itsalloverfatman
11-30-2010, 09:49 AM
Ted Bartlett Monday Night Thoughts
I’ve been feeling pretty hostile toward a large part of the Broncos fan base lately. I used to think that we were a really educated and reasonable fan base. Through the magic of Twitter, I’ve learned that neither is actually the case. Broncos fans, by-and-large, are tremendously spoiled, and short-sighted. They don’t know much about football, and they don’t try too hard to learn about it from resources like It’s All Over Fat Man and Mile High Report. (The Broncos MSM only has negativity and obviousness to contribute, of course.)
On that note, here’s the ever-growing media narrative: the Denver Broncos are on the wrong track because their young egomaniac coach has set out to destroy a once-proud team. Doug Farrar from the often-craptastic Football Outsiders grew up in Denver, and this is the truth, according to him. Mark Kiszla thinks Josh McDaniels looks like a beaten man. (Which for Mark, would be a big success!) This whole thing reminds me of when noted ******** TJ Simers and Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times successfully ran Dodgers’ GM Paul DePodesta out of LA after 2 years. They hated the young, Harvard educated, Moneyball-reared DePodesta, and called him Google Boy, like knowing how to use The Google is a bad thing. Luckily, Pat Bowlen said Monday that it’s not going to work.
The most frequent charge against McDaniels is that he’s a terrible personnel guy. I think that’s hogwash, aided by a lot of hindsight. There has really been no transaction that seemed egregiously bad in the moment, where somebody knowledgeable would say that it made absolutely no sense. Everybody likes to hit the Broncos for the Peyton Hillis trade, but I’m sure it seemed like a pretty good deal to them at the time. Hillis wasn’t what the Broncos were looking for in a back (and still isn’t, for the record) and they’d lost two games in 2009 largely due to Chris Simms’ suckitude. Why not shore up your backup QB position with somebody who has looked functional-to-solid at times in the NFL, and give up a guy who you weren’t going to use anyway? Eric Mangini had his Jets defense run over by Hillis once, in the best game of his career to that point, and thought he was worth a look. It seemed like a solid trade for both teams, and the only real objections came from some Broncos fans who had developed man (and woman) crushes on the rare caucasian tailback.
(Yes, caucasian-ness is the primary driver for the majority of the love that Hillis gets. You can’t possibly convince me otherwise, because as a player, he’s not too different from Reuben Droughns or Mike Anderson. Identifying with people who look like you doesn’t make you a racist, necessarily, so there’s no need to get butt-hurt about this. For what it’s worth, as a policy, I’m only really interested in dating white women, and I’m definitely not a racist.)
You get my point, though, right? No Peter King, Mike Silver, John Clayton, or Pork Chop Williamson screamed about the greatness of Hillis at the time of the trade. They were more focused on the possibility that Quinn may be able to beat out Orton. They trumpeted the factoid (which is a thing that’s believed to be a fact, but actually isn’t) that Quinn played in the exact same offense McDaniels runs at Notre Dame. Quinn has sat on the bench, like backup QBs do. Hillis has had success running and catching the ball this year, (which a lot of Broncos fans, including me, weren’t really that surprised about), and suddenly McDaniels is an idiot who traded away the franchise RB they needed to run the ball with success. How could he not have known he had the NFL’s only one-man running game on his roster? This guy doesn’t even need an offensive line! McDumbass is a fool!!!!!!
Continued at onemanfootball.com (http://onemanfootball.com/2010/11/29/another-county-heard-from-cuyahoga-that-is/)
I’ve been feeling pretty hostile toward a large part of the Broncos fan base lately. I used to think that we were a really educated and reasonable fan base. Through the magic of Twitter, I’ve learned that neither is actually the case. Broncos fans, by-and-large, are tremendously spoiled, and short-sighted. They don’t know much about football, and they don’t try too hard to learn about it from resources like It’s All Over Fat Man and Mile High Report. (The Broncos MSM only has negativity and obviousness to contribute, of course.)
On that note, here’s the ever-growing media narrative: the Denver Broncos are on the wrong track because their young egomaniac coach has set out to destroy a once-proud team. Doug Farrar from the often-craptastic Football Outsiders grew up in Denver, and this is the truth, according to him. Mark Kiszla thinks Josh McDaniels looks like a beaten man. (Which for Mark, would be a big success!) This whole thing reminds me of when noted ******** TJ Simers and Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times successfully ran Dodgers’ GM Paul DePodesta out of LA after 2 years. They hated the young, Harvard educated, Moneyball-reared DePodesta, and called him Google Boy, like knowing how to use The Google is a bad thing. Luckily, Pat Bowlen said Monday that it’s not going to work.
The most frequent charge against McDaniels is that he’s a terrible personnel guy. I think that’s hogwash, aided by a lot of hindsight. There has really been no transaction that seemed egregiously bad in the moment, where somebody knowledgeable would say that it made absolutely no sense. Everybody likes to hit the Broncos for the Peyton Hillis trade, but I’m sure it seemed like a pretty good deal to them at the time. Hillis wasn’t what the Broncos were looking for in a back (and still isn’t, for the record) and they’d lost two games in 2009 largely due to Chris Simms’ suckitude. Why not shore up your backup QB position with somebody who has looked functional-to-solid at times in the NFL, and give up a guy who you weren’t going to use anyway? Eric Mangini had his Jets defense run over by Hillis once, in the best game of his career to that point, and thought he was worth a look. It seemed like a solid trade for both teams, and the only real objections came from some Broncos fans who had developed man (and woman) crushes on the rare caucasian tailback.
(Yes, caucasian-ness is the primary driver for the majority of the love that Hillis gets. You can’t possibly convince me otherwise, because as a player, he’s not too different from Reuben Droughns or Mike Anderson. Identifying with people who look like you doesn’t make you a racist, necessarily, so there’s no need to get butt-hurt about this. For what it’s worth, as a policy, I’m only really interested in dating white women, and I’m definitely not a racist.)
You get my point, though, right? No Peter King, Mike Silver, John Clayton, or Pork Chop Williamson screamed about the greatness of Hillis at the time of the trade. They were more focused on the possibility that Quinn may be able to beat out Orton. They trumpeted the factoid (which is a thing that’s believed to be a fact, but actually isn’t) that Quinn played in the exact same offense McDaniels runs at Notre Dame. Quinn has sat on the bench, like backup QBs do. Hillis has had success running and catching the ball this year, (which a lot of Broncos fans, including me, weren’t really that surprised about), and suddenly McDaniels is an idiot who traded away the franchise RB they needed to run the ball with success. How could he not have known he had the NFL’s only one-man running game on his roster? This guy doesn’t even need an offensive line! McDumbass is a fool!!!!!!
Continued at onemanfootball.com (http://onemanfootball.com/2010/11/29/another-county-heard-from-cuyahoga-that-is/)