I’m afraid that I’m going to have to hijack my own website for an entry to talk about my favorite pastime, FOOTBALL. I think we can all agree that FOOTBALL is by far the best sport in the history of history - easily beating out baseball and Scottish rock tossing. Well, I listen to a lot of NFL commentary because I’m genuinely interested and because it makes me feel better about myself because I’m obviously smarter than 90% of the analysts currently populating the various forms of media.
While driving to work the other day, I turned my radio to ESPN to check in on Sports Center or whatever. Unfortunately though, The Herd was on with its grating and pompous host, Colin Cowherd who was interviewing Trent Dilfer; whom, ESPN tells me, is a football expert. The topic of the day was Brett Favre and his signing with the Minnesota Vikings. The conversation was flowing as smoothly as one might expect until Colin asked Trent about how he thought Brett would get along with his new teammates considering that after his year with the Jets, one of his teammates was upset with him, saying that he was “distant” toward the players and didn’t like to socialize with them and such.
Trent, not being Brett Favre, not being in the Jets locker room last season and knowing basically nothing of the situation in general, threw in these “thoughts.”
You gotta understand, he’s a 40 year old man, got growing kids; I think he has a kid in college this year, um, and he’s dealing with college age kids many times, and definitely college age mentality kids. It’s, it’s he doesn’t relate well to a lot of his teammates and that’s not his fault.
I’m going to stop things right here and just point out that if Brett Favre has a “kid” in college who, I assume, is “college age” he should have a pretty good understanding of the “college kid” mentality.
I think it’s an indictment on the NFL more than it’s a indictment on Brett Favre. Um, there’s very immature players in the National Football League, guys that, you know, concentrate more on their Madden prowess than on their prowess on Sunday.
Hi, it’s me again. I just wanted to pipe in and say that I really have no idea what Trent is saying here. I think he’s upset that players are recruited out of college and that they aren’t forced to get “real” jobs – i.e. sitting in a room in Connecticut talking about a game – before entering the league.
I’m also not certain, but I think Trent Dilfer is accusing professional football players of focusing more on advancing their “skills” in a video-game than on playing football. I’m not an expert on all things football, but if these guys were spending all their time playing video-games and eating corn-dogs (they go hand-in-hand) they would look like me and get killed. I’m pretty sure this is just Trent’s way of being “edgy” but really he just comes off like your 80 year-old grandfather who can’t figure out how the cable box works and won’t stop talking about rap music like it’s a witch that should be burned at the stake.
Um, and Brett has a hard time relating to those types of people and I think that’s what happened with the Jets and then we give some of those players a forum to talk about Brett Favre, a platform to talk about Brett Favre, as if he was an island when yet these were the ones that are probably more socially dysfunctional than him.
One of the critics of Brett Favre was running back Thomas Jones, who rushed for 4.5 yards-per-attempt (ninth in the NFL) and 1312 total yards (fifth in the NFL) in 2008. He didn’t like Favre because Mr. Mature, aka Favre, played with a bicep injury (that would later require surgery) and was awful during the last few games of the season because of it. This helped cause the Jets late season collapse. I’m not Thomas Jones, but if I were, I’d be pretty pissed that Trent Dilfer just called me “socially dysfunctional,” especially when my reasons for talking were reasonable and legitimate.
With Minnesota he doesn’t have that problem, he’s got the Steve Hutchinson’s, the William’s, he’s got older, more mature guys that have been through the battles of the National Football League and they’ve weathered the storms of life that he relates more too.
This right here is the absolute epitome of “I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, and I hope no one actually looks this up or they’ll call me out on my bullshit.” During the 2008 season, the average age of a player on the Jets was 27.9 years-old which was seventh OLDEST. They also had eight starters who were thirty years-old or older, which was tied for second highest in the league (Washington had the most starters over thirty with nine). This information, literally, took me about five seconds to find on Google and I’m not being paid to know and research football things…you know, like an analyst is. Included with this group of young and immature college-minded players was:
Player Age
Tony Richardson 37
Laveranues Coles 31
Alan Faneca 32
Damien Woody 31
Maybe Trent is talking about Dustin Keller…the only rookie who started a game on offense. Way to make Brett feel bad Dustin. I hope you’re real proud of yourself you meanie.
But really, Brett must be thanking his lucky stars that he’ll finally be playing with people his own age like Steve Hutchinson (31 years-old) and the Williamses (Pat is 36 and Kevin is 28).
After this pile of thought, Trent was asked about how Brett will fit into the “run first” style of play that the Vikings like on offense. In normal Trent fashion he said that the Vikings have to make sure to continue to run the ball even when opposing defenses are in obvious run-stopping looks and not have Brett Favre do what he was brought there to do. Trent Dilfer is dumb.