RIP Grimm--the little series that could

Television can be divided into winners and losers, shows that are renewed and shows that are cancelled.  Come to think of it, life can be divided into winners and losers too.  In most cases shows starts off strong, run for a few seasons, then limp to the inevitable end (except for The Simpsons).  Or, they don’t catch on and are off the air in 13 (or fewer) weeks and never of again (except for Firefly).

One outlier is the late, relatively unlamented NBC series Grimm, which ended its run after five full seasons and half of a sixth.  The show never caught fire, or created a huge fanbase, or acquired critical acclaim (its two Emmy nominations were for stunt coordination). But it survived, reaching the famous 100-episode threshold, which is not nothing in the cutthroat world of network television.  Its departure leaves a Grimm-sized hole in NBC’s Friday line-up.

The show, created by David Greenawalt and Jim Kouf, began with the tail wind created by Greenawalt’s work as a producer on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Like Buffy, it was about a not-so-lone champion who fought mystical beasties that existed right under the noses of an oblivious society.  Like Buffy, its hero developed a cadre of friends and colleagues, some of whom were frankly more interesting than the lead character. But unlike Buffy, the central mythology never quite gelled.

In my opinion, the central problem with Grimm was not giving the audience a reason to care about the main character, Portland police detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli).  Speaking as a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the audience cared about her DEEPLY.  Not just whether she’d survive her battle with evil; we cared if she’d have a nice date to her prom, that she’d get into a good college, that she’d stop sleeping with pretty boys who either dumped her or were in an evil government military organization.  The creators of Grimm just assumed we’d care about Burkhardt because he was the star, he was sort of good-looking, and was a cop.

The premise behind Grimm was that there was a society of fairy tale creatures in the world that were called Wessen (one endearing yet annoying aspect of the show was that all the words describing the mythology were Germanic in origin, making them difficult to spell or pronounce).  Wessen looked human, but could “woge” into creatures that looked half-human, half-animalistic.  Some had magic powers, some were evil, some were just hungry and ate humans, and some were just refrigerator repairmen.

Burkhardt was the last in the hereditary line of Grimms, who protected humanity from Wessen, but Burkhardt put a modern twist on the job—instead of killing ALL Wessen, he instituted a policy of only killing Wessen who threatened people or other Wessen.  Luckily for him, he was a homicide detective in Portland, where most of the murders seemed to have some Wessen link.

Grimm did an excellent job of filling out its “Scooby Gang” including Nick’s detective partner Hank and a Wessen named Monroe who was a Blutbad (when he woged he turned into a fierce wolf-like creature).  Eventually the team included Nick’s fiancée Juliette, a police sergeant with the unfortunate name of Drew Wu, and Monroe’s finacee, who woged into an adorable fox-like Wessen.  Complicating matters was the fact that Nick’s boss was a Zauberbiest who was a member of the royal family that were the hereditary rulers over some aspects of Wessen society.

Like The X-Files and Buffy, Grimm juggled “monster of the week” plots with an expanding mythology about how evil elements of Wessen society was organizing to possibly declare was on humans.

Nick was a bland character, and his relationship with Juliette was one of those typical TV pairings where the couple is deeply in love because they are both in their mid-20’s, good looking, and the script requires it.  When Juliette got amnesia (that plot device never gets old), all she could remember about meeting Nick was that she thought he was cute. They had nothing in common, shared no hobbies, and it was easy to forget she was a veterinarian because it was seldom mentioned unless it somehow was required by that week’s plot.

What amused me the most about Grimm was that they never got the opening credits quite right.  The kept tinkering with them until they finally gave up around season four or five.  They still were terrible, but they stopped changing.

What distinguished Grimm was the imaginative way it re-worked old fairy tales into modern morality tales.  The supporting cast was excellent as well. The standout was Silas weir Mitchell as Monroe, a schleppy human that could transform into a fearsome Wessen, yet was a vegetarian who repaired antique clocks.  His relationship with Rosealie (Bree Turner) had all the warmth Nick and Juliette’s romance lacked. Russell Hornsby as Nick’s partner Hank always provided strong support that suggested he was underused by the writers.  Sasha Roiz was suitably charismatic and mysterious as Nick’s boss, Captain Renard, and Reggie Lee provided Xander-like comic relief as Officer Wu.

