Sportswriters (The fantasy kind)

"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?

In the beginning...

"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
- Yogi Berra

A blog; "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.” (Merriam-Webster, 2006-2007)
This is what I am creating, now if I only knew what to create it about. Back in class I gave some glib answer when asked, but I really had no idea at the time. Now I have a few ideas but no time. Reflections and comments, is this describing a rant? I can rant on quite well. Now I need a subject.
My first idea is the media. I would do politics but it’s just too easy. By media I mean the whole information superhighway. It’s amazing what will pass for news on any given day. Plus where they get some of these people they use to report it truly boggles the mind. Have they ever heard of this thing called history?
It’s a bit foggy but I think this will be my subject. Good thing this is a blog as it will probably morph a lot before the end. I tend to get off track quite a bit, as I always want to cover all the bases. For the ENG 111 veterans just check my foray into the world of arachnids in the middle of my paper on choosing a college degree.
So pending instructor approval I will spend the next several weeks picking on the media. Sportswriters, news anchors, weather guessers, the dying newspaper reporter (profession, not personally), celebrities who want you to care about their causes or opinions, the list can go on and on. I just have to think of more. Maybe later…