I could say that things haven’t been going too well for the Saints this year. But that’s only relative to the success of last’s year 13-0 start and Super Bowl title. Relative to most of the Saints’ history, a 4-3 start is pretty damn good. But it’s also incredibly disappointing. Sure, the Saints’ offense hasn’t been anywhere near good as it’s been since the arrival of Sean Payton and Drew Brees. But the defense has been excellent; they haven’t scored the TDs or forced the turnovers that they did last year, but teams are having a very tough time scoring on the Saints. The Saints are 4th in total defense (measured in yards/game), an impressive stat. And the offense isn’t all that bad; they’re 7th in yards per game. Let’s look at the Saints’ three losses: a missed field goal in overtime against the Falcons; two pick-sixes against the Cardinals, and two more today against the Browns. Against Arizona and Cleveland, the Saints played excellent defense, keeping those teams’ rookie quarterbacks in check without too much trouble. But in both cases the turnovers killed the Saints. And the responsibility for those turnovers, while undoubtedly shared by players and coaches alike, ultimately rests with one man: the guy throwing them. Drew Brees is turning around to see the other team returning his passes for TDs almost as often as Jarrett Lee did for LSU in 2008. (Brees has thrown four so far this season; Lee had seven that year.)
I realize QBs are going to have bad games. It happens. Teams are obviously doing a much better job of adjusting to the Saints’ attack than they did last year. What bothers me about Drew Brees is the way he talked during the post-game press conference. (Transcript available here.)
Consider this quote:
“Any time you give up two defensive touchdowns, where you turn the ball over and that results immediately in a touchdown, you don’t even give your defense a chance to get out on the field and defend. When it happens once, you probably have about a 20% chance of winning after that. If it happens twice, you might as well throw it out the door. We have now had, in those two losses, four touchdowns scored against us where the offense turns the ball over and the defense scores. What is so frustrating is in both of those games if you take those touchdowns away, the defensive touchdowns, we score more points than they do.” Continue reading ‘drew brees not owning up to his mistakes’
It’s a common sight in a football game: the quarterback realizes that he won’t be able to get a play off before the play clock expires, so he burns a timeout to save the five yard penalty. There are other, similar situations where this happens. In virtually all cases, a team (whether on offense or defense) burns a timeout in order to save five yards.
I’m not sure if anyone has really crunched the numbers on this to determine when it’s a good idea. My guess is that an offense probably should call a timeout on 3rd-and-inches in a crucial situation rather than give up five yards. But the garden-variety first quarter 1st-and-10? Again, I’ll change my mind if someone shows me the numbers, but my guess is that holding on to that timeout in case you need it at the end of the half is better than using it just to save five yards. This is even more likely to be true in the NFL, where the clock doesn’t stop after a team picks up a first down; a two-minute drive is extremely difficult if a team doesn’t have any timeouts remaining.
Perhaps I’m wrong and a team should use its timeouts to avoid a delay of game (or similar penalty) on 1st-and-10. But clearly, there are times when a team shouldn’t. They punt from their own 30 on 4th-and-20. Surely a timeout wouldn’t be worth the five yards of field position when you’ve already resigned yourself to giving the other team the ball?
But perhaps the one situation that would most call for not taking the timeout occurred in today’s Saints-Bucs game. Even though I’m a Saints fan and the Bucs made a silly mistake, as a lover of football and hater of stupidity it pained me to see such idiocy occur. Continue reading ‘stupid timeouts’
The first weekend of the college football season is upon us. It features marquee matchups such as Florida State-Samford, Penn State-Youngstown State, and Arkansas-Tennessee Tech. As I type this sentence at 2:03 CDT, there is not a single competitive football game happening. I realize that the big-name schools are always going to schedule cupcakes early in the season. There’s really no way of outlawing that. But there’s no reason that the NCAA shouldn’t adopt stricter rules against I-A teams scheduling I-AA teams. (I mean, FBS teams scheduling FCS teams. I hope I haven’t offended the NCAA’s political correctness police.) As it stands now, teams can schedule a I-AA team every year and have that more-or-less guaranteed win* count toward the six wins needed for bowl eligibility. If memory serves, a few years ago you could only count a I-AA win every other year; I believe this rule was changed when the NCAA went to a 12-game schedule every year and let 6-6 teams into bowls.
