Sports – Page 4 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Overheard in the Noggle Den, As Seen On Facebook

October 29, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

Immediately after the Cardinals game, the Fox Sports sideline guy caught up with Allen Craig, who caught the last out:

After a commercial, we watched the presentation of the trophy:

Watching Selig speak from notes to make a two paragraph speech presenting the trophy, I made some comment, I’m sure. When it was Bill DeWitt, Junior’s turn to speak, the following exchange occurred in the Nogglestead den:

Wife: He speaks well.
Me: He speaks normally. Selig makes Allen Craig look like Cato the Elder. I’m probably the only person in the world who is comparing Allen Craig to Cato the Elder tonight. I’m going to put that on Facebook.
Wife: The Cardinals just won the World Series. Nobody’s going to care.
Me: Van will like it.

Prediction: Confirmed

That, my friends, is knowing your audience.

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The Horns of a Dilemma

October 9, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

25 minutes before game one of the 2011 National League Championship Series, and I can’t decide for whom to root.

The Cardinals versus the Brewers

Do I go with the team of my homeland, the team for whom I cried when I was a lad when the St. Louis Cardinals beat them in the World Series? Or the team whose games I attended throughout the 80s and into the 90s and 00s after I relocated to St. Louis?

By the way, the shirts/numbers are: Milwaukee Brewers #15 (Jim Edmonds); Green Bay Packers #74 (Aaron Kampman); St. Louis Cardinals #7 (J.D. Drew).

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Book Report: Run to Daylight by Vince Lombardi (1963)

October 5, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This book chronicles the week of preparation that the Green Bay Packers the week before the October 7, 1962 game against the (spoiler alert) Detroit Lions from the perspective of head coach Vince Lombardi. The book doesn’t name the opponent, but a little research will yield it. Although a Google search asking who the opponent was for this book apparently has not until now not yielded the result. Instead, I sussed it out by the final score and confirmed it by the mention of the UCLA upset of Ohio State. Look, ma, I’m a researcher!

At any rate, it discusses how much Lombardi studies films, how short that the actual practices are, and how long the meetings with the players are. It reminds those of us who have played the game a little for fun but never in an organized fashion how complex the games are, where each play in the playbook has variations upon variations not only upon where the players are supposed to line up, but also what shoulder they should block on their blocking assignment and whatnot. Even the rockheads on the line have to remember so much. Frankly, a detailed book like this makes me appreciate what they do weekly, and it also reminds me why I only want to dedicate six or nine hours of my life a week on it instead of 50 hours a week year-round.

If you’re a Packers fan, it’s definitely a worthwhile read to get a little behind the Lombardi legend. The book takes place five years before Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay, which I also recommend, and the time frames are different (Instant Replay is the story of a whole season, not just a week). Are modern football books this detailed, or are they personality-based? The ones I’ve read aren’t like this.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Your Press Release Is Not “Breaking News”

September 27, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

The NHL sent me an email with the BREAKING NEWS: subject line prefix. For what? A plane going down killing lots of NHL players? No, silly, the fact that the NHL has scheduled its annual outdoor game. For January 2. 2012.

Wow, let me rush right to my television at 9pm on a Monday night to see if ABC has broken into its regular programming to go to live coverage of this life-altering event.

No, of course not. This is a run-of-the-mill press release, and someone in marketing hoped that only the BREAKING NEWS: portion of the subject line would show up in the lower left hand corner of the desktop so people would click through.

Pah. Breaking news.

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Memories Set Early Are Set Eternally

September 5, 2011September 5, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

Now that the Milwaukee Brewers are poised to make the run to their first world title and my fanmeleon colors are changing from Cardinals red to Brewers blue, I hearken back to the year 1982, when the Brew Crew reached the World Series for the first and only time (so far). I was a wee lad living in the Berryland housing project with a freshly divorced single parent from St. Louis, and the Brewers played the Cardinals. My mother had a plastic baseball bat that she used to beat on the walls of the townhome style apartment to let the neighbors on either side know when the Cardinals scored. A couple years later, and I was a freshly minted Cardinals fan thanks to relocation and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch re-education program where the paper gave out free tickets to Cardinals games to students who got As in school.

For some reason, today I got to thinking about the lineups for the 1982 World Series, and I can give almost a complete recounting of the position players for both teams. Check it out:

	Brewers	Cardinals
Catcher:	Simmons	Porter
First Base:	Cooper	Hernandez
Second Base:	Garner	Herr
Shortstop:	Molitor	O. Smith
Third:	Yount
Outfield:	Thomas Oglive	L. Smith McGee
Pitchers:	Vukovich Caldwell Haas McClure Fingers*

* did not play due to injury, sadly.

