TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

Jaguars +6.5 at Titans: Let’s just start right off with team one on the “Can’t Get Them Right” list. My initial instinct here is to take the Titans to cover, but since my first instinct with the Titans is always wrong, I’ll take the Jags. Jags +6.5.

Broncos +7.5 at Chiefs: Can nearly dead Priest Holmes step up and replace LJ? Does Cutler care that Randy Marsh thinks he kinda sucks? Honestly, I have no idea… but after a complete schlepping by the Lions, I don’t have any faith in the Broncos anymore… not even 7.5 points worth of faith. Chiefs cover.

Bills -3 at Dolphins: This has all the makings of a let-down game for the Bills… and you’d really think Miami has to win at some point. But unfortunately for them, Buffalo’s been chugging along, winning the games they’re supposed to win and are a couple lucky breaks away from being 6-2. I think this spread is drastically low. Bills cover.

Browns +9.5 at Steelers: One word comes to mind for this pick: Ugh. These are both the teams that have been involved in knocking me around either in knockout pools or, last week, knocking me out of the money in a picks pool. I really, legitimately have no idea what the Browns are going to do from week to week. I honestly thought that the 5-3 record would lower this spread a bit to make it an easy pick… alas, it didn’t. That said, the Bengals have been beating bad teams and getting crushed by teams that should crush them… so I’m going to say this is going to be a repeat of week 1. At the very least, if you can beat a team 34-7 in their house, you should be able to beat them 17-7 in your own. Steelers cover.

Rams +12 at Saints: In case you haven’t heard… the Saints are back. And, fortunately, their huge win last week makes this spread way too big. Rams +12.

Falcons +4.5 at Panthers: Beating the Panthers with “whoever” at quarterback on the road should be any worse than beating the Niners with “whoever” at quarterback on the road. Falcons outright.

Eagles +3 at Redskins: I don’t think the Eagles are any better than they were the last time the Redskins beat them. Redskins cover.

Vikings +6.5 at Packers: I think the Pack wins this, but only because I think Peterson must still be tired. I don’t think the Vikings have enough in the tank against a defense that’s pretty good at holding back the run. That and Peterson is screaming for some kind of snap-back week. Packers cover.

Bengals +6.5 at Ravens: Much like the Titans, every pick I have with the Ravens is wrong. I think the Ravens win this, so Bengals +6.5.

Bears -3 at Raiders: Not enough points here to take the Raiders. Bears cover.

Cowboys -1 at Giants: The only game I really care about this week… and it terrifies me. have been historically awful coming off their bye week. I think I heard they are 4-14 coming out of the bye week… and the only thing that surprises me about that statistic is that they’ve actually won 4. This game has the makings of the same type of shootout that it was in week one with one difference: Osi and Strahan. The Giants should have a very, very good pass rush this time out that should mess with Tony Romo. It’s also an absolute must-win game for the Giants. They can’t give Dallas the tie-breaker. Can’t pick against the Giants… it’s bad karma. Giants outright.

Lions at Cards (pk) - Two pretty evenly matched teams… but one has Jesus on their side. The guarantee rolls on. Lions.

Colts -3 at Chargers: There might actually be too much class on the field here for their to be a proper football game. Just a class-off. Both teams are so classy, they sip tea between quarters while discussing opera through their monocles. Did I mention how classy everyone involved in this game will be? Do you know why both teams start with C? That’s right, because there’s so much class on the field. I’m picking the Colts because it’s alliterate with Class. Classy Colts Cover Classily.

Monday

49ers +10 at Seahawks: Monday night games have been pretty crappy this year… and the Seahawks have been dominating me in picks. I don’t think Seattle’s good enough to merit 10 points, last week’s score be damned. 49ers cover.

Sticking with my habit of reading books with absurdly long titles: the proper name of this is Now I Can Die In Peace: How ESPN’s Sports Guy Found Salvation, With A Little Help From Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, And The 2004 Red Sox by Bill Simmons.

