Gregg Easterbrook is Back and Apparently Now Has a Fetish For Shirtless Athletes

We've had a nearly four month sabbatical from reading TMQ. This break is now over. Man your bomb shelters, lock the doors and windows, and hit the grocery store for non-perishable items. Gregg Easterbrook is back and ready to make assumptions, pretend he knows how to read the minds of football players and misunderstand the responsibilities of defensive players in a zone defense. TMQ is back. It appears that Gregg still creepily fawns over cheerleaders, but he also wants to see more shirtless men in sports magazines. He's a very sexually confused man. Gregg also starts the year off talking about concussions and contact in practice at the Pop Warner level. I get this is an important issue, but Gregg is just thrashing a dead horse at this point in some ways.

But football's really important offseason development occurred on the field behind your local elementary school. The Pop Warner organization decided to limit contact in practice.

This is a great idea. That way every high school football player goes to college with the tackling ability of Deion Sanders.

I'm kidding of course. Limiting contact is a good idea at the Pop Warner level.

Making the sport as safe as possible is essential not just because this is ethically right, but to preserve the game.

You are in general speaking to the choir. I think most NFL fans believe the same thing. We don't want to see football players committing suicide or being so injured after they retire from the sport they are in constant pain. Yes, to an extent these players knew what they were getting in to, but efforts to make the game safer are always encouraged. Now stop rambling about concussions and start misunderstanding how the game of football works.

As TMQ laid out a year ago, more injuries happen in practice than on game days, because more hours of contact occur in practice than in games.

The obviousness of this statement, and the fact Gregg felt the need to further explain it, makes me laugh.

"More car accidents happen on the roads than in the driveway, because more hours are spent around other cars while on the road than in the driveway."

Won't limiting contact turn football into a wimpy sport? Aren't two-a-days and Oklahoma drills how players prove their manhood? Traditionalists are saying this.

I don't know if traditionalists are saying this in these exact words. Gregg has never been good at being concerned with the truth of something he is saying. He is mostly concerned with whether he can shade the truth enough to make him look right. Traditionalists probably speak their point of view in a much different way than this. To Gregg's ears, this is all he can hear so he makes it seem like this is the exact position of the traditionalist football fan. I'm sure if there is such thing as a traditionalist football fan, he/she would use different language.

Football must achieve such reforms both to take better care of players -- the vast majority of whom play at the youth and high school levels, where there are no scholarships or bonus checks -- and to remain acceptable in the public eye.

Blah, blah, blah...(smacks dead horse a few more times)

Consider as well: There is no law of nature that says football must be legal. Congress could be moved to outlaw the sport, or to impose restrictions.

I am continuously getting the feeling that Gregg Easterbrook doesn't like football. He seems to dislike the violence of the game, and while I wouldn't expect him to be a cheerleader for the sport, he does seem to hold a lot of contempt for football as a sport. Maybe Gregg should just quit writing TMQ every week if he hates football so much.

As for Tuesday Morning Quarterback, I'm back and I'm bad! Well, I'm back.

Oh no, you are bad as well. Bad at understanding what happens on the football field, bad at being completely honest with your audience, and bad at understanding the "fiction" part of science fiction movies or television shows means the events are not grounded in real life.

Annual revenue for the Buckeyes' football program is $60 million to $100 million, depending on how one does the accounting.

This suggests that if OSU sold a 50-year lease on its football program for the same multiple as the parking lots, Ohio State football would sell for $1 billion to $1.7 billion -- eerily close to what Forbes thinks the Dallas Cowboys are worth. The Cowboys enjoy more revenue than the Buckeyes, but OSU expenses are much lower since players are unpaid -- seeming to leave the Dallas NFL and Ohio State NCAA football programs at roughly the same level of profitability.

I'm not math major and, but the Cowboys are worth about $1.85 billion right now in 2012. $1 billion is not eerily close to $1.85 billion. It is $850 million dollars off in fact. I realize Gregg has consistently struggled with numbers and doesn't get how players can be timed to the thousandth of a second, but I would hope he is good enough with numbers to know a $150-$850 million valuation for a football team isn't "eerily close" when this is the gap in value between two sports teams. That's still a long way off in determining the value of a football team.

