Dave’s Football Blog

For my birthday, my parents got me tickets to the Stevie Wonder concert in Raleigh last night. He puts on a pretty awesome show. He had the crowd singing along with him all night, he did all his best tunes — including a show-stopping 7-minute version of “Superstition” — and, thankfully, did not play “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

Anyway, I went to that instead of staying home and watching the Cowboys-Packers game. Anything big happen?

Today’s my birthday, so if I appear to be off on some ozone expeditions today, that’s why…

So I’m watching the ACC-Big Ten Challenge on ESPN last night. It’s a big early-season college basketball event here in America that pits two of the biggest conferences’ schools against each other to determine which is the better basketball conference. During halftime last night, this exchange took place:

RECE DAVIS: You’re looking there at the Commissioner’s Cup, the award that goes to the winner of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge.

DIGGER PHELPS: Y’know, Jay, I’ve never seen the Commissioner’s Cup before.

JAY BILAS: Neither has the Big Ten.

Thank you, thank you, Jay Bilas will be here all week. Try the veal…

Anyway, as I’m watching my alma mater hold off Georgia Tech last night, it suddenly hit me — why don’t we have something like this in Association football?

Think about it. The structure of American college basketball and European football is actually quite similar. Colleges divide themselves into regional conferences — the ACC, the Big East, the Pac-10, etc. — and at season’s end, conference champions enter a tournament with the top teams in the nation to determine the national champion. In Europe, domestic league champions enter Champions League competition with a designated number of clubs from the biggest leagues to determine the European champ.

Wouldn’t it be fun if two of the top domestic leagues in Europe had a preseason challenge cup of their own? Let’s take the top ten clubs in the Premier League and put them up against the top ten clubs in La Liga. You’d get a matchup that looks like this:

Manchester United v. Real Madrid
Chelsea v. Barcelona
Liverpool v. Sevilla
Arsenal v. Valencia
Tottenham Hotspur v. Villareal
Everton v. Zaragoza
Bolton v. Atletico Madrid
Reading v. Recreativo
Portsmouth v. Getafe
Blackburn v. Racing Santander

Whichever country comes away with the most points wins the Challenge Cup. Profits from the box office and TV money could go to charity, just like the FA Community Shield, so if a league says no to the idea, you could say they’re being mean to the children. Besides, those matches would be a hell of a lot more entertaining than the Community Shield has been lately, too, don’t you think?

You could also do something similar between, say, MLS and the A-League, though Queensland Roar v. FC Dallas probably doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Y’know, if all these guys had just come to this site and learned a little history, none of this would have happened.

Two Australian Navy sailors jailed in California for a vicious fight with an American man about the merits of Aussie rules football will learn today if US prosecutors will pursue serious assault charges against them.

Philip Graeme Ferres, 26, and Kolis Barba, 24, have been locked up in San Diego’s Central Jail since their arrest in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Police accuse them of hitting and kicking their alleged victim, breaking his eye socket, after an argument flared at a party about Australian rules football and America’s gridiron.

The alleged victim, a 28-year-old San Diego man, was a fan of gridiron while the Australians were talking up the virtues of AFL, which led to the fight, police said.

C’mon, guys, it’s the 21st century. Can’t you just come to some sort of agreement that soccer is a girl’s game and enjoy your beers together? Really.

(Thanks, Simon!)

Apparently, it’s standard practice for a soccer superstar visiting Australia to hang out with stars in other football codes and have the local media photograph every moment. This vid doesn’t show enough of it, but David Beckham got to meet with some local Aussie rules and rugby stars for a quick lesson in kicking each other’s balls.

By the way, there are no American journalists covering the L.A. Galaxy’s trip to the Southern Hemisphere. I wonder why…

(Spotted on Who Ate All the Pies.)

UPDATE: The Herald Sun in Australia has a few photos of Becks kicking the footy around. I think even Richmond would pass at this point.

It’s a video full of North Carolina college girls playing rugby union in prom dresses. Why are there no wardrobe malfunctions? Bad form, I say.

(Spotted on Scrumbag.)

Just last week, I was writing about how the Redskins’ secondary might be vulnerable until safety Sean Taylor returned to the lineup from injury. Now, he’ll never return, and that’s just too tragic for words…

Sean Taylor died early Tuesday, a day after he was shot at home by what police say was an intruder. He was 24.

