Tuesday Football: Thanks for visiting Cowboy Nation

Blog buddy, birder and fellow Texan expat dguzman commented on last week's Tuesday Football post, fretting about her beloved Dallas Cowboys.  I assured her that my Bears were actually much worse, and that the 'Pokes should prevail at home in Week 2.  That prediction failed, and -- deeply as I hate Jerry Jones' outfit -- I'm worried, too.

It wasn't always that way.  As a kid growing up first in Austin, then in the Rio Grande Valley, I adored the Cowboys.  Somewhere in my family album live pictures of me, a seven-year-old decked out in a full replica of Duane Thomas's road uniform.  We had gone to my grandparents' house in San Marcos to watch the NFC title game.  Sadly, that was the game Dallas lost 26-3 to Washington's infamous Over-The-Hill Gang -- so one of those pictures shows me sprawled across the couch, bawling my eyes out.

My affection for the 'Pokes survived for a long time after my family moved to Illinois.  Eventually, I did adopt both the Bears and the Browns, but we made sure to catch the Cowboys.  [In return, CBS, which televised NFC games back then, made sure that watching Cowboy games would be easy.]  I even cared about them as new owner "Bum" Bright trashed the team in the mid- and late-1980s.

It was Jerry Jones who finally got me to abandon the Cowboys.  At that point, I had long since stopped being a kid.  Going 3-13 was one thing, but replacing Tom Landry with Jimmy Johnson, the Gordon Gekko of college football, was unforgivable.  The Cowboys I knew and loved had ceased to exist.  Better to fret about the Bears' interminable quarterback search than worry one more minute about Jones' new toy.  To hell with the new Cowboys.

Since mine is a Texan family by birthright, they Cowboys still come up every weekend in the fall and early winter.  One of my sisters still roots for them, but the rest of us have moved on, mostly to the Bears.  If the Cowboys do miss the playoffs this year, we'll be sad -- not because we once loved them, but because it will represent one of the worst wastes of gridiron talent we've seen in a long time.

Fantasy update:  Score two more victories this week.  The Fluttering Horde rode the Peyton Manning-to-Andre Johnson connection to a 95-78 win over Toothless, the team run by one of my twin nephews.  Meawhile, The Middlemen backed deadly receiving with a crushing Miami defense to roll over TheSDPackers, 108-95, and move to the top of the table.

Victory Weighting update: The Week 2 standings are up.  Washington lost to Houston, but the overtime period they played puts them alone atop the stunningly weak NFC East.

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AutoTune of the month

Up until now, I've despised AutoTune. It turns out that, until now, no one has made good use of it.  Enjoy this Quote of the Month nominee from Jacob Isom, Texan skateboarder and now national hero.

Administrivia

• The Victory Weighted standings for the new NFL season are up.  Expect three updates every Sunday and a fourth late Monday night.
• I learned of this video from Informed Comment, Juan Cole's most excellent daily notes on the Muslim world.  Not surprisingly, its emphasis these days are on the AfPak theater and Iraq.

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Tuesday Football: Nothing but net

More Scooter, with tennis:  Let it be known that Scooter has taste, or at least an eye for gridiron.  For the second Monday night in a row, my cat watched 30 minutes of gridiron with me.  This time, it was the second half of the Ravens-Jets game.  Instead of actually watching the action, though, she faced away from the TV and waited for me to scratch her ears.  Clearly, she recognized how horrible the Jets were on offense.  She went off to her nightly mousing well before the final gun sounded.

It wasn't much prettier to me, either, and I ended up switching to the last set of the 2010 U.S. Open men's tennis final.  That's champion Rafael Nadal at the left, pulling yet another incredible winner.  Everyone marveled at his tricks, including Novak Djorkavic, who managed to kick ass and still lose.

I bring the tennis up because it showed up on a channel where it normally doesn't belong.  Usually, the men's final at Flushing Meadows airs on CBS on Sunday afternoon.  That was the plan this year, too, but rain pushed the match back to Monday.  With an event so important to tennis, you'd think that CBS would preempt its normal Monday programs to show the delayed match live.  Unfortunately, this week's episodes of CSI: Modesto and Survivor: Northern Marianas Islands were more important; so the match ended up on ESPN2.

Even worse, ESPN2 warned that, if it hadn't ended by 21:15 CDT, the match would then move to ESPN Classic.  (Match point fell just after 21:00, so that didn't happen.)  In short:  the U.S. Open men's tennis final was about to fall from a broadcast network all the way to a channel that wasn't even on basic cable.  To say the least, this does not bode well for the sport of tennis (at least not in the U.S.).

