10-27-2007, 11:28 PM
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#1
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Practice Squad
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Stamford, CT
Posts: 279
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A Mere One Thing That I Think (PFT.com)
[There have been no 'five things I think' lately because I had relatives over. This week I can only think of one thing....]
1. Mike Florio really does talk a lot of crap at times.
I enjoy the site greatly, but boy does Florio come out with some crap. Three things on the site have really irritated me in the past week.
First, his frickin' obsession with the Michael Vick case and all it's legal minutiae. Please, do reply and let me know if I'm wrong, but I don't think your average NFL fan gives a flying feck about this business any more. It was interesting in as far as 'is he gonna get prosecuted and what are the implications for his career and for the Falcons?'. The answers to those two questions have been known for many weeks. Do you care that the prosecutor once represented Vick's father, that Vick has bought property in Florida, that there is a statue on the books that Zzzzzzzzzzz..... ??
Secondly, Florio's absurd and pompous claim in his 'Ten Pack' (that's on sportingnews.com these days I believe) that the Patriots have given opponents extra motivation to hate them/play harder next time by running up scores. His chief evidence here is that the Pats - gasp! - did all they could to score a touchdown with the ball inside Miami's 10 just before the end of the first half last Sunday.
I don't believe that scoring points in the first half of any game can be considered running up the score or poor sportsmanship. The first freakin' half! And now, remind me how many points the Pats scored in the second half of the game, the half during which we played our second and third string quarterbacks? Seven. One touchdown. Waaaay to run up the score, guys. Florio, you are talking utter bollocks.
Thirdly, his unquestioning buying-in to the NFL's mission to export football, at the expense of its own teams, players and loyal fans.
He admits himself that 'it might take 100 years' for football to overtake soccer in the rest of the world. Is that a rational, worthwhile, necessary or even valid goal?
Whether it is or not, I am here to tell you that it ain't going to work, even in a hundred years. I respect the comments of fellow Brits in another thread who are keen to assure you that there are genuine football fans in the UK. There are. But don't be fooled by the huge demand for the tickets for this one-off game. The demand is there largely because it is a one-off game.
Having lived in both the UK and the US, I believe that soccer has a far greater stranglehold on the British sports world and culture than the NFL has here in the States. Every remotely decent-sized town in the country has a professional soccer team (many have two). You see five British people wearing a replica soccer shirt for every one American person you see in an NFL jersey. The British soccer season runs from August until the beginning of May, and in the off-season there is a major international tournament every other year.
Beyond that, folks that like to see an oval ball being thrown around by men mauling each other already have a pretty popular sport to follow called 'egg-chasing' (I think 'rugby' might be its official name, I'm hazy on the details).
American football is a great, great sport. The NFL is a fantastic league. People already do follow it around the world, and can do so nowadays far more easily than only 20 years ago (when I used to have to listen to American Forces radio on a terrible AM signal for live commentary and hunt through seven newspapers in hope of finding results).
All is already good, and moving real games (thank heavens this Giants-Dolphins game shouldn't be too significant) to a different continent in search of the pipe-dream of global sports domination is misguided at best, stupidly greedy at worst.
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