Grimm was never a ratings blockbuster, but expectations were lower on Friday nights, and it did well enough to make it to 123 episodes.  I’ll miss it, but frankly I am not clamoring for any follow-up TV movies to find out what happens next in the impending Wessen/Human conflict.  Six seasons and 123 episodes is a good run for any TV show.

No tying in baseball

Major League Baseball is coming off its greatest, and one of the highest rated, World series of all time, with the Chicago Cubs breaking a century old curse and winning a title despite being down 3 games to 1 to the surprising (and almost equally cursed) Cleveland Indians. NFL ratings were down last season, and NBA ratings are suffering from players “resting” and the fact that there are only two interesting teams in the league.  And, for the fiftieth year in a row since soccer was predicted to become America’s national pastime, soccer is not the national pastime.  So everything’s coming up baseball.

But you can’t get ahead by standing still, and baseball is looking at the next great crisis to face the sport.  The relative paucity of African-American players? The seeming inability for a pitcher to pitch for six innings a game and not require Tommy John surgery? The retirement of Vin Scully? No, the next great crisis for baseball is the tie game.

Football and hockey accept ties, albeit grudgingly. Basketball doesn’t, but given the nature of the game repeated tie scores after overtime periods are unlikely.  Soccer without ties would be like the 4^th of July without hot dogs.  Only baseball insists on preventing ties even if it means playing for twice as long as the game was originally scheduled for.  Traditionalists revel in this, but maybe it is time to reconsider.

Let’s first look at the most obvious point, player safety.  MLB, like other sports (I’m looking at you, football), trots out player safety as a reason to justify anything it wants to do.  But because of baseball’s ironclad rule against a player re-entering a game once he has been pulled, there are some legitimate concerns.  Bullpen pitchers can be asked to throw more pitches than they are comfortable with.  Position players can be put in to pitch, which can result in injury (Jose Canseco missed part of the 1993 season because he pitched, and he wasn’t throwing Nolan Ryan type heat). And heaven help the team whose catcher either has to play for 15 innings, or is taken out and then the back-up catcher suffers an injury.   Fatigue causes injuries, and playing in the 16^th inning at 1:15 AM sounds fatiguing.

There are some other, more subtle problems with the “no ties” policy.  For example, if the game being played into the 15^th inning is on a getaway day, teams may have to fly out of a city at an ungodly hour, and arrive at their net city about the time players should be waking up, not going to bed.  Some cities have established curfews to prevent games from disturbing neighborhoods (of course I am talking old school stadiums in inner cities, not modern parks out in the sticks), resulting in uneven rules being applied.

But the argument that resonated with me was, who is watching these games?  Baseball is for the fans, but if you look at tape of any 16-inning marathon that started at 7:05 PM local time you’ll notice the stands are mostly empty, filled only by a handful of die-hards who presumably have no job or school to go to the next morning.

One thing that I always felt truly differentiated baseball and football—to the betterment of both—was that baseball had rainouts but football was played no matter the weather.  Watching a game played in adverse conditions just made it better, but baseball was such a nuanced sport that if it couldn’t be played right, then it shouldn’t be played at all.  Playing after midnight after 12 or more innings isn’t conducive to playing baseball right.

Not that I am endorsing the idiotic idea proposed and implemented in some minor leagues that extra innings in tie games start with a man on base. Not only is it a gross distortion of the game, but it does nothing to address breaking the tie.  Yes, it gives the first tam up a greater chance of scoring, but then it gives the second team up the same greater chance of scoring, accomplishing nothing.  Truly moronic.

I am not a fan of distorting baseball to end ties the way other sports do.  Soccer and hockey have adopted gimmicks like shootouts and playing three-on-three in overtime.  The next thing will be basketball ties being broken by free throw shooting contests.  Baseball should be played as it was meant to be played, down to the bitter end.

