Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: Photo Day

After a few days in which there were no stories dumb enough to warrant a DSBHM post, we here at the GRBG were all set to give some rare praise to the mainstream media. In years past, the flow of media effluent started pretty much the moment that the conference championship game winners came down off of their Percocet buzzes. But this year the media seemed happy to wait until Super Bowl week, a move which would bring some much-needed sanity to the Super Bowl hype process.

Then Photo-gate broke out.

For those unaware, a very, very mild controversy erupted last week around whether the Green Bay Packers were trying to exclude players on injured reserve from appearing in the team's Super Bowl photo, presumably because the injured guys wanted to go with the cool laser background, while the team wanted to go with the more modest "pool of light on a black background" option.

above at left: LAZ3Rz!!!

Then the Packers decided to let everyone be in the picture AND throw in a free wallet-size potrait to those who registered in advance, and everything was cool.

Except somehow it wasn't, because Green Bay's gravy-brained QB, Aaron Rodgers, for some reason decided to dredge the whole thing up again by taking his injured teammates to task for not being around more, we guess because if they'd have been around, they'd have gotten the photo day message in their cubbies after snack. So now we're apparently supposed to believe that there is enough dissention within the ranks in Green Bay that it will somehow affect their performance on Sunday.

We've debunked the dissention meme before around here, so we won't bother doing it again. But what really irked us about this meme is the way it was presented on SportsCenter this morning. ESPN talking neck Sal Paolantonio all but winked his way through his report, trying to acknowledge the ridiculousness of the story while further fanning its flames. This is the sort of cutesy stuff that droves us bonkers, because it involves an implication that ESPN is smarter than its audience. The attitude that comes across is "We know this is stupid, but so are you, so sit there and take it." It is, but we're not and we won't. Knock it off.

For getting Super Bowl week off to just the wrong start, we're giving this meme an 8 on the hype scale. If this keeps up, we'll have worn the Mute button right off of our remote by Wednesday.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: B.J. Raji is Fat

The formula for the players being covered at the Championship Games and Super Bowl is pretty set in stone. The media will lionize the quarterbacks, praise the running backs, criticize the loud-mouth wide receiver, find some quiet lineman that exemplifies a stoic work ethic, dig up someone who's on the road to redemption and renewal, laud someone who's been nice to a dying child, and cross their fingers that someone says something stupid, or even better, solicits sex from an off-duty cop. Most years, the media find someone that they're going to crown their "darling"--past examples have included Steve Young, Jerome Bettis, Kurt Warner, both Mannings, and of course, Tom Brady. This year' early media darling is something of a sleeper...

...Packers' defensive tackle B.J. Raji. A google of articles related to Mr. Raji returns no fewer than 15,000 screeds written either about him or including him. That's a lot for a guy who was pretty much unknown to the general public until he intercepted a Caleb Hanie pass and ran it in for a score last Sunday. Sure, he was a first round pick in '09 and made the Pro Bowl this year, but c'mon, what percentage of America knows about a nose tackle in Wisconsin? 6%?

The overwhelming amount of coverage given to Raji has been positive, and it's all been about roughly what you would expect:

• Raji is an up-and-coming star in the NFL for a team in the Super Bowl, and is someone you should know;
  
• Raji made a great play picking off a guy who had thrown fewer than 10 NFL passes and running it in for a touchdown on Sunday;
  
• Raji was lucky that nobody knocked the ball out of his hands on the way to the end zone, making him the next Leon Lett; and
  
• Raji has an creative touchdown dance.
  

These all basically are newsworthy because of a plain and obvious fact: B.J. Raji is very, very big. Officially clocking in at 337 lbs--a number we're officially calling into question--Raji isn't quite the massive tub of fat that Terrence Cody is (right), but is the logical heir apparent to The Fridge, Gilbert Brown, Tony Siragusa, and all those lovable fatsos that have played in Super Bowls in the past. Suffice to say that if Raji was built like, say, Shawn Ellis, we wouldn't be seeing this much coverage of him. Heck, William Gay had a defensive touchdown on Sunday, and nobody is talking about him.

So if Raji worthy of all this praise, discussion, adulation, and in some respects, mocking because he weighs as much as a Harley? Well, if the articles were praising his play or saying how he'd impact the Super Bowl, sure. Alas, most of them aren't going into that; they're either retrospectives of his fun touchdown against the Bears, his dancing skills, or his girth. And that's all fine and good because he is a player in the game...but it's a chance for the media to discuss how he'll impact the game itself. Which, for the most part, it's not doing. More than anything else, it's using him as a prop for comedy or just character analysis.

Because this theme is about a guy in the game and there are traces of stories that are relevant to the game, we'll give this a 5 out of 10 for now. If there's still no real discussion of how Raji's hidden quickness will impede Pittsburgh's running game in the next 10 days, we reserve the right to bump this up a notch or two.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: The Bears and Jets Lost, Right?

