First, the Twins did not just “drop one” in bed, they literally made a bed out of poop. The Timberwolves still exist, though that link or this idiotic headline are the only ways you’d ever find out. The Wild unleashed the most blatantly f*%&ing stupid thing since, well, ok, since either last night or every day of my life. And on top of that, my alma mater suffered two of its most embarassing football losses in modern program history in three weeks, while narrowly losing in the third. (I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.) Now, you may say…“But Super Bowl Homeboy, PASADENA BREW has got the perfect balance of delicious hops and barley to ferment the Gophers to the ROSE BOWL this year.” Touche. Pasadena Brew is a sexy man. But I’m only concerned with pro Minnesota sports for the moment. So, I was startled to see in the face of Minnesota professional sporting negatrometers everywhere, this shell of a column in the Star Tribune today.
Umm…HELLO?? There’s something I particularly dislike about columnists in general. Having written my fair share of them, columns almost always — unless they are driven by a single story meant to be open to interpretation or stand alone — attempt to draw parallel stretches that fit a cute single idea engineered a few hours before deadline. You can’t get away with this in a serious piece. But generally a column gives you the space. And if ANYBODY knows stupid arguments crafted to stretch a bad idea to 750 words, it’s the Star Tribune sports page. (Though to be fair, I shouldn’t pick on the Strib too much. This is a problem of all sports pages.)
Some of this problem is based off the unrealistic expectation that people have remarkably unique, eminently readable ideas 2-3 times per week that fit into this kind of a format. (Especially true of the sports world, which when you boil it down is pretty meaningless and repetitive.) But much of the issue has to do with terribly stupid ideas. This Childress-as-Belichick one reminded me specifically of another oft-repeated claim. Take the last two grafs of this column:
In this respect, Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era (the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA), expanded the powers of the presidency, established a new doctrine for active intervention abroad, and ultimately engaged in a war (Korea) — also absent an attack on the U.S. — that proved highly unpopular.
So unpopular that Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration.
This is a remarkably stupid convenient way to view unpopular people or ideas you favor that are unpopular not because they’re forward-thinking but because they have already failed. It is true that history takes time to judge. But people who use that line as an excuse for complete and utter failures in the present tense are simply putting themselves in a position where they always win. Take this case of Bush, who political preferences aside, is simply a disaster of McHale-esque proportions. (I refuse to acknowledge any systemic argument to the contrary when the man’s own party is abandoning him to the point of criticizing him during national debates.) Bush, perhaps wisely, has been going around the last couple of years telling people hes like Truman, because Truman was unpopular and now he’s not.
While it is still in the realm of mathematical possibility that Bush is reevaluated as a success decades down the road, this is like Christian Slater trying to tell me that his shit-split-personality excuse for virtual feces a show is automatically going to be judged a raving success by David McCullough’s grandson just because Sports Night once got canceled. I’m calling this ‘previsionist’ history. And it’s f*$#ing insane mentally handicapped.
Oh, so, Christian? You’re telling me that despite the fact that network television each year puts out dozens of stupid, stupid, awful shows that make me want to type so many skglhwlkjerghgjslgj swear words that I am punching the keys through the bottom of my computer, that because once or twice a decade history judges one of the failures to be above average at like a rate of 1%, that it gives your show’s failure an excuse? Is that how you want to look at it Christian? Because if so, I guess you belong in this cookie-cutter, ice cream-shoveled, every child gets a f*%&ing unisex minotaur trophy because we wouldn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, don’t offend someone’s performance because you’ll hurt their It’s All About You attitude and make them change professions for the 18th time rather than actually improve themselves, excuse for a society.
You failed, Christianbushchildress. I refuse to hear otherwise from you OR your sportswriting surrogates. In all honesty though, the Bush and Childress comparison doesn’t hold up. I was simply using it to illustrate a point, which is that I’m pissed off. If I tried to tell you these two fit the same exact principle my name would be Mark Craig. They’re not. It’s important to note that while Krauthammer is spouting this previsionism because as a conservative beacon he has a vested interest and an admirably unshakeable belief that his viewpoint will historically prevail as the correct one, Mark Craig is simply tired of Minnesota and trying to loosely stitch together a stupid argument that makes no sense.
