Why is there no NFL thread?! (And A SB Poll)

Email Print posted by ihavenobias 01/06/2008 04:19:20 PM EST

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God damn it! I just wasted 30 minutes writing a huge post with links on the NFL and my playoff predictions only to have it be wiped out because I forgot to include the fucking tags at the top and submitted it through.

I'm not rewriting everything so here goes the short version (minus the game by game picks).


Sorry to Cenk about the Steelers.  But they couldn't make it far with those awful injuries at OT, RB and on D.


To great condense some of what I wrote before: Go ANYBODY but the Patriots (they *have* to make it to the superbowl to play Dallas, right?).

They were fun as underdogs vs the Rams (I actually rooted for them) but 3 superbowls later (all barely won by a field goal) I can't stand them, especially Brady (who cries like a baby if he's sacked or loses) and the coach.


But if you grew up rooting for the Patriots, I can't blame you for rooting for your team. Otherwise, you have NO business rooting for them (unless of course you have money down on them and or fantasy football ties).

PS---I just found this website.  Some of these are *really* stupid but #1 was pretty funny (and true).

< CNN to air counter transmission, FOX News- The Least Trusted Name in News, updated | Obama is coming. He's coming. He's coming to your house. >

Poll

Do you want the Patriots to win the SB?
Yes, I've always been a fan and always will be 0%
Yes, I like watching an exciting, winning team 22%
Eh, I don't care, my team is out of it so I just want a good game 0%
No, it's boring to watch the same team win over and over again 22%
No, it'll be boring watching them blow out their opponent 11%
No, I can't stand Tom Brady and or Bill Belichick 66%

Votes: 9
Results | Other Polls
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Why is there no NFL thread?! (And A SB Poll) | 15 comments (15 topical, 0 hidden)
A Win is a Win (none / 0)

  all barely won by a field goal
Won is the operative word. There is win column and loss column. There is no all barely won by a field goal column.

The Patriots are the best team and organization in the NFL ;their record over the last few years proves it. They have demonstrated that even with the desire for parity and a salary cap, smart coaching and good personnel development can produce consistently competitive football teams

As my grand pappy used to say "It ain't bragging if you can" 

 Now when my Jags knock'emoff ( assumse SD win) ask me again

by MRFred on 01/06/2008 06:38:28 PM EST

Oh no, don't get me wrong (none / 0)
I'm not saying the Patriots weren't/aren't a very good team (and this year, an insanely, obnoxiously good team).

Although in years past they always did *just barely* weasel their way to those superbowl wins (and there's the questionable ref jobs, like when they mugged the Colts inspiring a rule change the following year).

Yes, the bottom line is that they won, of course, and if I was a fan it wouldn't take away any of my joy.  But as a non-fan, I like to point it out because it could have so easily gone the other way. 

The ONLY good thing I can say about a Patriots superbowl this year vs in previous years is that they FINALLY have a non-boring team. 

Now I would actually *take* a 3 point win (second choice after a Patriots loss) because I'd hate to watch an incredibly boring superbowl featuring the Yankees of football blowing out the NFC opponent.

(yawn)

by ihavenobias on 01/06/2008 08:16:14 PM EST

[ Parent ]
I have three words for you (none / 0)
Let's.  Go.  Giants.

by jarett on 01/06/2008 07:58:41 PM EST

Not again (none / 0)
I want them to lose for one VERY good reason.  The Red Sox won the World Series, New England doesn't need another freaking title.

<insert true, albeit incendiary, comment>

If they hire the same refs they had for Super Bowl XL, it won't matter who the Patriots play, because they'll make all calls in their favor no matter how patently wrong the calls are.

</end true, albeit incendiary, comment>

by mathcore on 01/07/2008 12:27:13 AM EST

Missing poll choice (none / 0)
| |  All pro football is boring except in preseason when they wear their see-through spandex uniforms.

by zenie on 01/07/2008 12:30:05 PM EST

Oh no you don't! (none / 0)
I'll give you a pass since you're a woman *and* I tend to agree with your posts.  :)

Football (the American version) is, by far, the best sport (and it's not even close). 

