Say What?

It's not very often that I laugh when I hear about a new reality TV show. The premises of shows have become either completely ridiculous (Amish in the City!!!) or incredibly repetitive (I hear Octo-mom is getting a show to go along with all the other ones about families with tons of kids), but a series that is about to start filming isn't one where the idea is out there, but rather...well, here's the basis:

A pro athlete will challenge other pro athletes in their respective sports. He will take on Ben Roethlisberger in some sort of a football challenge, Michael Phelps in swimming, Oscar de la Hoya in boxing, Albert Pujols in baseball, Serena Williams in tennis, Misty May-Trenor and Kerri Walsh in beach volley ball, and is hoping to book Lance Armstrong in cycling when the Tour de France is finished.

This is actually something I've wanted to see for quite a while. Sure I'd prefer whole teams going at each other in different sports, but this would have done quite nicely. The star of the series says that he came up with the idea and figure fans "would really want to see an athlete play another sport." Indeed I would. I would love to see a Lebron James, a Ladanian Tomlinson, a Derek Jeter, a Tiger Woods, a Lance Armstrong, or some elite athlete switch sports for a bit (though the Michael Jordan experiment was an utter disaster). Unfortunately, that's not what we get here. We get Shaquille O'neal. Yup, we get all 7'1" of him. And all 325 pounds of him. Yes, it's okay to laugh as the mental pictures start flooding your mind. Yes, Shaq is (or at least was) an elite basketball player. But for his size and his ability to use it. He may be extremely athletic relative to his size, but... a 7'1" body doesn't cut through water at all like Phelps does. And the thought of him trying to hustle back and forth from one side of the tennis court to the other as Serena Williams calmly places the ball on alternate sidelines is quite amusing.

While Shaq concedes that he isn't very skilled at tennis or baseball (a home run derby), he says he expects to exceed at football and swimming. At swimming? Versus Michael Phelps? Suddenly, Chad Ocho Cinco's claim that he could beat Michael Phelps doesn't sound quite so outlandish.

Where the real catch comes in is that O'neal and his rival will negotiate a handicap. No kidding. And it gets even better with Shaq's quote, "Bragging rights is always better than any monetary prize" in response to the fact that there won't be a cash prize to the winner of the event.

I find the bigger question to be, how could anyone find any reason to brag about winning this event? What are they supposed to say?

"I, Michael Phelps, Olympic record holder and double digit gold medal possessor beat a 325 pound 7 footer who is over ten years my elder in a swimming race?"

"I, Albert Pujols, one of the best sluggers in the major leagues, hit more home runs than a 7'1" NBA center who's hand/eye coordination was only good enough to hit a little over half his free throw attempts?"

And with adequate handicaps figured in, how is Shaq supposed to brag?

"I, Shaquille O'neal, beat Serena Williams in a tennis match despite each game starting at 'game point-love' in my favor?"

"I, Shaquille O'neal, beat Lance Armstrong in a cycling race despite the fact that I started at the top of the hill and raced down, and he started at the bottom and raced up?"

I don't know, perhaps I'm misunderestimating the big fellow's athletic prowess. But I do know the handicaps will have to be significant (though probably not quite to the extreme of those mentioned above). Sure, handicaps can be fun in order to level the playing field, but I don't see how any bragging rights can come from winning a handicapped event.

Now don't get me wrong, the show will be plenty entertaining, no doubt (though I doubt I'll ever see any of it). I just have a hunch that "Shaq VS" will be funny for the same reason as, say, tryouts for American Idol are funny.

Lebron a bad sport?

Lebron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers had just lost in the NBA semi-finals. After leading a team with mediocre surrounding talent to the best record in the regular season, it was over. So Lebron James left the court and went home. Now he is drawing all kinds of criticism for not shaking opponent's hands or speaking to the media that night. As a star player, and team leader, he should have demonstrated good sportsmanship, so they say. And I agree to some extent. But looking back on my own limited sports experience, I have to ask the question, what is true sportsmanship?

