the best ever for sheer longevity, and eye popping plays.  He amazes one play, only to gunsling into a loss the very next play.  The best ever just win, and because of them, not in spite of them.  

Minnesota's head coach got fired for one reason only . . . he bet the house that Favre could somehow not be himself at the age of 41.  But he is who we thought he was, and now the coach is fired and the gunslinger will ride off into the sunset, never to return.  Maybe.  Possibly.  No, for good this time. 

Guys Will Bet on Anything. And I mean anything.

So from Thursday to Monday, it goes like this:

Thursday night, a few buckets of beer, and pretty soon, we are betting the next bucket on whether or not an NFL play will get overturned via replay.  Then there was a bet between two guys about how many feet are in a mile.

Then I made five separate bets, five bucks each, against pointspreads for Sunday, all sealed with a handshake (and did well, thank you very much).

Then two of my friends decided to race the 40 yard dash in the parking lot.  One of them was barefoot, the other one pulled a hamstring.

So today, they go back and forth about the injury, the race, the stakes.  They propose a new date and time.  First its three miles, then 60 yards, then 40 yards.  Then it's best of three races.  Meanwhile, I'm betting yet another friend a Subway lunch that Jay Cutler will have better numbers than Tony Romo this year (don't ask me why).

Then we are talking about betting about my Bears versus his Cowboys.  As this goes on, a half dozen people are in on an email string, and the 40 yard footrace from Thursday between two guys turns into the following competition that we have instantly decided is a great idea.  I coined it "The Mancathlon."  However, a quick Google search and damn it, the name was already taken.  Hence, I must rename it.  Haven't figured out what to name it yet.  Awesomethon?  Stupidthon?  You be the judge.

It goes like this . . . start the timer.

• Eat 6 megahot wings. 
• Chug a 24 oz mancan. 
• Run a 40 yard dash. 
• Rest 20 seconds.
• Run a 60 yard dash.
• Swim across a pond. 
• Throw footballs at a target until you hit it 3 times.
• Kick a kickball as far as you can.
• Hit a softball off a tee as far as you can. 
• Spring 100 yards to the finish line.

Your final score is your time in seconds, plus your distance in kickball, plus your distance in softball hitting.  You are penalized 50 points if you puke.  

We are going to organize this before the weather gets cold.  I'm sure we will bet on who finishes where.  There will be side bets.  Bystanders will laugh at us.  And we will probably change the events at some point.  

What does this mean?  Guys will strangely bet on just about anything.  I have psychological theories about this, but they would not be nearly as interesting as sharing our new competition with the world.  

If you want to sign up, hurry, because I'm sure spots will fill up quickly.

The Popularity of Fantasy Football is Ruining Fantasy Football

Fantasy football used to be such a fun and tidy proposition.  It was the year 2000 (funny how that sounds now, saying "the year"before 2000) and my college friends and I had signed up for fantasy football.  We had goofy, dirty team names.  We picked real NFL players to score points for these imaginary teams, and all was right with the world.  With a roster of about 10 players, I would know who to watch for each Sunday.  I could focus and root for those players, making otherwise meaningless games much more interesting.  Everyone knew who was on everyone else's team.

Now every time I open my email inbox, I have invitations to join another fantasy football league.  I have capped myself at three leagues, which is a lot of damn football players, well over 30 players to manage.  I have players that I need to score for one team playing for another team in another league that is playing against me.  Sound confusing?  I have long since stopped keeping track on gamedays.  I just eat some chips and check to see where I stand every couple of hours.  The fun of actually knowing who you got, and who your opponent has, is over.
 

And I manage my team on a very simple philosophy.  I want good, healthy players playing against bad teams whenever possible.  It seemed simple enough.  I hoisted my fair share of fantasy trophies and cashed a few checks.  Now there are stat geeks everywhere.  I am drafting guys in the wrong rounds.  The coach's philosophy is going to kill a certain running back.  This guy is injury prone.  This guy is a rookie.  This guy is a felon.  This guy will benefit from this new offensive system.  I have to pick up the handcuff for this running back because I took him in the first round.

Whole channels are dedicated to fantasy.  Whole sports shows.  No pregame show can be completed without analysts giving you their fantasy picks for the week.
 
And the complexities keep coming.  Now we have keepers . . . players you keep from year to year.  Some leagues are dynasty leagues, where you can draft and keep minor league or college players.

And it's not a fantasy anymore--sports reporters get asked fantasy questions by fans more than actual, legitimate, NFL-related questions.  Pro athletes comment on their fantasy performances.  Commentators let you know that this guy who's in the zone, wow, he's generating some serious fantasy points today.

Twenty-three million people are playing fantasy football this year.  Which is great, I guess, but I miss the old days of one team and one league, and you plug your guys without the need to mine stats for six weeks to find a sleeper buried on a team's depth chart.

It's kind of like the old days, the days which I will call "reality sports,"when you had a team that you liked regardless of the players (mine is the Chicago Bears) and they would play against similar teams with equally loyal fan bases.  There was still trash talking, there was still a trophy at the end, and you can still bet on the games (if you are so inclined).
 
Ah, those were the days.  I'm enrolling in a reality sports league as soon as I can find one.