This is Officially Ridiculous.

As an addendum to yesterday's entry (and because there's else nothing in the news that wouldn't overload the already bulging Dossier O' Dumbassery), let's look at the chronology of the Titans' cringe-worthy crescendo thus far:

Team plays with the intensity of limp asparagus most of season > QB in hot water for decking a guy at a strip joint > RB whines endlessly about his contract > LB suspended four games on suspicion of using banned substances > chaos erupts at practice, complete with flying helmets and unsettling notion that WR and CB hate each other > Rookie DE arrested for speeding and driving with a suspended license > sinkhole opens at LP field, revealing greater problems, possibly not covered by insurance...

And now backup QB Chris Simms was arrested early yesterday morning in Manhattan on suspicion of driving while under the influence of marijuana - while his pregnant wife was in the car with him. (AP/ESPN) Three days before the anniversary of Steve McNair's death (the circumstances of which will not be investigated further, if I forgot to mention this above.

I seriously cannot make this stuff up. If Jeff Fisher doesn't commit hara-kiri within 48 hours, I'll send all of Tennessee a fruit basket. Or maybe steak. 

Summer Extra Points

Comments are again closed/hidden. The minute I opened them up two weeks ago, I received a staggering influx of porn links written in other languages. Which is great, I guess, if you understand said languages and you're feeling a bit randy, but I wouldn't expect a fair portion of my readership to feel that way while reading about football.

If anyone's been following the Tennessee Titans (who seem to be hogging the NFL's entire supply of bad karma), and have thought it could get no worse, ye are mistaken, mortal - it just got worse. The spring's flooding in Nashville has caused a sizable sinkhole to open up at LP field, in addition to the other three million dollars of damage the flooding caused to the stadium. (Nashville Business Journal) Due to the fact that those in the know think this may have been caused by a "pre-existing condition" (ie, they built the place on shaky ground) and shoddy construction (ie, they can't hold a stadium together any more than they can hold a team together down there), the city's insurance may not cover the damages! Folks, we've officially crossed from bad psychology into a disaster of Biblical proportions. God/Goddess/The Powers That Be has decided (s)he/it hates the Titans and anyone/anything associated with said team and is content on wrecking their home turf, thereby offering schadenfreude to everyone else. I'm actually kind of sad that the Bears don't play the Titans this year; watching the League's most inept offense square off against the League's biggest train-wreck would be uproarious. I'm also looking forward to the Eagles/Redskins game just to watch Donovan McNabb get confused about who he plays for halfway through the third quarter or something. 

My buddy Eric, football fan and avid reader, points out that the whole sordid mess in Nashville actually follows Greek mythology, where the Titans were actually the Elder gods of the Greek pantheon, and they were eventually overthrown and banished by other gods. History always repeats itself, right?

In other news: Bears tickets go on sale in sixteen days. I'm excited. 

This just in...

I know, everyone is still reeling from the USA's anticlimactic World Cup implosion against Ghana, or happy/upset over having to watch Germany/Argentina annihilate everyone they play. There's still a few hilarious things happening in football, however, (the other football: the one without the low scoring, bad acting, and endlessly buzzing vuvuzelas). Did you hear that a woman actually burst her windpipe blatting away on one of those things for hours on end? (UK Daily Mail)

My favorite story from the past two days: Detroit Lions president Tom Lewand was arrested in Michigan (following a charity golf game) for driving with a blood alcohol level over twice the state's legal limit - after telling police that he was the designated driver. (ESPN) I don't know what to say about this, but if I were president of the Lions, I'd probably be drinking too.

As the World Turns...

I listed the humiliating offseason collapse of the Titans as #2 on the year's all-time bad psychology rankings. I'd hate to say this, but it keeps getting worse. Over the background of Chris Johnson's workout-skipping and seemingly endless bleating about his contract and this banter about whether or not Commissioner Goodell with discipline Vince Young, we now find out that Titans rookie DE Derrick Morgan was arrested on Wednesday for speeding. Badly. (The Tennessean). Did I also mention that requests to re-open the case of slain former Titans QB Steve McNair have all been denied? (ESPN and other sources) Jumpin Jehosephat, I honestly can't think of what else can go wrong for the Titans at this point. Political campaign contributions? Methamphetamine? Smuggling weapons to Al Qaeda? A gay sex scandal involving players from a division rival team? An official decree from the governor of Tennessee to drown the entire organization in the Cumberland River?

In other news, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has released/leaked 572 pages of records detailing the investigations surrounding Ben Roethlisberger's sexual assault allegation from earlier this year. A small chunk of it can be found over at The Smoking Gun (fine purveyors of pop culture bilge since 1997). Warning: It's got some bad words and likely not safe for work/little ones because (if events actually transpired this way) it's beyond creepy. I skimmed through a few pages of it out of morbid curiosity, and only thing that really caught my eye (if anything can be amusing in a rape case) were the approximately eighteen different spellings of Roethlisberger's name in the police statements.

