@Randem

Hillary Clinton may have won three of the big states last Tuesday, but it’s not states that count, it’s delgates. She continues to lag in delegates, and now it’s mathematically impossible for her to win the nomination by the agreed rules. Nevertheless she continues to keep the drama rolling.

So now we have Clinton and Obama clawing and scratching at each other while McCain sits pat. McCain now has the luxury of proactively winning more support while the Democratic contenders do all his dirty work for him. For the Democratic Party, this is a horrible strategic mistake.

This draws a nice parallel to another of history’s big rivalries: that between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Let me elaborate…

Just like two parties, both the Packers and the Bears are hoping to find the new leader. On one side you have the Packers who, like the Republicans, have picked out the person who they want to be the leader, and have begun to prepare him for the task. On the other hand you have the Bears who, like the Democrats, can’t commit to a leader, and the candidates for the role have to fight each other to win it.

The Packers will go into training camp committed to one guy — Aaron Rogers — and no matter what else has to be worked out for the team, the quarterback will spend his time preparing to lead his team and win games. Meanwhile, the Bears will spend the majority of their off-season distracted by multiple quarterbacks competing; whoever wins out will be underprepared, and he will be second-guessed all season.

So what’s my point? If the Democrats or the Bears want to have a chance of winning, they need to make a commitment to one person, stop the in-fighting, and start preparing to win because their opponents — the Republicans and the Packers — are already formulating their strategies to win.

After 17 amazing years, nine Pro Bowl appearances, two Super Bowls, and rewriting every meaningful record in the book, Brett Favre is hanging up his helmet.

There have been other great quarterbacks and there will be more. There have been amazingly accurate, high-percentage passers, and plenty of guys with more than one ring. But none of them was ever as much fun to root for as Brett Favre.

His absence will be felt on Sundays for a long time. (And what will John Madden talk about now? Just food, I guess.)

While baseball bears the moniker of “America’s pass time”, basketball has always had its loyal fans, and NASCAR seems to resonate well with the toothless gitterdones, I have always held the NFL as truly being America’s sport.

Just think about the difference. New Yorkers and Bostonians make a lot of noise when the Yankees play the Red Sox (and somehow this phenomenon manages to suck in all manner of outside interest). There is no city in the world where you can’t find a Chicago Cubs hat. All of Hollywood’s elite compete for court-side seats at Lakers games. But for four months out of the year, the entire world stops on Sunday while we all tune in to see our favorite teams and players.

While big market baseball teams (read The Yankees) spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in order to steal the talented players from everywhere else, and buy a championship, as they say, teams in the NFL have had to make teamwork and coaching matter under a tight salary cap.

While the average hockey team is predominantly Canadian and European, and while the average baseball team is predominantly Dominican and South American, you still find that most players in the NFL are American — black, white, hispanic, or asian, there is no racial bias, but there is a bias toward being American.

While Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds use steroids to rewrite the record books, and while the NBA’s definition of traveling keeps bending to allow superstars to take five steps and slam dunk without a whistle, the NFL works each year to tighten the penalties and to stop teams from cheating.

And that topic, cheating, is what really pisses me off about spygate. It was cheating. Hardcore, in-your-face, no nonsense, no excuses… it was cheating.

Worse, the team that did it just happens to be the team that everyone has been calling the latest dynasty. The pundits have all praised the Patriots for being the first team to figure out how to win consistently since the salary cap was imposed. Little did they know that they were praising a team for figuring out how to cheat.

League commissioner Roger Goodell handed down his (weak) punishment before he ever got his hands on the tapes. But worse still, he learned that Congress wanted to see the tapes and knowing this, he had them destroyed. Come on, folks… you’ve seen Sopranos, you know how this works. I sure miss Paul Tagliabue.

What a dumb move. Really. But I thank the powers that be for the tenacity of Senator Arlen Specter who, as ESPN.com points out, isn’t buying it:

Specter heard that explanation from Goodell on Wednesday. On Thursday, Specter said, “The word absurd and ridiculous keep coming to my mind, because he [Goodell] says it with a straight face.”

Specter said it was unsettling to learn that the tapes, as well as notes, turned over by the Patriots in September had been destroyed in Foxboro rather than in the league’s New York offices. Aiello said the documents and tapes were destroyed after they were reviewed by NFL officials Jeffrey Pash and Ray Anderson, and that the call to destroy the material came from Goodell, saying “There’s no further use for it, so he said get rid of it.”

Specter said the league’s suggestion that the material, particularly the notes dating to the 2002 season, was destroyed because it might have afforded a competitive advantage is unbelievable.

“Everything has changed,” he said. “Nobody could use those. They are scrap paper — except evidence.”

What we really need here is a whistle-blower — someone who was a member of the Patriots organization, and who knows the extent of the cheating and what advantage it provided, and who would come out and tell the world the truth in order to salvage the integrity of the sport. Unfortunately, that will never happen. Anybody who did that would never work in professional sports ever again, and that’s too much to lose for anyone who’s worked to get to this level.