If someone wants to create a thread titled "what is the best sport and why", I'd be happy to present an air-tight case for football.

The End

by ihavenobias on 01/07/2008 12:35:24 PM EST

[ Parent ]
Basketball is better (none / 0)

I like college basketball. I like neighborhood basketball, especially outside. Basketball has continuity, and each player on the court is an equally important part of the team. [and they have good legs]

American football is BORING. It's like bad sex. One guy calls the plays. Worse, just when it starts getting interesting, they stop the play! Bummer. Yawn. No wonder they have so many sex drug commercials.

As in dating, the scores are vastly inflated. 

Play football if you like it, but it's boring watching those oversized, overpaid children playing their game on TV and perpetuating a billion dollar industry based on imagining they they're "your" team. They're not.

by zenie on 01/07/2008 01:44:34 PM EST

[ Parent ]
Nonsense (none / 0)
Basketball is boring (usually) because they score every two seconds!

Wake me up when they learn to play a little defense and or the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarter when scoring might actually *mean* something.

Then again the last 5 minutes are horrible, because ironically (considering you raised the issue) they stop every 5 seconds!  It's BRUTAL, especially college basketball.

Foul, foul, foul, foul (and so many stupid fouls at that...a  "loose ball foul", come on!).  A team is down by 10 with 10 seconds to play yet the foul and foul again (and or take their 30th timeout).

Hockey and soccer are on the other end of the spectrum or boring because they score once every 2 months.  At least in hockey you get the physical element and speed which gives it a leg up over soccer.

Baseball is somewhere in between, although tends to be slow and boring unless you're at the game (in which case beer and nice weather makes it better).

Finally, we're left with football. 

It has the physicality of hockey, and more diveristy than all of them (three phases of the game, offense, defense and special teams) and several different levels of scoring (touchdown, extra point, 2 point conversation, field goal and safety).

Not only can it be played in any weather (making it more interesting and unpredictable), but it may surprise many to realize that it BY FAR has the most strategy of any popular sport.

Head coach, assistant head coach, offensive and defensive coordinators, special teams coaches, individual position coaches and so on.  And consider the number of players on the field at any one time (take that basketball) and you have yet another layer of complexity.

Don't forget the play calling.  There are thousands and thousands of complicated plays where each player has a unique role, including fake plays (pretend to run and then pass), double reverses, short plays, long plays, zone schems, man to man schemes, blitzes and on and on and on.

To be honest, I HATED football until a roommate I had long ago introduced me to video game football. I got into it, and pretty soon I started to understand the game as a giant, physical chess match rather than just a bunch of big dudes running into each other and then stopping (a popular misconception).

The chess match is after each play, where the different coaches plan each move and anticipate what the other is thinking.

PS---Football has the best scoring. It's in between the boringly low scoring of hockey and soccer yet doesn't have the devalued high scoring of basketball.

by ihavenobias on 01/07/2008 01:58:38 PM EST

[ Parent ]
my biggest complaint about football (none / 0)
to play a little bit of devil's advocate...

the season is only 16 games long, and then you go through sudden-death elimination to make your way to the super bowl where they crown the league's best team by playing just one game?&nb sp; short season, short playoffs, and and an absurdly short inter-divisional championship series.  best 1 out of 1.

basketball, hockey, and baseball all require you to prove your dominance by winning in a series.  in this sense, football feels like 6 months of masturbation for 3 seconds of ejaculation.  all that buildup just to be e nded with, "you're done already?"

i do love the bbq's, though.  oh yeah, and if the seahawks make it past green bay, i will be full of highly-irrational local pride.

by mathcore on 01/07/2008 04:21:24 PM EST

[ Parent ]
I agree, there are pros and cons (none / 0)
to the sudden death approach. You've stated the con, but on the pro side, it makes the games SO much more meaningful.

Multiple games (like the ultra high scoring of basketball) dillute the importance (and therefore excitement) of each individual game, unless of course it goes to the last game or so in a series (but that doesn't always happen).

Also, think about how incredibly boring it is watching a team get swept and or only one 1 game of a given series.