Let’s examine for a moment something we here at SBHB like to call a “fact.”
FACT: The Mediocrikings are 11-11 since the beginning of last season.
FACT: I’m giving Chilly the benefit of the doubt because the first season of a rookie NFL coach should be tossed out in almost all cases.
FACT: In those 11 wins, only three of them came without defensive points or a kick return touchdown. (Meaning, unless we are playing the Bears, the odds of us winning a football game without the defense scoring are pretty freaking low.)
FACT (as far as I know): Bill Belichick did not have a free-spending owner, a Thunderdome, Ragnar, a kick-ass, tough-guy, pump-it-up defense that was the team’s best hope of reaching the end zone on any given play.
FACT: Bill Belichick is not Mormon.
These are not disputable points. Trying to compare Billyball on a team that was miserable and about to go defunct against a team with nearly any resource at its disposal that chose not to go after a starting quarterback better than Tarvaris Jackson is in no way comparable. Finding the fact that Belichick was booed and fired is lazy and moronic. I could put the SBHB intern, which may or may not be a near-blind dog with no professional insight on football coaching, to work in order to find out how many coaches were fired in between Belichick and yesterday (a number which would have been one higher without the NFL-ordered phantom pass interference call), but that would be pointless.
The point is that somehow Sunday’s win was more painful to watch than any of the Vikings’ losses this year. The point is that despite the fact that the Vikes are 3-3 thanks to lining up in the pass interference formation during the 2-minute drill, Minnesota fans can honestly say they’ve deserved to win exactly one game this year — against the Carolina Panthers. The point is that this offense has regressed almost every week since Gus took over. (And I don’t want to hear about the Saints game being anything other than the defense plaing ten times the game the rest of the team did.)
The question remains whether I will by the end of this season look forward more to going to work on Monday morning than I do waking up on Sunday to trek down the hill to the sports bar in order to watch the worst offensive game since ‘me in a party full of good looking women.’ Because that is the way this is shaping up.
As I pointed out, last year the Vikings won two of their only three victories without defensive/return points against the Chicago Football Bears. If they somehow find a way to do that again, they enter a bye week with time to heal up for a one-or-two-win Houston Texans team inside the Thunderdome. That would seem to spell a 5-3 record at the midway point of the season and the driver’s seat of a terrible conference. But I can’t tell you whether 5-3 with this offense would make me want to wake up in the morning and smile or puke.
1) Mandate that the checks and balances of the Vikings’ Triangle of Authority allow any branch of Purple government power to veto non-werewolf quarterback selections. It was firmly established in Sunday’s victory over Carolina, both on the field and in post-game interviews, that Gus Frerotte is a USDA-certified werewolf. While it did take nearly a quarter-and-a-half of Chilly’s boneheaded gunslinging plan to breakdown before we moved to the traditional werewolf-style offense, 35:00 was more than enough to howl at victory. Werewolves’ shapeshifting powers, insatiable desire to taste the human flesh, and curiously convenient inability to differentiate between the full moon and the Metrodome roof make them prime candidates to lead this otherwise Mormon value-led electric speed train to Tampa.
“The Rockers”
Kevin McHale is a vampire.
Are the Twins werewolves or vampires? Jason Kubel did his best werewolf impression last night. Delmonster is already a card-carrying member of the monster community, but as a giant lizard, he is far from attaining werewolf status. Nick Blackbeard’s Delight, on the hill tonight, is of course a pirate, which defeats vampire as we all know. He has the sideburns to be a werewolf. The question is whether he has a vampire’s heart and A.J. Pierzynski smells like garlic. I bet you never thought you’d read that sentence…
