So Many Small Amounts of Bad Journalism, So Little Time

After my anger directed at Frank Wren has subsided (go to the post down below if you care/dare and want to hear me whine), I still think he sucks and I really think he needs to show Braves fans he has a longer term plan. Currently there are holes in the rotation and the outfield that have not even begun to be addressed, follow that with Smoltz signing with my least favorite team, I am depressed. There are people trying to talk me off the ledge about this and I am not sure it is going to work. He was my favorite Brave. I know he is old and injured but I can't stand to see him on the Red Sox. Time to turn the depression into anger.

-Brett Favre meet denial, denial you probably already know Mr. Favre.

"I'm not going to let one or two guys ruin a career for me or the relationship I had with my teammates,"

That's funny, because if that was Eric Mangini's motto then Favre probably would never have gotten traded to the Jets and Mangini would never have gotten fired for "underachieving"

and his players may have still liked him at the end of the year.

"If you polled my past teammates, I bet 90% would say they enjoyed playing with me. I'm not so insecure as to let the comments bother me." Jones, along with unnamed teammates, was critical of Favre's interceptions.

Brett Favre has never let things like "comments" and "numbers" affect how he thinks he is doing on the football field. 22 interceptions was a problem? No way, that was 22 examples of Brett's unbridled joy at playing the game he loves. How many teammates would not love playing with a guy who leads the league in interceptions? Isn't that what football is all about? Having fun, shooting the shit in the locker room, playing a few jokes on guys? The point of football is to have the most fun, not to win games. That "winning games" thing is for guys like Tom Brady, you know, guys who have more than one Super Bowl ring.

The bottom line is, I didn't play well in the final five games. It starts with me and it should....My expectations of myself are high, and the only one that I let down was myself."

If it starts with Favre, then he should be able to understand the criticism that has been pushed his way and if his expectations are so high, he should try to meet his expectations, which he apparently did not do. If he can't do that retire. Maybe that is a bit harsh but Favre's entire personality and why he irritates me and so many other people is contained in the last part of the quote.

"the only one that I let down was myself."

Oh yeah, he just let himself down. The rest of the Jets team is actually playing in the playoffs right now with Kellen Clemens as the quarterback. Wait, that's not right, you let the entire fucking team down by bombing the last five games of the year. Brett Favre needs to remember he is not the only player on the team, there are 50 something other guys in the locker room who aren't going to the playoffs because of the last five games. It's not all his fault but he is correct in saying it begins with him, so he needs to also realize he let down his entire team, as well as himself. I don't think he realizes this.

-Peter King thinks Eric Mangini was a controversial hire for the Browns.

Why not wait? No other team was lining up to steal Mangini from him.

Quite possibly, and this is just a guess, the Browns had decided that Mangini was their man and it made no sense to wait around. Not every team needs a four month coaching search.

So he interviewed four coaches -- Mangini; his own defensive coordinator, Mel Tucker; Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo; and New England offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels.

The Browns interviewed two of the hottest coaches on the market right now in Spagnuolo and McDaniels, its not like they just snatched up Mangini as soon as he was fired by the Jets.

He liked Mangini far and away the best.

This IS a controversial decision. So they interviewed four qualified candidates and liked one of them far and away the most? The one they liked most of all was also the only one with head coaching experience? Tough call...

This is really about Scott Pioli, in that he will definitely not go to the Browns to work with Mangini because of the whole Spygate thing. In essence the Browns had to choose Mangini or Pioli and they did choose. It's always about Pioli though.

But Pioli never gave Lerner the indication that he was prepared to take the job. A source close to Lerner told SI.com that, contrary to some reports, Pioli was never offered the job, nor was he given a deadline by which time he had to accept or reject the job. The Lerner source also said Pioli never made any demands that gave Lerner cold feet. Lerner felt Pioli might go somewhere else (Kansas City, perhaps), or he might return to the Patriots.

Lerner felt if he waited for Pioli to make up his mind, he might be waiting a week or two, or maybe longer, and there was no guarantee he'd get Pioli.