In compiling our hype memes, we often find it valuable to take a look at espn.com's NFL page, which generally serves as a fine snapshot of what memes are lumbering down the precise middle of the media road. But we were taken somewhat aback by today's landing page:

To summarize, here is a breakdown of the linked articles by most featured team:

Chicago Bears (4) (plus a lead photograph depicting the overwhelming tristesse of Jay Cutler)
New York Jets (2.5)
Green Bay Packers (2)
New England Patriots (1.5)
Cincinnati Motherforgetting Bengals (1)
Johnny Depp as a Cartoon Lizard (1)

Deploying the fourth-grade math at our collective disposal, this means that the losers of last weekend's conference championship games somehow generated more than three times the stories as the winners did. Also, apparently the Pittsburgh Steelers franchise has been contracted by the league. We'd have thought that story would merit a mention, but perhaps ESPN is just saving it for the third hour of Cold Pizza.

Those inclined to be pro-mass-media (which at this point consists of about 20% of the people actually working in the mass media, and a slightly larger percentage of those people's mothers) can spin this as a positive thing: the media is holding off on saturation coverage of the Super Bowl participants until we get closer to the day.

But surely there must be something to say about these teams that trumps speculation surrounding the future of the (unfortunately) second-greatest Heisman QB of the last 25 years. Here, we'll get things started: can someone write something informative and revealing about Mike Tomlin, who has conquered more of his chosen world at a younger age than anyone since Alexander the Great (who, like Tomlin, had trouble beating patriots)?

Listen, no one is more grateful than we are that the hype has started off soft. Our teeth are pre-gritted for all the Ben Roethlisberger-is-great-because-he-no-longer-rapes-(as-much) stories. But whether the media is ignoriong the game by focusing on drivel like that, or ignoring the game by simply IGNORING THE GAME, it's still going down the wrong track. Still, though, we'll be kind and give today's espn.com front page a 5 on the meme scale, because we're expecting the deluge any second now.

No Means No, Mr. Kenny

We're loathe to pile on ESPN, as there are plenty of other blogs out there already dedicated to ESPN bashing, and most of which are better written than this one. That said, we would be doing a disservice to humanity if we failed to note the "interview" of Chris Mortensen by Brian Kenny that ran during the 6:00 P.M. eastern SportsCenter on Thursday. The interview concerned the report that former New England Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh has provided the NFL with additional videotapes of opponents' signals.

To us, the interview and evinces either a mindless determination by Kenny to continue hyping the story in the face of Mortensen's calm recitation of the facts, or a signal failure by an ESPN intern to brief Kenny on anything resembling the factual background of the story. Either way the interview looked like it killed whatever was left of Mortensen's respect for his employer.

Serious notes before we begin: What follows is a partial transcript of the interview. It includes everything but the last part of the last answer by Mortensen, which related to league rule changes and which we cut to save space. We have not otherwise altered the content of the transcript. However, as with any transcript, other listeners might have differently chosen to punctuate or add indications of emphasis or parenthetical clarifications.

It's lengthy, but hang in there. As an incentive, we'll do before and after shots of the increasingly beleaguered Mortensen. Here's the before, with Mort looking wary, but resolute:


Brian Kenny: We're joined now by our own Chris Mortensen. Mort, Commissioner Roger Gooddell had said that he could consider further punishment against the Patriots. These are [tapes of] different games, and there's film now of offensive and defensive signals--is this enough now to open it up?

Chris Mortensen: No. Not based on what we know from the letter of certification Matt Walsh's attorney sent the league. The tapes are now in the league's offices . . . league hands, being reviewed.

But we need to go back and maybe make sure chronologically that we understand that, number 1, the NFL always had information that this taping took place back through 2000. There's no new revelation there. And if you go back to the September 13th release when Belichick was penalized as well as the Patriots, you will see in there that it covers offensive and defensive signals.

So, therefore, unless Matt Walsh has some new testimony that he can corroborate outside of these tapes, there's no new information. And let's don't forget that Belichick admitted to the commissioner that he had been doing this since he'd been in New England.

BK: Going back to 2000, then?

CM: Absolutely, yeah. We reported it. We reported that first week of Spygate that Belichick had admitted that. So, that's not necessarily . . . that's not a new revelation.

BK: Mort, how will the teams that were taped--especially the Steelers, in a conference championship game--take all this?

CM: Well, again, when Commissioner Gooddell met with Arlen Specter, the senator from Pennsylvania, he briefed him on on what were in the notes in addition to the tapes they had, because the notes dated back to 2000, and in those notes, as Gooddell told Specter in their meeting, it included these Pittsburgh Steeler AFC Championship games in '01 and '04. The Boston Globe reported that on February 16th, and then Dan Rooney, the Pittsburgh Steeler's owner and chairman of their board released a statement saying 'there is nothing in the tapes of our coaching signals that would have an impact on the games, and it is no issue with us.'

