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Showing posts with label football. Show all posts
Showing posts with label football. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

There's Always Something To Complain About

There's never an offseason for Shank criticizing the New England Patriots.

Looks like Shank isn't too pleased with Rob Gronkowski's decision to unretire in order to go to Tampa Bay and play football with Tom Brady:


Monday, November 25, 2019

It's That Time Of Year

...when Shank pretends to care about high school football.
It is supposed to be the football highlight of a high school senior’s life. You invest a great part of your youth playing football and it culminates in the annual Thanksgiving Day game against a century-old rival. Morning football jousts give way to afternoon turkey, stuffing, and canned cranberry sauce.
The rest of the country has Friday Night Lights. Here in Massachusetts we have Turkey Day bragging rights.
Sweet.
But our ancient ritual has been modified and in many cases, severely diluted.
This is not the fault of global warming, the Internet, or millennial apathy. The change in our traditional Thanksgiving football rivalry games is owed to changes in the MIAA state football playoff format.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Random High School Football Story

Every couple of months Shank does a column on high school sports in order to give the false impression that he's not a totally negative asshole. Yesterday he gave us one of those columns.
There were seven of them in the high school football office when the first shots rang out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School three weeks ago. Douglas head football coach Willis May was gathered with four of his student-athletes, including quarterback Tyler Goodman, plus two representatives from Nichols College: running backs coach St. Clair Ryan and assistant dean for enrollment Paul Brower.

It was supposed to be a standard meet-and-greet where representatives of the college get to know the athletes and tell them why they’d be happy playing sports and studying at the Division 3 school in Dudley, Mass.

But then everything changed.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Flipped Out

It's Dan's World...we just live in it.

Or so he wants us to think, given the lede to his column today:

It amuses me that the football world is talking about coin flips, deferrals, arrogance, hubris, amazing luck, insulting the opposition, and the Patriots’ chances to win Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara Feb. 7.  
Welcome to my world. I’ve been writing about this stuff for years. Finally, everyone is paying attention.

Ahh, yes. The CHB knows football! He knows Cover 2 and the stack. He knows the nickel and the blind side and the short side. He knows the route tree and the "T."  He even knows the Statue of Liberty (the play and the drink). He's brilliant, and we would do well to bask in his reflected glory.

Getting back to reality, the only thing Shank knows about football is that he can't play it. He certainly can't critique it. What he thinks passes for analysis is really just one part observation mixed with two parts whining.

For example, The CHB thinks he was the first (and only) fellow to notice that Patriots head coach Bill Belichick defers the ball when they win the coin flip (which they almost always do). To The CHB, this is arrogance (and perhaps, cheating). To the rest of us, this is common sense: when the hole parts and you can walk in for the score, you do so.

Next, confirming what we had guessed at before, Shank reports on what all the bloggers and tweeters have to say. We always assumed The CHB spent most of his day listening to talk radio and reading what others wrote, then lifting either the best lines, or, when he was feeling particularly lazy or hungover or both, the entire premise of the column.

He compounds his journalistic sins by alleging for the umpteenth time that the Patriots throw games in order to improve their playoff chances.

Finally, he closes with the most pathetic of puns: "Heads they win. Tails you lose." Stolen from Jim Rome?  Or Ben Watanabe? Or Barstool Sports?

Arrogance is ripping off the same lame retread column and somehow thinking it makes you clever.