It was my senior year of high school; my only year playing varsity soccer. It was the season I had been anticipating every since I had started playing for Penn Manor. And we started off 0-4. Next on the schedule was McCaskey, an inner city school known much more for their basketball than their soccer, so it was the perfect time to get a win and get our season moving in the right direction. But on a wet, rainy day, we slopped our way into a second overtime period, tied 1-1. With about six minutes left, a McCaskey player got the ball just outside the box shot it crisply, but straight at me on one hop. It was a simple forward dive to scoop it up, but when I lowered my arms, the ball slipped through, and went between my legs for the game winning goal. Heading off the field in disbelief, I had absolutely no desire to ceremonially shake the opponent's hands. Given the nature of our coach, however, I knew I had no choice unless I wanted tomorrow's practice to be more than miserable. So I took the keeper's position at the front of the hand shake line and proceeded. As we passed the other team, I slapped hands, saying nothing. If I made any eye contact, it was a scowl. Looking back, I see no sportsmanship in this, only anti-sportsman ship. It was even to the point that when one of my friends (who was on McCaskey's JV team and sitting beside the bench) called my name several times, trying to get my attention in order to offer his condolences, and I completely ignored him.

Now before I go any farther, let me say this. I could have made the choice to have a better attitude. I could have been more gracious in defeat. But this was at least the second game in the young season that I felt like I had single handedly blown. In a way, I felt like I owed it to the rest of my team to not just walk off the field like everything was great. But given the way I carried myself, and knowing how I would act while "congratulating" the other team, would it have been more sportsman like to have sat down on the bench and said nothing, done nothing to the other team? Isn't there a point when, though it may be the more difficult and criticizable, the right thing to do is sit down and bypass the token and somewhat legalistic exchanges, because you know you might do something worse in the heat of the moment?

Now this is entirely speculation, I don't know what was/is going on inside Lebron's head, but I wonder if some of the same reasoning was behind Lebron's comments. When asked if he had spoken to Dwight Howard or any of the Magic players, he responded,

"No, I haven't, I send him an email last night congratulating him. One thing about me you gotta understand, it's hard to congratulate someone after just losing to them. I'm a winner, it's not being a poor sport or anything like that. Someone just beat you up, you're not going to congratulate them on beating you up, that doesn't make sense to me. I'm a competitor and that's what I do. It doesn't make sense for me to go over and shake some one's hand."

While it's easy for these comments to sound like they came from a poor sport, I do have to wonder whether it was Lebron's attempt to articulate, "You know, it was a tough loss, I was obviously disappointed, and as the leader of this team, I felt like we let a lot of people down. I knew that if I would have went over to congratulate them it wouldn't have been from the heart, it would have just been tradition; going through the motions." Again, I could be completely wrong on this one. But when people go to one extreme to criticizing someone, for not legalistically shaking hands in the name of good sportsmanship, you have to go to the other extreme to defend them. This may or may not be the case with Lebron, but sometimes the right thing, the mature thing, the sportsman like thing to do won't look as good to the public eye as the standard response does. But it is the best thing.

Finally, a story of a time when I decided to sit down. My church youth group was in Honduras on a missions trip, and one evening, we went with some of the Honduran church members to play soccer at a rented indoor field. The way the small field was marked was: a midfield line, and a goal box line roughly six yards in front of each goal. Being the highly skilled ball handlers that many Central American players are, they played by the rule that you could only score from inside the goal line. I knew that there weren't many soccer players in our group, and those of us that were (myself included) lacked the precision passing skills that were required to set up such close range shots, so I asked if they could lay that rule aside for the evening cause we would hardly be able to score that way. In my head, I wanted to ask if they could trash the rule so we could actually play soccer instead of having a competitive passing drill, which was what their style of play looked like compared to the physical style I'm used to, but I elected to be respectful of them as the host culture.

