Dave’s Football Blog

It’s time for a Gaelic Football update, kids, and we start in the Leinster Senior Football Championship, where County Louth and County Wicklow just can’t seem to come to a resolution.

‘Saga’ will probably be the word most associated with this series of games as Louth and Wicklow will have to replay again next Sunday in GAA headquarters, following a second draw, this one after extra-time…

Louth missed several opportunities to score as Wicklow’s defending became a bit sloppy and they were giving away needless frees. But the Wee men failed to capitialise.

Wee men. *chuckle*

Wicklow pointed again in the second half of extra time to take them to 0-11 to 0-9., but a Nicky McDonnell goal put them into an undeserved lead, leaving Wicklow to finish on the offensive.

And (Tommy) Walsh was the hero as he scored the late equaliser with only seconds left on the clock to force another replay and give Wexford another week of rest.

That’s the second draw in two weeks for these two sides. If the 2nd replay on Sunday in Croke Park is also a draw, the match will be decided by a drinking contest, and the winner has to play County Wexford the next day, hangovers be damned.

Meanwhile, back in the Munster Senior Football Championship, one county side has attracted the attention of Joanne Cantwell and her haunting, haunting blue eyes…

People on the outside may not realise it, but this Waterford side is finally starting to make some progress.

Most of the country was shocked when John Kiely’s side dismissed Clare in the opening round of Munster; the manager felt they should have won by more. He expected to win; the whole team did.

That’s the difference between Waterford now and Waterford in the past - they now believe they can win.

Know who else believes they can win? The Arizona Cardinals. Really, they’re just one or two pieces away from the playoffs. Waterford plays defending champion Kerry on Sunday, and really, County Kerry is who we think they are, so if you want to crown ‘em…

Other big matches this week include Dublin v. Meath, Longford v. Laois, Cork v. Tipperary, and Derry v. Antrim. I’ve got Cork and the points. How about you?

Apparently, Mark Cuban is actually serious about creating a scarecrow to compete with Michelangelo’s David. He even suggested on his blog that the NFL is ripe for the picking. Really?

2. The NFL wants and needs competition. They have grown so big and powerful that every move they make is scrutinized by local or federal officials. A competitor allows them to point to us and explain that their moves are for competitive reasons rather than the move of a monopoly.

Oh, look! There’s Mac OS X! Microsoft isn’t a monopoly after all!

3. They just extended their CBA. Their CBA structure is not designed for a competitive environment. Competition for top players, even if the UFL gets just a few, increases prices at the top end for all teams. Every star will get paid more, but still have to fit under the cap. That forces teams to use more low cost players, at the expense of signing the middle of the roster. That gives us access to quite a few very, very good NFL players.

Like Aaron Brooks. And Charles Rogers. And Chris Gardocki. Oooh, pinch me.

4. There are a lot of markets that are bigger than some current NFL markets that do not have teams that would love to have a pro football team.

No, Mark, there are a lot of markets that would love to have an NFL team. There’s a difference. Cities don’t want to be part of a startup football league — especially cities in Texas, who will refuse to support a league that plays on Friday nights in the fall. They have teenagers for that.

Seriously, I can give you three football codes off the top of my head that would result in more compelling sports product that this United Football League of yours:

1. Futsal. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — a well-funded, well-marketed pro futsal league could do very well in America. Despite what the naysayers will tell you, a good chunk of the American population is willing to embrace soccer in its many forms, and futsal is a FIFA-sanctioned football code, so teams can play internationally. Quality futsal players are as flashy with their feet as Magic Johnson was with his hands, which is a draw itself. Plus, if those players are properly developed, their contracts can be sold off to any football club in the world. Oh, and you could start an entire futsal league for less than half of what a UFL franchise could cost. You’ve got $12M to burn, eh, Cubes?
2. Rugby union. Remember how soccer-mad the U.S. went during the FIFA World Cup? You don’t think they couldn’t go rugby mad during this year’s upcoming Rugby World Cup if ESPN gets its hands on it, or if Team USA is successful? (Granted, success in a group with England and South Africa is finishing 3rd and qualifying automatically for 2011, but still…) Unlike the UFL, an American Rugby Union Association has plenty to differentiate itself from other football leagues in America, and because it’s also an international code, it has the potential for future matches against the best clubs in Europe and the southern hemisphere. Oh, and the code itself is even being tweaked to help speed up the pace of the game and make it more appealing to the fans. You could start the whole league for $30M and build an audience from the ground up.
3. Punch Football. Okay, I’m joking, but it would work just about as well as the UFL, wouldn’t it?

Of course, I don’t have the business savvy of my fellow IU alum, or else I would have created web 2.0 site and sold it to Yahoo for millions of dollars myself by now. Still, I have enough sense to recognize a non-starter when I see it. Like that Palm Foleo. Hey, there’s an idea — a crippled compact laptop to complement the smartphone that we bought so that we wouldn’t have to haul around a laptop in the first place. Brilliant. When’s that iPhone coming out again?

