So, we're counting down to kickoff, and the inevitability of 18-0. It's not an inevitability that I particularly enjoy, but one that I have come to accept. I am tired of convincing myself that there are any one of a number of vulnerabilities on this Patriot team that any one of a number of opponents could exploit in any one of a number of ways.

It doesn't matter how slow and decrepit the Patriot linebacking unit is. It doesn't matter how dirty Rodney Harrison plays this week. It doesn't even matter that I don't think Laurence Maroney is a legitimate big time tailback in today's NFL. All that really matters is that Quentin Jammer, Antonio Cromartie, Marlon McCree, Clinton Hart and Eric Weddle have a better chance of being elected Pope than they do of containing Moss and Welker this week. And even if they could contain those two, what of Ben Watson, Stallworth and Kevin Faulk (who has been coming up big in situations where I didn't want him to come up big since he was at LSU under Gerry DiNardo's reign of terror)?

Yes, the Chargers managed to lead the NFL in takeaways this season. They also managed to beat Indianapolis twice this season, even winning in the RCA Dome last week. But they also suffered humiliating losses to the Patriots and the very, very, very average Minnesota Vikings this season. Playing on the road and in the cold in New England against the undefeated team that every one loves to hate, it's just not happening. I only hope LaDanian Tomlinson manages to be as entertaining with this year's round of postgame whining as he was last year.

Since this blog is supposed to be about the Red Sox, I would be remiss if I didn't pass along Mike Lowell's statesman-like response to potential testing for HGH in baseball. Mike Lowell is willing to take the test, provided that it's 100% accurate, but he's out if the test is only 99% accurate. I can't help but wonder if there's any room for negotiation there, since it seems very unlikely that any test for any substance will ever be 100% accurate.

Lowell also brought up the double standard issue. Baseball players, writers, coaches and so forth have been quick to point out the fact that Shawne Merriman was suspended for four games and still went to the Pro Bowl last year, and Rodney Harrison missed the first four games of this season for being implicated in an HGH scandal. But it is baseball that is in the cross hairs.

It's simple, as Lowell himself conceded in that article. Baseball looked the other way for a long time, refusing any kind of testing. The NFL, on the other hand, has had a ban on steroids for years. It might not be perfect, but at least football players have been suspended for violating the NFL ban on performance enhancers for years.

Mark McGwire admitted he took andro in 1998, when it was not banned according to the rules of Major League Baseball. It was, however, a banned substance in the NFL at the time. Roger Clemens is alleged to have taken steroids in years when none of the substances Brian McNamee and George Mitchell accuse him of taking were even banned in baseball. Baseball didn't even start testing or developing any kind of comprehensive policy until Congress got on their case.

I don't think there is a double standard here. Rodney Harrison and Shawne Merriman lost a quarter of the season and four game checks. Four games doesn't seem like much at first, but when you do the math it is the equivalent of 40 and a half baseball games. Considering the NFL developed and implemented this policy on their own, long before baseball got religion thanks to a Congressional hearing, I think it's more than reasonable.

I do think Merriman shouldn't have gone to the Pro Bowl, but I wasn't one of the people who voted for him. I think out of common decency, he should have declined the invite, but that's his business. It is, or at least it was, a free country. If people are dumb enough to vote to send a cheater to the Pro Bowl, that's their misfortune.

In other news, in my ongoing effort to make this blog more interactive, here's another gem of a comment from an anonymous reader. In a recent post I happened to bid the Seattle Seahawks a less than fond farewell from the 2007 season. As a part of it, I ripped Seahawk fans for ripping off traditions from Texas A & M and suggested they should play a song to commemorate every early exit from the playoffs the way A & M plays Taps across campus when an alumnus (or alumna) dies in the line of duty serving in the Armed Services.

I suggested "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" as Seattle stole the nickname Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz (Not very funny, but then I just might have overindulged with respect to beer at the time). Reader KobraKommander (in one of his rare instances of bringing things to the table) improved the suggestion with one of his own, offering "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," which is pretty funny.

To make a very long, and pretty unnecessary story short, the anonymous commenter suggested "I'm an @#$hole" by Denis Leary. I bring it up because this is a bit ambiguous. I assume the commenter meant that I, the blogger, am the @#$hole. But it is open to the suggestion that the commenter himself could be the @#$hole. Or any Seahawk fans who might play that to bid their team adieu from the playoffs could be the @#$hole. And let's face it, the odds are that if you live in Seattle or root for the Seahawks, you probably are an @#$hole.

I received an interesting comment on last night's post:

Alan has left a new comment on your post "The other day, I got a snide little email from a f...":

If Derek Lee had teared up after the Cubs got swept this year, I would have never heard the end of it. Never. But of course, when it happens to TO, it's barely worth a mention.

First, and foremost, there is no fair barometer to compare a team that lost an NFL playoff game by four points to a baseball team which was bounced from the playoffs as quickly, brutally and unceremoniously as this year's Cubs were. Don't get me wrong, I don't tend to like picking on Cubs fans (unless they happen to be close friends of mine because I am a horrible person). But the Cubs were outscored 16-6 in their three game travesty against the Diamondbacks.

As for Derrek Lee, yeah he managed to hit .333 for the series against the Diamondbacks, so he has that going for him, which is nice. Too bad for the Cubs fans, all of his four hits were singles and not one of them drove in a run. And on top of that, he struck out four times. Better still, if you look at his postseason stats for his career, Derrek Lee has one more career postseason homer and four more RBI against the Cubs than for the Cubs.

TO didn't have his best statistical game by a long shot, but at least he managed to get his team on the board in Dallas' loss to the Giants. Not only that, but a wide receiver in football is much more bound to his quarterback's performance, offensive line play and his coaching staff's follies than is a first baseman in baseball. Lee got 12 official at bats against the Diamondbacks, but the Cowboys didn't exploit the mismatches available in the Giant secondary the way they should have in the second half.

Two of the missed connections between Owens and Romo in that second half, the long pass down the left sideline where a Giant d-back (I believe it was Corey Webster, but I might be wrong) tipped it away at the last moment and the pass inside the ten where the ball was behind Owens likely would have been TDs. The Cowboys should have gone back to those plays, or at the very least wasted a lot less time in their two minute drill. Can you really say that any of the GDPs Derrek Lee threw at us in the playoffs would have been run scoring plays?

To make a long story short, with the way he played and his team played, Derrek Lee forfeited the right to have any kind of emotional response to the Diamondbacks sweep this fall. TO produced one of his team's two TDs, so he earned the right to be a little frustrated with the Cowboy's failure. And be grateful I chose to overlook the fact that you misspelled your hero's name when you brought that foolishness up in here. I am the only one allowed to misspell words here.