So things were going great, we were allowed to shoot from farther out which helped our lack of skills considerably. But part way through the evening, some of the Honduran players asked if we could all revert back to "inside the box scoring" because they, quote, "couldn't play this way." While the rest of my group was saying, "Sure, whatever," I was thinking, "What do you mean you can't play this way?! Just cause you're allowed to shoot from far out doesn't mean you can't shoot from close up! You can still play the same way!" As I expected, scoring became much less frequent. Nine times out of ten, getting close enough to shoot meant getting close enough for the keeper or defender to take the ball. And we were divided into four teams, a new team went on to replace the team that got scored on. So with goals now only coming every 5 to 10 minutes, that meant a lot of standing around, and a lot less fun. It also meant a lot of time for me to get more and more frustrated. I tried to make my case a time or two to the people around me, but was basically just told to get over it. So I got more and more frustrated and eventually angry. But finally it seemed that my youth pastor bailed me out. We were the next team to finally get to go back on the field, and he buried a brilliant shot from the side of the field into the top corner. "Alright, it's finally time to play again, just forget about how irritated you are" I thought, but just then the goal was called back because apparently my youth pastor was a few micro inches outside of the goal box. That about put me over the top. I knew I was one unsympathetic comment, or one more called back goal from saying or doing something I'd regret. So I walked off the field and sat down by myself in the bleachers. I'm pretty sure that the Hondurans thought I was quitting just because I didn't get things my way. My peers probably thought I was just an overly competitive player who couldn't take a laid back, friendly game for what it was. I think the only person who understood why I sat down was my youth pastor who came and talked to me. But regardless of how bad it may have come across, I'm convinced that it was better than anything I would have done had I continued playing.

I'll never know what Lebron's reasoning for not shaking hands was, but if it was at all like what I expect, then I have a lot of respect for him. Walking off the field in Honduras was difficult. You know people are going to judge you. But in the long run, you know you've made the right choice.

How much wood? Answering the old question

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Once the fast delivery of this tongue twister has been mastered, have you ever stopped and wondered what the answer to the question is? I hope to find an answer, or at least be able to give a ballpark estimate.
There’s a series of distinctions that need to be made before finding an answer, and here is the order:
1) The definition of “chuck.” Determining what the woodchuck is supposed to be doing is key.
2) “IF.” The word “if” implies that a woodchuck cannot “chuck” so the next step is to decide what must happen in order for the woodchuck to be able to “chuck.”
3) Now that we’ve figured out that “A woodchuck can chuck wood,” we need to decide how effectively it can do so, therefore determining how much. After completing this step, we will hopefully have an estimated answer.

Step 1:

I find it impossible to determine which definition of “chuck” is intended; at least not certainly enough that the margin of error would not throw the accuracy of the answer so far off that it would be rendered irrelevant. So the best option is to get three different answers from the three most likely definitions: a) “to throw or toss,” b) “a device used for holding drill bits,” and c) “food, provisions.” Having chosen three definitions, we proceed to step 2.

Step 2: Let’s define “a piece of wood” as the triangular cut of wood that is typically used for camp fires: about a foot long, and 4-6 inches in diameter.

2a) “To throw or toss.” Now “IF” must be determined. Can a woodchuck throw wood? Woodchucks are solid, tough creatures, but they have short limbs. So while they have the strength required, they lack the proper build. I’m no woodchuck expert, but given their body shape, and most likely lower coordination, throwing firewood is something a woodchuck could do marginally at best. So it needs to be clever. Since all the lists of smartest animals were completely void of woodchucks, I’ll rule out it being able to create any kind of device such as a catapult. Instead, in order to chuck, a woodchuck needs a perch, say, a 20 foot cliff. A woodchuck would be able to apply enough horizontal force on a piece of wood to toss it off a small cliff. Therefore, the woodchuck would be able to chuck.

2b) “A device used for holding drill bits.” This one presents a grammatical problem, as this definition of “chuck” is a noun, and the tongue twister uses “chuck” as a verb. However, given the context, I think we can concede that placing a piece of wood into the chuck could be called “chucking the wood.” It may not be the easiest task for a woodchuck to complete, but I have no doubt it would be capable.

2c) “Food, provisions.” I find this definition to be the least likely due to its specifications. We all know that the only way a woodchuck could chew up wood (food) and use it as its dwelling (provisions) is if there was some beaver in its pedigree. Since woodchuck-beaver cross breeds are few and far between, one has to question whether this was the definition intended by whoever penned the phrase, but the author of a tongue twister is going for functionality, not accuracy, so this possibility cannot be discarded. So what must happen in order for a woodchuck to “chuck?” It must be part beaver.

