A Conversation I Had Twelve Minutes Ago
Sep 26, 2008 Awfulness, Fuck the Cowboys, Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging, You'd like to think I was joking
Bum: (as I walk past the bus stop) S’cuse me, sir.
Me: What’s up?
Bum: Sir, I’m from Texas and I am trying to get back home. Could you spare some money? Anything you have, sir, I’d appreciate it.
Me: (reaching for wallet) Texas, huh? You a Cowboys fan?
Bum: Yessir! Love the Cowboys!
Me: (pushing wallet back into pocket) Sorry, man. I don’t have any cash.
FFL Update
Aug 21, 2008 Fantasy Geeks, Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging
7 Teams in. 3 or 5 spots remain. Preferably 5.
Email me for the info.
Update: Chris points out an added bonus to being in this league.
Hey, I don’t know if you want to reference it in your FFL post or not -
but it may or may not help participation to mention that we will be
talking about the league when we do our (hopefully) weekly fantasy
football podcast.So, if they’re in the league, they have a unique opportunity to be praised
and/or mocked relentlessly on a weekly basis for all the world to hear.
So there you go.
A tribute to Pacman
Apr 13, 2008 I really dig my readers, Shameless begging
Our good friend Eric, who obviously has a particular man-crush on Pacman (as in, an anti-man-crush), sent along a couple of links. For your viewing pleasure:
PFT reporting that Pacman {hearts} Jerry Jones. And, you know, who doesn’t?*
And this? Well, this just kicks ass. Though, I gotta admit: this one reminds me of just about every day of college. Cept for the money.
* Unless you aren’t a mentally unstable psychopath.
Warning Track Power
Mar 28, 2008 Awesomeness, Bloggerating, Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging, Warning Track Power
By popular demand (BWHAHAHAHA!!!), I am delighted to introduce you to our new, wonderful, awesomest baseball blog, Warning Track Power.
Though I imagined all of us on a grand stage, flowers being tossed at us lovingly by our admiring fans, well, that just ain’t gonna happen. I think we’ve put together an outstanding starting cast of contributors to the site, including Matt, Tim from BRB, and a couple of extra special guest stars.
I think it’s safe to say that you can expect the high level of polite discourse at WTP as we exhibit here, except without the filipino tranny porn.
So, if you’re a baseball fan, join us over there for some baseball fun. The site’s still a work in progress, but I am truly excited about it. WHEE!!!!
Open Thread - BFD Fails the Texans Nation
Feb 5, 2008 Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging, Suck it bitchez, You'd like to think I was joking
Yes, that’s right, I’ve got nothing better.
Look, I have excuses, but they all suck. Life is just super-busy these days, and Matt thinks that watching him “star” in blow-your-own-trumpet films qualifies as pay. Now, as incredibly flexible as he is, I can’t send that to the mortgage company. Those hardasses!
Tim is doing a fantastic on taking a look at positional needs, and I can’t beat that. As far as off-season material, I can’t think of many things better.
So, I look to you, my fan club. What would you like to see?
I hope to post more Football 101 type material (though, seriously, the zone blocking thing was more like 185 type stuff). I think there should be a deep, probing expose on cheerleading twins that I would be happy to undertake. Is there anything else? Seriously, I am stuck for ideas right now as we lead up to the draft (when I won’t shit TF up).
Post ideas here. And post anything else you might be pondering. Umm, regarding football. Only *I* am allowed to talk about my sex life here. And Matt’s.
PSA
Jan 21, 2008 Bloggerating, Fascism, Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging
I am working on a draft-related post that is taking way more time than I thought it would, but I thought I would pause for a second to address the more pressing issue of this blog being blocked as “porn” by Websense.
Right now, I am emailing Websense to see if I can get them to unblock it. If any of you have any pull with your IT departments and can get them to contact Websense, that would probably be 500x more effective, but as someone said “that would require admitting that I am screwing off at work.” So I understand if no one wants to.
One other thing that might work for some of you is using a proxy server around the block. Here’s a partial list:
- http://safeforwork.net/
- http://hidemyass.com/
- http://www.stupidcensorship.com/cgi-bin/nph-surf.cgi
If those don’t work…well…we’ll think of something.
History is the distillation of rumour.
