Babeled

J-E-T-S: Jets, Jets, Jets!  Somebody make it stop!  Sadly, those chants will be louder than ever after today’s edict of false hope was bestowed upon a beleaguered franchise.  Brett Favre, lord and savior, is now a New York Jet. Can you believe it?  Sadly it’s true and it looks like Jason Morgan’s wish was a total failure.

It is a shame that an all-time greats of the National Football League will finish out the twilight of his career in a uniform that does not bleed nearly as pure as Packer Green.  I’m not even going to touch upon the melodrama that unfolded between Favre (the King of indecision) and the Packer organization, but isn’t it going to be awful to see a player of his caliber and importance in another uniform?

Situations like this represent all that is wrong with sports.  When players like Jerry Rice, Michael Jordan, Willie Mays, Joe Montana put on another uniform it is sad and unfortunate.  Granted more often than not the player is always of diminished skills and just cannot let go of the game.  Nevertheless, there is something to be said for an organizational mainstay to live out his entire career with one team.  Where is the pride of legacy?

Now we all have the joy of watching Packer great Brett Favre in an impostor uniform; playing for New York’s other team.  Of course this will not stop Jet fans from thinking this is their year.  I just hope that after Favre embarrassed himself this off-season he does not resort to wearing pantyhose and fur coats like the Jets other legendary Quarterback.

Update: Whoops!  This is going to be interesting for the marketing folks at Electronic Arts.  As a sendoff for the legendary quarterback, Brett Favre is set to appear on the 2009 cover wearing his Packer Uniform.  So much for that!  The game is set to ship to retail stores in August.  Will they update the cover?

Either way, this further magnifies the embarrassment and awkwardness of the entire situation.  Personally, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw this.

Donovan McNabb has been a man surrounded by controversy since being drafted second overall by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1999. There were jeers and boos from the crowd who had hoped that the Eagles would draft Rickie Williams over McNabb. In retrospect, who got the last laugh out of that one?

I became disenchanted with Donovan McNabb in the 2002 season. I saw a lot of passes being thrown at receivers’ ankles. Then there was the inability to seal the deal, as it were, and get the Eagles to the Super Bowl. As the years went on I saw in McNabb a quarterback who had excellent mobility trying desperately to reject that athletic ability and evolve into a pocket passer. Seeing as most pocket passers would benefit from a bit more mobility, I consider this a devolution in McNabb’s style. Then there is the issue with his fragility. He has had season ending injuries in 2 of the last 4 years and continues to look frail as he had another ankle injury in the 2007 season.

And let us not forget the T.O. factor. I am going to make this very simple for everyone regardless of your opinion of T.O. or McNabb. McNabb’s quarterback rating in 2003 was an anemic 79.6. In 2004 (the year T.O. really played in Philadelphia) McNabb’s QB rating was a robust 104.7. The next year (T.O. was on the Eagles roster but did not play most of the 2005 season due to quarrelling with McNabb and the franchise) McNabb’s QB rating dropped to a barely middle-of-the-pack 85. Anyone still think T.O. didn’t matter in Philadelphia and that McNabb was really the superstar? If so, you clearly have no concept of what QB ratings mean or football in general

Despite all of this injury-laden history, Eagles Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Lurie continues to stand behind the Reid-McNabb show.  During his State of the Team address yesterday, Lurie focused mostly on contracting strategies but also discussed Reid and McNabb.  This speech included bold statements such as:

They have been one of the most special, successful duos in probably the history of the league and it’s still just there.  They are both in their prime, coach and quarterback, and it’s been awhile since we’ve been able to really appreciate Donovan healthy.

This anecdote is especially troubling to me.  It is clear that Lurie is deluded about his quarterback’s true value to the organization.  While he clearly acknowledged the injury situation, Lurie did not place any blame on the quarterback for not maintaining proper game-day fitness-levels.  McNabb isn’t going away anytime soon, based on Lurie’s remarks.

Attached is a NFL QB analysis that shows where McNabb falls out when compared against 9 other NFL starting quarterbacks. When viewing the graphs inside the file please note that the size of the bubble corresponds to the size of the salary. The other two axes are labeled.

The good (for McNabb): McNabb and Brady are tied for highest touchdown to interception ratio at 2.2 TDs per INT. McNabb was 2nd best in INTs per game at 0.7.

