The Vikings are Getting Favre'ed for Christmas

Editors Note: Cousin Eric, as long as he refrains from pimping his own defunct blog, will be contributing regularly to The Sports Sauna. For his day job, his career is business.

Hey Paul, did you hear about Tiger!? My buddy Skip Tiger, got a DWI over the weekend, blew a 0.22!

Anyways, I have decided to write a bi-weekly column in the Sports Sauna pending your concurrence of course. Why bi-weekly you ask? Well, weekly was a bit too much and monthly not enough. Any more idiotic questions? Oh and I wanted to make sure this wasn’t all about how awesome Syracuse hoops is. Granted they beat up on my Tar Heels a month or so back but this team just struggled to put away the Bonnies minus their best player. Some balance to the editorial staff couldn’t hurt cuz…

Let me first share my thoughts on the NFL. In the classic movie “Kingpin”, Roy Munson was so infamous for his inability to capitalize on his god-given talents that the American public verbalized his last name. In other words, to get Munson’ed was to have the whole world in the palm of your hand only to piss it away (courtesy of urbandictionary.com). I would like to be the first to coin the verb Favre’ed. The definition would be something like; to build unrealistic hopes and dreams to an entire fan base only to break their hearts when you can’t possibly deliver. For example, the Jets got “Favre’ed” last year going 8-3, loving life, thinking Super Bowl, only to sputter down the stretch (1-4) and miss the playoffs. Granted, Brett did have a torn biceps tendon but let’s look at what’s happening with the Vikings. After starting the season an impressive 10-1, they have now dropped two of three. Much to my chagrin may I add as I have/had him starting on my FF team. There are articles popping up all over the internet explaining how Favre refuses to be benched, the Vikings are falling apart and they can’t match up to any of the NFC playoff teams. Being a Bears fan, nothing sees me happier than to watch Favre lose football games during the holiday season and it looks like the streak will continue. It will be a sad state of affairs in Minnesota if they get beat by the Bears this Monday.

Speaking of the Bears, Cutler has obviously been a disappointment. You can’t lead the league in picks and expect people to love you. Unless of course, you are Favre who makes up for it by throwing a snowball after a TD and laughing on the sidelines…oh wow look at how young Brett appears, he is really enjoying himself, it’s so refreshing….that was me doing my best impression of any commentator doing a Packers/Vikings game the last decade or two. Back to Cutler, it’s tough to watch the Bears as normally, each loss brings bad teams closer to better picks come April but Chicago traded their first and second rounder (Gaines Adams!) so literally there is not a single thing to root for. When you watch your favorite team and your only wish is for no one to get seriously injured, you need to move on to the next sports season.

That’s all I got for right now. I will provide my annual College Bowl Recap after the new year where I review my picks and why they didn’t work out for me, then we can move on to the start of the PGA Tour and of course, college hoops!

Salary Cap Considerations

First, read this excellent article referred to me by my brother Dan. Shawn Hoffman of Baseball Prospectus points out that a salary cap in baseball might be devastating to small market teams, believe it or not.

Chris actually was the first one to get me thinking outside the box about the value of parity, particularly in baseball. Frankly, it's delightful to see the Yankees lose. It was cool to root for the Rays this year, and smaller teams in general.

Chris has also criticized the NFL because "he doesn't know who is good," and that has really played out this year. Still, I think the NFL regular season is ridiculously compelling because of the parity. I haven't been into fantasy that much, and I'm still addicted to watching football on Sunday almost in spite of myself.

On the other hand...last year was one of the best NFL regular seasons in memory precisely because there was one dominant team. Actually, there was one dominant team and a couple really, really good teams. Remember the hype for the Cowboys-Pats, Indy-Pats, and Giants-Pats games? Ridiculous.

Devo and Notent Notables

• The latest from ESPN.com. More from Syracuse.com.

• I actually told Cousin Mark last week that I thought Devendorf would eventually be suspended, based mainly on the fact that he was already on probation. Wrong again. I think it's a pretty fair penalty. I also don't think a non-basketball playing SU student would have been treated as harshly as Devendorf, but I have no experience with the judicial board to back that up.

• Flynn is also questionable for the Memphis game. Bummer. Actually, that turns it into something of a low risk, high reward game. The selection committee does take into account missing players when considering a team's body of work.

• I feel like I've got a superb feel for the NFL right now. Trust me when I say that Carolina is the team to beat in the NFC all of a sudden. If you saw the MNF game against the Bucs a couple weeks ago, you know why. In fact, gun to my head, they're my pick to win the title.
  

• In the AFC Tennessee (like the Giants) peaked at the wrong time. The Titans (like the Giants) have lost a key player at a bad time in Albert Haynesworth. They think he'll be ready for the playoffs, but at what capacity?

• Indy is, as we all know, the hottest team at the moment. They need Bob n' Joe to be healthy if they're going to challenge for the Super Bowl.

• Pittsburgh is the other contender from the AFC. All of the east teams are flawed, unless the Jets can get clicking again in the final two weeks.

