Grit, Guts, & Glorious Winners

We abandoned this blog. Then we forgot about it. We’re writing, about sports and everything else, under our real names, someplace else, now.

Well, the other guy, Russ, wrote something. I’ll write something when I feel like it.

PS: I extracted little joy from watching the Packers last season.

Looks like it’s pretty much over.

Finally.

Brett Favre has been a fixture for the Packers for, well, a long time. Longer than I can remember. I really liked having him as a quarterback and am uncertain about his departure.

But the retirement bullshit has been too much this season. I’m sick of it causing distractions, coloring every news report about the Packers, and causing all of football to turn into a game of he said she said mumbo jumbo.

I’ve already talked about it. Anyone with half an inkling about football has talked about it. It’s not worth it to spend much time on it.

However, reading about/watching/ listening to the Packer fanbase tear itself and the players, mostly metaphorically, to pieces causes me pause.

It reminds me why I wanted to get away from Green Bay so badly when I was younger.

Some things Packer fans need to realize/consider:

1) Good and evil, absolutes, dichotomies, and the like do not exist. Especially in football.
2) One player does not make a team… Actually, maybe that is true in cycling (but then one player makes a whole sport). It’s not true in football, though.
3) Regression toward the mean, regression toward the mean, regression toward the mean.
4) Stop yelling stupid, ill conceived, uncouth things at Aaron Rodgers. Wait until you see him play in an actual game to hang him. It’s what I’m doing!
5) The Packers organization is not the devil. Mike McCarthy is a winning coach. Ted Thompson has made sound decisions in the draft and in trades.

Have you heard of AJ Hawk, Greg Jennings, Aaron Rouse, Mason Crosby, and James Jones? Those, among others, are players he drafted. Remember Ryan Grant? I think, you know, those fellows might be good at football. Really. Open a book for once, you’ll see.

So, yeah. The coaching staff and management is not evil. They aren’t trying to destroy the team. That is, in fact, the opposite of their job! That would be like a famous chef attempting to make a chili that is not delicious (unthinkable and impossible). However, if you think that Brett Favre is the sole component of the Green Bay Packers, I can see how you would think the staff is trying to destroy the team. So, finally…

6) If you are not a Packer fan because someone other than Brett Favre is now the quarterback, you are bad at being a Packer fan. When you are a fan of a team, really a fan, you support that team one way or the other. High or low. Winning or losing. Without gunslingers or with gunslingers. You can criticize, but stating that you are no longer a fan of a team because they have a new quarterback probably means that you weren’t ever really a fan. You were probably a fair weather fan. And don’t know about the eighties.

(PS: If any of you “I hate the Packers now because TT AND MM ARE TRYING TO KILL MY BRETT, the gunslinger, blah blah blah, I have season tickets but will never again use them” fans somehow actually have season tickets, can I buy them? I will use the hell out of them.)

I can’t handle reading more about Brett Favre’s un-retirement, or about the accompanying idiocy of some vocal Packer fans not-fans, or about what Peter King thinks he thinks about Brett Favre’s awesome abs.

Looks like it is almost over. Phew.

We, those of us kind-of-rational Packer fans, can now, I hope, get to watching Aaron Rodgers hurt himself coming off of the bench destroy Brett Favre’s team eat a hotdog play a game involving a ball as the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.

It’s about damn time.

It’s time for our Friday Conversation! Value Adjusted Phineas chooses the topic this week, so here we go!

Value Adjusted Phineas: I’d like to talk about something pretty dear to my heart today: endurance sports. I like them a lot.

As a kid, and now, I was never particularly “talented” or…uh…”passable” when it came to sports that involved things like kicking, throwing, catching, or doing anything involving other human beings. Normally, my adventures with these sports begin with me getting hit in the face.

Endurance sports, though, I’ve been able to manage those. I can typically do things like running, biking, inline skating, and cross-country skiing without getting a black eye. Endurance sports are great. They’re highly accessible, easy to learn, and pretty darn good for the ol’ cardiovascular health.