The bad (for McNabb): McNabb has the 3rd highest salary with the 3rd lowest QB rating. He also had the lowest completion percentage at 58.5% which significantly trailed the other 9 quarterbacks who all were above 60%. McNabb was middle of the road in just about every other category analyzed.

After all the analysis, McNabb is a better quarterback than I gave him credit for but he still trails the top QBs in several production categories. What he does not trail the top QBs in is salary. There are certainly a lot worse options for the quarterback position out there but McNabb sure is expensive given his production. All I am saying is that maybe Donovan McNabb is a solid starting QB; however, he is certainly not a future Hall of Famer based upon numbers and production.

This past Sunday I had the pleasure of taking in my first horse race.  I went up to Monmouth Park Racetrack with family and friends for some gambling, grilling, and good ole fashion beer drinking - in no particular order.  The experience was better than expected, even with the flood gates unleashing a two hour thunderstorm and over an inch of rain.  Fortunately I grabbed some decent photos with my Canon Digital SLR while it was still dry.

For this picture I was shooting in RAW mode with a wide open aperture value of f/5.6 and the shutter speed set to 1/1250.  My ISO setting was at 400. My post editing consisted of High Dynamic Range processing of this photo with Photomatix Pro 3.

Image Used in this Post

Race Horse image courtesy of flickr user Greg Molyneux published under the CC license.

As the Yankees and Red Sox prepare for the final game of their three game set, Manny Ramirez addressed the possibility of a trade from the Boston Red Sox.  Check out Manny’s quote as reported by ESPN:

I don’t have any preferences: I could choose a team that offers me the best conditions or one in the chase for the postseason. I don’t care where I play, I can even play in Iraq if need be. My job is to play baseball.

It sounds like we need to get Manny an M16 and some desert camo.  If he doesn’t want to fight we could dress him up and send him out to lip sync reggae tunes at a USO show.

Manny Ball took it even one step further in his interview with ESPN…

The Yankees are getting closer and getting stronger, while we haven’t done much,” Ramirez said. “I could say that right now there’s a strange atmosphere in our team.”

All I can say is wow!

In ancient Greece, the Olympics was an athletic competition between city states that only free men who spoke Greek were allowed to participate in.  Furthermore, athletes had to qualify, have their name in the lists and take an oath before Zeus that they had been training for 10 months or more.  Also, only the most youthful and vigorous of Greeks were allowed to participate.  It was an elitist event in every sense of the word, as only upper class Greeks who met very specific criteria were allowed to participate.

As a child I had a vague unrefined dream of one day being some kind of Olympic athlete.  It was borderline ridiculous, considering I had no interest in sports and limited athletic aptitude.  Even if I did have an amazing athletic ability to run or swim really fast, I probably never would have made it to the Olympics.  The traditional elitism of the Olympic games would have held me back.

These athletes train for hours a day, every day for years.  Do you know what that sounds like to me? A job.  It sounds to me like you can’t really have a job and be an Olympic athlete, which means you have to have an alternative financing method.  You need a source of income, and generally it has to be a lot of income.  For a lot of people, this income comes from their rich parents.  Other people have sponsors or benefactors, but you can not really acquire a sponsor or benefactor until you have already demonstrated much promise in some arena of Sport.

To achieve the  caliber of athleticism and skill necessary to be competitive, you also need to hire a coach, preferrably a coach who’s only job is coaching you and only for hours a day, every day for years.  Coaches don’t work for free, and they don’t really work for cheap either.  Furthermore, coaches are generally arrogant, elitist narcissists who only want to be known for having coached winners.  You have to show them that you are worth their time, even if you are paying them.

A lot of the sports we find in the Olympic games today are the kind of sports that underprivileged kids just don’t have any opportunity to participate in in the first place.  Sports such as fencing, tennis and rowing are the purview of the very rich, country-club-attending upper echelon of our society.  There are other sports included in the Olympic games that are more accessible to every level of society, but high class sports are certainly favored.

The Olympic games were and are an elitist endeavor designed for rich people to amuse themselves while extorting money out of the lower classes who are convinced to adulate the athletes and purchase Olympics paraphernalia.  They rope you in when you are small with promises of athletic glory and world fame.  Upon your inevitable failure as a member of the working class to ever become an Olympic level athlete, you are left to buy a little hat with five rings on it and watch the Olympics on television while being bombarded by advertisements.  I am not suggesting that anyone do anything to make this any less of a ridiculous elitist athletic spectacle.  I’m just saying that it is one.