Ok, I'll do it: Drunk Diary IV

Eventually I'm going to catch up to the Super Bowls...only 37 more entries to go.  If I can make these drunken posts on frigid Feburary nights, than it's surely attainable...by May.  Or perhaps by the middle of March if I dedicate myself to making it a daily routine (neither a bad idea nor out of the realm of possibility...)

American football.  So excting.  So exciting that...it had me asleep by halftime.  Not even the artist fomerly known as...could awaken me from my slumber.  That guy's really really overrated, too.  Unless it's the Bills or has fantasy implicationas, I can't watch the NFL anymore.  It's so generic, so predictable, so antiseptic, if my mind is functioning well enough to use that word properly.  Coaches gameplan 18 hours a day 365 days a year to basically achieve a stalemate.  Even the most exciting athletes in the league (Reggie Bush, Vick, Vince Young, Steve Smith) aren't that exciting to watch because the context in which they perform is so fucking...contrived.  What we're really watching is a bunch of coordinators with laminated playsheets covering their mouths shouting the same shit into Motorola headsets, which has been dissected to death by their opponents in the week prior to he game...I'm sorry, but the NFL has nothing to offer me anymore.  It doesn't excite me.  I've seen it all.  

Back to the real national pastime.  Is it just me, or does the "collective consciousness" of AN gain ground on Billy Beane with each passing interview?  I feel as though this may be the one where we have actually surpassed him in our astuteness and savvy.  Derspite his acknowledged ability to adapt to an ever-changing market, he's still clinging to philosophies that really serve as crutches: it's only my job to get us to the playoffs, I can only exert so much control, the manager can only exert so much control, etc.  He was a visionary at a time, but his time may have passed.  Now, he's stuck in a mindset that may render him average in a couple years' time, maybe more if GM's continue to exhibit the glaring idiocy that they have to this point.  Basically, he's not willing to re-evaulate and further refine/perfect his stances on the minute aspects of the game that he could exert further control over...like in a short series.  He might need to cede some control, because he's obviously not going to make that change willingly.  Has he never seen a fucking WinExp graph?  He certainly can handle the long term, but the short term...he acts as if there's NO way to affect the outcome from a managerial standpoint.  That pisses me off, and strikes me as ignorance.