Simmons vs. Gladwell

I just spent like 37 minutes reading the Bill Simmons/Malcolm Gladwell email exchange on ESPN.com.

I do not consider this a waste of time. Far from it. I bring it up here because of something Gladwell brings up regarding the no-huddle offense toward the end of the 2nd part of their exchange:

I feel the same way about the attitude of professional football teams toward the no-huddle offense. Right now, great teams (such as the Colts and Patriots) use the no-huddle selectively, as a way to maximize their dominance. But why don't bad teams use it? If you were the Lions, why not run the no-huddle this season? Why not put together a lighter, better-conditioned offensive line and a radically simplified playbook and see what happens? It's not as if you are risking a Super Bowl if it backfires. Your offensive line is lousy anyway, so there's no harm in tearing it down, and your fans aren't going to turn on you if you get killed while you work out the kinks. Last I checked, your fans have already turned on you. On the plus side, maybe the no-huddle exhausts the other team's defense so much you slow down their pass rush in the second half. And maybe giving your quarterback a bit more autonomy helps develop his knowledge of the game, and his leadership skills.

It made me wonder why, with all of the speed on this current Raiders team, Cable doesn't put some no-huddle in. Are you telling me a zone-blocking, Fargas/Bush to punish the d-line and tire out the linebackers, and then McFadden coming in and blowing by everyone, or DHB or Johnnie Lee running a hitch-and-go, wouldn't be awesome?

Wouldn't it?

Obviously, you don't run it the whole game. But picking your spots? I'm wondering if that's not part of Al is doing with this roster, "putting together a lighter, better-conditioned offensive line and a radically simplified playbook." I know he said he wanted more power, but other than Lorenzo Neal, he didn't exactly go out and load up on beefy offensive players.

I'm just speculating, and probably giving the Raiders more credit than they deserve (which is none). But that's why this is the best time of year to be a Raiders fan.

Sllaacs' Mom Provoked My CyberStalker; Picks.

I'm still pretty sure that the guy trying to get his flame war on me is my brother, who didn't know who Lance Kiffin was. Although, when I read it out loud to him, he laughed and said he didn't write it but wished he had. Still, he's the only one who so lovingly calls me "DickFace."

I feel like I need to mention Bill Simmons today, because he brings up the NFL.com "Every Day is Like Sunday" commercials. Which I wrote about almost a month ago. Wow, I beat one of my heroes to the punch, which means absolutely nothing. It's also relevant because he has the Bye week beating the Raiders (though not by as much as it's beating the Rams), has some funny-ish reader emails about which Hollywood monster Al Davis most resembled at the press conference, and says that we Raiders fans get a Stomach Punch because Tom Cables record as Head Coach at the University of Idaho was 11-35. Anyway, that's more games in the span of 3 years than we've one the last three, so it's an improvement, right?

As for Sllaacs saying that Cable should keep to Lance's plan, does that include the weekly "Tell The Truth Mondays," or what Al Davis referred to as Flat Out Lying? Because that would be awesome.

On to the picks:

Niners vs. Patriots. I really, really hope that Patrick Willis catches Randy Moss coming over the middle. Oh, right, Randy doesn't go over the middle. Oh well. The 49ers win. 17-14.

Packers vs. Falcons. Is Aaron Rodgers even playing? Still feeling good about trading the Indestructable Brett Favre now? Rodgers is the man of Glass. Falcons, and Bubba Malaysia's All Star Running back Michael Turner run the shit out of the Packers, 29-13. Seems like Turner busts out ever two weeks, so he's due.

Bufalo goes to 4-0 with a 27-14 Win over AZ. Is Matt Leinert still on that team?

By the way CLOAK OF IMMORTALITY would like to thank Al Davis, Lane Kiffin, the NFL, Tim Kawakami, John Herrera, and Morrissey for the month of September, which I just noticed was our most prolific month since our inception, with a total of 116 posts.

Glazer, Mort: Kiffin is Fired.

Jay Glazer got the scoop. Mort also heard that, but says the details aren't forthcoming. Glazer doesn't have many details, either, and notes that we heard the same thing last week.

Also, in the tradition of Bill Simmons, can we officially say that Al is rocking the Terri Schiavo face, and induct it into the Pantheon?

Al Davis.

Terri Schiavo.

I was probably going to hell anyway.