Dec 28, 2007 2007 Season, 2008 Season, Andre Johnson, Bloggerating, Casserly blows goats... I have proof, Douchebag Tom, Gary Kubiak, Rosie Rosenfels, Roster, Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging, T-shirts, Tempting Fate, The Future, The Schaub Experiment
I’m guessing we all sort of assumed as much but, in case you had any doubts, Kubes said yesterday that Sage Rosenfels will start Sunday’s finale.
I’m going to start Sage. Sage will be our starter going into the game. It will be a game-time decision on Matt on whether he’ll be our backup or the third. Over the course of the next couple of days, we’ll see.
Possible Translation: Sage’s trade value took a hit last week, so I am going to run him back out there, hope they play their second-team defense, and give him a chance to bring that stock back up. Also, I’d be a fool if I let Matt Schaub back out there before his shoulder was 100%. Since I already managed to get Andre Johnson hurt this year, I think I’ll pass on taking another stupid risk. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go remind everyone that Mario was the correct pick.
In all seriousness, though (or at least as much seriousness I can muster), this is the right move. As much as we would like to win this game, it would almost be a pyhrric victory if Matt did further damage to the separated shoulder (or suffered another concussion). Besides, right now, at this exact moment in time, I can’t honestly look any of you in the virtual eye and say that starting Matt gives us any sort of increased likelihood of winning.
Which is NOT to say that I don’t still think Schaub is the guy, both in terms of short-term competition with Sage and long-term health of the franchise.
Unless I am missing something, we have four answers to the question of “What about Sage?” 1. We can hold on to him, content in knowing that we have “The Best Backup in Football” should Schuab get injured. 2. We can take advantage of his reputation as “The Best Backup in Football” and use it to net ourselves players or draft picks to fill more pressing needs. 3. We can make him the starter based on what he’s done this year as compared to Schaub. 4. We can hold on to him and let him and Schaub battle it out next summer because we believe both of them are capable of being an NFL starting QB.
Numbers 1 and 2 both have their merits, but we’ll deal with them in a moment. To my way of thinking, #3 is asinine unless you really, REALLY believe that we messed up by trading for Schaub, which is a pretty hard position to defend and is generally shared only by the same sort of people that believe Tony Hollings was a smart pick. Number 4, though…that’s what this discussion is really about, isn’t it? Because there are intelligent people who honestly believe that Sage is capable of being the starter and that whichever one of the two QBs who wins the battle can be the future of this organization. To those people, I have to say that I respectfully disagree. (To the people in the #3 camp, I disagree, but there is no respect involved.)
I’ve said it before, but there absolutely had to be a reason that Matt Schaub was the most sought backup QB in the league before last offseason. True, he did not have much of a body of work to support that lofty position, but NFL heads had to have seen something they liked in him to drive his pricetag up as high as it went. And in his first two games of this season, when the team was reasonably healthy and there was a semblance of a running game, many fans (myself included) were thrilled about how great the Matt Schaub era was going to be. So, yeah, there have been flashes of starting-caliber ability from Matt. Additionally, red zone INTs notwithstanding, there is no substantial body of evidence that suggests Matt isn’t capable of being a starting QB.
On the other hand, for all Sage has done this year, can we really overlook the fact that in four years of mini-camps and training camps (not to mention the 13 games had played in) he couldn’t beat out such Dolphin luminaries as Jay Fielder, Ray Lucas, Brian Griese, AJ Feeley, and Gus Frerotte? Don’t you think that, if Rosenfels had shown even a glimmer of the ability to be a starter, that he would not have been the one constant on the roster as the Dolphins brought in all those other guys in an effort to find a real QB?
Is this dispositive? Of course not. There is nothing that says future performance has to be directly correlated with past performance. Besides, in theory, it is perfectly believable that a guy languished in an organization so bereft of common sense that he never really had a chance to prove his ability. But, while that sounds nice in theory, can someone point me to one guy–just one–who did next to nothing for four years on a winning team (the Dolphins were over .500 three of Sage’s four years) only to be reborn as a bona fide starter somewhere else? I honestly can’t think of one. The closest I can come up with off the top of my head is Rich Gannon in his four years with Kansas City, but that’s a crappy comparison because (a) Rich had already been in the league seven years when he got to KC, (b) he played much more during his time in KC than Sage did in Miami, and (c) anyone with any sense was screaming for Rich to remain the starter over Elvis Grbac. Still, I suppose Gannon is an example of a very late bloomer, so at least that part holds.