Step 3: Having previously set “pieces of wood” as a camp fire log, let’s set “chucking effectiveness” at a rate of how many pieces of wood the woodchuck can chuck in an hour.

3a) “How effectively can a woodchuck toss wood?” The act of the woodchuck chucking the wood off of the small cliff will take little time, maybe ten seconds max. This would mean that a woodchuck can chuck wood at a rate of 360 pph (pieces per hour). However, in all likely hood, the wood isn’t already at the top of the cliff, so the woodchuck will have to drag the small log all the way to the top. No easy task, but since we’ve already established woodchucks as strong, sturdy creatures, I’ll estimate that it will take about 8 minutes to drag one log up the hill and throw it off the cliff. So the final answer is: 7.5 pph.

3b) “How effectively can a woodchuck put wood in a chuck?” Since chucking wood in this way takes a bit more coordination, I would guess that it would take a woodchuck about 20 seconds to chuck one piece of wood. But here we run into even more problems. The decided size of the log won’t fit into many chucks if any. It will need cut into let’s say six pieces in order to be able to be chucked. So first, the woodchuck will have to drag the wood to the nearest beaver (unless it is part beaver itself, but not likely). This could be a long way away, or quite close. We’ll say it will take about 20 minutes for the woodchuck to take a piece of wood to the beaver. The beaver will need about three minutes to finish servicing the log, then the woodchuck will have to drag six small pieces of wood back to the chuck. Since the log is now in pieces, it will be more difficult, and will probably take about 30 minutes. After all of this, it will have to chuck each piece of wood, which at 20 seconds per piece will take two more minutes. So the total time is 55 minutes. In this case, a woodchuck can chuck wood at a rate of 1.09 pph.

3c) “How effectively can a woodchuck use wood for food or provision?” Chucking wood is what beavers do best, whether it’s building a house, or chomping down on a tree, but the question is how well a beaver-woodchuck cross breed can chuck wood. Looking specifically at using wood to build a house, a beaver is quite proficient, I would guess it could use a log every minute and a half (giving it time to push the wood from shore, to the dam, put it in place, and swim back to shore for the next one.) Since this prototype cross breed is half beaver, half woodchuck, we’ll say it has only half the effectiveness, therefore taking three minutes per log. Do the easy math: 20 pph.

So how much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? If you can figure out how long the woodchuck is chucking wood, you can now find three answers.

Tribute to John Madden

Several weeks ago, longtime football broadcaster John Madden announced his retirement. As many of you know, Madden has long been the punchline of many of my jokes, however, today I've had a change of heart. So, here is my tribute to John Madden. My tribute to some of his incredible feats and accomplishments.

-Congratulations, John Madden, for your perseverance at trying to master the broadcast etch-a-sketch. We all know how difficult and confusing it is to use it. It wasn't your fault you were always drawing circles around the wrong players, that machine has a mind of its own. Yet you never showed hesitation while trying to show us how the slot receiver ran a crossing route...er...the outside receiver came across the middle to make the catch. We never would have been able understand what had happened on the previous play without all those yellow scribbles.

-Congratulations, John Madden, on being probably the only person with your level of fame, to NOT show up first on a youtube search of your name. What's the title of the first video? "Frank Caliendo." Go figure, such a titanic household name, yet you don't actually show up until 5th in the previously mentioned search. That's what I call impressive!

-Congratulations, John Madden, on providing building blocks for the country's greatest impersonator/comedian. Frank Caliendo is now known for being able to pull off a convincing impression of pretty much anyone famous, but it all started with his famous, "Now if the quarterback, throws the ball, an-an-and the receiver catches it, in the end zone, well that's gonna be a touchdown!" Frank Caliendo has made so many people laugh so many times, and just think, you helped start it!

-Congratulations, John Madden, on being one of the few people who could see a steak being prepared in a stadium and see it as an opportunity to make fun of vegetables. I'm sure you remember going off on a tangent about how green beans aren't good when a shot showed a Pittsburgh vendor piling sauteed onions on a large slab of meat.

