Tag Archives: playoffs

National Nightmare Unleashed: NFL Playoffs 2012 Part Deux

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Image of Tim Tebow and Justin Bieber

Mr. Popularity: What do these two have in common? Apparently, a lot more than I possibly imagined.

Well, after declaring false prophecy last week when I picked Pittsburgh to dispose of Tim Tebow and the Broncos, I was not expecting to be blindsided by a tsunami of unparalleled hype. However, when I read the news Thursday morning that an ESPN poll rates Tim Tebow as the most popular athlete in the U.S., I — apparently unlike a lot of people — experienced acute disgust at yet another Tebow headline. But this was far worse. As Charles Barkley so eloquently states, this is more than just turrible, it’s a national nightmare.

After my stomach had settled down somewhat from rage-induced vomiting, I became perplexed at how all of this is even possible. Then a “light bulb moment” struck me. I realized that Americans, as a whole, have the absolute worst taste in just about everything imaginable. We are a nation that loves the taste of McDonald’s. We lap up sequel after sequel of horrible movies faster than Hollywood can rip them off and spew them out. Almost half of us voted George W. Bush into office in 2000 and more than half re-elected the buffoon to a second term.

Perhaps our greatest detriment as a society at large is an unfounded infatuation with pre-pubescent bubble gum pop music. That’s when it hit me. I realized that Tim Tebow is the Justin Bieber of sports.

This realization did not settle my stomach any, but it has allowed me to make sense of the Tebow phenomenon unlike anything else before.

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Questions, Answers, and False Idols: NFL Wild Card Weekend

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Image of Tim Tebow

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Tim Tebow, worshipped as a false idol in Denver and across the country, prays for the salvation of his followers...and a victory over Pittsburgh on the Sabbath.

Predicting winners in the NFL Playoffs is much like picking the winner of a Presidential Election. With the start of the Republican primary campaigns polluting television screens across America, we are inundated with numbers from the latest popularity polls and so-called expert opinion, only to witness these prognostications rendered meaningless when final results roll in and evaporate the fanfare. As in life, so as in football.

However, unlike politics, the opinions of your everyday American slob actually bear weight in the landscape of our country’s rich culture and tradition. We can also take solace in knowing that one cannot lobby or simply buy their way to victory as we experience each election cycle, but that wins can only be gained—and manifest—on the actual field (except in college football). With that, I present my keen insight and clairvoyance in picking the winners for Wild Card Weekend.

As always, this is not the place where we examine statistical breakdowns or X’s and O’s. No, my friends, this is a genuine, red-blooded American blog where we need no facts to form opinion and no numbers to prove we’re right. We create our own logic and rationale based on gut feeling and inexplicable bias.

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NBA’s Second, Less Boring Season Begins

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Image of NBA fan

Many fans, including myself, are awakening from the typical slumber-inducing NBA regular season.

Many people mark April 15th on their calendars as a reminder to pay their income tax. It is also a day for large U.S. corporations to celebrate another victory over common man and revel in the fact that they will pay Uncle Sam jack squat as they realize $10 billion in profits (GE did just that in 2010). With these troubling disparities, all we have as working class slobs is the solace that only April can offer: relatively half-decent weather in which to drown our sorrows, a new Major League Baseball season, and the beginning of the actual NBA season — the playoffs.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will look at key playoff series — should they actually exist — and combine our efforts and energy so that we might actually survive the brutal eight-week trek to the NBA Finals. But first…

Regular Season Round Up
If you have not been following professional basketball up until the playoffs, fear not. You missed nothing. The 2010-2011 campaign offered few surprises other than Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose and his meteoric rise to a chorus of overwhelming harmony in the likely unanimous vote for Rose as regular season MVP.