But maybe that bitter end should, on rare occasions, be a tie. After three extra innings, declare the game over and avoid an unlucky 13^th inning.  Managers could manage their pitching expectations better, fans in ballparks would know (approximately) when the end was coming, and teams could adjust their strategies to a finite time horizon.  Not that many games go past 12 innings, and maybe there would be fewer ties if teams knew it was going to end before there was a 13^th.

There might be some provision for making up tie games if the affected the post-season, or maybe not allow ties until the expanded rosters in September.  But playing games until the tie is broken just leads to the situation lampooned in WP Kinsella’s novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which was about a cursed baseball game that went on for months.  Maybe for over 100 years baseball played without a time limit, but maybe that time has come to an end.

I predict the Cubs win

One of my favorite quotes, from Damon Runyon, sums up why I think most sports-related prognostication is silly.  Runyon said, “Remember, the race is not always to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet.”

You want to predict who will win the NBA championship? At the start of this season, saying anything other than Warriors or Cavaliers would have been either stupid or partisan fandom.  Who will win March Madness? Sure, you can choose a “Cinderella,” but the two teams playing in the championship game are both #1 seeds.  The winner of next year’s Super Bowl will probably not be the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and I’d be willing to put some money on that.

So, who will win the 2017 World Series?  Excuse me if I go for the obvious and answer that it will be the Chicago Cubs. In any year, the winner of last year’s championship is usually the favored team, even if repeating championships is rare (in 90 years only one National League team has managed to repeat, the 1975-76 Big Red Machine).  But this year is different, in that the Cubs should be favored for reasons other than shear inertia.

The Cubs underperformed last year. Yes, they won 103 games, which is very impressive.  However, they performed like a team that should have won 110, which is one of the four or five greatest performances ever.  The discrepancy is based on a new-fangled stat called clusterluck, which looks at how a team’s statistics translated to wins in previous years.  Say a team gets 9 hits in a game; how many runs would you expect them to score?  If all the hits were in one inning, then six or seven, maybe 8.  If the hits were spread out one per inning, the answer is zero.  Looking back over how teams grouped their hits in the past 130 years of baseball we can say that given how the Cubs hot, they should have won an additional 7 games, but they were unlucky.

Add to this that manager Joe Maddon might have deflated those stats (in a good way, not like Tom Brady) by easing up as his team clinched the NL Central Division and locked up home field advantage in the playoffs.  The Cubs started off incredibly hot, then cooled off in the second half of the season.  Maybe if they, like the 2016 Warriors, wanted to set the record for most wins they would have, but at what price for the post season?

Then there is the fact that the team’s offense is powered by incredibly young players on their way up.  The Cubs position players were the 5^th youngest in the league, most under 27 years old.  This means that unlike older players with diminishing skills, their hitting prowess will only improve.  In the case of Kris Bryant, that should terrify National League pitchers.

The only every-day player the Cubs lost was their lead-off hitter, Dexter Fowler, who departed to the hated Cardinals.  On the other hand, they lost Kyle Schwarber early in April and didn’t get him back until the World Series, so barring another injury he’ll be there for the entire season.  They lost Alroldis Chapman, but he was only there for part of the season.  Thanks to Maddon’s over-use in the post-season Chapman nearly blew Game 7 of the Series, and closers are overrated anyway.

The one source of concern is the starting rotation, which is not a collection of youngsters like the offense and have been atypically free of injury the last two years.  Maybe they are overdue for some elbow trouble, but these days what staff isn’t one Tommy John injury away from just missing the post-season?

When some talking heads on ESPN were making predictions the other day, the first one picked the Cubs.  The second one said, “Well, yeah, they should be good, but they could have injuries so I’m picking the Dodgers.”  First off, why is he assuming the Dodgers will be more free of injuries than the Cubs?  What if Clayton Kershaw goes down for the entire season and not just a couple of months like last season?  Any team can be laid low by injuries, and if anything, the Cubs’ relative youth puts the odds in the Cubs’ favor, not another team’s.

