Damn Vikings ... a pretty nice little Sunday

It's hard to imagine a better first Sunday of the NFL season for a Minnesota Vikings fan.

• Adrian Peterson has a 180-yard day in an opening win over the Browns. A good friend who is a Chicago Bears fan immediately phoned after Peterson's 64-yard touchdown run where he broke six tackles and said, "Best running back I've seen since Barry Sanders. We'll talk later."
  
  
• Ol' Brett Favre mostly just stayed out of the way. OK, so it is not so clear the Vikes could win a game if they were unable to run well.
  
  
Neither the Bears or Green Bay Packers looked all-fired great during NBC's Sunday nighter, which NBC's Al Michaels did not call "the NFL's most storied rivalry between two teams which have losing records vs. the Vikings during the Super Bowl era."


• Jay Cutler's four interceptions on Sunday night were at least as hilarious as anything Jay Leno will do Monday night.
  
  
• The Bears lost Brian Urlacher for the season. A player being injured is not something to celebrate, but if the Bears end up bringing Derrick Brooks out of retirement, it means no one can razz the Vikings about Favre being older than dirt. Thirty-six in linebacker years is older than 40 in quarterback years.
  
• We can't wait to see what the alternative point spreads will be this Sunday for the Vikings' game vs. the Detroit Lions. The APS is the brain candy of sports betting lines. There is a double-digit spread on tonight's doubleheader, Bills-Patriots and Chargers-Raiders, but it would be much more fun it you took New England by 21½ instead a mere of 11.
  
  
• Percy Harvin gets his first NFL touchdown and does some damage as a runner, receiver and a returner like a latter-day Gale Sayers.
  
  There's a reason behind citing a Bears legend. Everything Harvin will do is karma for the Bears never doing much in the '60s when they had Sayers. For that matter, everyting Peterson does vs. the Bears is karma for using high picks on Curtis Enis and Cedric Benson and for Mike Ditka not finding a way to get the greatest football player of all time, Walter Payton, a touchdown during Super Bowl 20. Just saying
  
  
• And this happened, involving the Bears former quarterback:
  
  
  
  Of course, it was a total fluke play, but nevertheless.
  
• Last but not least, Queen's won and the Saskatchewan Roughriders "went out of their way" (Regina Leader-Post) to avoid scoring 60 points against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Banjo Bowl. Yeah, it was a pretty nice little Sunday.
  

Cheney meant journalists would liberated from having to wear shoes!

The pain that the Bush Administration inflicted on Iraqis is such that you probably can't make a sports joke. Please, let's not have any jokes that with an arm like that, the Detroit Lions should give a tryout to Muthathar al Zaidi. When you can't make fun of the 0-14 Lions, clearly, the terrorists have won.

(Hey, how 'bout those Vikings?)

Snark break ...

As you were figuring out how to get by without that extra $5 a year.

Anyone who makes a joke about Michael Vick being this much closer to playing for the Oakland Raiders deserves to be cuffed about the head and shoulders.

A politician in Alberta wants to make rodeo the province's official sport. There's actual rodeo events at the Calgary Stampede? Since when? A lot of people might get a mental image that includes cowboy hats and boots (and not much else) when they hear "Calgary Stampede," but they aren't thinking of barrel racing and calf roping.

Why do we even play the games anymore? Notre Dame beat Texas in a big college basketball game last night, but the outcome had already been predicted by EA Sports Basketball 09.

Cox Bloc has a few choice words for anyone who didn't like Leafs GM Brian Burke Cliff Fletcher making a trade for Lee Stempniak.

The weakness in the human heart. Bob Knight left Indiana Univerisity eight years ago, had nothing to do with the shenanigans that have landed the Hoosiers on NCAA probation, and still it pleases you to see that happen.

(Also pleasing, college basketball-wise: Syracuse knocking off Kansas in overtime last night in front of 16,000 fans in Kansas City, with Jonny Flynn making a tying three-pointer late to force the overtime.)

This above is of dubious worth, but this is worth noting:

• Stephen Brunt's Searching For Bobby Orr is available for $10. If you mentioned you read Out of Left Field, the price goes up to $15.
• Sixteen seasons after the fact, Joe Posnanski is pointing out that Roberto Alomar got jobbed in the 1992 MVP balloting, which means I am not crazy:

  "Then the best choice for MVP league-wide was probably Toronto second baseman Roberto Alomar who was fourth in on-base percentage, third in runs scored, fifth in triples, fifth in stolen bases and an absolute revelation as a defensive second baseman. This is a topic for another time, but it’s so strange to me how OVERRATED scrappy middle infielders can be and how UNDERRATED great middle infielders can be. One of the weirdest parts of the game."

• Former Kingston Frontenac Kyle Paige is the newest member of the Gatineau Olympiques.

