CONCERT HALLS! (RAAAAAAH!)
I have no idea why I said that. Anyway, tonight the Eagles find themselves in the awkward position of having to break the hearts of the beleaguered citizenry of a hurricane-ravaged city. I was afraid the national media would play up the "Saints are America's team, Eagles are terrorist-loving villains!" angle but thankfully they have avoided that. Indeed, people have been respectful toward the Birds, and opinion seems to be evenly mixed about who's going to actually win this thing. Speaking as one random Eagles fan, my heart absolutely aches for the great city of New Orleans; I recall the images of flooding and devastation with horror; the stories I have heard about the refugees in the Superdome haunt me. Should the Eagles unfortunately lose tonight, I got the Saints' back. Having said that, it's just a game - a game I rather energetically hope the Birds find a way to win.
No "Dumb Things Bill Simmons Said" this week. His column yesterday was fairly reasonable and occasionally amusing. He predicts a big Saints win, which is his right. He took one minor dig at Andy Reid, but no harm done. He kind of arrogantly picks the Pats over the Chargers based on the somewhat specious reasoning that Belichick and Brady have a better playoff record than Schottenheimer and Rivers. He takes yet more shots at Peyton Manning, using the typically inane argument that he's "never won anything", conveniently ignoring the fact that he's just one player playing in a team sport where it's next to impossible to win games singlehandedly and has never been on teams quite good enough to go much farther (which should now be referred to as the "Abreu argument"). He takes lots of shots at various coaches, insinuating that he could coach much better than all of them, basing this argument on the fact that he's learned everything there is to know about football from playing "Madden" nonstop for the past twenty years. He keeps making up increasingly ridiculous "rules" to base his gambling picks on, then complains that "the league makes no sense" when they don't work. Actually, I guess he did say lots of dumb things this week.
It occurs to me now (and I haven't formulated this entirely) that Sports Guy's problem is that he assumes that all sports are the same, and keeps trying to apply the same dumb "rules" and "corollaries" to all of them. He's a big NBA fan, so he grew up watching Bird and Magic and Kareem and Jordan dominate games and win championships more or less by themselves (yes, I know that they all had very good teams behind them, so I guess I'm sort of reaching here). And I agree that it's possible in basketball - I just spent the last ten and a half years watching AI, so I know that if a guy scores 45 points one night, and his teammates get out of the way and don't do anything egregiously stupid, they're probably going to win. But with a few isolated exceptions, football and baseball just aren't like that - Peyton can score all the touchdowns he wants, but if his team's defense blows, all he can do is stand on the sidelines and watch them blow, and there's really not a damn thing he can do about it, and it's annoying that bitter, jealous, Boston-loving losers are then allowed to rant about how horrible he is and how he "can't win in January". (Similarly, Abreu was nothing short of spectacular while he was here, but he was usually surrounded by morons who could neither hit nor pitch, so he unfairly became a scapegoat for the team's failure. I've already covered Abreu in this space, so I'll say no more.) Point being, for all his obvious intelligence and talent, Simmons can be a very dumb man. Have I mentioned that he thinks Jimmy Kimmel is funny, and in fact used to write for his show? Make of that what you will.
On the subject of AI, we just lost him and C-Webb in the span of what, three weeks? Strange times. Webber was never embraced here, and in fact it appears he can no longer run or shoot, so he, for better or worse, won't be missed all that much. It's unfortunate, because I remember being really excited when we got him - it was a bold, gutsy trade, and the team really did look pretty good for a short while there - they lost in the playoffs to a clearly superior Pistons team, but they played hard and it was kind of a fun series. After that, things just fell apart. You know what, I think I’d rather cover this in a future post, so I’ll just leave you with the following thought: It suddenly occurs to me that Iverson might be my favorite Philadelphia athlete of all time.
GO EAGLES!!!