Add to all this the genius of Joe Maddon, who did a masterful job of riding the front runners last year and is the perfect manager to keep the Cubs from complacency.

This is not to say the Cubs are a lock; FiveThirtyEight has them the favorite to win the World Series at only 14%.  The post-season is notoriously fickle, and as great as the Cubs were last year, they dodged a couple of close calls in October.  But anyone predicting any team other than the Cubs winning the 2017 World Series is whistling in a graveyard.

If all goes as expected, the Cubs should handily win the NY Central again and make a strong run to repeat.  108 years ago, the Cubs won back-to-back titles, then had a century long dry spell.  If you want to put some money on the 2017 World Series, the Cubs are the way to bet.

Dollhouse--Even Joss Whedon Isn't Perfect

I have a confession to make: I am a huge Joss Whedon fan, yet I abandoned two of his TV creations.  Not Buffy, the Vampire Slayer or Angel; I stuck with those series until the very end (although the abysmal quality of Buffy’s last two seasons made it a challenge).  No, I gave up on his two non-Buffy TV shows, Firefly and Dollhouse.

Given the subsequent critical adoration of Firefly, my throwing in the towel after three episodes seems inexplicable.  But, as the defendant said in court, I plead guilty . . . but with an explanation.  I will lay the bulk of blame at the feet of the FOX network, which reportedly insisted that the show NOT begin with the pilot episode but instead insisted that Whedon rush a new episode into production for the premiere.  The result, an episode called The Train Job, proved to be arguably the worst episode of the series (IMDB has it ranked as the third worst).  I have since purchased the show on DVD and watched the episodes in their correct order, and the results are MUCH better.

Secondly, I still believe that the show pushed the “space as the old West” metaphor WAY too hard.  Okay, settlers on new planets in the future may have a culture similar to that of the old West, but it wouldn’t necessarily look like the American west circa 1870.  I find the stronger episodes of Firefly (and the exceptional follow-up movie Serenity) are the ones that minimize the Western paraphernalia and instead deal with space ships (Out of Gas), Government control (Ariel), and behavior modification (the movie Serenity).

I gave up on Firefly after three episodes, but I stuck through Dollhouse until the end of season one.  Once again, network interference played a part in my initial disappointment.  The first few episodes of the series, in which humans called “actives” could be programmed with different personalities, mostly featured stand-alone episodes in the vein of “Who will Elisha Dushku be this week?”  I have read that this was on the insistence of the FOX network, and that Whedon had wanted to start the series in the direction of the shadowy conspiracy of the Rossum Corporation that eventually emerged in season two.  Despite a weak beginning (one of the minor knocks on Buffy is that the seasons were slow to get going), I stayed with Dollhouse.

A bigger problem with Dollhouse was that it was created by Joss Whedon as a vanity project for star Elisha Dushku.  Frankly, she couldn’t pull it off.  Dushku is a very god actress, and showed some talent for playing multiple personalities in the Buffy body-swap episodes This Year’s Girl and Who Are You?  But she’s no Sarah Michelle Geller; heck, she’s not even as good as Charisma Carpenter.  Building a show around an actress that will showcase her skill at playing disparate characters is a non-starter unless the actress is supremely talented, and Dushku wasn’t quite there.

It didn’t help that Dushku was surrounded by an exceptional supporting cast, notably Tahmoh Penikett, Enver Gjokaj, Dichen Lachman, Franz Kranz, and Amy Acker.  Many weeks I wished the show was following the exploits of Sierra (Lachman) and Victor (Gjokaj) instead of Echo.  By the way, Dollhouse must hold the record for the most cast members with really strange first names; I know actors want distinctive monikers, but Tahmoh, Enver and Dichen?

I think another problem with the concept of Dollhouse was the potential (and reality) of unreliable narration.  Sometimes an unreliable narrator can be a blessing (for example, Mr. Robot).  But with Dollhouse there were several plot twists where the revelation was that a character that we thought was good turned out to be an “active” who’d been programmed. After a few such shocking twists, it becomes difficult to invest in any character, lest we find out later it was all a ruse. Such shocking reveals are great in a Hitchcock film, but in a weekly TV series it makes it hard to keep watching.