Rachael Ray Missed Her Calling: The governor of Virginia was found to have a corrupt chef.

The chef had been convicted of embezzlement. He had been hired by other politicians to cater their events as well. I feel like I have to add this to show other politicians didn't do a background check on this chef either. It's doesn't make it okay, but it's clear this chef had fooled more than one person.

Unified Field Theory of Creep: Queen Elizabeth celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, which means 75th year as sovereign, in her 60th year. Back in 2002, Elizabeth elaborately celebrated her Golden Jubilee, which means 50 years as sovereign. So 10 years passed between elaborate celebrations, though 25 were supposed to.

Can anyone imagine being related to this man and having to carry on a casual conversation with him? Just think how miserable the holidays are around Gregg Easterbrook as he picks apart the logical inconsistencies in "A Christmas Story" for two hours and questions why we are celebrating Christmas on December 25 even though that isn't the real date of Jesus' birth.

One of the worst aspects of Hollywood is when dead characters suddenly are alive again, with little or no explanation. On "Fringe," William Bell is a mad scientist played by Leonard Nimoy, who was Mr. Spock in the original "Star Trek." The recently concluded fourth season brought Nimoy back from the dead for the second time.

Then Gregg starts complaining about a science fiction television show, "Fringe," not being realistic. Yet, Gregg seems to watch "Fringe" every single week. If it is such a bad television show why does he keep watching it?

You've guessed by now that TMQ thinks "John Carter" was a good movie.

Well of course TMQ thinks "John Carter" was a good movie. "The Dark Knight" is one of the worst movies ever and is completely unrealistic, but a movie about a thought-dead Civil War soldier who ends up fighting a war on Mars, now that's some realistic movie-making. Not shockingly, Gregg doesn't seem like he wants to pick "John Carter" apart for its lack of realism. He only picks the movie apart for relying too much on special effects. I'm a little confused how Gregg wanted a movie set on Mars not to use CGI when the protagonist fights fictional monsters/animals and the antagonists are alien creatures. It's hard to not use CGI when a character is fighting an animal or creature that doesn't exist in the real world.

Graying commentators may get their ideas from news-organization claims that "hooking up" has taken over colleges. Hooking up sounds racy and unsettling, thereby appealing to headline writers, but the expression is studiously vague. I've not heard any coherent explanation of how hooking up differs from meeting people at parties, as the young long have done.

Depends on your definition of "hooking up." When I think of "hooking up" with a girl, I think of a lot more than just meeting people at a party. I think of meeting a person at a party, giving them a tour of your apartment/home/dorm room, and then having some sort of carnal relations with that person. I'm not even sure why I'm talking about this. My point is everyone's definition is different.

The current generation may hold a more laissez-faire attitude toward sex than did its parents, but that does not necessarily translate into increased sexual activity.

I can't really compare the two generations since I didn't go to college when my parents went to college. Any type of broad-based discussion like this usually is a big failure in my book. I feel like describing the sexual activities of a large group of people will always fall into conventionality. It's hard to generalize when talking about such a large and diverse group of people like college students. Most of the time, I personally went out with my friends and just wanted to hang out with them. To describe college students as sex-starved predators looking for their latest conquest or as college students having a specific plan towards what kind of and how much sexual activity will be on the menu for the night is probably giving college students not enough or too much credit.

Aging, grumpy guys like Limbaugh assume out-of-control carnality on the modern college campus, feel mad that they missed the party, and so accuse college girls of easy virtue.

Quite possibly. Or perhaps Limbaugh and Don Imus don't really think and just say words with no specific purpose that are broadcast over the radio.

Or perhaps aging male commentators are jealous that undergraduate enrollment on American campuses is now 56 percent female, shifting the Saturday night odds in favor of guys. That certainly makes me jealous!

That certainly makes me feel disgusting to hear it makes Gregg jealous. I'm sure Gregg would have had a great time as a college students in 2012 serenading the opposite sex with stories of government waste and examples of why "Star Trek" isn't realistic enough.