That’s off the top of my head. Not bad. Actually, it’s better than I could do remembering the 2006 Cardinals who won the World Series. I could also take stabs at the lineups to the 1985 and 1987 World Series Cardinals teams, but some of the years will blur and blend since I followed the Cardinals so well.

How did I do?

For the Brewers, I misspelled Jim Gantner’s name, although I could picture him in my head. I also forgot poor Charlie Moore and transposed Yount and Molitor’s positions.

For the Cardinals, I forgot Oberkfell and Hendrick; both were gone by the time I got to St. Louis. I couldn’t name for sure the pitchers, although many of them carried on into the years of my fandom.

I guess it stuck with me because it was such a snapshot moment. I’ve followed the Cardinals off and on for 25 years or so, so I have certain eras where the players overlap, come up, get traded, and so on. But 1982, because I was young, because it was a big deal, and because I would soon move and follow another team, is set pretty tightly in my memory.

And before you ask, of course I still have the baseball cards from the era, including the special ones given out by Milwaukee police officers to prove to urban youth that the cops aren’t scary. I am a 27th Level Pack Rat, after all.

UPDATE: What, you unbelievers ask me to prove it? Here’s the 1982 Team Card:

Brothers and Sisters, not only am I a Level 27 Pack Rat, but I’ve been a pack rat for more than two decades already. By the time you experience “Ultra Hoarders in 3-D” via Mynd.Net in 2021, I will be on its all-star list by age fifty.

Also, I gotta say, having a +2 House of Holding rocks. Not only can I keep all this worthless junk, but I can put my hands onto items within minutes.

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Why Can’t Modern Football Players Act?

July 8, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

So someone help me out here: why don’t modern football players transition to acting careers as successfully as old timey football players did?

In the Olden Days, we have:

In the modern era, we have, what? Brett Favre in There’s Something About Mary? Brian Bosworth in Stone Cold?

Take a look at this list: 50 Football Players Who Acted in Movies and note that the ones who could be said to have made a successful transition to films and television played prior to the 1980s, and that most of the roles from then on are as “Self”? Is it a transition in football culture? Is it that older players were better-rounded and most professionals these days are football robots, funnelling all their energy into it from an early age?

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News Lance Can Use

July 5, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

Trog‘s been posting about the country’s problems a lot lately. You know what could be a good distraction for that serious lad?

Brett Favre comeback speculation.

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What’s Counselorese For FYNQ?

February 5, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

An awesome story:

Football fans know what happened in Super Bowl I. The game, which was played on January 15, 1967, was the first showdown between the NFL and AFL champions. It ended with the Green Bay Packers stomping the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.

Unless they were one of the 61,946 people at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that day, or one of the fans who watched it live on NBC or CBS, there’s one thing that all football fans have in common: They’ve never actually seen the game.

In a bizarre confluence of events, neither network preserved a tape. All that survived of this broadcast is sideline footage shot by NFL Films and roughly 30 seconds of footage CBS included in a pre-game show for Super Bowl XXV. Somehow, an historic football game that was seen by 26.8 million people had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.

….

The long search may finally be over. The Paley Center for Media in New York, which had searched for the game footage for some time, has restored what it believes to be a genuine copy of the CBS broadcast. The 94-minute tape, which has never been shown to the public, was donated to the center by its owner in return for having it restored. It was originally recorded on bulky two-inch video and had been stored in an attic in Pennsylvania for nearly 38 years, the Paley Center says.

Estimates are that it’s worth millions.

Enter the NFL.

Mr. Harwood, the attorney, says he contacted the NFL in 2005 about the tape. He says the league sent him a letter on Dec. 16, 2005 claiming the NFL was the exclusive owner of the copyright. Mr. Harwood says the NFL offered his client $30,000 for the tape and his client declined.

Geez, I realize that it’s a labor dispute year and the NFL owners have to plead poverty while building billion-dollar stadiums, but come on. $30,000?

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Make That Man An Honorary Milwaukeean

December 30, 2010October 2, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Finally, a man has combined bowling with pool:

At nearly 30 feet long and 15 feet wide, the table and the hybrid game played on its surface — a combination of billiards and bowling that Steve calls “Knokkers” — are a culmination of an idea 25 years in the making.

Bowling + Pool = Crazy Delicious

They need to put a statue of this visionary in downtown Milwaukee right next to the statue of Fonzie.

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Trog: The Original 12/12 Truther

December 18, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

Trog smells a conspiracy:

Could the Minnesota Viqueens be thinking of moving west?

Snow does not make roofs collapse. Google it!

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I Was Distracted

November 24, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

An ESPN columnist asks:

Has anyone else noticed all the drama surrounding black quarterbacks during this NFL season?