-Congratulations, John Madden, for making so much out of so little. All the other people in the broadcast biz can formulate sentences better than you can, can find informative pieces of information better than you can, can speak more clearly than you can, and can analyze games better than you can, yet you still got your voice all over prime time games AND the biggest NFL video game. You are a testament to beating the odds and overcoming disabilities.

-Finally, congratulations, John Madden, for picking the perfect time to retire. You left your spot in NBC's Sunday Night Football broadcast booth just before a season in which you would have done three Eagles games. If I would have had to listen to you announce three of my team's games the same season, within six weeks none the less, yours truly just might have gone crazy.

Happy, retirement, John. You will not be forgotten.

How we think and keep score in tennis

I've been told my many people that I have an interesting and certainly unique way of thinking. I have no doubt this is true, but find the way we determine how other people think to be interesting. After all, how do people know that I think differently? They've never been inside my head. So certainly it's all derived from how I express my thoughts. That's odd. I see a significant difference between what someone thinks, and how they express those thoughts. Some people just start talking, and eventually, after a lot of unrelated, somewhat pointless words have been said, they have made their point. Does that mean that they are scatter brained and incapable of nailing down a thought or idea? No. Some people won't say a word until they have ever loose corner of their thought tied down, so when it comes out, it's polished, perfected, and to the point. Are these people all more intelligent? No, different people have different ways of expressing their thoughts.

So how do we really know when people are thinking differently? How do we know they aren't just verbalizing differently, and that's not even mentioning how we interpret things differently. Yet we all think that by the time someone's initial thoughts have gone through at least two sets of unpredictable filters, we can tell how they think. Interesting. But I suppose that's all we can really do. After all, we can't get into other people's heads, so all we can judge is what comes out of their mouth (or out of their fingers in the form of words).

It's kind of like colors. For all we know, I could see the color named "green" as blue, you could see the color "green" as green, and someone else could see the color "green" as purple, but we've all learned to call it green, so nobody knows the difference. Hey, if I was God, I'd do all kinds of stuff like that because no one would ever be able to figure it out. Hmm, perhaps this explains why there are such varied opinions and tastes when it comes to color schemes.

The irony of this is that you're probably reading this thinking, "This Ben kid really thinks about things really differently."

Well, that was interesting. I was trying to figure out how to start a piece on the scoring method for tennis, and that evolved. I'm not even sure how anymore. I guess that just shows how many different directions my mind can go. From "how can we tell how other people think" to "who in the name of Uncle Sam came up with tennis scoring?" Whoever it was went to all ends to make sure that none of it made sense.

First of all, the first score is worth 15 points. There are two logical reasons for making a score worth more than 1 point:
1) There is a way to score less. A score in basketball is worth 2 (or 3) because there are also free throws worth 1 point.
2) To proportionalize the valuable of different scores. A touchdown is (usually) 7 points, and a field goal is 3. Somehow or another, the inventors came up with that proportion given the difficulty of each feet.

So why go by 15's? 1-2-3 seems just as feasible as 15-30-45. There in lies the next oddity. The scoring isn't 15-30-45, it's 15-30-40. Beyond the blatant illogicality of this lies a deeper problem. Well not problem, more of a personal gripe. I'm pretty big on proportionality. When you look at the score, say, 40-15, it would generally imply that the party in the lead has scored roughly 2.6 times as many points than the losing player. However, since it's actually 3-1, they've scored 3 times as many points. So the score, which should be a simple, easy "count your way to 5" system is so abnormal that it doesn't even reflect the proper proportion of the score.

And it gets even better! Once a player with 40 "points" makes another "score," they are given the win...unless the other player has 40 "points" as well, because you have to win by two "points, no scores." (See, it's so much harder to explain the rules with this scoring system.) In that case, the score goes to "40-advantage." That makes some sense, but why can't it be 50-40 (or 40-50)? After a "40-adv" play, if the "40" player scored, it goes back to "40-40." Is that because 50-50 is too difficult to remember? Wouldn't it just be easier to keep adding on to the score than to start cancelling them out after a few volleys? Beyond that, however, just going back to 40-40 over and over doesn't at all reflect the progress of the game. If the score is 80-80 (although, knowing the guy who came up with all this, it would be 67-67), you know that they've been going back and forth a couple times; neither player able to win enough volleys in a row to get the win. If the score is 40-40, who know how long they've been going at it? Did they just get tied up at 40 for the first time? Have they been at the 40-40 or 40-adv stage for several go arounds? Who knows.

