I Dislike Your Favorite Team

There's a really old grumpy white guy. There's a younger white guy whose facial hair and frown connotes a certain confused toughness. There's a couple of other white guys in the middle.* There's an old white guy with a leather jacket, which means his reactionary conservatism is somehow a cool, rebellious stance**. And photoshopped in, Mike and Mike! When Mike Greenberg (a pretty fantastic douche in his own right), is the one whisper of a minority voice on your banner photo, and you are discussing sports full time, you may wish to think about how you are going about business. Just sayin'.


*I feel a bit bad about that one, as Judd Zulgad, the 3rd white guy from the left, is one of my favorite radio hosts in the Twin Cities. He deserves his job, which necessitates waking up early in the morning, driving to an AM sports station, and having to engage with, for hours at end, Jeff Dubay. I take it back - Zulgad doesn't deserve that at all. He deserves something a bit better.

**To be clear, that isn't supposition. That's Joe Soucheray, host of Garage Logic, and he's tough as fucking nails! He's an angry, leathery Ward Cleaver, complaining, for example, about how single moms are ruining society. Seriously. A couple of months ago, he made that argument. A couple of months ago!

Just a quick follow-up to some of my predictions in reaction to Mike Greenberg (of Mike & Mike in the Morning, a show so important it is simulcast on radio and ESPN2 every weekday morning).


Mike Greenberg predicted that the NFL Draft was going to be the #1 show on Thursday night.  That was hilariously incorrect.  It basically tied the vampire teen show on the CW.


Mike Greenberg also suggested that the Twins without Joe Nathan were doomed to finish in 3rd or 4th place in the AL Central. How's that prediction working out so far?  Horribly, that's how--because as I predicted, the Twins have one of the most dangerous offenses in the league, and as I also predicted, have found a very solid closer in their in their bullpen in Jon Rauch.  (OK, sure, I guessed it would be Pat Neshek, but the point stands)


What's my point?  Mike Greenberg gets paid money--a good amount of money--to talk about sports.  And he doesn't know shit, half the time.  And that's not even mentioning the time he tried to bring the phrase "womanned down" (the opposite of "manned up") into the American vernacular.  Seriously, he tried.


Let's be clear--I'm not saying I could do his job better than he does.  The idea of waking up at 3 am so I can drive into Bristol, CT and stare at the flapping jowls of Mike Golic frightens me terribly.  It would be a form of hell for me.  I could not do the job that the Mikes do, day in, day out.  But I can point out, quite fairly and reasonably, that they are idiots, and Mike Greenberg is a fucking waste of space who doesn't know what he is talking about, even as he weighs in on the topics of the day (that he knows nothing about) with supreme confidence.  

This morning, prior to leaving for work, I was watching Mike and Mike (I know, I know) and "Greenie" said something that I find highly dubious.

He predicted that the first round of the NFL Draft (In case you haven't heard somehow, the First Round is on in Prime Time on Thursday night) would win the ratings battle for the evening.  Co-host Mike Golic was a bit more circumspect, saying that he had to know what was on before he made that prediction.

I predict "No way, Jose", for a couple of reasons.

A lot of the people who look at numbers, but don't really look much beyond the first blush (like, say Mike Greenberg) see this as an easy prediction for Greenie to make.  Last Year's draft drew 36.7 million viewers.  On a Saturday afternoon!  Why, on prime time, it will draw at least twice as much!

But think about it for a second.  That 36.7 million viewers was a total made up of the entire five hours (Rounds 1 and 2) of Saturday coverage.  The draft Thursday night won't be anywhere near as long, because it is only the first round.  Let's be fair and assume that a lot of those viewers were checking in on the first round.  Let's say that 25 million people were eyeballs during the first round.  That might be generous.

Last Thursday night, the lineup on the five "major" (that includes The CW) networks combined for 33.6 million viewers just from 7-8 pm eastern.  Most of that was Survivor and Bones (almost 4 million were watching a rerun of the Office, though).

