As I was doing my background reading for these rants and to catch up on things, I ran across an obituary written by Mark Heisler in the LA Times. George Kiseda passed away and sports journalism is definitely the worse for his passing. If you never got to read George Kiseda, it is your loss; if you did read him, you recognize what the world now lacks. RIP, George Kiseda. Here is the obituary; I commend it to your reading:
Yesterday, I had a few snarky things to say about the excessive coverage of the NFL Draft – and I don’t intend to retract any of them. In fact, I have a suggestion to improve the coverage by subtracting from the coverage. After the draft there are about 2 million items written wherein somebody gives each team a “report card grade” on draft day. There is no way that any draft can be totally evaluated in the first 72 hours of the afterglow; Tom Brady as a 6th round pick did not demonstrate his significant value for several years; Ryan Leaf as an overall #2 pick did not demonstrate his abject worthlessness to an NFL franchise for several years. So here’s my idea:
Take all the instant report card columns written and put them in a time capsule.
Five years later, dig them out and grade the columns – not the draft – on how insightful and accurate the columns were.
Then fire anyone from their current job who got a C or below as a grade.
And just when you thought things couldn’t get all that worse comes news from ESPN that they will cover – live and in color – the 2007 baseball draft. Are you kidding me? At least with the football draft, a fan would have had the opportunity to see most of the top prospects actually play in real football games – assuming that fan invested the time to watch a lot of college football. That doesn’t mean the football draft is rational in any way; it means that the fans may actually know the players being considered by the teams.
In the case of baseball, they are going to be drafting kids in high school. When a team announces that in the nineteenth round they’ve selected Joey Sweetcheeks from Pigsknuckle, Kentucky, there will no one outside the county where Joey plays who will have ever heard of him let alone seen him play. He’s probably going to be listed as a shortstop – since that’s where most amateur baseball teams play their best athletes – but you won’t know if he fields like Ozzie Smith or like Edward Scissorhands.
There used to be some infomercials that featured a woman with a buzz haircut who kept screaming to “Stop the insanity!” I have no idea what she was trying to sell – demonstrating the true value of infomercials – but we need her to make a comeback. We need to “Stop the insanity!” when it comes to what is put on the air in terms of peripherals to sporting events. And the baseball draft for 2007 crosses over the line into the realm of the insane.
Tony Kornheiser said on Pardon the Interruption recently that Donovan McNabb and Brett Favre were both divas. I hadn’t looked at it that way before, but he’s absolutely correct in that assessment. The latest tizzy regarding Favre and whether or not he wanted to be traded from Green Bay wasn’t even up to the level of a tempest in a teapot. For about the last three years, it seems to me that instead of Brett Favre being “all about winning”, Brett Favre has become “all about Brett Favre”. He’s now played the retirement or not card and he’s played the maybe I should be traded card; what’s next?
How about just going out and playing football?
The same goes for Donovan McNabb. Yes, I do think he was victimized by Terrell Owens two seasons ago; and yes, I do believe that he is a person who has too much class to retaliate in kind with regard to people such as Terrell Owens. But once again, enough is enough. The Eagles used their top draft pick to take a QB who is several years away from even hoping to play in the NFL. Was that a good idea? Probably not. But this is not the backdrop to some kind of psychodrama starring Donovan McNabb and his parents and his publicist and a random cast of hundreds. It happened; deal with it. Here’s an idea for Donovan McNabb:
How about just going out and playing football?
Speaking of divas/prima donnas, I read somewhere that Warren Sapp lost 50 lbs in this off-season. Don’t worry; he won’t be trying to make a position switch to WR; that would take a loss of at least another 150 lbs. Regarding the loss of 50 lbs of fat, I sure hope that Sally Struthers isn’t the first person to find it…
MLB issued a ruling that denied Johnny Pesky a seat in the Red Sox dugout during games because the rules say only six coaches are allowed. Johnny Pesky is not a coach; he’s part of the fabric of the Boston Red Sox franchise; he’s in his late 80’s and is still a recognized and respected figure in the Boston area. But MLB has it rules and so it needs to enforce those rules – - I guess.
Now we can only hope that the NFL might take a lesson from MLB here. Suppose they had a rule saying that no more than three people can be in the broadcast boot at any time when an NFL game is on the air. That would eliminate the parade of “C-List celebrities” that ESPN insists on foisting upon all of us during MNF. That would be a positive outcome and a rule I’d gladly see the NFL enforce.
Finally, here’s Golden State Warriors’ forward, Al Harrington, on the pressure of the NBA playoffs:
“Everything is magnetized by ten.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…