Here is How We Fix the NFL.......

           

            Turn off your television sets. 

            Look away from the shamefulness of this damaged game. If you need sporting entertainment, there is quite an exciting pennant race going on in baseball.  It may seem impossible to do, yet it is the only way to get the real referees back.

Last night the integrity of football dissolved right before our eyes. The replacements made a call that cost somebody a game. Although the normal refs would have also faced a great deal of scrutiny for this call, they would have at least discussed the play first. Yet as much as you will yell, curse, and tweet, there is one harsh reality that for some reason many do not understand.

The NFL doesn’t give a crap about its fans. As long as you are still eating up whatever they serve, the league will continue to serve you the same previously digested pig meat.

Think about it. If you go to a restaurant and get poorly prepared food there are two courses of action. You could pitch a fit, throw your food at the waiter, demand a refund, and demand the restaurant makes certain staff changes. However, you will then be seen as a jerk and if you go back to that same restaurant, they will still serve you food that tastes like wet dog.

The other course of action is to not go. If enough people stop going to a restaurant, they have no choice but to make changes because they are bleeding revenue. The NFL has the exact same mindset.

It is tragically funny to see and hear talking heads act so shocked that multi-billion dollar cooperation doesn’t give a flying fudge about the fans they are supposed to be catering to. Steve Young of ESPN was the only one who seemed to get this very critical point. Everyone is yelling about the same thing, yet their cries of anguish will be ignored while the NFL bathes in its billions.

It is a basic fighting principal that hard must be met with soft to do more damage, and this is now a fight to get the real refs back. Everybody screaming at the league about the broken integrity of the game will be lost in the vacuum of NFL space. Instead, what must be done is the soft approach: turn off your television set.

That means that you the fans have to sacrifice in order to make the NFL listen.

This means no fantasy updates. No Tebow coverage. No are the Saints on the verge of implosion debates. Not even any complaining about how bad the replacement refs are. If you want your game to be fixed, you actually have to give something up in order to make that happen.

I know sacrificing something for the greater good sounds weird, but it must be done. Otherwise the NFL will continue to feed you the same crap for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Do not fear. In this instance not watching your team will not make you any less of a fan. If you want the NFL to be fixed, you have to refuse to accept the product the league has sent out.

Otherwise you look stupid for giving that same terrible restaurant more of your money. 

And the Loser is...Everyone who Cares About Hockey

          Congratulations Garry Bettman, Sidney Crosby and everyone else at the decision making table for the NHL. You have officially passed college football as the most incompetent group of people running a sport in the business.

            Oh it took quite a bit of effort to wrestle the crown away from the BCS. College football had you beat by letting a team that did not even win its own conference play for, and win the sport’s championship. Yet you, the NHL, remained determined to one day hoist the crown and hold it over your head like the most coveted trophy in sports.

            And you finally did it. When college football announced their four team playoff system you responded with the fourth work stoppage in league history.

            We have seen this debauchery three times in the last 20 years; though the numbers are bigger this time. The players were so hung up on hanging on to their precious 57 percent of total league revenue they forgot that they get more of their league’s revenue than the players in the NBA (51 percent)  and NFL(between 46 and 48 percent).

            While the owners laugh at that last statistic, they forget that guys like Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs make them look just as stupid. Jacobs, who happens to head the NHL board of governors, demanded that the new CBA have players’ deals be capped at five years. Just days before, he signed Tyler Seguin to a six year contract extension.

            And like in every lockout, the true victims of any work stoppage are the fans of the sport and the game itself.

NHL fans are golden retriever loyal to a sport run by morons. Bettman, Crosby, all of you abuse their loyalty so badly, Sarah McLachlan is on the verge of making a commercial about it. Bettman has repeatedly championed the fans’ loyalty to the sport, and then plunged a knife in their backs by stopping games.

With his third lockout in his commissioning career, Bettman has stopped his sport from conducting business and somehow still has a job. Since he has been commissioner, Bettman has been responsible for a total of 414 days of lockout; excluding the upcoming one.

Think about this. Bettman has more days locking out his players than Ryan Whitney and Joe Corvo have career assists combined.

            There is a certain determination that exists in actively pursing the title of most incompetent group of people running a sport. It takes a lot of chutzpah to shut down your league after you made close to 3 billion dollars last season; a new league record by the way.

Even though the lockout was a foregone conclusion, the inevitable remains infuriating. Enjoy the title of most incompetent sport in the business NHL; see you in 2013-2014. Maybe.

             

A Buried Lead

Devon Walker will never play a down on Sundays. He will never win the Jim Thorpe Award for best defensive back in the country. Walker’s team, the Green Wave of Tulane University, will likely never host College Gameday on ESPN.

These are just some factors as to why the kid who broke his neck in a game has become a one day story.

