Dallas vs. Dynasty

OK, the super bowl is set and SR has a few things to say. First of all, Jim Mora Jr. knows that he still has Michael Vick on his team right? Atlanta should have carved up that Philly defense but they only used Vick to his true abilities when it was predictable, or on busted plays. Vick is the most exciting player since Barry Sanders, but only when you allow him to do what only he can do. Barry used to lead the league in yards lost, but he’d also lead the league in yards gained. The point is you have to take the bad to get the good. By playing so conservatively in the first half Atlanta put themselves in a bad situation, instead of Vick being unpredictable and maddening Philly knew exactly when and where he would try his trickery.

That said Philly played very well. The great thing is that they did it without TO. Don’t get me wrong, TO is a great player, and I rode him like Zorro in my fantasy league, but, in the end I, like the Eagles, had to find a way to get it done without TO. Andy Reid drew up a great game plan the last two weeks but, Freddie Mitchell’s “great” hands not withstanding, the Iggles won on a couple of lucky bounces last week. Now I’m left to wonder whether TO will help or hurt his team if he can come back for the big game.

Not that I think it will make any real difference. The Pats look as good as ever and I expect them to win it all. Sure, last week I thought that Manning and Co. would roll into Foxboro and sprint on to Pittsburg. Sure I said that a scheme can’t win without the players to carry it out and that the time had come for the New England secondary to finally not only be exposed, but exploited. But I was wrong. Around the middle of the third quarter last week I decided that Belichick IS the next Walsh and that my money’s on the Pats to win until they lose. After Pitt escaped last week’s game against the Jets and Big Ben looked like the rookie he really is, I knew there was no way the Steelers could win.

So, if the Pats win what is their legacy? A lot of people are starting to throw around the word “dynasty.” During the broadcast yesterday Chris Collinsworth mentioned that when asked about dynasties Belichick mentioned the Dallas teams of the early 90s. Those teams won three titles in four years, which is exactly what the Pats are trying to do, so it’s apt that Belichick would choose them as his example of a dynasty. I disagree. Those Cowboy teams were very good, great even, but they were no dynasty. “But SR, if the Cowboys run doesn’t make a dynasty what does?” I’m glad you asked.

A dynasty requires both winning and longevity. Both the Cowboys of the 90s, and these Pats, if they win the Super Bowl, have the winning, sort of. In order to be a dynasty I think you need to match the title total of the NFL’s first modern dynasty, the four Super Bowls won by the Steelers in the 1970’s. During their dominant stretch (1972-1984) the Steelers won their division 10 times, went to the playoffs 11 times and played in 7 AFC Championships. Still, in order to define a true dynasty you must look at the single greatest dynasty in NFL history, the San Francisco Forty Niners. Even if you mark their run only from the start to the end of their championship years you are looking at 14 years at or near the top of the league. If you include the fact that they lost the 1997 NFC Championship Game their legacy spans 17 years of dominance, nearly two decades as the team to beat in the NFC. During those 17 years SF won their division 13 times, went to the playoffs 15 times, played in 10 NFC Championships, and was the first team to win 5 Super Bowls. No other team has ever had that much success for so long. Even in the lean years, 1998-2004, SF made the playoffs three times, including the second biggest comeback victory in NFL playoff history.

Want more? Too bad, it’s my web site and I’ll Rant if I want to. Going back to the original dynasty, the Steelers won two titles in the first half of the 1970s, and then two in the second fitting them to the criteria of both winning and longevity. The Niners won their championships over an extended period of time becoming the team of the 80s. This is a very important factor. Even if you toss out the ‘94 season the Niners won four titles over nine years with one repeat. They never went more than three years without a title. By contrast, the Cowboys of the early 90s won three tiles in four years, but none after 1995. In my mind this makes them the team of the first half of the nineties, but not a dynasty. This is the mold from which the current Patriots may be cast. If they win this title they will be a very good team that has had a short run of incredible brilliance. Of course they still need to win the Super Bowl this year, and even then they won’t be as good as those Cowboy teams for the fact that between titles the Boys lost to the Niners in the NFC championship Game, between titles the Pats missed the playoffs.

So what needs to happen for the Pats to become a dynasty? Well, they’ll need to win on Feb. 6th, and they’ll have to win at least won more time after that. That fourth win can come any time, but if it comes in 2006 or 2007 so much the better. In the meantime the Pats would have to win their division and make it deep into the playoffs in the years they don’t win it all. If they can keep up this kind of pace for next two or three years I’ll be willing to call them a dynasty.

Rush Makes Waste By DMJ

Well, at least ESPN got their money's worth.

