A very special Monday post in which we begin with...What Will's Watching, Super Bowl LVI. Were we not entertained? A solid game with tonnes of tension at the end. For reasons unexplainable we wanted the LA Rams to win. We felt bad for Rams wide receiver Odell Beckam when he got hurt. We felt great for Ram's QB Matt Stafford who spend a decade suffering in Detroit. We have no major coaching criticisms. The halftime show was a boring disaster in which they tried to cram as many acts into fifteen minutes as they could. It wasn't about the show but about nostalgia. For an example of a good halftime show, see The Weekend last year or dare we say, Prince in Super Bowl XLI performing Purple Rain in the rain. The commercials were remarkably un-woke. 3/4
A special LA Rams Monday not Metal:
For most American NFL fans this is truly the beginning of winter. There's nothing but six weeks of dreary weather and nothing to look forward to on the weekend. We don't care about basketball and have only a passing interest in the NHL. Sorry, moose eaters.
We were working with The Great Nuclear War of 1975 MS and had major technical problems. Man, one can take all the pills one wants and still get worked into a rage so bad one wants to rip the refrigerator out of the wall and toss it into the back yard. The formatting seems to have been resolved.
This blog anticipated that Roll Canada would be the last bit of Soviet collusion we wrote for some time, maybe ever. But there's been no invasion yet...comrades. We'll plan on writing something this week. What to do? We write about what we think is interesting. Here's our post-Super Bowl article from last year.
Over the weekend we boxed up more of the library. That's 30 banker's boxes in all. We'll need 30 more. After carrying the books to the utility room post Ida (cunt), and having to put them on the remains of our book cases when a bad storm was coming and we weren't sure if the sump would work, and finally stacking them in the corner, the books are all jumbled without rhyme or reason. We're tempted to sell them to one of those outfits that resells books by the yard for decorative purposes. We did find the Saddam and Kremlin books and set them aside. We think we'll toss the print on demand books we used for Pershing in Command. These were hundred year old out of print books whose copyright had expired and frankly, an eyesore.
Below, the Stroock's Books Valentine's Day Spectacular, Freak me baby, awww yeah!:
Just how good were the '85 Bears, or more accurately, Ditka's Bears? Each season, one could put them down for 10 wins without fear. They were absolutely the class of the NFC Central. They won one Super Bowl and got to a pair of championship games. The Bears played in an era when the San Francisco 49rs were the best team in the NFL, followed by the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants, all in the NFC. That's a tough conference to get through. The Niners knocked the Bears out twice, the Redskins twice and the Giants once.
We've heard some Bears players say that if quarterback Jim McMahon hadn't been so injury prone they could have had a dynasty. Let's get something straight. McMahon wasn't that good. He certainly wasn't as good as Marino or Montana or Elway, not Simms, not Kosar and this blog doesn't think McMahon was better than Danny White. McMahon was...Okay. He was never the key to the Bears winning. In fact they went on to win with Jim Harbaugh as starting quarterback. No, the Bears were about defense, which dominated throughout the Ditka years even after Ryan left. That's why we remember them today.
This is about the best example of 80's era uber-cool one will find. In the 80's, everything needed to be cool, even sports. For all the talk of the importance of music videos in the 80's, record companies usually weren't willing to spend a lot of money on them. Hence the above.
We were 12 years old in 1985. Don't let anybody tell you different, this was the coolest thing ever. During the school lip-syncing contest the teachers did this. For years later the Super Bowl Shuffle was lame, but now that we're in a time of 80's nostalgia, something this honest and 80's is kinda cool again.
We'll be talking about the 1985 Chicago Bears all week. Why not?
For decades the NFL has had a gap week between the championship games and the Super Bowl. This does make for anticipation and buildup, and we're sure the NFL is afraid of what will happen if they lose this week. Which is understandable.
A few years ago the NFL moved the Pro-Bowl from the week after the Super Bowl to the week before. That's something, at least. They've tried some gimmicks like having TV analysts chose the teams. But still, nobody cares about the Pro-Bowl. It's just so stupid.
This week is really just a reminder of the bleak, bleak February and March Sundays without football that lay ahead. God, it sucks.
This blog calls for the NFL to lose the gap week, dump the Pro-Bowl and play the Super Bowl a week after the championship games. Commissioner Roger Goodell, you're the NFL, you don't need the buildup before the Super Bowl. The game is the buildup.
When we got into football in the mid 80's (let's say 1984, when we went to our first Giants game) the NFL was still very much defined by the previous decade. The glory franchises were the Steelers and Raiders. Tom Landry's Cowboys were still good. But a new dynasty was rising, and would win the Super Bowl that year: the San Francisco 49rs. The Niners were great from 1981 through 1998. That's 18 years people. At the age of 26 the Niners were a power for our entire lives. We never knew an NFL that didn't have a great 49rs team. A few year after the Niners fell, the New England Patriots rose. Now for another 18 years the Patriots have dominated. For almost our entire lives two teams have dominated the NFL. Remarkable.
We've all seen the numbers, NFL ratings are down, attendance is down. Last weekend's divisional playoff games were down 23,000,000 (that's million) from last year's divisional games. This is the worst NFL season in our lifetime, we're talking 35 years of NFL viewership and fandom, folks. It cannot be stated enough, the kneelers brought all the league's other problems together. Kapernick is just the glue. The league faces multiple crisis, head injuries, quality of play, over officiating, hip hop chest thumping culture. The game is hard to watch. Now the NFL faces the real possibility of a Super Bowl featuring Nick Foles against Blake Bortles. Then again, would that really be a disaster? Even I'm getting sick of Tom Brady. If New England just went away it really would make the league more interesting. Winning may never get old, but it can get dull.