As a result of this stance, I’ve always wondered why there’s so little focus on endurance sports in our world. In the world of sports reporting, there’s nary a mention of endurance sports, despite the fact that there’s something going on in endurance sports at just about any time of the year. The only time the Tour de France even gets mentioned on ESPN anymore is when someone is caught cheating.

Perhaps more important, the world of sports education turns a blind eye to endurance sports. In school, gym class consisted of: football, soccer, basketball, racket sports, weight lifting, field hockey, and baseball. If there was time, there might be a unit that involves running.

I mean, my high school was in Wisconsin. We have, what? Three months without snow in the year? Have a unit on cross country skiing! It’s only 6 miles to one of the finest sets of trails in the mid-west! But, no, we have a unit where we go to a local bar and bowl, instead.

This lack of attention makes very little sense to me, especially in schools. Lifelong activity is VERY VERY VERY important. Why focus on activities that require specialized skills and multiple participants when individual activities with huge health benefits and low barriers to participation exist?

DJ Fabulous Fred: Well, I don’t think our aversion to endurance sports is anything surprising. For one, endurance sports are boring and hard. At the same time.

Look at American attention spans, we can’t pay attention to 45 minutes of soccer. We need commerical breaks at five minute intervals in everything to even begin to pay attention. We like to do activites that we like to watch, and no one likes to watch endurance sports.

When was the last time anyone said “Oh man, did you see when Chris McCormack’s nipples started bleeding in hour five of that triathlon? That was fucking awesome!”. Never, that’s when.

Anyway, we all know that endurance sports are just a testbed for the performance enhancing drugs that will create our next generation of supersoldiers

Value Adjusted Phineas: Wait. Are you claiming that cross-country skiing is boring? One could make the argument that it is hard, but I would counter: cross-country skiing is no harder than trying to hit a ball the size of a fucking orange when it is thrown at you by some barbarian in your gym class (2x your size).

But…boring!? You would claim that cross-country skiing is boring? You would call THIS boring!?

DJ Fabulous Fred: Ohh, the old exclamation mark-question mark combo, you’re bringing out the big punctuation guns. Well, yes, I do think cross-country skiing is boring. You have to remember that most of us weren’t born in northern Wisconsin. Most of us didn’t grow up cross-country skiing. Most of us don’t consider lutefisk a food group. Most of us don’t look like this:

(Value Adjusted Phineas)

I mean, looking like that, how could you not like cross-country skiing? I do like the ironic mustache by the way.

Value Adjusted Phineas: The Swedish Chef is an upstanding member of the world community, and I, as a person of Swedish descent, am proud to share his heritage.

But, fine. If all you fat fucks don’t want to take my advice and pay attention to or try cross-country skiing, or any other sport that actually requires you to MOVE YOUR FUCKING ASS MORE THAN 100 FEET AT A TIME for that matter, that’s fine by me. You guys have fun dying of cardiovascular disease.

The world of professional women’s beach volleyball is all a-twitter over the immense win streak the May-Treanor, Walsh pair have accumulated recently. Color me surprised that anyone actually knew there was a win streak. I didn’t know anyone actually kept score during a women’s volleyball match.

I thought people just…watched.

My dropped jaw aside, this win streak impresses me. I mean, 101 consecutive wins, that’s…well…a lot of beach volleyball to sit through and actually care enough to win. So, yeah, that’s pretty good…

Almost…too good.

Un-doctored image from http://www.southofboston.net

I like soccer. I find it quite nice to watch, well… when no one is broadcasting baseball games. Or NFL games. Or basketball games. Or episodes of the Simpsons, Futurama, The Wire, Pushing Daisies, Generation Kill, King of the Hill, and pretty much any show Adult Swim touches. So, as long as nothing else is on, I like to watch soccer.

I mean, what’s not to like about a sport that can feature guys like this? Or this?

