Monday, February 3, 2014

richard sherman and the super bowl


The Super Bowl happened, and aside from a few funny commercials - the Full House, Puppy Love, and Seinfeld ones all come to mind, it was kind of a snoozer. The game got out of hand pretty quickly, and especially now that it's done, it's obvious that the first snap was the only play you needed to see. Admitedly though, I was cheering for Peyton Manning. And when that quickly became an exercise in futility, I began cheering for myself - in the ping pong tournament that then consumed the Super Bowl party.

Congratulations to the Seahawks though (like they would be anything less than indifferent to my feelings on the game). And holy shit, Bruno Mars killed it.

But on the radio the other day, I heard something kind of funny. During a Super Bowl show of sorts, essentially the host said something along the lines of "we live in a crazy society where people are still talking about Richard Sherman but we seem to have forgotten about Riley Cooper". If it matters to you, radio show host guy, I'm gonna talk about both of them. Right meow.

Couple things: Riley Cooper happened over the summer, and there was a huge hullaballo that went along with him. Widespread condemnation, many interviews with his teammates, friends, family - it was a circus. We aren't talking about it anymore because it was like six months ago, and certainly more interesting things have happened since some relatively unknown hothead wide receiver dropped a drunken n-bomb.

Richard Sherman happened like two weeks ago. And other than now being mentioned in passing or via memes, along with the celebration of HIS TEAM WINNING THE SUPER BOWL, really the coverage of his interview meltdown consisted of:

1) Alarmist pontification about what is wrong with America because a bunch of idiots on twitter are tweeting really stupid things.

2) People coming to Mr. Sherman's defense.

Also, there's the fact that Richard Sherman actually is a great story worth talking about a little. He lived in a shitty part of town, had good parents, crushed high school, killed it at Stanford, and is now one of the best players in the league. Most would agree that his is a great story.

Dude made an awesome game-winning play, got super PUMPED, yelled at a pretty little NFL reporter, and that was that. To be fair, Crabtree does seem to be a little bitch. Who cares that you'd never see Tom Brady or Peyton Manning do anything like that. Sherman isn't getting paid to be a team leader, he's getting paid to be an awesome cornerback on a brutal defense with tons of attitude.

On the flip side, Riley Cooper is pretty athletic, had a solid college career, initially disappointed in the pros, dropped the infamous n-bomb, and now just had a better than average season in 2013. Yeah, I don't really care to hear too much about him anymore either. Except when he's a priority pickup in fantasy.

In summary, Sherman's is an interesting, hope-filled success story lightly marred by an outburst; Cooper's is one of medicrity to kinda above-averageness with a stain of idiocy.

This Martin-Incognito stuff is way more interesting. Now that the Super Bowl is finally done, I don't think we'll have long to wait for this to get really good. Though, credit to Martin for apparently being just as much of a piece of shit/awesome as Incognito, evidenced by the latter's lawyer leaking some text messages last week. Good stuff.





No comments: