Whipped Cream Difficulties

“The Year Without A Tuesday Morning Quarterback” was one of Rankin-Bass’s lesser holiday specials.

Then a year ago this time, I took a year off to complete my next book.

Oh. Is that what it was? (By the way, Gregg Easterbrook has a new book coming out.)

But now, he’s back. And so is the editorial “we”. Not to be confused with the editorial wee, though we plan to purchase one or more of those really nice Toto smart toilets when we win the lottery.

Welcome back to TMQ Watch. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

…which comes in at over 9,000 words by our rough count. Guess that answers that question. To be fair, it looks like some of Easterbrook’s initial offering is explaining terms and tropes to his new readers: why are they the “Pittsburgh Hypocycloids” or “Santa Clara 49ers”? Perhaps next week’s TMQ will be closer to 7,000 words. Perhaps monkeys might fly out of our neither regions. (In that case, the Toto Washlet might come in handy.)

This is the most comprehensive catalog of Easterbrookian tropes and obsessions we’ve seen in our time doing TMQ Watch, and we feel it should be documented here for posterity:

Over the course of the football season, this column will introduce many aspects of its quirky worldview.
In sports, among them are obsessions with: punting on 4th-and-1 (this form of folly actually bears on international events as well as sports, but you’ll have to wait for the proof of that); thinking the blitz is overused and more likely to backfire than succeed (a running item is titled Stop Me Before I Blitz Again); distaste for weasel coaches; strong distaste for the NCAA (this is a common feeling, in my case the focus is not on paying players rather on the pitiful graduation rates of big-deal college football and men’s basketball); concern that the traumatic brain injury issue is all too real but the harm done is to youth players not to the NFL; concern about public subsidies to the billionaires who sit upon the thrones of the NFL; concern that there is no law of nature that says football must remain popular—prizefighting proved its own worst enemy; football could, too.
Outside of sports, TMQ’s quirky obsessions include holiday creep (seen any Christmas decorations yet?); that the rich should stop giving to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, giving instead to colleges for average people; that talk of manned Mars flight is nonsense with foreseeable propulsion technology; that the “security” details surrounding government officials down to the county level are there to make the officials seem important; and that time-travel plots have become common in Hollywood because time travel relieves scriptwriters of producing material that makes sense.

We’ll have to remember that term, “quirky worldview”. “I’m not beating a dead horse! I just have a quirky worldview!”

But we’re jumping around. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Since the turn of the 21st century, NFL ratings have steadily increased, and Tuesday Morning Quarterback has gotten steadily longer.

Except for that year he was writing for the NYT, where the columns came in at a tight 2,000 or so words without digressions.

Colin Kaepernick should sign with Google.

Can he code?

Does it matter?

Most of Easterbrook’s opinions on Kaepernick and Google are reheated hash: Kaepernick has the right to speak out, but that does not exempt him from consequences, Google is acting like a big organization by “oppress[ing] dissent while imposing thought control, rather than to engage ideas and refute arguments”, yadda yadda.

But there’s a germ of truth in this column:

Neither Griffin nor Kaepernick throw particularly well from the pocket, and pocket passing is the all rage right now.

Buried in all the stuff about zone reads versus pocket passers, there’s something simple: Kaepernick just isn’t that good a quarterback.

What do Americans love as much as, if not more, than the flag? Dogs. Michael Vick spent time in prison for dog fighting, and went on to play in the NFL as a starting quarterback for five years after he got out (plus two more as a backup). In comparison, Kaepernick’s done nothing. If he was a good quarterback, teams would be falling all over themselves to bring him in.

(Also: about 150 words of self-quotation from one of TMQ’s earlier books.)

This week: the AFC preview. We’re going to try and boil TMQ’s discussion of each team down to one nut graff.

Baltimore: loses because they play it safe.

(Interesting note that we put here because it’s in the Baltimore item, but not directly related: “…the NFL has changed the rules for this season, so that ‘intentional multiple fouls to manipulate the game clock’ will result in unsportsmanlike conduct and the clock reset to the previous time.”)

Buffalo: got to give the man credit. “The Bills worked hard at being bad.”

Cleveland: See above.

Cincinnati: Is Marvin Lewis the reason why they can’t win in the post-season?

Denver: good management, but why dump defensive genius Wade Phillips?

Houston: Was the Osweiler deal a sign that the NFL is becoming the NBA?

Indianapolis: the only reason anyone thought Andrew Luck was good, was that Indianapolis was playing bad teams.

Kansas City: Mahomes. Good? Bad? Questionable?

(Note: there seem to be a lot of weird typos in this column. Not that we’re in a position to throw stones, granted…)

Take down the Confederate statues. And the Confederate flag, too.

Jacksonville: can’t draft.

Jets: ditto.

Chargers: oh, Ghu, the Philip Rivers apologia, yet again.

Miami: poor defense.

New England: “Though Bill Belichick has never drafted particularly well, he has a keen eye for undrafted free agents and gents that other teams will surrender at bargain prices.” (Ding! Another example of the “quirky worldview” of TMQ!)

Oakland: Jack Del Rio needed a scapegoat.

Pittsburgh: is this item about Pittsburgh, or is it about Bill Belichick?

Tennessee: “In 2016 the Flaming Thumbtacks went 5-1 versus teams that reached the playoffs, an outstanding result in what this column calls Authentic Games. Yet Tennessee missed the postseason.” And that pretty much tells you all you need to know about TMQ’s “Authentic Games” metric. But don’t worry, we’ll come back to it over the course of the season. Repeatedly.

(Question: is the “4th Down Bot” intellectual property of the NYT?)

We’re not going to go over TMQ’s “cognomen” in any great detail: regular readers of TMQ or TMQ Watch should know almost all of them, and new readers should just go directly to the column. We do note. however, the new entries for “LA/A” (Rams) and “LA/B” (Chargers).

…it is deep arrogance on the part of the NFL to have a team in a publicly subsidized stadium in the nation’s capital blasting out an ethnic slur. American Indians were not just mistreated; thousands were held as slaves: TMQ will return to this later in the season.

Of course he will.

Get a haircut, Colin Kaepernick. Also, a real job.

The Arena League is still around? (Just barely: “Four teams can boast they made the Arena League playoffs. The Arena League has five teams, meaning the entire regular season was played to eliminate the Valor.”)

And that’s a wrap for this week, folks. We’re considering taking donations to gift Gregg Easterbrook the complete discography of The Slants. If you want to contribute, contact us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2017 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Books, TMQ watch, TV, Urine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.