Mystery, Alaska

Bear with me. If you are one of the twelve people who saw this movie you saw Mike Meyers (Wayne's World, Austin Powers, etc.) play a hockey announcer (mullet and all) for a game between the NY Rangers and the Eskimos of Mystery. (All in all a good flick, if it weren't for Russell Crowe). The reason I bring this up is that Meyers plays perfectly the kind of sports announcing we can expect from today's generation of blowhards. During one period he talks how he wants to take the Mystery team home and adopt them because they are that good, only to vacillate to saying they never had a chance and it was sad the game even got scheduled. This reversal happens several times during the course of the game a la the announcing crew for MNF.

Tony Kornheiser said the Cardinals should just leave the field once they got that first down because that was a victory for them. (At this point I thought we were going to have to tranq the Wife). I wanted to kill him. Then as the game progress Kornheiser jumped on the Cardinals bandwagon, saying Leinart was the second coming of Bradshaw. Only to end the telecast with the Bears are a team of destiny and the better team won. At one point the Wife and I turned off the sound to stop listening to it. The the Wife went to bed angry at the world and I stopped watching. (The Wife is quite the Bears fan). Luckily I switched back for the fourth quarter and what a great quarter for a Bears' fan.

I am really trying to make a couple of points here:

One, it is sad that sports "journalists: (using the term "loosely") think the must take opinions to such extremes to be heard in the current on-demand environment.

Two, the reason that the NFL is such a great product is that there is such parity in the league. You in fact are never sure exactly what is going to happen. Recently, someone said in my presence that the Buckeyes or USC would beat the Texans or Raiders. This is possibly the stupidest sports comment anyone can make. The reason a top flight program like OSU is so good is because they may send ten players to the NFL, but out of every class that large it will be lucky for two to be impact/starter players. A pro team is made up of the best players from every source available, thus such a game wouldn't even be close. (Fun fact: Back in the early days of football it was common for the all-pro team would play the Collegiate National Champion, granted when everyone wore leather helmets.) So would people stop making this idiotic statement. (This is backed up by the pFil/Russell Corollary; such that when the two of us agree on anything we are always right).

Third, the Wife is starting to understand why I become so crazed as an OSU football fan. It is sometimes harder to support a team who is winning in fantastic fashion because when they underperform it makes the possibility of a loss that much harder to take. (Reason No. 389 why I love the Wife, after I got the most recent ESPN mag with the Bears on the cover, the Wife became visibly upset that they were trying to curse the team by putting them on the cover and giving them crazy amounts of publicity.)

Finally, there may have to be a new level of loss on the Sports Guy Scale for what happened to the Cardinal fans last night. Just horrible.

Oh and the Bear with me pun, was completely unintended.


Two random notes:

Gamers: John Terry put on the keeper jersey and maintained a clean sheet for Chelsea after both the starting and reserve goalies were knocked out of a recent EPL game against Reading. You don't have to wonder why Terry will be wearing the Captains armband for England and for Chelsea for the foreseeable future.

Funnies: After a shot of Al Davis this past sunday night in the Owners box someone commented, "It looks like a Weekend at Bernies."