In the giving the devil his due category, Bill Simmons came up with a fairly interesting and surprisingly well thought out comparison of the 1986 Celtics and this present Patriots squad. As far as comparing apples and oranges can be done, it was reasonably successful.

I do think that he is looking a little to hard at the present at the expense of the past, but then I've never been a Patriots fan while I was a Celtics fan before Danny Ainge came back to town. I think the Cs win going away in this comparison, since they neither sold their soul nor (perhaps, given that Moss is both a character problem waiting to happen and in a contract year) mortgaged the future for their epic run at history.

And I think Simmons also fails because he is even slightly afraid of jinxing these Patriots. Maybe Green Bay can catch lightning in a bottle, but I fear that this season is already over.

The other day, I got a snide little email from a friend of mine who just happens to be a big Patriots fan. At the best of times, it can be particularly difficult to be friendly with Patriots fans but being from New England, and all, it's also very difficult to find normal friends who watch sports and aren't fans of the local teams to befriend. This year, however, it has been particularly difficult.

My friend wondered how I felt when I saw TO crying at the end of the Dallas debacle this weekend. I told my friend the truth, I said I generally have no problem with a person expressing their genuine, honest emotional response to a given situation provided, of course, that I happen to like the person in question.

I didn't mind TO crying at the end of the game. It had to be incredibly frustrating to see Dallas waste an entire season by playing a second half without any semblance of urgency. Even in the two minute offense, it seemed like they either counted the game-winning TD they never actually scored as already on the board or they just assumed the Giants would realize that Dallas was much better and would simply forfeit.

I thought Dallas didn't make a concerted effort to get TO the ball in the second half. I thought Dallas seemed to assume that the Giants wouldn't make any adjustments in their pass rush and coverages. I thought Dallas assumed they could simply run the same plays that worked in the first half because the Giants couldn't or wouldn't change their game plan. And with Tom Coughlin on the other side, it might have looked like a safe bet. But I got the sense that Dallas didn't approach the second half of the biggest game of the year with a unified vision to win the game. And I don't know whose fault that was, but I doubt that it was TO's.

It could be worse, right? After all, it's not as though TO became embroiled in a strange personal scandal in the week leading up to the biggest game of the year. I don't know what the truth is, in this situation, if there is any truth on any side of this strange story. I am inclined to think that there have to be a few simpler ways of extorting $100,000 from a guy than this restraining order con.

I am upset by this whole stupid little mess. Why did it come out now? What is the point of wasting what might be a perfectly good distraction on a week where the Chargers couldn't beat the Patriots if they got to put 15 of their best "men" on the field against the regulation 11 from the other side? It just sets up so well, to have the team with the revenge angle from the grace and dignity the Patriots displayed beating San Diego on the road last postseason coming to Foxboro to play the team with the unblemished record in all but the moral dimension of the game.

Of course, just about every thing that looks so well scripted is bound to unravel spectacularly in reality. Especially if Philip Rivers can play this week. I'd feel more comfortable with Billy Volek under center. You know Rivers is due for an dismal performance of epic proportions, especially with Eli Manning still playing and the inevitable comparisons between the two of them. Plus, LaDanian Tomlinson is a great player when the breaks aren't beating the Bolts, but who whines better when the breaks go the other way?

And finally, the Chargers deserve to lose. For all they cried about how classless the Patriots were last season, and with some measure of good reason, you'd think they might have emerged from the upset in Indianapolis with some measure of dignity. Alas, that wasn't the case. Not since Emmett Smith walked the Earth in the first half of the 1990s have I seen such a shameless display of helmet removal as I saw when the Chargers defense stopped Indy on fourth and goal in the late fourth quarter.

And it's a damn shame. 17-1 might not sound quite as good as 16-1 would have, but I could have found the strength to live with it.

Since I last posted, I've been wondering whether the Steelers are the team to beat the Patriots. On Monday Night Football, provided that you could sit through the forced banter between the three hosts who have no business working with each other and stomach Tony Kornheiser desperately failing to channel Howard Cosel and/or be funny, you'd have seen a team look just about as good as a team can. But it was against the wreckage of the Baltimore Ravens.

The Patriots are slightly better than the Ravens offensively, in the same way that eating Thanksgiving dinner is slightly better than getting kicked in the shins a half dozen times. But the Steelers, more than any of the teams the Pats have played to this point, have all the pieces on defense to give stopping this juggernaut the old college try. Having the pieces and bringing them to the game and having them work the way the coaches drew it up isn't as easy as one could hope, though.

No matter how good they are, the Steelers cornerbacks are all considerably shorter than Randy Moss. And with Moss getting away with offensive pass interference the way no one on this Earth has since Michael Irvin brought his talents to the broadcast booth, he is a disconcerting prospect. And there is the question of whether or not the Steelers can find a way to stop Wes Welker finding every little hole in every zone. If they can't do that a handful of times, they're not going to get the Pats off the field on third down.

Then there is the zone blitz scheme which Dick Lebeau practically invented. It's greatest strength is its capacity to baffle, confuse and frustrate pass protection schemes and force them to break down while closing off the quarterback's outlets. Unfortunately, you can't do that to Tom Brady and his offensive linemen. As a group, the five linemen and their field general do not possess enough intelligence to be baffled, confused or frustrated. And while there are coaching staffs and teams that can come up with plans to outsmart any opponent, is there a plan to outdumb the morons on the Patriots?

On offense, the Steelers can run the ball, even though they didn't do much of that against Baltimore. Even if the size and strength of the Patriots defensive line leads you to believe that Fast Willie Parker will be contained, don't forget that the Steelers can throw Najeh Davenport at the Pats. Even though he's best remembered for being arrested after an ex-girlfriend awoke to discover him befouling her closet in the middle of the night, he still has the potential to run all over the Patriots like Marion Barber did in Dallas.

Pass protection could be a problem, since Mike Vrabel seems to have borrowed Rodney Harrison's fountain of youth. And Big Ben loves to hang on to the ball, even though he moves well in the pocket and shrugs off defenders because of his size and strength, this could hurt the Steelers. If he makes even one mistake when it comes to ball security, that could provide the Patriots with the opportunity to take a lead which no sign seen to date points to them relinquishing.

One thing this secondary for the Pats has yet to face is a deep threat like Santonio Holmes. If the Steelers can protect Big Ben, this could burn the Pats badly. Then again, if any of the ifs I have brought up to this point in the season had amounted to anything more than a small colossal waste of time in this giant colossal waste of time that is this blog, the damn Patriots wouldn't be undefeated and I'd look like less of a tool.

Speaking of tools, it provides an inelegant segue into a group of people who badly need criticism. NBC is saving the environment, whether we like it or not. I was reluctant to blog about this a few days ago, because I expected the Bush Administration to have a change of heart along the lines of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol when Matt Lauer went to Greenland to break the story of global warming, but I was disappointed.