We're barely four weeks into the NFL season, and already the Disney-owned cable sports channel's investment in porcine windbag Rush Limbaugh is paying dividends in the form of free publicity--and lots of it.
Limbaugh's claim during the Sept. 28 broadcast of "Sunday NFL Countdown" that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because of a shadowy conspiracy among the media to promote an African-American quarterback has already become fodder for sports-talk radio and unknown dozens of sports columnists nationwide.
Never mind that the same sports media he speaks of has savaged other black QBs like Kordell Stewart and Charlie Batch. (Breaking news--as I'm writing this and watching game 1 of the division series between Your Oakland Athletics and the Boston Red Sox, ESPN has just announced that Limbaugh has resigned from the show. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant, shall we?)

Never mind that Limbaugh was silent about similarly "overrated" quarterbacks like Brad Johnson (perhaps the greatest recipient ever in the Super Bowl Sweepstakes, thanks to a truly awe-inspiring Tampa Bay defense). Quite frankly, nothing Limbaugh said has surprised me at all. I've known for years that this obnoxious, braying jackass was also a racist, sexist, and pretty much the poster boy for closet xenophobes everywhere.
This is the man who said in 1994, "If you want to know what America used to be--and a lot of people wish it still were--then you listen to Strom Thurmond," referring to the thankfully-dead hatemonger who once ran for president on a platform of "segregation forever."

This is a man who said in 1990, "Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"

This is a man who told a radio caller, who said black people need to be heard, that "they are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?"

So nobody, least of all the suits at Disney, should have been the least bit surprised when, left to his own devices, Limbaugh spewed ignorant invective all over the set Sunday. Let's go to (a transcript of) the videotape:

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

I'll leave discussions of McNabb's relative worth to the aforementioned call-in hacks and "jake reporters," to borrow a phrase from Rich Gannon. The real outrage here is not that Rush said something so stupid and racist--hell, he's made a career out of saying, stupid, racist things, and judging by the radio ratings, there are a whole lot of people in this country who agree with him. No, my anger here is directed squarely at ESPN--a "sports" network so desperate for ratings growth that they recently aired a one-hour special about Anna Kournikova's swimsuit calendar shoot (I didn't watch--more than
once, anyway). If you tune in right now, you may catch shows like "Playmakers," "Around the Horn," or "Pardon the Interruption," which offer nothing except solid proof that no one at ESPN learned anything from the way MTV so destroyed its network with endless episodes of "Cribs" and "The Real World" (sorry, Malik) that they had to start a new network and advertise that it just played music videos--what a radical idea!

So ESPN hired a congenital liar like Limbaugh, a man whose experience with football pretty much starts and ends with the "knee injury" he claims to have sustained during a high school game and that kept him as far away from Vietnam as humanly possible. Proving that he can't even tell the truth about himself, Limbaugh later claimed that his 4-F status in the draft was because of a pilonidal cyst, which is basically a disgusting, hairy boil on his ass. (Sorry for sneaking in that horrifying mental image there.) They can't possibly make the argument that there weren't enough experienced football commentators available--outside of the usual cast of former players and coaches always clamoring for some of that TV money, the network had just fired former Green Bay Packer Sterling Sharpe, a thoughtful, insightful
commentator.

They can't make the argument that they were "experimenting" with the idea of bringing in an outsider, an Everyman, to provide a fresh perspective on the game--their sister company ABC's experiment with Dennis Miller will go down as one of the most embarrassing moments in the storied history of Monday Night Football. To paraphrase a much better writer than myself, King Kaufman of salon.com, if I wanted to hear an uninformed idiot's perspective on the game, I can turn to either side of the couch and ask one of my friends.

So we are left with this--ESPN hired this one-man Klan precisely because they knew what a polarizing figure he is. They knew that his "dittoheads," so named because they parrot everything Limbaugh says without bothering to mentally process it, will tune in to see their man. They knew that football fans will continue to tune in, because, what, we're gonna go to church instead? Hell, they were probably banking that even people like me, who froth at the mouth at the mention of Limbaugh's name, would tune in, looking for more reasons to hate him (like I needed more).

Limbaugh's hiring was a crude, craven act by a company that (surprise, surprise) puts the scrambling, scrounging, desperate search for ratings and money above everything else. They gave a platform to a man they knew was a liar and a racist, and now they'll expect us to believe that they are shocked, that they feel terrible about what was said, and that they meant no offense to McNabb or the millions of African-Americans whose achievements are routinely dismissed by racist conservatives like Limbaugh as either the gifts of affirmative action or failures masked by a crusading liberal media.
They'll appear contrite in front of the cameras, telling us with glum faces what a disappointing affair this has been, and how Limbaugh's statements don't speak for ESPN, or Disney, and how much they value diversity. And then they'll go back behind closed doors and high-five each other when the ratings reports come in.