In the Arena

While flipping through the channels on a lazy Saturday afternoon, I stumbled upon yet another arena football league. It's called the Indoor Football League, not to be confused with the American Indoor Football Association or the Arena Football League (the granddaddy of all arena football leagues, which shut down in 2008 and was re-launched this year under the same name). The game, which featured the West Texas Roughnecks verses the Amarillo Venom, was being shown on a weird channel provided by my cable system that I rarely watch but usually seems to be airing local high school sports or infomercials.

I didn't watch the game for very long. The last arena football game I had watched prior to this match was the 2008 Arena Bowl, which turned out to be the final game of the original Arena Football League's first incarnation. That broadcast was kind of interesting because the commentators apparently had access to both team's playbooks. The announcers were diagramming and calling the plays out as the coaches were sending them in from the sidelines. It was kind of weird, but it held my interest in a game and a sport that I cared little about longer than a more conventional broadcast would have. The IFL game that I saw featured no such insider information from the broadcast booth, but it did feature a stoppage of play that lasted a minute or two while Amarillo's quarterback and head coach searched for a contact lens that popped out of the QB's eye on the previous play. The IFL ain't the NFL, the XFL, the Arena League, or even the now defunct arenafootball2 league, but I'm sure that Gary Bettman is more that a little jealous that a third-tier semi-pro arena football league can get their games televised nationwide on basic cable. Check your local listings for the next IFL game in your market and start developing some allegiances so you're be ready to go when the 2011 NFL season is canceled.

Fantasy Island

On the recommendation of a friend, I started following Rainn Wilson's Twitter feed recently. Normally, I don't have any interest in celebrity self-promotion, but Wilson's Twitter is often interesting, funny, or poignant. I loved this tweet from yesterday where he solicits advice for his upcoming fantasy football draft. It seems that the staff of The Office has an "office" fantasy football league. I'm not sure if they formed the league because they enjoy fantasy football or it's some sort of method acting technique they use to get into their average office worker characters, but either way, I love it.

Out Like a Lamb

The most depressing part of the Lions amassing the NFL's first 0-16 record is the realization that I grew up during the post-merger golden age of Detroit Lions football. The reason that is depressing is because the Lions' post-merger golden age of the 1990s wasn't much of a golden age. While they made six of their nine post-merger playoff appearances during the 1990s, they still only won one of those playoff games, never even made it to the Superbowl, and only had five winning seasons. The Lions record from 1990-99 was 79-81, which is much better than the 40-104 record they've managed to amass over this decade, but it's still a losing record.

Pipe Dream

I've created a couple new Yahoo! Pipes for Michael David Smith's writing on College Football Talk and Pro Football Talk. It probably would have been more useful to put these together earlier in the football season, but I never got around to it (which was just kind of dumb on my part, since it took all of five minutes to put these feeds together). Here's the College Football Talk feed URL and here's the one for Pro Football Talk.

Sex, Eyes, and Videotape

I caught a few minutes of the Today Show this morning while I was in the waiting room with Michelle before she went in to get her other eye zapped. They interviewed Eli Manning and Michael Strahan, and I thought Matt Lauer got a good question in when he asked Strahan if he was going to bring a camera to the Superbowl parade. Strahan replied that he was going to bring a video camera and added that he rarely video tapes anything besides his children. If it was the Jerry Springer show instead of the Today Show, this is the point where Strahan's ex-sister-in-law would have come onto the field cursing at Strahan while swinging a chair or perhaps a potted plant, but it wasn't so Lauer didn't pursue that line of questioning any further. For those of you who are not up-to-date on sports gossip, Strahan recently went through a messy divorce where accusations surfaced that he, among other things, secretly video taped his ex-wife's sister while she was undressing.

As for the eye surgery, it went very well once again. She's still recovering, but she's already seen a dramatic improvement.

Not My Job

This week's installment of Not My Job of NPR's news quiz show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me featured NFL quarterback and NPR listener Joey Harrington. Joey definitely cements his reputation as one of the NFL's more cerebral jocks with his appearance on the show. It's actually a pretty fun interview. You should definitely listen to it, if for no other reason than to hear Carl Kassell say "Joey's a winner" at the end of the show. It'll probably be a long time before someone utters those words again in the national media.

Superbowl of Blogging

Three of my favorite sports bloggers are at the Superbowl right now. That's great news for them and great news for bloggers in general, I suppose. At first, I was somewhat disappointed, since everyone was writing about the same stuff, none of which was all that interesting to me. The blogging soon became a lot more interesting. MJD and Will have mostly focused on slice-of-life Superbowl stories and outsider observations of the Superbowl media circus. MDS has taken a different approach and has apparently been attending every single press conference he has been able to get into and written some really interesting stuff about the Superbowl, the Hall of Fame, the player's union, and even next season. I've really enjoyed the variety of perspectives offered by these three bloggers, from MDS' investigative journalism to MJD's epic bowling matches against Matt Leinart and Derek Anderson, to Will's thoughts on media day. I hope the actual game is as interesting.