While NBC is making hypocritical gestures like sending a waste of space to Greenland to waste even more time and space than he usually wastes and shutting off a few lights in its studio, a serious question is going unanswered. NBC wants me to be conscious of my carbon footprint (and as a subsidiary of GE, the network is far less a threat to the general environmental health of the planet than a guy who doesn't even own an automobile, right?), but did they really need to send one of their talking heads to Greenland to do it?

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm assuming that Matt Lauer didn't row himself up to Greenland in a boat. So he must have taken a plane or a boat to Greenland. And since NBC probably didn't buy him and whatever personnel were required to support him and his crew tickets on a Southwest Airlines flight to the middle of nowhere in Greenland, some genius must have chartered a plane or a ship to move those people and their equipment to Greenland, unless of course the natives there have all the necessary equipment for broadcasting "news" across the globe.

So NBC spent how much money, transported how many people and how much equipment to Greenland to get me and a few million other people to think about their impact on fragile ecosystems? It seems like that could have been done more efficiently. What with the fact that these people (unless Matt Lauer can provide heat, shelter, food fresh drinking water and whatever other necessities a film crew in the middle of nowhere Greenland require with the powers of his mind) must have done some damage to the pristine ecosystem they visited, how much do I have to scale back my carbon footprint to offset what they did while they went up there to tell me to scale back my carbon footprint in the first place? Good job NBC.

Weekends just keep on getting better for me, don't they? Next week I am forced at long last to root for the Indianapolis Colts to win a football game. I still hate the Colts, but far less so than I hate this incarnation of the New England Patriots. With each game, I like this Patriots team less and less.

The two images which will linger on longest in my mind from this "game" against the Washington Redskins will be Randy Moss committing offensive pass interference while the officials looked on without discharging their duties and Bill Belichick standing confused at midfield when the game ended and there was no opposing coach waiting to shake hands with him.

Imagine the audacity of Joe Gibbs, resenting the Patriots for scoring 44 points more than were needed to win. He should have been there waiting to congratulate Belichick for being God's gift to professional football. Even if he had to trample over widows and orphans to do it, Gibbs should have been there to render unto Belichick what is Belichick's.

I realize I'm in the habit of quoting or referring to Jimmy Johnson's response to Gerry Faust after the latter complained that Johnson had run up the score on his Fighting Irish team. Johnson's response was terse but to the point, as he said if you don't want to get blown out, then recruit better players. I am of the opinion that the Redskins should have taken steps necessary to ensure that they didn't find themselves on the wrong end of a 52-7 beating. But I don't blame Gibbs for not shaking Belichick's hand.

I am sure that I will be in the minority on this issue, since I am sure the sages of the Boston media like Shaughnessy, Ryan and the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing troglodytes at their rival newspaper will rise to Belichick's defense. After all, the Boston media is exceedingly reluctant to question or criticize the pride of the NFL since they know they are less formidable adversaries for the team owner than certain eccentric heads of state.

Back to the point at hand, I don't blame Gibbs for refusing to shake hands with Belichick after this game. It is true that he could have, and probably should have, done something more to prevent this from happening. That said, I don't remember the portion of the Johnson quote that enjoined the defeated to enjoy their defeat. After all, would Belichick have been the model of graciousness had the situation been reversed? I hardly think so.

It seems strange, after the episode with Eric Mangini at the end of the rgular season last year, to see Belichick the victim of an episode like this. But can one fairly say that Joe Gibbs refusing to meet Belichick at midfield was any more classless than Bleichick leaving Brady in as long as he did, or when he replaced Brady continuing to pass the ball with Castle and Gutierrez? I don't think so, and not just as a Patriot hater but as a general football fan.

I appreciate that it is generally advisable to have a backup quarterback with game experience on hand in the event that the unthinkable should happen to Tom Brady. However, a half dozen completions against a Redskins team that had given up the ghost two and a half quarters before said backup quarterback left the bench aren't going to serve Castle or Gutierrez particularly well should one or the other be pressed into service next week. And it doesn't earn any karma points with the powers that govern the football universe.

But kudos to Joe Gibbs for not worshipping at the altar of Belichick and actually rendering unto him what is due. Going forward, I don't really know what to think yet, about the Colts game next week. I'm not going to make any predictions for a long time, now. I just know I'm rooting for Indy, even if it hurts my soul to root for Manning. And I'm looking forward to the Freeny matchup with Matt Light.

To any Patriots fans who take issue with my claim that the Moss play was offensive pass interference, consider this. What if Terrell Owens had made the same move in a theoretical game in Foxboro? Would you not call for the Norfolk County Sheriff's deputies to haul him off for arraignment for felony assault in Wrentham District Court? Or if Assante Samuel found himself the victim of such a play (even if it is stretching the imagination to the breaking point to picture someone puling a stunt like that without getting a beating to rival that which Bruce Lee threw on the Ohara character in Enter the Dragon from Assante for his trouble), would the fans not demand justice? Or at the very least a flag?

Of late, I've been thinking of the end of Moby Dick. The movie, since I never had the courage to face the book. Captain Ahab stabbed at the white whale from Hell's heart, and fat lot of good it did him. The whale just kept right on swimming. And the World Series is now over. And I have this to say to Red Sox fans: GET FUCKED. But remember, I mean that in the nicest way possible.

I know I promised my take on the Joe Torre situation with the Yankees, but a few things have come up to interfere with my blogging. Not the least of which is that I recently checked Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut out of the local library. I realize I just 86ed my street cred, since no one who is any one between the ages of 18 and 65 checks books out of the library. And if they do, it's certainly not to read them for edification. That said, if you get a chance and you are in the habit of reading, I highly recommend this book. It's short, it's funny and it offers some chilling insights into the way people act.

But Joe Torre will have to wait, because this afternoon, a more pressing concern is on my mind. This Sunday, two undefeated teams square off on the field beneath the half-assed open roof at Texas Stadium. They are the loathsome New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys. And, as you might expect, only one of these teams can emerge with a victory.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the Patriots will win the game. Rodney Harrison is back from his little slap on the wrist for taking illicit performance enhancing substances. Tom Brady is something like 29-2 on artificial playing surfaces in his illustrious career. The Patriots have steamrolled over every opponent they have encountered this season, and the pasting the Chargers put on the Broncos suddenly makes it look as though the Pats have faced a half-decent team. And on top of that, the Patriots have the second best player to wear number 81 on the field at Texas Stadium in recent memory on their side. No one can stand in the way of this juggernaut, and only a fool would believe that any team has a chance against them.

