Super Bowl Homeboy

Bring your cleats to the streets of Chicago for the first annual SBHB summit.

Topics this Halloween include: The inevitable fall of Nordy, who the VIkings can draft to lead them in 2009, whether Franchise and K-Love will lead the Wolves to 30 or even 31 wins this season, and how Pasadena Brew sizes up to some of the second-year coaching greats in Big Ten footbal history.

Oh, and bring your mustache

Super Bowl Pasadena Homeboy does not endorse politicians, but no matter what happens next Tuesday, it will mark a new day in America — and usher in some sunshine to the dark nights that have blanketed our nation. It is no coincidence that Brad Childress is at the helm for the largest breakdown in free-market capitalism since the age of Murderers Row.

Think about it. The country Brad Childress placed the keys to shiny new houses a National League Football team in the hands of a party in no way qualified to handle it — those with shitty credit Tarvaris Jackson. Meanwhile, greedy sons of bitches Childress mortgaged OUR future by peddling the false of hope of mortgage-backed securities a deep playoff run reliant on the oh so reliable foundation of subprime loans the least kick-ass offense in the history of football.

Ok, enough of that. Between the Vikings debacle and the apparent secret handshake between Gardy and Bradstache to apply the kick-ass offense for one night at US Cellular about a month ago, times have been tough for Minnesota sports fans. And of course, the Homeboy hood was shaken by the news that one of the few sports personalities in the state respected by SBHB ran into some personal demons that led to his departure from KFAN. Times are rough.

But oooooh oooh child the night is darkest just before the dawn.

WHY?

BOOM. Pasadena Brew has been crafting up his finest Oktoberfest for the Gopher Nation. Pasadena Homeboy realizes that the Rose Bowl relies on some unlikely bounces such as a win in Madison and a Buckeye loss at Champaign, but watch out because Pasadena Brew is capable of nearly any feat. Pasadena Brew will lower the world’s CO2 levels to 350 parts per billion, will eliminate our dependency on foreign oil while simultaneously ending the recession by creating industries that don’t yet exist while also solving the massive logjam in our nation’s highway funding by scrapping the gas tax in place of high speed bullet trains — ALL TO PASADENA. Pasadena Brew will hold a summit the day before the Rose Bowl in which he welcome the new President and the heads of state of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Georgia, North and South Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sudan, China and Canada (just to make Canadians feel good about themselves) and will single-handedly solve world peace by unleashing the transcendent beauty of his 38-3 win over USC.

Pasadena Brew is not of us, but he walks amongst us. I would recommend taking whatever scraps are left in between your mattress - and the faux box of Parliaments you keep on your dresser to fool mattress robbers in these harsh times - and double it all down on Pasadena Brew and the Pasadena over against the Wildcats of Northwestern this Saturday.

Homecoming indeed.

Meanwhile, Nordy lost the first game of his life tonight to the team whose name still does not exist. However, due to Nordys not being present at said loss, researchers are still determining whether Nordy’s invincibility is still in tact.

Homeboy fave Justin Gaard is increasingly rockin’ the airwaves with his svelte positive vibe.

AND HEY!! FRANCHISE JEFFERSON AND THE PUPS ARE COMIN OUT!

It has been 24 hours since I held my Twins vigil.  Yes it took me this long to throw away my Twin’s 2008 schedule, I’m not sure what made me clutch this piece of paper for so long.  Perhaps the fact that my morphine dealer left town and I have nothing left to dull the pain, maybe I know that it will be 6 months until a winning Minnesota product hits the field.  Perhaps it was the fear of having the Kick Ass Offense being too explosive for my wiener to handle for the next 10 weeks.  Perhaps it was the fact that I was still holding out hope that the entire White Sox team was on HGH and their AL Central title would be stripped…whatever it was I am now left plodding through 10 weeks of Viking football. 

If you scroll through this page you will observe several comments from yours truly drinking the chilly kool-aid out of my 1998 Cris Carter Thermos.  Hell, six weeks ago if Chilly asked me to take a bubble bath with him I probably would have hopped in and scrubbed that bastard clean.  Today is not six weeks ago, I have wasted approximately 24 hours of my life watching this season (not to mention the countless hours I have spent over this millennium watching this team sputter season after season) and I would rather have a steamy terd resting on my chest than continue to watch this crap.  Maybe I am a masochist though, maybe this is my version of “cutting” maybe I am not happy unless I feel pain.  Well Chilly, I hope your time here was fun for you, I hope all the back slapping and hand shaking made you feel special.  Because no matter what happens this season, you and the KAO need to head back to the scrap heap with the other dirty diapers.  By the way, if you want some real heart break TIVO America’s Game: The Lost Ring about the 1998 Vikings.  It’s about as fun as getting a blood transfusion before 1983, except you know the outcome to this.

These headlines are amongst the “Most Read” for Star Tribune stories on the Minnesota Timberwolves:

Wolves trying the wide angle

The Timberwolves, along with lots of other NBA teams, are trying width instead of height with their inside players.

Subs’ success no balm; coach upset at starters

Scoring hasn’t been Miller’s priority with Wolves, yet

NBA hands Telfair a three-game suspension

The hat alone should be grounds for dismissal.

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.

Ahh,  Ahhh,  It was just a little too early to be going for two.  Ahh, you know if we didn’t get it, there were no guarantees that we would have the opportunity to kick the game winner.

I thought this might come up, so I brought up my two-point chart.  So, how many of you know the success rate of two-point conversions in the NFL this year?  Yeah, I didn’t think any of you would know it.  Well, it’s about 44.8%.  I think I’ll take the points.

It’s gonna be alright…

and it can’t come soon enough.  Kiss me franky.