Maybe I need to turn this blog into a Twitter feed

It sucks.  I mean to post more often than I do.  But often, when I'm about to, I start to think "Well that's not really enough for a post.  I need something better if I'm going to put in all the effort it takes to log into Blogger and stuff."  Which is so dumb.  There is no rule about the appropriate length for a post, and in fact, some of the best posts in the history of this blog have been very short.  But somehow I hit a strange mental block when I want to do a short post.  So, maybe I should switch to @FireJayMariotti and throw in the towel on this blogging game.  Probably not going to happen though.  Sounds like a lot of work to get that whole deal set up and stuff.  (Also, a quick search shows that @FireJayMariotti is available.  If any of you sign up for it after reading this and then try to sell it to me, I will send you a strongly worded email informing you that that was not a nice thing to do.)

Anyways, here are some of the half-baked ideas and quick thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head recently.

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Earlier tonight I was watching Heat-Thunder on TNT.  Reggie Miller is pretty decent in his role as Kenny Albert's broadcast partner, although he certainly talks himself into a corner from time to time.  Tonight he ended up here:

The league has a huge group of very talented small forwards right now.  Of course you've got LeBron and Durant.  And then Paul George belongs in that group, I think. (Pause) And then there's DeMar DeRozan... (trails off)

Easy there, Reggie.  Next time get all the way through your thought before you start speaking it.  George is a fantastic player, but like everyone else in the NBA, he's two steps below LeBron and one below Durant.  And then maybe end your list there, because while DeRozan is having a nice breakout year and is a perfectly decent player, he's significantly worse than George at 1) defense, 2) rebounding, 3) distributing and 4) shooting 3s.

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Pierre McGuire is a useless sideline reporter/sometimes color commentator/penis with a microphone who takes much more away from a hockey broadcast than he adds to it.  But I have to tip my hat to him for his performance during today's Canada/U.S. women's gold medal game.  The number of times he made sure to interrupt Doc Emrick's skillful play-by-play call to inform us that a trip or cross check administered by an American girl to a now-crumpled Canadian girl was completely clean warmed my patriotic little heart.  If there's ever a time to be an obnoxious homer, it's when a gold medal is on the line and your country's team is playing a country whose fans are raging cunts at all times.  The eventual result of the game made my stomach churn and ruined my day, but hats off to Pierre (non-sarcastically) for contributing to broadcast for once in his career.  May the U.S. men beat Canada by 15 tomorrow.

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Spotted earlier today among the front page headlines on ESPN, now relegated to the NFL page:

Older, wiser T.O. says he can still play at 40

Hopefully older, wiser sports fans will soon realize ESPN is a bottomless abyss full of nightmares and cat shit and decide to get their news and analysis elsewhere.  I know that I contribute to their pageviews by going there to find shit to blog about, but I swear, I don't pass through for any other purpose anymore.  If I'm not looking for a Simmons/Easterbrook/Reilly/Keri article to dump on, I'm not going there.  I encourage you to do/not do the same.  Fuck ESPN with a rake.

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Finally, earlier this week, Simmons (fresh off of winning yet another Nobel Prize in economics) put out his annual article about the worst contracts in the NBA.  I'd like to do a full breakdown later, but for now, two brief highlights.  Here's the opening paragraph:

In December, I gave my kids $20 for a toy store trip and they picked out $90 worth of stuff. They had no concept of money. They didn’t know if our house cost $2,000 or $2 billion. So I started making them pay for small things — Starbucks, Jamba Juice, pizza, whatever — hoping they’d slowly understand the concept of worth. I think it’s working. When we attended Monday-night Raw in L.A. last week, I gave them a $100 salary cap on whatever they wanted. They spent

RIVETING. If you want to engage a group of strangers, be sure to start with a story about your kids. Instant entertainment. Good job, Bill. Also, fuck you for giving your grade school-aged kids a $100 allowance for one night.  A night they're already spending at an awesome event.  I'm not going to attack the guy's kids because the irreverence expressed on this blog does have SOME boundaries, but let's just say I question whether that is a good parenting decision.