While it's like a blowout in the playoffs or SuperBowl, at least you don't suffer through *multiple* games.  You watch a lopsided game within 3 hours and that's the end of it.

by ihavenobias on 01/07/2008 04:30:58 PM EST

[ Parent ]
Bear Wrestling (none / 0)

Basketball came out of football, the football at the turn of the century looked like a basketball does today. It is arguable whether football came from Rugby or Gaelic rules football or soccer. On the one hand, the rest of the world calls soccer futbol, where as rugby would be most similar, however since Gaelic football is by far the oldest (tracing back to the 1700's in Ireland) t'would appear to be the grand daddy of them all.

Baseball is classic, the game has changed very little since the 1840's. Where as football, when looked at over the course of a 100 years is constantly changing. The game today resembles very little the game of a Knute Rockne or say, Fordham's Seven Blocks of Granite..

 

Where as one could imagine, ala Field of Dreams, that a Honus Wagner or say Harry Steinfeldt could play today, if not in the big show. Baseball is a different dimension, it is a time and a place not under the ordinary constraints of the space time continuum, it exists outside of our world, superimposed upon it. It is what makes America great.

Football, SUV's, Texas oilmen, George Bush, republican expats, frat boys, fantasy leagues, Rambo, and cheap watered down beer are why the rest of the world hates us.  

Where as basketball will be the first sport with a true world champion. When you see Argentina or Brazil play, you know the day isn't far off. If you don't think the NBA has defense, maybe you should stop watching the Knicks and check out the Pistons. They put the "D" in Detroit. I'll take Dollar Billups and 30 foot jumpers with the shot clock winding down over Bill Bellacheat and the Brady Bunch any day of the week.

Football is the new professional wrestling. All it is is entertainment. Sure, Andy Petit and Roger are on roids, but na, none of the them 350 pound behemoths ever juiced, sure sure.

That said, I hope the Colts pound the shit out of the Pats before it ever gets that far, in the AFC Championship game, if they meet there again.

If they are so damn good, then why did they cheat against the worst (or second to worst) team in the league. Granted, it was the first game of the season, they were an unknown quantity, but were they just stupid? That just makes no sense to me. Makes me think the whole thing is rigged.

I don't buy any of your arguments really. Like any red blooded normal American male, I love to watch football and the NFL, I love big titted blonds and pizza and dogs and whatever. But to me it is just entertainment. Baseball is the chess equivalent. I watch boxing if I want to see brutality, and I think the amount of concussions from those jarring bone crushing tackles is just plain stupid. How long before Brewsky is just like Romanowsky?

I agree that the sports highlight reel has ruined basketball to a certain extent, but Lebron's windmill's are still fresh, and if you understand the triangle offense, the pick and roll, the high post center, and the Princeton offense, there is still a lot that is interesting and worthwhile in the game. The Wizards, the Kings and the Nets all incorporate various aspects of the motion offence and the Lakers run the triangle.

I bet in a hundred years football won't look anything like it looks now and it will be ruined precisely by the video games you love so much. People will tune into some sort of Google TV to watch Bear Wrestling or Naked Women's Waterpolo instead. In the NFL, the quarterback (or the player with the green dot on his helmet) is allowed a speaker in his helmet and most quarterbacks in college and in the pros routinely check their wristband cheat sheet play calling thingy. How long before they have video screens on their visor? They already use video game mods to prepare, why not not just have them on the field, superimposed over their field of vision on the plastic above their grill over their eyes?

But besides, with the next gen of HGH and designer steroids, linemen are going to be 6'9" and 400 pounds and bench press 600 pounds. Who'd really want to watch freaks like that give themselves brain injuries when you could be in the superbowl yourself on your Virtual Reality Playstation Seven. 

by tiggerporn on 01/07/2008 11:07:25 PM EST

[ Parent ]
You don't buy ANY of my arguments? (none / 0)
Wow, you're a harsh critic. 

How many people attack it from so many angles and in that level of detail?  Usual arguments are "dude, football rocks".

For the record, I stopped playing the video games.  And there *are* defensive teams, like the Ravens of old, the Titans, the Bucs, the pre-injury Steelers.