So, so far I'd say all that damage control has been done.

BK: Walsh says he does not have the Rams 2002 Super Bowl walkthrough tape--that's a potential smoking gun that's been reported out there. Do you think it wasn't done, or that Walsh doesn't have a tape of it, because Walsh hasn't spoken to the commissioner yet.

CM: Well, let's also remember that the only report concerning the Rams' walkthrough, Matt Walsh was never named as the guy who allegedly videotaped it. And he's never said he's had it, and I think that's one thing commissioner Gooddell really wants to speak with [Walsh] about on Tuesday is, OK, even though you were identified, this thing lingered out there a couple of months, why didn't you clarify this, why did you let this thing linger?

And so, if Walsh has information, and he can identify another videotape assistant who videotaped that Rams walkthrough, that'd be one thing. But right now there's no evidence there is such a videotape.

BK: Mort, does this change anything though around the league as far as how Bill Belichick should be viewed, now that there's this hard evidence on precisely what they were doing and it's a pattern that goes back to 2000?

CM: Not around--it doesn't change the perception around the league; everyone knows Belichick's been doing--he admitted that he'd been doing it. [Remainder of answer cut for length.]

* * *

Gee whiz, Brian, you think maybe there's no story here? Christ. Did Belichick sleep with his wife as well? Kenny better hope that Buzz Bissinger doesn't get hold of this transcript, or he's likely to bite off Kenny's ear. In any event, somebody should put Mortensen on a suicide alert--here's the "after" shot:


We all feel you, Mort. Drinks on us next time you make it out Gowanus way.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: Weather and the Patriots

In his most recent podcast, Bill Simmons joins the parade of journalists speculating that the warm weather in Phoenix will favor the Patriots' high-powered passing offense, and contribute to a Pats win. There is certainly a meme out there, amongst both analysts and fans, that holds that the Patriots passing attack has slowed down as the weather has gotten colder this year. But do the numbers back that up?

To find out, we've put together a chart showing Tom Brady's passing yards in each game, along with the weather conditions during that game as recorded in the official NFL gamebook:

Right away, Brady's big games in cold weather at Buffalo and against Philadelphia and Pittsburgh jump out--the cold weather didn't appear to have slowed Brady down much in those games (as least as measured by his yardage output). Similarly, the Pats' sack-drowning of Washington took place on one of the windier days of the season.

It's certainly true that, in general, Brady's passing yards are down since December. But given the big games Brady had in cold weather earlier in the year, it doesn't seem to makes much sense to chalk that up to the weather. Rather, a combination of opponents who were both fired-up and determined to cut down on the deep ball, and the Patriots' consquent increased focus on Laurence Maroney and the running game have combined to pull down Brady's ever so slightly.

So what does all this mean for the Super Bowl? Well, probably very little. It's true that the Super Bowl will likely be played in better weather than New England's other playoff games, or its previous game against the Giants--based on weather.com, it will probably be in the low 60's at kickoff.

But even if you ignore the above chart and assume that the Patriots do pass better in warm weather, it's tough to believe that the 15-20 degree difference between the first Giants game and the Super Bowl could have a measurable effect on the Pats--it's not as though it's going to be 85 out there. Moreover, given how well Brady threw the ball in the first game, it's tough to imagine that there's a whole lot of marginal upside for him in this game--exactly how many more yards can he throw for over and above the 355 he hung on New York last time?

So, for all of the above reasons, this meme doesn't pass the sniff test. Give it an A- for effort, but a D for accuracy. We figure that works out to about an 8 on the hype scale. Sorry, Bill.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: The '72 Dolphins

As yesterday and today were travel days for this year's Super Bowl teams, reporters were even more starved than usual for column inch fodder. So, as has happened repeatedly over the course of this season, reporters turned their grateful dictaphones towards various members of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins, in the mistaken impression that anyone is interested in Larry Csonka's thoughts on anything besides proper joust technique.
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Zonk and the other members of that Dolphin team have been eating out for free on that season for more than 35 years now, but have really stepped up their collective game in the face of the Patriots' recent run. The Dolphins' reactions have run the spectrum from classy (cornerback Tim Foley complimenting the Pats' teamwork), to beligerent (Mercury Morris delusionally belittling New England), to frankly sorry (Don Shula damn near soiling himself on national television while rooting against the Pats against Baltimore). That said, most of the coverage has focused on the fact that the Dolphins are only grudgingly prepared to share the spotlight with another undefeated team.

But leave the specifics of their reactions aside and go back to the fundamental question that should be asked of all these pre-Super Bowl stories: Who the f%$# cares?