Rapids: Now available for rent, Million-dollar Crybaby

Please let this be the be the last time this site ever references the Zipperheads. In the wake of the Rapid(e)s' return, the former owners are getting what they have coming to them:

"This million dollar a year lease argument is entirely irrelevant — a red herring. It's pretty tough to blame the City for this — no more than I would blame an undertaker for not saving his unfortunate client. ... the City has bent over backwards for Independent baseball in Ottawa, they're not the problem.
— Carl Kiiffner, The unofficial Ottawa Rapids blog, Sept. 29

"Former Rapidz owner (name redacted) used the city as a scapegoat when he exited Sept. 29, saying the city was trying for a 10-fold increase in rent to about $1 million a season when the existing lease with the former owner of the International League’s Lynx runs out following the 2009 season.
— Ottawa Citizen, today

"The city offered to extend the $108,000 a year to (name redacted), (city councillor Bob) Monette said, so he’s not sure why the failure to secure a long-term deal with the city was cited as one of the reasons for the team folding."
— Sun Media, today

It's a long road to justice sometimes.

It's a good day.

UBC does not always mean 'utterly brilliant coaching'

The University of British Columbia should learn how to get a last-second field-goal attempt off before it joins the NCAA.

Sorry, it's impossible to resist taking a potshot. The UBC Thunderbirds contriving to lose 18-16 to the Regina Rams on Friday, not even managing to line up for a field goal -- let alone have a bad snap, botched hold or a wicked duckhook by the kicker -- after getting in range with ample time, 16 seconds, is irony, on a base level. On the previous day, there was a column in the Van Province about UBC wants to join the NCAA, and get away from the CIS, whose "appeal has been watered down" by letting in riff-raff schools. On the next night, the school's football team commits a blunder not even befitting of a peewee team.

UBC's athletic aspirations have little to do with the utterly bonkers clock management. For cryin' out loud, though, if you're going to talk a big game about leaving the CIS, make sure you actually do manage to line up for a field goal after you were in range with 16 seconds left.

As best as can be figured out from reading cisfootball.org postings and the boxscore, the Thunderbirds, down by two, had first-and-10 at the Regina 21-yard line with about 16 seconds left. Their quarterback, Marc McVeigh, had moved them 67 yards in a little less than a minute. Their kicker Shawn McIsaac, who was only 10-of-10 dating back to the start of their previous game.

There was enough time for one more scrimmage play, if the offence had got up to the line and snapped the ball quickly. There was some suggestion among the dot-orgers that as play was whistled in and the clock began to wind, UBC for whatever reason didn't get over the ball with any great alacrity. No one made any motion to call a timeout and settle things.

The clock was apparently down to :03 when the ball was snapped. McVeigh, instead of taking of a knee or spiking the ball -- either play stops the clock -- handed the ball off to the tailback, Dave Boyd.

By the time Boyd was brought down, there were zeroes on the clock, and a probably more than a few Thunderbirds' jaws scrapping the ground. Instead of a 19-18 win, they'd lost. (One feels guilty for merely mentioning the players who touched the ball on the fateful play. It has to be pointed out that UBC's starting running back, Cheng Wei, who'd had a couple fumbles, was out of the game, although that can't totally account for such a unfortunate event.)

It is odd how it went down. The Province column took a couple potshots at the CIS. It talked about how there is "extreme pressure to win in (NCAA Division 1), something foreign to the Canadian University Culture at this point."

However you capitalize it, UBC coach Ted Goveia and his staff should be glad that they don't face that kind of pressure. A coaching staff in the Southeastern Conference or Big Ten who left a win on the field like that on a Saturday would be polishing resumes by Monday. An assistant coach would probably be jettisoned just to appease the public. They would hear about it for weeks, from boosters, bloggers, babysitters, columnist, talk-radio reactionariess, fans on Rivals.com, the media, the milkman, their pastor and the paper boy. There would be YouTube takedowns, like the one directed at former Arkansas coach Houston Nutt.

(A lot of fans are taking issue with Goveia's quote, "Obviously the guy under centre managing the clock should have realized to run the play and get out of there but he is young." It's a team game, last anyone checked.)

In this case, the UBC coaches and players' ignominy is pretty much confined to CIS diehards, the sports fan equivalent of the weirdos down at the bait store. It will probably die out within a week, since really, it's not that big a deal compared to what's really important in the world. The football might not even make it on to YouTube, unless some angry UBC player bogarts the game film and gives it to one of his roommates to upload.

It's a bit of a Canadian conundrum, but UBC gets off lucky because what many, including a few UBC folk, see as Canada's backwards approach to university athletics is another person's sense of perspective. It's Canadian football. The coaches and players bust their butts as much as the school's or a CFL team's budget allows them to, but a fan has to approach it with a little bit of ironic detachment.

