NFL's East Coast/Cowboys Bias may be crushed Sunday night, which would be sweet justice for NFL fans! If Redskins beat Cowboys, strong chance no team from 5 of U.S.'s Top 6 TV markets will make NFL playoffs: No NY, no LA (not even Chargers!), no Chicago, no Philly, no Dallas. Plus, we'll finally be free of analysis of Romo & Roethlisberger's angst! Hooray!!!
NFL's East Coast/Cowboys Bias may be crushed Sunday night, which would be sweet justice for NFL fans! If Redskins beat Cowboys, strong chance no team from 5 of U.S.'s Top 6 TV markets will make NFL playoffs: No NY, no LA (not even Chargers!), no Chicago, no Philly, no Dallas. Plus, we'll finally be free of analysis of Romo & Roethlisberger's angst! Hooray!!!
It's all up to the Redskins to make this reality come true Sunday night when they host the Cowboys in a battle for the NFC Eastern Division title that I believe may well be a Redskin rout by the middle of the third quarter, a result that should lead to the Cowboys making major changes that are long overdue, including a change at head coach.
If the Redskins win Sunday night, the only team from a Top 6 U.S. TV market will be the San Francisco 49ers, at number six.
http://www.stationindex.com/tv/tv-markets
That will mean that what seems like the majority of the teams that the NFL and Madison Avenue have foisted upon us this past season via nationally-televised Sunday Night, Monday Night and Thursday Night football ballgames will be completely absent from the playoffs: Cowboys, Giants and Jets. Buh-bye!
For the Cowboys, this absence will mean that the following is now true: the Cowboys have won one playoff game in the past 16 years.
Now say it over to yourself and ask yourself whether this self-evident fact will prevent the NFL and Madison Avenue from force-feeding the Cowboys down America's throat next year on the tube?
No, more likely, they will front-load many of those Cowboys games at the beginning of the season and cross their fingers to get some games at the end of the season on the flex schedule.
As I've written here before, one of the few conspiracy theories in America that is actually TRUE is that the NFL props-up the Cowboys in ways that it doesn't seem to for any other team.
At one point in this past season I had figured out that over half of the Cowboy 16 regular season games had been on national TV broadcasts, and with the flex schedule going into effect for Sunday night's Redskins, I believe that makes either 8 or 9 Cowboys games out of 16 that will have been nationally-televised.
Why so much pushing for such a mediocre team?
A few years ago, ESPN commentator and NFL Hall of Fame QB Steve Young succinctly tore into the Dolphins and the Vikings organizations as THE most over-rated NFL teams of the past 10 -or 15?- years.
To that he could have added the Jerry Jones Cowboys of the 21st Century.
No, contrary to what is said perpetually on ESPN, especially by Jon Gruden, the Cowboys are NOT one of the most-talented teams in the league, they are one of the most under-performing.
As a matter of fact, as far as most NFL fans are concerned, the Cowboys and Giants don't need to always have one of their two games be a nationally-televised game, or even rate a 4:15 p.m. Sunday kickoff.
It's not the 1990's anymore, capisce?
An exciting team on the rise like the Seattle Seahawks needs to be on national TV more and I don't mean 1 p.m. Eastern kickoffs against the Dolphins, either.
But don't kid yourself.
The Cowboys will be on more national TV broadcasts next year than the Seahawks even if Seattle gets to the Super Bowl. Even if they win it.
Rest assured, the powers-that-be at NFL HQ will see to it.
NFL Odds & Ends
When he was still head coach at Texas Tech, I used to wonder what a brilliant mind like offensive-minded coach Mike Leach would do if given the keys to the Cowboys, the Chargers, Jets, Bucs or the Ravens, five perpetually under-performing NFL teams, none of whom have made the Super Bowl despite having had numerous opportunities before collapsing.
I still wonder about that now that Leach is at Washington State, but only re the Ravens.
My January 6, 2009 post on Leach going to the Bucs was titled,
So THAT'S why newspapers are dying? BORING!; Jon Gruden must go!
As someone with a few Ravens t-shirts and jackets in my bedroom closet and who's rooted for the Ravens since they moved to Baltimore -and who came this close to becoming a Ravens season ticket holder that first year when I lived in Arlington County, VA- while it might be heresy for some to hear, while I think he's a good coach, I believe John Harbaugh's era at Baltimore could and should come to an end if they lose in the playoffs against either the Colts or the Bengals.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/ravens/ravens-insider/bal-updated-ravens-nfl-playoff-scenarios-20121224,0,345461.story
At home.
