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The Marcus Vick Counterfactual

I grew up a Virginia Tech football fan. And I will never forgive Marcus Vick for what he did. Since he’s back in the news tonight, I thought I’d clue you in on a particular thing that’s bothered me for years.

Marcus Vick cost Virginia Tech the 2006 BCS Championship. I’ll explain why.

In the 2006 Gator Bowl, Marcus Vick stomped on the leg of Louisville defensive end Elvis Dumervil, an act that, on top of a series of indiscretions and illegal acts that would have made even his celebrated older brother (pre-incarceration, in fairness) blush, earned him his dismissal from the football team. 

Virginia Tech was coming off a No. 8 finish in the BCS standings when the younger Vick was cashiered, and they went on to a respectable 10-3 finish the next season under sophomore starter Sean Glennon. But if they’d retained Vick, I believe that the Hokies would have won the BCS title.

Here’s how it goes. Virginia Tech lost twice in the 2006 regular season, in back-to-back weeks, to Georgia Tech and Boston College. Neither game was particularly close, as in the first game, Calvin Johnson overcame a Virginia Tech defense (and, in Reggie Ball, a Georgia Tech quarterback) that had hamstrung him for his first two years as a Yellow Jacket. In the second, Matt Ryan and Boston College held a one-possession lead for most of the game before pulling away in the fourth quarter.

Here’s the point. That Virginia Tech team had two future NFL cornerbacks, four future NFL receivers, a very good college running back in Branden Ore, an even better college tight end in Greg Boone, a moon of a man who moonlighted in a single-wing package called the “Wild Turkey,” the last great Beamer Ball special teams unit and the last great Bud Foster defense. 

The one weak link was Glennon, the quarterback. To watch Sean Glennon play quarterback was to witness a level of panicked ineptitude the like of which I’ve never seen, before or since, in any position, at any sport. He was the Ford Pinto of quarterbacks—slow, uncomfortable and prone to blow up. He offered all the turnover potential of Michael Vick with none of the big play potential. I have never seen someone look so entirely and consistently frightened in any situation. I’ve never seen someone, in real life, tied to a pole and facing the serrated knife of a serial murderer, so I can’t say with any certainty that no one has ever been more frightened than Sean Glennon in the pocket. But even a middling ACC defense filled Sean Glennon with the level of panic that a normal person would feel facing vivisection.

It didn’t help that Bryan Stinespring was still calling the plays. Stinespring, the Hokies’ offensive coordinator, is…well, imagine the opposite of someone like Urban Meyer or Steve Spurrier. Imagine a playcaller who lives for seven-yard outs on third-and-10, who lacks even a scintilla of imagination. A strong-armed, mobile quarterback, a Tyrod Taylor or a Logan Thomas, can overcome such a feeble playbook, but Glennon was neither of those things. Glennon was Stinespring’s masterpiece, a pieta of offensive messiness the like of which Virginia Tech fans hadn’t seen since the days of Grant Noel. An orgy of tipped-ball interceptions and sack-fumbles that was less offense than pastiche. Bud Foster’s defense and Frank Beamer’s brilliant special teams scored so often more out of necessity than anything else. Under Glennon, Macho Harris, a cornerback and kick returner, was the team’s most dangerous weapon. 

Here’s the point—Marcus Vick was maybe 80 percent the runner his brother was, and didn’t have anywhere near Michael’s arm strength (which still puts him in the top 1 percent all-time of dual-threat college quarterbacks), but he could hit his excellent receivers short, and he could buy time in the pocket. He’d certainly have managed to do better than Glennon’s -63 net rushing yards (including sacks) in Tech’s two regular-season losses, and maybe he’d have managed to put more than three points on the board against BC before Matty Ice put the game away.

Maybe Vick would have been able to muster something more than Glennon’s first quarter against Georgia Tech, in which he pulled down his pants, took a shit at midfield at Lane Stadium, played ninepins with with the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his men and woke up down 21 points.

