So, I’ve been lax in my obsession with some things Peter King the last two weeks, though I would be unduly self-critical if I didn’t note that Peter King has been lax with some things Peter King the last two weeks. I like to think that he literally phoned it in (to some poor, poor intern). This week doesn’t seem much different, but I’m rested and reinvigorated in my quest to be an asshole. Onward!

It's been a little boring around the NFL over the last month or so.

Yes.

Lots of off-the-field crappola going on, but not much to sink your football teeth into.

Also true, but the o-t-f “crappola” (a word that is as sure a generational marker as any) is a lot of fun. Between the canine pugilist impresario and the house of burlesque meteorologist, we’ve barely had time to think about that recidivist space alien who plays receiver for the Bengals.

Here's my attempt to stir things up. It's the first MMQB Quarterback Ratings.

And here we are, almost exactly six months ‘til Christmas. Peter, what have you done?

Here's what I've done

This should be good.

[I’ve] ranked the 2007 starting quarterbacks in the league from 1 to 32, from Manning (Peyton) to Croyle (Brodie). The rankings are in the order of quarterbacks who will have the best seasons in 2007 and 2007 only.

Dumb list—check

Ridiculous Prognostication—check

Bizarre severance of “best season” from “best quarterback” (more to come on this point)—check

Giving us lots of information about his picks before actually revealing the list—check

Manning's No. 1 (Surprise!): A year ago, I would have picked Tom Brady over Manning. But fair is fair. Manning beat Brady twice in 2006, won the Super Bowl and put all the can't-win-the-big-one stuff behind him. Now Peyton has the ultimate reward -- being picked over Brady in the inaugural MMQB Ratings.

Fair is fair, Mr. Legend of Billie Jean, and you’re right, I’m not surprised. And did Manning compete directly against Brady in some pay-per-view event of which I was unaware (like Summer Slam or boxing or that 150 meter race between Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey[link])?

“Ultimate reward”? What? The man just won the Super Bowl and you’re saying that—oh, wait. I get it. Peter is mocking the inanity of his own column. Plus, kudos for saying “inaugural” and not “first annual” (especially because first annual implies something that I don’t even want to think about).

I'd take Drew Brees over Carson Palmer if I were starting a team right now. Sacrilege! With fewer weapons and the same comeback from serious injury, Brees has narrowly outplayed Palmer over the past two years, and I think it's a good bet he will in '07.

No, peeing in holy water is sacrilege. This is a just a preference for one quarterback over another, both of whom are pretty good, neither of whom is magnificent.

Want my upset specials in the top 10?

Do I!?

Try Vince Young and Jon Kitna. Young's the most feared young player in football right now. More feared than Reggie Bush.

Once you look at the list, you’ll note that being in the top third of the NFL as a quarterback isn’t the superlative that you might think. And Peter’s right about Vince Young. His FII (Fear Inducing Index) is scary. (But Peter should have asked around USC’s athletic department for people who currently fear Reggie Bush.)

It's not that I don't like Donovan McNabb. I do. I just don't trust him to stay healthy. I rank the Eagles' QB 12th because I have no confidence that McNabb, at 30 and having missed a combined 13 games over the last two years, will be upright in December.

Remember this when you see that Brett Favre is 14^th.

Ben Roethlisberger 17th? What gives? From Year 1 to Year 2 of his career, his completion percentage dropped 3.7 points; from year two to three, 3.0 points. His TD-to-interception ratio, plus-eight in 2005, dropped to minus-five last year. He is profoundly inconsistent. I say he's a C-plus player until I see six or eight straight weeks of the same guy.

I think that we did see six to eight weeks of the same guy last year, and he wasn’t particularly good.

Mike Vick's understudy will be better this year than Mike Vick.

Former understudy, and, yes, Schaub is certainly off to a better start than is Vick, though Schaub is worthless to someone who wants to see one pit bull kill another (allegedly).

Eli Manning, who could playing for two jobs this year (his own and Tom Coughlin's), enters the pop charts at number 23. He'll need to be feistier and significantly more accurate, neither of which I am confident will happen, to save his career in the Meadowlands.

A kind of clever first sentence, though I’m not sure that I consider feistiness to be the attribute that Peter does.

Rex Grossman's got some improving to do.

No exactly litotes, which is a shame because litotes is a great word.

I hadn't seen such a low-performing passer in the Super Bowl since Trent Dilfer with the Ravens seven years ago, and quite frankly I'm surprised the Bears didn't get some insurance at the position with a youngster in the draft. I have him 27th, fairly ridiculous for a first-round pick who started in the Super Bowl.

Peter isn’t being fair here because he includes winning as his first criterion for this list (and that is winning football games, not direct individual competitions like ping pong or golf or vying for the affections of former Playmate of the Year Heather Kozar).

