Gregg Easterbrook Is Still Very Wordy

In this week's TMQ, Gregg Easterbrook spends 1,800 words on the Patriots being evil. This isn’t written in the guise of comedy or to be witty or something. Since GGAS recently moved our offices to New England, I’ll put this out there in the interest of full disclosure; I root for New England teams. Now I’ll balance that out with this: I’m not really an NFL fan. I enjoy watching the Patriots because they are good, not because they are “my team”, because they are not. Now, much of TMQ is essentially calling Bill Belichick and Tom Brady classless assholes who were running up the score against the Dolphins on Sunday and have been the NFL embodiment (on the field and off) of evil, while the Colts (specifically Dungy and Manning) represent all that is good. I have nothing against Tony Dungy and Peyton Manning, but I just think Easterbrook's entire premise and arguments against the Patriots is silly.

To address the accusation of running up the score in yesterdays win against the Dolphins, he spends a lot of time on the logistics of the plays that were called to support his claims. Personally, I don’t give a shit if they were, but is it really a big issue today? It’s not like it was 63-0 and they continued to try to score. It just seems like a non-issue when you consider it was 42-7 at halftime and the final was 49-28. I mean, I got to think they’d be a little better about running up the score than to be outscored 21-7 in the second half.

It also makes little sense when you consider one of his “stats of the week:”

Stat of the Week No. 2: At one point, Tennessee led Houston 32-7 and held a 311-34 advantage in offensive yards, yet the Titans ended up needing a field goal on the final snap to win.

Look, the Patriots had a massive lead at halftime, and the odds of the Dolphins coming back were slim, but come-backs do happen. I think if Matt Cassel didn't get picked and the Dolphins weren't putting points on the board he would have finished off the game. Get over it. Oh no wait, write 1,800 words about it. Yeah, that makes more sense.

I’ll try to parse out some specific items that I thought were a little over the top/unfair.

Their coach, Tony Dungy, smiles in public and answers honestly whatever he is asked: He never yells at players or grimaces at bad plays and, when defeated, doesn't act as though it's the end of the world.

Okay, so that’s the mark of a “good” coach. So Red Auerbach, who yelled at his players on the court…he’s evil? Bobby Knight? That guy must be the devil. Doesn’t Peyton Manning yell at people from time to time and even (gasp) grimace after a bad play? Is this worth our time? Did Vince Lombardi, the man credited with “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” act like it was the end of the world when he lost (sounds like it)? These are rhetorical questions that I realize don’t directly address his point, that Tony Dungy is the embodiment of “good”, but is the antithesis of these acts really the embodiment of “evil”. That’s stupid.

The team has three Super Bowl triumphs, yet its players regularly whine about not being revered enough.

I honestly have to disagree. Other than the standard locker room fare that teams use to search for motivation (‘the other team is favored to win’ kind of stuff), I have never heard the mainstays on these Patriots teams (or the new players, since they joined the Patriots) whining about not being revered enough. If there are examples, then I’ll admit I’m wrong, because I’m not soaking up a ton of NFL media. But don’t say “regularly” without giving me one example.

The team's star, Tom Brady, is a smirking sybarite who dates actresses and supermodels but whose public charity appearances are infrequent. That constant smirk on Brady's face reminds one of Dick Cheney; people who smirk are fairly broadcasting the message, "I'm hiding something."

This is a very petty attack on Tom Brady. Let’s review:

Smirking sybarite:

Okay, I had to look up the word sybarite because I’m not as smart as Gregg Easterbrook, but dictionary.com defines it as the following: a person devoted to luxury and pleasure.

So we’re making an attack on Tom Brady for smirking - which implies that he’s going out of his way to put on a negative vibe - and apparently liking luxury and pleasure. What-fucking-ever man. I recommend you not study Tom Brady’s face so much.

Dates actresses and supermodels

So? Is that evil? What if he dated cheerleaders like the ones you pretend to like and post all over TMQ, to compensate for the fact that you are kind of a dork? Check it out! I like chicks too!

..but whose public charity appearances are infrequent.

True, Brady’s ratio of supermodels dated to charitable donations is pretty low. Evil!

That constant smirk on Brady's face reminds one of Dick Cheney; people who smirk are fairly broadcasting the message, "I'm hiding something."

What the fuck are you talking about? This is very irresponsible ad-hominem attacks in the name of being righteous. You can’t say “he smirks” and then leap to “he’s dishonest”. Gregg, your writing REAKS of pomposity and arrogance. That tells me that you’re an asshole. Is that fair?

The TMQ loves rhetorical questions. Let’s answer a few.

The New England players still might suffer some long-term harm from the cheating, though: Given the image New England is projecting, would you want Patriots' players endorsing your product?

I don’t think Tom Brady will have any trouble getting endorsements because of Belichick’s taping scandal. I see Patriots players advertising all sorts of shit in New England, and there really aren’t that many NFL stars involved in national ads, but Brady is one of them. So that’s bunk.

But if the Patriots are unfairly maligned, why the whole screw-you act they are staging?