An 11-0 Tech team would have easily dispatched Wake Forest in the ACC title game and gone on to face 11-0 Ohio State in the BCS title game. That Ohio State team beat a Texas team that had just lost Vince Young and Michael Griffin, beat up on terrible competition all year, then breezed past a No. 2 Michigan team, at home, to book a spot in the BCS title game. And the first time the Buckeyes faced a team that wasn’t from the Big Ten—or, put differently, wasn’t total shit—it laid the championship game egg to end all championship game eggs, capitulating to maybe the third-best Urban Meyer-led Florida team with all of the resistance and fortitude I’d put up if Alison Brie walked up to me wearing nothing but heels, lingerie and a smile and demanded that I leave my fiancee to engage in a lifetime of senseless hedonism with her. It wouldn’t have been a slam-dunk, but Marcus Vick could have led the Hokies to victory against such a team.

This counterfactual involves replacing a terrible quarterback with a good one. It’d do to the No. 19 team in the country what changing an F to an A- would do to your GPA. 

So thanks a lot, Marcus Vick, because your inability not to step on Elvis Dumervil’s knee cost the Hokies a shot at a national title. I’m sure you’d rather live in a world where you’d won a ring and maybe gotten more than a perfunctory look from NFL scouts. You’d probably like that almost as much as I’d like to live in a world where I’d never been subjected to watching Sean Glennon play quarterback. 

I had faith in you, Marcus Vick. But you had to step on Elvis Dumervil, and our lives are appreciably worse for it.

Supermarket Condiment Power Rankings

Apologies to the various restaurant sauces I’ve consumed and enjoyed.

  1. Frank’s Red Hot
  2. Kikkoman’s yellow curry
  3. Vinegar (Ideally, Heinz malt vinegar, but to each his own)
  4. Chinese hot mustard
  5. Bleu cheese dressing
  6. Honey mustard dressing
  7. Thai chili sauce (Frank’s makes a decent one for starters, but you can find better)
  8. Raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing
  9. Soy sauce
  10. Hellman’s fat-free mayonnaise

On Anti-Semitism in Medieval Spain

One of the more interesting bits of European history, at least from my perspective, is the end of the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula in the 15th Century. I really wish it were a Caliphate until it collapsed in 1492, because “Caliphate” is a really cool word, perhaps my favorite name for an autocratic state, but I’ll have to live with my disappointment.

So we all know about how when the Christians retook Spain, it led to a new era of Spanish expansionism and control of the European power base, and how Ferdinand and Isabella remain celebrated historical figures to this day. Happy Columbus Day, by the way.

Anyway, the ouster of the Moors left the Spanish Jewry in an awkward position, as wars between Christians and Muslims have done for centuries before and since. The most celebrated example of such harsh treatment is the Spanish Inquisition. 

Now, some say that the persecution of the Jews in medieval Spain is the result of a power-hungry Church bending the ear of a power-hungry monarch, that the Church’s motives were religious or political in nature. I have a different theory.

I believe that the economic void left when the Moors were removed from power is historically undervalued. In my view, the most important cause of the Spanish Inquisition was the need of a fledgling and cash-strapped monarchy to 1) eliminate a potential economic rival in Jewish merchants and bankers and 2) appropriate the personal capital for royal and Church use, particularly in the absence of trade with the Moors.

It seems like a stretch, I know, to attribute such atrocities—raids on Jewish neighborhoods, torture, forced conversions, imprisonment—to economic reasons alone, but consider this:

It’s like the Moor money we come across, the more pogroms we see.

Afterbirth

@gberry523: “just how much did that debate format suck [Wednesday] night?”

It was awful, but Mitt Romney played it the way Tiger Woods played Augusta. Never have I seen such obvious contempt for a moderator. Romney took the opportunity to run riot over not only Jim Lehrer but Barack Obama as well (if for no other reason than it looked like Obama hadn’t been informed that there was a debate on until Wednesday morning). Romney scored points with moderates by backtracking on his entire campaign platform, but who cares, since no one really seems to care about facts in politics anymore.