The weird part is, a team losing a game in the lamest way possible is kind of endearing. Aside from the whole turning-its-back-on-Canada thing, who's not going to root for UBC, now 2-2 instead of being 3-1 in an eight-game season, to rise above this and make the Canada West playoffs? Any team who's worth a damn finds a way to overcome, right?

(Cross-posted to The CIS Blog. That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.)

Snark break...

Hopefully, the stupid and ugly doesn't stay in the system all day.

The Hater Nation is jumping the gun a little by trying to figure out which NFL team has got the best shot at going 0-16.

Why hasn't there been anything here on that 82-0 women's hockey game? It's Geek Code -- don't blab on about a sport or a league that you ordinarily ignore. Until 10 days, that was the "U of T Varsity Blues" rule.

Truer words might have never been accidentally spoken about big-time college football: Tim Tebow on the Miami Hurricanes: "They are paid to stop us."

The life of a baseball prospect: Being assigned to the Hawaiian Winter League means Buster Posey will play for five teams in one calendar year. At this point, he doesn't ask where he's going, he just says, "What colour undershirt?"

The Terrier Hockey Fan Blog is calling shenanigans on any inference that Ethan Werek chose the Kingston Frontenacs because the hockey in the USHL is poor quality.

Hate to pull out the easy reference, but Larry Mavety is Lisa Simpson in that episode where the family gets a backyard pool. "He's just using you to help his draft status." ... "Shut up, brain!"

It's best left unexamined what it says about anyone who watches this Tom Brady clip more than 25 times in succession. Please keep it in the low 20s.



(By the way, the male Democratic vice-presidential nominee is more of a feminist than the female Republican one has been. (Charging women for rape kits, really?)

Consider your eyes, ears, nose and throat warned...

"I had several glasses of Tiverton Dark and Premium Lager while chatting with Jim Kindree from the revived Steelback Brewery, who told me about the company's reduced line and the return of former brewery head (name not worthy of mention in any respectable forum), who has apparently found a sucker to financially back his return to the beer business." — ChartAttack.com, Aug. 8

Zen Dayley: Benefit of the doubt lost in translation

The Yankees in town, and all the hipsters predicting doom ...

There are times when it doesn't do be glib and knee-jerk.

Reading that the owners who were handpicked by Major League Baseball to own and operate the Washington Nationals (ne Montreal Expos, 1969-2004) haven't paid their rent on their ballpark and that their last-place team has the lowest regional TV audience in major-league baseball by a factor of three is not one of those times. Instinct says that it's really weak to be all told-you-so almost four years after the fact, but well, told you so. It's even less surprising story than the one about how David Lee Roth wasn't really in Brantford last month. (Diamond Dave's star has fallen, but not that far.)

The optics are suddenly so different when it's not a team in Quebec that's involved. The Nationals draw 9,000 viewers for their regional telecasts and it's, well, the team isn't doing very well and it takes time to build up brand loyalty (which is true, it does). It still stings to see such a state of denial when there's emerging proof that baseball isn't working in Washington, D.C., especially when so many in the States were so quick to pronounce it dead and buried in Canada.

Meantime, in Miami, a lawsuit brought forth by anti-tax crusading billionaire Norman Braman (Buddy Ryan's favourite ex-NFL owner) threatens to deep-six construction of a ballpark for the Florida Marlins and owner Jeff Loria. The Marlins have only been playing baseball in a football stadium for 16 seasons -- three longer than the Jays spent at the old Ex -- and yet that's manageable. You don't read anything about MLB holding city and state officials over the coals -- maybe they should, it might be only way the renovations to the Miami airport ever get done -- or condescendingly explaining to them, "This is what you have to do to show us you still want baseball in your city."

(The latest, though, is that the two sides in the lawsuit have been ordered to try and work something out. Chances are the Marlins will get the ballpark, but it might end up costing taxpayers less and Loria more.)

Baseball is not coming back to Montreal. That ship has sailed. It's weak to feel this way, but it's hard not get a sick sense of satisfaction out of seeing the Nationals owners still at loggerheads with a municipal government that already built a $611-million stadium mostly for the benefit of fans who don't even live in the District of Columbia -- and evicted many businesses and social agencies as part of the gentrification.

It looks good on 'em.

Other business

• It bears passing along: How does MLB invite 64 players to the All-Star Game and not have one of them include a setup man? (Jayson Stark.)
• Another suggestion from Vegas Watch: Let fans vote one player on each team out of the game.
• Anyone who's around a TV at 5 p.m. Eastern might want to flip on the CBC Halifax news -- Matthew Leibl, a Winnipegger who visited all 30 major-league stadiums, will be profiled.

The Jays ....