But, really, I guess I should probably say I like football instead of saying I like soccer. I really don’t like watching Major League Soccer. It’s…just…kinda…boring. It’s rather hard to put my finger on the reasons behind this. I mean, besides the whole “everyone with great talent plays for teams in parts of the world that are not the United States” thing.

However, I think SI might have hit on a contributing factor.

Only by offering Eddie Johnson money — in the neighborhood of $850,000 — could MLS possibly keep Cooper happy in the league for the long-term.

Wow. That’s enough to keep a good player around in the MLS? An offer including a signing bonus of 2freakingtimes that much wasn’t enough to make Ryan Grant come to work today.

But such a staggering salary would elevate him to DP status and far surpass the salaries of strikers like Twellman and Carlos Ruiz, and make it much harder for the league to keep prolific goal scorers without busting open its coffers. It could also set a dangerous salary benchmark for a talented third-year league veteran who has hit double figures but twice.

If paying a talented veteran radically less than the Bears pay Rex Grossman to “play” “quarterback” has the potential to drain your professional sport league’s reserves of cash, well, you probably need to rethink you branding.

Maybe start calling it the Major Fun Soccer Mimicking Extravaganza League (of Awesomeness and Delight). And maybe give away some free bobbleheads! Or sell hot dogs for one dollar!

If it works for single-A baseball clubs, it will work for soccer.

I spent a little too much time reading about meaningful and soul crushing things this weekend (read: Iraq). I’m stuck thinking that everything I could write about here doesn’t even scratch the surface of true relevance – a notion which I have contradictory feelings about even when I’m not in this mood. I don’t want to soil any sports that I actually care about by writing about them when I’m like this. So, I’m going to write about something I consider so irrelevant and I care so little about that I don’t give a fuck if I come off as a snarky, pretentious dick: Nascar.

I just glanced at SI’s and ESPN’s Nascar section to find something topical to bitch about. I couldn’t linger for long, my hippocampus was beginning to atrophy. Apparently, someone named Kyle won some race recently. I think he drove in circles for a couple of hours. That’s as far as I got, because just reading about Nascar makes me want to stab myself in the eyeballs.

I have a bad taste in my mouth related to Nascar. In my hometown, there were many fans of Nascar. In my hometown, there were many people growing up with me that held racist beliefs. There was overlap. A house with a Nascar flag on my bus route also flew the Confederate flag. During my time in high school, there was an incident involving several white students wearing shirts emblazoned with the term “White Pride” to school. This caused some nervous shuffling and staring at feet on the part of the administration until the kids were told to take their shirts off.

I later asked around about the controversy. I hoped to write a short piece for the school/community newspaper (bit of a story about why it’s both) about it. Wanting to be fair, I interviewed one of my peers that had worn one of the shirts. I asked him why they had worn the shirt, he replied, “Well, the niggers and spics can wear whatever pride shirts they want. I’m white, we should be proud of our race.” (Suffice to say, I gave up on the article.) He was wearing a hat emblazoned with the number 3. I later found out that was a Nascar hat.

So, I formed a pretty negative view of Nascar. Everything surrounding it just seems charged in a sort of pro-White, pro-male, pro-Confederate/South, pro-laissez-faire, pro-conservatism manner. There’s what, one female in Nascar? I remember the sports media making a huge deal that there was finally another black driver – in fucking 2004 there had only been two. As though that somehow represents progress. The executives, the sponsors, and the sport itself seem dedicated to a kind of culture that fosters ignorance, sexism, and racism.

And the fans just follow along in this bullshit. While googling for this piece of writing, I found this. That seems like something the racist fucks I went to school with would just eat up. And, from the extremely slow pace at which racing diversifies (Nascar seems perfectly fine with the lack of diversity), it seems like this segment of professional racing promotes an environment conducive to ignorance and racism among its fans.