How bad has it gotten in Brisbane these days? Lions coach Leigh Matthews, who earned the nickname “Lethal” during his playing days, is turning to A.A. Milne for inspiration…

Matthews has told his players he doesn’t want to see any long faces like Eeyore’s from Winnie the Pooh around the club.

“We are having an anti-Eeyore week this week,” he said.

“You know Eeyore out of Pooh bear - ‘Ooooh it’s a sad day’. So we are having an anti-Eeyore week.

“I don’t care what people are like a day after the game, you can be miserable or you can do whatever you do.

“But Monday morning the next week’s on. The sky’s blue and you’re going to start nil-nil apiece against Richmond.”

And if anything ever looked like a big fat jar of honey that would get you stuck in a hill hole, it’s a fixture against Richmond.

Nothing quite says “Lethal” like a Winnie the Pooh reference, does it? Hey, here’s an idea — maybe the Lions can swap out their regular guernsey this week with one that has a picture of Tigger on it. Then they can bounce out onto the pitch shouting, “Worraworraworraworraworra!!!” The wooden spoon favorites will be shaking in their boots…

Mark Cuban has always struck me as a pretty smart guy. You would think he might have learned something from these guys:

Then again, maybe not. According to TrueHoop (of all places), Cuban is considering investing in something called United Football League, a new pro football league that will attempt to enter cities where the NFL doesn’t have a franchise and build a league that can compete with the NFL.

Because that was such a hit every other time someone tried it.

Guys, you cannot compete with the National Football League. It is the stage for gridiron superstars, period. If players come to play for your UFL, they will do so with the hope that some NFL team will see them and offer them a contract. This is why the XFL failed. Vince McMahon tried to make his league all about bone-crunching hits and extreme action, and not a single player bought into that idea, because they didn’t want to risk a serious injury in case an NFL team came calling.

As for the cities that don’t have NFL teams, they don’t want minor league football, and if it’s not the NFL, it’s minor league. Otherwise, the Baltimore Stallions might have stuck around a little longer. We already have a well-developed minor league system, and it’s called college. You can’t compete with that, either.

Maybe Mark Cuban has $60 million to burn and wants to own a football team without going through the hassle of buying an NFL club. It’s his money to lose, I guess, but he should know from experience that this is a losing game. You cannot compete with the NFL. It’s been tried before. It didn’t work then. What makes anyone think it will work now?

If Cuban really wants to invest in football in America, he’d be much better off choosing a different code than American football. Here, Mark, I’ve got one for you — futsal. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — futsal is unique to American audiences, it’s much cheaper to put on, and it can aide player development for a growing sport in America. You can grab players when they’re young, build up their skills, and sell their contracts to MLS and European leagues — just like you suggest could be done with basketball players.

Want something even more unique? How about creating an International Rules Football League? Or just investing in the USAFL and building Metro Footy into a viable sport in America? You don’t even need $60M for that. Better yet, start a Beach Football tour. People like football. People love the beach. Pick a football code that people will pay to watch, adapt it to sand, and you’ll get an audience. It worked in Brazil and Virginia Beach, didn’t it?

Trust me, Mark, any of these ideas has a better shot of succeeding than this cockamamie United Football League idea. Seriously, you might as well spend $60M on another season of The Benefactor. More people will watch that.

(Spotted on Our Book of Scrap.)

Well, I should take unpopular stances on rugby more often. I’ve never seen so many reader comments on this blog as I did yesterday. Maybe it was a result of Ufford making a cameo — people saw him here and probably showed up expecting to see more hot teenage pole vaulters. (Say, aren’t the Hot Teenage Pole Vaulters opening up for Arcade Fire right now? I hear they put on a good show…)

Anyway, most people seemed to push the idea that rugby league might be more fun to watch, but rugby union is more fun to play, because rucking and mauling is just fun to do. I think Andrew, though, had the most interesting comment:

The creators of Rugby League are people just like you who 100 years ago realised that to obtain payments for players they needed people through the gates, thus they needed a more attractive game. Rugby League is Rugby Union, just 100 years advanced.

Unfortunately the trials going on in South African schools is the IRB attempting to breathe life into a poorly performing sport. The one thing the ‘brains trust’ failed to do was provide adequate real game review of the sport as it traveled into professionalism.

Professionalism in football is a fun topic, isn’t it? Sure, we’ve had pro football in America for almost a century and pro soccer and rugby league in Europe for just as long, but several codes have just recently become fully professional. The International Rugby Board didn’t remove all restrictions on player payments in rugby union until 1995, and Aussie Rules was mostly a semi-pro sport until the Australian Football League formed in 1990. Gaelic football is still entirely amateur.