A little personal landmark: The Chicago Bears opened Sunday with a 19-14 win over Detroit on a Calvin Johnson mistake.  It's worrying to see my beloved Bears struggle with the Lolcats Lions, but that wasn't the important part this week.  The big news is that, for the first time, I wore a Bears jersey while watching the game.  It's an orange Brian Urlacher replica, given to me as a birthday present last May.  I also got a coach's polo shirt, which I plan to wear for road games.

Yep, I'm now not just an NFL fan.  I'm an obsessed NFL fan.  Um, hooray?

Fantasy football update:  I opened with wins in both my leagues.  In the family league, Peyton Manning and Wes Welker combined for five touchdowns to lead the Fluttering Horde to a 99-73 upset of the defending league champions, the Smoking Popes.  Andre Johnson had only 33 receiving yards, but I didn't need him any more than the Houston Texans did.

In the public league, I left Bears RB Matt Forte and his 30 points on the bench, yet still coasted to a 102-88 win over the Dallas Drunks.  Woo-hoo!

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Tuesday Football: Of horses and butterflies

Scooter the BCS fan:  Last night's Boise State win over Virginia Tech was such a compelling game, my cat Scooter saw fit to watch the entire second half with me.  She made herself comfortable next to me as I watched the game, and she kept her eyes on the game the whole time.  When Virginia Tech missed its last fourth down, she up and left, returning to her nightly mousing duties.  To be fair, she was in an unusually friendly mood yesterday, but that doesn't explain her actually watching the game.  Very weird.

The game was close, and it made compelling drama, but it wasn't very well played.  Boise had to beat itself as well as the Hokies.  Now, some requests:

• Virginia Tech:  Please, never let me see those black jerseys again.  In fact, the next school that wears black when it isn't one of its colors ought to lose a scholarship or two.  [See:  Oregon football, Duke basketball, and too many others.]
• Boise State:  Neat helmets, but do your road uniforms really need 37 shades of gray?  Put some orange back, for heaven's sake!
• Brent Musberger:  How stupid do you think the TV audience is?  "Boise State's not used to this weather"?  In the first place, the vaunted humidity in Landover was only 43%.  In the second, Boise is in Idaho, not freakin' Arizona.  On top of that, BSU is still in the same league as Hawai'i and Louisiana Tech, places where 43% humidity is often a relief.  Sheesh.

Behold!  The Fluttering Horde!  My original fantasy-football team is back, complete with new name, new logo and new players.  I named the Horde after another set of characters from the Venture Bros. cartoon, namely, The Monarch's minions.  The monarch-butterfly wings on the helmet are sure to strike fear into my opponents.  Otherwise, they will have to deal with Peyton Manning passing to Texan WR Andre Johnson and 49er TE Vernon Davis.  I did better in mock drafts, but those assumed 8- and 10-team leagues, and we ended up with two six-team divisions.

It'll be a tough opener, against my league's defending champions, the Smoking Popes.

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Tuesday Football: All over the map

Football related thoughts abound this week.

You shouldn't do that on television:  I can understand why, as Comcast does here in Chicagoland, a local cable channel shows games involving area schools.  The same channel also has programs for local politics and the local arts scenes, so these games clearly qualify as local-interest programs.  I can see myself caring about a football game between, say, Geneva and Batavia, partly because those two schools are close to my home.  I could easily understand why a football fan in Sacramento would watch a televised game between Grant and Folsom, two Sacramento-area high schools.

But could someone at Disney please explain to me why, in the name of all that is unholy, a resident of exurban Chicago could possibly care about that Grant-Folsom game?  I don't care how highly ranked those two teams are, they're both 3300 kilometers and two hours west of me.  Why should I care how highly regarded individual players on either side are, when some -- if not all -- of them will crash and burn once they start playing college football?  [For what it's worth, I graduated from my school two years after a high-school All-America running back who fizzled in the then-Big 8, and a year ahead of an eventual NBA player who starred in the Big Ten.]

Apparently, people who have better things to do care that much about high-school sports.  At least the ESPN channels think so.  That's why, besides the Grant-Folsom game, I had to click away from at least four other nationally televised high-school games this weekend.  This is just more attention and adulation for athletic young people who already have too much of both.