On the contrary, you can think of a number of guys who were thought to be better than they’d shown with their previous teams, only to also suck upon arrival at their new NFL addresses, even if they initially showed promise with the second team. David Carr had some Carolina fans calling for Jake’s head based on some training camp games. How’d that work out? People actually believed that Joey Harrington could be the guy in Atlanta based on…umm…I actually don’t know. Brian Griese has gotten multiple shots like this, always based on a couple good games he had in the preseason or in the previous season. So, do you really have enough faith that Sage is the exception to this pattern that you would let the future of the Texans ride on that belief?
Look, I’m not trying to suggest that Sage hasn’t had a good year, or that his year wasn’t objectively better than Schaub’s. Clearly, it was. I would suggest, however, that we are comparing apples and oranges when we put them side-by-side: one is a guy who came in with a ton of promise, lived up to it for his first two games, then saw his #1 weapon–one of the best three or four WRs in football–go down and his running game go kaput; the other guy is one that has a five year history of not being the best QB on a roster full of crappy QBs, led a nice near-comeback that caused people to ignore his turnovers in that game, then was at the helm when Andre Johnson was back at full strength and the defense began playing much better. Which, I guess, is my long-winded way of saying that Sage’s success this year can just as easily be chalked up to right place, right time as to anything inherent in him. There’s nothing wrong with that–a lot of guys get their initial breaks that way (Kurt Warner, Tom Brady, etc.). But how many of those guys previously lost playing time to Ray effin’ Lucas?
Trying again to make a long story short–if you had to bet your life on one of these two QBs being successful in Houston five years from now, would you take the guy who came into town with enough promise to warrant two second-round picks or the guy who came into town after four years of being the backup to guys who should never have been anything more than backups?
“But,” some of you are probably saying, “why not just keep both of them so we have a solid backup?” Thank you for segueing me into Numbers 1 and 2 from the earlier list. In a perfect world, where every Mario Williams is backed up by an Earl Cochran and every free agent WR can produce like Andre Davis, it would be a fantastic luxury to have a backup of Sage’s quality. Hell, it would be ideal. But, as we all know, this Texans roster is far from complete. Our highest paid player, Anthony Weaver, has been invisible or worse for much of the season. We don’t have a real first- and second-down running back. Strongside linebacker, nose tackle, center, right and left guard, free safety, all continue to be question marks as well. To make matters worse–at least when it comes to filling some of those holes–we don’t have a second-round draft pick this year.
Even if you don’t buy the idea that Sage’s past gives us any sort window into his abilities, the mere fact that we have so many spaces to fill should suggest that, if someone is willing to give us any kind of a package that includes the words “third-round draft pick” we owe it to ourselves to make that deal. We would be letting someone else take the chance that Sage 2008 will be more like Sage 2004 than 2007 and we would be addressing actual, pressing needs.
I have to believe that Smithiak realize this need to get something for Sage and that this is what is driving all the talk about Sage being a quality NFL QB. I mean, otherwise, by telling the fans over and over that Rosenfels is a starting-quality QB and will “push” Matt to be better, they would be creating an instant QB controversy as soon as Matt had one down game. I might have bought that the previous regime was that short-sighted, but I tend to think this group understands these things and would not set Matt or Sage up to fail. Besides, given that Kubiak is by all accounts a huge Matt Schaub fan and has been since the kid arrived, any scenario that doesn’t revolve around getting the best team possible on the field around Matt Schaub would be incongruous with what they’ve been telling us.
Wow…I really didn’t mean to write that much when I started this post. Sorry about that. And I realize that a lot of this is rehashing some old points, so I don’t know that much of it is comment-inducing. Such is life.
****************************************************************************
In other, non-related bits:
- You know how I use the Texans’ logo at the top-left of every post? Well, after seeing that the NFL “asked” HPF to remove team logos and whatnot (and factoring in that there have to be at least a few people out there who are unhappy with their respective portrayals herein), I’m beginning to think that I should get rid of that. Now, this place is pretty graphic-free as it is, so I kind of like having a little something up there for visual interest and to make it easier to see where new posts start if I am scrolling down the page. I think it’s pretty well-known that I am awful at photoshops (right, BFD?), so if any of you can come up with some sort of graphic roughly that same size that “embodies” this blog in some way, I’ll, like, give you my undying love. And a free DGDB&D t-shirt, if you want one. To the extent this is a contest, it ends as soon as I pick one.
