Monday Night Football preview: A perfect distillation of East-Coast media bias!

Oh Year End List Makers:
This week (the second to last of the Footballz broadcast schedule) we reap the benefits of a sports media that is a slave to the whims of the Big Markets. Let me set up a hypothetical for you. Two teams have the sterling records of 7-6 and 4-9 going into a game, and even the 7-6 team has a very slim (almost no) chance of making the playoffs. The 4-9 team has a laughingstock of a coach who will probably not make it through the off-season, and a first-round quarterback who is largely thought to have been a huge bust. The 7-6 team was a trendy pick (and it always seems to be this way) to do damage in the playoffs and features a quarterback who shows flashes of talent but takes too may hits and is consistently inconsistent. Should these teams be on national television with two weeks left to go in the season? (Especially with so many exciting games this week – well, okay that last one was kind of boring)? No, they should not, which is good because they aren't. I was describing the Texans and the Raiders, but our Monday-night match-up is eerily similar.

The Redskins are 4-9. Coach Jim Zorn, while clean of soul, has the dirt of dead-man-walking on him. (For crying out loud, his play-calling duties were given to a bingo caller -- and one who calls it at a senior center, not even a pro.) Jason Campbell is thought to stink on ice (though some people whose opinions I trust claim he isn't so bad). And both Zorn and Campbell are kind of mailing it in, since they both know they'll be gone by the end of the year. The team remains in a constant state of disarray. And I will not even get into the not-talked-about-enough fact that the team that plays in Our Nation's Capitol (I guess they play in Maryland but whatever) has the most racist name in all of sports (sorry Orangemen) and who's mascott's questionability is outstripped only by the worst mascott in all of professional sports. This is a team that noone should be forced to watch.

Their opponents are the over-covered, underachieving 7-6 New York Football Giants (not to be confused with the much-more-entertainingly-named Wabash Little Giants). Eli Manning (the whelp of the litter) has regressed from this to this or maybe this or this (okay that last one was both photoshopped and a little unfair) and has never found a connection with any of the young receivers on the roster who were brought in to replace Eli's sweatpants-wearing security blanket. While the team has been mildly embarrassing, nothing can touch the work of its former superstars, Tiki Barber and Michael Strahan. Oh, goodness. I will leave Tiki's Olympics coverage to stand on its own without comment, but his grit-and-grin  while trying to hold together that polished-in-a-million-media-relations-classes smile after the Giants won a Super Bowl without him might have been the only salve for Patriots fans everywhere. Mr. Strahan has tried ever so hard to cultivate a gap-toothed teddy bear image with his move to the guffaw-filled Fox studio show. (Dear god, if I would be allowed to kill just one man with a rusty implement it would be tough for me to choose between Jay Glazer, Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, and Frank Caliendo; and Jimmy Johnson would escape my wrath only because of this.) While we’re on the subject of Strahan, let’s also mention his starring role in the terrible, Brothers and his messy divorce (oh New York Post, you fantastic print version of wikipedia that no one can/wants to edit after the fact). All in all it has been a rough couple of post-championship years for the boys in blue.

So, what can we look forward to in this game, drawn up by the morons who believe that all people want is a steady diet of mediocrity from the eastern seaboard? (When it comes to sports, that is. I prefer my political mediocrity from the East Coast, but also from Chicago and the West Coast, with one notable exception.) Well, let’s see: Brian Orakpo has turned out to be pretty good, and it will be fun to see the close-ups and try to guess which players/coaches/NFL employees/cheerleaders/fans will be looking for new employment soon. (ECONOMY! I am one health care joke away from turning this into the Christmas Sweater. Well, that and a self-hate that turns itself outward towards any who disagree with me. Um ... okay, let's say that and a NAPA sponsorship.) It is our second-to-last broadcast of the year and will probably be the last coherent one, since we will be inviting a lot of un-miked guests to the last one so we'll probably be talking to them a lot of the time but it will sound like a (boring) party! So we'll see you tonight at 8:30pm EST! Listen at the link below.

Foot Ballz Talk is a live internet broadcast in which "two guys talk about football during a Monday night and play records." It is produced by Mac and TD (familiar to fans of the musical endeavors Big Digits and Bodega Girls), and has been described by us (not by them) as "Mystery Pigskin Theater 3000." Each Monday, we'll publish the FBT preview of that night's contest. You can listen to Foot Ballz Talk on the internet, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.