Call me a fool, but I think Dallas will win this game. Any reasonably competent high school algebra student can tell you that in accordance with the transitive property, since New England destroyed the Bills and Dallas barely escaped Buffalo with an improbable win, New England will beat Dallas handily. Alas, the transitive property works much better in a math book than it does in the real, honest to goodness, no fooling three dimensional world of pro football.

I am fond of quoting the Michael Douglas character from the Ghost and the Darkness who said that in prize fighting, everybody has a plan until they get hit. Dallas has been hit, and hit hard. They have shown that they can overcome adversity, silly mistakes and a hostile crowd in a strange environment and survive. New England has shown that they can get a lead and front-run with the best of them. No one has hit the Pats yet. And that is in large part due to the fact that the Pats have been great so far, but what will this version of the Pats do should the breaks start beating the boys?

Recently, a good friend sent me a cold analysis of the Notre Dame game vs. UCLA which pointed out that when the UCLA starting QB went down, they were forced to play a walk on with no game experience. Although the author's intent was to caution fans like me from getting to happy about ND's first win, it had the unintended effect of reminding me that New England knocked JP Losman out of their game against Buffalo and got to face the untested rookie Trent Edwards. Edwards had a few games to adjust before he faced the Cowboys. And yet Buffalo managed to score precisely zero offensive TDs against the Cowboys.

What worries me about the Cowboys is how their pass protection will hold up against the Patriots, or any team for that matter. I am not overly concerned with their ability to run the ball. The Patriots have a big defensive line and they have been able to push around lighter offensive lines to this point. However, Vince Wilfork will encounter a creature nearly as rare as the Loch Ness Monster in the form of Dallas guard Leonard Davis - a man actually bigger than Vince Wilfork and not on one of those TLC shows about an enormously fat shut-in who is moved from point to point by a piece of construction machinery. Dallas is much bigger on the offensive line than any team NE will face this season, and I'm not sure the Pats can handle it.

I think barring holding penalties or some sort of deal with the devil, Matt Light will be made to look ridiculous (at least in a professional capacity, he does his own work making himself look ridiculous off the field) by DeMarcus Ware and Anthony Spencer. No matter what Shawne Merriman and the pharmaceutical industry tell you, Ware is the best OLB in the game right now. And the Pats o-line just isn't ready for him.

And make no mistake about it, take any combination of three Patriots you want, and you'll still be a man and a half short of covering Terrell Owens. And for all the highlight reel TDs Randy Moss has caught this season, show me one play where he threw one block 1/3 as good as any TO threw to spring Creighton for the long TD in St. Louis. That's why TO is that much better than Moss, he's not as fast, but he's tougher, smarter and braver about going over the middle. He may drop a pass here and there on account of a lack of concentration, but I'd much rather have him than Moss any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

Dallas is a better team than New England. And unless Belichick has some sort of trick up his sleeve involving compromising photos of Tony Romo or illicitly obtained video of the Dallas coaching staff's signals, I'm confident that for once, right will prevail.

In other news, the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians face one another for the right to represent the AL in the World Series. I really tried the last day or so to generate any interest, any hope of rooting for the Indians, and I can't. My hatred for the Red Sox is in no way diminished, and I still want them to lose every game by 100 runs, but I never wanted Cleveland to be the team facing them. As Victor Frankenstein said, it wasn't supposed to be this way. It wasn't supposed to be this way at all. It was supposed to be a thing of beauty.

And I run a risk doing this, as I try to avoid political matters in this space, but I have to rip some one for this. Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize? How is that possible? Maybe he has done some nice work on global warming whoring himself out to the Day after Tomorrow's promotional campaign and appearing in an Inconvenient Truth. But has that made the world a more peaceful place in any way, shape or form?

For instance, when Teddy Roosevelt won it, he got it for brokering the treaty that stopped the Russo-Japanese War. That is making the world more peaceful for his efforts. Al Gore and his UN group have gotten emerging economic powers like China and India to reduce what percentage of their greenhouse emissions? They've increased liberal guilt in the G8, but that's not Nobel worthy. Even if it were, how is it worth a peace prize? It might be worth an eighth grade environmental science bee prize, but not the Nobel Peace Prize.

What a depressing weekend. I never would have believed that the Yankees could take two out of three from the Red Sox and it wouldn't make me smile. What is happening to the football team at Notre Dame is just that depressing. And the instability and unpredictability of the early stages of the NFL season isn't helping.

It's hard to find words to describe what Michigan did to Notre Dame this weekend. Suffice it to say, there just isn't a lot of fight in this vintage of the Fighting Irish. I guess the one moment that best encapsulated the debacle in the Big House this week came when the ABC telecast wound down mercifully. As they do for each team in each game, they chose the Chevrolet Players of the Game.

I didn't bother to remember which individual was singled out for Notre Dame, I just remember that he was a defensive player who recorded 9 tackles, including one for a loss. The team was beaten 38-0, and the player of the game was a defensive player. The bright spots were so few and far between that a guy who made a tackle behind the opponent's line of scrimmage merited a $1,000 donation in his name to the University of Notre Dame's general scholarship fund. How the mighty have fallen.

And as for the telecast itself, if ABC had dragged 3 of the inbred hayseeds who made up the home crowd in Ann Arbor, the network could hardly have assembled a crew more biased toward the Wolverines. That wouldn't have been such a big deal if they were at least decent announcers. Paul McGuire gets worse with each word that leaves his mouth. The world might be better served if they paid him more to stay home than they pay him to show up for work. Or at least unplugged his mike periodically. Let him think he's calling the game if they don't have the heart to get rid of him.

I found the brief segments where individual Wolverines were allowed to share fun little snippets of their thoughts and feelings about the game to be the most galling aspects this particular telecast. Granted, I have searched far and wide to see Jake Long give his own opinion of his strengths. And I was deeply shocked to see that literacy and the ability to point out forks in his family tree weren't among them.

A close second on the list of things that continue to vex me from the Michigan game is that Mike Hart delivered on his guarantee, so now this win will probably be cataloged in history with Babe Ruth's called shot and Namath's guarantee in Super Bowl III. Of course the fact that I predicted a Michigan victory in this space last week is absolutely no consolation. A blind man could have seen it coming with the way Notre Dame has played to this point.

Even with Ryan Mallett making his first start (and knowing Mallett would be a tool, with that name and all) I didn't expect Notre Dame to be 3-0. I knew with their opening schedule and a slate of untested players at key positions like QB, RB and WR that this 0-3 start was a very real possibility. What I did not expect, however, was that after 180 minutes of football I would find myself on a vision quest to see the Fighting Irish score their first offensive touchdown of this season. I could live with 0-3 if even one of the games were close enough to make me think that 0-7 weren't on the horizon.