Learning what the 1972 Dolphins think of the Patriots does nothing to affect our understanding of the game of football in general, the Giants-Patriots matchup in particular, or even our understanding of any of the players who will play in the SB this year. Unless Bob Kuchenberg is planning to pull a Woody Hayes at some point (and we wouldn't put it past him), all these stories show is how easily the press can form symbiotic relationships with anyone or anything that might provide them with a story angle. Mercury Morris could light himself on fire outside the Delano tomorrow, and it would no effect whatsoever on this year's Super Bowl.


So lets let poor Mercury slide gracefully into the narcotized oblivion that swallows most former NFL players. and stop asking for his opinion on anything other than mustache styling. We'll all be better off for it, and maybe the press could get back to writing about, you know, the teams that are actually playing this year's game. Give this one a 5 on the hype scale. And remember, tomorrow we all bear witness to the skull-humping that is Media Day! Starting loading up on Advil now.

Super Bowl Hype Memes: This Was The Week That Was

For an explanation of the Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme, click here.

For those looking for a Cliff's Notes version of the week in insane and/or irrelevant Super Bowl hype memes, allow us to bring you up to speed:

• People from New York don't like sports teams from Boston, (except for the 50% of the city that doesn't care);

• The Giants play well on the road (except it turns out that they really play well against bad teams);

• Tom Brady is hurt (except he isn't);

• Tiki Barber and Jeremy Shockey are terrible human beings (except they really just aren't very good football players);

• Lots of people will watch the Super Bowl (except they'll only watch because they think everyone else will watch).

Tune in next week as the hype machine goes into overdrive!

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: Neilsen and Schrodinger

Recent articles on espn.com, and Yahoo! (among others) have been dedicated to speculation that this year's Giants-Patriots Super Bowl will be a Neilsen ratings bonanza, possibly even the most-watched Super Bowl of all-time.

at right: a highly-rated Neilsen

The premise of the articles is tough to dispute (popular large market teams + history on the line + Tom Brady is dreamy = cash in your pocket), However, the two big questions (one frivolous, one fundamental) raised by the article might be more interesting. To wit:
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1. Are there really people who are only occasional viewers of the Super Bowl?

According to the espn.com article, last year's Super Bowl between Indianapolis and Chicago was seen by about 93 million people. It goes on to speculate without a lot of detail as to methodology) that this year's viewership could top 100 million.

So where the hell were those 7 million people last year? Do they lack both friends and televisions? Do they hate both beer and hot wings? Are they somehow ordinarily averse to the spectacle of chemically-enhanced mogoloids running around crippling each other? In short, are they not entertained?

Could it be true that about 7% of Americans are terrified enough of falling behind the cultural curve that they will tune in to a game about which they do not care simply because they understand it to be more popular than usual? Sounds about right to us.

Our theory here at the GRBG is that these additional people will watch this year's Super Bowl mainly because articles like those cited above have told them in advance that everyone else will be watching.

In other words, the mere act of writing about the popularity of the game will cause that popularity to change. To the extent that dead cats and sportswriting can overlap, they have done so here.

above: an awesome illustration of Schrodinger's Box, from http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/ardlouis/

That's what makes this such a genius meme: it's self-fulfilling in a way that a prediction about the game itself could never be. But that clever bit of reality invention by the articles doesn't address the second, more fundamental question they raise, which is . . .

2. Who f#$%ing cares?

That's a pretty big question--in fact, it's arguably the big question for any piece of journalism. At the most basic level, when you sit down to write an article for a sports website, it seems as though you'd try to touch in some meaningful way on, well, sports. Yet somebody was (presumably) paid to write an article describing the popularity of a game, rather than the game itself.

As such, these articles are the opening salvo in an expected week-long barrage of meta-coverage of the Super Bowl. (We recognize that this blog is arguably also such meta-coverage; however, we're not passing our posts off as actual news, while the mainstream meta-coverage still presents itself as something other than mass media onanism.) As the football-related angles dry up to the point where hardcore fans long for the halcyon days of boot p0rn, writers are reduced to covering the coverage of the game, rather than covering the game itself.

This is an abomination to the true sports fan, with the notable exception of the official Super Bowl media day, which has now been anti-hyped to the point where it may, in first-order terms, be underappreciated. But more on that next week. For the time being, let's give a solid 7 to writing about watching.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: Addition by Subtraction

It's difficult to think of two sports columnists as far apart on the intellectual spectrum as the New York Post's Mike Vaccaro and espn.com's Gregg Easterbrook. Yet Vaccaro and TMQ (among others) have come out with columns advancing the meme that the recent retirement of/injury to Tiki Barber and Jeremy Shockey have helped galvanize the Giants into their Super Bowl appearance this year. Barber and Shockey are posited to be great but selfish players who threw off the delicate chemistry of the Giants' locker room. Does this make even a damn bit of sense?