• Are 16-12 when Vernon Wells doesn't play, 29-35 when he does. That's an 118-point swing in winning percentage. The Neifi Index usually only applies to backup middle infielders. (Dave Feschuk put it best about Wells: "On the bright side, enraged gadget geeks can take comfort that the iPhone's isn't the only Rogers contract that's poor value!"
• The betting here is Dustin McGowan has thrown his last pitch in 2008.
• Keith Law believes A.J. Burnett will end up with the Phillies, but he wouldn't part with Double-A catcher Lou Marson. Jason Donald, whose .302/.383/.497 slash stats are best among Eastern League shortstops, was also mentioned as a possibility, although reading between the lines, he might not have the glove to pull off playing short every day in the majors.

Putting the dink in coincidink

Talk about crazy cross-referencing: The Supreme Court of Canada handed down a decision that expands the use of fair comment on Friday — the same day that reportonbusiness.com profiled the new CEO of Steelback Brewery, who couldn't have distanced himself more from the former CEO whose name doesn't rate a mention.

Let's drink to that -- although with all due respect to Jonathon Sherman, something-anything else will be the libation of choice this holiday weekend.

A man named Dick Pound doesn't need Viagra

The New York Daily News' latest Roger Clemens revelations -- he, among others, apparently have been popping Viagra in order to improve their on-field performances -- also manages to make sport of Canada's favourite former IOC second-in-command:

"Catlin said he even wrote a letter several years ago to then-WADA chairman Dick Pound, notifying him that Viagra might be a doping agent.

"The e-mail got bounced back by Pound's offensive-content filter, which thought it was spam."

Obviously, this is just a coincidence. It's just that Dick Pound has a tendency to come across as a wee bit insufferable. That makes it fun to say that Pound might have eradicated this particular bit of doping years tago, if only it wasn't for those damn spambots sending messages about Viagra. It's never Pound's fault, you know.

Zen Dayley: Come not to bury Joba, but to praise him

As you were making your non-concession concession speech ...

• Joba Chamberlain's start vs. the Blue Jays calls to mind what happens in theatre circles after a disastrous opening night. Everyone hangs around, supposed to offer sympathy and kind words, but really they're Christmas Eve -eager to see how savage the reviews are.
  
  That's all well and good to pile on Joba, since it's a natural reaction to how much he's been hyped. (People get on Sidney Crosby for the same reason.) Please keep in mind that it's Hank Steinbrenner who should get condemnation for using a 22-year-old pitcher with only two major-league pitches (fastball and slider) as a wedge in his battle with Yankees GM Brian Cashman. It serves him right that it backfired so spectacularly.
• The Tao is back and throwing smoke. Awesome.
• Jim Ed Rice seems really eager to remove all doubt as to why a lot of Red Sox fans are indifferent about him getting into the Hall of Fame.
  
  

  "I'm tired of people saying, 'Manny being Manny.' It's not like I'd take my 11-year old kid to go out and watch 'Manny being Manny,' that's not baseball. (Sunday) he hit home run 501, but, even though he hit 501 they still almost lost the game. Did you see those two plays he made out in left field? Now, do you want your kid to be 'Manny being Manny' missing those balls?"

  It's actually cool, in an age where everyone seems willing to go along to get along, that he's out there, doing the banquet circuit, slagging his former team and not expecting that comments in the Watertown, N.Y., paper will make it into wide circulation. That's old school. Rice also claimed that Jonathan Papelbon was the only member of the 2007 Red Sox who would have bumped a regular from the '75 team. It barely seems worth refuting that -- or pointing out that if Rice had run the bases right, he doesn't get thrown out at the plate in Game 6 of the '86 World Series and Bill Buckner never misses that grounder.
  
  Peter Gammons wrote of that play that Rice "cut the bag at third like a 16-wheeler turning into a McDonald's."
• Phillippe Aumont, the Seattle Mariners bonus baby from Gatineau, was selected for the Midwest League all-star game yesterday. Aumont has a 1.47 ERA, a .186 opponents' average and a 41-to-11 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 43 innings with Wisconsin. That's pretty good even when taking into account that's a league where no one hits for power (quoth Rany Jazayerli). Aumont went seven strong (six hits, no walks, six K's) to earn his fourth win last night. He hit a batter who has the same last name as Jeffrey Loria's stepson, probably not on purpose (but it's nice to think it was)

UP AT 6: THRASHING LOOKS GOOD ON 'EM

On second thought, leading with AAA midget hockey on a Monday morning is probably not the wisest decision.

• Relax ... you don't have to be totally heartless to love the news that that the 58-1 Winnipeg Thrashers team choked in the final of the Telus Cup in Arnprior, losing 6-4 to the Sudbury Nickel Wolves.
  
  No doubt it hurts for the players, but life goes on. The joke is on the minor hockey pooh-bahs in Loserpeg. For years and years, they've tried to stack the deck in order to bring a Canadian midget hockey title to the city.
  
  Winnipeg accounts for more than half of Manitoba's population, but has only two teams in the 12-team provincial Triple-A midget league. Six years ago, it had four, then it was down to three for one season, 2002-03, then it was down to two. After Winnipeg blew it against Sudbury yesterday, it might have to go down to one for next season.
  
