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Since there was so much trouble over even having one this year, may as well make the effort to comment on the NFL season at least one more time.

Here in Cleveland, the Browns are the subject of a sorta-kinda quarterback controversy this week, at least among armchair quarterbacks. My man Seneca Wallace, fellow graduate of dear auld ISU, started on Sunday and showed some exciting flashes of athleticism before the whole team just kind of ran out of gas and Arizona completed a creeping comeback victory in overtime.

So right now we have a range of opinions just among the relatively small number of football pundits I keep up with. Peter King is on record strongly advocating that the Browns should stick with Colt McCoy, and focus on upgrading his supporting cast, as their best route to success. While a Canton reporter has suggested that, when you look at their records, Wallace has proven at least as effective as McCoy; combined with Wallace’s history with football czar Mike Holmgren, this could mean that Wallace starts in 2012, at least while yet another quarterback-of-the-future takes practice reps as his understudy.

Up here in Cleveland, though, one of the local hacks has declared today that Wallace and McCoy are both mediocre, and the Browns need to go back to the well for a savior at center yet again.

Personally, I don’t know; I find it more and more difficult to refute the “career back-up” label which more than one observer has applied to Colt McCoy. (more…)

Per my increasingly-ludicrous vanity, I shall reply to Peter King’s MMQB column of this morning here, rather than joining the e-mail queue with the hoi-polloi.

In point 8 of his “things I think I think,” today, King muses “I think I wonder this about Cleveland: Will the city’s sports fans be happier if Colt McCoy wins a playoff game this year than it was when LeBron James lost a championship series last night?” I think, myself excepted, it would not even come close.

Frankly, it might still be tight if the Browns won the fucking Super Bowl in 2012. Even in Cleveland, football and the Browns are still of interest to only a subset of the population. The herd mentality of LeBron James as mortal enemy seems to have swept up the entire city, however. (Again, myself excepted.)

The roads still suck, the economy is in a 50-year coma, the city is a perpetual national laughingstock; population, youth and far more talent than is represented by one man, no matter how good he is with a ball, continues to drain away. But 99% of Cleveland is bursting with pride this morning because a Dallas team defeated a Miami team in a professional basketball tournament. “America, fuck yeah.”

I also have a few comments on the subsequent two points. (more…)

…ain’t just that long green strip cutting through the desert of northern Africa on Google Earth. As demonstrated by this survey widget from cleveland.com:

I think they left out one or two important options. Like, say, the bogeyman. Or the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Or perhaps the Jews, never overlook them.

And what about China, where are they? I suppose that including “China” as an option might veer too close to part of an actually plausible explanation, though, i.e. an increasing disparity between the dwindling supply of a finite resource and growing demand for said resource from rapidly-developing economies increasingly capable of backing up that demand with cash on the international oil market.

Nah, I’m just kiddin’ of course; that couldn’t have anything to do with it. Anyway, who is to blame for these rising gas prices, someone must be behind it all.

(As atrocious as the state of what passes for modern journalism is, I think it’s even more depressing that I basically predicted this exact fantasy with appalling accuracy three months ago. I suppose maybe the answer which really needs to be added to the choices is “the mainstreaming of willfully-ignorant, infantile know-nothingism in America…”)