Well, no. Not really. Because Barber and Shockey weren't that great to begin with.
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This meme has the same funadamental flaw as many barstool sportsman arguments, which is that it incorrectly conflates correllation (i.e., the loss of Barber and Shockey coming at roughly the same time as the Giants Super Bowl run) with causation (i.e., the loss of those two players is the reason why the Super Bowl run has happened). This is large in part because the media has underestimated the relative effectiveness of Barber and Shockey versus their replacements. Here are the invaluable Football Outsiders DVOA rushing ratings for Barber and his replacement:
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'06 Tiki Barber:

8.0% (21st in the league)

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'07 Brandon Jacobs:

16.3% (14th in the league)
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Briefly, DVOA measures the per-play effect of a player on his team's chances to succeed. By that measure, Brandon Jacobs was nearly twice as valuable this year as Barber was last year. So the simplest explanation here is not that Barber's personality was hurting the team; it's that his play wasn't doing as much to help the team as Jacobs's does. What about Shockey, you ask? Let's look at the DVOA receiving ratings:
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'07 Jeremy Shockey:

1.8% (25th in the league)

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'07 Kevin Boss:

50.9 % (not enough playing time to qualify for rankings)
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Let's acknowlege up front that this comparison is slightly unfair--Kevin Boss's rankings are grossly inflated by his TD catch against New England in week 17, and it's tough to imagine that he could keep that pace up for a full season. That said, Shockey's numbers are mediocre enough that it's likely not a tough a job to improve on him. These numbers also don't take into account blocking, where my admittedly amateur eye thinks Boss has an additional advantage. So again, it's not that Shockey's attitude sucks; it's that his play sucks.

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For further proof of the relative importance of talent versus character, by the way, look no further than the Patriots, who have assembled recent teams around noted malcontents such as Corey Dillon and Randy Moss, and come through the experience looking pretty darn good indeed.

So the writers of the world don't need to try to peer into the walnut-sized brains of our nation's sporting elite to try to explain away the absences of Barber and Shockey. All that's needed is an accurate valuation of of their relative worth and an understanding of the bedrock principle that teams with good players are better than teams with bad players. For all of the above, give this meme a 7.5 on the hype scale.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: Das Boot

For an explanation of the Super Bowl Hype Meme of the Day, click here.

BRISTOL, Connecticut: By nearly any measure, former New York Times Review of Books editor and current ESPN.com ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber has had a remarkable journalistic career. Sadly, that career came to an abrupt end Tuesday night, when Ms. Schreiber passed away in her home in Connecticut while watching ESPN SportsCenter's coverage of Patriot quarterback Tom Brady's ankle injury. One witness attributes Ms. Schreiber's death to "her damn head exploding," though doctors are officially attributing the passing to "a rapid pressure change in Ms. Schreiber's intracranial cavity."

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The boot, the boot, oh my God, the freaking boot. For those who are still somehow blissfully unaware, Tom Brady was photographed on Monday wearing a protective boot/walking cast on his right foot. The photographs show him wearing the boot as he walks up a flight of stairs into his girlfriend Gisele Bundchen's place in Manhattan. Other photographs taken later that night show him walking without the boot, which was presumably removed at Gisele's in order to facilitate her licking whipped cream off of Tom's toes. End of story, right?

Any other week, absolutely. But during Super Bowl bye week, with baseball and college football gone, college basketball not really going yet, and the NHL and NBA in the boring middle of their regular-season slogs? Gold!

So SportsCenter reacted accordingly, eliciting the opinions of: (1 & 2) both anchormen; (3) ESPN analyst John Clayton; (4) Giants' defensive end Justin Tuck; (5) Brady's father; (6) an unnamed Brady teammate; (7) an official Patriots' spokesperson; and (8) ESPN analyst and former QB Ron Jaworski on the issue. Every single one of them said that the purported "injury" wasn't a big deal, and would have no impact on the game next week. After the first two people expressed that opinion, I was inclined to agree. Certainly no later than four guys in, I was convinced. Pontificators 5-8 caused my left eye to begin twitching, and were no doubt the cause of Ms. Schreiber's unfortunate demise.

Jaworksi needs to be singled out for special scrutiny here. Let me make clear at the outset that nobody on television knows more football than Jaws, and he is a generally a favorite of us here at the GRBG.

But during Jaws' segment, he gleefully admitted to having watched every New England offensive snap against San Diego at least 10 times in an effort to identify the moment the injury occurred. At no point was it explained why the hell it mattered when the injury occurred if it would have no impact on the Super Bowl. Regardless, Jaws carried on, running the film slower and slower, until he was finally able to find the precise instant that the second shot hit former Texas Governor John Connally. Also, Jaws thinks Brady rolled his ankle in the first quarter.