  The league standings suggest that the situation has made an absolute joke out of the idea of player development and fair competition. The Thrashers were 40-0 in the regular season with a 268-43 goal differential. The other Winnipeg team was 32-7-1, which likely means that it also went unbeaten against teams from outside the city.
  
  This is being written without knowing anything about the Sudbury team, other than it represents a city of 150,000-some people, not a place that has one team per twice as many people.
  
• For what it's worth, Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports thought the Vikings had a pretty good draft week.
  
• One hero from the weekend is the athletic director at Rutgers, Robert Mulcahy, for telling Notre Dame to get lost.
  
  Mulcahy walked away from a deal for a football series starting in 2010 after the Notre Dame insisted that Rutgers' home games be played at a neutral site. (Another Big East school, Connecticut, is playing Notre Dame, but its "home" games won't even be in the state of Connecticut.)
  
  Here's hoping Rutgers fills the vacancy on their 2010 schedule with an opponent which has actually won a bowl game this century.
  
• Something everyone might want to check this out further later this morning: The organizers of a MMA event on the Six Nations reserve in Southern Ontario are facing criminal charges. That could be a fun story for a couple of days.
  
• Thanks, everyone, for not sending word Season 2 of Friday Night Lights came out on DVD last week.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

BOUNCING CHECKS LEAVE A BITTER AFTERTASTE

It's cruel and mean-spirited to take pleasure in this, but none of us had a shot at sainthood: People in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., are organizing a petition to get the Steelback name scrubbed off the city's hockey arena and get the name changed from Centre to Memorial Gardens. At the very least, they want the local politicians to find out if they're ever going to get their money while the brewery is in bankruptcy protection.

"The group known as the re-dedication committee is collecting names on a petition that they plan to deliver to council by the end of February. The group states that Sault Ste. Marie taxpayers have already lost $67,500 since the last cheque from Steelback Breweries bounced."

"... The group is concerned that the City is dragging its heels on the issue.

" 'That is real taxpayer money that could be used on driveway snow removal for the elderly that is instead being wasted.' "

First the Patriots get upset, now this and a Bobby Knight resignation? Great quote from Steelback's incoming president from last week: ""You will not recognize Steelback in four months. The marketing campaign was promoting an individual and not the beer itself." "

Related:
Petition Group Claims The Steelback Centre Has Cost Tax Payers close to $70,000 (SooNews.ca; via Junior Hockey Blog)

SUPER BOWL: MEASURE PLEASURE BY THE PATS' PAIN

The Super Bowl was last night, Eli Manning and the Giants won ... the form calls for a post.

• KSK took care of business: "The biggest choke job of all time."
• The parallels between Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll are just irresistible.
  
  Carroll is the anti-Belichick, the overmatched previous coach in New England who eventually found his own level coaching college football at Southern California. (This is more or less straight from the gospel of Bill Simmons.) He was the touchy-feely, rah-rah California guy whose failure with the Pats in the late '90s was the prologue for Coach Hoodie building his legend.
  
  The Patriots' gag job duplicated several elements of USC's loss to Texas in the 2006 Rose Bowl. They lost by three points on a last-minute touchdown after going unbeaten all season and having their glamour-boy QB reduced to a mere mortal.
  
  Tom Brady wasn't that bad, really. It was his turnstile of an offensive line, who easily had those worst performance by any group of five men at a Super Bowl since N*Sync performed at halftime in 2001.
  
  The big parallel to the Pats' duplicating USC's Rose Bowl loss was a failed fourth-down gamble. Belichick's decision to go for it on fourth-and-13 from the Giants 32 in the third quarter instead having Stephen Gostkowski try a long field goal probably won't stick in memory like the two failed fourth-and-1 gambles that Carroll and USC had in that bowl game, but it loomed just as large. (The second, for those of you who don't remember or could give a shit about college football, gave Vince Young with a short field for Texas' winning drive.)
  
  Like King Kaufman of Salon.com wrote about USC back in 2006, there might be a "cause and effect" with Belichick not being able to trust Gostkowski from 49 yards indoors. The Patriots frequently go for it on the fourth-down situations when a field goal would be dodgy, which is fine against the Bills or the Dolphins in October, but they couldn't get away with it against the New York Giants. It just begs the question of whether Gostkowski couldn't be trusted from 49, since he's used to the Pats going for it all the time.
  