I still stand by all of arguments. If you want to take about a watered down sport, it's basketball. The golden days of Bird/Magic/Jordan (and so on) are long gone.


Little kids are coming out way too early and dilluting the talent pool and bringing down the learning curve. 


As for juiced up players, many would argue baseball, not football, has paid the price for that.  A Baseball chess match?  Sure to an extent. 

But the coach doesn't tell that many players what to do on every play. The pitcher tries to outwit the hitter and vice versa, but in football, you have two coaches (at least) trying to outwit each other on EVERY play.

And baseball is much more linear. You have to run within the basepads for example, and you don't have the excitement of turnovers. You get that with basketball but again, the importance is so dilluted by the high level of scoring (and the fact that the other team gets the ball back in 10 seconds).


I also think there's far less improvisation in baseball compared to football.  The field general is the quarterback, who can throw it, hand it off *or* run it himself.


And how can you dismiss the scoring diversity for football?  Several ways to score and each one counts so much more.  Even if I watch the Pistons who allow 70-80+ points per game, we're talking about allowing (easily) 30 plus scores allowed by ONE team!

PS---The weather angle too. Basketball is always indoors while baseball games don't get snowed but *do* get rained out.  So many more exciting variables in football, period.

by ihavenobias on 01/07/2008 11:22:31 PM EST

[ Parent ]
You make a lot of good points (none / 0)

No worries, I'm just pissed the terrible towels couldn't help Big Ben out one more time. You make a lot of good points. And I'd be surprised if steroids weren't rampant in basketball and hockey as well as football and baseball; doesn't seem to make sense that only baseball players would use.

Two thousand years ago the Irish played a game called Hurling, it is something like feild hockey but more brutal. The so-called "H" posts are where the scoring in football comes from. Everything has been flipped. Gaelic football was originally for the girls and small boys who couldn't handle the roughness of hurling. Now girls play feild hockey. The G.A.A. used the fields for both football and hurling. In gaelic football and hurling, you get three points for a shot under the post, where there is a goalie, and one point for a shot above. When football got rid of the goalie, around the time they started wearing helmets and allowing the forward pass, they switched it to three points above and eventually got rid of the one point below. It is an interesting historical note most people aren't aware of. But I did enjoy Zenie's quip about the scoring.

But I agree with Zenie's main points, about how football is more static and basketball (and soccer) are more fluid.In both basketball and soccer the field of play is in constant flux and every player has to be able to read it and react on the fly, without constantly getting breathers and resetting. Sure, there are hundreds of plays in football but come on, the vast majority that are run are variations on one of four playsets, and how many wide out dump offs and quarterback draws do you imagine we'll see in the next few weeks. The pats are going to continue their timed crossing routes and with the help of generous officiating, march to another superbowl victory.

 

by tiggerporn on 01/07/2008 11:58:52 PM EST

[ Parent ]
Don't hate, I'm a balla (none / 0)

Over a hundred years ago, Dr. James Naismith scribbled down thirteen rules, later that night typing them up and posting them on the door of the YMCA he ran. He invented the game of basketball. He was dismayed that the hoodlums he dealt with, already violent from years being hardened on the streets, only became more unruly, violent and truly stupid while knocking each other around on the football field.

A hundred years later science has confirmed what the good doctor knew all along, football makes you retarded. The link between football and brain injury is now definite. They haven't yet made the connection to the fans  though, but give them a minute.  

by tiggerporn on 01/07/2008 11:28:31 PM EST

[ Parent ]
You're approaching this (none / 0)
from far too much of a historical context IMO.

Are there a lot of dopey football fans?  Sure, but I think most people are dopes so that doesnt' mean much.

You really believe that basketball fans are somehow more intellectual as a group?

Besides, I could just as easily talk about gridirion greats like George Halas, Landry, Lombardi and all of the great history there.

You have to concede on the comedic value of this alone.

by ihavenobias on 01/07/2008 11:40:44 PM EST

[ Parent ]
Why is there no NFL thread?! (And A SB Poll) | 15 comments (15 topical, 0 hidden)
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