The season has been so disappointing and surprising that I have struggled to find a good analogy. The closest I have been able to come to it is if I were to walk by one of those Dance Dance Revolutions games and hear Born to Run. Hearing that foolish machine play an Elvis song would hurt more, but surprise me less with the way Elvis Presley Enterprises operates. No, finding that Springsteen sold out in such a shameful manner would be the only equivalent to this travesty of a season.

Two final thoughts on Notre Dame-Michigan. First, I don't know now when I'll see 3:10 to Yuma. Russell Crowe attended Saturday's game in Michigan regalia as Lloyd Carr's personal guest. Eventually, I'll get over it because I love the movie Gladiator. But I hate Michigan, so it will take a while. And good riddance to Demetrius Jones as he transfers to Northern Illinois. Maybe he wouldn't have been as hurt by losing his job to Jimmy Clausen if he had tried to play a bit less terribly.

Then there is the bizarre NFL season to date. These weekend's games didn't do much to improve my state of mind. In fact, it made things much worse. First, no one on my fantasy team got in the end zone. So that put the kibosh on the Pork Chop Express. It didn't help that Chad Johnson had such a big game, as he was on the opposing team. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I hate Chad Johnson. TO made his shtick possible when he signed that ball in Seattle all those years ago, but every one loves Chad and hates TO.

Since the Cleveland vs. Cincinnati game was so surprising, it has been covered to death. I, however, have my own unique angle. I am (or more accurately now, was) in a suicide pool. For those who might not be familiar with the term, the people against whom I compete and I pick one team per week. If that team wins, we advance, When the team you pick loses, that's it for the pool entry. To make a long story short, I picked Cincinnati this week.

I had my reasons. In no particular order, here they are. As I understand it, the rules said I could only choose a team once. So I was trying to save teams who looked more like a guaranteed win for later on in the season. Fat lot of good that did me. In my inimitable wisdom, I decided that I was going to target teams that weren't very good and pick their opponent in the early going.

In week one, I chose San Fran over Arizona and that nearly blew up in my face. So I decided to pick against a team that looked dreadful in week one. So I chose Cleveland, who was so bad against Pittsburgh that they cut the guy who started at QB. And go figure, they scored 51 points. I would have bet going into the game that they wouldn't have scored 51 points by week 5.

It might be due to some neurotic streak in my personality, but I am not going to eat any crow on this Patriots win. Yes, the Chargers have an vastly superior pass rush than the Jets. But if you recall, the Patriots did just as good a job containing the same defensive package last season in the playoffs. And then when all New England seemed ready to fall in love with the Pats O-line, Dwight Freeny and Robert Matthis carved them up as though that were the object of pass protection and not the antithesis of pass protection just one week later. So I am not sold on this offensive line.

And the Chargers do have a better secondary than the Jets, so it was a more impressive performance for Brady, Moss and the rest. But the Chargers are not really that good in the defensive backfield. Maybe you think Quentin "Bad Mamma" Jammer qualifies as a front-line, shutdown corner. I don't. He's adequate, forgettable and occasionally regrettable to steal a line from the Simpsons President's Day Pageant in the Ralph Loves Lisa episode.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but Moss has always been a great front-runner. On national TV in the regular season, he just might be the best of all time. However, that isn't what gets players to Canton. Lynn Swann got into the Hall of Fame with weak regular season stats because he was incredible in huge games like Super Bowls. Moss hasn't gotten there yet, but he's fallen short in NFC championships. So forgive me for not putting on sackcloth and streaking my face with ashes as though I were a penitent man.

I didn't have much time for watching highlight shows or Sportscenter these past few days, but I wonder how much attention has been paid to another oddity at this stage of the season. During the four minute offense when the Colts had a chance to shut the door on the Titans, Manning threw two incompletions and took a big sack with under 3 minutes to go in the game.

If I remember correctly, the Titans only had one timeout, so even three running plays would have all but killed their chances to win, even if they went for no gain. Hell, even kneeling the ball three times would have run time and forced the Titans to burn their last timeout. It certainly would have been better than two incompletions which burnt mere seconds off the clock and a sack which forced the Colts to punt.

Granted it's all academic, as Indy went on to win the game, but for all the praise given Manning for his inexpressible brilliance it would be nice to see him take some heat for this one. Indy might have come up with a TD on one of those passes, but then again there could have been a deflection that turned into an interception or that sack could have turned into a fumble. Or Vince Young could have engineered game-winning drive when they only needed a field goal. You can't get lucky all the time, but you can be smart every day, as they say.

I don't have very much to say on the cheating scandal. Yes, every one tries to steal signs and signals. That's just one of the things that happens in professional sports. But having some front office flunkies sneaking around in the bowels of Giants Stadium with video recording equipment is a little bit excessive, no? All we need now is to find out that Kraft or Belichick referred to these guys as plumbers or a revelation to inform us that there is a recording system in the Patriots front office with a number of suspicious gaps in the tapes and then we have the NFL's version of Watergate.

I don't expect that there will be any kind of consensus on this issue. It's tricky. It seems to me that the Patriots and their apologists are dead wrong, because they're falling back on a defense that never got any of us out of punishment when we were kids. Just because every body else steals signs doesn't make it alright that your flunkies skulk around with cameras. Granted, Patriots fans as a group struggle to compose a more reasoned defense, but that's no fit excuse. But I have a strong antipathy to the Patriots, their fans and their management, so I might be wrong.

I guess I would be remiss if I didn't talk a little about this weekend's Red Sox Yankees series. I will keep my comments to a minimum since I fear my lengthy posts following the August sweep might have jinxed the Yankees a little bit, since they didn't gain any ground in the standings until very recently.

I will also refrain from making too many cracks about the three homer performance from Frank Thomas. I'd hate to beat Dan Shaughnessy to the punch by making some quip to the effect that the Big Hurt put a big hurting on Big Schill. Hell if I could work in blogboy blowhard, I'd write his whole column for him. I'd hate myself for it, since I'm sure the CHB all but wet himself with excitement when that third bomb left the Sky Dome or the Rodgers Centre or whatever the call it in Toronto.

I don't know what to make of Joba Chamberlain. It was nice to see him unveil his curveball for all of about ten seconds. He locked up Pedroia with it, but probably wasted it on JD Drew. JD Drew couldn't hit an eephus pitch at this point. As my old grandfather used to say, he couldn't hit the floor if he fell out of bed. My grandfather loved bad jokes and hated the Red Sox, God rest him. And then the media beat the story to death in an evening of good, hard work. Or at least work.

I'm not too worried about him letting up his first career run in the form of Lowell's homer. It had to happen at some point, as they say. Ideally, it wouldn't have come against the Red Sox, especially not in the manner in which it occurred. But Lowell is a very dangerous hitter in Fenway Park. That's part of life in baseball. If you throw heat it's not going to end well if a guy gets a hold of one.