Rush note 2: Repeatedly calling a woman he had never met "a slut" put Limbaugh into the national conversation, including at the White House level. Thus he was rewarded with publicity for foul manners. Had Limbaugh made exactly the same points about contraception and federal policy using civil language, no one would have paid attention. This doesn't say much for the national conversation, does it?

No, it means several commentators discuss conception and federal policy using civil language, but these same commentators don't go around calling women "sluts." It's a bad comparison Gregg is making. One comment is not seen during normal discourse on the topic of contraception, so it naturally would gain more attention, while the other comment is normally seen or heard during normal discourse on contraception, so it wouldn't gain as much attention. If I write a post about Peter King and MMQB then I would get a lot less attention for this post than if I wrote a rant-filled column about the inferiority of the Asian race in sports (which I do not believe is true, I'm giving an example). Calling a woman a "slut" is about lowering the discourse used in the national conversation on contraception.

TMQ thought the sexiest pics in the swimsuit issue and in ESPN's competing Body Issue were of fit, strong women -- soccer star Alex Morgan in body paint in Sports Illustrated, kickboxer Ronda Rousey wearing nothing in ESPN The Magazine (Published on Earth The Planet). The Body Issue offered a lot of athletic beefcake, while the swimsuit issue had only a couple of shirtless men.

Someone emailed me about what Gregg wrote here and I couldn't help but agree it not only sounds a bit odd for Gregg to want more shirtless men in a sports magazine, but I don't know why he is concerned about the lack of shirtless men. It certainly sounds like he is troubled by this trend and wants to see it reversed.

At this point many of the attractive women in athletics -- Morgan, Dominika Cibulkova, Brittany Jackson, Lolo Jones, Anna Kournikova, Candace Parker, Danica Patrick, Maria Sharapova, Lindsey Vonn and others -- have done seductive posing in bikinis or less. Yet hunk male athletes posing with their shirts off remains rare. Why?

The reason magazines like ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated have more women than men posing nude or semi-nude is because more men than women buy these sports magazines. Plus, women are much prettier than men. A shirtless man not only isn't necessarily attractive to another man, but many times a shirtless athlete only serves to show a man reading that magazine what bad physical shape he is in compared to pro athletes. So a shirtless man in a sports magazine isn't attractive to most men, more men than women read sports magazines, and men don't want to be reminded they aren't in peak physical condition. Therefore, more women then men appear nude or semi-nude in sports magazines.

If Gregg really wants to see more shirtless men, there are magazines that can satisfy this urge he has. He can just google "Shirtless athletic men" and I think he will get his fix. Between fawning over cheerleaders and wondering why there aren't more shirtless men in sports magazines I get the feeling Gregg is very sexually confused.

Your Honor, the State Will Show the Director Was Armed With a Loaded Script: A jury heard a two-week trial over the "killing off" of a character on a television show.

That's not what the trial was about. The trial was about a wrongful dismissal of an actress from the show. In the world of television she was dismissed by being written out of the show. It wasn't a trial about the killing off of a character, though that was the result, it was a trial about a dismissal from an actress from her job. This is just one of the latest examples where Gregg takes facts and attempts to skew them just slightly in order to deceive his audience.

EXCL OPPTY TO DENY YR EMPLOYER: The CIA ran help-wanted ads.

The CIA has to find qualified employees somehow I guess. Not every potential CIA employee can be handed a business card that says to call a number and then the potential employee calls that number and has suddenly become a CIA employee.

Next Week: TMQ's AFC preview.

Which, per usual, will not be an actual preview. Instead it will be a summary of what happened last season and some comments on what happened for each AFC team during the offseason. Thereby, this would be an AFC review, since Gregg makes few predictions or previews anything about these teams for the upcoming season.

And the envelope is in: TMQ reveals his favorite Batman movie.

We don't care what Gregg's favorite Batman movie is, but $100 says it is an animated Batman movie. Gregg will probably state he finds the animated movie to be more realistic than the live-action Batman movies. Because movies where a guy dresses like a bat to fight crime needs to stay as close to reality as possible. It's fine for movies that place on Mars to be completely unrealistic though. Gregg isn't bothered by that, as long as too many special effects aren't used to show Mars and the protagonist fighting fictional monsters and aliens.