The best episode of Dollhouse I’ve seen is the un-aired “season finale” for season one that was scrapped when the show was renewed.  The episode, called Epitaph 1, was never aired in North America but is available on DVD (and on streaming, although it is leaving Netflix on April 1, 2017).  It was a brilliant demonstration of the potential devastation that could be wrought by the Dollhouse technology, potentially destroying humanity by obliterating the concept of “self.”  My understanding is that this thread was developed in season two, and the series finale Epitaph 2 wrapped things up.  Season two is the vision that was sidetracked in season one.

I could go back and catch up with season two of Dollhouse on DVD.  However, to appreciate season two, I would by necessity have to go back and re-watch season one, and that is too much of an ask.  I don’t remember much of season one except that I kept expecting it to get better and, with the exception of the episode Spy in the House of Love, it never did.

Life is short, and there is too much good TV on to find out if a sci-fi show I passed on in 2009 was as good as people say.  I gave it a fair shot.  It’s just that it has been a long time since Joss Whedon produced a new TV series, and season two of Dollhouse is the only Joss Whedon produced TV that I haven’t seen.  I guess I can hold out until he decides to produce some more.

What to expect from Tony Romo?

Reports coming out of Dallas indicate that our long national nightmare may be just about over:  Tony Romo may be released by the Dallas Cowboys to join any team NOT in the NFC East.

When the talking heads at ESPN talked about this last week, they were unanimous on one thing—Romo is as fragile as a crystal football.  He was called fragile, injury-prone, “unable to play a full season” and a lot of other words that meant that he was a strong breeze away from being on the disabled list.  Even the sportswriters who LIKED him agreed he was a buttercup.

Looking at his history, it is easy to see why people would say that; he has missed major time in several seasons.  That’s why he is expendable in Dallas—while he was recuperating from his last injury the Cowboys discovered Dak Prescott who filled in so well, he got the job permanently.

But is Romo actually “injury prone”?  Yes, he’s been injured several times, and his back has been injured more than once.  But he isn’t a running back who’s torn his ACL repeatedly, or a pitcher needing a second Tommy John surgery.  His injuries have usually been caused by very large men falling on him with considerable violence.  Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t say that makes him “prone” to anything other than being tackled.

In 2010 Romo broke his collarbone.  In 2011 his hand was injured.  In 2013 he hurt a rib, followed by a herniated disc.  In 2014 he hurt his back being tackled, and in 2015 his collarbone was broken once again.  Most of these were caused by tackles that would cause damage to any human.  The back issues seem unrelated.  Yes, his collarbone has broken twice, but I doubt the problem is a calcium deficiency. I think he just plays a violent game and is a tad less lucky than Tom Brady.

Is it reasonable to expect that Romo WOULD NOT suit up for 16 games in the 2017 season, if he gets a starting job?  First off, no QB, not even the sainted Tom Brady, is assured of starting 16 games in a season (you may recall that Tom Brady missed four games last season, for non-injury related reasons).  But Romo has as good a chance at starting 16 games as Alex Smith, Jay Cutler, or even Dak Prescott.  Second, Romo is 36 years old, and we know that people do get brittle with age, so that is a strike against him.  Third, a lot would depend upon the ability of his offensive line to a) protect the quarterback, and b) establish a running game that makes play-action passes effective.

If I was a Bronco fan and they signed him, I’d buy a plane ticket to where ever Super Bowl 2018 is being played.  If I were a 49er fan, I’d bet the Niners DOUBLED their win total from 2016 (that’s right, four wins, baby! Maybe five!). 

The downside is that Romo might get hurt, but the upside is that the perception of the downside might keep his price low.  In a league where the Bears are throwing around $15 million a year at unproven starter Mike Glennon and his career 84 passer rating, Romo’s 97 passer rating would be worth a lot more.  If people didn’t assume he’d get injured.