And as the song goes: mo’ money, mo’ problems. Remember when NFL players fought for free agency in the 80s? That was partly because the league was getting a lot more cash from TV contracts. TV money is creating huge gulfs in the Premier League right now. Some blame the AFL’s current drug problem on players (unfairly targeted or otherwise) with too much money and too much free time.

On the flip side, the AFL’s presumed drug problem isn’t keeping Irish footballers away. Ireland’s finest would probably love to play pro Gaelic Football, but they can’t, as it remains strictly an amateur code. This may explain why Tadhg Kennelly is in Sydney and Kevin Doyle is in Reading.

An aside: Chad Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals almost chose Association football himself. He decided to pursue American football after high school, though, because in the late 90s, there were far fewer opportunities to become a soccer star in America. MLS was fledgling, and the only way to become a real star was to play in Europe, which he didn’t want to do at that time. So he chose to pursue an NFL career instead. I’d say that worked out pretty well.

Can you imagine Ocho Cinqo as the face of American soccer? My god, the goal celebrations would have been epic…

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how rugby union handles professionalism in the future. League is “watered-down rugby” in large part because it needed to put a product on the field that would bring more fans through the gates. Union has never really had to worry about that. Now it does. Will that change the way the game is played in the future?

In an attempt to further expand my football horizons beyond the codes I can actually understand, I watched parts of a couple of big rugby matches over the weekend — the Super 14 Final, which is rugby union (and not without controversy, apparently), and the first game in the Australian State of Origin Series, which is rugby league.

I’ll just say this. If the creators of Rugby League aimed to create a game that was more accessible to the common fan… well, mission accomplished. For an American football fan who’s a total rugby newbie, rugby league is much easier to follow.

Rugby union has lots of rucking and mauling and lineouts and such, and the strategy of the game still flies over my head. It’s almost as if you have to grow up with the game to understand it at all. Rugby league? It got rid of all that and boiled the game down to the essence — advance as far up the field as you can before getting tackled five times, then kick the ball away. Of course, you can kick the ball whenever, and a kicked ball is a live ball in both codes. So if you can kick it to a teammate, hey, all the better.

The Rugby Union World Cup will be a much harder sell than the FIFA World Cup in this country, which may be why it’s only on Setanta Sports, the one network willing to cater to rugby fans. On the other hand, if ESPN follows through on its rumored threat plans to buy Setanta, will it attempt to sell us on rugby here? Can it explain this game to a gridiron-obsessed viewing audience? And will it even bother to explain that there’s also a Rugby League World Cup in 2008?

It’s no wonder that Association football is the world’s preferred football game. It’s the only game where everyone can agree on the rules…

USA Football has released its roster for the team that will defend America’s gridiron honor in Japan this July, and as you might expect, these are not household names of college football. Those guys got drafted. These guys have one last moment of glory before they attempt to become coaches, personal trainers, journalists, insurance salesmen, Home Depot staffers, and part-timers in the CIFL and United Indoor Football.

The only name that jumps out at me is running back Wendell Johnson of Fairmont (WV) State, and that only jumps out at me because my parents first met at Fairmont State, and I was born in Fairmont, WV. Mary Lou Retton was born in Fairmont, too. So there’s that…

You know what? I’m leaving this one to you, dear readers. Feel free to take a look at this roster and post a comment if you have any knowledge of these guys and how they play. Does this look like a team that can take on the world’s best? (Of course, the “world’s best” at American football wouldn’t exactly scare the Detroit Lions, who could probably beat the Japanese national team at two sports, but hey, there’s a reason David & Goliath is a popular sports metaphor…)

With Leather offers up this video, which brought back painful memories of when I was 13 and didn’t understand that you weren’t supposed to try and block a corner kick like it was a field goal. And yet I can’t stop giggling when I watch this. Go figure.

No, I don’t plan to try an invent any football codes from this video, so just chill, okay?

In case you might have missed it, the boys at AOL have decided to let me contribute to the relatively new Soccer FanHouse, in addition to my usual NFL duties. The readers hate me already. Awesome.

I’ve added a couple of long-form articles there this week that might interest a few of you…

• Will the Premier League’s TV Windfall Relegate the FA Cup?
• Lalas: Relegation Too “Foreign” for MLS

In addition, the NFL FanHouse is just packed with interesting stuff this week. Here is but a sample:

• Source Tells ESPN He Knows Vick Takes Part in Dog Fights
• Anybody Think the Falcons Want a Do-Over on the 2001 Draft?
• Not Everybody Happy About the NFL Playing in London
• Kevin Mawae: NFL ‘Stupid’ to Consider 17th Game
• Random YouTube Magic: Bruce Smith Passing Out
• Does Video Lie? David Carr v. Matt Schaub
• Joey Porter Has a Unique Leadership Style

As always, you can find all my FanHouse contributions here.