  The Pats would have stood a much better chance if they had gone to the fourth quarter leading 10-3 instead of 7-3.
• Pride goeth before the fall: Howie Long pulling out the Red Sox hat during Fox's pre-game show was the first sign something was about to go dreadfully wrong. With a coif like this, Howie Long probably doesn't wear a hat too often.
• The Mighty MJD already has the takedown on Belichick leaving the field early.
• Eli Manning's scramble and David Tyree's catch, one more time:
  
  
  
• Some idiot went on the record -- tongue-in-cheek -- saying Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel would be the game MVP. Naturally, he dropped a potential interception on the Giants' winning drive. "DB hands," remarked a work colleague who played some wide receiver in his day.
• The wicked burns on Bill Simmons just keep on coming. (Former) readers of The Sports Guy know he hates Steve Nash (or is it just projecting?) and slagged his selection as NBA MVP, especially when he won in 2006. That couldn't have had anything to do with Nash telling NBC Sports before the game that he was taking the Giants, could it? Again, Steve Nash could rule the world.
• Obvious analog for the Giants? The 1993 Montreal Canadiens. Neither was very good, but ended up doing something that's statistically remote (winning 10 straight road games, winning 10 straight overtime playoff games).
• Randy Moss clearly just wasn't meant to earn a Super Bowl ring. Once a Vikings, always a Vikings.
• How did the 20th anniversary of Doug Williams becoming the first black quarterback to win the Super Bowl seemingly pass without any notice?

SUPER, THANKS FOR ASKING

A Super Bowl-related post, a couple days late and a couple dollars short (he typed, enveloped in self-loathing):

• A new word has to be coined to describe the experience, as a Minnesota Vikings fan, of watching Brett Favre blow it big-time: Schadenfreulicious.
  
  It was easily the biggest flop in a conference championship game by a heavily favoured home team (non-Bill Cowher division) since the 1998 Vikings. It's a pain that never ends.
  
  Hey, it was said here, after Week 1, that Green Bay "has enough D to get to (the) 10 or 11 wins it will take to win this division before Favre throws it away in the playoffs." Even with the typo, there's proof if you put it vaguely enough, eventually you'll look like a prophet.
  
  Basically, that meant a long season of being Coach Kilmer from Varsity Blues to Favre's Jonathan Moxon: "Keep it up, a--hole." Obviously, there's more to it than Favre (Mike McCarthy forgot to put running plays in the game plan, the Packers couldn't complete any of those crossing routes like they had all year and it was really too cold to play).
  
  Still, who knew it would all come together? Favre and the Packers lose to a team that the Vikes destroyed in the regular season. OK, so it means the Giants are playing in their second Super Bowl since 41-doughnut, but Vikings fans can handle the irony, especially since Randy Moss should surpass his numbers from the 2000 NFC title game (two catches, 18 yards) on the Patriots first drive.
  
• The irony of spending much of yesterday pointing out the errors and omissions of one Ottawa media outlet was that it pushed back pointing out the errors and omissions of another Ottawa media outlet by a day.
  
  CTV Ottawa did a fine job with the simulcast of the conference championship games, so long as you didn't expect to be able to see every play of a game or the New England Patriots locker room celebration after becoming the first NFL team to be 18-0 during a season.
  
  This actually happened: The clowns tried to jam in a newsbreak when CBS went to a commercial after the third Patriots touchdown. That meant viewers got to see a bunch of workers flooding the Rideau Canal instead of the ensuing kickoff, which for all we knew, could have been returned for a touchdown. When they returned to the game, the Chargers offence was already at the line of scrimmage for the next play.
  
  After the Pats won, CTV immediately cut away from CBS -- without showing the trophy presentation or getting any post-game reaction -- to go to Fox's pre-game for the Packers-Giants NFC game.
  
  You'll remember, of course, that at the two-minute warning the Giants had the ball and were trying to get in range to kick the winning field goal. CTV Ottawa came back late from the commercial break -- just had in a promo for one of those 250 spin-offs of CSI or Law & Order that had already been shown 63 times that day -- and missed a 14-yard pass play that got the Giants closer to field-goal range.
  
  It might be moot since the drive ended with a Tynes miss. Still, it's infuriating that year after year that something so simple gets screwed up by the Canadian rights-holders for the NFL, who reap huge profits from simulcasting the games while creating nothing of value.
  
  On a related tangent, Greg Layson of the Guelph Mercury points this out: What are Canada's three sports networks airing on Saturday night, when Carleton and the U of O will be playing in front of perhaps the largest crowd ever to watch a university basketball game in this country?
  
  Poker and UFC on Sportsnet, some X games-like thingy on TSN and a NBA game on The Score.
  
  That said, you can't blame 'em for being small-town-cheap. Canadians tend to look down on watching our own compete against each other, with the exception of the NHL, CFL and curling.
  

• Nice of Fox anchor Curt Menefee to diss the CFL when discussing Giants hero Lawrence Tynes, saying, "he went to the CFL, then he went to NFL Europe." Not only was it incorrect (Tynes played in NFL Europe before joining the Ottawa Renegades), but implied the CFL is a poorer brand of football than the since-discontinued developmental league.
  
• No word of a lie: Eli Manning's quarterback rating in the regular season was exactly the same as Rex Grossman's in 2006. Try not act too surprised if he regresses badly next season.
• You can't make this up: Brett Favre's wife's maiden name? Tynes.

