My Varsity Letter

If secrets constitute us as individuals, and secrets are crucial to storytelling, then it must be storytelling itself that expels us from Eden. Storytelling is corrupt and corrupting. - James Wood, writing about the works of Ian McEwan, in the 4-30-09 London Review of Books

So let me tell you a story.

When I was in high school, I thought long and hard about going out for football. This would have been a spectacularly bad idea, as I was/am 5'-3", around 135 pounds, and not even all that fast or shifty. My role would have been, at best, fourth quarter special teams, mascot/joke, and de facto star jock tutor. But what the hell, right? Life is short, death is long and the writer in me (yes, always) just wanted to hear pre-game motivational speeches from the coach.

Eventually I took the laughter of the coaches to heart and kept the clipboard in my hand as the team's reporter for the school paper, which let me go to all the games anyway. The coach even let me listen to the speeches, because why not, really? You don't have that job unless you like the sound of your own voice. (Or this one, of course.)

The Northeast High School varsity football teams that I covered were pretty mediocre. As with most "magnet" schools, we had a thin level of top-tier talent from the inner city, supported by scrappy/overmatched borderline 'burb candy asses. Let's just say you could really tell who our bench guys were, and that we were not at our best in an endurance contest.

Our best player was our starting QB and CB, a tall athlete who was basically a homeless man's Randall Cunningham. He was also our best basketball player, and while dreams of MVP level stardom came to those who saw his good moments, he was really more of a I-AA player, which is where he wound up.

In my years of following the team, there were two very memorable games. The first came when we played Frankford, who had Blair Thomas (a star RB at Penn State, a first round draft bust with Jets). It was a tight game for a long time, but every time Thomas touched the ball, the difference between his future and everyone else's became more clear, and he eventually dragged his team to the win.

The second was our big annual game against arch-rival Central. The game was played rain and mud that made Scooby Doo-esque foot fumbling common, especially for a reporter without cleats. Closest that I came to that special teams work, really.

At the half, buoyed by the knowledge from my feet and eyes and not noticing the presence of actual real-life reporters, I burst into the coaches room to tell the head coach to call more rollouts, so that our mobile QB actually had a chance at making a defender miss on the only part of the field that still had grass. It got me laughed out of the room so that the real minds could work. Maybe it's coincidence, but we did get more rollouts in the second half.

At the end of the year, I also found that the coaches, who relied on me as the only source of statistics, had voted to give me a varsity letter. Your call as to whether they did that to thank me for not trying out. I had my mom sew it on my gray 80's bomber cloth jacket, and didn't get any action, ever, while wearing it. There's nothing like being the reporter/hanger-on for a dramatic lack of action, kids. One benefit of the death of print journalism, really.

Top 12 reasons why the NFL needs to create a spring league

Every year, the lack of spring football -- by which I mean real, honest to goodness football, rather than some nonsense in a closet, wrestling-esque silliness or foreign force-feeding -- pisses me off. In a country where the NFL just utterly dominates the sporting consciousness, then goes away for the majority of the year, it's Just Stupid. And it will stop any year now, because markets are like that, and even the first year XFL drew reasonable ratings. So why not start it up now, now, now and get the following benefits?

12. For the sheer hilarity of fantasy drafts with tons of unknown players, followed up by weeks of Toss Darts point spread picks

11. No matter how bad the play is, it will get higher ratings than the NHL

10. Would allow the NFL an easy and wonderfully backhanded way to cover the LA market

9. Makes my rocking of the retro-cool Philadelphia Stars hoodie earn your worship and respect, rather than your respect and worship

8. Stops cold the weeks at a time when the mainstream American sports public has to actually think, however briefly, about basketball

7. Prevents tens of millions of football fans from having to interact with their families, which, really, is all to the best

6. Takes the gambling industry off the list of businesses begging for a government bailout

5. Shuts up megalopolises that say they really want/deserve/will cry or sue for a second NFL franchise

4. Fun's fun, but seriously, Ohio really deserves a professional football team

3. It would make many criminally underused new NFL stadiums be of use for 20 dates a year, rather than 10

2. Gets some of the most violent offenders in the country off the streets for weeks at a time in the spring

1. As soon as it gets popular, the NFL Network would get more games to black out

Epic Drop: Top 12 reasons the Arena Football League won't play in 2009

I'm certain that to some portion of the audience, The Day The Indoor War Died will be right up there with the Lennon assassination, the Challenger tragedy, 9/11 and that time when you found a five dollar bill on the street in terms of Memorable Days of Your Life.