Mercifully.
They no longer have the number and caliber of defensive playmakers to mask his bad coaching decisions:
Ravens Have Underperformed During John Harbaugh’s Tenure
By Zach Wilt
ttp://baltimoresportsreport.com/ravens-overvalue-john-harbaugh-35505.html
Bloomberg News
Oakland Pays $17 Million for NFL Raiders as Cops Fired
By Darrell Preston & Aaron Kuriloff - Dec 20, 2012 5:58 PM ET
____________________________________________Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and insight onto Florida and local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now. On this blog, locally, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger and laser-like attention on the coastal cities of Hallandale Beach and Hollywood.If you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be stuck in stultifying traffic, paying higher-than-necessary taxes and continually musing about the chronic lack of accountability among not only elected govt. officials, but also of city, county and state employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, eager work-ethic mentality that local residents deserve and expect.This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the "Perfect Storm" of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.Sadly for its residents, HB is where even easily-solved, quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and ineffective supervisory management. It's a city with lots of potential because of its terrific location, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion, merely kicked -once again- further down the road. I used to ask myself, not always rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show that through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?" Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable but skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time, and wanting questions answered in a honest and logical way that citizens have the right to expect.Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change.If there's one constant gripe in South Florida, regardless of your age, race, nationality or political persuasion, it's about the fundamental lack of PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY here among Florida's state, regional and local govt./agency officials. Hallandale Beach Blog aims to be a small step towards regaining some of that needed accountability, whether it's thru simple public scrutiny, or requires a degree of follow-up investigation and public exposure of incompetency, cronyism or simple negligence -South Florida's usual governing style."And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen."- Preacher Purl encouraging the underdog Hickory High basketball team before the state title game against heavily-favored South Bend Central in 1986's Hoosiers http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091217/
Audio of pregame speech:
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_____________________________________The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpted from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster: In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administrations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly. At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accommodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated...
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"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"
_____________________________________________"Laws and Constitutions go for nothing where the general sentiment is corrupt."-New York Times, September 22, 1851"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"-
Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper at April 2, 2008 HB City Commission meeting, in discussing possible inclusion of Broward County Charter Review Commission's proposal for Ethics Commission to deal with Broward County Commission, on November 2008 ballot.Six YEARS after the county's voters had overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the County charter requiring its adoption, the Broward County Commission had yet to live up to its legal responsibility. That's why!________________________________________
Corruption Isn't Unique to South Florida, It's the Level of the Stupidity That Is
Corruption Isn't Unique to South Florida, It's the Level of the Stupidity That Is
"[Chicago Mayor] William Hale Thompson was defeated Tuesday after a campaign which he alone made disgraceful. The election was an ejection, a dirty job, but Chicago has washed itself and put on clean clothes. Thompson recognized the [Chicago] Tribune as his chief enemy. The Tribune was glad to earn that opinion. It certainly tried to do so. It has taken the fight to him on every occasion during the long and depraved course of his administration. It is unpleasant business to eject a skunk, but someone has to do it. For Chicago, Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy. He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization. In his attempt to continue this he excelled himself as a liar and defamer of character. He’s out. He is not only out, but dishonored. He is deserted by his friends. He is permanently marked by the evidences of his character and conduct. His health is impaired by his ways of life and he leaves office and goes from the city the most discredited man who ever held place in it."
-Excerpts from April 1931 Chicago Tribune editorial following Republican "Big Bill" Thompson's loss to his Democratic rival Anton Cermak. A friend of organized crime during the Al Capone era, Thompson was the last Republican elected mayor of Chicago. But less than two years later, Mayor Cermak was shot while shaking hands with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at Miami's Bayfront Park. He died from gunshot wounds to his lungs three weeks later.
See http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3686.html
Hallandale Beach in The Miami Herald over 25 years ago
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Hallandale Beach in The Miami Herald over 25 years ago "For years people living in and out of its condo-walled sector east of U.S. 1 have wondered what to do about the city of Hallandale. In the 19th Century the condo giants would have served as ideal fortresses. From top floors of the towers, enemy ships could be readily spotted and blown out of the Atlantic. Oceanfront dwellers could have been protected from the west by the Hallandale Beach Boulevard drawbridge and moat called the Intracoastal Waterway. But this is the 20th Century..."-Miami Herald Broward Columnist Bill Braucher's first paragraph from July 24, 1983.To which Hallandale Beach Blog can only say, Bulls-eye!
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