As for how I arrived at my picks, other than with a divining rod, I used a few measuring sticks.

Nice parallelism in the metaphor.

I value wins from my quarterback, which helped Manning and Brady, the leaders in victories over the last two years. I value postseason success; their seven combined wins over the past two years is significant. Completion percentage and yards-per-attempt are the two passing stats I value the most because they tell you how often a quarterback succeeds in efficiently moving the chains through the air. Finally, intangibles. Brady led all passers with a 10 on a 10-point scale, because he's a coach, an offseason facilitator, a free-agent recruiter -- and he does it while retaining respect from the guys he often has to lean on hard.

I told you about wins, and postseason success would seem to favor Grossman, too (not that I think he’s good, of course, just that the first two criteria should favor him quite a bit). Remember when Peter was defending Brett Favre a few weeks ago and he cherry picked some stats and did meaningless analysis with them? Yeah, he didn’t mention completion percentage or yards/attempt (I did because I’m not trying to prop up a charismatic aging superstar). Finally, we have a bullshit dump called “intangibles” because Peter needs some way to massage these rankings as he sees fit. And how can someone actually go through the intellectual process of discussing “intangibles” and then assign a quantitative value to them? What was that about measuring sticks? Also, note how the last sentence finally acknowledges the role of a qb’s teammates for his success even though we get the blunt instrument of “wins” as a first standard of a quarterback’s play.

And hey -- don't go saying, "King's such an idiot! He thinks Jon Kitna's one of the best quarterbacks in football.'' That's not what I think. What I think is by the end of this year, we'll have seen Kitna as one of the 10 most productive quarterbacks in the NFL this year.

What is the difference between “best” and “most productive”? That is to say, what is the difference between performance and identity as far as we should care when evaluating athletes? Peter even accounts for intangibles, so what’s the problem?

One final note: Now that he's won the Super Bowl, how special is Peyton Manning, and how long a shadow must he cast for his little brother in New Jersey? Check out his line. Among two-year starters returning to start in 2007, Peyton's the most productive over the last two years (8,144 yards), the best at getting it downfield (8.06 yards per throw), the most accurate (.660), with the best touchdown-to-interception ratio (+40). For years, we could say -- and not be wrong -- that all Manning does is put up great numbers. Now we've got to say he puts up intergalactic numbers while, at the same time, putting his team in a good position to win.

But Peyton has only 9/10 intangibles (shadow casting is actually a tangible and is calculated with actual, literal measuring sticks). And I’m not even sure how to talk about intangibles. Are they discrete quantities, as in, “How many intangibles does Tom Brady have?”—a prodigious fuckload, you’ll no doubt answer—or is intangibles a continuous quantity, as in, “How much intangibles does Eli Manning have? Four? Then who has less [note: not fewer]? No one? Then how does the scale go from 1 to 10?” Either way, I think that a twelve-sided die should be involved here.

By the way, can we ever expect a sportswriter to say that “putting up great numbers” is a really good thing and usually equals “played really well”? Brett Favre, by the way, who hasn’t played well or put up good numbers, receives an intangibles score (heretofore an oxymoron quotient) of 8, but Peter fails to note that a solid 3.5-4.0 of that 8 are Brett’s intangibles in favor of an opposing defense.

On to the quotes of the week

QotW I

"People talk about them not being very exciting. All they have done is won four world championships, played great defense. There is nothing wrong with that motto right there.'' -- Giants coach Tom Coughlin, talking about the San Antonio Spurs winning their fourth NBA title of the decade on Thursday.

My personal motto: a list of two facts is not a motto.

QotW II

"I didn't know paintball was that dangerous. I hope it wasn't friendly fire.'' -- Washington linebacker Marcus Washington, commenting on the injury suffered by first-round pick LaRon Landry at a team-building exercise among defensive players on Wednesday. Landry missed practice Friday after getting pelted in the groin by a paintball pellet.

At least this is funnier than Westbrook v. Davis (assuming that LaRon has a sense of humor). Also, do we have any chance in our lifetimes (and I’m including anyone currently alive on this planet. Hell, I’ll throw in frozen embryos while I’m at it) of ever hearing someone in the media say genitals/testicles/gonads/junk instead of the euphemistic “groin”? At least groin is more accurate than mid-section (and years ago I heard Bill Walsh, commenting when 49ers o-lineman Steve Wallace was clearly popped right in the nuts, refer to that shot as a blow to the “stomach,” which is almost true inasmuch that such a blow makes one feel as though a watermelon were creeping through one’s abdominal cavity.)

QotW III

"I can still pop on the film and show you I am still the best at what I do.'' -- Giants defensive end Michael Strahan, 35, who will have to prove that all over again in 2007. He has missed 15 games due to injury over the past three years and has 18.5 sacks over that period.