Football is all about risk.  Nothing is guaranteed except signing bonuses and base salaries.  At 36, Romo is a risk, but then so is any QB in the league; the younger ones just get up a little faster.  Romo says he might be willing to sign for $6-$8 million; if so that is a risk I’d want my team to take.

Science Fiction TV as of March 2017

First off, if anyone out there actually watched the execrable ABC pilot for Time After Time, I have a suggestion—immediately, as soon as possible, rent the 1979 version with Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen, and David Warner. The difference between it and the ABC pilot?  The 1979 movie was made by people with brains (director Nicolas Meyer) and talent (the above listed cast), two traits absent from everyone associated with the lame remake.

As we near the end of the 2016-17 season (or what passes for seasons nowadays), let’s check in on some science fiction TV shows:

Supergirl:  Big changes as it switched networks from CBS to CW, and lost regular Callista Flockhart.  Winners: Winn Schott (Jeremy Jordan).  This character was so underwritten last season, who knew his last name?  His sole purpose was to be the “Xander” the platonic friend who wanted more from the superheroine lead.  He ditched his job as a low-level tech guy at Catco Media and got a job better suited to his supposed kills, head tech guy with the DEO.  He also got over Kara, got a hot alien girlfriend, and a cool hobby as the brains behind Jimmy Olsen’s Guardian.

Another winner was Alex Danvers (Chyler Leigh), who got a lot more screen time and more back story thanks to the juicy story line of her realizing she was a lesbian.  This could have been handled awkwardly, but they generally handled it with aplomb (she’d tell people her “big news” and they’d usually go, “And?”).  Her new relationship with her gal-pal developed aspect of her character that didn’t come out when she was with Kara.

The big loser is Jimmy Olsen (Mechad Brooks), who has been AWOL from several episodes.  As the focus shifted away from Catco and on the DEO the interim head of Catco is suddenly superfluous, he was replaced as a love interest by Mon-el, and who needs Guardian when you have Supergirl and J’onn J’onzz around?  He suddenly wasn’t needed as a love interest or as a member of Team Supergirl.

Legends of Tomorrow:  Someone, I think at Hollywood Reporter, had this on their “bottom 10” TV show list.  Maybe its first season was hard to defend, but this show has improved significantly.  The show was even self-aware enough to make fun of itself for having a charisma-challenged bad guy (Vandal Savage) in season one.  The show has found the fun, letting different characters (even the bad guys!) put their own stamp on the show’s overtly pretentious opening monologue (the best one was the one read by gruff good guy Mick Rory (Dominick Percell) who ended by saying, “Who writes this crap?”).  The show added a big bad with charisma to spare, the “Legion of Doom” featuring Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough) and Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) from Arrow and Eobard Thawne (Matt Letscher) from The Flash.  The show still struggles with time-travel gaps in logic and a limited CW budget, but any show that doesn’t make me hate Brandon Routh is doing something right.

I deeply miss Wentworth Miller, but I keep hoping they will find some time loophole and bring him back as more than a hallucination.

The Flash.  Sigh.  When The Flash started I praised it for eschewing the angsty baggage that most post-Dark Knight superheroes wallowed in and brought a sense of (here is that word again) fun to the material.  Now close to wrapping its third season, The Flash is all about the angst.  Barry Allen went back in time to save his mother, but that had consequences, so he went back in time again and let her die, but THAT had consequences.  That sentence demonstrates the pretzel-logic that has taken over the show.  Now every episode is all about how Barry must save his beloved Iris from being murdered by the evil speedster Savitar.  Who?  Why?  What??  Every week some member of Team Flash makes a selfish decision, then bravely apologizes just before consequences set in.

Thank the stars for Tom Cavenaugh, a beacon of (here it is again) fun in an otherwise dreary offering.  Cavenaugh has now played three different roles, or three versions of the same role, and he manages to make each amusing in a unique way.  If there was a category for MVP of a show, my vote would be for Cavenaugh hands down.