Quite simply, it’s a joke to see a Top 10 team playing a I-AA team. These games are glorified exhibitions. I can understand a weaker I-A team needing home games and scheduling I-AA teams, but a BCS conference school shouldn’t be playing a I-AA team, ever. Sure, you may have to pay a bit more to get a Sun Belt team to play you than it would cost to get someone from I-AA, but last time I checked your average college football powerhouse was doing okay from a money standpoint.
What I’d like to see is a ban on games against I-AA teams, or at least a rule that wins can never count toward the bowl eligibility total. Perhaps in conjunction with this we might also need a rule capping teams to seven home games, forcing a team that plays eight games within its conference to play at least one non-conference road game every season.
* Yes, I know I-A teams sometime lose these games. But a top team (and no, Michigan doesn’t count) isn’t going to lose to a I-AA team except in an absolute freak occurrence.
You know what phrase inexplicably pisses me off? To take something “to the next level.” What the hell does it even mean? It might refer to a relationship. Or business negotiations. Or anything, really. Can’t we find more precise and accurate ways of expressing things that are supposedly being taken to the next level? If a man and woman take their relationship “to the next level,” does that mean sex? Moving in together? Making it Facebook official? Getting engaged? (Which order are those things supposed to come in, anyway?) Why not just directly state which of those items are involved?
One problem I have with “next level” is the fact that it implies that progress in whatever field is being discussed is quantized and split into discrete steps. This may very well be the case in certain circumstances, but in many, it’s nonsense.
So please, don’t ever use this phrase again.
Let’s say you’re eating a bag of M&M’s. You’ve munched your way through almost the entire bag, and you figure that there are probably one or two more in the bag, tucked away in one of the bottom corners, ready to give you one last bite of chocolatey goodness. You turn the bag upside down to get at the last candies, only to find that you were wrong. There are no more M&M’s in the bag. When you know you’re eating the last M&M in the bag, you take the time to savor it. But when you don’t realize you’re eating the last one, you gluttonously chomp away without an appropriate regard for the sweet deliciousness that is milk chocolate. And once you realize your mistake, you feel as though you’ve squandered a wonderful opportunity to enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures.
Then you die a little on the inside.
You stop in for a meal at a restaurant. You’re thirsty. The waitress asks for your drink order.
“I’ll have a Coke.”
“Is Pepsi okay?”
GAH! Well, it’s okay. I don’t really even dislike Pepsi. If I open up the fridge and see a Pepsi, I don’t mind drinking it. But wanting a Coke and having to settle for a Pepsi is an incredibly frustrating feeling. Some may say that the drinks don’t taste all that different. Trust me, they do. And when I’m really, really thirsty, a fountain Coke is quite possibly the best thing in the world. But to seek that thirst-quenching goodness and then have it ripped away from you by a restaurant’s exclusive contract with Pepsi can be a terrible, terrible feeling.
I admit I don’t know what the economic factors are involved in whether a restaurant decides to serve Coke or Pepsi. Obviously, some national chains have deals with one beverage company or the other. And I’m guessing Pepsi must be cheaper because why the hell would anyone choose Pepsi if it weren’t cheaper? I’ll admit that most people probably don’t scratch a restaurant off their list just because it serves Pepsi—I don’t—but sometimes I really find myself wondering why a restaurant skips out on Coke to serve Pepsi.
And no Coke means no Barq’s Root Beer either. I love Barq’s with a roast beef po-boy or fried shrimp or some other New Orleans-style food—given the regional connection, it just feels right. And Barq’s is so much different from other root beers that there’s really no comparison. I’m not saying that other kinds of root beer are worse; but nothing is really all that much like Barq’s.
So restaurant owners, I realize you’ve got a bottom line to consider, but please give us Coke, okay?
The homeless guy at I-10 and Elysian Fields. The can-shaking sports teams at Carrollton and Claiborne. The Salvation Army bell-ringers. Your alma mater calling and asking for a donation. Your 8-year-son who wants a snowball. What do they have in common? They’re all people asking for money. Maybe you give them money, maybe you don’t, but surely, it’s annoying. (Okay, if you have an 8-year-old son, his asking for snowball money would probably be one of the least annoying things he does. I’m just guessing here, but I imagine I was pretty damn annoying at 8.)
