FanNation

Favre Needs To Go Away

It is a spectacle the likes of which we can't off-hand remember seeing before.  A star football player announces his retirement in a lavish ceremony; his number is slated to be retired in the team's season-openng game; the media lavishes with elaborate rememberances and replays of past glories.  And then the superstar decides to come back, but his team doesn't want him, and so he throws a tantrum.  

Somewhere along the way someone needs to remember just what Brett Favre really was as a quarterback.  Drafted by the Atlanta Falcons, he'd been bypassed by several teams, notably the New York Jets who at the time employed Ron Wolf in their front office; the Jets also missed out on a chance to hire Mike Holmgren, who was coming off a stint on Bill Walsh's Forty-Niners coaching staff.  Favre played sparingly for the Falcons and was shipped up to Grenn Bay, a team whose best days were thought long gone thanks in part to some unwise personnel decisions - refusing to draft Joe Montana, for one.  

My Guess Game For The 2008 NFL Season

In about two weeks the literal beginning of the 2008 NFL season takes place as official training camps kick off.  They are of course the marathon of drudgery within which teams forge an identity to take into the games.  And as training camps kick off, the game of predicting who will do what in the coming season begins, so I toss in my own guessing game for 2008:

NFC:

EAST:   As defending Superbowl champs, the Giants have most of their guys back together and have in Eli Manning a quarterback who shocked everyone by pulling off a stunning playoff run capped by the most iraculous game-winning play anyone can recall in a Superbowl.  The question remains whether Manning can sustain this level.  That he took equipment to train with on his wedding and honeymoon certainly shows how serious he is about mastering every nuance he can about quarterbacking.  Unfortunately it also suggests some level of desperation on his part.  Certainly one shouldn't forget how easily he was bullied in the locker room by Tiki Barber and Jeremy Shockey, and despite everyone's better judgement, Shockey appears set to return to the Giants huddle.  There's also the comparison with Peyton, a more talented quarterback up and down whose own Superbowl success didn't translate to playoff wins in 2007.  And there is the Giants' recent history; as good as they are at building competitive squads it has never translated into consistent success, and even the Superbowl/playoff run was a touch-and-go affair that could have collapsed at several points - the ultimate overachievement.

The Lynching Of Bill Belichick, Continued

And the lynching of Bill Belichick continued with Matt Walsh's testimony to Roger Goodell and susbsequent testimony to Senator Arlen Specter and an interview by HBO.  The angle that got the most anticipation was belief that Walsh had a videotape of the walkthrough by the St. Louis Rams before Superbowl XXXVI, but no such tape was ever made, as known facts and plain common sense had already confirmed.  Walsh's testimony under legal oath to Goodell also confirmed what facts and common sense had confirmed long ago in discrediting the varied rumors of mic'ing of players to record opponant audibles, jamming of opponant radio frequencies (the conspiracy-mongers never explained how the Patriots did this in opponants' own buildings), bugging of opponant locker rooms, etc. 

The NFL media was also treated to a montage of footage stolen by Walsh and turned over to the league, showing opposing coaches in Miami, San Diego, etc., which merely confirmed what Bill Belichick had volunteered to Goodell on September 14 of 2007.  In short, it appeared to be case closed on Videogate.

Except Walsh stirred more controversy with comments impugning the honesty of Belichick and the Patriots and inpugning the integrity of the Patriots' victory over the Rams in Superbowl XXXVI.  Given the wholesale dishonesty of most Mainstream Sports Media coverage of Videogate, it should be expected that they would overlook that even in telling the truth to Goodell, Walsh embellished his ass off to make himself more important to the story than he ever was. 

Four whoppers by Walsh stood out -

NASCAR's Most Overrated Tracks

As the Winston Cup season hits Week Five, it hits the first of six short track races, and this one is the track that gets a disproportionate amount of publicity.  Bristol for some reason excites some people more than most other tracks, and this first of two annual dates there will no doubt get a lot of attention.