Jason Campbell, who has been fighting for his job all season in Oakland, was benched for the second time this year against Pittsburgh on Sunday.

• Six-time Pro Bowler Donovan McNabb was replaced by Rex Grossman during the final 1:50 of a close game against the Detroit Lions earlier this month because Redskins coach Mike Shanahan claimed Grossman was better suited to run the team’s two-minute offense. Shanahan questioned McNabb’s “cardiovascular endurance.”

• And on Sunday, Titans coach Jeff Fisher demoted Vince Young to benchwarmer after Young threw a tantrum following Tennessee’s 19-16 loss to Washington. Although thumb surgery is the official reason Young’s season is over, Fisher made it clear before he knew the severity of Young’s injury that his 27-year-old quarterback was being removed as the starter.

No, sorry, I didn’t notice. I was too wrapped up in the Brett Favre/Brad Childress drama and the Little Brett/Hot Sideline Reporter drama.

Next question?

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Spurious Assertion

June 22, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

The people who snootily prefer soccer over other, more traditionally American sports, are internally consistent, as they tend to look down at other people who work with their hands, too.

(See also this post on Dustbury and its links.)

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Direct Object Teams

May 27, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

The Kansas City Royals are so desperate that they’re holding open tryouts at a city park.

There’s something very underdoggish about baseball teams that are often futile. I explained to my wife that the Royals are too often the direct object in the sports headlines (Dodgers Pound Royals, Oakland Shuts Down Royals, and so on), and the direct object teams don’t win pennants.

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Bryan Burwell’s Litmus Test for NFL Ownership

October 8, 2009January 13, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

To own an NFL team, you should think like he does:

I know how those words play out in Idiot America. They are embraced as gospel. But inside the locker rooms of the NFL, where the overwhelming majority of the players are descendants of slaves, Limbaugh’s ignorant ramblings resonate with entirely different emotions.

His money might be green, but his words are colored with hate and intolerance.

Got that? According to Bryan Burwell, if you listen to Rush Limbaugh, you are an idiot-American. But it’s Rush Limbaugh whose intemperate words are colored with hate and intolerance.

Perhaps Burwell’s career in sportswriting has left him incapable of addressing Rush Limbaugh’s views instead of dumping on Rush Limbaugh as though he were a slumping left fielder. Or maybe he never had that intellectual acumen to begin with. However, make no mistake, trying to bar someone from a profession or from acquiring property based upon his views is not the American way.

Not the old American way, anyway.

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A Touching Story That Could Use Improvement

September 20, 2009November 19, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

Here’s a touching story about how a high school football team gave up a shutout so that its opponent could have a Downs Syndrome running back get a touchdown:

So in the final stages of Benton’s third game of the season on Monday at Maryville, McCamy decided it was time for Ziesel — a 15-year-old freshman with Down syndrome — to make his season debut.

With about 10 seconds left in the game, and Benton trailing 46-0, McCamy called his final timeout, told an assistant coach to organize the team for the “Matt play” and ran across the field to the Maryville defensive huddle — and to some puzzled looks from the opposing players.

“I’ve got a special situation,” McCamy remembers telling Maryville freshman defensive coach David McEnaney. “I know you guys want to get a shutout. Most teams would want a shutout, but in this situation I want to know if maybe you can let one of my guys run in for a touchdown.”

Here’s the video:

Those kids on both teams (and the coaches) did a nice thing.

But you know what would make it even better for some people?

A compulsory government program to redistribute touchdowns from the teams who can play football to those who just try. And take 14 points from each good team each game just to run the program.

I know, I can’t leave a nice story alone. My comment doesn’t diminish the real story at all.

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13 Years Later, Post-Dispatch Finds The Fine Print

August 4, 2009August 30, 2011 Brian J. Noggle

Hey, who knew that the Rams built in an escape clause in their contract?

The Rams wouldn’t have moved to St. Louis from Southern California without the existence of the TWA Dome and its lucrative lease. The franchise’s move to the Midwest led to a second wave of relocation in the NFL, and sparked an unprecedented boom in stadium construction throughout the league.

And if the Rams could move from the nation’s second-largest market to a mid-level market in the Midwest, it could happen anywhere. Owners wanted to keep up with the revenue stream that a new stadium produced; cities worried about losing their team if they didn’t have a new stadium.

One new stadium after another sprung up around the league. Jerry Jones’ new $1.12 billion playpen in suburban Dallas opens next month. In 2010, when the New York Giants and Jets move into a $1.6 billion stadium, 22 of the 31 other NFL teams will be playing in new or massively renovated stadiums that were built after the St. Louis dome opened in ’95.

