Monthly Archives: February 2012

Bill Parcells, NFL, Peter King, Sports Illustrated

Pity Pandering

We are a sick group of individuals. We’ve got to the point we’re just openly pandering for pity.
Oh, but it’s worse than that – we have to be creative in how we seek each other’s pity. We line up more excuses than a high school freshman before homework is due in Algebra class. We’re like the opposite of stand-up comics, trying out new sappy material on unsuspecting people to get them to feel bad for us.
We are master manipulators and we are one-uppers. We constantly have a retort in the chamber, ready to take on anyone.
If someone talks about money, you’re poorer. If groceries cost you $125 a week, they easily cost me $200. If someone tells you they are tired, everyone else takes offense to this.
“You’re tired? Ha! I worked 62.435 hours this week and put up a new fence in the backyard!”
“Oh…wow…you must be exhausted.”
It’s nauseating and it has to stop. Why can’t we just have conversations that don’t automatically imply that you’re directly talking about anyone other than yourself? We’re all selfish anyway, so what’s the difference?
What happened to the good old days where we used to just feel bad for people based on our own emotions? Now you have to lay it on like you life is a replay of the Labor Day MDA Tele-thon.
And frankly, I’m mad because there are no levels of these pity parties anymore. Because of this, I’m becoming numb to handing out any sympathy what-so-ever.
Case in point to all of this: Sports Illustrated’s senior NFL writer, Peter King.
King, who you’ve probably seen on NBC over the past several years on “Football Night in America”, is a widely respected veteran who writes the “Monday Morning Quarterback” column for SI.com and also does features in SI during football season. He is also heavily entwined with the NFL and is one of the electors for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
This week, King makes a passive-aggressive comment bemoaning the fact that people are upset with the committee over this year’s inductions (and those that were left out, namely, Bill Parcells and Cris Carter).
Now, you want to get mad and defend yourself in print every now and then, I’m fine with that.
But then Tuesday rolled around and King wrote a follow-up column that oozed self-pity seeking narcissism. Literally, an entire follow-up column devoted to poor Peter, by Peter, about how hard it is to select the Hall of Fame inductees each year, how much time he spends on it, how the weight carries a burden on him that increases each time he goes about voting.
First of all, get over yourself. It’s football. A game. I mean, I am as passionate about sports as they come, but crying all over your laptop over the flack you’re catching over the Hall of Fame is a little bewildering and
Really?
This is what our most esteemed football journalist is doing now? I know it’s 10 days after the Super Bowl and things are slow…but really? How egocentric can you be?
King rambles and babbles on and on throughout the column about how the process works (or doesn’t) and he basically supported everyone who’s ever played the game. It’s not his fault Bill Parcells isn’t in the Hall of Fame this year. It’s not his fault Cris Carter goes another year without a gold jacket.
He also justifies that he doesn’t take things personal against candidates and how he’s not holding some grudge that keeps players out.
That’s fine, truly. But shouldn’t that go without saying? Why do you have to write a column defending yourself? You know what you do when you are Peter King and you’ve built up such an honorable credibility over 30 years of covering the sport? You don’t acknowledge them. You ignore them. What does it matter what Joey from Long Island thinks about you for leaving Parcells out?
Stooping to the level of the rabble just besmirches you, not them. Some people just want to complain, over complain and watch the world burn. And it exposes you as somewhat of a blowhard, frankly, when you defend yourself to this level. To wax philosophic about how important the task of voting for the Pro Football Hall of Fame is unbecoming and pretentious.
But King misses the point in two different ways, actually.  
First, is the bottom line: Bill Parcells should be in the Hall of Fame by now, so should Cris Carter. You are one of the people, as a collective group, who did not put them in.
Again, it’s football. It’s the Hall of Fame. And Bill Parcells isn’t in it.
How would you expect people to react, Pete? He’s Bill Parcells, the Bob Knight or Tony LaRussa of the NFL.
Secondly, King is playing the same hand so many in this country do…something happened that others don’t like, so feel bad for me because I’m being attacked.
We’ve become enablers. We play to the minority more than the majority.
To illustrate this, think of the last time a group of people went out to eat and couldn’t come to an agreement on where to eat because one person out of 10 doesn’t like pizza. Another guy hates hamburgers. Someone doesn’t like fish. And soon enough we’re sitting around at some weird pizza and fish taco place pacifying them.
If Parcells didn’t deserve the Hall, then tell us why. Or, you know, don’t write two columns in a row that belabor the point of how you are not to blame and defend your own honor.
Whatever happens from here on out, I don’t care. After reading King for nearly 10 years, I’m out. He lost me. Not that he cares – he doesn’t even know who I am, so my reading or not reading his columns doesn’t bother him nearly as much as those that are screaming about the Hall of Fame today. But I won’t be coming back. 
It’s the first of many changes I’ll be taking to stop enabling people who take pity on themselves and demand, through a carefully and manically crafted plan of self-absorption, that we take pity on them too.
Just stop it.
We’re so afraid of offending anyone that we say nothing – even when we should be offended (like Nicki Minaj’s horrendous, sacrilegious and terribly offensive Grammy act Sunday). Soon enough, someone in the Celebrity Culture of Sports and Hollywood (yes, it’s got an official name and everything, at least to me) will be telling a sob story that gets us all back on their side.
We should show pity to ourselves, because we really are a sad and pathetic bunch. 
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Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots, New York Giants, NFL, Peyton Manning, Super Bowl XLVI, Tom Brady

Isn’t It Ironic?

