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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…)

So, one of the 100-some categories which have been created in SB’s WordPress system is “Year in Review.” Apparently it’s been used before not once, but twice: two years ago both Charlie and Josh assigned a post to this category. Given that it’s there, then, and that fast away the old year passeth, I suppose I might as well do a 2010 Year in Review of sorts.

I think the lead item, at least in reflecting on 2010, has to be The Gulf Oil Spill by BP.

Be honest, now: it’s hard to even believe that was this year, isn’t it? It feels like it was all so long ago, though of course the consequences are still playing out and will probably continue to do so for years. But it’s long-gone from the public consciousness, in sharp contrast to the weeks (which seemed like months) during which it was a full-scale four-alarm national obsession.

And at this point it’s really hard to avoid wondering, at least quietly, if it might all have been a bit of an overreaction…? Personally I think that it was, and at the same time, was just the opposite. (more…)