Rex Sets Us Back; John's Picks

Picked up an SF Weekly to read while I was having lunch today, and turned to the cover story about two homeless junkies who go to SF State. "Oh, this seems interesting," I said to myself and then opened to page 11 where there was a full page picture of Rex getting ready to cook up, holding his cell phone between his teeth. On his cell phone is a sticker: A Raiders shield.I'm starting to understand how the Cavemen feel every time they see a GEICO ad. First tigers, now junkies. I'm getting sick of how the media portrays us.Anyway, on to this weeks picks, courtesy of Sllaacs Brand HaterAde:I like the Cowboys as well. Just as an aside, punk ass DeSean Jackson cost me a bunch of fantasy points by throwing the ball away before he crossed the plane of the goal line the other night. Not because I have him, but because I have Donovan McNabb. Instead of a touchdown pass, McNabb handed the ball to Westbrook who got a rushing TD. Knock that shit off, DeSean. Cowboys win a close one, 31-28.I agree with Sllaacs that Detroit sucks balls, too. 49ers win 13-12, all defensive touchdowns and field goals.Ah, the Raiders. Who knows at this point. Bufalo is alledgedly pretty good, and our top two running backs are injured. So we lose, again, 36-14. Only Kiffin isn't fired; instead the Raiders pass out Nancy Gay's Monday column dissing Kiffin's playcalling to the media before Norv Turner's conference call.

P.S.: Mike Lombardi is on the BS Report today. They get into the Raiders situation about the 21 or 22 minute mark. Interesting tidbit: he blames the Tampa Blowout in Super Bowl XXXVII in part on only having 1 week between the championship round and the Super Bowl instead of the usual two. He also jokes that they would hope Al's players would get hurt so they could get them out of there and play the guys they wanted because it made them better. He also says Lance had no chance, because A.) he was a college CO-offensive coordinator with no NFL experience and B.) the Raiders are the weirdest organization in sports, and have been weird since Barrett went missing in TJ.

Schadenfreude

Leave to Jerry McDonald to break down the game, and continue to show why he's my favorite writer covering the Raiders with his blog post, "Enjoy:"

With the Patriots perhaps being the Raiders’ most hated opponent ever since Brady made his reputation in the playoffs in the snow, you can forget about 19-61 over the last five years for a few hours and realize that occasionally justice is served.

Manning bailed out a Giants defense which finally tired in the fourth quarter after harassing Brady all night.

With the help of a guy named “Tuck.”

It is indeed poetic, if a little bit pathetic justice for us Raiders fans. But I will admit that I really enjoyed rooting for the Giants, not because I care about them, but because I was a straight up hater today. I felt Sllaacs in a room full of fat women Raiders fans.

Oh, and Bill Simmons is a Mother Fucking Jinx. I won't be surprised if his Boston pass gets revoked after this shit.

The Patriots lost.

To Eli Manning, who was indeed unstoppable.

Muhahahahahaha!

Is Bill Simmons a Jinx; John's Picks

The other day after Bill Simmons wrote the column asking which was Boston's best ever team, the 1986 Celtics or the 2007 Patriots, I said he was "jinxing the hell out of them."
I know Dan isn't a fan of Simmons' work, we've talked about this and he said as much in the comments of that post, implying that he is part of ESPN's Bristol, CT-based East Coast Bias.

It's actually a little more complicated than that. See, ever since espn.com debuted Page 2 in November, 2000, I don't think I've missed a column by the guy who was then known as "The Boston Sports Guy." Back then, there were three writers I absolutely had to read every week that wrote for Page 2: Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph Wiley, and Bill Simmons. Hunter and Ralph both passed away, and now it's just Bill Simmons that I still read every week.

The thing is, there are two Bill Simmonses. There's the "Sports Guy," who has great composition skills, understands the intersection of sports and pop culture and navigates that intersection better than anyone. He's a populist writer who regularly features a "mailbag" column in which he prints his funniest readers' comments and questions and responds to them, and the feel is like a group of friends hanging around talking about sports, movies, and TV shows. One of the signs of a great writer is that he or she gives you a feeling of intimacy when you're reading them, so that even though you've never met that person, you feel like you're buddies. Bill Simmons is that kind of writer.

Here's an example of how that works for me. In 2002, I got married and moved from Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, to Connecticut, where the Professor was immersed in her graduate studies at Yale. Around that same time, Bill Simmons married the Sports Gal and moved from Boston to Los Angeles. His columns made a lot more sense to me now, since I had driven on Merritt Parkway, and I now knew who Mike and the Mad Dog were. Then we both had daughters within 4 or 5 months of each other. So even though I've never met Bill Simmons, I feel like I know him because of the shared experience as sports fans and fathers, all transmitted through his columns. This Bill Simmons is one of the reasons I wanted to have a Raiders blog.

