Sunday, August 9, 2009

I'm Ready For Some Football

Ahh, the world is regaining its sanity. Football is back. I’m watching the Hall of Fame game as I write this. It’s a bit of a milestone since it’s the first game since John Madden retired. I had forgotten that he had retired and I was trying to figure out what was different about this game. It took me a while before I realized that Chris Collinsworth was the color analyst to Al Michaels’s play by play announcer. I like Collinsworth, mostly because he’s not afraid to shut the hell up if he doesn’t have anything worth saying. He’s smart, he’s funny, and he isn’t into shtick yet. He also gives the best analysis on television. It’s weird watching the first game of the season. Even though it’s meaningless, it’s my favorite moment of the football season. It’s like when I hit Main Street in the Magic Kingdom.

Rod Woodson was inducted into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, which makes me happy. I was never a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, but I was always a Rod Woodson fan. Personally, I think he’s the best defensive back to have ever played. He was 95% the cover corner that Deion Sanders was and 105% the football player. I thought I was the only one outside of Pittsburgh who really noticed. He was always a humble, soft spoken guy that played in a small market while Prime Time captivated America. Woodson always seemed to get lost in the glitz and glitter of his more flamboyant counterpart, and I didn’t have a whole lot of faith that the sports media that votes on the hall of fame was actually paying attention. All the beat writers that covered the teams Woodson played on would make his case as vociferously as they could, but it’s fat, lazy, national writers that actually make the decisions, and they’re much more interested in their own “genius” than paying attention. Ironically, Woodson called them out on a number of their hall of fame omissions during his entrance speech.

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