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…