Whipped Cream Difficulties

This week, haiku. And for the second week in a row, no “TMQ Trailer”.

TMQ Watch is not going to re-type all of Easterbrook’s haiku, as that would be unfair to Easterbrook and ESPN. Nor are we going to write our own responses in haiku; one of WCD’s limitations (“A man’s got to know his limitations.“) is a total inability to write haiku.

Easing our toe into the waters…

• Ah, the revenge of the cupcakes, another recurring trope. Even better from TMQ’s point of view, the Jacksonville State turnaround began with an interception caused by Ole Miss trying to run up the score. “The football gods punish this sort of thing.” And thus the football gods make their first appearance this season in TMQ.
• Scantily clad Ukrainian cheer babes. Photo too small.
• Whenever TMQ says, “Tuesday Morning Quarterback long has maintained…”, yeah, that’s a trope. In this case, TMQ argues that year-to-year athletic scholarships hurt athletes, by leading to a focus on athletics over education, and may constitute “restraint of trade” according to the Justice Department.
• Creep.
• 335 pound linemen. Noted as another example of a recurring trope.
• Why does the media love a good oil spill? TMQ thinks it could have something to do with the $200 million BP has spent on “image advertising”.
• Haynesworth.
• TMQ bashes the NYT; in this case, the paper of record acts like David Romer’s “go for it on 4th down” paper is new, when it was covered by people like the Washington Monthly and TMQ in 2006.
  

  In the same package, the Times asks why, if going for it, kicking onside and deuce tries make sense, NFL coaches rarely attempt these stratagems. The answer the Times proposes — that coaches don’t want to be blamed for failed gambles — is a running theme of Tuesday Morning Quarterback. I’ve even been saying this for 10 years, since this column began on Slate.com, which was then a radical innovation on that new Interweb thing.

  Not just a trope, but a trope Easterbrook admits to!

• Easterbrook complains about the recent glut of hitman movies, and the glamorization of violence. Again.
• Technology has made the study of game films much easier, resulting in game film study trickling down to the high school level and below.
• Hurrah for one of my personal favorite TMQ tropes, the obscure college score of the week!
• Quoted without comment: “[Sports commentators] have a snug image of what’s “supposed” to happen, and don’t take kindly to original thinking.”
• Christmas creep.
• After last year’s minimum wage increase, Easterbrook suggested that this would be a test of the relationship between higher minimum wages and unemployment. If unemployment went up, that would be evidence for the proposition; if it went down, that would be evidence against. The end result so far? Unemployment remains constant at 9.5 percent. It would have been interesting to see Easterbrook break out the figures by age group; has unemployment among teens increased?
• Reader comments: objections to characterizing Dallas as a non-neutral site for the Texas-OU game, discussion of cupcake games pro and con, the 18-game season as bargaining chip, and getting shot hurts.

Next week, the start of the season, and Easterbrook steps up his game. We hope.

Last week, the AFC. This week, the NFC.

I’d start out by discussing Monday’s TMQ Trailer, as I’ve been doing; oddly, though, there does not seem to have been a TMQ Trailer this week. (If there was one, it does not show on Page 2, or in the Easterbrook archives.)

Before I jump into the meat of Easterbrook’s column, I’d like to note two things about TMQ Watch:

1. TMQ Watch is not intended to be a substitute for reading TMQ. Easterbrook is a much better writer than I am, and I strongly encourage you to read his columns, not just my filtered summaries of them. The intent of TMQ Watch is to highlight recurring themes and tropes in TMQ, to call out things in TMQ that I believe are wrong or mistaken, and to provide a different point of view in places where I disagree with Easterbrook’s positions.
2. There does not appear to be any place on the web that currently hosts discussions of Easterbrook’s columns (the great Football Outsiders did for a while, but does not currently) so I welcome discussions and responses to TMQ, or TMQ Watch, here. Please note that comments are moderated, and will be approved as my time permits. Also, if someone wants to start a “TMQ Watch” Watch (like WikiLeakiLeaks) I promise you a link on my blogroll (as long as your blog isn’t a spam blog).

So let’s rumble.

Another TMQ trope is complaining about college football powerhouses scheduling weak opponents, such as UT vs. Rice  (Easterbrook calls these “cupcake” games). With the college season starting on Thursday, Easterbrook drags this one out of the closet like a Neru jacket and tries it on; behold, it still fits!

TMQ is in favor of dumping two preseason games, but opposed to an 18 game season;  Easterbrook believes that an 18 game season will “dilute the product”.  “Plus an 18-game season would mean either starting the NFL regular season before Labor Day or holding the Super Bowl after Valentine’s Day.” And that would be bad…because? Once again, he trots out the “there is no law of nature that says the NFL must remain so popular” trope.