Finally, the dunk contest has gotten extremely stale.  Bill, use your wondrous powers of genius to save it, please.

My quick fix for 2015: Remodel it into a “Dunk of the Year” contest. Twelve contestants, 12 dunks, America votes on the winner. Your 12 contestants: nine NBA players, two D-leaguers, one street baller. Name it the “Bud Light 12-Pack Contest.” Oh, and if they want to raise the rim to 12 feet or higher for their one dunk, they can do that, too. Anything goes. I’d like to meet the one person who wouldn’t watch this.

So before, it was a dunk contest, but now it'll be a dunk contest.  Brilliant.  WHO SAYS NO?????

Bill Simmons is a horse's ass.

Lazy post. It's the holidays, bite me. Especially if your name is Chris W

"Bill Simmons" has been the most commonly used label on this blog for at least a couple of years.  I write about him so often that, as is the case with Easterbrook, I'm sort of running out of things to say about him.  Part of what causes that, not that I'm trying to be like Klosterman and use a nonsensical contradiction to sound smart, is that I write so much that it's hard to say everything I want to say.  By which I mean I have written about Bill so many times that I can't really crystalize everything that makes him horrible into one short essay at this point.  The best I can do is direct you to the 140 essays I've done, and hope you can take away an overall understanding of why Bill sucks should you decide to waste 6 hours reading them all.  Well, much as I hate to give Deadspin credit, they did a year-end feature about everything in the world of sports that should go away forever in 2014.  Tim Marchman selected Bill's career, and man, did he ever get some work done.  Allow me to copy and paste it in full, because he says it better and more succinctly than I ever could at this point.  (Bonus: Albert Burneko, who writes the insufferably pretentious Foodspin columns, leads off the year end column in that link with an excellent little essay about why the NFL sucks balls.  Check that out as well.)

Yes, I told you this would be a lazy post.  Happy New Year everyone.

There comes a point in the career of every writer-turned-multiplatform brand at which, faced with the insatiable demands for content presented by his corporate overlords and his own vanity, he stops being a writer and turns into something else. In 2013, a year that saw him serving as an analyst on NBA broadcasts, making forays into Hollywood, and overseeing Grantland—exerting power, in all, in ways that made ESPN and the sports-industrial complex better than they would otherwise have been—it happened to Bill Simmons.

Unfortunately, he kept writing anyway, with bizarre results. Just run through his archive. Here he is going on about Calvin Johnson as if no one before him had ever noticed that Johnson is a very good football player, opening with a column-length piece of fanfiction about a Calvin Johnson Nike commercial. Here he is paying tribute to David Ortiz by telling a long story about how he, Simmons, hung out with Bill Russell this one time. [Larry B note: I posted about this.]  Here he is going on for 9,000 words about a documentary about the fucking Eagles. Here's part one of a two-part series that came in at around 15,000 words comparing the NBA offseason to the justifiably forgotten Midnight Run.  [Larry B note: this too.] Here's part one of a two-part series of nearly equal length, in which various notable moments in Tim Duncan's career are viewed mainly through the prism of what Bill Simmons thinks of what Bill Simmons thought of them as they were happening.

It just goes on like that. There's nearly nothing there but banal assertions about the most obvious possible subjects, gestures at fitting them into some comprehensive schema in which everything in the known universe is tagged as over-, under-, or properly rated according to a vaguely defined sense of what the masses think, declarations that suggest Simmons may not realize the world remains in place when he closes his eyes, and allusions to forgotten junk culture.

