The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

While football is by far and away my favorite sport, the media's seemingly constant barrage of overreactions throughout the course of the season is enough to drive a sober person drunk. The main reason for this is, in football, teams play one game per week, whereas teams play multiple games every week in baseball, basketball, and hockey. So while a star player or team may have an awful game in baseball, basketball, or hockey, talk and overreactions are typically kept to a minimum, unless that player or team start going into an extended slump. In football, however, if a star player or team has an awful game, it tends to get talked about ad nauseam for a full week. Often times, these comments come across as extreme overreactions, which tend to get debunked a week or two later. Remember the New England Patriots just a year ago? After getting pummeled 41-14 by Kansas City on Monday night football to drop Bill Belichick's team to 2-2 on the season, many ESPN analysts said the Beli...

After the post-game BCS National Championship game wore off, it seemed as if the biggest story in the sports world this past week was with regard to Denver Broncos starting quarterback Peyton Manning and his alleged struggles (or choke jobs as some claimed) in the playoffs. With the Broncos beating the San Diego Chargers today, that improves Manning's overall playoff record to 10-11. While Manning started his career 3-6 in the playoffs, he's 7-5 since then. Tom Brady - the press' favorite quarterback, it seems - started his career 14-3 in the playoffs and is 3-4 since that time. While I think it's understandable that the press gives Tom Brady such high praise, I think they're being quite unfair to Peyton Manning. While it's true Manning's playoff numbers were inconsistent in the early part of his career, he's been quite steady over the past 5-6 years. Since 2008, his lowest quarterback rating was 88.3, when he posted that in a 38-35 loss to Baltimore a...

Baltimore Ravens' Super Bowl-winning quarterback Joe Flacco is currently a free agent and some members of the media are claiming he should be the highest-paid quarterback in the NFL. While I think Baltimore would be wise to hang on to Flacco, especially given his great run in the playoffs this past season, I don't think the guy should be one of the top-paid quarterbacks in the league. Throughout his career to this point, Flacco has been fairly average as far as completion percentage goes and a little above average as far as quarterback rating is concerned. He has shown himself to be a capable starter, but has been aided a great deal by the talent around him: Tailback Ray Rice, fullback Vonta Leach, receivers Anquan Boldin, Jacoby Jones, and Torrey Smith, along with a top-notch defense. He's also been blessed with having a great coach in John Harbaugh. Following his great run through the playoffs and earning the Super Bowl MVP honor, Flacco deserves to receive a nice contrac...

As I mentioned previously, I got into a rather heated exchange (well, I was on the receiving end of his "heat". I was rather cool and collected) about Carolina Panthers' quarterback Cam Newton last weekend. The person whom was speaking to me made the claim that Newton is already great and has nothing more to prove to illustrate this, as he saw it, fact. I, on the other hand, said that while Newton has gotten off to a solid start in what will hopefully be a lengthy NFL career, I'm not going to judge the guy based on 5 (4 at the time) games. So, how do we define greatness in terms of athletes? Is there one clear definition? As usual, I think there are a variant of answers to the question of defining athletic greatness. There is such a thing as short-term greatness and while Cam Newton hasn't illustrated even short-term greatness yet, I could understand the other's (the guy at the bar) standpoint a bit better if he had alluded to this as opposed to declaring Ne...