Wednesday, April 26, 2006

I'm tempted to cancel my subscription: Now, I'm a sports nut to be sure. I love to read sports articles, projections, rumors and even the all-the-rage "power ranking" where an analyst takes a look at a field of teams/individuals and ummmm, ranks them. This is often suitable or at least fun with sports like college football where there is no end of the debate on which team is the "best" or even some pro teams, just for the fun of it.

However, I must draw the line here. You want to talk money leader? Fine. Best putter? I'll listen. But "power ranking" for fu*king golfers? No my dear reader....NO.

4 comments:

Flyer said...

So what the hell makes college football's eighteen polls and rankings so much better? Why is is somehow perfectly defensible to play 5 months of basketball only to have the entire tournament seeding made up by a bunch of guys in a back room, goin' "I don't know, just don't see Wimington as the 47th best team in the country." And these sports actually decide things this way, like championships. Sure, the coach's poll make sperfect sense to me now.

I'll grant you that this "Power Ranking" is completely absurd and arbitrary. I'm as big a doofus for this stuff as there is and I wouldn't read, much less decide anything on, Jim Gorant's regurgitated media soundbytes. "Gee, Phil Mickelson won the last two events he played, including the biggest tourny of the year. He must have the Power!" I'm sure his editors insisted he put Tiger number two. Any lower and they're on the interview blacklist for 6 months.

But, 95% of sports journalism (and I use that term loosely), in print or broadcast form, is complete speculation, bloviation and a general waste of oxygen. Unless you're a fan, at which point it's all just good, clean fun. But it's silly to pick on poor Jim Gorant's little slice of meaningless drivel when, as I bet he'd admit, it's just one guys take. It's not meant to decide anything.

Your other sports could learn a lesson from that.

Flyer said...

Only in your thug-ocracy is dissent unpatriotic. I love America enough to speak truth to power when my right to power rankings and soft core porn are threatened (oh yeah, it's a slippery slope in Razor's world).

enobarbus said...

Ah, Sprouts Illustrated, always in the vanguard when it comes to idiotic lists masquerading as sports journalism.

Subscribers to SI are invariably squids who like to "talk sports" with the guys at work or at the block party, etc., and therefore need to know only the most superficial crap.

On a nearly unrelated note, I blame SI for the state of modern baseball, which used to be an esoteric, heroic sport that attracted intellectual discussion.

Nowadays the fat, egotistical, doped up whiners who play baseball and the louts and degenerates who call themselves "fans" seem to be in a race to the bottom of society.

I'll take my son to see farm league games, where the players are less likely to assault us or spill their cocaine on us, and where the fans might just want to cheer for something other than a jumbotron display of the cleavage of silicone-busted trophy wives of overpayed goons.

But that's just me.

enobarbus said...

In Philly? I'm surprised one of those degenerates didn't try to pick her up.