Tag Archives: blogging about blogging

The NFL kicks off in less than two hours

Posted on by
1

Two months ago, who would’ve thought there would be a season this year? Well, probably everybody who actually thought about it. The NFL never was going to cancel this season, just like the NBA won’t miss theirs, and from the fan’s perspective (if not the media’s), the work stoppage wasn’t that big of a deal. But who would’ve thought the 2011 NFL season would look like this?

Probably not too many of you. Moreover, if told that, as work resumed and the season approached, Brett Favre was in talks with another NFL team, who would guess that the once-retired, greybearded quarterback starting in week one would be Kerry Collins?

Keep reading…

Short week in ALDLAND

Posted on by
Reply

Back in the saddle after a long, exciting weekend of college football. A post on that should be up this afternoon. In case you were tv’d out by the time Labor Day finally rolled around, know that you missed something uglier even than Auburn’s performance for 98% of its game against Utah State or Notre Dame’s weather-extended and not unexpected defeat at the hands of South Florida:

New week: A month in ALDLAND?

Posted on by
Reply

This week will round out the site’s first month online, and I think it’s been a fairly representative sample, although I hope it will continue to expand in scope, style, and authorship. I’m excited that Magalan joined as a co-author a couple weeks ago, and I’m looking forward a couple more writers coming on board before too long. (As always, if you’d like to get in on the action, send an email to ALDLAND[dot]com[at]gmail[dot]com.)

In addition to regularly visiting the site, you can keep up with content through Twitter (@ALDLANDia) and the new Flickr photo page.

This week, look for my review of the Lyle Lovett concert I attended last week, some college football content, and more.

“The Ballad of Kerry Collins”

Posted on by
1

Ethan Trex wrote that “if Tom Waits ever writes a sad song about an exhausted journeyman quarterback, it will almost certainly be called ‘The Ballad of Kerry Collins.’”
Bubbling up in the bloggochatter since the announcement this week that the former Titans, Raiders, Giants, and Panthers quarterback was going to join the Indianapolis Colts have been comparisons between Collins and former Packers, Jets, and Vikings quarterback Brett Favre, and that’s unfortunate for everyone.

I first noticed it when a reader pointed me to Jim Wyatt’s post on the Titans Insider blog, and I saw it again in Trex’s post on The Triangle, quoted above. Wyatt hit the theme heavily, opening his post with,

Quarterback Kerry Collins insisted back in July he wouldn’t pull a Brett Favre. “No, no,” he said. “I’m done.”

Yet on Wednesday he pulled a Favre, coming out of retirement and agreeing to terms with the Colts. Collins said in July he was retiring after 16 NFL seasons, including the last five with the Titans. A call from the Colts, who are dealing with lingering injury issues with quarterback Peyton Manning, changed his mind.

Trex started out with a Favre theme as well, although, to his credit, he didn’t attempt to coin a phrase when he lamented:

Great, now we’re going to have to put up with the Great Kerry Collins Un-Retirement Watch every August until the end of time. We finally get Brett Favre’s career put in the ground, and you job us like this, Kerry?

Admittedly, Collins shares some things in common with Favre, like persistent, gray, stubbly facial hair. But we shouldn’t be so quick to apply the “pulling a Favre” label every time a player unretires. What’s important to remember about Favre is how he went about his “retiring” and “unretiring,” if it even can be called that. He never really shut the door at the end of a season. He kept himself in the spotlight through strategic PR moves. In short, he milked it. And he did it multiple times.

If we have to talk about “pulling a Favre” every time a player comes out of retirement, we unfairly cast a negative light on something that need not be negative at all, and we diminish the magnitude of the terribleness that was the actual Favre’s retirement process. To even approach Favre status, Collins is going to have to do this a few more times and make a bigger stink about it. Until then, he’ll just be the next guy to try to “pull a Testaverde.”

Text messaging competitions: Non-sports vs. no sports

Posted on by
3

August is known as a slow sports month, which means it probably isn’t the best time to start a new sports website, but here we are. An NFL labor dispute provided a compressed preseason that offered some contrast to that part of the baseball season right before most people wake up and start watching again (which means it’s exactly when the Tigers will go on a tear (and as soon as I write that, for them to blow it in the 10th against the D-Rays)) and that part of the NASCAR season where drivers are still screwing around, oblivious to the fact that the lack of urgency probably will cost them a spot in the playoffs.

Revelations about the Longhorn Network grew into the second annual Texas A&M-SEC flirtation that again has fizzled, and the news of brazen NCAA violations at UMiami are simultaneously so flagrant and unsurprising that there’s not much to add to Charles Robinson’s initial report. And so we cover year-old mascot news.

On the sports blogging front, famous ex-benchwarmer and blogger of the people Mark Titus of Club Trillion apparently now is writing for Grantland, to no tidings whatsoever. I can’t decide what to think about this. Everywhere but on this site, Grantland has been taking it on the chin pretty badly, and even I’m beginning to find The Triangle’s daily sports update by Shane Ryan unreadable. Titus has been the anti-establishment candidate for as long as he’s been a public figure, and probably longer, so it’s tough to see him alongside the purported literary elite that populate Grantland, even if that site’s natural audience surely must be welcoming his voice.

While that relationship, to the extent it is one, remains in its embryonic stages, a new site lurks on the horizon. The Classical, a conceptual rival to (at least the idea of) Grantland, is slated to get rolling possibly by the end of this year.