He's staying?  Okay, fine:  To my surprise, Bob Bradley is staying on as coach of the U.S. men's soccer team.  During the World Cup, I opined that he should be replaced.  The team started quickly enough in its 2-0 loss to Brazil a month ago, but that needs to become the rule instead of the exception.  I'm not convinced that he's the man to make that change.  On the other hand, a 2-0 blowout of Spain, a Confederations Cup final and (at long last) a group win at the World Cup itself are real results; and Bradley also deserves credit for those.  I would've replaced him with Jurgen Klinsmann, and let him move on to Aston Villa.  (That would've been worth tracking.)  Besides those two men, though, I couldn't imagine an alternative as the U.S. skiper; so keeping Bradley makes some sense.

Twice the fantasy fun:  I wasn't sure that my fantasy-football league was going to convene this year, so I went ahead and joined a public league at Yahoo!.  That league auto-drafted last Friday, and I ended up with RB Chris Johnson, WR Miles Austin and TE Antonio Gates.  I've decided to call this team The Middlemen.

As it turns out, my old league is playing.  The draft is this Sunday night, and (as you may gather from my new tag line) I do not plan on having Brett Favre on my team this time.  Given his latest ankle issues, maybe the Vikings won't, either.  My team has a new name and its own helmet, which I'll reveal next week.

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Because this beer's just so manly!

Because it can, MillerCoors (or whatever it's calling itself these days) has several ad campaigns just for its Miller Lite product.  All the ads are aimed at men, and most of them revolve around the "men suck at relationships" meme.  The exceptions are a set of five spots from ad agency Draftcb, all of which look like this:



If the only problem with this ad were its sexism, it would be pretty ordinary. (It's for mass-produced alcohol product, after all.) What makes it worth posting about is the other ways it and its siblings so miserably fail. Let's count.

1. It is, in fact, more sexist than usual.  The guy may look funny with his huge shoulder bag, but so what?  Why should the bartender care if no one else in the joint does?
2. Oh, that bartender.  Yes, she's pretty -- and she's remarkably snooty.  In high school, she must have thought that because she was prettier than everyone else, that also made her better.  When the rest of us graduated, we were pretty happy to be rid of girls like this.  If I ran into someone like her at a bar, I'd find another place to drink.  Hell, I'd run as fast as I could to that other place.
3. "Do you care how it tastes?"  Why, yes, you bubble-headed moron, I do care.  If I wanted actual beer right now, I'd have ordered something other than Miller Lite for myself.
4. And then there's that "Man up!" tagline.  If "Man up!" means "Dare to drink this swill!" well, that would smack of accuracy.  Somehow, I doubt that's what the marketing geniuses at Draftcb intended.

Heavens, do these ads ever suck.

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The Defenders of 9/11

Mark Lennihan/AP, via the NPR Web site

When President Obama defended the Córdoba House project last Friday, I was sure that all the posturing from the GOP would have ended.  Silly me.  This isn't the party of Eisenhower, Nixon, or even Reagan; it's a loudmouthed collection of racists, Dominionists, warmongers and old-school fascists* who might well dismiss Joseph McCarthy as a commie pinko.  Of course, they were going to try turning Córdoba House into a campaign issue.  For Republican campaigners, there's nothing but win.  Who cares if innocent Muslims get demonized yet again? They aren't voting GOP anyway.  The real points are to (a) rally the teabagger base and (b)trick Democrats into demoralizing their base, again.

One thing I've yet to see, though, is a direct connection to "9/11" -- not the actual 2001 attacks, but the metaphorical cudgel that the Cheney-Bush cabal created from them.  I remember arguments with conservatives during the Bush years.  Anytime the right-winger sensed that he could no longer win an argument with logic, his inevitable response was to invoke 9/11.  Leave Iraq?  "No way; 9/11 changed everything."  End warrentless wiretapping? "9/11 changed everything."  Opposed to No Child Left Behind?  "Too bad; 9/11 changed everything."  [I'm not even making that last one up.]  For Bush's supporters, the attacks were a way to "unite" the nation behind even the worst Bush proposals.

But time has passed, Chimpy has retreated to Dallas and Cheney has gone back into hiding.  Most of us have put 9/11 the event in the past, where it belongs.  But in blocking Córdoba House, the Republicans are trying to bring back the trauma.  If they succeed, and they also take either house of Congress this November, they will have revived 9/11 as a weapon.  They didn't stop at Muslims the last time they used it, and there's no reason to believe they will this time, either.

In other words, the GOP must defend 9/11.  It's too important a tool for them to just let fade away.

* Supporters of increased corporate influence in government, like Mussolini and Pinochet.  Used properly, it's a more elegant word than the clunky "corporatist."

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More administrivia:  I've opened the two Victory Weighting pages to comments.  If you have more questions about the system, feel free to comment on either page.

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