Author: Stagger Lee

“You can’t save everybody. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t save anybody.”

Apparently Coke is going to make us all healthier by selling smaller portions.

Anybody smell a scheme to make more money by giving us less stuff? Who the hell do they think they are, Blue Shield of CA?

This team is officially beyond help. There will be no success in Washington football until:

1) Daniel Snyder either sells the team or completely recuses himself from its operations;

2) An actual general manager is installed with carte blanche to turn over the roster;

3) An actual head coach is hired and allowed to install his own staff;

4) The offensive line is completely replaced with younger, fresher talent; and

5) The rest of the roster is repopulated as necessary with fewer big-name free agents and more well-chosen spot performers.

Even if the team were forcibly sold tomorrow to some 21st-century Jack Kent Cooke, who hired some 21st century Bobby Beatherd, who in turn brought in the 21st century Joe Gibbs, Joe Bugel and Richie Petitbone, the whole player-personnel situation is untenable and will probably take a good two or three years to clean up.

Unless…

Right now, if there is no new collective bargaining agreement with the players’ association by next year, the 2010 season will be played without a salary cap – and if that happens, you can almost certainly count on the owners locking out the players in 2011. This will basically put the entire salary cap, roster, contract situation in a blender and possibly give the Skins a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to massively disrupt and reconstruct the team, possibly shortening the time needed to make the turnaround. IF you have the right guys in place, smart enough to take maximum advantage of the situation.

But as long as Snyder’s running this team, they’re going to be the Raiders. Or Clippers. Or worse. In perpetuity.

Um…Geaux Saints?

So Verizon’s got a superphone coming. Hah.

Let’s take a moment to consider Verizon. This is a company that for years has been touting their network – a network that until recently was still relying on analog to fill out their coverage map – while downplaying the fact that their CDMA-based network meant a worse selection of handsets than any major mobile carrier on Earth. Handsets that had worse battery life than their rivals, thanks to the limitations of CDMA. Handsets on which they forced their own custom user interface and own custom application type. (BREW? Really?) Handsets on which they regularly locked out or removed features like Bluetooth, e-mail support, GPS.

And now, they want us to forget all that, because they have a new phone coming real soon that will put the smack down on the iPhone and show Apple what’s what.

The obvious question is why a carrier thinks it’s in competition with a handset maker. But setting that aside…what are they pushing? “Doesn’t run multiple apps at once.” (Technically true but largely irrelevant.) “No open development.” (Verizon can suck it – they have less than zero room to talk about “open” anything. Do you think Mary Sue Enduser gives a shit about the developer options?) “Doesn’t run widgets.” (Huh? I assume they mean some sort of idle-screen display.) “No removable battery.” Well, two years and three models later, I don’t think the battery thing is killing the iPhone too bad, do you?* “No physical keyboard.” Again, doesn’t seem to be making that much trouble, especially considering that the current flagship Android phone (HTC myTouch 3G on T-Mobile) doesn’t have one either. The 5 megapixel camera is a possible get – but then, there are plenty of other phones with 5 megapixel cameras and none of them seem to be putting a dent in the growth rate of the iPhone.

The bigger story, to me, is that Verizon has pretty much punted on the iPhone on LTE in a couple of years. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a guy whose name rhymes with Sleeve Knobs who was never going to deal with the red V again after they wanted UI input. Now Verizon has found an open source phone OS that they can presumably trick out how they want…the question is, will they have the sense to let Motorola design a MOTOBLUR-type look for it or are they going to go with the same block-red abortion of an interface they slapped on everything from cheap-shit LG freebies to Blackberries?

The lesson here: Verizon is shitting themselves because the iPhone is eating their lunch. Not AT&T – AT&T sucks and most iPhone owners will tell you the same. But despite that, they’re still going for the phone – and that’s why Verizon has to try to knock down the iPhone.

The truly interesting thing, though, is that of all the stuff Verizon says is terrible about the iPhone, almost every bit of it is something that could be changed in OS 4.0. Not the camera or the battery, obviously, but don’t forget that everyone was touting the advantages the Pre had over the iPhone – and by launch day, most of those were minimized at best. So they could well be setting themselves up to get lapped sooner rather than later – and if you don’t think the iPhone is Apple’s #1 platform these days, wait until you see sales numbers Monday.

Verizon’s gone out and bought themselves somebody else’s hardware and somebody else’s OS and thinks they’re going to give Apple the beatdown? COME TRY IT IF YOU’VE GOT THE BALLS.