Team by team breakdown:

• Arizona: Maybe they’ll develop a balanced attack and become less “pass whacky” (an Easterbrook coinage). And hey, TMQ may have been wrong about Matt Leinart. I’d love to laugh at TMQ’s admission about Leinart..but, well, I think a lot of other people were wrong, too, including me.
• Atlanta: “If the Saints can win the Super Bowl, why can’t the long-suffering Falcons, too?” Long-suffering Houston football fans are welcome to respond in the comments.
• Carolina: Once they dumped Delhomme, they went 4-1. Could they be even better in 2010?
• Easterbrook is now writing a regular column for Reuters. I’m not going to be blogging that, unless he says something noteworthy; I’m RUNNING OUT OF TIME! Seriously, I don’t have time to blog this column as well, but I’d love to see someone like Battleswarm take it on.
• Chicago: Easterbrook invokes another trope, exaggerated NFL deals, in the case of Julius Peppers. Peppers supposedly signed a “six year, $92 million” deal, but since the contract is heavily loaded on the back end, it is unlikely he’ll see the full $92 million; depending on who you talk to, he could get $20 million to $42 million. In any case, this makes him nearly as overpaid as Albert Haynesworth. And why isn’t Devin Hester returning kicks?
• We still haven’t given up on the Christmas Creep.
• Was it really worth the taxpayer money that was spent to investigate whether the governor of New York took free World Series tickets? Easterbrook says no; I’d argue that there’s something to be said for truth and honesty in government, even in seemingly small things like World Series tickets.
• Speaking of RUNNING OUT OF TIME, Easterbrook’s substitute for complaining about scientific implausibility in SF television shows this week is…complaining that people don’t react realistically to being shot in movies and television. (See, for example, Jack Bauer.)
  “Hollywood sells violence, violence, violence — and then with movie stars, people the public empathizes with, suggests: Hey, bullets don’t really do any harm, you’ll be fine 20 minutes later. So fire away!” Complaining about movie and television violence is another Easterbrook trope, and one that’s gotten him into trouble previously.
  He may be right about Cop Land; I missed that when it was in theatrical release, although I was curious about it. At some point, I’ll have to catch up with it on DVD.
• Dallas: December collapse, Wade Phillips is 1-5 in the post season, would you pay 1.8 billion dollars for the Cowboys?
• Another recurring trope: the wacky disclaimer (this time for Comcast’s file backup service) and the word count comparison to the United States Constitution. For the record, I come up with a word count of 8,761 words (which I believe includes some photo captions; this seems fair to me, as I think Easterbrook writes those as well) in this week’s column; this site gives a total word count for the US Constitution of 4,400 words. So Easterbrook nearly doubles the word count of the founding document of the United States to discuss one week of events in a sport that hasn’t even started yet. (Isn’t turnabout fun? For the record, this blog entry comes in at 1,380 words.)
• Detroit: Ndamukong Suh should have won the Heisman. The fact that he didn’t means “linemen simply are not eligible for the Heisman” and “the award should be renamed the Heisman Trophy for the Running Back or Quarterback Who Receives the Most Publicity.” (Yet another Easterbrook trope; linemen don’t get enough credit, especially at Heisman time.) “There’s a sense of optimism around the Lions.” I’d be optimistic too, if I had no place to go but up.
• More kickoff specialists, fewer punters, please.
• Green Bay: Aaron Rodgers is already a better deal for the Packers than keeping Brett Farve around would have been. That sound you heard was Peter King’s head exploding.
• Giants (aka Jersey/A in the TMQ World): Since they won the Super Bowl, the Giants have looked like just another football team. And people in New York can’t stand that. Not exactly a TMQ trope, but Easterbrook here sure sounds an awful lot like Mike the Musicologist (who did a several year bit in New York attending grad school, and speaks of it in the same terms Marines use for their time in ‘Nam).
• More creep.
• Vikings: Farve the Farve. Farve farve farve. Farve! (If you’ve never seen the original Malkovich Mediator, it’s here.)
• Saints: Doomed. Drew Brees is on the cover of Madden. Doomed. Also, stuff about taxes and the Saints getting a sweetheart deal from the state of Louisana. Corruption? In Louisana? Shocked, I am, shocked! I’m reminded of something Calvin Trillin quoted once: “The only important question about any public project in [Louisana] is: who’s writing the insurance?”
• Eagles: Listless and stale the past two seasons. Maybe the offseason purge will help. I’m surprised that Easterbrook didn’t invoke another of his tropes; that the Football Gods are punishing the team, in this case for signing Michael Vick.
• Rams: “Where is the players’ self-respect?”
• San Francisco: Lousy team in a very weak division. Easterbrook, to his praise, has some interesting stuff about why the team is moving to a new stadium in Santa Clara.
• Seattle: Pete Carroll is a cheater.
• Tampa: Good special teams, and that’s about it.
• Washington: Seven head coaches, eleven starting quarterbacks, and nine offensive coordinators in the eleven years “Chainsaw Dan Snyder” (trope!) has owned the team. Don’t look for McNabb to save them; his team in Philadelphia was much better than this one. “In his official photo, Shanahan looks like someone auditioning for a reality show about people who think they are Napoleon.” I was going to make fun of Easterbrook for this comment, but…damn, he’s right!
  Also, more Haynesworth bashing.
• Reader comments: Easterbrook is wrong when it comes to killing.

And thus we come to the end of this week’s TMQ Watch. Next week: season predictions in haiku. I haven’t made up my mind yet whether I’m going to give TMQ a hard time for not including seasonal references in his haiku. (No, I’m sorry, the fact that they’re all about football does not, in and of itself, constitute a seasonal reference.)