To say what I’m pussyfooting around: near every person I’ve met that follows Nascar closely had – at the least – ignorant, hateful, racist views.  Since I have no hope of writing anything objective today, I’ll just state my own ignorant and hateful view that I know not to be true: Nascar fans are a all a bunch of stupid rednecks.

Now, I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t do this! I shouldn’t hold the belief that certain people are ignorant or stupid or or racist simply because they like watching a few cars drive in circles at high speed for hours. I shouldn’t utilize my experience with a few Nascar fans to form an opinion about all of them. I really don’t. I know it’s not true. Not every Nascar fan delights in racism and ignorance. I know this to be true.

However, I also know that the fans and participants in Nascar have overwhelmingly voted for and supported Republicans in recent years.  So, let me have my fun. Let me make some baseless observations. Let me get something out of my system, because if I don’t, I might just explode.

The Nascar fans voted Bush. The Nascar fans voted for many of the men and women behind the disaster that is the United States’ current foreign policy. They voted for the people that capitalized on fear to motivate military action. They voted for the people that sent us to Iraq on false (and often vaguely, if not explicitly, racist) pretenses.

The people the Nascar fans voted for have gotten us into a disaster, unmitigated and draining.

I was just driving to the store, listening to the New York v. Boston game. A-Rod was doing something or other, I don’t know, it was Yankees v. Red Sox. Who the fuck cares? If I really wanted that kind of douchefest, I would watch Baseball Tonight.

Anyhow, the game cut to commercial and I heard a very convincing car advertisement. It was a Hummer H3 ad. The ad spoke about all the great features of the Hummer, cash-lubricated transmission and poor person/minority repellent in the exhaust, but those weren’t the compelling part.

No, the thing that made me decide to make an illegal U-turn and buy a Hummer at that moment was something said near the end of the advertisement. The ad noted the drive for the need to have a Hummer in your driveway and on your all-terrain trips to the corner store: the ability of the Hummer to move you to the exotic, hard to reach destination of the Appalachian Mountains.

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Yep.

Devin Hester knows how to play football. Really well. Unfortunately, Devin Hester plays for the Chicago Bears, a single-A baseball team miscast into the NFL.

Considering these laws of reality, one might be a bit perplexed at the team’s course of action leading to the current situation in Chicago. The Bears, realizing their own offensive ineptitude, (rightly) want Hester to continue playing for them. They also want Hester in a more prominent position on their offense, at receiver. This makes sense; as Hester excels in just about all of the areas that qualify a person for playing wide receiver.

However, the Bears don’t want to pay him anything more than they already are. The Bears want to keep Hester on their team, also expanding his role, while paying him far less than ESPN pays Rick Reilly to “report” on “sports.” Does this make sense to anyone? This is a guy who can return failed field goal attempts for touchdowns.

But, no. The Bears do not appreciate that ability. They would rather try to win a game of points solely under the power of their defense than keep players with insanely high ceilings happy. So, Hester hasn’t reported to camp.

I think Hester made the right move. The Bears show that they undervalue him by refusing to secure him with a long term deal. And what choice does he really have? He’s still under his rookie deal. He is pretty limited in his choices related to his contract.

He can skip camp in an effort to push the Bears into offering him what he’s worth, or he can…well, do nothing else, really. If he gives in to the Bears without a new agreement, he risks injury in camp. He’s making the choice any player with great potential ought to in this situation, if his or her head sits straight.

In spite of this, Hester’s absence SHOCKED the Bears organization today. Other facts that shocked the team today: football requires a quarterback, you can generate light using electricity, and the Earth orbits around the sun.

Hester’s action also caught various Chicago Tribune writers by surprise. Some seem hurt, others might even be a little offended! This caused them to say a few stupid things:

Hester wasn’t done sounding ungrateful and stupid: “I’m like this — it’s not worth it to show up.”

To be charitable, Hester is not the most accomplished public speaker, nor does he seem like a guy who rejected a Rhodes scholarship in order to play in the NFL.