All of this might be of only marginal interest to the Rams — and to St. Louis — were it not for the “first tier” provisions of the relocation and lease agreement negotiated between the Rams and the CVC in 1994 and ’95. The first-tier provisions were the work of Shaw and are the envy of just about every other team owner in the NFL.

Huh, who could have known about the provision that the football team could break its lease if the stadium wasn’t one of the top ones in the league? Only opponents of the public funding of the stadium in 1995. I’ve snickered about it myself for over a decade now, pointing out that they could either hold the city up for more or take off.

But now the crack team of the Post-Dispatch is all over it:

So what are the first-tier provisions and the mechanisms that could lead to the departure of the Rams? The Post-Dispatch obtained a copy of the 1,700-page lease and relocation agreement from the CVC and with the help of a local attorney sorted out the first-tier language.

You know, perhaps if you’d read some opposition work from 1995, you’d have already known that. But the St. Louis paper’s institutional memory is shorter than most, what with turnover of reporters, editors, and ownership since then.

Hey, an inscrutable, thousand plus page document being waved in front of the people as a triumph without comprehension or attention? What does that remind you of?

The bottom line on the American health care system is that it makes absolutely no sense.

No one — not conservatives or liberals, doctors or patients, businessmen or humanitarians — would design such a system starting from scratch.

It’s paradoxical, pricey and porous. If President Barack Obama has his way, it’s about to get a significant overhaul.

Senate Democrats already have released several draft proposals that they hope will expand insurance coverage and control costs. That’s no mean feat. Even many who wish them well doubt that it’s possible.

In both cases, the paper will cheerlead the passage of something it only understands at a high level, and when the time comes and all the bad things shake out, it will run stories to gin up more.

In the case of the Rams, it will be more government money to improve the stadium and keep the underperforming, underloved team here.

In the case of a government health system, it will be more control or more money or maybe all of the above.

I hope I don’t prove right in 15 years.

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Book Report: One Knee Equals Two Feet by John Madden with Dave Anderson (1986)

June 8, 2009February 10, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

This is an insightful book from 1986, the beginning almost of Madden’s commenting career. He was fresh off of his years coaching the Raiders and being one of the all-time greatest coaches in the game. Within it, he describes the elements of each position, including coaching, and describes what he thinks makes a successful player at that position and who are the all-time best at that position (through 1985). Unfortunately, that means a lot of Chicago Bear loving, including extolling the virtues of Jim McMahon. Or Ed. Whichever wore glasses and was flaky. Or dark glasses and was flaky. Of course, if he wrote the book in 2006, he’d be all about Brett Favre, who played the game like quarterbacks did before they were drones radio-controlled by the coaches on the sidelines.

The best insight from the book: Madden had to teach his linemen to be aggressive. Unlike linebackers, who were sort of normal-sized, linemen where huge from birth and were conditioned throughout their youth to be gentle and to not use their size to their physical advantage. So he had to teach them otherwise. Fascinating insight.

A good book if you’re into football at all. Even if nobody gets icepicked in it.

Books mentioned in this review:

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If The Packers Complain About The Tax Burden, Perhaps Wisconsin Will Fix It

April 18, 2009November 1, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

Forget the tea parties: if there’s one thing that will galvanize the drive for tax reform in Wisconsin, it will be complaining Packers:

The states without income tax, I felt, always had an advantage in recruiting free agent players. Teams in Florida, Tennessee and Texas used the fact that their states had no income tax to show players how much more they would take home than teams in high income tax states (like Wisconsin). In some cases, agents actually showed me data from other teams showing how much more the player would make over the life of the same contract in one of those states. In recruiting players for Green Bay, I would always hear from agents how much more a player would make from, say, the Buccaneers or Texans compared to the 6.6-percent state income tax that Wisconsin would take from Packer players.

If taxes are keeping the Packers from the Super Bowl, the people will rise against Jim Doyle and the Wisconsin Legislature faster than you can say “Rick Santelli.”

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Superbowl Recap

February 2, 2009November 1, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

So the team I’m rooting for goes down big on a mistake or turnover, then fights its way back to take a small lead with very little time left, when suddenly the defense collapses and the opponents march down the field to score the winning touchdown, followed by my team turning the ball over in its last second desperation drive?

It felt like I was watching a Packers game.

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Another Legend Returns

September 11, 2008November 5, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

Lance Armstrong returns to bike racing:

Lance Armstrong is welcome to compete in the 2009 Tour de France, Tour officials have told USA TODAY in an e-mail.

“Yes, if Lance will have a license and if he is in a team that we will choose for the Tour, L.A. (Lance Armstrong) will be at the start of the 2009’s Tour de France in Monaco the 4th of July,” race director Christian Prudhomme said.”But it’s a long way until July 2009.”

The bad news? He’s biking for the New York Jets.

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