But it brings to mind the sport's most overrated tracks.  Of all the tracks the sport races on, Bristol is arguably its worst track.  The speedway is narrow and the enormous banking is among the most physically taxing on drivers and racecars.  Launched in 1961 as a banked short track of 18 degrees, Bristol was nothing special but had some good racing, notably a 1968 500-lapper in which David Pearson held off Richard Petty in a race where at times Petty, Pearson, and Cale Yarborough got pinched three wide by lapped cars. 

In 1969 Larry Carrier decided to speed up his races by increasing the banking and thus the speeds; the first race with this new 36-degree banking was in July 1969 and only ten cars finished the race because of multiple crashes.  "They ruined a pretty good racetrack," Dick Brooks, one victim, noted afterward.  The new banking meant a dramtic upsurge in use of relief drivers; one, Friday Hassler, drove Charlie Glotzbach's Chevrolet to the win in July 1971, a race where some five drivers needed relief help.

Bristol races tended to be one-sided affairs, especially as Junior Johnson's racecars took it over.  Glotzbach's 1971 win with Hassler was the first of nearly a dozen Bristol wins for Junior's team in the 1970s decade; whether it was Bobby Allison or Cale Yarborough driving the car, Junior's team all but monopolized Bristol.   Cale led all 500 laps in March 1973 amid an epidemic of bad crashes.  In July 1974 rookie Neil Bonnett sliced open the inside guardrail and 40 laps were needed to repair it; late in that race Buddy Baker got the lead but on the final lap Cale stormed to the inside and slammed Baker to the fourth-turn rail for the win, much to Johnson's delight and the consternation of Baker and Moore. 

Darrell Waltrip took over Junior's car in 1981 and won seven straight Bristol races.  Junior's domination of the track largely ended after that as several drivers took turns dominating the place.  In August 1992 the surface was changed from asphalt to concrete after years of treating the asphalt with sealer and seeing the track slicken up quite badly as a result.  This, though, caused far more problems, for the crashes increased and the outer groove that had been common before disappeared, so much so that in 2007 the speedway - purchased from Larry Carrier in 1996 by Bruton Smith - changed the banking to a progressive design where the high groove was banked higher than the lower groove.  This, though, had only marginal effect on the racing.

It all illustrated Bristol's fundamental problem as a racetrack - it is too small, too narrow, lacks a raceable surface, and has no particular history of memorable racing.  Not that it didn't once have some good races - the Southeastern 500s of 1989-91 were strikingly good events with hard battles up front, notably in 1991 when a bizarre pitstop and double-file restart procedure was tried and the lead changed an astonishing 41 times, by far a record for a short track. 

The COT debuted at Bristol in 2007 and all the problems shown by a year of testing of the car cropped up in the race - the cars pushed in dirty air worse than the "old" car, the racing was not made better (virtually the entire race was led by a Joe Gibbs Racing car and the leader was almost always a straightaway or more ahead; a two-lap restart made for a close finish that wasn't that close), and the only noteworthy item from the race were the crashes. 

COT or no COT, Bristol has never lived up to the competitive depth shown by the sport over the years and has not shown any race worth remembering since 1991.  The one word needed to describe Bristol is OVERRATED.

Yes, Make Fontana And Other Tracks Restrictor Plate Tracks

The prolonged Fontana race weekend in February 2008 ended with Carl Edwards winning and not that many people watching.  Fontana once again failed to sell out, and amid discussion over handling of water seepage, rain delays, and other such issues, Michael Waltrip made an apparantly flippant remark that Fontana should be made into a restrictor plate track. 

The remark got surprising attention and even a pathetic response from Larry McReynolds and Jeff Hammond on their FOX Sports page about the folly of running restrictor plates at other tracks beside Daytona and Talladega.  But the idea is worth taking seriously, for we finally have a real alternative to the rules packages that haven't worked for the sport's other tracks for nearly two decades.