But people need money. It makes the world go round. And in some cases, the best way to get money is to ask for it. The homeless guy doesn’t have a job but needs money for beer.* Universities have billion dollar endowments but still need more. And so on. For example, bloggers who can’t make any money with Internet advertising sometimes resort to begging for money. It’s annoying, and you probably would never give any money to them. But I figured hey, I’ll put a little “Donate” button in the sidebar and see what happens. Do I need the money? No—I’m an unemployed Latin teacher, but I’m in no danger of going broke anytime soon. Am I going to stop blogging? No. Do I have more money than the starving college students who make up most of my readership? Probably. To avoid being annoying, I’m only going to bring this up once, and I won’t mention it again. If you feel that you have a surplus of money and would like to direct some to me in appreciation of my brilliant blogging, that’d be great. Or just buy me a drink next time you see. Or let me crash on your couch during my month-long vacation binge.** Continue reading ‘people who beg for money’
Not too long ago I complained about TV commercials. What form of advertising am I going to complain about today? Internet advertising. Except this time I’m not just the embittered consumer sick of ads ruining his television-viewing experience. This time I’m also the greedy capitalist looking for a few dollars.
When I first moved this blog from wordpress.com to its own domain, I thought, hey, there’s a chance I could make some money on this. Maybe not a lot of money, but hopefully enough to cover the $20 a year I pay for the domain name. (Fortunately, the hosting is free; thanks again to Rob Heath for the help.) And who knows, maybe it’ll be like the lottery, except with a lot more work involved.
But that’s not how it works. The Internet is made for niches. Find a niche, cover it in detail: obsessively catalog everything about your favorite TV show or sports team or video game. Then watch the search engines direct the traffic to you. I get a fair amount of search traffic (compared to what I get from direct traffic and links from facebook, twitter, and other blogs), but it’s an interesting, very scattered mix. Continue reading ‘internet advertising’
On Friday I was walking down the sidewalk of Freret Street in shoes that were already completely soaked thanks to walking through the puddles. That’s bad enough. Then, as I’m on the sidewalk minding my own business, some asshole driving 30 mph makes no effort to avoid the puddles on the side of the road and splashes me with water. I ran down the street shouting profanities and making obscene gestures at the car, but to no avail. To you, asshole driver, I say: what the fuck is your problem? First of all, you shouldn’t have been driving that fast in the rain. Second of all, there was no oncoming traffic, so you could have moved to the middle of the street to avoid the puddle. Third, you could have slowed down to avoid splashing so much water around. Fourth, you could have at least stopped to apologize. I’d have been upset, true, but I’d have calmed down to accept an apology if you were sincere about it—I’m sure it’s possible that I might do something like that not realizing how big a splash was likely to be caused. And if I did that and realized what I’d done, I’d feel pretty bad about it and would hope that an apology would be accepted. But you were completely oblivious, you asshole. Or perhaps you’re not an asshole, you’re just an idiot. Either way, you suck.
P.S. Thanks to the motorcyclist who shook his head in commiseration as he passed by. It almost makes me reconsider the post I made about motorcyclists.
The other day I was driving through the parking lot of a strip mall on my way to a Best Buy to pick up a mouse to replace the piece of crap excuse for a mouse that came with my new iMac. My driving task was made considerably more difficult by the vast number of speed bumps. Apparently we the drivers of the industrialized world are too stupid to moderate our speeds when driving in a dangerous, pedestrian-packed situation such as a parking lot. (Well, millions of people are stupid, horrendous drivers who should never be trusted, but maybe we should deal with the root problem—bad drivers—instead of employing the band-aid solution that is the speed bump.) Sure, the speed limit sign says “10″ and I’m probably doing 20, but I’ve never hit any pedestrians. (Knock on wood.) And why should my car’s suspension have to suffer? It deals with enough potholes (and roads buckling in the heat, too) as it is.
And on a larger scale, they create noise (cars banging over them) and waste gas (people slamming the brakes and then gunning it). They’re just a pain in the ass, and we should spend more time teaching people to be responsible drivers and less time putting in stupid speed bumps that are a pain in everyone’s ass.
P.S. As an interesting aside, in Britain they call speed bumps “sleeping policeman.” Gotta love the way with words they have across the pond.