I think Pioli is going to stay in New England and I don't think hiring Mangini, a coach who has had two winning seasons out of three is any riskier than hiring a completely unproven coach. Peter King disagrees.

It's a compelling, risky decision by Lerner.

Really Peter? Is hiring a guy who has head coaching experience more of a risk than hiring someone who has never had any success as a head coach? The unknown provides so much more mystery for people to write things about, I realize this, but doesn't mean this was not the safe choice. I think hiring Rex Ryan, Josh McDaniels, Jim Schwartz, or any one else with no coaching experience is more of a risk than hiring someone who has been a head coach before.

You know who else is not a risky choice? Jim Fassel. What ever happened to him?

-Dallas has released Pacman Jones.

Jones' release came after "Outside the Lines" reporter John Barr contacted the NFL, the Cowboys and Jones' attorneys about a piece scheduled to air Sunday in which three Atlanta-area men allege that Jones arranged for someone to shoot at them two months after the football player was suspended by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in 2007.

THIS was the event that told the Cowboys Pacman was too much trouble for the team, not the other 6 times he has been arrested. Those were just misunderstandings, but now the Cowboys see they can't win with him, they want to go ahead and get rid of him because he is bad news.

Jones missed six games this season for violating the league's player conduct policy after an Oct. 7 scuffle with a team bodyguard at a Dallas hotel. He missed a seventh game with an injury.

The 25-year-old Jones spent part of his time away from football taking part in an alcohol rehabilitation program.

Again, more misunderstandings...and also the Cowboys were in the hunt for the playoffs so they needed him. It made much more sense at the time to keep him.

"If I beat myself up, who will take care of me?" Jones said, according to the report.

Great point. If he kicks the shit out of himself like Ed Norton did in "Fight Club," who will be there to tend to his injuries? I wonder if Pacman Jones knows a guy by the name of Tyler Durden?

"Football means a lot to me, but it's not everything. It's not like I'm taking it pretty good. I love me some me."

Unfortunately, it seems Pacman is the only one who likes himself some himself. Pacman has many other irons in the fire he can fall back on, such as a 3rd tier wrestling organizations to join, hiring hitmen to injure others, getting in fights with pretty much everyone, and going to rehab. He barely even has time for football!

-Boston College beat UNC and Harvard beat Boston College. In college football this would mean we could get a column by Gregg Doyel saying that Harvard should be the National Champion.

''I tried to pre-warn them,'' said Skinner after one of the Eagles' more disappointing regular season losses in many years. ''We were capable of being this team and capable of being another team.''

Al Skinner looks like the dragon in the NeverEnding Story. With his mustache and all of that, I keep expecting him to fly Tyrese Rice around the gym on his back. His quotes about the loss were the best part of the story though.

I am also interested in what "pre-warning" someone does and how you go about doing this? Do you say, "Later tonight, I am going to warn you about something, I just wanted to pre-warn you I was going to do this...but this is not an official warning, just a pre-warning I was going to warn you later."

I know I sound like the grammar police but telling someone about an event that may occur before it actually occurs is warning someone of that event. You can't warn someone before you actually warn them.

"Capable of being this team and being another team?" I guess he is saying his team is sort of bi-polar, I don't really know, but I do know this doesn't make sense to me and probably did not make sense to the players either, so they could have spent the entire game trying to figure out what pre-warning was and how they could be another team and forgot to actually play basketball.

''I told them its a short trip from the main house to the big house to the out house,'' Skinner said.

Before the UNC game they were in the main house, after they won they were in the big house and now they are in the shitter. I got this one...I think.

A dejected Skinner didn't have a feeling how his team would play when it resumes Atlantic Coast Conference play against Miami on Saturday.

''I don't know,'' he said. ''What do you expect?''

Um...I don't know either what to expect. What do YOU expect? Fuck it, just fly me around the gym on your back.

-This guy did not like the Announcer Swap on ESPN.