Family friend Richard Sharpstein said Taylor’s father told him the news around 5:30 a.m. … He said Taylor died early Tuesday at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where he had been airlifted after the shooting early Monday.

Doctors had been encouraged late Monday when Taylor squeezed a nurse’s hand, according to Vinny Cerrato, the Redskins’ vice president of football operations. But Sharpstein said he was told Taylor never regained consciousness after being transported to the hospital and that he wasn’t sure how he had squeezed the nurse’s hand.

The initial reports were that the shooting was part of a botched robbery of some sort, but the descriptions of how Taylor was shot has me thinking this was quite premeditated. Taylor had gotten his life back in order after brandishing a gun two years ago in a fight over stolen all-terrain vehicles near his home. I fear that incident has come back on him and his family in the worst possible way.

First Darrent Williams, now this. Too many NFL stars have been shot and killed needlessly this year. This trend really needs to stop.

Most of you out there probably saw this clip from Saturday’s Maryland v. NC State game:

Most people probably didn’t realize that “giving him the business” was a 15-yard penalty in American football. Even more people probably forgot that this wasn’t the first time the “giving him the business” penalty was ever called. Back in 1986, an NFL referee by the name of Ben Dreith introduced us to this obscure rule during a New York Jets v. Buffalo Bills game:

Dreith has his own Wikipedia page in part because of that call. This should encourage referees all over America to say something even sillier for our entertainment in the future.

So I think I’ve finally woken from my tryptophan coma this weekend, and I now find myself sitting in Champps — because the Steelers don’t play until tomorrow night, of course — waiting for a full afternoon of NFL games. (I haven’t posted to this blog from my Treo in a while, so hopefully, the formatting isn’t goofy.)

I would be remiss, though, if I failed to mention that the 95th edition of the CFL’s championship game, the Grey Cup Final, kicks off tonight at 5:30 PM in Toronto. Either the Winnipeg Blue Bombers or the Saskatchewan Rough Riders will walk away with the coveted Canadian gridiron trophy.

If you’re in America, it should be on one of the regional sports channels that you can get over satellite — probably Altitude Sports. If you don’t have satellite TV, it should be shown in one of your local sports bars. I recommend calling ahead.

Enjoy these Grey Cup Finals while you can folks. If the NFL gets its dirty little claws into Toronto, we may not get to the 100th Grey Cup — even if some Canadians think the NFL sucks.

Longtime readers of this blog — all seven of you — may recall that I used to write up the detailed AFC & NFC playoff pictures here around this time. I moved those posts to NFL FanHouse last year, and guess what? They’re back again this year. You can check them out here and here.

For even more fun, check out those highly intelligent comments — especially in the AFC post, where some guy complains that I’m disrespecting Seattle Seahawks by not including them. The Seahawks moved to the NFC in 2002. We attract all the smartest readers at FanHouse…

Professional football players don’t know when to let go. This is a proven fact, especially when it comes to NFL stars — witness Emmitt Smith in Arizona, Jerry Rice in Oakland, Franco Harris in Seattle, and so on. These guys spent their entire lives in the spotlight; walking away from that is just too damn hard. If you approached any former NFL player and asked them if they would give anything for one more game of gridiron glory, more often than not, he would answer, “Hell, yes.”

Priest Holmes got one more game.

None of us wanted to see a running back 3 years past his expiration date try to come back from a pretty major spinal injury just to be a backup — and talk trash at the starter in the process. We all ripped him for it. Who would be insane enough to risk re-injury to their spine, just so they could play this violent form of football?

NFL players, that’s who. This is all they know. They spend their entire lives wrapped up in the spotlight of this game, and when their career is over, we tell them that we’re turning the spotlight off now, and it’s time for them to go live the rest of their lives — sometimes with debilitating injuries they willingly accepted to continue playing. Imagine if someone told you that you couldn’t do your job anymore, and it was time to move on to something else. You might not want to accept it, either.

Neither did Priest Holmes. He risked his ability to walk to give it one more go, and he almost walked away with a win. Perhaps he’s just lucky that he’s still able to walk away.

You can admire it, or you can admonish it. None of that matters. Priest Holmes lived out the dream of every former NFL player — he got to play football one more time. Show me one gridiron star who wouldn’t want that.

Okay, besides Robert Smith.