* The obvious gimmick is that with CDMA, you NEED to be able to swap batteries, because you’ll never get through a full day on one charge. Try running multiple apps at once on a CDMA network; your worktime will be measurable in minutes.

This time, it was missing white BOY as cable news went batshit loonball. When I heard the balloon had come down empty, my first thought was “he was never in that thing. He is hiding out somewhere because he knows damn well he is going to get the living evangelical foot-washing Baptist HELL beat out of him directly.” As I told somebody else, if I had scared the hell out of my parents, burned a million taxpayer dollars’ worth of emergency responders, and then put my parents on blast as UFO wackadoos, my dad would still be beating me, and he’s been dead since 1998. Seriously, I would have been wore out with a belt until I reached Heaven and Jesus looked at me and said “I reckon you had THAT coming.”

The fact that every news channel went the full OJ on this story, I think, speaks to something deeper in the American condition in 2009: people are scared shitless. They’ve been scared shitless for eight years, ever since the real world snuck in and bitch-smacked us all out of an idyllic world of intern scandals and Britney bullshit, and they’re still scared shitless, to the point where they need an ever-growing spiral of distraction (thus the horseshit that passes for news on the morning shows and cable channels) and an occasional outlet for all this inner fright, which is why people flip out on something like this that they can vicariously panic through.

We as a nation need a good long bout of therapy and probably some mild drugs – little Paxil in the water supply for a year, maybe – but at some point, if we want to continue functioning as a society, we have to stop freaking out all the time about everything.

The only thing you can blame T-Mobile for is putting all their eggs in the cloud basket and letting Danger/Microsoft keep all the device data. They’re making up for it by allowing users to cancel their contracts without penalty – a ballsy move – and also offering discounts for people who feel like moving to a G1 – a smart move.

Meanwhile, it’s not enough that Windows Mobile 6.5 is basically Windows Moble 6.1 with extra Shinola applied – Microsoft just basically killed every Sidekick phone in America. How is it even possible to not have a backup of that kind of thing? Anyway, the old rules of DC are still true: don’t trust anything to a Microsoft product that you couldn’t live with being destroyed without notice. Anybody who would rely on a cloud product from Microsoft at this point may have a legitimate mental defect.

You would think that the whole Disney experience would be the farthest imaginable from being my kind of thing. But two days in the Anaheim part of the land of Mouse, as it turns out, just wasn’t enough. So we bought passes and will be headed back before long.

I think the thing I enjoyed most was California Adventure. After all this time, to have a completely new Disney experience…well, for a number of reasons, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t hurt that it comes with a roller coaster that is basically a railgun – no foreplay, no clack-clack-clack up the hill, just linear induction and POW, you’re going 60 miles an hour uphill, at night, surrounded by the lights of their boardwalk replica and with a pretty commanding view for as long as you can hold your head over to watch without getting whiplash.

I’ll tell you this, though: I could go the rest of my life without getting up at 4 AM to make a flight.

It’s difficult to escape the sense that the Nobel committee really has it in for George W. Bush, given the recent run of votes. Carter, Gore, and now Obama – and wouldn’t you hate to be the guy who gets jerked out of bed by a phone call at 4 AM saying “The boss just won a Nobel prize. We need a speech in time for the morning shows.”

The unkind thing would be to point out that if the situation were reversed, and Bush were the one who got the inexplicable award, his side would be out there screaming “SUCK IT LIBRULS” instead of sitting there scratching their heads in sheepish embarrassment. Instead, I think the thing to point out is that since the first prize in 1901, Americans have won twenty-three Nobel Peace Prizes. Which, I would like to think, says something about our character as a nation and our aspirations for the world.

Also, Eric Bickel will probably have a stroke on the air today.

So one of my wife’s college friends – a trombone player, the most noble of all the low brass – is doing a big fundraiser bike ride this week. It’s a fundraiser for the Arthritis Foundation, which for obvious reasons is near and dear to my heart – and my dad’s name is actually on her fundraising as her honoree.

I haven’t said too much about it, mostly I guess because it seems like a very Vanderbilt thing to have somebody else do your hundreds-of-miles fundraising bike ride for you, but also because the old man is where I get my whole “ahhh I don’t need people making a fuss over me” from and I guess that sort of spilled over. But in case I forget, because you know I will — Molly, thank you. Very much.

