Although everyone knew that Steelers safety Ryan Clark was going to sit as his team traveled to Denver for tonight’s Monday night game, he still made the trip with the team. Clark, whose sickle-cell condition causes his blot to clot when his body is under duress at high altitudes, nearly died after playing in Pittsburgh’s last game in Denver. But you know what the real killer is? Denver’s getting three points!.
If you’re watching the telecast tonight, join the liveblog at KSK if you’re game. Or just sit at the bar by yourself like a douchebag. Your call.
This is that scrum from the last night’s game that started after Atlanta tried for an onside kick for a chance to score a TD with the 2-point conversion and tie the game. And it’s just a terrific mass of humanity with a camera shot that makes you forget how annoying it is to watch that camera slide along on cables above the field. Remember two years ago when that camera actually fell onto the field? That’s the only thing that would have made this any better. Read the rest of this entry »
If you stuck it out for the duration of the Saints’ win over the Falcons last night, you were probably unsure whether you were watching the NFL or the NCAA Final Four. The last two minutes of that game seemingly took forever, littered by turnovers, a handful of booth reviews, and referee conferences where six seconds were taken off the clock, only to be put back on the clock after the following play.
I couldn’t help but think that MLB commissioner Bud Selig caught win of the multiple delays and thought to himself, This is exactly what we don’t want in baseball. And to be fair, baseball does seem to have more emphasis on flow than its staccatoed gridiron counterpart. Interruptions–and creating a specific avenue for them to happen more frequently–are a bit of a killjoy in baseball, unless there’s a cat on the field or a fight in the stands behind the home team’s dugout. Missed calls here or there, even as they’re magnified during the playoffs, aren’t the end of the world.
Anyone watching football last night realizes that the 15 minutes or so that it took to play out the end of that Monday Night game realizes that the NFL has no such margin for forgiveness. And whether they laid the eleven and a half with the Saints or were just hoping to boost Atlanta’s potential tiebreaker stats for playoff consideration, neither do its fans. And while it was irritating to sit between plays and wonder Dear God, when will this game ever end? at least the effort to get every call right was there. That’s more than we can say about baseball right now.
Brett Favre’s much-ballyhooed game against his former team finally happened last night, and the steady offensive output of both the Vikings and Packers, combined with Favre’s remarkable command under center, came rather close to justifying the hype. Favre threw for 384 yards and 3 TDs while completing 77 percent of his passes, leading Minnesota to a 30-23 win and their first 4-0 start since 2003. One source went as far as to claim that Favre was just having fun out there.
“My statement has been what I’ve done over my career,” Favre said. “One game does not define my career good or bad. I know what I’ve done. I’m proud of what I’ve done. I know I can play. I wanted to do what it takes to win.” via.
Green Bay was successful in shutting down the hexagonally-skinned Adrian Peterson, who only ran for 55 yards on the day and even had a ball wrenched out of his hands by Green Bay’s Clay Matthews, who ran it back for a touchdown. But it one of the better MNF games in some time, and hopefully we won’t hear much about Favre until the end of the week. Hear more about who? Exactly.
How many times has “Brett Favre” been mentioned in a single TV show? I don’t care either, but ESPN’s “SportsNation,” that show where they take 30 minutes to show you everything you already saw on the internet earlier that day, is looking to break that record…whatever it is.
ESPN, says spokesman Mike Soltys, will announce that on next Monday’s broadcast of its ESPN2 SportsNation [time redacted], it will try to set a record for the most mentions of Brett Favre on a TV show — with Guinness World Records now looking for the current record. via.
So “SportsNation” is looking to become–literally–the most annoying show in the history of television. What else would you expect from the monolith? They only seem to care about ratings and not showing Rachael Nichols’ breasts, and neither of those things leads to coherent television. Oh, wow…I’ve just gone through my calendar and I was already planning on not watching it. Sweet.
I’m already sick to death of people whining, “Oh, Tom Brady blew off Suzy Kolber for an interview.” Yeah, so? Do you have any idea of the demands on his time? Tom Brady makes $10 million a year for a reason, and it’s not so he can flash a flight attendant’s smile whenever somebody jams a camera into his face.
Think about his relationship with the media over the past year. Everything the guy does is being covered by either ESPN or US Weekly or the Honduran Gay Men’s Journal, Drew’s personal favorite. Dude had armed guards to keep the paparazzi out of his wedding. And keep in mind that he wasn’t even playing for nearly all of 2008. And he comes back last night and nearly loses to the GD Bills [and probably should have, were it not for the heroics of the Bills' Leodis McKelvin], and now he’s supposed to stop in his tracks and spoon-feed the beast? I don’t care if he’s just getting off of work or not; if he doesn’t want to talk to the media, he shouldn’t have to outrun Suzy Kolber to make that point.
That said…damn, Tom. Did you hurt your knee so bad that you couldn’t outrun some 45-year-old woman? But this is a guy that’s already knocked up two of the most beautiful women in the world. After pulling that off, I really don’t see why he should be making time for anyone else. Do you? vid.