You might know him as the guy on ESPN’s Page 2 who tells us every week about how awesome the Patriots are and how much the Celtics are going to rule. Going back before that, Bill Simmons was a long-suffering Boston fan who happened to be in the right place at the right time at the beginning of this whole Internet thing.

This book wasn’t anything that I was expecting. I thought it was actually going to be new material. It isn’t. It’s a republishing of Sports Guy columns going back to his old bostonsportsguy.com website. So basically, if I’d been a loyal Sports’ Guy reader through thick and thin I would have read this entire book already save for the small introductions to each section. The columns are annotated… boy are they annotated. The gimmick is the columns are being republished with Simmons footnoting them… filling the reader in on what he was doing, what he was thinking, explaining an inside joke or two, clarifying things, and in some cases eating his words. They’re not small annotations either… there’s almost another whole book of footnotes. It took me way longer to read this book than books of similar sizes. For each page, there’s almost another whole page of footnotes. The effect is a lot of back and forth between the actual body of the columns and the footnotes. It gets distracting.

One thing that becomes obvious pretty quickly into the book is how little Simmons’ style has changed in the last eight years. The First Godfather reference comes two pages in. He makes the same references now that he made years ago… and the book wears out Godfather and Shawshank. I love Shawshank as much as the next guy, but I was sick of seeing references to it by the quarter point.

It’s also very long. I’m a non-Red Sox fan and a non-Boston guy, so I guess the book isn’t really written with me in mind. By the time I got to the end of the book, I felt like I never wanted to watch another second of Red Sox baseball (and this was about a week before they won the title… well timed on my part). In fact, I enjoyed the 50 or so pages of fresh introduction than I did of the hundreds of pages of Red Sox copy.

To it’s credit: there were some interesting historical things in it. Simmons’ included his first ESPN.com column and the events that led to it. It was cool to read his take on the Aaron Boone game (well before I started reading him semi-regularly).

Funny thing in the introduction… Simmons’ mentions the four reasons that, during that fateful summer of 1997 when I had to choose a major, I chose CompSci over English and Writing. Back in my high school and college days, I was a religious reader of Sports Illustrated and other sports related magazines. Even at those tender ages, I noticed that SI didn’t have one writer under the age of 50. Simmons mentions this: guys get a column and they keep it forever. It’s an impossible industry to break into. This goes right back to my theory that I graduated at the wrong time to do anything. Had I been in college a little sooner with web programming, I could have really hopped on the dot-com bandwagon, cashed in some absurdly inflated Amazon stock, and bought the Dallas Mavericks. Had I been in college a little later, I could have gone for journalism… since now there was a whole new medium where people who weren’t 1000 years could get jobs writing.

The other three reasons: 1) the break-in jobs really, really suck and don’t pay anything 2) there are no hot women reporters and (most importantly) 3) Sports reporters all kind of struck me as star-f*ckers.

What I did enjoy about it was the little bit of personal, biographical stuff I got about Simmons. There was some historical stuff about his time in New England and his move to the West Coast. There was some very interesting stuff about how his writing from a “fan’s perspective” was very different than the stuff going on at the time. Thinking back on it, even seven or eight years ago, it really was all old codger-y writers who wrote their take and the readers were just expected to agree… exactly the kind of stuff that entire websites are now dedicated to tearing apart. Most sports’ bloggers write from the fans’ perspective because we have no choice. No one’s going to give us press credentials. He goes into WHY he still writes from the fans’ perspective… even though working for the Worldwide Leader he has access to every club house in the country. Basically: he doesn’t WANT to know if his favorite guy is an asshole to reporters. I think that’s why, even though his schtick hasn’t changed any in the last seven years, I still like him. It’s one of the reasons I like Tony Kornheiser, too. They get why people boo their teams. They get why fans are the way they are. They actively have kept themselves from becoming so immersed in the journalism aspect of sports that they forget why they started watching them to begin with. Those were the parts I liked which were, admittedly, few and far between.

Final Verdict: not really for me… but I’m admittedly not a Red Sox fan. This review kinda sucks, but it’s tough to review a collection of blog posts.