Yes, film from 2003. Let’s do the time warp again.

FotWTMIOPK

Pepsi has introduced cucumber soda in Japan.

Seems the company thinks people will find cucumber soda an alluring way to beat the heat this summer.

De gustibus non est disputandam (praecipue in Iapan)

A/ETNotW

As someone who loves train travel, and who takes the train up and down the East Coast quite often -- I did it again last week for an anniversary trip -- I can sit quietly no longer about the state of the Boston station in Back Bay. What a dump. Grimy, smelly, humid, with a crummy waiting room. Washington's train station is a thing of beauty, almost a destination in and of itself. Baltimore's is OK. Philly's is ancient and utilitarian. Even Newark has a little gem of a station, and it's always busy. But can't a great city like Boston do something about the first place many visitors see when they get to town?

Yes, literally dozens of people get the wrong impression of Boston every six weeks. And did I say that Peter phoned in his column? Amend that to telegraphed.

SotW

This actually is a good stat: the NBA finals drew an average of 6.9 million TV households—of 113 million—per game. Peter compares that number to a true dog of an NFL game:

Remember the late-night Monday night opener on ESPN last year between Oakland and San Diego? Awful game. San Diego won, 27-0. It was pretty much over at the half, when the Chargers led 13-0 and the Raiders couldn't get out of their own way on offense. That game -- after a weekend that started with Thursday night football, went into Sunday afternoon football and Sunday night football, and had a Monday nighter before the second game on the West Coast -- started at 10:25 p.m. EST and ended at 1:14 a.m. Tuesday. And it was on cable TV, which gets a lower rating anyway because not every TV household in America is wired for cable.

The Raiders-Chargers debacle was seen by 7.9 million American TV households.

Well-argued, Peter, and the NBA does look pretty bad by comparison, but, hey, you always talk about popular the NFL is. Peter’s reasoning is a little specious, though. To wit:

We all know football is king in this country, but if the best the NBA has to offer gets trounced by the worst the NFL has to offer ... well, the NBA is in more than a little trouble.

One, I don’t think that anyone would argue that the Spurs/Cavs final was “the best the NBA had to offer,” at least in the sense that such a series is an optimal draw. The NBA’s problem is that it produces a dog of a finals too often; i.e., we’re not seeing the best the league has to offer. Two, no one at the time knew that the Chargers/Raiders game was “the worst the NFL had to offer.” Play that game in December and see what happens, especially since the bloom on ESPN’s newly carried MNF would have since diminished and doubly since everyone (even those cucumber-soda-drinking types in Japan) would know how absolutely wretched the Raiders were.

And, while we all know that the Raiders suck in ways outlawed in seven states, we don’t yet know what PK thinks he thinks. Fortunately, he’s going to tell us.

1. I think one of the best ideas this league has had in a while is to gather all the team medics in one place to discuss concussions and head injuries -- which will occur in Chicago on Tuesday.

Those team medics have no idea what’s coming. Hooray for misplaced modifiers (or does a spin cycle through the NFL’s official party line count as a head injury?)

It's good that the NFL isn't bringing in only the doctors who agree with the league's approach to treating head trauma. The league has also invited critics of the way head injuries and concussions are treated. I expect computerized baseline tests of brain function to soon become mandatory for all NFL players [emphasis added].

Pacman Jones may as well quit now.

"Safety comes first,'' commissioner Roger Goodell said to a group of sports editors in April. "At no time should competitive issues override medical issues.'' I think he honestly means it. On Tuesday, we'll start to find out for sure.

My guess is that the anti-scientific skepticism on this issue will approach such proportions that subsequent meetings will appropriately be held at that new creationism museum in Kentucky.

2. I think Brett Favre's sore shoulder means nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's June. He's been sore before, in a lot of different places, in the spring and summer.

A fair point, though one might wonder if that routine soreness is the mark of man well past his prime. Well, one not named Peter King.

3. I think the best story I've heard in a while is about a guy not forgetting where he was.

I was hoping for something approaching Spinal Tap high jinks (I shouldn’t hope for things).

In Saints camp on the last day of the offseason program, defensive end Charles Grant called over the club's vice president of communications, Greg Bensel, handed him a wad of $100 bills -- 20 to be exact -- and told him he wanted to buy lunch for all the women who work in the team offices. "Can you make it happen?'' Grant asked Bensel. He did, handing the $2,000 to GM Mickey Loomis' administrative assistant, who organized the luncheon field trip for the 20 women in the building. Way to remember where you came from, Charles.

Charles Grant is from somewhere where lunch is a hundred bucks a head? Was he raised dining only at political fundraisers?

4. I think, speaking of New Orleans, that even though our government continues to pretend that everything is fine there 20 months after Katrina, everything is decidedly not fine.