Of course all of this is how Simmons built his brand in the first place. The main differences now are that he's a producer of sports culture, rather than a consumer of it—hence the Nike fanfiction, written as one salesman's critique of another's strategy for market positioning—and that it's not clear he's in on the joke at this point. A man who seems to consider it truly important that people understand how everything in sports that he deigns to notice relates to his own view of how others might view the fact that he views it is operating on something like the third derivative of reality. That doesn't work for someone who's writing from the perspective of the common fan, especially when he's a wealthy, middle-aged man who's impossibly out of touch with the world around him, so that his columns increasingly read like dispatches from Xanadu. I mean, Midnight Run? The fucking Eagles? Somebody stop this man before we get a 27,000-word exegesis of Chris Paul's State Farm commercials as viewed through the interpretive lens of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Happy lazy belated birthday to us

Was going to continue my Simmons trade value series (just wait until you hear about how uppity Chris Paul is) but had internet problems until just now, and I'm not going to stay up all night to entertain you people.  Sorry.  You'll have to wait until tomorrow.  But I figured it was worth throwing something up because--

1) Last week, the blog turned six years old.  Woo.  That announcement pales in comparison to the time Chris W made a birthday post for the blog that included clip art of a piece of birthday cake, but I've never been as creative as he is.

2) In hopes of coming up with something really quick to blog about in place of the Simmons post, I checked out the blog's email for the first time since February.  Figured maybe someone sent us a hot tip sometime in the last three months.  No such luck, there was no non-spam in the inbox, but I did find one of the best pieces of spam I've ever seen:

Hi,

Greetings!!

Do you realize more and more people are now using search engines to find local businesses, and NOT phone directories?

Are they finding your website?

If not, we can help.

Best SEO sales pitch ever: "By the way, person reading this piece of so-called 'electronic mail'--here's a fact that may cause your brain to explode out of your ears.  I hate to have to tell you this, but... people are not using the hard copy yellow pages anymore."  That email would have been kind of funny in 2003.  In 2013 it's a riot.  I hope they follow up with another email letting me know that people are using their pocket telephones to connect to the internet.

3) I was going to put something else here but now I forgot what.  Ran out of energy writing that hilarious joke about the spam email.

More Simmons on Monday night/Tuesday morning.

Attention readers:

If you 1) have ever watched, or are now watching, the NFL draft combine OR 2) think that someone's 40 time is sports news that should be reported by people paid to report sports news (I mean, reported as a standalone story--I can tolerate the fact that combine results are eventually aggregated in full profiles of potential draftees), please immediately throw yourself down a flight of stairs.  Thank you.

Knock me over with a feather

What the hell is this? Is that an interesting, well researched article by Bill Simmons that ISN'T also a) mainly Bill Simmons telling everyone about Bill Simmons and his family and friends or b) indefensibly wrong about sports in a dozen different ways? By jove I think it is. Good on him. When he sticks to basketball, and specifically sticks to telling a story about basketball with facts, he's somewhat inoffensive. I know that I haven't provided a link to a Simmons column in years, but go ahead and click that link. It's not a trick. Rick Astley is not waiting for you on the other side. That's one of the most interesting articles I've read in the last few months. No foolin'.

Of course, just in case you were worried that Simmons was turning some kind of corner, he's not.

LOL! I thought he meant Miami-OKC, until it turned out that he didn't

1) Fuck stories about your fantasy team, I promise you no one worthwhile cares 2) Fuck your AL-only keeper league 3) Depending on how the keeper rules work, that's either a bad trade or a comically atrocious trade

America's foremost Manning hater strikes again. HE'S NOT AS GOOD AS BRADY, HE JUST ISN'T, I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PROVE THIS BUT I KNOW IT DEEP DOWN IN MY SOUL. I THINK IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT HE DOESN'T PLAY FOR THE GREATRIOTS. Bonus stupidity points for implying that Tebow has any kind of shot at ever being more than a mediocre QB.

Finally! The "Blow Up American Idol" draft everyone's been clamoring for!

Great idea for a sketch. Pitch it to Kimmel! No but seriously, that's a pretty bad joke.

Still, I strongly and non-sarcastically recommend the article I linked at the beginning of the post. It's very cool. Here, I'll provide the link again.

(Wait, no, don't click that one! Click the one at the top instead)

Why worry about doing my job

When the professionals at The Onion are doing it for me?

This is a great example

Of a piece of information undoubtedly divulged to a reporter as some kind of "super top secret" detail that in fact adds absolutely nothing to a news report. You see these all the time as you read AP blurbs, but this one stands out from most I've ever seen.