On the final play of the first half, Walker went in for a tackle and his helmet met the plastic headgear of a teammate. The resulting collision fractured Walker’s spine, collapsed his lung, and broke his neck.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal and ESPN.com both reported that Walker was in stable condition after being rushed to a Tulsa hospital. Both of these sites also reported that Walker’s mother watched her son break his neck on TV.

The big media outlets filed the Devon Walker story and ceased their coverage. It was time to ignore Walker’s condition and focus on whether to start Adrian Peterson or Maurice Jones-Drew for your fantasy team.

Expanding on Walker’s injury and questioning the safety of football would have put a damper on the NFL’s opening day. A multi-billion dollar industry would have had to share the media cycle with the demons of their game; but that didn’t happen.

The season debuts of the pro teams were too important to the big time networks. Peyton Manning playing on a new team, the expectations for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and of course everyone’s fantasy team was more important than the life threatening injury to Devon Walker.

A college senior fracturing his spine during a game did little to continue the national debate about the safety of football. The death of Junior Seau had a media cycle that lasted for days, and prompted several well reported stories relating to concussions in the NFL. Walker’s story had the impact of throwing a pebble into the ocean. When in reality, the horrid image of a player dying on a football field looks clearer than ever.

There is a good chance Walker will never walk for the rest of his life. Yet he isn’t a deceased hall of famer, a player on a noteworthy football school, or a kid on Mel Kiper’s draft board, so he clearly doesn't  matter.

Not all media outlets were guilty of dropping the story like Terrell Owens. Yahoo!Sports, USA Today, and SportingNews.com did their jobs by following up on Walker’s condition. Whether or not Walker would ever walk, let alone play football again, was not even on the home page of ESPN.com on Sunday morning.

Even still a young man almost died on a football field, and his story gets buried in less than a day. Meanwhile Tim Tebow, a quarterback who couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat, gets an entire summer’s worth of media coverage for taking his shirt off in the rain.

Somebody’s priorities are really messed up.

A family almost lost a son to a game where bone shattering collisions are encouraged. Instead of questioning the culture of America’s favorite collision sports, or filing stories about the devastating impacts of helmet to helmet hits, the media turned our attention to bigger behemoths hitting each other at faster speeds instead. Yet for the most part, the audience turned away from the ugliness of the game to see something else.

What nobody will be watching is if Devon Walker will ever walk again. And the decision to ignore the dangers of football, could lead to the death of somebody else’s son. Chances are, unless Tom Brady dies in a head to head collision next week, it will be downplayed as somebody else’s tragedy.

Sadly, we are all someone else to someone else. 

The O's Have Learned to Fly

           Perhaps the most beautiful and nonsensical story of this season has been the play of the little birdies from Baltimore.

            Armed with the 22^nd best team batting average, the 17^th best team earned run average in the bigs, and the 23^rd best attendance in the league, the Orioles are tied with the Yankees atop the American League East.

Their team is not only absent of big names, it is riddled with guys you have probably never heard of. However, they are playing meaningful games in September for the first time since 1997.

This Jim Johnson character that has racked up 41 saves this year does not get the CY Young considerations that Cincinnati Reds closer Aroldis Chapman does. Their best hitter, Adam Jones, is a career .280 hitter. Their number three hitter, Nate McClouth, is hitting .210. Yet  for the O's, the siren song of the postseason is within earshot.

It is possible to ask how this Orioles team is hanging around while barely cracking the top 20 in the bigs in payroll (they are 19^th). Well, the Orioles either lead the big leagues, or are in the top ten, in the “Chutzpah statistics.”

The Orioles have not lost a game this season after obtaining a lead after the seventh inning. Seriously, they are 60-0 when leading after seven innings.

The O’s have the third most saves in baseball. They also have the seventh best earned run average in the majors away from Camden Yards. The “Chutzpah statistics” ,not sabermetrics, have enabled the O’s to rival the Yankees this season; all thanks to the head of the flock.

The AL manager of the year race is over. Buck Showalter has guided his Orioles to meaningful September baseball for the first time in 15 years. Anybody who thought the O’s were going anywhere this season is either a die-hard O’s fan or a liar.

Credit Robin Ventura of the White Sox for getting his team to play well to this point. Joe Girardi should get votes for holding his injury plagued Yankees together with silly string and scotch tape.

However, Ventura’s team is hitting .257 compared to the fighting Showalter’s batting average of .247. Also the White Sox are in a much weaker division than the talent riddled AL East.

As for Girardi, he will not get votes because the Yankees are expected to be in it every year; whether those expectations are fair or not. The Orioles are relevant in baseball for the first time in the new millennium thanks to Showalter.

Nobody has done more with less this season than Showalter. It has been his management skills that have propelled the Orioles to the perch they sit on today.

It makes no sense for the O’s to be here, yet that is the beauty of baseball: very little ever makes sense. While Showalter will be the only one to get accolade recognition, these dirty birds will continue to fly towards October.