Honestly, mocking this is a little too easy, like shooting Super Bowl hype memes in a barrel. Even the ESPN guys seemed to realize the ridiculousness of their saturation coverage, but seemed powerless to stop it. Plus, a real injury to Brady would be a legitimate topic of discussion. So we'll take a little pity here and split the Meme Scale grade: 3 for the subject; 9.8 for the execution. I'm holding back on the perfect 10 only because these idiots have another week and and half to come up with something even worse.

Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme: Boston vs. New York

For an explanation of the Super Bowl Meme of the Day, click here.

Yankees versus Red Sox! Tomatoes versus no tomatoes! Comical accents versus . . . other comical accents! But Giants versus Patriots? Is the Super Bowl really a New York/Boston rivalry game, as suggested by John Buccigross on SportsCenter this morning? Let's run the numbers.

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Yes, in many ways Boston versus New York is a true rivalry. Boston has long envied New York's usurpation of Boston's place in the financial and commercial world; New York has long been intensely annoyed by Boston continuing to consider itself the center of the universe despite that usurpation.

And it's also true that Boston has been getting the better of New York in many ways recently, from the recent dominance of the Red Sox and Celtics, to the installation of a Bostonian as mayor of New York City, to (SPOILER ALERT) the fact that the mysterious creature that destroys lower Manhattan in the movie Cloverfield turns out to be an giant, irradiated, developmentally challenged 11 year-old from Swampscott, Mass.

But how does that have fuck-all to do with a Patriots-Giants Super Bowl matchup?

The real NY/Boston football rivalry is between the Pats and the Jets, who play in the same conference and division. The Giants and Patriots only play each other once every four years, and even then nobody cares--scores of Giants fans sold their tickets to this year's game to day-tripping Patriots fans intent on seeing the completion of a perfect regular season in person. Can you imagine Yankee fans doing the same thing in the same situation?

The big problem with this meme is that it treats New York sports fans as a monolithic entity. In fact there are many sub-species of New York fan, many of whom hate each other, and many of whom couldn't care less about any potential rivalry game between the Giants and Pats. Because we here at the GRBG are nothing if not sticklers for precision in socio-athletic taxonomy, here is a breakdown of the four main species of New York fan:

Giantus Steinbrennerian

Roots for the Giants and Yankees, the two most popular teams in the region. This sub-species includes both front-running locals and casual arriviste sports fans who can't be arsed to seek out coverage of the less popular franchises. The former can be identified by their mustaches; the latter by their late arrivals and constant Blackberry use. This is the group most likely to care about this Super Bowl, as their Yankee roots cause their hatred of Boston to bleed over into football.

Testaverde Zeilonius

Roots for the Jets and Mets. Includes those who can only afford to buy remaindered sports gear, those attracted to lost causes, and people in Queens. The easiest way to identify t. zeilonius is to mention the name of a former Met or Jet player; if an answering call of anguish immediately follows, you've made a positive ID. This group is actually likely to root for the Patriots in this Super Bowl, out of a combination of antipathy for the Giants and a Stockholm Syndrome-like identification with their Patriot tormentors.

Freemanious Jeteratops

Roots for the Jets and Yankees. Characterized by wild mood swings, as the smug self-certainty of baseball season gives way to the free-floating anxiety of football season. Identifiable from their nesting patterns on Long Island. Were planning to root heavily against the Patriots, until the fucking Giants somehow got to the Super Bowl again, goddammit.

Giffordius Minayan

Roots for the Giants and Mets. Only rarely observed in nature, these reclusive creatures nearly all came of age as sports fans in the mid-'80's when both franchises were good at the same time. They have nothing in particular against Boston, but would like to finally see one of their teams win something as it's been since..., well, the mid-'80's.

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So there you have it--out of the four main sub-species, only one will really view this as a rivalry game. So not only will this meme irritate the rest of the country by forcing more Boston/NY talk down their throats, it's also flatly wrong. For all of the above reasons, this meme gets a 7 on the pre-Super Bowl Story Desparation Scale. Try again, guys.

New Feature: The Daily Super Bowl Hype Meme

EDIT--links to each daily meme will be added below.

The bye week that typically falls between conference championship Sunday and the Super Bowl has destroyed more sportswriting minds than bourbon and syphillis put together. Writers have to pull thirteen days worth of storylines out of what is, at the end of the day, just the prospect of two groups of cutting-edge pharmacological freaks destroying their joints for our collective amusement.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, writers are desperate to find any sort of angle or unifying theme that will let them re-hash the same old matchup in a new way. Every day, someone in the media comes up with such an angle, which is then immediately seized upon by the rest of the media in order to stoke the figurative content furnace. Thus is born a meme.