The other Bill Simmons is the "Boston Sports Guy," and this guy is an insecure, boring, otherwise-regional hack. He carried the collective angst of New England's sports fans to a world that was otherwise able to ignore it. This is where his love of TV and pop culture comes in. Sure, everyone knows about Ken Burns and his 17-hour exegesis of the 1986 World Series Game Six Collapse, where all of Boston's literary icons pompously left the R's out of words describing their heartbreak. But to the average sports fan who doesn't watch PBS or listen to NPR, here came Bill Simmons writing about "The World's Strongest Man" and "The Real World." The teams from his hometown were losers: it had been 14 years (in 2000) since the Celtics had won a championship, seemingly cursed with the deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Williams, and Rick Pitino trying to murder the franchise; the Curse of the Bambino was in full effect; the Patriots were losers who had never won anything.

Then, a couple of things happened. Walt Coleman created a Patriots Dynasty. The Red Sox came back from a 4-0 deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and went on to win their first World Series since 1918. And now the Celtics got Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and have the best record in the NBA. It's quite conceivable that Boston could have all three major sports championships, which would be not only impressive but downright fucking irritating to the rest of the country. With all of this success, Simmons' Boston columns went from being anxious rants to obnoxious, gloating rants. And I don't blame him, I just don't enjoy reading them.

The 86 Celtics vs. 2007 Pats is the perfect example of this new, arrogant Boston Sports Guy. First of all, nobody outside of New England remembers anything about that 1986 Celtics team, except maybe that Len Bias died, and because of him black kids get sent to jail for longer terms over crack than white businessmen get sent to jail for having the same amount of cocaine powder. He writes that the defending champion Lakers team allowed themselves to be be "'shocked' by the upstart Rockets -- with Sampson making the series-winning shot in Game 5 at Los Angeles -- to avoid what would have been a ritual beating by an unstoppable Celtics team." This is a bunch of crap. That Lakers team would rebound the following and beat the Celtics, and then repeat in 1988 for the first back-to-back NBA Championship in 20 years. Sure, people remember the 80s as the golden age of the NBA, and Lakers vs. Celtics was the main reason. But outside of New England, only racist white people rooted for the Celtics. And no matter what anyone from Boston tells you, that is the absolute truth. One summer in 1988, my friends and I were playing ball down at the local school yard. We were like 13 or 14 and there was this older man, probably in his mid-forties, and his son, who was 19 or twenty. We played with them because we need two to make it four on four, enough for a full court game on the short courts. When the older guy asked what team we were, I said the Lakers, and he said, "The Lakers are a bunch of Niggers. You want to root for white people. Be the Celtics." His son was kinda embarrassed, I think, because when we were talking later he said, "I like McHale, but I bet you'd rather be Worthy..."

Besides, it was Magic who joined Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline "They Dominated the Eighties."

Now, this Patriots is dominant. And they're probably good enough not be beyond Jinxing by Bill Simmons' column. But if you were going to write a column comparing a dominant team in one sport to a dominant team in another, wouldn't it be the 1996 Bulls team that won 70 games and had All Stars up and down the roster? Brady and Moss compare better to MJ and Scottie Pippen, with Rodney Harrisons' Punk Ass analogous to Dennis Rodman's Punk Ass. I'm just saying.

Anyway, in what is either a blatant ripoff of one of my favorite writers, or, if you're generous, an homage to someone I admire, here's an email I got from the Professor the other day that will segue into my picks:

Subject: Your Daughter and Your Dog are Disgusting

Lily pooped in her panties, which I noticed after she came into the kitchen and told me "poop!" She had a big old saggy load. I pulled off her panties right there in the kitchen and the turd log fell out onto the floor in front of the fridge. I took her into the bathroom to wipe and wash hands. In the meantime, Iggy smelled a tasty treat and hopped out of bed to go have himself a snack. By the time I turned around, he'd eaten half of Lily's turd. I yelled at him to quit it and he ran away, but it was like he had peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth that he kept trying to swallow but couldn't. He's outside now, washing his mouth out with soap. Fucking disgusting.

I'm running away from home today. You can raise these two yourself.

I should point out that we're potty training, which is why Baby Lily was not wearing a diaper. But the reason this email is relevant is because having to choose between the Patriots and the Chargers is akin to having poop stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. I can't think of two teams I hate more (I hate Denver and Kansas City as much). Anyway, I think New England wins but it's closer than everyone expects. 27-20.

Green Bay wins. I have to go. This has gone on too long and people are becoming exasperated with me.