It's all backward and senseless. Oh, I know, someone had a unique idea, and I shouldn't be scolding them for being creative just because I don't like their idea. Well, yeah, creativity is great. I love being creative. But creative engineers should be building cool looking skyscrapers, not designing the traffic grid. It's creative engineers who design the cities that are the most difficult to navigate through by car (I've heard this about Hong Kong, and though I never drove there, I can certainly see that this is the case), and it's the straight forward, detail oriented engineers that give you boring skylines. So if you're that set on being creative and different, don't design the ground work, design what comes off of the ground. In other words, make innovations to how tennis is played, don't change the way we've been counting since preschool.

Salaries

As much as we can't stand pro athletes for the money they make, I've always stood to the fact that given the enormity of the industry they're in, they're paid at least somewhat properly. What's ridiculous, is the size of the industry. Okay, why doesn't everyone try and think of what job has the greatest combination of difficulty and importance. For example, coal mining: Extremely difficult, but one coal miner? Not all that important (as far as business is concerned). A little more time to think...okay. One of the jobs I keep coming back to is the President. May not be #1 on the list, but that's a debate for another time. All in all, the stress, public pressure, and impossibility of the president's job would merit one of the higher salaries right? $400,000 a year. Certainly a pretty solid amount of money, but...here's a few persons who make just "a little bit" more...for doing a lot less.

Todd Pinkston: I apologize, Eagles fans, for mentioning the name. For those of you who don't remember the good old days of #87, here's a brief recap:
Todd Pinkston, WR. Notorious for dropping easy passes and shying away from contact. His attributes include: Being several steps behind his man with an easy 80 yard touchdown awaiting when he suddenly stopped and braced himself against the safety who was closing in, letting the pass fall incomplete. Playing as the #1 receiver in an NFC championship game against Carolina and catching less passes than Carolina cornerback Ricky Manning Jr. And dropping even more. After making one really nice catch in Superbowl XXXIX, heading to the locker room midway through the first half with a deer in the headlights look on his face that seemed to say, "Wow, I had no idea the Superbowl was this nerve racking. I'm glad this cramp gives me an excuse not to go back out there." Need I say more? So how about his pay?
Over Pinky's final four seasons of bumbling mediocrity at best, he racked in $6,598,100. To put it in perspective, that's over four times the amount the president makes in the same amount of time.

How about another Philadelphia "Great?" How many of you remember Jose Mesa? If you are still reading this, you 1) are not a Phillies fan, or 2) just resisted a strong urge to put a brick through your monitor. Now, Jose Mesa had two abilities that aren't found in very many Major League Baseball players. The first uncanny knack was to find a way give up game losing home runs almost day in and day out. Fortunately for Jose, his other amazing talent was being able to find a job. Despite his loaded portfolio of blown saves, he was somehow able to convince teams that he would magically go back to the form he was in during his one or two good seasons way back.
During this beach ball thrower's highest paid eight year stretch, he wasted $23,700,000 of his employer's money. That's over $20,000,000 more than our commander in chief was paid during the same stint. And over seven times more money.

Jake Long: The offensive tackle out of Michigan was the first pick in the 2008 NFL draft. So the money he got paid was based off of what he did in college. No real NFL performance to back it up. What did he make in his first NFL season? $6,225,000. Over fifteen times more than Obama will make in his first year in office.

Okay, so even though it is just sports, those aren't the easiest sports jobs. What about the New York Yankees manager? I've always thought baseball managers had the easiest coaching jobs in all of sports, so a manager who has over $200,000,000 worth of players to work with? $2,600,000. Per year. But at least the Yankees make the playoffs nine years out of ten, and when they don't, they have a record over .500.

