Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life in Sports Media

La Canfora sort of reminds me of his pal Lombardi when he, too, was an alleged analyst.  Let's go hunting with hand grenades.  Let's go fishing with dynamite.  The guy just doesn't seem to care about collateral damage.

Maybe he's like a lot of college professors.  The reality is that when you say outrageous stuff, a lot of people think that makes you a genius.  

Here's a copy/paste comment from one of these:

Rose-colored glasses? I can understand. Browns fans have had to use them for quite a long time. Always looking for something where it doesn't really exist.
I know the pain. I know the reality. 58 years worth of being a fan. But.....it continues......reality is what it is.....

Interesting philosophical question here: Do TRich's healed ribs really exist?  Did Gordon really catch over 50 passes as a rookie after a year out of football?  Did Greg Little really drop a total of four passes in his last eleven games?  If a tree falls in the forest, could this guy please be under it?

I'm even a little disappointed with Grossi.  No, you DON'T judge a GM by a team's win/loss record in his first three seasons when that involves a rebuild and coach/system change.  Not when the team is the youngest in the NFL.

Fortunately, the vast majority of analysts agree that the Browns have a LOT of talent, and that Tom Heckert did that.  That is real, and you can see it when you take off your excrement-colored glasses.

Bill Ayers recently said that every American President this century should have gone to prison for mass-murder.  Another gaping rectum called the 911 victims "Little Eichmans".  I think they both got a raise and maybe a book deal.  I think La Canfora is the sports' world's version of that.  "Oh wow nobody else talks like dat, darefore dis guy must be a geenyuss!"

Warren Sapp isn't one of those.  He's just extremely lazy.  A couple weeks ago, while analyzing the three teams he's seen more than a couple clips of from last season, and being forced to include the Browns because they're in the AFC North too, he showed it.

He said that the way to attack the Steelers' and Ravens defenses was to spread them out.  Then he asked which offenses could do that.  He prefunctorally said he KNEW the BROWNS couldn't.

Devone Bess can play outside, but is primarily a slot reciever.  Slot guys only play in a 3 or 4-wide set.  Turner's offenses use a lot of that, and by design spread defenses out both horizontally and vertically; often also splitting a tight end out.  Both Cameron and the massively underrated Barnridge can do a lot of damage in this offense in the intermediate and deep middle.

Warren appears to be oblivious to Bess AND Turner.  All he knows is they run this old West Coast thing with this Weeden guy who was bad last year next topic please.

Now that Adam Scheinn has left NFL Radio (thank you God), most of those guys seem to make an actual effort to know what they're talking about, (even about teams that sucked last season.)

Rich Gannon remains kind of sketchy on the Browns, but is Einstein compared to Sapp and La Canfora.  At least, being a quarterback himself, he's automatically checked Weeden and the other quarterbacks out, and gives an objective, insightful, and reasoned assessment.

He's not sure if Weeden can become a franchise guy quickly either, but regards it as a foregone conclusion that in his second season, in Turner's offense, he'll be better.  That's all I ask for from an analyst.  Common sense.

And some of the same fans who parrot what they heard others say about the criticality of the quarterback position bash the whole team, when Weeden was THE problem with the offense last season.  (Well, he and Square-Peg Shurmer's offense).

No, it wasn't the recievers, or the line, or the tight ends.  ALL of them were above average!  Even TRich vs. stacked fronts with broken ribs didn't suck!

Weeden held the ball too long, took unneccessary sacks, tried to throw without his feet set,   and had a lot of bat-downs because he was being forced to throw short and to the middle.

It doesn't mean he sucks, either.  He was a rookie in a complex system that didn't make the most of his unique skill-set.

I now have one more reason to root for Weeden this this season:  If he fails, some of that crap La Canfora threw at the wall will have stuck, and he will have accidentally been right about something.  Darwin would be spinning in his grave.