Subtle racism is courtesy of Steve Rosenbloom. Steve Rosenbloom, everybody!

The Bears want to pay Hester as the top kick returner in the league, except that Hester wants to get paid like a top receiver, except he’s not a top receiver, except that he is a top receiver on this retch-inducing offense.

Steve seems a little confused. Hester averaged 15 yards per reception last season when he played as a receiver. Small sample size, yes, but that’s still pretty respectable.

Rosenbloom does get one thing right in his cantankerous hate. The Bears do want to only pay Hester as a top kick returner. However, he ignores everything Hester brings more to the receiver table beyond other returners at his pay grade. No, Steve Rosenbloom feels that Hester is just being “ungrateful.”

Steve Rosenbloom’s career day advice: be great at what you do, then do even more for the same amount of money, otherwise you’re ungrateful. And stupid.

Other writers at the Chicago Tribune describe Hester’s action as “ridiculous” and suggest the Bears trade him. Maybe after the trade Kyle Orton will gain his wings and become an actual quarterback. Or maybe the rules of football will suddenly alter, allowing only defensive players to score points. Yes, the Bears will be a great team, if only they trade Hester!

It really makes me sad to see the day when Jay Mariotti writes something that makes sense. Thanks a lot, Chicago Tribune and the Bears, you’ve probably brought about the end of the world or something.

In other news, Ryan Grant may not show up at camp without a new agreement. This tactic is ridiculous, stupid, and ungrateful. I think the Packers should trade him immediately.

Brett Favre wants to play football next year. Anyone catching a glimpse of ESPN over the last month can confirm this. The media, salivating and frenzied at the scent of any sign of a dramatic storyline, has kept the public clued in on any miniscule detail related to Favre’s desire.  I grow tired of this deluge, this story, this figure.

I grew up in Wisconsin, just outside of Green Bay. Football assailed me from every direction. So, I am a fan of the Green Bay Packers. Further, as I am from a particular age group, I grew up cheering for a team featuring Brett Favre as the field general. He stood as a god to a young boy watching on the television or at training camp. He’s seemed reliable and steady and true. Favre stands as a bookend of my experiences as an NFL fan.

The situation surrounding Favre and the Packers this month bugs me as a fan of this pedigree. Others have analyzed and detailed the general narrative far more eloquently than I can. I will say that, after following Favre at the head of my chosen team for so long, I expected a far more level headed approach to retirement on his part. However, I’m interested in the reaction of Packer fans to this hullabaloo.

The fans have, well, seemingly split. Some, like me, wish Favre would have stayed retired. We wish that his actions had not drawn the whole of the NFL world into a squabble over whether or not Ted Thompson and the rest of the Packer organization act as spreaders of evil, communism, and lies through their – decidedly forward looking – moves. Another faction thinks Ted Thompson and Mike McCarthy exist as perfect personifications of Satan.

This faction feels that the Packer front office has shat upon team history. In their eyes, the organization abused the ever so playful – he really loves it out there and is having so much fun all the time in those Wrangler jeans – football hurler standing as the idol of modern Packer fandom. Vileness incarnate is afoot, and these individuals have decided to fight for their glorious winner, Saint Favre. They won’t rest until Favre holds his rightful position as starting quarterback for the Packers; sensible use of the exclamation point be damned.

I can see where they’re coming from. I mean, I lived in the suburbs Green Bay for most of my youth! I also have a huge man-crush on Favre.  If I had to choose between making out with Brett Favre and not making out with Brett Favre, I would make out with Brett Favre.  Just like any other real Packer fan.

That doesn’t stop me from thinking the people spouting vitriol towards the Packers’ front office and staff are short-sighted, gibbering madmen here. Why do I not writhe in fury at the thought of someone else taking the spot Favre held for a really long time?

