"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
- George Eliot (1819-1880)
Where oh where do they come from? These out of nowhere geniuses who want you to believe their total grasp of the sports world. While presenting no credentials to speak of, the majority simply wants you to believe based on their being online. One of the most evident and currently ramped up angles being fantasy football. All the major websites have fantasy pages; it is a craze that has swept the nation. Armchair quarterbacks who have never had a chance to display their intimate knowledge of the game before can now do so.
To feed the anxious masses in their quest for knowledge that will give them the slightest edge in the coming weekends contests, those same websites have amassed a gallery of so called experts who are ever so willing to spew forth what passes for knowledge.
Now, occasionally you will see articles from Howie Long or Chris Carter. Advice from them I take to heart. Both are well known players of the game. After them comes a long list of people I have never heard of. Some of them mention they have worked at this paper or that, been football fans forever, but none of them have ever coached or played the game. Judging from some of their photos next to their byline it is blatantly obvious some of them never played any organized sports.
The televised versions of advice shows for football addicts always have ex-players or coaches. The written kind rarely does. Is it that football players can’t write, or that seeing these pundits we regard as experts online on TV would cause us to drastically revise our opinions of their expertise? Where did they get these people? Did someone suddenly realize they needed a fantasy football department on their sports page and go scoop up all the loiterers around the water cooler?
Yet it works. People blithely read about these peoples predictions week after week and accept them as gospel. Even after botching up the easiest of calls they do everything but say they weren’t the only one wrong so it isn’t their fault. They can’t begin to explain the play that the team ran to win the game, but since they guessed right they are experts. It was once supposed if you gave enough monkeys typewriters, one would eventually complete the works of Shakespeare. Meaning to me, one monkey would sooner or later, through luck, hit all the right keys in the right order. Suppose it happened, does that mean you would give that monkey a book deal?
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3 comments:
This is an interesting angle to the popularity in sportswriting that we're all seeing, especially on the Internet. You bring up an age-old question, one that even I thought about when considering what to write about: Does a person *have* to be an expert at the sport to have knowledge of the sport?
For example, I love tennis, and I wanted to be a tennis player when I was a kid. I practiced a lot, read all the magazines, taped the big tournaments, etc. It just so happened, however, that I was a swimmer and I was only allowed one sport. Part of me dreamed of quitting swimming to play tennis. No more chorline, no more morning practices. But I didn't, and yet I continue to follow tennis to this day. Does this mean, because I didn't play it competetively, that I cannot blog about tennis?
Just wondering...I think this is an interesting discussion that we should continue.
Your blog is great. I enthralled about how sportswriters never playing the game but talk about fantasy football as if to trying to keep up with the trend. Great alliteraiton with the monkey. I laugh about anything having to do with monkeys and peguins. I would like to see a statistic on the sportswriters that have never played the game they write about. Most I have noticed talk mostly about the players' character and personal life. They do not talk about the important stuff like the way the players are playing. Sportswriters also tend to stick to the business side of things like trades and money value of each player's worth. Keep up with the play of words. Try to show why people think fantasy football is so fasinating. Look into writing on the ignorance of sportswriters in other things beside in fantasy football. And to slowly transition everyone to the next thing your going to talk about. I picked up on your sarcasm, but some people might not.
Personally I think the guy who came up with this idea for a blog is nuts. However, it isn't so much that you can't be an armchair expert, as in why would anyone pay for your services when yuor only qualification is having sat in your lazy boy all weekend.
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