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Monday, January 19, 2009

Dan Back to His Roots

In a head scratcher, The Globe sent Dan Shaughnessy to Phoenix to cover the NFC Championship game. Christopher Gasper busted his hump all season and gets to read Dan. Life is unfair.

And the game piece sucks. Dan uses the first two-hundred words of the article to give the history of the Cardinals and tweak Patriots fans. It took only fifty words before Dan mentioned the Super Bowl XLII.

But what about the notes column, you ask. It sucked too. Unless you consider this nugget as something that adds something to your enjoyment and understanding of football:
Donovan McNabb had an easy commute after the game. McNabb owns a home in Phoenix

And Dan even manages another Super Bowl XLII mention.

7 comments:

JJS37 said...

Here's what I don't get about this guy: Does he have any talent? Seriously, I'm 100% convinced I could do a better job. And piss less people off. And be more entertaining.

The part where Phili took the lead he reports as just facts. At this juncture Phili went ahead....

I get that he doesn't have any hometown interest in this, but if the Globe is sending him, he can at least put some fucking emotion into it. He writes it like a play-by-play robot.

At that point in the game, the momentum had completely swung. The Cardinals defense was tired, the Cardinals were doing three and outs, and Phili had confidence. This was a big deal. How would Warner and the upstart Cardinals respond?

Dan leaves you with none of that.

As for the 4th and 10 the Eagles had, that was clearly interference and a HUGE non-call. Dan's accounting? "Phili wanted interference but there was no call."

Thanks. How did he purpose to his wife? "Hey, you want to get married? To me? In the near future, in a church, with our friends and family around?"

God. Terrible.

Phili had gotten the ball and they put up a graphic on TV that said "The Eagles have scored 3 TD's on their last 3 possessions."

"Phili wanted interference, but didn't get the call.."

No commentary on how the Cardinals were able to shutdown a now rolling offense. No quotes to back it up. He could have written this from his living room and just randomly placed pool quotes in.

God this guy sucks. How, how, how does he keep his job?

Anonymous said...

Shanks whole purpose in life is to "piss people off"

Anonymous said...

Shank enjoys "pissing" on people.

g

Anonymous said...

"Shanks whole purpose in life is to 'piss people off'"

Shank's philosophy is almost like Caesar's - "I don't care if they fear me, so long as they hate me".

Monkeesfan said...

That Larry Fitzgerald is the son of a sports writer gives Shank a woody?

Shank hates the Cardinals, but for all the wrong reasons. That the Cardinals were slaughtered by the Patriots says more about how good the Patriots had become at that point of the season than it does about a Cardinals team that had nothing to play for.

Nowhere does Shank mention that the Bidwell family, which has owned the team from the start (1920), has never had any commitment to win, and I don't mean in the hoary old "they won't spend the money" cliche (though there's long been an element of that here) because the more I learn about sports economics the more I understand that the "cheap" attack is often grossly misleading.

No, the Bidwells' real sin is they never worked to find someone who understood football enough to make something good out of it. We've seen many a team turn their programs around not by spending a lot of money but by finding (or training) people who understood the game and the things needed to make a team good. The Bidwells even did it when they brought up Don Coryell in the 1970s and he turned the team into a winning outfit.

But the Bidwells overall never looked for anyone like that. They replaced Coryell after 1977 with a coach who hadn't worked for years and years (Bud Wilkinson). They never seemed to look for coaches who actually knew how to win, and their front offices over the years would constantly get high draft picks and ultimately do nothing with them.

If one wants to hate the Cardinals, hate them for Bill Bidwell and his yes-men people; don't hate them because the Patriots hammered them 47-7.

Monkeesfan said...

Oh, so now Shank gets around to the bumbling Bidwells.

Trouble is, it's just another rehash of the Title Game. Typical lazy Shanksterism.

And a correction on my part - I wrote about that the Bidwells owned the team from the beginning; that is untrue, they've owned it since 1932.

Anonymous said...

"Shank's philosophy is almost like Caesar's - "I don't care if they fear me, so long as they hate me".


Shank's is more like, "I don't care if they think I'm dumber than a bag of door knobs, just as long as they hate me"