Dave’s Football Blog

The Fox NFL Sunday Roadshow is going to be in Charlotte this weekend. And so am I. Look for the dork with the Treo wearing this T-shirt…

Sometimes being a blogger has its advantages. For example, people looking for cheap advertising occasionally think you’re important and give you free stuff in the hopes that you will promote it…

It’s with this in mind that the folks at Sprint invited me to join their Ambassador Program, in which they give free cell phones to people for six months in exchange for feedback on their usability. When Sprint contacted me, they told me all about the Sprint NFL Mobile package — live game stats, post-game highlights, fantasy stats, etc.

Of course, I said yes. Sure, I won’t be able to use the phone at home, as Sprint signal near my house is nearly non-existant, but I don’t stay home to watch games, and one of the things that annoys me about my current liveblogging setup is that my Treo 650 can’t multitask. I have to exit out of mo:blog, load up the web browser, run NFL.com through Skweezer, hunt down the game stats, memorize them before they change, then go back into mo:blog and start writing. It’s a kludge. Theoretically, with this little Sprint phone, I can look up stats and update the blog at the same time. Sounded like an upgrade to me.

So Sprint sent me an LG Fusic, which is a fairly standard cell phone in their lineup — high-speed data, 1.3-megapixel camera, built-in MP3 player, Bluetooth, and a microSD slot for storing MP3s and snapshots. (I already went out and bought a 1GB memory card so that I can carry some tunes and podcasts with me.) This phone also has an FM transmitter, which means you can theoretically set this up to play through your car stereo, eliminating the need for a cassette deck adapter.

Sadly, that feature still appears to be theoretical. As I was driving down the highway last night, the FM transmitter would cut in an out like a bad AM station in an electrical storm. That made it near impossible to listen to Mighty MJD’s picks for the week on Sports Bloggers Live.

What’s more, this MP3 player isn’t going to replace anyone’s iPod nano anytime soon. The controls on the outside are way too sensitive, so I try to pause what I’m listening to, only to hit the forward button by accident — not a big deal if you’re listening to music, but when you’re listening to an hour-long podcast, you instantly lose your place and have to go back and search for the place where you left off. There doesn’t appear to be a bookmarking function, either, so I can’t just pause a podcast, mark it, and resume listening from that spot later. I literally have to fast forward through the whole file to find the spot where I left off. That’s annoying.

I haven’t played with the phone’s data features yet — mostly because it’s refusing to connect to the Internet, which is a very bad sign. I hope those features will be a little more user-friendly than the MP3 player. That’s all coming in good time, though. I have a whole football season to geek out with this thing, and as you can tell by this post, I plan to be dead honest about my experiences. So far, though, the bar’s been set pretty low…

With T.O.’s not-a-suicide attempt, Chris Simms’ spleen, Terrence Kiel’s “lean”, Shaun Alexander’s faith and Jeff Fisher’s upcoming T-shirt purchase dominating American sports headlines this week, you probably had no clue that the Australian Football League Grand Final was taking place tomorrow night.

And why should you? To the American sports audience, this is just some obscure, foreign football game played on the other side of the planet. It was filler material on ESPN back in the 1980s, before the network got the television rights to more exciting stuff — like poker and darts. Obviously, if it couldn’t catch on then, there must have been something wrong with it, right?

Wrong. Once you actually learn a little about how Aussie Rules is played — Wikipedia has a really good primer on the game here — you realize that there’s a reason that the Australian Football League has the highest per capita attendance for any football league on the planet, including the NFL and the English Premier League. AFL games are a lot of fun to watch — continuous action, athletic plays, lots of scoring, hard-hitting tackles, and as the play-by-play men like to say, “lots of courage required.”

This is especially true of matches between the two teams in the Grand Final, the Sydney Swans and the West Coast Eagles, whose last three postseason matches (including last year’s Grand Final) have been decided by four points or less. So when these two teams face off in what’s essentially the Super Bowl of the South Pacific, you can expect a very close, very interesting game.

If you want to watch the Grand Final, it will air in America on Setanta Sports, a premium international sports network offered on DirecTV. Chances are there’s a sports bar in your neck of the woods that subscribes to Setanta Sports, so ask around. Grand Final coverage begins Friday at 11:30 PM Eastern, 8:30 PM Pacific.

You may also want to take a few minutes to check out streaming replays of previous AFL Finals Series matches at BigPond TV. Select the AFL Channel in the left-hand column and browse around a bit. I highly recommend the Week 1 Eagles-Swans qualifying final. (If you’re wondering how those two teams can meet in the first round of the postseason then again in the final, take a look at the AFL Final Series bracket. Suffice to say, the top four teams in the regular season get rewarded mightily for that.)

Seriously, if the EPL can develop a strong cult following in America, there’s no reason the AFL couldn’t do the same. I’m going to pay more attention to the Australian game when the 2007 AFL season starts next March. It’ll probably be more entertaining to follow than that other AFL.

That’s what tech sites GigaOM and MobHappy are reporting, anyway. ESPN is going to refocus on being a content provider for other cell networks, which is exactly what they should have done from square one.

Yeah, that was about as predictable as Shaun Alexander getting injured after being on the Madden 07 cover…

If you look at yesterday’s AP story and today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story about Ben Roethlisberger’s slow start this season, you’ll notice one very interesting similarity — the media’s kneejerk reaction to a certain four-letter word that begins with the letter “F.”