Let us first consider the situation with Aaron Rodgers. Hold a moment, let’s not; other people have already considered the dread potential implied in Favre’s actions between the Packers organization and the apparent starting quarterback. I’ll just state that the people that scream about the stupidity of the Packer organization’s actions in relation to Favre clearly care not whether or not the team has a season after 2008.
“Favre was and is at the top of his game! He has all the intangible qualities needed in a player!” they cry. “Forget that Rodgers!! We’ll go to the Super Bowl next year with Favre!!!”

“Well,” I say, resting my face on the palm of my hand. “He had a good year in 2007. But what of the constant passage of time Favre surely experiences?” No response. “Think of regression toward the mean! He’s one year older now, 38 is not young!”

It means nothing to the die-hard legion of the Favre.

Now, I know that Favre put up some of his best standard numbers last season. He broke a bunch of records and it was a cool time to be a fan of the Packers and Favre and the NFL. However, I don’t think Favre will excrete magic and wins next season just because he performed beyond expectations for him last season. Intangibles are intangible for a reason.

Furthermore, one might consider some outside factors that could have contributed to Favre’s success last season. What if the teams he went up during the season had somewhat “meh” defensive ability against the pass? That might have helped his numbers a bit, eh?

When looking at the game by game statistics for Favre’s 2007 season, one notes that Favre posted 10 games out of 16 with a passer rating above the 83.5 average across quarterbacks in the league last year. Favre played against 8 different teams in these 10 games (NYG, SD, 2xMIN, DEN, KAN, CAR, 2xDET, OAK). According to the DVOA system, 4 (MIN, CAR, DEN, DET) had pass defenses that ranked in the lower half of the league. This suggests that, for more than half of Favre’s above average games last season, he was throwing against teams that, one might conjecture, possessed defenses that were not consistently on the plane of existence that Favre existed on. It was as if defenders were supposed to be cheesemakers, but they always forgot the ideal temperature for the growth of lactic acid bacteria when Favre passed.

As such, Favre might have been helped by throwing against defenses that weren’t really performing that well against the pass. This doesn’t explain his whole season. However, it does suggest that there might be more to performance last year (luck, context) than a sudden and everlasting boost in ability and skill. It also informs against the idea that Favre will automatically win and take the Packers straight to the Super Bowl no questions asked. FootballOutsiders.com’s ranking of Green Bay’s offensive line as #1 in pass protection last year also hints against the whole “he now possesses mystic win powers coming out of his ears” argument for Favre as an unquestionable starter.

I wish nostalgic Packer fans wouldn’t scream, “Down with Rodgers – Favre 4 ever!” They ought not heap such scorn on Rodgers. Instead, I think they ought to try considering the issue while keeping the future of the Packers as a team in mind and considering the laws of physics that even Favre is subject to.

And, hey, even a monkey could have gotten us to the playoffs with that kind of pass protection.

Hello, readers from the future.

As we sit here, we hear of many problems. There’s war, poverty, depression, and the ever lurking menace of communism staring our world in the face every single second of every single day.  However, those topics stand within the realm of other men; philosophers, perhaps. We are not here to speak exclusively on those topics.

No, we are here to talk about sports.

We will talk of the great ball diamond, of the hulking men whom battle over the pigskin, of the glorious contest for the ever elusive basket.  We might talk about other things that interest us, at times, but sport is our raison d’être here.

However, we may go about things in a manner that curves and winds differently.

Others might mention grit and guts while describing the players of the games, they will speak of the intangibles. That is very well. We may slide into that area. We apologize in advance. However, our writing will probably feature numbers more prominently than descriptions of character.

We do not lean this way because we consider ourselves experts of any sort. No, we are simple fans of this game. Like many others, we watch the games on our televisions, celebrate the success and victory of teams we love, and cringe at season ending blows. We are fans, indeed; fans who enjoy, in addition to the subjective qualities, the objective side of the game.

As such, we pledge that we will resist, so much as we can, the usage of the term “has so much fun playing out there.” We, instead, will endeavor towards the usage of statistics in our writing.

It will be a battle, as we intend to talk about Brett Favre tomorrow.