A couple weeks ago I read an article in a trade magazine detailing how NBC had lost so much audience in the past few years it didn’t have much more media relevance than the Food Network. It’s been a fast fall from the top. Only a few years ago NBC was the king of the hill. The Jay Leno/Conan O’Brian fiasco being the final nail in the coffin.

So maybe they just did a Pin The Wheel on the Donkey thing with the scheduling of the Winter Olympics. My view about this event is this: if there were never another Winter Olympics I wouldn’t miss it. So it’s safe to say, as the date to the torch lighting came closer and closer my nipples were not exactly atwitter.

But someone over there hit a towering home run when it came to scheduling. First of all, the Olympic programming has no foreseeable end, which is convenient because NBC evidently has no prime time programming anyone wants to watch. The Winter Olympics are appearing on TV at the deadest, worst, most dreary time in the sportsfans calendar. The NFL season is a distant memory. The NBA is slogging through its dog days, the playoffs still over the horizon. The summer baseball season is many months away. I only care about college basketball when Texas is playing. Most of the country is buried under five feet of snow. People are trapped. People are desperate. I’m desperate.

So as I scan my ten thousand channels for sports I find ABSLOULTY NOTHING! Sorry but I have to shout this. Zip-Zap –Goose. Nada. So after days trying to avoid it, I land on NBC and the Winter Olympics. I’ve watched crap, unimaginable crap. I saw a bunch of guys embark on a long, long walk through the snow. Though I can appreciate the huge effort it must take to do this, riveting television it is not. I’ve watched people chase a puck across an expanse of ice with brooms. Can ice fishing be far behind?

One night I stumble upon on the woman’s downhill. I had no idea it was on. This was riveting. No really! Good lord those girls were skiing insane fast down a tumbling mountain of pure ice. They all seem completely out of control. When 3 of the gold medal finalists – the best professional skiers in the world - crash you know the course was more than a little dicey. Lindsey Vaughn managed a gold careening down Suicide Mountain on one leg. That’s good television.

A couple weeks ago I read an article in a trade magazine detailing how NBC had lost so much audience in the past few years it didn’t have much more media relevance than the Food Network. It’s been a fast fall from the top. Only a few years ago NBC was the king of the hill. The Jay Leno/Conan O’Brian fiasco being the final nail in the coffin.

So maybe they just did a Pin The Wheel on the Donkey thing with the scheduling of the Winter Olympics. My view about this event is this: if there were never another Winter Olympics I wouldn’t miss it. So it’s safe to say, as the date to the torch lighting came closer and closer my nipples were not exactly atwitter.

But someone over there hit a towering home run when it came to scheduling. First of all, the Olympic programming has no foreseeable end, which is convenient because NBC evidently has no prime time programming anyone wants to watch. The Winter Olympics are appearing on TV at the deadest, worst, most dreary time in the sportsfans calendar. The NFL season is a distant memory. The NBA is slogging through its dog days, the playoffs still over the horizon. The summer baseball season is many months away. I only care about college basketball when Texas is playing. Most of the country is buried under five feet of snow. People are trapped. People are desperate. I’m desperate.

So as I scan my ten thousand channels for sports I find ABSLOULTY NOTHING! Sorry but I have to shout this. Zip-Zap –Goose. Nada. So after days trying to avoid it, I land on NBC and the Winter Olympics. I’ve watched crap, unimaginable crap. I saw a bunch of guys embark on a long, long walk through the snow. Though I can appreciate the huge effort it must take to do this, riveting television it is not. I’ve watched people chase a puck across an expanse of ice with brooms. Can ice fishing be far behind?

One night I stumble upon on the woman’s downhill. I had no idea it was on. This was riveting. No really! Good lord those girls were skiing insane fast down a tumbling mountain of pure ice. They all seem completely out of control. When 3 of the gold medal finalists – the best professional skiers in the world - crash you know the course was more than a little dicey. Lindsey Vaughn managed a gold careening down Suicide Mountain on one leg. That’s good television.

Humpty Dumpy sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpy had a great fall.

Threescore men and threescore more

Can’t place Humpty Dumpy as he was before

Old English version

I have two items I was going to toss on to the end of my next column. Contrary to the opinion of some, I actually do give my columns some thought. I have a few ideas percolating but not ready to be born yet.