Now take my good old Baltimore Orioles. They're a team that finished 68-93 last year and haven't had a winning season in over a decade. By common logic, how many of their players deserve more money than the president? Umm...let's see...1-2-3-ZERO. But believe it or not, 26 members of the 2008 Baltimore Orioles had a more profitable year than George W. Bush. Financially, at least (although otherwise could also be debated). Shouldn't there be a rule that if you don't win even close to half of your games and vastly under perform, you shouldn't make as much as the president?

Dikembe Mutombo: Unlike some of the other's I've mentioned, Mutombo had a great basketball career. While I couldn't find any current information, I did run across a rather stunning figure from one of the last few seasons. During a season for the Knicks in the tail end of his career, Dikembe averaged 6 points and 7 rebounds a game. For the he got paid, oh nothin, $17,894,735. For those of you on your knees begging me not to do the math on that, sorry. It's a strange world we live in. What higher a degree of strangeness is there than a basketball player getting paid almost 45 times as much as the president for 6 points a game?

Established: One of the most overall difficult jobs in the USA gets paid pocket change in comparison to mediocre athletes. So what is one of the easiest jobs that gets the most pay? Without doing a whole lot of research, here's my #1:
Job Description: Be on TV. Say "yes" or "no." Give prewritten insults to 20 year old ditzes. The pay? Somewhere around $36,000,000 a year. It's an enigma that no mathematician, logician, or lunatic could possibly understand. Simon Cowell gets paid for 22.5 presidential terms (90 years) each year by American Idol. If anyone can truly figure out why, they're the one person that deserves higher pay than the president.

The Eagles (for lack of a better title)

If there would be one way to accurately describe, for the most part, football fans, it would be that they think they are better than the pros. Us fans tend to look at plays and think, “Hey, I did that in the back yard, why couldn’t he?” This leads to bashing the quarterback when a sneaky defender jumps a pass for an interception, holding our heads in our hands when a receiver drops a pass that was fired at his feet, and especially, ripping our team’s front office for their decisions regarding who to keep, who to get rid of, and who to get. For this reason, I always try to be slow to disagree with personnel moves made by professional GM’s and coaches. However, the Eagles front office has finally made enough inexplicable moves that I can no longer stifle my dissent.
So what did they do this year that at last put me over the top? Simple. Nothing. Nothing is what they did as long time Eagle Brian Dawkins left for the Denver Broncos. Now there are several reasons for not resigning a player:
-Salary Cap: Probably the single reason why the NFL is currently the best sport going is the salary cap which limits how much a team can spend on players each season. Sometimes, no matter how much they want to keep him, a team simply doesn’t have enough room under the cap to resign him. Going into this off season, the Eagles were $48 million under the salary cap. Okay, that must not be it.
-The Player: Sometimes, plain and simple, the player wants nothing to do with his current team and is going to leave unless they empty the bank for his services. Brian Dawkins said many times that he wanted to stay in Philadelphia. Now a lot of players will say that, but when a bigger offer comes from somewhere else, they’re gone. From every piece of information I’ve heard or read, Dawkins’s “I want to stay” statement was the most legitimate of it’s kind. All it would have taken was a reasonable contract offer from the Eagles and #20 would still be in midnight green (Here I’ll clarify that while we all like to complain about athletes wanting more money, the truth is that they are the driving force in a mega million dollar industry, so they are very deserving of the profits). I recently heard that the Eagles are one of four NFL teams worth over 1 billion dollars. Brian Dawkins was the face of the team’s defense. If not the entire team. Do the math I think we can all agree that he is worth more than the 2 year, 4 million dollar contract the Eagles threw at his feet.
-Age: Sometimes a team will decide that as a player gets older and loses some ability, and just not worth the money anymore. Now, we fans have a knack for being overly nostalgic about our long term players. We hate to see them leave. But the Eagles strategy of letting older guys go to let their young prospects onto the field has worked out pretty well so far (think of when they let star cornerbacks Bobby Taylor and Troy Vincent go and replaced them with Lito Shepherd and Sheldon Brown. Taylor and Vincent fell into oblivion and I barely heard their names again, while Shepherd and Brown rose to Pro Bowl or near Pro Bowl status. Or Hugh Douglass the ferocious pass rusher who left for the Jaguars and suddenly lost his ability. The list goes on). But Brian Dawkins is not just a player. He’s a team leader. He shows up biggest when the lights are brightest. He plays every down of every game like it’s the last play of the Super Bowl. He makes big plays when they count. Need I say more? If I was managing the team on Madden, which doesn’t take experience, leadership, or intensity into account, I’d say he’s an old player who has lost a step in pass coverage and should go. But Dawkins is so much more. Even if he isn’t on the field for every play, he’ll earn every dollar he gets paid by keeping the team fired up and ready to go.