Or, well, not.

Less football is generally not a good thing, but what the hell, maybe this will finally lead to the quality spring league, using real rules, that the market demands. Watching CFL rejects bounce off arena walls and netting... didn't really do it for me. Sorry.

My Actual Fantasy Football Sleepers: Quarterbacks

Now that my three drafts in six days fantasy football season is over, and my league mates in all of those endeavors have already seen my act, it's time to share my sleepers with the world. Draft these guys, and you'll be guaranteed to have a fantasy football team. Whether it's any good or not is another matter. I'm going to split these out into separate posts just to make it easier to identify my mistakes later.

It's a deep year for quarterbacks, in that if you don't get one of the top 3 to 5 players, you can pretty much take your pick of reasonable gambles. Here's the guys that I'd be going after if I'm playing quarterback roulette.

Donovan McNabb, Philadelphia Eagles. It's the second year back from the knee injury, with a fourth-place schedule, and a defense and special teams that looks to have added playmakers. As a bonus, you also get his starting wideouts (Curtis and Brown) being nicked up at the start of the year, which will make some shy away from him. If you aren't playing with Eagles homers, I think you'll be able to get him cheap, and for the first time in years, I think you'll be thrilled at the end of the year with the results.

Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers. I've seen him go undrafted in some leagues, which I think is kind of criminal. If you draft him, you'll need to have some good early-season options to wait out his growing pains, but with his weapons, offensive line and defense, he's not going to have to be that good to help you. A lot.

Vince Young, Houston Texans. Do you really want to watch this? Hell no. But at the end of the day, you'll be looking at 200 yards and a couple of touchdowns (probably as many with his feet as his arm) for a guy that might be available in your free agent pool. Compare and contrast that with, say, Eli Manning or Jon Kitna, and you'll see there's no real difference. There is also the chance that he's actually better than this, the Texans will surprise with Chris Johnson, and his defense will give him a lot of short fields to work with. Besides, it isn't possible that he gets worse than he showed last year.

J.T. O'Sullivan, San Francisco 49ers. OK, his team sucks, he's a career nobody, and he's got a name that sounds like a place where the waitresses are all oversized and pushing the jalopeno poppers. But on the plus side, his division is terrible, he's in a chuck and duck Mike Martz system, and he'll throw it 50 to 60 times a game. Let's say he completes 60% of those for 7 yards a completion, with a ton of garbage time prevent defense yards. What do you have? 250 yards a game, or nearly 4000 yards for the season, and some of them have to be for touchdowns. He's young enough to survive the battering he'll get, and the Niners really aren't all that interested in seeing more of Alex Smith.

Kurt Warner, Arizona Cardinals. While you weren't noticing last year, the ancient Quarterback of Jebus had 27 touchdowns and 3400 yards, and that was with the usual musical chairs routine at quarterback. He's always going to turn the ball over (17 picks and 8 fumbles last year), but he's also just plain accurate, and you can usually ride the matchups with him to good advantage. Especially early in the season (that opening week agains the Niners looks quite tasty), there's money to be made here.

Matt Schaub, Houston Texans. The schedule won't help much here, and the division is the best in football. But he's also good, has more weapons this year (see the running back post, a healthier Andre Johnson, and a more established Owen Daniels), and has exceptional accuracy to go with a quick release. If you own him, you'll need another quarterback for the weeks where the schedule is ruinous, but in the weeks that he's good, he'll be very good indeed.

The Perfect Union

According to Peter King over at SI, Mark Cuban's fledgling football league (because, in between winning nothing with the Mavs, trying to buy the Cubs so he can entice another franchise with false hopes and bombast, and messing around with Yahoo's board to see who can bring in the least amount of shareholder value) is thinking hard about...

drum roll please...

Michael Vick!

Now, Lord knows, there will be more professional football in your life at some point. The simple fact is that every year, the public grows less and less tolerant of the eight months of dead time that the NFL makes its fan base endure. It is not the #1 sport in the US; it is the number one through three sports in the US. MLB and NBA are not rivals; they are sideshows. The country begins and ends with football.