(How's this for synchronicity? On Sunday, Favre messes up the playoff game, which is great to watch as a Vikings fan. Monday, Rob Neyer from ESPN.com links to a post here. Tuesday, upon finally getting around to writing a post about it, a Google search reveals an article where Neyer, a baseball guy, professes that he too is a Vikings fan, even though he didn't grow up in Minnesota.)

TOP 5: COACHES WHO GOT SCHOOLED IN THE NFL

Bobby Petrino isn't the first college football coach to pull a Rodney Dangerfield.

The cute part about Petrino quitting on the Atlanta Falcons to go back to school with the Arkansas Razorbacks is that he told former boss to be, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot, that he was quitting over the phone. Yes, he phoned it in -- just like the Falcons have done this season.

I like to picture Petrino, when he called Blank, saying, "I'm quitting... sick of the NFL," then doing the worst fake cough into the phone, like Karen Smith in Mean Girls after the Plastics decided to freeze out Regina George.

Like Rodney, though, bringing a college coach to the NFL gets no respect, since typically they find it more mind-boggling than, well, a typical trip to Home Depot. It's worked exactly once in the past 25 years -- Jimmy Johnson with the Dallas Cowboys. There have been some modest successes, such as John Robinson and Bobby Ross.

More often than not, as you'll see, you get a coach who soon runs back to college to boss around the 19-year-old unpaid serfs of the turf:

STEVE SPURRIER
Washington Redskins, 2002-03
The best tone to take with the Ol' Ball Coach's two-year NFL sojourn would be akin to the opening voiceover in Fahrenheit 9/11, when Michael Moore harkens back on U.S. Election Night in 2000 and intones, "Was it all a dream?"

The Redskins' two-year Spurrier experiment was a Florida Fiasco in itself. But at the time, the five-year, $25-million contract Spurrier got to bring his Florida Gators Fun 'n' Gun passing game to the pros was perhaps the biggest story in the NFL in the lead-up to the '02 season.

Everyone who followed football had a take. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would cop to thinking it could have worked. Spurrier bagged it after going 12-20 and finding out that NFL coaches can't bugger off to play 18 holes of golf every day.

To add insult to incompetence, during Spurrier's first season, the 'Skins broke out throwback uniforms that were near replicas of those worn by Florida State -- Florida's rival.

NICK SABAN
Miami Dolphins, 2005-06
Saban's calling card is that he's usually leveraged and lied his way into a better gig by the time the roof caves in on one of his teams. That way, it ends up on some other poor bastard's permanent record.

Saban's successor in South Florida, Cam Cameron, will soon go down as the coach of the NFL's first 0-16 team. The Dolphins disaster belongs just as much to Saban, who deserted a team that regressed badly during his two-year pitstop in the pros to go the University of Alabama. He did guide his team to a 9-7 season in 2005, but then again, so did Mike Tice.

Chances are, Saban will probably have a winner at 'Bama eventually, but his first shaky year has offered all sorts of sadistic pleasures. His Crimson Tide are only going to a bowl since the NCAA greedheads changed the rules a while back to help out underachieving big-money teams. They get to count wins over slack teams from Division 1-AA toward being bowl-eligible. That means the Crimson Tide, at 6-6, are playing in a bowl since they recorded a 52-6 win over Western Carolina (no, never heard of them either).

Along with his abrupt departure from the Dolphins, Saban has been in one controversy over using ethnic slur to describe Cajuns. He's since been in another after referencing Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks while discussing a loss to Louisiana-Monroe. One need not be a Dolphins fan or a history teacher to root against Nick Saban.

DENNIS ERICKSON
San Francisco 49ers, 2003-04
Erickson was so-so in Seattle during his first NFL stint from 1995-98, but a college coach he was and a college coach he should have remained after getting fired by the Seahawks. Nevertheless, the 49ers gave him another shot at the NFL. To this day, no one knows why.

During his time with the 49ers, what had been a model franchise went backwards from being in the NFC title game the year before he arrived all the way to a 2-14 record in '04. There's plenty of reasons for the 49ers' decline, of course, but this is Erickson, the guy who once signalled he was leaving a coaching job by leaving town without telling anyone. Why bother being charitable?
Erickson has changed jobs eight times since 1986, which is standard for career assistants, not a coach who won two national championships at Miami. By this point, Marilyn Erickson probably doesn't even ask where she's moving to when her husband changes teams, but just mumbles, "What colour sweatshirt?"

JOHN MACKOVIC
Kansas City Chiefs, 1983-86
To understand how in hell a coach whose winning percentage in college was a weak-assed .533 ever got to run a NFL team, you have to know that late Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt had a Texas-sized resentment of the Dallas Cowboys. His team had begun life in Dallas, after all.