The way I see it, if none of the above three criteria are reason for letting a player go, then you resign him. It seems that the Eagles management thought the Age factor was a problem, but that was a miscalculation if you ask me (due to leadership, etc.). A criteria that I didn’t mention above is when another team comes out and way overpays a guy. That argument could be made given the Broncos 5 year contract to a 35 year old player…but if the Eagles hadn’t just sat around and done nothing, Dawkins never would have been in free agency.

Okay, so they made a bad decision with Brian Dawkins…in what other ways have the Eagles blundered?
Primarily, in the often stated belief that the wide receiver position is over rated. There’s some truth in the statement. You can run an effective offense with a group of average receivers; a star wide out isn’t a necessity. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get one. The Eagles have five receivers that I think could be in the top three for a lot of teams, but none that would be the #1 go to guy on most teams. A squad like this will do fine over the course of the regular season. They aren’t going to keep the team out of the post season. But when the playoffs come around and defenses start playing better, a big time, playmaking receiver is an undeniable asset. Just think of what Larry Fitzgerald did for the Cardinals in their Super Bowl run. When he wasn’t beating two or three defenders, he was opening up the field for the other guys. Meanwhile, the Eagles receivers got off to a very sluggish start in the NFC championship game that caused the offense to sputter early, putting them in a huge first half hole (I believe McNabb is equally to blame, but he is a whole topic in himself, so I’m intentionally leaving McNabb conversation out of this).
Do you think it is a coincidence that the year Terrell Owens was with the Eagles (and on good terms) was the only year out of their recent NFC championship seasons that they could be defined as “Dominating” rather than “Good?” The Eagles defense that year wasn’t much better if at all. Their running game wasn’t as good as it is now. I rest my case.
It seems that the Eagles strategy has been to try to field a team that is a safe bet to make the playoffs, and then hope they catch fire and make a run to the Lombardi Trophy. Not a terrible plan, but after five out of eight years making the NFC championship game with no Super Bowl wins, it is time to re-evaluate things. After all, they’ve come into the playoffs in just about every way imaginable; from the dominating 13-1 team that didn’t play the last two games of the season, to the 6-seed team that had to make a highly improbably late season run just to get into the playoffs; and no way they have done it has worked. The only year they even made it to the Super Bowl was when they went out and took chances with a controversial wide receiver (T.O.) and a freakish pass rusher with injury problems (Javon Kearse). The long term wisdom of those moves can be questioned with our prescription hind-sight glasses, but they were a big part of why the team was as great as it was that year and almost got that championship. And trust me. Any Eagles fan you talk to just wants one. Yes we’d cheer just as strongly for another should the Eagles win a Super Bowl, but getting that one championship is all that really matters. Yeah, a dynasty would be pretty cool, but those are for pretty boy quarterbacks, obnoxious coaches, and lead to one thing: Arrogant, pampered fan bases.
So overall, it’s not really that the Eagles decision makers have done a horrible job…it’s that they do a good job. Yes, good. Good enough to send the team to the playoffs 80% of the time. Good enough to keep everyone’s hopes up only to smash them year in and year out. Most of all, good enough to keep their jobs, and good enough that no one will call loudly enough for change (Yikes! I just sounded like President Obama! Let me rephrase that). Good enough that no one looks at them when the team comes up short again…and again. Good enough that there’s always some validity in the old Eagles adage, “There’s always next year.”