- Two different people have asked me if I am rooting for the Titans this weekend since I hate Peyton Manning with such a passion. No, I am not. I am rooting for Albert Haynesworth to kill Manning and then get kicked out of the game for violating Peyton’s corpse, but I want Sorgi to lead the Colts to the win. My reasoning? Seeing Vince choke away a playoff birth would make Mario’s breakout season extra sweet. (Also, if we can’t make the playoffs, I don’t want those turds to make it, either. I am selfish like that.)
- Douchebag Tom the douchey banned commenter is still a douchebag. Which is not really news, but still seemed worth mentioning.
Darcy Maeda strikes again!
Jul 18, 2007 David Carr has Post-Concussion Syndrome, Self-Referential Stuff, Shameless begging, T-shirts
If you are the observant type, you might notice that down near the bottom, over on the right side, is a section entitled “DGDB&D Gear.” And, though it’s a little hard to see in that thumbnail, you might also notice a certain, slightly famous photo available on a t-shirt.
If you click on that shirt, there are a couple others available, too.
I suppose I should mention that I am not doing this to make money. (In fact, that store is set up at 0% commission, so that I don’t make a single dime on any of them, that you might get them as cheaply as possible.) I am doing this because (a) that picture makes me laugh and (b) I think the thought of someone wearing a DGDB&D t-shirt is beyond awesome. You know… someone other than me.
Len loves Owen Daniels’ uncle Jack
Jun 25, 2007 Andre Johnson, David Carr has Post-Concussion Syndrome, Preview, Shameless begging, The Schaub Experiment
Here’s the part of the show where I do a little begging. Think of it like a Jerry Lewis telethon, but without all those depressing kids. (I’ll even get drunk and put on an ill-fitting tux to really sell the visual.)
In the near-two-month run of this blog, we have managed to be early reporters of a number of stories regarding the team. Part of this is because I spend way too much time on the computer, part of it is because I blog from work, and part of it is because fantastically awesome readers find a story on the web and email me about it. It’s this last part that I really like. It makes me feel all, like, important and stuff. Whenever that happens, though, I think to myself how cool it would be to be one step higher on the news foodchain. That is, the be the person who actually broke the story.
Which brings me to my point.
You see, in my mind, I like to pretend like at least one person with ties to the Texans organization knows of DGDB&D’s existence. If nothing else, someone out there has to have some inside scoop on stuff like Charles Spencer’s leg and the coaches’ real reactions to minicamp performances. Well, to that person, I say “help me help you.”
I am looking for a stool pigeon source or two to drop a little knowledge on this site from time to time. Nothing formal, nothing fancy–just an email to me whenever you hear something of interest. Or a willingness to reply to my emails full of random questions. In return, I promise two things: 1. Complete and total anonymity. I won’t even tell my wife who you are. Crap, you don’t even have to tell me who you are. 2. My undying gratitude. And a kidney if you ever need one.
So, uh… yeah. If you are interested, shoot me an email.
/shameless begging
Two stories of interest in the big sports websites. First, from FoxSports, Adam Schein lists Matt Schaub as one of his nine breakout players in 2007.
Matt Schaub: I’ve been saying it for a long time. If you give Matt Schaub 16 games, he’ll automatically be a top 16 quarterback. The Texans are giving him more than a full season. Houston is giving him $40 million and the keys to the franchise. Schaub is a quick study and has had a great off-season under quarterback guru and Texans coach Gary Kubiak. Schaub gets to work with one of the elite receivers in the game in Andre Johnson. Owen Daniels is an emerging threat at tight end. And the Texans offensive line, while not great, is improved. Schaub will put himself and the Texans on the map with a big season.
Now, I love the optimism here. I even believe most of it. I do think it might be a bit much to say he’ll “automatically” be a top 16 QB, however. Could he be top 16? Sure, I suppose anything is possible. Will he be? Well, that is going to depend on a lot more than Owen Daniels. In the end, though, I think upper half is a solid and realistic goal for Schaubby this season. And I can’t imagine a scenario where I would say the same thing for David Carr.
Second, Len P mentions that the Texans need to get more pressure on opposing QBs. Ya think? Thank you, Len, for that insight. I look forward to your next article, in which you point out how winning teams usually score more than losing teams. [Author's tangent: Is it just me, or does every picture of Len look like he's coming off a four-day bender?]