What bothers me a little bit is that so much is being made of him now. Between the 17 and 2/3 inning scoreless streak and the "Joba Rules," he's a bad month away from being this generation's Mark "The Bird" Fydrich. Not so much from the eccentricity standpoint, but the young pitcher who gets a big buildup but never gets back to that early magic. Chamberlain's gotten too much attention. Hell, Clay Bucholtz hasn't gotten nearly as much coverage and he threw a no-hitter. This can't end well.

Finally, watching this evening's third quarter, with Charles Barkley in the booth, I am more convinced than ever that he should be announcing games. I know with the way the sports media is seeking uncontroversial controversy (think the NBC Sunday Night studio show) soon no sporting event will take place without Joe Buck or Cris Collinsworth or some similar bland, white-bread mouthpiece demanding that you take their position on an inconsequential argument.

John Madden is the last real loose cannon calling NFL games, and he's too old, fat and jolly to say anything that would hurt any one's feelings. But at least he avoids real controversy by being genuinely nice. That's why I like him, even as he nears senility. Every other announcer lacks the balls to say what's on their minds or the minds to have something to say. So Barkley should call games. Or I could to it. I'd work for food, short money and one of those set ups they use to conceal witness identities in mob trials.

Against all reason, the NFL has yet to put an end to the charade that is the 2007 regular season. Even after today's action which saw the New England Patriots win the single most impressive football game in recorded human history, the show apparently must go on. When you get right down to it, you know that if you can beat the Jets in the Meadowlands, you can beat any team anywhere at any time.

There are some misguided naysayers who might offer an alternative explanation for today's event. People might dare whisper that the Jets made the playoffs on the strength of a weak schedule and some lucky breaks. They might wonder whether those factors might have had enough of an impact to negate the dreadful play on words that makes up the nickname of the young Jets head coach. But who among them would dare show their face in the wake of that amazing win?

After all, there is no possible alternative but to assume that today's dominance was due solely to the excellence of the New England Patriots. Who could dare think that the Jets inability to rush the passer and even more pathetic secondary play could have been the result of a bad football team as opposed to an outstanding opponent?

I think the one moment that best encapsulates the state of the New York Jets this season came when the crowd cheered after Chad Pennington was hurt. Not only did it show the Jets fans as total dbags, but it showed that this team can't be all that good if Kellen Clemens is the savior waiting in the wings.

In his brief career, Kellen Clemens had thrown two passes prior to this season and managed exactly zero completions. To his credit, he did lead the league in TD passes this preseason. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but that just impresses the hell out of me. Isn't that why we remember Joe Montana all these years after he retired? For leading the league in TD passes in preseason after preseason?

Outside of New York, no one cares who accumulated what meaningless stats in which slate of meaningless games. If Kellen Clemens is the QB of the future and the future is now, then the 2007 season is already over for the New York Jets. If that is the case, then the blowout the Patriots laid on them this afternoon isn't as impressive as people seem to think.

As impressive as Randy Moss' day was, perhaps it might be wise to wait for him to play a team with a serviceable secondary before we pack his bags for Honolulu and the Pro Bowl. For instance, on his long TD catch can we fairly say that he beat triple coverage? Might we instead say that three Jets took up some space but didn't earn their game checks even though they must have enjoyed their front row seat for the play?

Of course, it is somewhat unfair for me to be so critical of the Jets secondary today. After all, the front seven would have been hard pressed to do less to help their defensive backs. They made the Patriots offensive line look like supermen with their lackluster pass rush. They almost got near Brady once. I think I remember that.

In all fairness, I am just a bit bitter because Brady's performance probably cost me the game in fantasy football. Of course the Kansas City Chiefs horrendous offense dragging Larry Johnson down as though they were a 10 man albatross and LJ were the Ancient Mariner had a fair bit to do with it. And Tony Romo (my QB) hurt more than he helped with his treasonous penchant for throwing to Jason Witten (my esteemed opponent's TE) instead of Terrell Owens (my WR) poured salt into the wound.

It hurts losing this game (which isn't technically over, but I need a huge second half out of Romo and TO and a near miraculous effort from Vernon Davis against Anquan Boldin) to have a chance. It hurts doubly because I'm losing to Mr. Bean's stunt double and a guy who played Eddie Kennison. I guess I'm just not as smart as I think I am, or a victim of bad luck.

But before I wrap this post up, I have a couple of other things to say about a couple of things. First, on the Auburn-South Florida game. I have to congratulate Auburn coach Tommy Tubberville for his amazing ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. After South Florida tied the game with about 45 seconds to go, and Auburn holding onto two timeouts, Coach Tubberville elected to play for the tie and overtime rather than risk a turnover playing for the win.

Even if Auburn had turned it over, South Florida was out of timeouts. Their kicker had just tied the game, but he'd also missed four kicks that day. But giving them an equal chance to win the game by eating the ball and going to overtime couldn't have been good for Auburn's confidence. I assume this knowing that South Florida went on to upset Auburn. The moral of the story - only a tool plays for a tie.

The only thing that keeps Tubberville from becoming a tool of note is that he wasn't the biggest tool in the stadium. I saw a guy rooting for South Florida while wearing a wrestling singlet, only this and nothing more. It got me thinking, is there ever an acceptable time to wear a wrestling singlet. And the answer is no.

It is never appropriate to wear a singlet. Not as a costume for Halloween. Not while watching a football game. Not in the privacy of one's own home. Not even while engaged in that least cool and most homoerotic of sports, Greco-Roman wrestling is it appropriate to wear a singlet. A man should never wear scanty, skin-tight garments. It's not a good look.

If you wear a singlet in public you ought to be arrested. Doubly so if you wear it to an event that isn't a wrestling competition. If you aren't arrested, then maybe you ought to do the rest of us a favor and refrain from passing your genes to the next generation. The only thing that keeps him from being the tool of note is that an odd combination of laziness and horror at the choice of attire prevents me from searching for a photo of that tool.

Among the other things that are bothering me from this weekend is the new Nike ad campaign. In particular, the commercial featuring Shawne Merriman and Stephen Jackson is antagonizing me. I don't know if you recognized the song when you heard it, but it is the Promontory Theme from the cinematic triumph, Last of the Mohicans. It's the song playing while Chingachkook, Uncas and Nathaniel chase down Magua and his warriors at the climax of the film.

If I were a better person, I'd admit that I'm just a bitter person who resents Shawne Merriman's new, edgy style of play. But I'm not, so I can say spiteful things. For instance, I'd have less of a problem with this if a needle injecting some illicit concoction of performance enhancing chemicals were photoshopped into the ad somewhere reminding us of Merriman's four game suspension last season. Or maybe it would bother me less if someone could prove that Chingachkook's triumph over Magua had been aided by some sort of banned substance.