The UFL may or may not be the league that breaks through, though, to be honest, I'm not seeing it. Friday Night Football is a fine thing for high school, but it's kind of a dead zone for actual television viewing... and that's the night that the league is supposed to play. During the fall is the best time of the year to be a sports fan, between the MLB playoffs, the NFL regular season, the start of the NHL and NBA seasons, and the sheer rush that is Q3 / Q4 and the holidays. That's also when they are planning to play.

Needless to say, this is Big Stupid on many, many levels.

A winter / spring league, in domes and warm-weather cities, would work... provided it was domestic, didn't have dippy rules a la Arena Ball,with the rules tweaked for offense to make sure that unwatchable football doesn't happen. Sprinkle in some reasonable name coaches, a few decent names (either washed-up vets that are local to their teams, maybe some good local college players), and make sure the refs are good. Finally, relax some of the nonsense rules that people hate the NFL for imposing, make it supremely tailgate friendly, cap the salaries and don't expect to make money for five to ten years... and you may have something. Given that the Cube isn't about patience or sense, it's not going to happen that way with this league, but it eventually will.

Meanwhile, Vick. Good grief. If the league is to be paid for with sports blog hits, they'll do fine. Otherwise, not so much...

The Philadelphia (Stars) Story

As thoughts turn to football football football and my hands twitch from tuning in preseason games and wondering if now is the time to finally develop a college football fetish...

and as the weather outside remains resolutely summer, with jungle humidity and the unstoppable insect rampage that is Life in Mid Jersey...

well, it's making my brain push back to an earlier, simpler, time, when the local team was just a relentless machine of excellence, with a lockdown defense and an effective ground game, a great coaching staff and a QB that didn't make mistakes and always gave his team a chance to win.

I am talking about, of course, the most effective football team on a per capita basis in Philadelphia history. The Philadelphia Stars, of the USFL.

Nowadays, if you find anyone talking about the USFL at all, it's in three contexts:

1) The always fun notice of royalty-free images in advertising that wants a pro football look, but can't justify NFL scratch. The Houston Gamblers and the LA Express will be with us forever.

2) The periodic notifications about various USFL alumni (finally) hanging it up. Doug Flutie and Sean Landeta have collected a lot of checks.

3) A punchline for the big $3 antitrust payment the league won from the NFL in its final death gasp. More proof, not that anyone needs it, that Donald Trump is less effective than offensive.

But there really was more to the league. Like the ABA in the 70s, it provided a comic but welcome breath of life to a game that was a little too full of itself. And just like the ABA, the alumni list was some of the best and brightest of the game. Consider:

> Jim Kelly ran one of the first versions of the run and shoot for the Gamblers

> Steve Young was at his rawest for the Express

> Jim Mora went to the playoffs? playoffs! in all three years as the coach of the Stars

> His linebacker was Sam Mills, who showed he was big enough for 10+ years after this in New Orleans and Carolina

> Herschel Walker failed to dominate this league, too, despite having a huge amount of name recognition, creating a Foreshadow that the Minnesota Vikings really should have seen coming

> Bobby Ebert was at his pre-Saints, pre-Seinfeldian best for the Michigan Panthers (still one of the coolest looking uniforms ever for a pro football team)

> George Allen (yes, that George Allen) was the Schottenheimer-esque head coach for Vince Evans and the Chicago Blitz (gagged up a 21-point playoff lead with 8 minutes left to Mora's Stars)

> A very young Reggie White had a LT-like impact for the Memphis Showboats (23.5 sacks in two seasons)

At the height of the Stars' 3-year-run of 49er-like dominance, they brought a championship to Philadelphia, and I went to the parade. There really wasn't that much to it, probably no more than 10 to 15 thousand people all told, and the insecurity was in the air; everyone knew that this wasn't really the dawn of a new era or serious threat to the old order, which became especially apparent when the team quietly moved to College Park, Maryland and became the Baltimore Stars the next year.

But for that era, as the Eagles slid back from the Vermiel years into the slow torture of "Swamp Fox" Marion Campbell, and the LT Giants arose as the guys that would sack Ron Jaworski over and over again... well, there was something appealing about having your allegiances vied for by a team that was just refreshingly competent.

It's been 25 years since the Red and Gold were my sneaky favorite team, and in that time, it's become apparent that the American appetite for football -- real, honest to God football, and not some watered down minor league WLAF or pinball variant AFL -- remains something that is more than a half-year occupation.

At some point, the law of markets dictates that the void will be filled. When it does, we can only hope that the same talent level will be there.