There was surprise in Utah, however, where the wishes of a fragmented Utah Jazz fanbase materialized in all forms during 2010-11. They ran Carlos Boozer out of town immediately following last year and Boozer now finds himself amidst a championship run with Chicago. Those who were jaded with Jerry Sloan and his 20-plus years reign as head coach had their call answered when the great Sloan, presumably fed up with today’s pampered athletes and a stubborn Deron Williams, retired before the All Star Break. To top it off, the Jazz lost the player that ran Coach Sloan out of town — Deron Williams, who was until then, the face of the Utah Jazz.  In essence, a lose-lose-lose in Salt Lake City.

People may attempt to qualify the Carmelo Anthony trade to New York as surprising; I file it under “who cares” (much the same way fans in Denver have).

Now, none of that matters. However, as lengthy and predictable as the regular season was, you can expect more of the same in the playoffs. Especially the length.

Only the NBA and NHL boast playoff systems that span the course of at least two full months. They are also similar in that less and less people actually watch — or care — what happens. Apathy aside, here is one reason to watch…

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That Which Giveth Shall Also Taketh Away: NFL Weekend Recap

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Seattle Seahaws RB Marshawn Lynch flicks off human fly and Saints CB Tracy Porter on his way to game-clinching 67 yard touchdown run. (Michael DeMocker, Times Picayune)

On Saturday, Wild Card Weekend 2011 delivered one of the most exciting days of NFL action in recent memory. A team with a losing record knocked off defending Super Bowl champions in a high-scoring shootout and the Super Bowl runner-up gave a game away at home in the final minute.

Sunday did not live up to the high standards set by it’s rival day of the week, but still served as a worthy venue for millions of Americans to bear witness to both home teams’ lackluster performances and send their supporters home with the bitter taste of defeat, having dropped several hundreds of dollars in vain to see it in person.

The outcomes of these four contests did nothing but underscore the parity and unpredictability of the NFL. It was also a powerful reminder of the omnipotent destructive power of NFL Playoff football for Saints fans, who until Saturday, were still riding the rolling whitewater of Super Bowl XLIV’s proverbial wave. The lesson learned? You will always return to shore. And sometimes, it is extremely rocky.

All of this culminated in an adrenaline fueled frenzy for the victors and the marked the beginning of an offseason surely to be littered with second guessing and hundreds of pounds of hate mail addressed to the New Orleans Saints defense by agitated fans, followers, and members of the offensive unit.

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NFL Playoffs to Kick Off New Holiday Season on Wild Card Weekend

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Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone, which can only mean one thing: those holidays intended for amateurs have given way to a festive season of incomparable magnitude — the NFL Playoffs. Each year, football’s second season eclipses the overrated winter holidays in raucous celebration of watching freakishly large speedy men in tight pants battle for the right to play on our nation’s most hallowed holiday, Super Bowl Sunday.

Image of Jim Mora

The Playoffs? Yes, Jim -- we want to talk about the Playoffs.

To the neophyte, it may seem odd that millions of crazed pigskin fanatics shun the traditions of days past, such as caroling, egg nog, and donning gay apparel in favor of masking beer bellies under oversized jerseys of their favorite player(s) (who are often years, if not decades, their junior), washing down fatty hydrogenated snacks with several gallons of watered-down light beer, and yelling obscenities at a flat inanimate object in their living rooms at the top of their lungs. In addition to sharing indifference and even disdain toward yuletide cheer, this growing legion of initiates has something else in common — an unbridled desire to cheer, eat, drink, and dream their team on to the Promised Land on the first Sunday of February.

For many, the NFL post-season has replaced the idea of embracing the American Dream which, having decades worth of soggy dust blown away in a swirling din over the past ten years, has been revealed as nothing but an eroded myth with no happy ending. For some, it is the sole beacon of enlightenment in an otherwise bleak, empty sea of foreclosure, divorce, and a vanload of a half-dozen crying children who are crushed by the banishment of McDonalds Happy Meals. But make no mistake — there is no better escape from the drudgery of the bitter cold winter than vicariously living through our agile muscular heroes of the gridiron. NFL Playoff football is indeed the drug of choice for nearly all American sports junkies.

But why is this so? Allow me to explain…

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