But even more than the Patriots winning, the Bears losing and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad use of that song from that scene, another event is bothering me. I don't know if you saw it, I didn't. I had to be told by a Patriots fan who wanted to rile me for failing to show the new look Pats the proper respect. Last night, while I was occupied watching real sports, NASCAR and Dale Jr. crossed a line I couldn't believe they would dare cross.

In his seemingly futile chase for the Chase for the Cup, Dale Jr. dared adorn the hood of his car with the image of Elvis Presley. The universe punished him for his insolence, and he didn't win the race. In fact, Little E didn't even finish the race. If winning mattered to him, and I'd bet it doesn't based on the frequency with which he wins, this truly would be a blow.

It is not fair to blame Dale Jr. for this without criticizing the corporate entity that controls Elvis' legacy. Shame on the functionaries at Elvis Presley Enterprises for whoring his image out to be painted on the hood of a race car. Do they not earn enough money profiteering from his life's work? If I thought I had the discipline not to violate it, I would call for a boycott on Elvis just as I did against John Cougar Mellencamp. But I won't be that sort of hypocrite.

I'm sorry I haven't updated for a few days. I've been busy, as you would expect, since I'm a popular guy. My social calendar is always full, but of late it has been fuller than usual. But I have some time and quite a bit on my mind this evening.

Over the last few days, I have run across three tools who deserve to be mentioned as tools of note in this space. I happened to see a guy pulling into a Home Depot parking lot this afternoon driving an oversized camouflage pickup truck customized for off-roading. Ordinarily, that alone would catch my eye, driving an off-road vehicle to Home Depot is never cool. However, this dude was wearing what appeared to be welding goggles in lieu of sunglasses. Wearing tinted safety glasses as sunglasses is never acceptable, never mind the welding goggles. It is ironic, is it not, that such a giant tool would be travelling to a massive warehouse filled with tools of every description sold by one of the world's largest purveyors of tools? Technically it's a mere coincidence, but ironic sounds better.

Another tool who has managed to stand out from the herd of tools to warrant mention in this space is none other than the Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome. Mr. Newsome has decided to save the environment by banning bottled water from city offices in San Fran. Even though I realize that this decision is going to put a stop to global climate change, greenhouse gas concerns, the hole in the ozone layer and Republicans and their corporations, I wonder whether the mayor of San Francisco could have found a legitimate step to reduce his city's eco footprint.

It seems vaguely noble at first, trying to cut down on the amount of plastic recycled each year. But residents who sign the no bottled water pledge receive a stainless steel recyclable container. Now I might not be particularly smart, but doesn't that mean that you end the plastic problem by creating a stainless steel problem? Of course one can sell scrap metal (or recyclable metal, if you want to put a pleasant face on it) for good money. Particularly stainless steel.

I wonder, then, if this move to stainless steel recyclable containers is more utilitarian than altruistic, while still being a total waste of time and shameless grandstanding. Would that ending the public menace that is the plastic water bottle could change the fact that the city's budget is a mess, or undo the fact that the mayor got caught tagging a subordinate's wife.

Our final honoree for tool of note is our old friend, the CHB. In a recent "effort," the CHB came tantalizingly close to proving that he is, despite his advancing years, hip, with it and completely connected to current trends in the youth culture. He discovered what no one else had had the perspicacity to realize. It was the run of the 2005 Chicago White Sox that made Journey's Don't Stop Believing a cult classic.

Now I am no Journey fan, but I am sure that many others who feel that way have found that particular song to be a guilty pleasure long before the White Sox latched onto it. The song did manage to climb to number 9 on the charts following its release in 1981. It's been in a large number of movies and TV shows, most of which occurred before the White Sox made it their theme.

I think you'll find if you take the time to look up when the White Sox were on a road in Baltimore and Joe Crede requested some Journey songs, which triggered the song becoming the team's theme for 2005, that it had to have occurred after the Family Guy episode that started the song's reintroduction to the mainstream was shot and probably after it aired. That particular episode aired in June, and it got a much wider audience than the White Sox did prior to the playoffs. I also don't think that Laguna Beach took its inspiration for using Journey from the White Sox.

Thanks, though, for the effort. If only the CHB would either familiarize himself with a small portion of the world outside of his experience in the press box prior to writing about it. Far better if he just retired, but why would any of us be so lucky.

And finally, congratulations are due to the Chicago Bears. After all, who would believe that they cut Tank Johnson for the sake of expediency? It takes very little moral courage to drop a guy like that who has had legal trouble. It also took little moral courage not to step in with a sterner hand before the situation came to this pass.

I really don't know what the right thing to do in a situation like this is. I like Tank Johnson as a football player. I think he has a chance to get his life together. He hasn't shown the propensity for attracting trouble like Pacman Jones. We know Tank didn't pay a visit to the strippie prior to his meeting with Roger Godell because Jay Mariotti probably would have had that big heart attack, the one Fred Sanford always threatened to have from the sheer unadulterated pleasure he would have derived from another slip up from Johnson.

I was looking forward to another year of rooting for the Bears. Now I'm not so sure. Any team that did something Mariotti hoped for this much might not be worth rooting for over a long season. I don't have any other team that really inspires me right now, though. I will make a deal with New England though. If Bob Kraft can conjure a pair of testicles and some guts, make his way up to Kennybunkport this weekend and come back with the ring a certain Russian head of state (can't mention his name lest I get some polonium in the mail) pocketed a few years back, I'll root for the Patriots. I'll even defend Randy Moss when he lets his team down when they need him most.

It's funny to see the way professional sports franchises operate sometimes. The Celtics sinking ship let Sebastian Telfair go because his off court behavior gave them a convenient excuse to drop him without much fanfare. The Patriots reversed field on their operating mantra during this season's draft weekend, forsaking the traditional high character guys fans have grown accustomed to over the last decade and a half for riskier, sketchier players. The NBA equivalent of a chicken running around with its head cut off is trying to take the high road while the NFL's shining city on a hill is suddenly trying to recycle bad citizens. Funny, indeed.

Of course, we all learned recently exactly how significant the decision to cut Telfair is. Bob Ryan emerged from his lair and wrote yet another piece to kick a man while he was down. Anotine Walker, Butch Hobson and Nomar have all merited this treatment in the past, and now it's Telfair's turn. The only thing that amazes me in all of this is that it took an eminent basketball mind like Bob Ryan nearly 10 months to see the flaws in Sebastian Telfair's game.