The biggest problem, however, is that both candidates (and y’all probably know which side my bread is buttered on, but everyone’s guilty here) seem to have declared war on specifics, numbers, citing sources and, in general, the truth. What a political system we’d have, My Fellow Americans, if both political parties worth talking about didn’t hold voters in such contempt that they’d so brazenly peddle an amalgam of slogans, sound bites and outright falsehoods as immutable truths secure in the belief that American voters are stupid enough to believe it.

And if, you know, American voters weren’t actually stupid enough to believe it. Seriously, America. If you’re going to continue to be lazy, anti-intellectual, self-deluded and shortsighted, you’re going to get the politicians you deserve.

Wedding Dances

Along with my fiancee, I’ve been planning a wedding recently, and I’ve been thinking about line dances. They’re fun, but some of them are extremely annoying. For instance, under no circumstances will the “Cha-Cha Slide” be played.

In the interest of not taking up too much of the reception with coordinated dancing, I suggest mashing my favorite songs into one, with the help of a DJ.

Among the contenders:

The Cupid Shuffle. Because I love walking it by myself.

The Macarena. Because it’s among the greatest dance songs ever written.

Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat.” Because it’s the line dance that defined my generation.

Cotton-Eye Joe. Because I’m a closet redneck.

So we’ve got four songs, from at least three different musical traditions, in one line dance. I’m trying to think of a name for this line dance to end all line dances.

Oh, yes, I’ve got it.

The Eclectic Slide.

Why the NHL Lockout is Representative of The Fatal Flaw in American Society

Early Sunday, upon the expiration of the outgoing collective bargaining agreement, the NHL’s owners voted to lock out the players for the third time since 1994. In 2004-05, the NHL became the first major North American sports league to lose an entire season to a work stoppage, and now that that collective bargaining agreement is up, the owners are once again locking out the players, despite the NHLPA offering to continue to play under a system that massively advantages the owners.

During these negotiations, the NHL’s owners, coming off record revenue and a recent boom in popularity, has made it abundantly clear that not only will they refuse to pay the players what they thought was a fair share 8 years ago, but that anything approaching the status quo is unacceptable.

But you know all this. The real point of this post is the reaction from Calgary Flames winger Mike Cammalleri, who had this to say to the Toronto Star:

“How do we win? We’ve already lost,” said Flames forward Mike Cammalleri. “We’ve already conceded ($800 million, all figures U.S.). It seems like for them, it’s become the bully in the playground. It’s like: ‘We think we can take your cookies, too.’”

Cammalleri explained the players’ exasperation:

“They came to us and said we have a systemic problem with the small-market teams losing money. We said: ‘Okay, we’ll concede up to $800 million-plus as long as the bigger teams help us in a revenue-sharing model.

“Then we did that, and they said: ‘Oh, that’s not the problem. The problem is you guys just make too much money.’

“Your boss comes to you tomorrow and says: ‘My company does great, makes tonnes of money but I’m going to take 20 per cent of your salary just because where else are you going to work?”

“Where does it end?” says Cammalleri. “If we take their proposal, the next time around, they’re still going to have the same excuses. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t address any of the problems they said we know would make the league healthier.

“They’re going to come to us with the same issues. Of course they don’t want to fix those problems, because they want to be able to do this to us again next time.”

There are those who throw up their hands and call this labor disagreement “Millionaires vs. Billionaires” and engage in finger-wagging aimed at both sides. That’s missing the point. This is a multi-billion-dollar organization taking a bite out of its labor force (and in the process, putting out of work tens of thousands of support staff who make a relative pittance) not because it needs to cut costs to survive (as was the argument in 2004) but because it can.