I wonder if Peyton Manning enjoys the musical styling of Alanis Morissette? Because if I had to fancy a guess as to what is playing on his iPod during his rehab workouts, this week especially, it has to be Morissette’s “Ironic.”
Because isn’t it ironic – a little too ironic – that the Indianapolis Colts host Super Bowl XLVI this Sunday, a game they never would have received without the shiny new Lucas Oil Stadium, a stadium that would never have been built without Manning transforming the Colts?
Yet when the game kicks off, it’s difficult to predict two things: 1) If Manning will ever play football again, and, 2) If he does get cleared to play football, will it be for the Colts?
It’s technically cosmic irony. It’s like rain on your wedding day, or a traffic jam when you’re already late.
And just to make sure Manning got this message, the football gods aligned the stars so that Peyton’s little brother, Eli, leads his team to the Super Bowl.
Against Peyton’s long-time arch-rivals, the New England Patriots.
Who are quarterbacked by the one man people debate could go down as better than Peyton: Tom Brady.
What are the odds of that?
Super Bowl XLVI also happens to be a rematch between the Patriots and the New York Giants, who four years ago, gave us a thrilling Super Bowl that saw the Giants come-from-behind in the final seconds to topple the then-unbeaten Patriots.
There’s hype and then there’s the Super Bowl. And then there’s a Super Bowl rematch of the Patriots and Giants. Of all the storylines this week, Peyton Manning and his neck are a mere footnote.
But Manning should be more than that to this city, especially now. This city should be kissing his Super Bowl ring. Instead of Tebow-ing, we should be, uh, Manning-ing.
He has transformed this city in ways only people from here can understand. None of this – and by this, I mean the event of the Super Bowl itself – would be possible without Peyton Manning. Cold weather cities do not get the Super Bowl without a new stadium. (For reasons why, see Detroit in 2006 and Dallas last year.) And teams like the Colts, pre-1998, don’t get new stadiums. You get new stadiums by winning – like a lot – because winning 10-plus games a year for a dozen years brings in a ton of fans.
Fans buy seats, food and merchandise. They create an atmosphere. They create a fan base that will sell out said new stadium, even in a year like 2011, when the team goes 2-14, fires it’s coaching staff and organizationally derails. They stay loyal when the owner acts out his life like a Saturday Night Live sketch on Twitter.
The success of the Manning-era Colts led to this moment. In turn, we’ve learned in the last six months that Manning is the Colts, literally, and frankly deserves all the credit for everything they did between 1998-2010.
Peyton Manning masked wild deficiencies of teammates and front office decision makers. He covered for mediocre coaching, less-than-mediocre defenses and a talent discrepancy that, looking back on it, was sometimes as wide as the Grand Canyon.
Think about this: since 2001, only four teams have represented the AFC in the Super Bowl: The Patriots (five times), the Pittsburgh Steelers (three times), the Colts (twice) and the Oakland Raiders (once, in 2002).
The Raiders, clearly, caught lightning in a bottle in 2002. They’ve been horrible ever since. But how on earth did the Colts hang in there with the Patriots and Steelers, perhaps the two most well-ran organizations in the NFL? How did they compete with those two franchises?
Simple: Peyton Manning.
Because it wasn’t the owner – Patriots owner Bob Kraft and the Rooney family that owns the Steelers, are vastly superior to Jim Irsay, his guitar and his tweets. It wasn’t the coaching – Bill Belicheck, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin are all vastly superior coaches that Jim Mora, Tony Dungy and Jim Caldwell. And it certainly wasn’t the general managers and decision makers. The Steelers and Patriots draft really well, sign the right players and do all the little things right. Meanwhile, Bill Polian was asleep at the wheel in the player personnel department for at least five years.
Peyton Manning is so good, so vastly superior that he basically was a one man show. In hindsight, it’s become a chicken and egg question with his teammates. Was Marvin Harrison good, or did Peyton make him good? Is Dallas Clark a great tight end, or did Peyton simply make him great? You get better by association on the Colts when No. 18 is under center.
So was it a good business decision to pay him $28 million in 2011 for not playing a single down of football? Of course not. It was, as I said before, quite stupid. But did the Colts, on behalf of the organization and this city, owe it to him? Hell yes. Consider it payment for services rendered.
Certainly Manning has long been well compensated for his talents as the highest paid quarterback in football for a number of years. But what he did in Indianapolis transcends just the game.
Indianapolis was Naptown. We hosted a few NCAA Final Fours and claim “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” the Indianapolis 500 – as if anyone still really cares about open-wheel racing outside of the month of May – and the Indiana Pacers had a good run in the late 1990s, but that’s been about it.
Since Peyton arrived, the NCAA moved its headquarters to Indianapolis and we’ve hosted more Final Fours than any other city. Other events have come to town, thanks to the hard working folks at the Indiana Sports Corporation. The economic boost and impact will be felt for years. A new stadium was built. To give you the mindset pre-Peyton, we were the middle sized town in the middle of the middle West. This city built a new minor league baseball park before it built a new football stadium.  
To see the city this week, alive with a kind of energy and enthusiasm that is hard to even adequately describe, is frankly amazing. And none of this would be possible without Peyton Manning. And all this, coming from the most staunch Brady-backer.
Now that doesn’t make what is likely to happen in a few weeks any less difficult. The Colts have an incredibly difficult decision to make on Manning and the future of this franchise. And this has to be a business decision. They have a chance to start over with another franchise quarterback. Manning, despite his rosy outlook, might never play another down – and even if he does, he might never be what he once was.
But that conversation can happen after Sunday. After the city basks in the glow of the hosting the Super Bowl.
Thus far, Indy is nailing it. To the point I’m wondering if the NFL won’t come back again in five or six years for another Super Bowl. And in another turn of irony, the weather has been fantastic – leaving me to joke to a friend that people from out of town are going to go home thinking Indianapolis would be a great place to retire: warm winters, friendly people, tons of stuff to do…
Which makes me wonder if we can credit Peyton for the weather as well?
He’s pretty much responsible for everything else happening this week.
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