After watching Jay Cutler’s Hamlet turn Thursday, it has occurred to all right-thinking humans that the only quarterbacks anyone likes any more are Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and the three or four who haven’t played enough to offend us yet.
All the other ones suck irredeemably and should be stripped naked, abandoned on an ice floe and towed out to catch the Arctic current.
Of course, if that’s your template, based on the fact that quarterback is the hardest position in all of sports, then most teams should return to the Wing-T and have no quarterbacks at all because the few that thrive cannot be replaced and all the other situations are just replacing one form of suck for another (see Cutler and his backup, Jimmy Clausen).
So if you have a quarterback who happens to suck (Nos. 9 through 15,480 in the industry), you may want to consider that our demands are making their chances of succeeding at the job almost infinitesimal, and they’d all have better chances becoming circus juggler/microbiologists.
Or you could recalibrate your suck-o-meters and stop being such insufferable gasbags.
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And while we’re at it, Cutler won points for that very presser, which means that the metric kids better get off their digitized arse-cushions and come up with a formula that incorporates press conference demeanor, behavior, articulation and miscellaneous affability, because that’s a thing now.
A big thing.
Not that being crap at a press conference is a predictor of anything, except someone who’s okay with being a jackwagon in public, mind you. But surely we media members are savvy enough to understand that pressers are just another expression of artifice in action, in which the subject pretends to be a swell guy in a business that requires only absurd levels of excellence.
Is it so clear that we never hear any expressions of honesty from them that we end up falling for fake conviviality? Did Colin Kaepernick make a huge maturity jump in a week? Did Cutler actually go from publicly repellent to Audrey Hepburn in 60 hours? We typists and camera bait must be wiser than to fall for this cheap old parlor trick, mustn’t we?
We mustn’t? We must be suckers for it? Oh, okay. Good thing the holiday starts soon, and we can all work on our phony cheer.
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In other news about suckers, a devoted fan of Brazilian side Santos is suing Neymar, the national star who now plays for Barcelona, for allegedly perpetrating a fraud on the fan’s wallet and heart. Luciano Pereira Caparroz, said plaintiff, learned via reading that Neymar had struck a clandestine agreement to join Barca back in 2011, before the two teams met in the Club World Cup final, and that Barcelona had put a 10 million euro down payment on the player in show of good faith.
So he did what anyone would do -– he sued for about $10,000 because he flew to Japan for the match to see his favorite player without realizing his favorite player was about to become his favorite defendant. He has no chance to win.
Next up, a 49er fan will sue Jim Harbaugh for agreeing to whatever the hell he agrees to in the next few weeks, because fans.
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News from the math brutes at FiveThirtyEight.com: They estimate that the Warriors’ chances of winning an NBA title by 2019 at .95, a better chance of doing so than any other team. Of course, the site also pencils in the 76ers for 16 wins, meaning the Tank Corps has to go 14-44 from here on out, a task they seem neither capable of doing nor eager to do, so there’s that.
That still puts a lot of pressure on Steve Kerr, for you do not jilt Nate Silver without paying a heavy price. The man can crush a skull with a single well-directed integer, and his work with coquaternions are the mathematic equivalent of batrachotoxin, the poison that makes the arrow frog the baddest thing on land.
Hey, we’re teaching you stuff here, you thick-lobed ingrates. Attention should be paid.
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And finally, we’re taking next week off to see family and remind ourselves of the true meaning of the holidays –- to envy orphans.