I Fall to Pieces Each Time I Strain My Quadricep

I have been looking forward to the first Falcons game of the season for a while. I’m a Falcons fan. I’m only a marginal NFL fan, but I have always been a hometown fan kind of guy (maybe home-state is more appropriate, but you get the idea). Anyway, the Falcons have not been a popular pick for Monday Night Football games during their history, so I haven’t seen a whole lot of MNF games. Sure I’ll flip over to them while watching other things, but last night’s Falcons opener is the first time in a long time I’ve been excited about a game on Monday night. I was so excited I even watched that countdown show on ESPN despite it being hosted by Stuart Scott. About halfway through the countdown show a “fight” erupted on the field between a group of Falcons and the Eagles. I put the word fight in quotes because, well, when you’re in football pads and helmets, can it really be a fight? I’d call it a skirmish at best. Anyway, two guys were tossed before the game even started. I don’t know if this has ever happened before, but even if it hasn’t it was no reason for Stuart Scott, Michael Irvin, and company to treat it like a shot had just come from the book depository. Wait, it’s ESPN, why was I surprised?

So MNF starts and they do their little sketch. I guess they have pressure to make these as tame as possible ever since that Desperate Housewives/Terrell Owens thing last year because this one took place in a control tower at Heartsfield-Jackson-Cougar-Mellencamp International Airport. It starred Clint Howard, Robert Carradine, Peter Boyle, and Joe Namath. Well, you can’t get any less sexy than that. (Still no word on the validity of the rumor that Joe Namath was drunk during the filming of the sketch and called Carradine “one sexy nerd” while trying to stick his tongue down his throat.) By the way, is it any coincidence that the two biggest TV censorship issues in the past couple of years have been because of football? Is it because football is the only thing a lot of people watch together anymore? Just asking.

When the actual football coverage started I was immediately reminded of just how out of it John Madden can be sometimes. (I’m talking about the football guy, not the director of Shakespeare in Love.) Does everybody just cut him slack because of those video games and his age? While talking about the Philadelphia Eagles in the intro he actually said that they would be in trouble if they lost 3 or 4 in a row. Really, John? You think? Are you telling me that a team that plays a 16 game schedule would be in trouble if they lost 3 or 4 games in a row? I would have never known. The whole thing reminded me of that SNL sketch they did after Dennis Miller started doing MNF games. Will Ferrell played Dan Fouts and said stuff like, “That's right, Al. Tampa Bay is an excellent, excellent football team. But the Vikings have a great football team too. Al, my prediction is that whoever puts the most points on the scoreboard will probably win tonight's football game.” It was parody, but it couldn’t have been more spot-on. Sadly, that’s the majority of analysis you get on televised sports these days.

At halftime Al Michaels got to introduce a new segment for MNF. Each week Tim McGraw changes the lyrics to his song “I Like It I Love It” to reflect what went down in the previous week in football. I’m not sure what the best part of this segment was. It was either the fact that Al Michaels introduced it like it was the last thing he wanted to do or it could have been during the actual video for this week’s version of the song when Tim put his arm around a silver-haired old lady that looked exactly like David Letterman’s mom. It seems that Janet Jackson’s tit has scared the NFL so much they won’t even let Tim McGraw hug a hot chick during his weekly football video. All hot chicks are now relegated to the beer commercials only. Now this brings the total number of country songs that get their lyrics changed each week on MNF to two. They’ve got Hank Williams Jr’s “Rowdy Friends” in the opening and now the Tim McGraw song at halftime. Where will it end? Personally, I’m hoping for a revamped “I Fall to Pieces” for each injury update. And is there any reason they couldn’t have quickly reworked “Fist City” when talking about the pre-game brawl?

Well, maybe I should actually say a few words about the game. I haven't read anything about it yet today but I imagine there are a lot of people saying the Falcons got lucky because of the ejection before the game. I suppose that's true. The Falcons did rush a lot last night and the Eagles guy that was ejected was their top defensive guy against the rush. But if the Eagles kicker would have made two of his missed field goals, they would have won anyway. No matter what the supposed injustice is in sports, playing the if game is pointless. Unless you are talking about Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS. Eric Greg called anything that landed in Charles Johnson's glove a strike. I used to think my memory of this game was just fuzzy, but I saw some clips of it the other day and there's no way Livan Hernandez wins that game without Eric Greg behind the plate. Why hasn't there been an investigation into that game? We can call players in front of congress because of steroids, but we can't get to the bottom of whether Hernandez bribed Greg? Look at that. I started writing about football and ended up on baseball. Imagine that.