So when Hunt's Chiefs fired their coach -- a guy named Marv Levy -- after the '82 strike season, it figured they would hire Mackovic, who had been Tom Landry's quarterbacks coach in Dallas for two years after coaching at Wake Forest. As the saying goes, though, you have to be lucky to be good. Mackovic was evidently neither.

Within a few weeks in '83, the Chiefs passed on Jim Kelly and Dan Marino in the famous Quarterback Draft to take Todd Blackledge (career high in touchdown passes: 10) and star running back Joe Delaney tragically drowned while trying to rescue three children from a pond.

Maybe it could have been different. We'll never know. What is known is that Mackovic got fired after the '86 season, even though he had actually guided the Chiefs to the playoffs for the first time in 15 years. That probably spoke volumes about how well-suited he was to the NFL game.

There are plenty of fans of the Texas Longhorns and Arizona Wildcats who would say he wasn't cut out for the college game either. Mackovic's last gig at Arizona ended when he was fired after a player revolt.

LOU HOLTZ
New York Jets, 1976
Holtz could be forgiven if the song he wrote for the Jets to perform after wins -- he really did this -- wasn't as catchy as the Gilligan's Island theme. What can't be forgiven is that his only NFL season was a three-victory tour ... a three-victory tour. (Hey, remember, you're reading this for free.)

That's about all you need to know about Holtz as a NFL coach. OK, so he also tried to put in the college-style veer offence that relies on a running quarterback, even though the Jets had an aging Joe Namath, who had knees like an old camel.

Holtz is a major thread in this rich tapestry. One of his wins came over a Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that went 0-14. The Bucs quarterback? Steve Spurrier.

His other two wins in the NFL were over the Buffalo Bills, whose coach was Lou Saban -- Nick Saban's father.

Much later, at Notre Dame, Holtz lost a chance at a repeat national title in 1989 when his No. 1 Irish were beaten in their final game by the Miami Hurricanes. Miami's coach was Dennis Erickson.

In his final season at Notre Dame, 1996, Holtz's team was squeezed out of a bowl bid, despite an 8-3 record. The Orange Bowl had to take Texas, who probably wouldn't have been in a major bowl if they hadn't managed to upset Nebraska to win their conference. The Texas coach was John Mackovic.

Holtz was also 3-10 in the NFL when he quit to go to Arkansas -- just like Bobby Petrino. It all makes sense now why NFL owners should veer away from letting a college coach run the show, but chances are, like many of the players who go through these football factories, they haven't learned much.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

A GOOD LAUGH THAT'S BEEN BREWING FOR MONTHS

With all apologies to that dead Brit he's probably never heard of, the Ex-Beer Baron is finding out who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Personally, the B.B. and his forever-on-the-outs relationship with reality has been a dead issue for a couple months. In all honesty, the response was to chuckle and go, "Oh, yeah, the guy who sued me for $2 million," yesterday when e-mails and Facebook messages started to trickle in, each one a variation on, "This must make your week."

Not really. It was like something that happened back in university, not within the past nine months. The Sager who concerned himself with little people who are beyond education and embarrassment doesn't write here anymore, or at least not as often.

The not-so-humble feeling is that maybe the shitwinds started blowing when the man sent his legal eagles after lil' ol' Out of Left Field last winter. Please forgive the ego trip, but after putting up with the B.B.'s for the past couple years, it's well-earned. The point here is that standing up to the man's bullying for as long as possible helped get us here.

Who knows, maybe it brought about -- take it away, Percy Bysshe -- "the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion."

What is for certain is that post-lawsuit, post-sexual assault charge, public opinion of him certainly hardened. Who knows, it might have got the public palate whetted for the truths hard-working journalists have unearthed about the man and his business interests. That's the story, and I'm sticking to it.

He messed with the wrong man. That stocky, slow-witted balding guy (me) is now laughing to beat the fucking band.

Now he can go on believing and saying, nonsense like, "This tongue has no bones, but it can break 'em," for the rest of his days. That's Frank D'Angelo's right, and I could give a shit. Living well and not caring about what he does, or where he turns up, seems like the best revenge. Good luck, Frank. You'll need it more than I will.

Related:
Steelback in 'liquidity crisis' (Tony Van Alphen, Toronto Star)
D'Angelo's fortunes fading fast (Jennifer Wells, Toronto Star)
In rejecting D'Angelo's bid for Ottawa franchise, CFL came out a winner (Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen)
Ad overspending forces Steelback into protection (Andy Hoffman, reportonbusiness.com)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

ALL THE BAD SINGERS WANNA ACT

A show without the never duplicated sound (hopefully) of Frank D'Angelo and the Steelback 2-4 is not a show ... actually, sounds like it would be a good time.

D'Angelo and his bestest band ever had to cancel a gig at a benefit due to "recent developments with his business interests." That must be that "major, major movie" he was talking about, right?