Let me put it another way--last week, CBS in three hours of prime time, grabbed 36.65 million viewers--that includes, for some reason, almost 12 million people for a rerun--a RERUN--of The Mentalist.

That's one thing--those five hours of coverage generated big numbers, but only in the context of 5 hours of draft coverage, not for primetime Thursday night fare.

Here's the other side of that coin--the Draft last year was competing against infomercials and maybe a baseball game on your local Fox affiliate.  It has purposefully moved itself to face real competition.  I personally think that's a horrible idea.  They owned one Saturday in April, and now they are trying to make it 2 evenings in April.  That's overreach.

For the first hour of the draft, it will be going against all new episodes of FlashForward, Community & 30 Rock, Survivor, and Bones.  At least on the East Coast and Central Time Zones.  On the West Coast, you'll have your choice of new episodes, or the last third of the first round, as it starts at 4:30 your time.  Are people  in San Francisco leaving work early to see who the 49'ers draft?  I tend to doubt it.  Oh, and LeBron James and Derrick Rose will be going at each other on TNT, as will Kobe and Kevin Durant.

Why does this matter?  Who gives a shit about the ratings about the NFL Draft?  Well, to some degree, I do. Because I think this is a chance for the NFL power structure to get the shot across the bow it so desperately needs.  The NFL is clearly convinced it can do no wrong; that NFL fans will swallow anything the NFL spoon feeds them.  I think this is the one of the few times left it might get proved wrong before they rush headlong to the player lockout they desperately crave.

I'm not rooting for the draft to fail on prime time, but I think it will.  I don't think it will lose to the Vampire Girl Show on the CW, or anything, but anyone who thinks the Draft will win the night is living too much in the sports world.  Given the option, would you rather listen to Steve Carell and Joel McHale make jokes, or Chris Berman and Mel Kiper, Jr?



I predict a huge percentage of the folks who plunked themselves down in front of their TV on a Saturday afternoon for a few hours (like I have done, for the past few years) will do what I will do on Thursday night--watch their favorite shows, and during a commercial break, flip over to ESPNews and check out the Bottom Line to see who their team picked.  And suddenly, when given a choice of entertainment and something that isn't really all that entertaining to watch, will wonder "Why the fuck did I watch this shit last year?"  The NFL might take a step back and say, "Oh wait, our piddling Human Resources minutiae isn't the most important thing in the world?  Good to know."

Nice work, NFL.  You fucking dummies.  And nice predicting, Mike Greenberg.  You are my least favorite dummy of all.

When I was a kid, I bought comic books (resolved future points of contention: I still do), but I remember pretty specifically the first time I bought a comic involving Captain American and the dirty, dirty neo-Nazis. When Captain America (this is before Ed Brubaker killed him) showed up at some secret Neo-Nazi base, the neo-Nazis would yell, "Mein Gott in Himmel!" which was (kind of) German for "My God In Heaven!"

In the 80's, when I was a kid, the mainstream comic writers could have never used the English Phrase "My God in Heaven!", so it made perfect sense to have the German yell that in untranslated Deutsch--it was a way of getting around sensitive censors and parents. It is still what I think when something surprises me--whether that is because my formative years were formed by goofy comic books, or because I took German in high school, or because I'm secretly a henchmen of the Red Skull, I'll never say. (It could be all three, I suppose).

Anyway, when I was rising and shining Thursday morning, and decided that I didn't want to watch Mike Golic talk about an anal abcess (hard to turn down) or watch MSNBC fluff their dumbass reporter who got stuck in Hurricane Dolly, I flipped the switch to VH1. And this is what I saw. And I thought, "Mein Gott in Himmel!"

(Let me answer the two-part question that hit me halfway through this video--1) Yes, Donnie Wahlberg does have a respected acting career going. 2) He's 38 years old.