Thursday, October 22, 2009

Break My Heart Slowly



If there is one enduring truth about professional athletes that has remained constant since I began doing this crap professionally over 20 years ago, it is this: they are never happy with the WAY they find out about bad news.

Traded, benched, demoted, fired....

All tragic blows to the pro athlete's psyche. Yet it never reaches their ears the way they want.

Patrick Crayton is the lastest. Crayton just lost his gig to Miles Austin in Dallas. He has no real beef with the benching, just the Cowboys lack of explanation....

“Crayton was the odd man out, and he was looking for more explanation from the Cowboys.

"I would have loved it," Crayton said, via ESPN, while noting that neither head coach Wade Phillips nor coordinator Jason Garrett relayed the news to him. "It would have been real stand-up. That's not what happened. Oh, well."


REACT: Perhaps a finely engraved, gold laminated, 80 lb. Card stock note: “Dear Patrick. Due to the fact that you suck, you have been officially demoted on the depth chart. Please check chicken or fish at the bottom of this card. Thank you. Management.”

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John in Laurel has Dan Snyder nailed.

I haven't believed in Snyder in 7 or 8 years. Looking at his repeated management screwups, I'm pretty sure he made his money by being a good salesman and being in the right place at the right time. He certainly didn't do it by being a good manager.

I'm no football person, but I do know management, and the principles are the same in business or in football, off the field. Find good people, give them the tools, protect them from outsiders, don't embarrass them, praise in public, censure in private. Danny has tumbled from one error to the next, with no apparent learning. He's got no learning curve, he's got a learning block; his ego's in the way.

I'm sure he sincerely wants to succeed, but have you noticed that every solution he's come up with has been marketing-driven, rather than fundamentally sound? Even the one fundamentally sound move he made, with Schottenheimer, was marketing-driven. It's always the next glitzy thing, the new shiny toy, but it looks as though the rest of the town has finally caught on that Danny has just been polishing a turd.


REACT: And even with a whole can of Minwax, turds never quite get that gleam, do they?

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Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk.com posted a spaghetti-on-the-wall report that Gibbs might try to come back in a Bill Parcellsian role, ala his current spot with the Dolphins.

Not only do I think this is never going to happen, but if it did, it would be a complete disaster. Gibbs came back for one reason: CASH! Mission accomplished.

That said, I think Florio is a genius for building what is essentially a dot-com NFL noodle flinger (see what sticks, say you had it first! Forget the rest...) and making a mint off it, now selling it to NBC's Football Night In America.

I think Florio presents some very entertaining things, and I have no doubt he gets some very good “tips” from good sources. Still, I don't treat his stuff like the NFL rumor “Bible.”

UPDATE: My man Neal Jacobsen in Rockville chimes in: “Czabe, I just asked a buddy who is very active in the sports blogosphere who says that Florio posts about 50 stories a day, 20 of which are rumors, and about 50% end up being correct.”

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Week 7 NFL Picks

Coming soon....

4 comments:

  1. Czabe, you nailed Florio perfectly. He posts any and every rumor, gloats about the ones that turn out to be true, and sweeps the ones that turn out to be wrong under the rug. He also has a big ego and looks like a garden gnome.

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  2. Good analysis of The Danny by your man John in Laurel. Based on that finding, doesn't it essentially make him a real life version of Michael Scott, who has simply ascended to his level of incompetence?

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  3. Czabe, two quick observations:
    1 - You're right about the players, "Bitchy millionaires" as the owner in The Replacements called them. If homeboy has a cushy union job that often forces management into certain actions they may otherwise object to, he should not expect to get the family-owned-for-3-generations familial talks that he possibly would in a Right to Work environment. Not that those companies are perfect, but you can't have it both ways.
    2 - Has anyone else wondered what in the heck Olbermann is doing on Football Night in America? Don't the producers realize that MAYBE he could be a polarizing figure, maybe moreso than even -gasp- Limbaugh as a commentator would be? What a self-aggrandizing sack of mud!

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