The Road to the Superbowl

January 26, 2008 | 12:50 pm | Providence, RI

Bowling for Dollars

Here are my bowl picks for this season, in descending order of confidence. I got off to a good start tonight with TCU's decisive victory over Northern Illinois tonight. Upset picks are denoted by boldface type.

Game	Matchup	Pick
Hawaii Bowl	Arizona State vs. Hawai'i	Hawai'i
Sugar Bowl	Notre Dame vs. LSU	LSU
Fiesta Bowl	Boise State vs. Oklahoma	Oklahoma
Texas Bowl	Rutgers vs. Kansas State	Rutgers
Gator Bowl	West Virginia vs. Georgia Tech	West Virginia
Poinsettia Bowl	TCU vs. Northern Illinois	TCU
Alamo Bowl	Texas vs. Iowa	Texas
Outback Bowl	Tennessee vs. Penn State	Tennessee
BCS Championship	Florida vs. Ohio State	Ohio State
Emerald Bowl	Florida State vs. UCLA	UCLA
Sun Bowl	Oregon State vs. Missouri	Oregon State
Holiday Bowl	California vs. Texas A&M	California
Independenc Bowl	Oklahoma State vs. Alabama	Oklahoma State
Orange Bowl	Louisville vs. Wake Forest	Louisvile
Motor City Bowl	Middle Tennessee State vs. Central Michigan	Central Michigan
Liberty Bowl	Houston vs. South Carolina	South Carolina
Insight Bowl	Texas Tech vs. Minnesota	Texas Tech
Papajohns.com Bowl	South Florida vs. East Carolina	South Florida
Chick-fil-A Bowl	Georgia vs. Virginia Tech	Virginia Tech
New Orleans Bowl	Rice vs. Troy	Rice
International Bowl	Cincinnati vs. Western Michigan	Cincinnati
Capital One Bowl	Arkansas vs. Wisconsin	Wisconsin
Rose Bowl	USC vs. Michigan	Michigan
Meineke Car Care Bowl	Navy vs. Boston College	Boston College
Armed Forces Bowl	Tulsa vs. Utah	Utah
New Mexico Bowl	New Mexico vs. San Jose State	San Jose State
MPC Computers Bowl	Miami vs. Nevada	Nevada
Music City Bowl	Clemson vs. Kentucky	Kentucky
Las Vegas Bowl	BYU vs. Oregon	BYU
GMAC Bowl	Ohio vs. Southern Mississippi	Southern Mississippi
Champs Sports Bowl	Purdue vs. Maryland	Purdue

This is Our Country?

The Football Outsiders know a lot about football, but they probably know even more about the annoying things that people who enjoy football have put up with in order to watch football. I was browsing through the notes in this week's installment of Audibles at the Line when the following comment about Chevy's latest ad campaign, running in heavy rotation during all televised American sporting events, caught my eye:

“Not only does that ad not make me want to buy a Chevy, it makes me want to join Al Qaeda.”

I couldn't agree more. The old "Like a Rock" campaign was insufferable, of course, but at least it didn't feature John Cougar Mellencamp and his cornpone paeans to folk wisdom and knee-jerk patriotism. I loathe John Cougar and his entire songbook. I even refuse to refer to him by his nom de plume John Mellencamp. You can't just add the word 'Cougar' to your name and then remove it once you become a commercial success. As you can see, my distaste for him is deep-seeded and highly irrational.

Setting aside my reservations about the music and the musician, the commercial itself is borderline insulting. It's full of stock footage celebrating at worst the banality of life in America and at worst, some of the darkest days in our history. Ok, so there are a couple of perfunctory clips of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, who are certainly spinning in their graves over being included in this travesty. After that, it's all downhill. There is some footage of kids at the sock hop, followed by the Vietnam War, anti-Vietnam War protests, probably a clip from Woodstock for good measure, Nixon resigning, some other crappy moments in American history, and New Orleans under six feet of water. What are future installments (and you know there are going to be future installments) of this series of commercials going to show? Lee Harvey Oswald? The Manson Family? Jimmy Carter? Have Americans gotten so stupid that they feel nostalgia for any even that happened more then 30 years ago, regardless of whether or not it was good?

If this campaign runs as long as their "Like a Rock" campaign, I'm going to have to seriously consider whether or not I want to remain a sports fan.