Before the game and during halftime of Davidson-Duke, ESPN showed highlights of the last NBA game Vitale called as he was shown courtside in Denver talking about what it was like being at an NBA arena and getting ready to call an NBA game again. Any and all analysis of the actual game he would be doing would have to take a back seat to the fact that he was there for the time being.

This guy clearly does not watch any college basketball game that Dickie V is involved with because this happens EVERY SINGLE GAME HE CALLS. He starts talking about charities or what a great guy so and so is, maybe talks a little bit about the Tampa Rays and eventually gets directed back to the game by Dan Schulman.

After the first commercial break, George Karl and Dwyane Wade were shown doing Vitale impersonations along with a vignette of Vitale highlights. Similar vignettes appeared throughout the night.

What did you expect? This is what happens every single college game he calls. The game becomes about him and he starts screaming at everyone. Last night was the most I enjoyed the play by play call of a college basketball game in a long while on ESPN because the announcers actually talked about Duke-Davidson and finally started talking about the stupid ass charging calls that go on all the time. I still love Bill Raftery the most and I am not going to apologize for this. I wish he were on ESPN.

Vitale feeds off the energy and the atmosphere around him. Stick him in Cameron Indoor Stadium and you get Dickie V baby, seat him at the Pepsi Center and you get Mr. Dick Vitale.

I wish he would stay in the NBA for good. Four years ago in every single Duke/Texas game he called he brought up the fact Daniel Ewing and T.J. Ford went to high school together and always followed it up with, "how is that for a dynamic duo" and called him "Mr. T.J. Ford down there in Texas with Rick Barnes" or "Mr. Daniel Ewing up there in Durham with Coach K." He really brings nothing but volume to a telecast. It sounds mean but I was hoping his throat surgery would cause him to tone it down a bit. That did not happen.

-This guy thinks Boston sports are going down the drain.

But Boston teams aren't comfortable at the top and one by one they've slipped back to the state of mediocrity the city is accustomed to.

What the hell is this asshole talking about? The Bruins actually had a great year last year, the Red Sox were one game away from the World Series and have signed Baldelli and Smoltz in the offseason, the Celtics still have a great record and won the NBA Title last year, and New England got ripped off from being in the playoffs because Brett Favre could not stop throwing interceptions.

Boston teams have no idea how to act like winners. They taste success and the humility is out the door in two seconds.

I do agree with this statement, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact the Boston teams are not falling back into mediocrity. The Red Sox have shown no signs of falling off and the Patriots should field a pretty competitive team next year.

The Red Sox have been thrashed by the Yankees in the hot stove league.

Which means absolutely nothing. The reason the Yankees filled those holes is because they had huge holes to fill, though I still think they are creating a problem for baseball in regard to them getting all the free agents, but this does not mean they win the World Series automatically.

The Patriots missed the postseason completely and don't know when Tom Brady is coming back.

They went 11-5! Granted, if they had won another game they would be in, but in a given year that is plenty good enough to make the playoffs. This is a brutal, brutal column and if this guy needs attention this badly he should just run down the street naked or fly around on Al Skinner's back for a while.

I am not a huge Boston fan, but man, the whole city is not falling into mediocrity at once.

-Who is going to win tonight's big game?

My gut instinct tells me that Oklahoma will win this game and I only say this because I think the offensive line is good enough to protect Sam Bradford and they run the ball incredibly well no matter who is back there. My gut has been wrong before though. I think I am choosing Florida though because I think the Oklahoma defense is not going to be completely prepared for Tim Tebow and the speed of the Florida Gators. They have absolutely destroyed the teams they have faced since losing to Ol' Miss at home and I think the defense is good enough to hold Bradford in check, while I am not sure the Sooners have seen anything like the Gators offense. I also look at what the SEC teams Florida has beaten have done in bowl games and what the Big 12 teams have done in the bowl games and the SEC has looked much better in my opinion. I say the Gators but I think this will end up being a closer game than the last couple national championship games. I would not be shocked if Oklahoma wins though...how's that for a cop out?