If you were unfairly maligned, wouldn’t your mentality be of the “screw-you” variety? Mine would be. I peg you as saying:

Gregg: "I'm being unfairly maligned, but please please see that my heart is pure, and look at the ass on that one!"
Me: Gregg that's a man
Gregg: I like naked women!
Me: Sure.

If the Patriots were unfairly maligned, they'd be trying hard to convince us their hearts are pure, and that distinctly is not what they are doing.

Woah woah woah. Hearts are pure? Man I was kidding about that shit (okay I cheated). No, if a team is accused of cheating, they don’t then go out and play and try to barely win, but in a “our hearts are pure” kind of way. No. They try to win in a way that says, “do you see any cheating now, while I’m kicking your ass?” This is pretty simple.

But if the Patriots are so awesome they don't need to cheat, then why were they cheating in Week 1? The whole situation remains creepy. Should New England continue on and win the Super Bowl without a major attitude shift toward nice-guy behavior -- and should the year end without the NFL's ever explaining what New England evidence it destroyed or why -- there could be a huge amount of cynicism about this NFL season. Cynicism doesn't sell a sports product, nor is it what the NFL should be marketing to the young.

This is a great example of how Easterbrook can, in a passive way, make incredible leaps in logic that just make little sense. It’s a pretty innocent little set of sentences, but the statement that he’s making is pretty grandiose. I’ll just chime in and say that there won’t be a huge amount of cynicism if things play out with the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, for precisely the reason why you are wrote those 1,800 words. They are kicking everyone’s ass, and letting it be known that they are the better team, regardless of what your opinions of them and the taping scandal are. I’m not sure why this is so difficult to understand.

This entire post is less than 1,400 words - he wrote 1,800 about the Patriots being evil. That's a little obsessive.

Gregg Easterbrook Writes a Long-Ass Column

So I'm really tired and this post may be very sloppy and non-sensical.... but what the hell, right?
Gregg Easterbrook writes an incredibly long-winded column on ESPN page 2 called “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” where he explains why he’s so much smarter than you and everyone else. I just finished reading this week's edition and I’m too tired to type a better intro. For the record I don't hate the guy or think he's unintelligent. He often has many good points, particularly about NFL strategy. But he can get a little too righteous for my liking.

On the NBA point below, I’m not really saying he’s wrong, just responding. I don’t know. I’m really tired, just read it. I’m not even going to address his hyperbole when talking about the impact of the camera issue on the NFL - but feel free to check out his column for his (long) take on it (hint: it's catastrophic). Also, if you want a lot of comparisons of Bill Belichick and Richard Nixon, that link will suit you well.

Think the NFL can't decline? Fifteen years ago, the National Basketball Association was going up, up, up by every measure and was widely considered the gold-plated can't-miss "sport of the next century." Since then, NBA popularity and ratings have plummeted while NBA-based teams have floundered in international competition.

No, actually NBA popularity and ratings plummeted when Michael Jordan retired, which coincided with a lockout. There are dozens of other reasons, but I’d point to those two first. Also, losing in international competition is largely the result of much improved international competition.

I believe it was 1994 when Sports Illustrated had a cover story called something like “Why the NHL is hot, and the NBA is not”. Just saying.

Fifteen years ago, sports-marketing types would have said "impossible!" to the notion that only 11 percent of American households would watch the NBA Finals, which is what happened this June.

Look at the chart midway down on the left of this page. Notice anything? The ratings were high with Jordan or Los Angeles in the Finals, and pretty much lower any time the Spurs were involved. Also, this is a long time to be reviewing ratings. I think if you told the sports-marketing types about the rise in video games, and explained to them “the Internet”, TIVO/DVR, and cable packages with hundreds of channels and then told them the finals would be played between San Antonio and Cleveland, they would have thought of that notion as being very possible.

I also couldn’t quite follow Easterbrook’s train of thought when talking about the possibility of the Patriots cheating on Sunday night against the Chargers. Namely if they had used illegally obtained video from the January AFC playoff game (which he acknowledges had different coaching) to their advantage on Sunday night.

Was New England cheating again Sunday night, when the Patriots advanced the ball with such ease it seemed they knew what defense San Diego would be in?

He's asking that question for real. It's at the tail end of a paragraph where he explains exactly how the Patriots could have been cheating. Now let’s read some snippets of his analysis of the game from a different section of his column.

What in blazes was the story with the Chargers? Rarely has a quality team seemed so ill-prepared for a monster game, and rarely has a quality team seemed to give up the moment the going got tough.

He then goes through several plays where the Chargers should have known what was coming, but were ill-prepared. Based on AccuScore and (he seems to imply) common sense, the Chargers were not playing smart.

He concludes just by saying, “That's awful defense” after both long-winded detailed paragraphs explaining how the Chargers sucked.

But what was really awful about San Diego's performance was the coaching timidity.

He then goes into detail about how San Diego should have gone for it fourth-and-1 near midfield in the second quarter when they were already down 17 points and later in the quarter they punted again on 4th and 2.