Until the blog goes down, I'm actually thinking of making the Second and One Police Blotter a regular feature. I just need to come up with a good name for it. Sheet O' Slander? Journal O' Justice? Dossier O' Dumbassery? 

And we'll end with a bit of Bears fanservice: the Tribune yesterday did a nice photomontage of WR Johnny Knox's rookie season, and the following picture, where Knox shows Seattle kicker Olindo Mare his Heisman pose, got a good laugh out of me:

PWNED. (source: Tribbie).

So Here's What's Happening.

18 months ago, when I started this blog, Second and One, it was a distraction from some unpleasant things in my life. And it worked. It worked very well as a place for me to harmlessly divert energies that would have been (plausibly) destructively wasted elsewhere - I took all of this energy and used it to write about something I truly do love: football.

Then, it became a challenge for myself, where I sat down and said "If I write a blog where an average person simply writes about news and feelings about the sport in a safe yet matter-of-fact way, will anyone actually read it?" And about a year later, we have our answer: no. Despite months and months of ashamedly pimping this site on Facebook, etc., readership remains extremely low and I've tried several events to get people to participate more (polls, etc.) to no avail. 

Couple this with the fact that I'm very busy at work these days and getting ready to move into a new, amped-up phase of my career, and the balance between the time it takes for me to actually do the research, find credible sources (and then express this material in an engaging manner, even when I'm not feeling humorous) and what feedback I get back on it gives me diminishing returns. Additionally, I have no way to assess readership or circulation beyond the use of a cheesy "hit counter" or the like (which is hard to do in Blogger), because I had to lock the comments to prevent spammers from posting inappropriate material.

So Second and One is going offline because I don't have the time/energy to commit to it anymore given what is coming out of it. I've had someone recommend that I try and get it syndicated, but this involves more time and energy and is essentially a crapshoot. I've had people say, "Just update more frequently." Well, this is hard to do in the offseason when there's no news on the radar for months, and it's also rather difficult to do when I work a job that, some weeks, demands 50+ hours of my time.

I've also gotten allusions to the "why don't you make it more like [insert name of popular sports blog here?]" routine. Simple answer: I shouldn't have to sacrifice something I liked doing, in the way I liked doing it, to fit someone else's mold (and this would come with syndication as well).  And I shouldn't have to make this blog something it isn't - sensationalist, crude, or vulgar - to attract readership. I shouldn't have to emulate someone from ESPN or Deadspin. I shouldn't have to perpetuate unfair stereotypes of certain players, or post pictures of half-naked girls, or use rhetoric that's misogynistic, racially insensitive, or just plain raunchy. This is/was meant to be witty rambling about football and the teams and players we love, and there's plenty of wiggle room for the subtle idiocy and innuendo, but it's not some saucy, profane manifesto of how I want to strangle whoever I started at running back during fantasy season. 

And perhaps I'm not qualified to even write about this subject. Sure, I watch a lot of football, I read a lot of football news, I go to plenty college and to pro games, I get lots of peoples' opinions - but beyond the occasional game of flag footie, I've never played (and I could go into why but that's *really* beside the point here). Maybe it is tantamount to asking someone who's never been in the military to write a detailed account of a tour in Afghanistan, and maybe it's not. Maybe I should write a blog about something I know very well: random humor, political stuff, writing fiction, or what hydrogenation catalysts light on fire spontaneously. The point is, short of my father and a few friends, nobody cares what I have to say here, and I find the whole notion rather depressing now.

So here's the order of events here. Posting will continue semi-regularly until the end of July. August 1st, "2ndand1.blogspot.com" will be abandoned. There may be another "save the blog"-rally then, but it's unlikely. I'm sorry for anyone I may offend, upset, or inconvenience with this action. Thanks to everyone who participated in this experiment.

Comments are open.

MC

Founder/Blogger

Second and One

Bad Psychology Addendum, 2

Texas and (Ch)Oklahoma have elected to stay put in the Big 12. Nonetheless, interconference shenanigans are still ongoing - The Pac-10 11 12 has extended an offer to Utah, who has all but accepted. (Deseret News). The Utes are apparently a nomadic tribe, now moving into the sixth conference they've been in. 

A University of Utah alum (read as: one of my sports-crazed colleagues) expressed borderline violence when he learned of the news, and called Utah's move "traitorous," as it breaks up the school's biggest rivalry - with BYU. Additionally, the president of the University of Utah is a BYU alum, and the president of Brigham Young University is a Utah alum. With all of this information in hand, I will jump on the bandwagon: What are they thinking?!

Bad Psychology Addendum:

In light of the last post's #3 entry: It's not happening. News breaks today that MSU head coach Tom Izzo is staying at MSU, (ESPN), and there will be no purple Kool-Aid-style mass suicide in East Lansing, MI. 

More to come later that's actually about football.