There is nothing fans can do to stop it. The owners don’t need to play anytime soon because not only do they still get paid for their TV deal, they also tend to have cash reserves that allow them to hold out longer than players—and without having to pay staff and players, that advantage only grows. The owners don’t need to win a PR battle, because we as hockey fans have proven that we’ll come back when the games return. And why wouldn’t we? We’d only be depriving ourselves of the game we love so much, and at next to no cost to the owners.

Do you think that if I were naive enough to think some sort of boycott would have an effect, the Flyers would miss the $20 I’d spend on a Jakub Voracek shirsey next year? Even if thousands of fans joined in and made a public ruckus, it would take almost a complete fan blackout to make any sort of real economic impact. Cancel your season tickets? The big-market owners who are driving this lockout will just sell them elsewhere. Any effective fan protest would topple hilariously just like the 100 million-player game of prisoner’s dilemma it is.

So the fans have no recourse. The players, who are bargaining collectively with their employers in accordance with Canadian and American law, are similarly up the proverbial creek. They are faced with two options: 1) ply their trade overseas, in the case of the NHL’s North American majority far away from friends and family, for less money and in leagues that take only a passing interest in player safety or 2) sit at home without work of any kind, thanks to a Canadian Major Junior system that essentially stops educating promising young hockey players before they’re even out of high school. 

And again, there are the beer vendors, jumbotron operators, ice girls and PR staff who will go unpaid. Because the NHL has decided it’s not profitable enough. Six weeks, six months, a year from now, the players will cave and swallow whatever diktat Gary Bettman and Ed Snider deign to offer, because they can.

This is not a case of the rich getting richer. The rich getting richer is when a player signs a contract extension that bumps his salary up a few hundred thousand dollars. This is a small group of men whose wealth is beyond comprehension to normal Americans, plutocrats of such vulgar material worth that we only even belong to their species in a biological sense. Who were rescued from their own greed and shortsightedness only a few years ago and are now back for everything they can get.

It’s their right as Americans and Canadians to attempt to gain as much material wealth as possible. Some would say it’s kind of the point. And that they can put thousands out of work because they don’t think they’re rich enough is the logical extension of a political and economic system that values the individual over the whole. So they’ll grab for their billions because they can.

And we’re just sort of…okay with this…

What the fuck, America. What the actual fuck.

This isn’t about the lockout. This is about a society that holds labor in such low regard that the comfort of corporate ownership trumps the livelihood of the workers who make that comfort possible.

This is about a society that forgives companies who run themselves into the ground through risk and shortsightedness and rewards them with taxpayer money. We understand when they cut salaries and benefits and lay off employees to get through the lean times, then fail to notice when those jobs don’t come back when the company is healthier. 

This is about a society that is being taken apart by rich, old, white men whose ethics and morality bend to their own convenience and fails to question the sincerity of the very people who are out to screw it.

This is about a society that not only buys the absurdly transparent and self-serving lie that the only thing you need to get rich is hard work, but fails to see the hypocrisy in a political system where businesses have a right to make a profit but people don’t have a right to physical and economic security.

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we all buy the American dream on some level. I know I’ve got plans for my second house when I get rich, and all I have are a couple hundred dollars in my checking account and a set of skills the market doesn’t value anymore. I’ve dreamed on my millions when I hit the lottery, or sell my bestselling book, and I’ve blanched at even paying the taxes that come with wealth, to say nothing of potentially taking less than I could have to give others what they need. 

It’s not fair.

And that’s not the point.

Fairness has gotten us to the point where money buys not only comfort and security but political influence, and the best way to get money is to have it to start. If that’s fair, perhaps we should start looking for a different standard, or at least a different definition. 

I don’t expect a society that values the individual more than any other to change overnight into a communitarian utopia. I’m just frustrated.

We, the not-so-rich-you-have-live-in-servants, have been sold a bill of goods by the plutocrats. I made a bad deal, and I want to take it back. I want to renegotiate my contract with my society. I want only what the NHL owners want.

I want to fix these problems so they can’t do it to us again next time.