“The doctors said there’s nothing wrong with my brain, but I’m having brain (cramps) out there,” Roethlisberger said. “It’s one of those things where you make mistakes and you learn from them.”

Come on, people. It’s 2006. Can a quarterback not say “farts” in plain language without getting censored? What are you afraid of? A bunch of prepubescent Steelers fans having a good giggle in pre-Algebra class? Yinzer, please.

We should all be free to call a brain fart a brain fart. We’ve all had them, and we’ve certainly seen enough brain farts on Pittsburgh’s special teams unit to last a whole season…

Recent gaffes by the Panthers’ Chris Gamble and the Steelers’ Ricardo Colclough and the incredible starts to the season that John Kasay and Robbie Gould have had are bringing the importance of good special teams play back to the forefront early in the season. It’s also given coaches, players and pundits the opportunity to examine how to handle certain special teams situations.

For example, teams like to call time out before their opponents attempt last-second field goals — an obvious attempt to ice the kicker. Turns out that’s not such a good idea. As we found out from Jason Elam and Mike Shanahan earlier this week, the kickers actually like it when opponents call timeout:

On Sunday, Elam missed a 44-yard attempt through a strong crosswind against Kansas City in the first half at Invesco Field, but nailed a 39-yarder through the same uprights in overtime for a 9-6 Denver win.

“On that last one, it was kind of nice when Kansas City called a timeout. I was able to go out there, see what the wind was doing, see what the plant foot area was like,” Elam said.

And visualize the ball going through the uprights.

“It is kind of funny. I don’t know where all that started,” Elam said. “But I love it when they call timeout. If they didn’t, maybe I would call my own timeout.”

So if you really want to get to a good kicker, make him set up and kick the ball as quickly as possible. Gotcha.

The special teams talk has also allowed Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback, to drag out a favorite strawman of his — the idea that punting the ball on 4th-down, short-yardage situations is a bad idea perpetuated by blame-shifting coaches afraid for their jobs.

Think about all those punts on fourth-and-1, fourth-and-2, fourth-and-3. The average NFL offensive play gains about five yards. Yet game in, game out, coaches boom the punt away on short yardage, handing the most precious article in football — possession of the ball — to the other side. Nearly three-quarters of fourth-and-1 attempts succeed, while around one-third of possessions result in scores. Think about those fractions. Go for it four times on fourth-and-1 — odds are you will keep the ball three times, and three kept possessions each with a one-third chance of a score results in your team scoring once more than it otherwise would have. Punt the ball on all four fourth-and-1s, and you’ve given the opponents three additional possessions. (It would have gotten one possession anyway when you missed one of your fourth-and-1s.) Those three extra possessions, divided by the one-third chance to score, give the opponent an extra score.

Bottom line? If you face fourth-and-1 four times and punt all four times, your opponent will score once more than it otherwise would have. If you go for it all four times, you will score once more than you otherwise would have.

Of course, Easterbrook supplies plenty of caveats — never go for it inside your own 20, for example — but he suggests that coaches don’t do this because they don’t want to risk the avalanche of criticism from ownership, writers, sports radio callers, and bloggers if their team fails to convert on 4th down in a crucial situation. They want to protect their jobs and shift the blame to their players.

Considering how often coaches get fired in the NFL, that seems pretty pointless, doesn’t it? After all, if a coach really believes in his players and his system, why shouldn’t he show some confidence in them? Why should he be afraid to stand up like Jim Fassel did six years ago and say, “This team is going to the playoffs?”

It’s an interesting idea. Too bad no NFL coach will ever try to make it work…

If you want T.O., look here, here, or here. This is a football blog, not an exploration of media-induced psychopathy…

In other words, go sell crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here.

For those of you living in the Raleigh-Durham area who actually get up early in the morning, tune in to 620 “The Bull”, a local sports radio station on the AM dial, tomorrow morning around 7:30 AM. I recorded a brief interview with Joe Ovies for the station’s new “Blogger of the Week” feature, where we talked about the Panthers, the Steelers, the AOL Fanhouse and the value of YACrabbits.

The clip will also be available from the station’s web site sometime tomorrow. You can also subscribe to the station’s podcast feed, where you’ll get regular clips from on-air shows and full replays of the Steve Logan show, which I hear is getting popular around these parts…

How bad have things gotten in Miami? Apparently, one newspaper is suggesting that the Dolphins should bench Daunte Culpepper in favor of Joey Harrington. Yes, that Joey Harrington. Their justification?

What? Things are going to get appreciably worse with Harrington in charge?

They obviously don’t get a lot of NFC North games in the South Florida TV markets. Padraig’s ne’er-do-well cousin has a 54.7% career completion percentage, a career passer rating 68.1, and more INTs (62) than TD passes. (60) Sure, that was in Detroit, where Tom Brady could probably be the QB and the Lions would still be 0-3 right now, but just because it couldn’t get any worse doesn’t guarantee that putting Harrington in will make it better.

Don’t expect Nick Saban to take this advice. Culpepper will remain at the helm of this offense until the ship is officially sunk, and Dolphins fans are hoping Daunte will put the dice away long enough to keep that from happening. Or is that carrying the metaphor too far?

Yes, I know about T.O.’s reported suicide attempt. I’m just going to point you to the Cowboys Fanhouse at AOL Sports for this one. That site will have a lot more updates than I will…