I suppose I am being somewhat unfair to Mr Ryan and not presenting his entire argument, but this is my blog and I can say what I want. And anybody who has read any of my past material probably can anticipate where this post is heading. Cutting Telfair is just one more in a long line of spectacular personnel failures in this Celtic regime.

The Sebastian Telfair catastrophe is one more step Ainge has taken to step out from under the albatross that was the Antoine Walker trade. Ainge didn't like Walker's game, so he traded him to Dallas for Jiri Welsch and Raef LaFrentz. Jiri added very little value. And Raef's contract was such a nightmare that Ainge unloaded him for a glass menagerie of failure and helped enable Portland to pull off a draft day coup and land Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy.

In the end, I am somewhat disappointed that the Celtics have let Telfair go. He was paid too much, produced too little and served to remind the last few people that really care about the Celtics that the team was in the hands of incompetent morons. Every time he took the floor for the Celtics he was a walking dilemma. He either embodied the fact that the people running the team have no practical conception of how to assemble a basketball team or that the people running the team are deliberately assembling a bad team. Either way, it suited me.

And now the Patriots are rolling the dice with Randy Moss, who has promised to revert to the Randy of old. People can take that one of two ways. Randy Moss will either burn up the league, catching passes, scoring TDs and delivering in big situations or he'll burn down Gillette Stadium. I am more inclined to believe the latter than the former, although the fact that the CHB has thrown down a gauntlet on this deal makes me far less certain of that than I was at this time last night.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a Patriots fan. And even though reports have Moss wowing the assembled luminaries by clocking in at an impressive 4.29 in the 40, I do not find myself convinced that the Patriots are the prohibitive favorites in the AFC. I remember the old Randy from his days with the Vikings. Nobody could run like he did, catch the way he did or terrorize defensive backfields the way he did. But there was always something missing. I think it was courage.

At least, by that I mean the courage to go out and put everything on the line to win a big game. Say what you want about Terrell Owens being a miserable, selfish cancer. But let's not forget that he came back from a broken leg in a month and a half to play in the Super Bowl, signed a waiver and outplayed eventual Super Bowl MVP Deion Branch. And let's not forget that there is no moment like that in the Randy Moss highlight reel. There are no postseason moments in there at all.

That's the Randy I remember. As I talked to my man who is a Patriots season ticket holder, I couldn't help but think of the Randy moments I will never forget. And none of them involved that famous Monday Night game where he punished the Cowboys for passing on him in the draft.

No, when I think of Moss, I'll remember the day a dreadful Giants team earned the right to be destroyed by the Ravens. They shut out the Vikings 41-0. And in all of that, rumor has it Randy sulked all game and didn't perform because he was upset that the powers-that-be in Giants Stadium wouldn't let his kid on the sideline. Truly that is the heart of a champion.

Then there was the tail end of the 2003 season when the Vikings needed to beat the Bears in Chicago to clinch a playoff spot. The Vikings drove down into the red zone, in a goal to go situation, and they looked to Randy Moss on a corner route. The TD would give the Vikings the lead, which would have put them in prime position to make the playoffs. And what happened? Charles Tillman, an unheralded rookie at the time, took the ball away from Randy, who didn't put up much of a fight for the ball and the season, in the end zone. The Bears won the game, the Vikings got a jump on the offseason.

Maybe all the optimism is warranted. Maybe the Patriots can awaken in Moss the fire that never seemed to be there when it really, really, really mattered. Or maybe his production over the course of the regular season will be enough to get the team in prime position for a first round bye and home field throughout the playoffs, so it won't matter if he disappears in the playoffs. Or maybe he won't enjoy playing in balmy Foxboro in November, December and January. Not to mention trips to Buffalo or New York in the dead of winter.

If he is so fragile that he coasted through two dismal seasons in Oakland because he wasn't happy, what will Randy Moss do if he experiences any adversity in New England. Will Stallworth be able to play a full season and be productive? Will Kelley Washington play up to his potential? Will the fact that the Patriots did nothing to shore up a weak offensive line come back to bite this team when they have to play the Colts again this year?

Only time will tell the answers to those questions, and the other fascinating conundrum... can Teddy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel combine to form a serviceable linebacker since they have lost very nearly two steps at this point? And before any Patriots fan reminds me that Matt Light contained Shawne Merriman and was a Pro Bowl alternate last season, think back to how that line held up against the Bears and Colts last season. I think I have a better chance of smiling at the end of this season than Patriots fans do.

This draft was very compelling, and not just because of Brady Quinn's humiliating Green Room experience. It seemed to me like a group of teams got together to see who could make the most spectacular mistakes. Kansas City may very well have pulled it off, passing on Joe Staley to take a wide receiver when they desperately needed to replace Willie Roaf and Will Shields more than they needed a wide receiver. But I think Philly took the cake, trading down to the second round to take Kolb, who looked to have a big future in Canada.

Let's not leave Miami out of this, either. Going with Ted Ginn Jr. will come back to haunt them. They faced a similar situation as the Radiers did this season. Both teams made the wrong QB decision last season, Oakland passing on Leinart and Miami signing Culpepper over Drew Brees. This time out, Oakland owned that mistake and took Russell over Calvin Johnson. Miami didn't own that mistake. In fact, they made it again. Instead of taking Quinn, they took a college receiver who will have more impact returning kicks than catching passes and went with the Mormon Chris Weinke in Round Two.

We also have a tool of note segment or three before I wrap up tonight. First, to Chicago fans who are enjoying the fact that Pat Riley gave them an easy victory in their opening round series, here is an action shot of the broadcasters of the second team in Second City performing the song "Summertime Blues" at a benefit concert. I get the feeling that this song probably made things worse for any one who found themselves feeling any blues, regardless of the season.

There there is this ____________ on Myspace. I really don't know which insult out of my vast store of insults to apply here. This tool transcends words like spaz and dork and tool and fist magnet. Maybe it's because he's Australian. Maybe this is considered cool Down Under. Either way, you'll have to supply your own insult for him, I am just too baffled.

And finally, there is this loser having a go at the eating of meat. Apparently eating meat is not eco-friendly. Apparently it takes too much energy and produces too many carbons. Just for the sake of argument, I wonder how many carbons it takes to produce the synthetic protein supplements that vegetarians often take. Not to mention the fact that there would be a bunch of cows running around once people like me stop eating them. And chemical castration is ever so much more humane and natural than killing them outright and feeding them to people like me.

Orwell himself had very little esteem for vegetarians, whom he deemed "food cranks." In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote:

"This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity."

Eating meat is part of what it means to be human. My ancestors scratched and clawed and invented their way to the top of the food chain. And they didn't do it so I could eat lettuce and pop protein pills. And I wonder how much energy and how many carbons will go into caring for generations of vegetarians living to be 100 when all the meat eaters like me have kicked off from coronary thrombosis at age 60.