We are going down to wave her across the finish line, which just happens to involve going to see the Mouse, so I will be behind the Orange curtain for the weekend. You can follow our exploits via the usual Tumblr site, as I still haven’t figured out a way to blog from the iPhone that doesn’t make me want to throw it through the window. (Not that other phones are any better, as you still need a typeable keyboard to really do anything, but holy smokes does that new Android-based Moto look incredible or what? Finally, somebody’s out there pushing Apple, and a good thing too, because you know RIM and Microsoft aren’t gonna do it…)

Tomorrow night is the debut of the UFL. The what? Yes, the United Football League, a 4-team league playing a six game season to be telecast on Versus and HDNet, this October and November.

If you don’t have HD, you don’t have HDNet. If you have DirecTV, you don’t have Versus, which DirecTV has dropped in a dispute with Comcast saying they don’t want to pay for “basically a paid programming and infomercial channel with occasional sporting events of interest”. (Harsh.) So there’s a very strong possibility that the TV ratings will be abysmal. In addition, the San Francisco-based “California Redwoods” are the only team playing all three home games in the same stadium – the “New York Sentinels” will play one home game in Connecticut, one in Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and one in the new Mets stadium in Queens, while the “Las Vegas” team plays one in Los Angeles and the “Florida” team plays two in Orlando and one in Tampa. So it’s going to be tricky to actually go out and see the teams in person. If there’s precious little TV and multiple stadiums happening, who exactly is going to be seeing this?

John Clayton has it right: this is a soft launch to get infrastructure in place with an eye toward 2010 and 2011. In 2010, unless the NFL comes to a new labor agreement, there will be an uncapped year which should set the personnel situation in the league on puree – and in 2011, if the NFL has not come to a labor agreement, there will almost certainly be a lockout, giving the UFL the chance to pick up premium talent.

This sort of shit comes along every four or five years – somebody thinks that they can start a second league and carve out a niche. The WFL in the mid-1970s (one and a half years), the USFL in the mid-80s (three years), the NFL’s own World League of American Football in the early 90s (two years in the US, then another ten or so exclusively in Europe), the CFL’s expansion into the United States in the mid-90s (two years), the XFL in 2001 (one famously mocked year) – and now, with the UFL starting up, there are no less than three other entities purporting to play spring football in 2010 (including one group ludicrously claiming to be reviving the USFL).

Professional football isn’t like hockey or baseball – there is no tradition of a professional developmental league. There has been overflow to the CFL for decades, and the Arena Football League caught some of that as well from the late 80s on – but the CFL had the advantage of a whole nation to itself, and the Arena League only had to fill the lower bowl of the typical urban multipurpose arena rather than turn out possibly tens of thousands of fans. And even so, the Arena League didn’t survive the onset of the current recession.

The big catch, though, is that there’s already a long established developmental league for professional football – it’s called the NCAA, and for over a hundred years it’s filled dozens of stadiums every Saturday in the fall with fans a thousand times more passionate than any American minor league has ever managed. The UFL’s not competing with the NFL – they’re competing with the NFL plus Cal, Stanford, San Jose State, Nevada, UNLV, Florida, Florida State, Miami, Central Florida, South Florida, Rutgers, Syracuse and Notre Dame*, just to name the obvious. Are there people with enough attention span for pro football, college football, AND the UFL? Probably, but how many?

Finally, the UFL is playing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night has become one of ESPN’s feature games in college ball, and while minor games are also played on Friday, the consensus is that Friday belongs to high school ball – so much that the NFL is forbidden by law from playing or broadcasting games within 75 miles of a high school game on Friday from September to mid-December.

SO…are there people who have the time to pay attention AND will do so in preference to other games AND have the resources and willingness to either buy tickets or to seek out Versus and HDNet telecasts? And are there enough of them to make the UFL a going concern long enough to attempt to capitalize on a labor explosion that may never take place?

Ax me. –NO.

It was different for the AFL. They came along at a time when the NFL had only a dozen teams, with several markets large enough to sustain a second entrant (New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area), football-mad parts of the world with no NFL presence (Buffalo, Texas, Florida), and only one national television outlet (CBS – at a time when teams largely sold their own television rights individually). There weren’t five channels in existence, let alone five showing NFL action (CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL Network). In short, the market for professional football was nowhere near the saturation point it is now, with 32 teams and two games a week in prime time.

This is one time where you look at the graveyard of the last 35 years and have to face the honest-to-God free-market truth: if there were a way to make money off a second professional football league, somebody would have done it by now.

* My understanding is that ABC Sports considers New York City to be a Notre Dame market for purposes of regional telecasts. May be true, maybe not, but the New York market was indisputably involved in the use of “Fighting Irish” as a nickname and the development of the tradition of “subway alumni”.