When the coach quits on the game in the second quarter, it should come as no surprise that the players quit.

So first he questions if they were cheating because they advanced the ball easily and seemed to know what defense was coming.

Then we get:
- “ill-prepared”
- “awful defense”
- “awful defense”
- “coaching timidity”
- “coach quits”
- “players quit”
…to describe the Chargers.

Hmm, well….. I realize that those statements and the Patriots cheating aren’t mutually exclusive, but why would anyone who watched the game waste time putting a lot of thought into crediting their offensive output to the Patriots cheating, especially when that person has such disdain for the Chargers’ defensive execution, strategy, and effort?

Bill Simmons Would Like You to Focus On Important Stuff!

It is hugely ironic to me that Bill Simmons is so outraged at the level of coverage given to the Bill Belichick issue that he has decided to preach to us and the networks about how our news prioritization is fucked up. This is a guy who has written thousands of words about old, socially irrelevant television shows and running diaries on completely useless shit. I’ll let him take it away:

We live in a world in which global-warming activists charter private jets to take them from speech to speech, then tell people not to use so much toilet paper. We live in a world in which American kids are getting killed every day in the Middle East and nobody will mobilize a valid protest until the President finally decides, "We're having a draft lottery." We live in a world in which you can Google the female star of the most popular Disney TV movie ever and see her naked, and NBC runs a popular show in which they trap potential child predators and film the confrontations on TV. We live in a world in which high school kids can decide they don't like another high school kid, so they can build an anonymous slam page and libel the hell out of him, and even though this happens and keeps happening, we still don't have any set-in-stone Internet laws to prevent this. We live in a world in which Perez Hilton and TMZ.com get their own TV shows, but "Friday Night Lights" is two months away from getting canceled. We live in a world in which every home run record from the past 10 years has to be taken not just with a grain of salt, but an entire salt shaker.

So save me the moral indignation about CameraGate. The whole world is screwed up. We watch football every week because the games are entertaining, because it's something to do, because it gives us something to discuss with our friends, co-workers and family members. If you're searching for a football-related moral cause with some meat, watch this month's feature about Earl Campbell on "Costas Now." He's the Texas hero who got chewed up and spit out by professional football; now he suffers from crippling back and knee problems and needs a cane or a wheelchair to get around. The NFL makes roughly a kajillion dollars a year, only its player's union doesn't give two craps about a deteriorating ex-star like Campbell, one of the watershed stars of the '70s and someone who helped push the league to its current heights. They have a lame pension program and no disability benefits, and they have a union head (Gene Upshaw) who openly admits he's paid to worry about current players and not former ones ... even though he's a former player himself. Of course, that story isn't nearly as controversial as the current Patriots scandal because we can't slap a "Gate" behind it. Too bad.

We live in a world where Bill Simmons gets paid to write running diaries of the Scripps National Spelling Bee and Comedy Roasts; where he gets paid to write about his favorite YouTube clips; where he gets paid to write about Las Vegas once a month, name drop his buddies, reference archaic, meaningless shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and talk incessantly about TV and Movies in a sports column. He should be licking is chops to write about an actual news story involving the NFL…on the field.

Simmons’ point is mind-bogglingly stupid but his self-righteousness is in his way of seeing that. Bill, Iraq has been going on for YEARS, so has just about all the things you noted (or other similar things), which is why during the Patriots game, the first game since “Camera-gate”, THAT was the big story. Who cares if, in the grand scale of immoralities, it ranks below other highly questionable circumstances? On Sunday, during the only NFL game on at night, and with the Patriots playing, it WAS STILL the story. You can’t get mad because one commentator didn’t interrupt the other to say, “Can we talk about Earl Campbell’s knees for one sweet minute?” It's not like they didn't cover the game and just rambled about the issue for 3 hours.

Nothing in your rant changes what should have been the story in the specific context of the Patriots game. During the first game after the incident, the incident IS the story (even if racism and war exist in the world). If Tony Dungy was accused of what Belichick is accused of, then you would be talking about it 10 times as much and with 10 times the disdain. You would be demanding that the Patriots be allowed to play the Bears to re-do the Super Bowl without the cheatin’ Colts.

I understand that Bill’s point was not that Global Warming or the Iraq war should have been front and center stories on Sunday night NFL. I guess his point was the world is so screwed up, we should just focus on the product on the field and minimize off-the field news. Did he actually talk about steroids there? Now THAT is a story that has received more than its share of attention. We should ignore the camera story and talk about it even more, because it's had a greater impact on sports? For a sportswriter to be so dismissive of a sports issue because it is minor in a global context (or even a global sporting context) is laughable. Especially when that sportswriter is the king of writing about inconsequential bullshit that is trivial even to the professional sports “world”.

The crazy thing is that Bill had a lot of good observations about the actual game. It’s too bad he couldn’t do what he was asking of the commentators and stop harping on “camera-gate”. The column is more effective and a lot less maddening without the two paragraphs I cited above.