The problem, of course, is that nearly all of these memes are powerfully, powerfully stupid. Which is where we at the GRBG come in.

Each weekday between now and the SB, we will catalog and test a meme that has bubbled up from the shallow end of the sports media gene pool, to see where it falls on the scale of Super Bowl hype ridiculousness (where a "1" is a discussion of whether the aggressive upfield pass rush of the Giants' defensive ends will leave them vulnerable to draw runs by Laurence Maroney, and "10" is any coverage of what Gisele Bundchen plans to wear to the game).

So check back frequently over the next few weeks, as we all slowly lose our minds. Cheers!

Monday, January 21st: Boston vs. New York/NY Fan Taxonomy
Tuesday, January 22d: The Giants as Road Warriors
Wednesday, January 23d: Brady's Boot
Thursday, January 24th: Addition by Subtraction
Friday, January 25th: Writing About Watching

Monday, January 28th: The '72 Dolphins
Tuesday, January 29th: The Pats Are the Best Ever
Wednesday, January 30th: The Devolution of Media Day
Thursday, January 31st: Cold Weather and the Patriots
Friday, February 1st: Arlen Specter is High on Drugs

Tremendous Week for Fantasy Screw Jobs

We don't talk a lot of fantasy football here, and that's okay, we're the GRBG, not the GRFG. (We'll ignore the fact that this permits us to take detours into the lands of horse racing, soccer, and Boston politics.) But this week is too good to not mention the fantastic week of middle fingers foisted at fantasy football players this week. For those in conventional FFB leagues, this is playoffs time, and probably a semi-finals week. The time that you've been building towards. The time that your draft was intended to culminate at. And what happens? Let's look at, in reverse order, the five largest asshole moves that happened today to kill playoff berths:

#5: Joseph Addai. Now granted, this could happen any week: a fantasy back draws a tough matchup, and just doesn't have a big day when you need him to. But Addai had moved into the premier echelon of fantasy RB's this year. And he was playing Oakland. AT Oakland. Unlike the entire East coast, there was no snow in Oakland. So they're playing an awful team....great, right? NO. Somehow, he only manages 77 yards on 20 touches today, and even his garbage two-point conversion can't save the fact that he didn't get in the end zone. Bad timing, Guiseppe.

#4: Tony Romo. Many a surprise contender this year was built around Mr. Simpson's blossoming into an elite player. Not only did The Ribs Guy pull off a 3-pick performance against a crappy Iggles team, he broke his thumb. Oops. Even if you survived your game with Tony today, you're not happy about next week's prospects of a guy with 9 digits.

#3: Tom Brady. Let's look at Tom Brady's score lines this year in a conventional league: 23-21-26-19-22-33-36-35-19-34-20-17-31. He's having arguably the greatest fantasy QB year ever. And week 15 presents a gift that Brady owners were salivating for weeks in advance: home against the Jets. So what intervenes? Hurricane Freaking Zelda. The nor'easter that hammered the entire East coast took out his passing game and rendered him useless. No TDs, bad INTs, and no garbage yards on the ground. Just 3 measley points. In the playoff week.

#2: Tampa Bay Defense. This wasn't a curse if you had it, this was a curse if you faced it. There isn't a single person that is taking Tampa seriously this year, and with good reason. Still, there was some merit to having them against the Falcons. Then Petrino quit. Uh oh. And then lo and behold, they pull off the ultimate f-you: they ran back their first kickoff for a touchdown. EVER. As my buddy emailed me today: "Tampa's Defense is killing me single-handedly. Are we using 2002 stats?"

Losing to a Tampa runback should have you hit #1. But it doesn't, and that's thanks to.....

#1: Brian Westbrook. Paint the picture for a second: Iggles up by 4, two minute warning is about to hit, Cowboys have no timeouts. Westbrook breaks free for a run straight at the end zone. Free money! No! He intelligently (for real football) takes a knee at the 1, enabling the Eagles to kneel out the game and not have to kick it off again. That's super. That's great. That's 6 points you cost half a billion Westbrook owners, and probably about 50,000 league titles as a result. Thanks for nothing, buddy.

If You'd Like To Know Why We Don't Write More About Football . . .

The Jets head to Foxborough this weekend to endure what most people assume will be an epic face-sitting at the hands of the Patriots. (For the record, I have this down as a closer game than that, with a final score in the 23-14 range.) Regardless, the tension of waiting between the hammer and the anvil appears to have gotten to the good folks over at The Gang Green, one of the most prominent Jets fan message boards.

If you have an hour or so on your hands and are interested in a full-spectrum tour of the depths of the human spirit, we strongly encourage you to read this thread previewing the upcoming game. For those looking for the lazy-man's lobster version of the same, allow us to present our top 3 choices for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Batshittedness:

3. "KurtTheJetsFan" contributes this burst of holiday spirit:

I would rather Tom Brady get injured than us win the game.

