Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Saturday will feature the last Notre Dame / BC matchup in football for some time. BC has done very good in the series to have a 9-9 mark against the "powerhouse" Fighting Irish. The Eagles have won the last 6 matchups. The unspoken reason why this series is coming to an end is because the Boston College fans are obnoxious when it comes to Notre Dame. There is simply no couth on the BC side of this "rivalry". You're better off wearing Red Sox gear head to foot at Yankee Stadium than simply wearing a Notre Dame cap at a BC home game against the Irish. The line in this game is ND -7.5 but I wouldn't touch this one (if I was to pick it my heart would be with BC but my head would say ND)... Girls in bikinis doing hula hoop. Yeah baby!... Georgia Tech beat highly touted Virginia Tech by 5 points last week yet the line against Virginia is just GT -5.5 points? This looks like a gimme. Am I missing something? Is this a trap?... On this date in 1850 Worcester was host to the first National Women's Rights Convention. That put Worcester on the forefront of the woman's suffrage movement. Seeing how Worcester was also the birthplace of the birth control pill - it can be argued that Worcester was one of the most important cities in terms of woman's rights in the entire US (throwing this in to balance off the girls in bikini's doing hula hoop)... Hard to believe but both the iPod and ESPN's Pardon the Interruption have been around for 8 years now... I wonder why the Wake Forrest / Navy game is off the board? Navy was an early 3-point favorite... Happy 47th birthday to Doug Flutie. I have no idea why Flutie is not still with ESPN doing college football. He is way more knowledgeable than dickhead Jesse Palmer. Can someone explain this to me? Doug Flutie is to Larry Bird what Jesse Palmer is to Michael Smith.

PTI and the Dumbing Down of America

Norman Chad has an amusing column on sportswriters on TV. Norm was just half-joking but he's hit on a serious problem. Sportswriters on TV are responsible for the dumbing down of America and they must be stopped.

First there was The Sports Reporters which was lead by the great Dick Schaap. It was a veritable Algonquin round table for serious sports fans. However, after the passing of Schaap it became the Mike Lupica show and the quality of the discourse went down the tube because the other guests were too worried about wearing the same tie as or looking the little dictator directly in the eye to make cogent arguments.

Sports Reporters spawned Pardon the Interruption (PTI), which as Chad points out, took two of the best sportswriters in the business out of the business of writing. PTI spawned Around the Horn which is to intellectual improvement what cockfighting is to sports. (While I'm throwing around analogies - Stephen A Smith is to bleeding ears what Japanese cartoons are to sudden epileptic seizures.)

The trend has been downward in quality of discourse and upward in volume. At the same time, as Chad points out, the sportswriters have stopped writing. It gets confusing because if they are not writing then they can't be sportswriters. Since most of them never played the game they can't be called sports personalities. Yammering white guys would cover 90% of the TV talking heads but I think it wouldn't be politically acceptable.

If you think I'm kidding consider that while at the same time the sportswriters on TV phenomenon was spreading a gender gap in education was also developing. Girls were surging ahead of boys in reading and math skills. Boys who used to read the Kornheisers and Wilbons of the world were now just vacantly staring into a boob tube. Instead of working out the math of a boxscore - boys just assumed the numbers Woody Paige shouted out were correct.

There has been a serious dumbing down of the American male youth and ESPN is to blame. They must be stopped before something worse than Stephen A. Smith is forced upon the youth of America.

If you need any further proof that what I claim is true - just look at the recent Who's Now "competition" on ESPN. Never mind the inanity of the idea behind the competition - just look at the grammar of the title of it.

(Oh and Norm - just an FYI - Nipsey Russell died 2 years ago.)

HT The Big Lead for the Chad column