1) The Pro Bowl. I can confidently say the total sum of minutes spent watching the Pro Bowl – in my lifetime – can’t possibly exceed 15 minutes. I’ve never given a second of thought to why this is. Anymore than I do for missing a cricket match from Peshawar. A little thought tells me once the Super Bowl ends the football season is over. I’ve moved on. Evidently most sports fans feel pretty much the same. The Pro Bowl has always been universally ignored. Now that I think about it, for the NFL, by far the sharpest of all professional leagues, to have their All Star game be a joke is shocking. The operative words here are “ now that I think about it.”

Why am I thinking about it? Because the league, in a possible stroke of genius, is trying out a new concept. Taking it out of Hawaii, which is so many time zones away it’s like in Australia or something, moving it to Miami and playing it in the awful week between the conference championships and the Super Bowl. More about this in the next section. Nothing looks worse on my HDTV than a half empty stadium. Which is a generous assessment of the attendance in Hawaii. And most of those people are relatives of the players on a free holiday. People might actually attend the game in Miami, which automatically makes it marginally more watchable.

It’s such a simple idea, first grade simple, I wonder why I, let alone the poobahs in NFL Land never thought of this before. And it might be a stroke of total brilliance. Why? Well for one, PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT IT. This is unprecedented. For two, I think I’ll watch it. Also unprecedented. I’m still thinking football and what else do I have to do? Of course many of the best players won’t play because they’re playing a week later in a real game. But, really, so what? Most of those guys would find a reason not to go to Hawaii anyway.

It’s an experiment. I think it just might work. We shall see

Notes from a Cowboy hater: Why they lost

Andy Cotton

I wouldn’t bother to comment on a subject that most NFL experts have already beaten to death. But two things stand out like a bloody nose and I haven’t heard a word about them

1) Flozel Adams. I really don’t like Flozel. He’s a cheap shot artist supreme. He’s never seen a defensive end he didn’t enjoy leg whipping. No opportunity for a career ending chop block ever goes untried. No face guard sturdy enough for him not to get his forearm into. Having noted this, there’s a reason the guy is a perennial All-Pro. Football is a nasty game played by nasty guys. I wish Flozel was on my team. Dallas was moving the ball smartly early on when the usually durable Adam’s had to leave the game with an injury. He didn’t come back. My prayers were answered. Disaster quickly followed.

The left tackle position is the most critical spot on the offensive line. He protects the quarterbacks’ blind side from savage hits that, in this case, Romo never saw coming. It took the other Cowboy staple, Jason Witten, out of the offense because he had to help the hapless Flozel replacement try to keep guys in purple out of the Cowboy backfield. And not with much success. From the moment Adams departed Romo was a dead guy. No chance. This was a huge moment. Dallas never recovered.

Before the football season ends I have a story to tell. I played football in high school at New Trier, a large school in suburban Chicago. With the copycat explosion of the so-called Wild Cat offence, there has been a lot of talk of the Single Wing, which is exactly what the Wild Cat is.

When I tell you I’m not really that old we need a point of reference. I am sorta old; my playing days were in the middle 60’s. For any younger folk, they actually ran the t-formation back then. However my coach, Coach Achenbach, was that old. Coach A had to be well into his 80’s. So it is that I am one of the few people alive who actually played in a Single Wing offence.

So let me tell you about the Single Wing. This now quite primitive offence was, in it’s day, an offensive revolution. It came along after the early days of football when the game was more like rugby than the game we know today. The forward pass really didn’t exist. The Single Wing changed all that. It spread the offence out. The split end was invented. Whereas the early days were crude brute strength, the single wing was all about ball faking and trickery. It was the first “finesse offence”

The year was 1907; there really was a Pop Warner. Coach Warner had a talented running back by the name of Jim Thorpe. Pop thought it would be good to get the ball to Thorpe. A lot was a good idea. Thus a direct snap to Thorpe. The single wing was born. And it was the only offence football teams used until the invention of the t-formation in the 40’s. In fact Texas, under Hall of Fame coach Bible was one of the last places to use the single wing. Coach Achenbach never got the memo.

The single wing is a direct precursor to the shotgun and today’s spread offence. But to say it’s a precursor is to say a monkey is a precursor to a human being. By modern standards it’s crude and one-dimensional. The single wing is a super power formation designed to run the ball. It’s almost impossible to throw the ball anywhere but in the flat or a simple one-man pattern down the sideline. Want a modern reference? Think Nebraska from 1965 until 1990. Think wishbone. Think triple option.