The Curse of the China Doll

A little-noticed fluff piece on NFL.com today revealed that Sean Payton, head coach of the New Orleans Saints, apparently has a habit of giving his injured players china dolls. If that's the case, I think that would have a seriously negative effect on injured players. 

From the player's perspective in the NFL, the front office is always trying to replace you. There is tremendous pressure on every player but the superstars, all the time, to stay on the field and make plays. This leads to players concealing or downplaying injuries in an effort to look good, which leads to their quality of play declining and can often lead to them getting cut. If the coach is actively mocking players with injuries and accusing them of being fragile, as the china doll gift suggests, that puts even more pressure on those players and can hurt their careers. It also leads to a poor outcome for the football team, if the player never lives up to his talent level because of injuries that never got a chance to heal. 

Jack Bechta of the National Football Post says it much more eloquently than I do, but our point is the same: this is a really bad thing for injured players.

The NFL.com Message Boards are the Scariest Place on the Internet

In As Good As It Gets (1997), Jack Nicholson's character is asked how he writes women so well in his books, Nicholson being a writer. The irritated author replies, "I think of a man, then take away reason and accountability". 

The NFL.com message boards are like 4Chan, if you subtract reason, intelligence and a modicum of sanity.

So it begins.

The place has the perfect blend of ingredients for total anarchy. There are no omnipresent mods, although particularly offensive comments do get deleted. There are no names or faces, and accounts are easy to make, so there's no accountability. And best of all, because everybody's a fan of one NFL team, absolutely everybody comes to the party ready to whale on 31 other factions.

Whether your player was ranked too low or criticized or someone else was ranked too high, there's always some reason to cuss out both the writer of a given article and anyone else within reach. And boy, do they cuss. I was reading a Michael Lombardi article (who I've read a lot of on nationalfootballpost.com and on NFL.com; he's a Peter King-like writer and a good football analyst) on the best players in the league and practically every commenter was saying you suck, you're horrible, you should be fired because you ranked XXXX lower than YYYY, leaving ZZZZZ off the list is criminal (Criminal! Can you imagine?), and so on and so forth. For every positive comment towards a given article/other poster, there's 10-15 negative ones.

The only saving grace is that swear words are technically unlawful. I say technically, because since nobody gives a rip, the commenters find moderately clever ways to cuss each other out anyway ("b u l l s h i t, bullsh!t, bullshet, etc). The restriction also does nothing at all to mitigate the vitriol on the boards, just the ways in which it can be expressed. It's one big crowd of loud, angry, overwhelmingly male, poorly articulating, flagrantly misspelling, misogynistic all-hating assholes.


Oh, and few commenters even try for correct grammar or spelling, so it's that much more of a mess. There are some reasonable comments, sure, but the lack of a direct 'reply to this comment' function leads to one huge confused thread instead of lots of little threads that make sense. The reasonable comments get lost in a sea of misdirected Internet rage.

Predicted Free Agent/Trade Destinations

Kevin Kolb: Seattle

Donovan McNabb: Minnesota

Carson Palmer: Retired. He’s been keeping the hard line all this time, I don’t see him changing it now.

Vincent Jackson: Chicago (I hope I’m wrong about this one)

Logan Mankins: Patriots

Matt Hasselbeck: Arizona


Nnamdi Asomugha: Houston Texans

Sidney Rice: St. Louis

Ray Edwards: Miami

Charles Johnson: Cincinnati

Marshal Yanda: Atlanta

Jared Gaither: Dallas

Doug Free: Chicago

Quintin Mikell: Denver

Ahmad Bradshaw: San Francisco

DeAngelo Williams: Denver

Santonio Holmes: San Diego

Pat Williams: Cleveland

Jonathan Joseph: Minnesota


Packers:

Mason Crosby, John Kuhn: Packers

James Jones: Jaguars (I have a feeling about this one)

Cullen Jenkins: Washington

Justin Harrell: Seattle (he’ll be cut, and Pete Carroll will give him a chance because Pete Carroll gives everyone a chance.)

Daryn Colledge: Carolina

Jason Spitz: Philadelphia (this one’s been some time coming)

Brandon Jackson: St. Louis

Atari Bigby: Philadelphia

Lockout, Day CXI: Deal Close?

A few months ago, a decision like that of the Eighth Circuit upholding the legality of the NFL lockout would've produced acrimony and strife. The NFL would've scoffed at the NFLPA and the NFLPA would've railed at the NFL, each crying unfairness and each pandering to the media. But instead of that, we got an actual joint statement from both parties.

Regardless of what the text says, (we're committed to negotiating, etc.), can you imagine the parties making a joint statement like this in February? I view this as a sign that the two sides have really stopped trying to make themselves look good to the fans and gotten down to what's actually important, that is, working out a deal.

Stay tuned.

Shutdown: Don't Panic (YET) Week

Well, here we are, lads and lassies. This week will be nuts.

Collective Bargaining News

On Tuesday, our homegrown budget nuttiness could go into endgame, as what Gov. Scott Walker says is a crucial deadline in his budget repair bill will irrevocably pass, forcing him to lay off 1,500 state employees (although Sen. Mark Miller has challenged this).

At midnight on Thursday, the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the NFL and the NFL Players' Association will expire. What happens in the next four days will largely determine whether the NFL has a lockout for the 2011 season.

And in slightly more serious news, Friday, March 4th is the deadline for Congressional Republicans and Democrats to come to some agreement on a continuing resolution that will fund the federal government, or (heaven forbid) actually pass a budget. Failure to do so could result in a government shutdown. 

Damn. 
Also in the "nutty news" category, apparently Navy ships are required by federal law to sell tobacco on board, thanks to some hefty lobbying by the tobacco industry. 

The military has denied Rolling Stone's allegations that a certain Lt. Colonel Holmes was asked to perform 'psychological warfare' techniques on visiting U.S. and Afghan dignitaries. The Washington Post goes into some much-needed investigative reporting detail about the subject. It's kind of funny, actually. Rolling Stone's overblown article played up the one-man-against-the-machine angle, detailing how Holmes was reprimanded and censured for refusing to follow orders he considered illegal. But the Post not only shows how Holmes' assignment resulted from a bureaucratic reorganization rather then a sinister order, it highlights all the efforts Holmes made to fight the policy, from fighting with his superiors to consulting a military lawyer, to-revealingly-emailing the press to get his story out. (His first choice, for some reason, was the St. Petersburg Times. They turned him down, so he went to Rolling Stone.)

The House of Representatives will vote today on H.R. 386, which would enact a federal law against aiming laser pointers at aircraft. I thought this was a joke bill, but apparently it's a big safety issue; lasers flashed in a pilot's eyes during takeoff or landing could temporarily blind the pilot and even cause a crash. The penalty would be a fine or up to five years in prison, or both.


And the New York Times has published a mammoth piece on the health hazards of fracking, or hydraulic fracturing of rocks underground to release natural gas. Gas looked so promising when I was writing my paper last fall; now, with the revelations that fracking creates so much wastewater and is bad for the environment, coupled with the news that it may not be as carbon-friendly as we thought, well... huh. 

(Hilarious quote from a Texan gas-well neighbor: "“I’m not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist or anything like that,” Ms. Gant said.")


Of course, nobody else is really clean, either. The Union of Concerned Scientists recently published their report on subsidies to nuclear power, "The Gift That Keeps On Taking". I have every intention of reading the full PDF, but it's a hundred and fifty-odd pages, so I might be a while.


So, uh... keep checking back throughout the week as my state, federal and entertainment governments attempt to avoid their various fiscal boondoggles. 


Bonne chance.