Sometimes I appreciate Peter’s beating on hobbyhorses (ignore the mixed metaphor).

And it's up to organizations like the Reggie White Foundation, with its Crescent Rising Program, to continue, brick by brick, the arduous process of rebuilding the town and its environs. Even in death, White is making a difference. This program is taking on the thankless job of efficient and safe home demolition, because there are thousands and houses that can't be properly rehabbed or rebuilt until the rotting timber and ruined guts are torn down. It's wonderful to build homes, obviously, but the first step in home rebuilding and home rehabbing is the very un-sexy job of demolition. I applaud the foundation for taking on this worthy project.

Crescent Rising? Without the imprimatur of Reggie White, I’d have sworn that that name would have something to do with Islam. Kudos to the group, which I assume isn’t demolishing the houses of homosexuals (unless they don’t want their houses demolished?). And, as Graham Greene tells us in “The Destructors,” destruction is, after all, a form of creation.

5. I think no one has any sympathy for Jets guard Pete Kendall's contract demands, which he stridently whined about the other day at a New York minicamp. He wants to renegotiate one year into a new four-year contract. If the Jets give in, they're fools.

PK’s right. The only strident whining that we’ll accept around here will come from aging liabilities who play quarterback and want to wear the general-manager pants.

6. I think the interesting thing in reading the newspaper clips from May and June is this: Everyone's going 16-0 this year. All the offseason adjustments are working everywhere. One lone exception: a very good story by Neil Hayes in the Chicago Sun Times questioning the Bears' shift of Devin Hester from defense to offense, with some solid reporting and good quotes from the last man to play electrically both ways -- Roy Green.

Exaggerating dumb hyperbole is like the worst rhetorical move ever.

7. I think Jeff Garcia said what I thought about his situation after he played so well down the stretch last season. "I felt personally snubbed,'' he told reporters at Donovan McNabb's charity golf tournament. Garcia still can't figure out why the Eagles didn't seriously try to sign him after he led the team to the playoffs. Neither can I.

I wonder if Donovan McNabb’s petulant reaction to a second-round pick of a quarterback might reveal some nugget of information relevant to this situation.

After a few actual football thoughts, we get our weekly non-football treats. I feel like Augustus Gloop.

a. I know it's illegal to even imply this, but there's not a lot of better things to do in the world on a nice early-summer night than smoke a Cuban Cohiba, which I was lucky enough to be able to do the other night to celebrate 27 years of wedded bliss.

Imply—to involve or indicate by inference, association, or necessary consequence rather than by direct statement.

Umm, that’s not what Peter just did.

b. Who woke up Kaz Matsui? The guy's playing like Ichiro.

Lame and vaguely racist, and remember when I praised Peter for avoiding facile racial comparisons (Think-I-Think 6) between athletes when he compared Keyshawn and Drew Bennet? I rescind that praise.

i. Speaking of Monday-morning-quarterbacking the last show, David Chase knew exactly what he was doing in creating a show the world would alternately hate, tolerate and debate endlessly over the past week. And no, I do not believe Tony is dead. Isn't it a part of mob ethos that you don't whack a guy when he's out with his family?

It probably is, but, and I’m no Sopranos acolyte, hasn’t Tony violated various mob dicta like 57 times? Also, and I think, having watched the last few episodes, that this is part of the point: Tony Soprano is a colossally terrible human being in every milieu but a guy whom we like because we’re suckers with A.J.-level attention spans when our scruples are at stake. What rough beast, indeed, A.J. A terrible beauty is—what? Oh, John from Cincinnati is on (and is the kid in that show supposed to seem mentally deficient in some way?).

j. In the coming years, we'll be talking about a Sopranos movie or one more season the way our big brothers and sisters talked about a Beatles reunion before John Lennon died.

Yep, I remember having that very same conversation with my little brother six months before he was born in May 1981 (it wasn’t very articulate since I was only two and much more into Hershel Walker at that point in my life).

k. Got a couple of assignments this week for SI, but MMQB is going on summer vacation, returning July 16. Try not to miss me as much as I'll miss you.

That’s why I love you, PK: you have no idea how much I love you.

The Incongruities

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Apple Juice

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Days are Getting Longer, but MMQB is Getting Shorter

QotW I

QotW III

FotWTMIOPK

A/ETNotW

SotW

All of My Dreams Have Come True

Will JLD post something substantive ever again?

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Important Dolph Lundgren News

Friday, June 15, 2007

"I put the Glue in...

Monday, June 11, 2007

AP: I'm here to help

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Four (4) Miles!

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

I don't like to pick on little girls

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Facendo un Giro di con Tourette's

Monday, June 4, 2007

To Me, This is Too Much

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Points of Interest

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