Timeless.  Sigh again.  There is much to like about Timeless, mostly the wonderful Malcolm Barrett (late of the wonderful sitcom Better Off Ted).  But the whole thing MAKES NO SENSE.  If the bad guy, the improbably named Garcia Flynn (he’s what, Mexican-Irish?) had a time machine (which he did), wouldn’t there be some way for him to accomplish is nefarious (or noble) goal by only taking ONE TRIP back in time?  Two max?  Instead he goes back in time, over and over, and always to an inexplicably convenient major historical event.  The plot has gotten so complicated I have no idea who to root for as both sides seem bad, and the season one finale hinted that there may be multiple universes vying for reality.  Throw in a leading man who is the definition of wooden and a story that wasn’t on any rails to go off of, and my desire to see this series return is 50-50.

Bill Polian says something stupid

Even smart people say really stupid things sometimes.  Indianapolis Colts GM and Hall of Famer Bill Polian said this week that neither Terrell Owens nor Randy Moss deserve to be in the Football Hall of Fame. Why?  Terrell Owens wasn’t a good team mate, and Moss didn’t give 100% effort.

Really?  And I suppose Babe Ruth doesn’t deserve to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame; sure, he hit 714 home runs, but he was drunk a lot and didn’t give 100% effort.  Mickey Mantle doesn’t belong either, because he boozed it up as well.  And Jim Brown shouldn’t be in Canton; he quit after only nine seasons!  That’s not giving 100%.  Why is Lawrence Taylor in Canton?  He wasn’t a very good teammate from what I hear.  Polian apparently believes entry to Canton should be based on saintliness, not statistics.

Look, if Randy Moss didn’t give 100% effort, then how many yards, receptions, and touchdowns would he have had if he did?  He got over 15,000 yards and scored 156 touchdowns, but Polian wants him to have at least 30,000 yards because he only gave 50% effort.  If that’s your standard, then every receiver who ever played the game is disqualified.  Oh wait, I forgot about Lee Folkins; he only had 80 career receptions for the Cowboys in the 1960’s, but he gave 100%!  Put Folkins in the Hall of Fame, but keep Randy Moss out!

Did Terrell Owens help his teams?  He made it to the postseason eight times, and his 16,000 yards and 156 TDs certainly did help.  Owens took a lot of flak while he was in Philadelphia, but who played better in the Super Bowl?  Terrell “I have metal pins in my hand” Owens, or Donovan “Would you like to see what I had for lunch” McNabb?  Owens had nine receptions for 122 yards and was probably the MVP for the losing Eagles.

Okay, we get it, Bill Polian doesn’t like players like Terrell Owens or Randy Moss.  He’d rather have players with less . . . talent.  If he thinks Terrell Owens should not be in Canton because he was a bad teammate, then why does Canton induct individuals instead of teams?  Football may be a team sport, but individuals are singled out, individuals who have the most talent.  If Owens and Moss were marginal hall choices, he might have a point.  But Owens and Moss are, statistically, the second and third best receivers OF ALL TIME.  Of course their combined 31,000 yards and 300 touchdowns helped their teams FAR MORE than any locker room incidents or spats with the media.

There is also the fact that these are receivers—almost all receivers are divas.  This is such an accepted truth that now a days a receiver would have to say that he thinks his team throws to him too often t get any attention.  Owens and Moss were just ahead of their time.

Either Randy Moss made an effort in practice and in games, or else it is incredible that he could have been as successful as he was coasting on only 90% effort.  No one gets to be that good with a lot of effort; no one is that naturally gifted.  Did Owens’ gift for self-promotion really negate 16,000 yards of offense?  I doubt it.

Bill Polian is too smart to believe what he just said.  Of course Moss and Owens deserve to be in the Football Hall of fame in Canton.  They are two of the three greatest receivers in NFL history.  Does Canton select its inductees on merit, or on Bill Polian’s list of player who showed proper deportment?  I think it should be a meritocracy, but Bill Polian apparently thinks the definition of a Hall of Famer is to be well-behaved.