Sports bloggers probably fall into two camps: the big time, corporate types viewed as influential but out of touch, and the small time, snarky, critical types viewed as operating on the rumor level as much as the cutting edge. Whether internet sports writers are generally clueless reactionaries or hypercritical gossipmongers, they managed to pull it together for uniformly positive and heartfelt responses to the news that Lady Vols’ basketball coach Pat Summitt was diagnosed with early onset dementia. (See here, here, and here, among many other examples.)

All this to say that, today, I traded the slow sports news for the non sports news when I saw a commercial during the TV dead zone that is 6:30-7:30 pm Eastern for a text messaging contest on Wednesday night. I haven’t been able to locate the details on this particular contest online, but apparently these things happen from time to time.

Texting is not a sport, and neither is gambling, but for someone who likes writing about sports (and, really, writing about writing about sports), gambling on sports has a certain, vague attraction, even if I don’t gamble myself, and so I took in Bill Barnwell’s second dispatch from Vegas for Grantland. Of course, I’d trust Barnwell’s betting advice as much as I’d trust that of former vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root or Danny Sheridan. Barnwell does provide some background information on gambling terminology and strategy, though, and that’s nice even if it isn’t always accurate. What I do enjoy from him are the parts of his submissions that talk about the history of Las Vegas, and about trying to find a way to live there and maintain sanity and financial solvency. Having spent just twenty-six (consecutive) hours in Vegas, I have just enough personal experience to enjoy following Barnwell on his desert adventure. We’ll see how long my jealousy lasts.

Finally, Wednesday saw the fruits of a story I’ve been trying to cultivate since the early days of The Triangle and Google+, which is to say, July. It was then that the unappreciated legacy of Kerry Collins, associated more with memories of problems with alcohol and, per the New York Times’ “Black People” section, misplaced racial epithets, than gridiron greatness, came to my attention:

Collins retired this week, which, considering that I happened to graduate from the same college at around the same time, and considering that he once (rightfully) mocked me in a pizza parlor after I got wildly intoxicated on sambuca, seals both of our journeys from misbegotten youth into adulthood. And while we’re here, I would like to note that Collins has more passing yards than Jim Kelly, Donovan McNabb, Phil Simms, Steve Young, Y.A. Tittle, Johnny Unitas, and Troy Aikman. If he had won the 2000 Super Bowl with the Giants, and then made the Super Bowl with the 2008 Titans, he would be a borderline Hall of Famer. As it is, he has to be considered as the most underrated decent-to-very-good quarterback of the past 15 years.

The author makes a fairly remarkable point here, even excusing his sambuca-driven intoxication, and it’s one that Chris Johnson, Collins’ former teammate in Tennessee, mentioned in my fake interview with him the other weekend. Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts apparently got the memo too, because he pulled Collins out of retirement as insurance for an ailing Peyton Manning. And there’s the ALDLAND news/non-news cycle. Good keeping up, all.

Week three in ALDLAND

Posted on by
Reply

Last week was another good week here, with readers especially enjoying a take on Bill Simmons’ new ESPN project, Grantland, a report on a stop on the Béla Fleck/Bruce Hornsby/Flecktones/Noisemakers tour, and the site’s first readers’ poll. We also featured Chris Johnson as the subject of the Weekend Interview and welcomed a new writer, who jumped headlong into the fray of SEC expansion and Big XII discord in his first post.

This week, we’re continuing to track what may remain of round two of the SEC-Texas A&M maiting dance. Also look for a new album review or two among the usual coverage.

Thanks for reading!

Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday

Posted on by
2

It’s the end of the week again, and this Friday finds ALDLAND having avoided (I think) a week-two sophomore slump. Friday-themed jams seem like a good idea as long as I can keep thinking of them. Suggestions are welcome.

After last week’s inaugural jam, the selection for this week was the next logical choice. I wanted to offer a live cut instead of a generic slideshow of grainy stills, and, as it turned out, there was only one real option readily available. The band apparently went through its Amish phase in 1980, but don’t worry if you don’t recognize the group since you’ll get a pretty good clue around the 1:35 mark.

Writing about writing about writing: Grantland

Posted on by
6

Even before Clay Travis’ new site came online this summer, 2011 already had seen the unveiling of an even bigger sports blog. The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, brought his ESPN Page 2 act above board and began directing an ESPN.com side project called Grantland, named for Vanderbilt University graduate and early 1900s sportswriter Grantland Rice.

In May, the New York Times declared Simmons “the most prominent sportswriter in America.” I remember being pretty surprised to read those words, and then thinking, well, maybe that’s right. Sports Illustrated Rick Reilly would’ve had something to say about that a few years ago. Mitch Albom probably is part of a generation being supplanted– or at least his hair is. Simmons had seized the internet and the kids’ attention thereby. He had a popular web column and podcast, and a bestselling book. The NYT declaration probably was correct, but it was strange to read it in print for the first time.

Grantland would find Simmons in a new role, or more accurately, an additional role. ESPN wanted him to keep up with his podcast and column, migrating that content to the new site. In addition, he was to serve as editor in chief.

Keep reading…

Week two in ALDLAND

Posted on by
Reply

Things got off to a good start here last week. Readers especially enjoyed an early assessment of Clay Travis’ new website, OutKick The Coverage, a retrospective on the newly expanded “27 Club,” and a closer look at Justin Verlander’s comments after Angels-Tigers.  We also celebrated Jerry Garcia’s birthday and featured Chris Osgood as the subject of the first Weekend Interview.

This week will bring reactions to two Philadelphia teams, a report on the Bruce Hornsby/Flecktones tour, and, hopefully, the introduction of some new contributors to the site.

Thanks for reading!