There..I said it.
__________________
It's Official: The Patriots have ruined the NFL

That post is even better if you imagine that "KurtTheJetsFan" is Kurt Warner. We suppose it's unlikely, but we can dream.

2. "allan1" pines for the days when the NFL was about the love:

The Patriots are due for some serious bad karmic juju, we have to be the team to deliver it. And I mean seriously bad, like hopefully brady gets both legs broke and belichicken suffers a stroke or something.

it started with us and it has to end with us...and it has to end sometime. This version of the Patriots is nothing more than a bunch of mercenaries [emphasis added]

Yes, it's a shame that more of the Pats' players didn't come up through their farm system. We've no doubt that former Toledo MudJet Chad Pennington will stick around as a backup once his contract expires in order to repay the goodwill he's received from Jets fans through the years.

And our clear winner comes from . . .

1. "ollie" in response to a post from a Pats fan [ed. note--edited in an attempt to avoid offense and filters; original NSFW]:

You better pray there's not such thing a karma, f-----t.

Any other fan of another team would have been embarrassed by what your team was CAUGHT doing after specifically being warned by the league not to do it.
But not you Massc--ts. You're too stupid for humility, which is really why you're the joke of the nation.

Ollie, we think we speak for all of us out here in the land of objectively shared reality when we say that you desperately need a hobby. Maybe start with some needlepoint, work your way up to macrame? Scrapbooking can be quite relaxing--you could start with your mentions in the police log of your local paper!

That really troubling last post aside, we're sure you could find similarly asinine posts on a Pats' website. We're not sure what it is about football that makes rational discussion nearly impossible, but other than the guys from Football Outsiders, it's pretty bleak out there.

So try to play nice this weekend, OK, boys and girls? Try to keep in mind that the very large men you are rooting for or against do not care about you at all. They are happy to make some money off of your combined presence, but their interest in you as an individual human being falls in a range from "Zero" to "What's her cup size?" Act accordingly.

The Best Sixth Round Ever?

There's an article in Saturday's New York Times concerning Tom Brady, who, as we well know, was pick #199 in the 2000 draft, and was the 7th quarterback taken. Which obviously leads to the question: who were the other humps taken before him? Let's examine the QBs taken that draft:

#18: Chad Pennington, NY Jets. You can't say this was a bad pick, as he's had a decent career with Gang Green, it just pales in comparison to what came later.

#65: Giovanni Carmazzi, San Fran. Oops. Lesson learned: only draft Hofstra WR's.

#75: Chris Redman, Baltimore Ravens. This pick was so similar to Browning Nagle (getting thumped, left) from the outset, it's pretty funny.

#163: Tee Martin, Pittsburgh Steelers. The Troy Smith of 2000.

#168: Marc Bulger, New Orleans Saints. This was a tremendous pick obviously, though he never took a snap for the team that drafted him. Great job giving him away for a box of donuts, 'Aints.

#183: Spergeon Wynn, Cleveland Browns. The only QB that could have given Tim Couch job security.

#199: Tom Brady, New England Patriots. No explanation necessary.

After Brady: Tom Husak (Washington); JaJuan Seider (San Diego); Tim Rattay (San Fran); Jarious Jackson (Denver); Joe Not Joey Hamilton (Tampa Bay). Outside of Rattay, I'm not sure if there was a single snap taken by any of these guys in the NFL, though Jackson's a fricking stud for British Columbia in the Canadian Football League.

Suffice to say this was a decent QB class: three bonafide starters, including one Hall of Famer and one Pro Bowler in the mix. But what's more amazing is to just look at that sixth round in general, it's almost as if the entire league slept through the middle portion of the draft and woke up after a pizza break Sunday afternoon. Let's look at some of the highlights from that round:

• Mark Bulger & Tom Brady---See above.

• Adaleius Thomas---This guy alone would be a great find in this round, let alone with the two big QB's.

• Neil Rackers---A Pro Bowl kicker, and a machine from inside 40 yards, whatever the hell that's worth.

• Mike Anderson---A useful-to-good RB for Denver until Shanahan gave up on him for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, what the hell goes on in the RB section of that locker room? Do you just walk in knowing you have a half-life of 8 games?
  

• Robaire Smith---A real nice defensive player that did a ton for Tennessee until leaving this year.

• Dhani Jones---In addition to being a fair linebacker, he founded a company that sells bow ties. Awesome.

My somewhat cursory investigation into the post-1996 drafts has shown NO sixth rounds rivals this one. Only one other has more than 2 Pro Bowlers, and that one includes David Tyree, who sucks. Pretty amazing at the end of the day. Lesson---never stop paying attention, GM's, and scout those late rounds out well.