• Love the K-Rod signing for the Mets. LOVE IT. What's that about him being injured? I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LA-LA-LA-LA-LAAAAAAAA!!!!! (plugging ears)

• Finish with new SU football coach Doug Marrone. It's unbelievable how quickly everybody in Syracuse started drinking his kool-aid. There must have been a truck out delivering it door-to-door. Whatever the case, I missed my cup. I'm still sipping on a nice batch of Turner Gill. Okay, so Gill wasn't passionate about the job the way Marrone was. Other than that he's better than Marrone in EVERY WAY. I won't rehash all the knocks on Marrone. You've heard them already. I will say that they all concern me. It's another five-year roll of the dice for Gross. If we had taken Gill and he had used us as a stepping stone, at least that meant he succeeded in some way here. I guess it could have been much worse. We could have hired Gene Chizik! That guy SUCKS!
  

Notent Notables

• I'm still shocked that England failed to qualify for Euro 2008. It wasn't until they drew the groups for the finals the other day that it hit me the three lions wouldn't be participating. I haven't seen a game since I left, and I'm still upset. I can't imagine what the nation is going through. If I were Steve McClaren, I'd go hide in Florida somewhere for the rest of my days. Good heavens, what a disaster.

• I think we can all agree that the NFL is the biggest sport in America. But that doesn't mean it necessarily has to stay that way. Thinking the NFL will always be king is like thinking the US economy will always stay strong or that America will always be the strongest nation in the world. Baseball used to be the biggest sport in the country. In the 80s, as I understand it, the NBA was bigger. Personally, even though I followed Michael Jordan religiously and liked college football more than the NFL when I was a kid, I've always admitted the NFL was on top. But now I'm sensing a change. I'm finally seeing Chris's point, that the parity in the NFL might have gone too far. Sunday Ticket isn't quite as appealing as it was 5 years ago because the number of worthwhile teams has dropped. I still like tuning in when all the games are ending, in case it gets exciting, but most of the afternoon the games don't have my attention. Don't get me wrong, I think the playoffs are going to be amazing this year. But I think the overall quality of the product has slipped...

• ...while the NBA is looking better. I think the number of worthwhile teams is growing this year. I also think that with the Big Three in Boston and Dwight Howard's emergence as an all-time superstar in Orlando, the East has legitimate contenders this year. In fact, I think more teams can realistically win the NBA championship than the Super Bowl. Count 'em yourself. The NBA is coming back, folks. I'm intrigued.

• College Football will always have its base with the Solid South, but the lack of a tournament is really killing it. This season has been the most exciting one that I can ever remember. It is true that the significance of the upsets would have been lessened slightly by a post-season playoff. But ask yourself this: how many of the huge upset games have been "appointment viewing" for the casual college football fan? For me, the only appointment viewing games have been the Ohio State-Michigan game, and the Missouri-Kansas game, both of which would have been on my list of games to watch even if there was a playoff system. (Think of it this way: if #1 plays #2 in college basketball during the regular season, are you going to watch?) My point is the exciting storyline of the season isn't making me actually sit down and watch more games. And I'm not really interested in any bowl game other than the national title. But an 8-team playoff, that included the 6 major conference winners plus two at-large teams...I'd watch every game that stayed close, and I'm sure other casual college football fans like me would, too.

• I have Jim Valvano's ESPY speech on our downstairs TiVo tagged with "Save until I delete" status. If you're in town and need a pick-me-up, feel free to drop by.

• On SU's loss to UMass. That was a wildly entertaining game. Well into the 2nd half I was still watching with glee. But about halfway through the 2nd half (which was, I realized later, when Donte Greene cooled off), I got one of those bad feelings that you get when you really know your team is going to lose. You know what I mean? Sometimes it can work in the opposite direction, and you'll just know your team is going to pull it out. The problem, I decided, was that we weren't playing Big East basketball, or Syracuse basketball for that matter. Syracuse basketball wins with defense. As spectacular an offensive team as we are this year, our defense needs to be a lot better. We're not going to win too many games in the Big East playing shootout basketball. I didn't see the Tulane game, but it sounded like we took a step in the right direction. I think we're going to learn a lot more about this team on Wednesday, in Virginia.
  

Pats v. Cowboys

Are you ready for some disappointment? This game is going to be a blowout. The Patriots are as good as we think they are, and the Cowboys are not.

Here's another prediction: Dallas will NOT have the best record in the NFC come playoff time. They might win their division, but they won't be playing in the NFC championship game. As we will see this afternoon, their defense is seriously flawed in defending downfield passing. And more importantly, Tony Romo might just suck.

OK, so Romo got off to a great start this year before last week's debacle. But recall the opponents. In week 1, he had 4TD/1 INT against a Giants team that, it seems to me, was not quite ready to roll. Week 2: 2/0 at awful Miami. Week 3: 2/1 against the falling apart Bears. Week 4: 3/1 versus awful Rams.

But last year he was great, right? Well... Here are his regular season numbers in five games against teams that made the playoffs (NYGx2, IND, NO, PHI): 4TD, 10 INT. Then of course there was the disastrous loss to Seattle.

So I'm asking the jury in the case of "Tony Romo v. Super-Stardom" to return to deliberation for the rest of this season at least. Today, for instance, we are going to see how a brilliant defensive coaching staff can destroy him.