I hope Senator Specter gets to the bottom of this and delivers a huge slap in the face to Roger Goodell and the NFL and to the Patriots organization for the shame they’ve brought upon the one team sport that I always felt was above the rest.

I’m glad someone finally put an end to that bullshit perfect season. Sorry, Pats fans, but cheaters don’t deserve names like “dynasty” or “best quarterback ever”.

Thank you, Eli Manning, Michael Strahan, and all the true champions of the New York Football Giants, for pissing all over the crybaby GQ QB’s corn flakes, and preventing the NFL from being tainted the way that some other sports have become.

Yeah, that’s right. Fuck Randy Moss. Fuck Tom Brady. Fuck the players who think they’re bigger than the game. Take a look at that enormous “in your face” act performed by Randy Moss after is Super Bowl touchdown, and you’ll see exactly why it’s TEAMS that win championships, not players.

Last time I counted, Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, and Ocho Cinco had a combined ZERO Super Bowl rings. The Giants won the Super Bowl with Jeremy Shockey on crutches on the sideline. I wonder if they’d have done so well with him on the field.

After 1,865 kickoffs in their 31 years as a franchise, the Buccaneers finally returned one for a touchdown on the same day that they clinched first place in the NFC South, beating the Atlanta Falcons 37-3.

I wish I could’ve seen it, but at least I got to see Brett Favre set a new all-time passing record, eclipsing Dan Marino. Favre’s name is now attached to every meaningful QB record in the NFL. Way to go, Brett.

Michael Vick received a 23-month prison sentence today for his part in the dogfighting conspiracy. He will also get 3 years of probation upon his release, scheduled for October 2009.

Who knows… he’s still young enough to come back from this sentence and possibly play again in the NFL. Other pro football players have served sentences and returned to the starting lineup.

Oh, if only we could have gotten similar swift justice for Barry Bonds. Had justice been served promptly in his case, he’d have never gotten his name tied to a record he didn’t deserve.

If Barry Bonds served time — even only a year — he’d come out 40 pounds lighter due to the inability to find quality steroids and HGH in prison, and even if he returned to baseball (what is he now, 50 years old?) he’d never be able to crush a ball into the river.

After riding the back of Thomas Jones all the way to the Super Bowl, the Bears repayed him by letting him go, putting all their eggs in the basket of top draft pick Cedric Benson.

This is a classic case of holding on to a bad investment, no different than the phenomenon seen every day in the stock market, where investors watch a stock plummet and, rather than dumping it to minimize losses, they hold on to it as if it owed them something.

Benson did was all bad investments do - he continued to disappoint. He’s been the league’s worst rusher, with a dismal 3.4 yards-per-carry average. Meanwhile, Thomas Jones is on pace for a 1000-yard season in spite of his new role on the anemic New York Jets offense.

Poetic justice came Sunday. The Bears offense struggled all day, with only the heroic efforts of Devin Hester keeping them in the game at all. In the second half, the Broncos took a commanding 14-point lead. But then Benson went down with a season-ending injury.

Amazingly,  as soon as Benson was out of the game, a Bears offense that had only made two first-downs in three quarters, suddenly marched down the field and scored a triumphant touchdown. Then, on their next possession, they did it again, tying the game and going on to win in overtime.

When you take off the bad wheel, the bus starts rolling again.  Adrian Peterson (unlike his namesake in Minnesota) is no stud, and I’ll bet the Bears wish they’d kept Thomas Jones. But perhaps now that Benson is off the field they might start winning again. Hopefully it’s not already too late for their season.

By way of the Freakonomics Blog, I’ve found a remarkably well-written — dare I say, gripping? — story about field goal kickers in the NFL. The author, Michael Lewis, examines the records of “clutch” kickers and compares them to average kickers and finds there’s not much difference — just a few memorable kicks that cement a reputation.

No quarterback in NFL history has beaten 31 other teams. Granted that stat is only noteworthy as of the moment that there were 31 teams to beat, which would 1999, when the new Browns took the field.

Nevertheless, the bizarre part is that Brett Favre, Payton Manning, and Tom Brady have all beaten 30… and all three of them are playing their unbeaten opponent this week.

Will the three best quarterbacks in the game today all go into the history books for the same event on the same day?

Okay, this week I went 10 and 3, a serious improvement over the decidedly mediocre results I’ve been getting the past few weeks. And with Bears loss coming on a 55-yard field goal with 4 seconds left on the clock, I feel like I was within 4 seconds of going 11-2 for the week.

Vinny Testaverde really came to life for the Panthers, practically out of nowhere. I won’t be surprised if having him at quarterback marks a big turnaround for their season.

And Testaverde’s old team, the Jets, didn’t put up as much of a fight against the Eagles as I thought they would… but the fact that the Eagles only won by one field goal seems to be proof that my assessment of them was right.

Otherwise, for the rest of the teams in the rest of the games, it looks like everything shook out pretty much how I thought it would.