* I know I'm not the first person to say this and I won't be the last, but the proper response by the NFL to the egregious pass interference/targeting no-call in the NFC Championship Game is to make PI and other penalties reviewable.
Pass Interference is already reviewable in the CFL and has been for awhile. I'm a CFL fan and watch a lot of CFL games. It works well. PI is really no less subjective than, for example, whether a receiver had complete control of a ball before going to ground.
What is not acceptable resolution is any sort of do-over. Blown calls are a fact of life. I feel deeply for Saints fans. I firmly believe in granting the widest net possible when it comes to instant replay. I think NFL coaches should get more reviews, and not lose a challenge when they get the challenge right.
But we cannot disrupt all the logistics and semantics of the NFL going into the super bowl by replaying it, either, in entirety or from that point. It would open a ridiculous pandora's box. It's only sports. All fans suffer from bad calls; let's not gate-keep those bad calls with special unprecedented resolutions for some of them.
* Are you ready for some football, right after the Super Bowl? If you are, you'll be pleased to know that yet another new spring league is on its way: The Alliance of American Football. This one has decent optics: CBS will carry two opening week games on a regional basis February 9th (in prime time, no less), as well as their championship game later in the year.
Next year, they are scheduled to be joined by the XFL. That's right, Vince McMahon is trying again.
Will either of these leagues succeed after the failure of the USFL, original XFL, UFL, and every other attempted offseason football league?
Probably not, but I hope they do as someone who gorges on the quantity of sports. I also believe that, given football's popularity, there is some winning approach out there to profitably run professional football outside of the fall. What that approach is, I have no idea.
* There's a collegiate summer baseball league concentrated in the upper Midwest called the Northwoods League, and they have a new team. The Traverse City Pit Spitters. Check out those logos.
I'm not sure I've ever encountered a nickname and logo set more riffable than this one, and that's really saying something.
I say all this with affection. Generally, you want your team name to convey strength. What act can be stronger than ... um, eating some cherries and spitting out the pits?
If you look at the logos, you see that the anthropomorphized cherries and trees are spitting out pit themselves. I would, then, accuse these cherries and trees of cannibalism, but upon closer inspection, those "pits" are baseballs.
What are these cherries eating where the pits are baseballs?
OMG THEY'RE EATING HORSES WHOLE. RUN!
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