A handful of NFL owners -- at least two of whom are from AFC teams -- believe the parameters of the deal being discussed don't adequately address the original issues the league wanted corrected from the 2006 collective bargaining agreement, according to sources.

OHHHHHH! JUICY! Two of them--strike that, AT LEAST two of them--are owners of AFC franchises! Well that just deepens the intrigue, doesn't it? I wonder what conference the rest of those owners' teams play in? Can you imagine the guy who leaked this information sweating profusely, repeatedly checking over his shoulder while whispering to the reporter? "OK, I really shouldn't be telling you this.... but a couple of these guys own AFC teams. I know, I can't believe it either." This just in: several members of Congress are cheating on their wives... AND ONE OR MORE OF THEM IS A DEMOCRAT!

That's the best effort you're going to get out of me on a Friday.

A Bygone Era of Lazy Sportswriting

From the article "U.S-Algeria sets record for [online] viewers" by ESPN.com news services:

The World Cup match from South Africa was a throwback to a time when not all major sporting events happened during television's prime-time. Only an older generation remembers listening to World Series games on transistor radios at work or school.

Yes, I can remember all the way back to when the NCAA tournament games were played at 2pm on work days. It was a simpler time...

And we were trying different things
We were smoking funny things
Making love out by the lake to our favorite song
Sipping whiskey out the bottle, not thinking 'bout tomorrow
Singing Sweet home Alabama all summer long

p.s. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of my complaining about lazy sportswriting with possibly the laziest post in FireJay history. Thank you.

Can We Nitpick Blogs?

Is that allowed here at FireJay? I know we can nitpick the shit out of people who claim to be real journalists, but what about normal bloggers like us? If they say something stupid, should we be allowed to point it out? In most cases, I'd lean towards no, but in the case of Deadspin, I think they're fair game. Those guys must be millionaires with all their page hits and ad revenue! Well, I was joyfully reading about the football matches this weekend when I came across this.

Before I say anything else, just watch that video a couple times. So good. Anyways, we can have a debate all day on whether or not this was a "clean" hit, but Dashiell throws this out:

And Clark nearly did as much damage to himself as he did to McGahee. So, yes, it was a "clean" hit, but it was horrible form and not very smart. Stop throwing yourself around like guided missiles out there, because it's scary and rarely does any good.

If by "rarely does any good", you wanted to say "forced a 4th quarter turnover in the AFC Championship game and ended whatever slim hopes Baltimore had of a comeback", you'd be much more accurate. These type of hits do all sorts of good-- for the league, the players, the fans, basically everyone except Willis McGahee. Part of why the NFL is so popular is that the game is so fast, collisions like this are bound to occur. If you took these collisions away, I would argue that part of the game's integrity would also be comprimised. Ryan Clark just got tons of free press, and a step towards a nice big contract. Just ask John Lynch what a couple big hits can do $$$$$$$$$$$ for your career. Also, if you want to say that the game was out of reach, I'd point you to this game and the Broncos not making the playoffs.

A sidenote: This wasn't even the dirtiest hit in the game, if you ask me. The crackback block that Limas Sweed threw down at the end of the 1st half was insanely violent. Flacco and McGahee have to know that a safety is gonna be there to deliver a hit on a play over the middle, but the guy that Sweed blew up was in a very vulnerable position and not expecting it at all.

Monday Morning Bizarro QB

Contest: I give you two pieces of journalism, you tell me which was written by an angry sports blogger, and which was written by a fat, Brett Farve-loving columnist.

Sample A:
"This game showed what kind of a football team the Cowboys are, for going out with all their football players and making football plays on the football field to win this football game."

Sample B:
"Why does every announcer say "football game'' instead of "game'' or "field'' or "player'' over and over and over in the same sound bite? We know the sport is football. Does Joe Buck say, "The Cubs are playing a heck of a baseball game on this baseball field?'' Does Mike Breen say, "This is a basketball game for the ages, and these basketball players out on that basketball floor will remember it forever?''"

Bizarrrrrro.