Vince Young is the comeback story of the year

If not for the Fall of the Cablinasian Empire, the story of 2009 would be redemption. If Tiger could have found a way to squash the Nov. 23, National Enquirer story the way he did a few years ago or if he never gets into that car wreck on Thanksgiving or if, you know, he wasn’t a serial philanderer, we would be talking about Kobe finally winning a title without Shaq or Alex Rodriguez and all he went through and then accomplished this year.

And then maybe, just maybe, we’d make some time for the best comeback story of all -- Vince Young.

Young’s story isn’t nearly as salacious as Kobe or ARod’s. He has never been accused of sexual assault or admitted using performance enhancing drugs. But no one in sports has faced more scrutiny since he entered the NFL in 2006. Since that time, he has been called dumb, thickheaded, unrefined and has generally been labeled a bust by most of the people who cover football.

It started with his Tiger-esque fall from grace following Texas’ national championship in 2006. In what was the most exciting championship game in any sport of this decade, Young singlehandedly led the Longhorns past USC and what many were calling the greatest college football team ever. Then came claims that he scored a 6 out of 50 on his Wonderlic Test at the NFL combine. This led everyone to question whether or not he could read (a score of 10 is considered literacy) let alone handle the complexities of an NFL playbook.

Suddenly the world turned on Young. He became the butt of every joke from the blogosphere. We all took practice Wonderlic Tests so we could compare our scores to his and feel better about ourselves. The mainstream media generally wrote him off as just another black athlete with a ton of natural ability but as missing the brains to get the job done.

But he continued to prove that he could win. His first year, after Tennessee made him the third pick overall in the NFL Draft, he won the Offensive Rookie of the Year and made the Pro Bowl. The following season, he helped lead the Titans to playoffs. That didn’t change the media’s perception of him, however. He was still considered too flawed to ever be successful for an extended period.

Last season, an injury forced him out of the first game and he disappeared for a short time the following day, causing some to believe that he was contemplating suicide. His mother suggested that he was hurt by the taunting of fans and he might not want to play football any longer. Before long, his head coach Jeff Fisher had named Kerry Collins the starting quarterback for the rest of the season.

Fisher’s decision would normally have been controversial because of the age-old theory in sports that suggests players aren’t supposed to lose their job due to injury, but most people agreed with it. Young was called too-sensitive and the talking heads began to gloat about how they were right about him all along.

Then it all clicked for Young.

Collins went back to being Collins and the Titans were 0-6 when Young became the starter this season. Since that point, the team has gone 7-1 and is still alive in AFC Playoff race following yesterday’s victory over Miami. Young had his best game of the season against the Dolphins, throwing for 236 yards and three scores.

Now he’s thriving and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Aside from the constant criticism, Young also had to deal with the murder of his mentor Steve McNair in the offseason. McNair, another black quarterback who ran just as well as he threw the football, helped pave the way for more athletic quarterbacks like Young. In September, Young surprised McNair’s two kids by accompanying them to a father-son breakfast.

"Those are my boys," he said. "I wouldn't say it was to pay anyone back; it was just out of love. Steve would do it for me. He pretty much did it for me when I was growing up. I have a history with the boys and I want to do anything I can. I am their big brother."

Now Young has to do what he can to lead the Titans to the playoffs, something McNair always seemed to manage to do. But while he still has more work to do this season, one thing is clear:

The Vince Young comeback is complete.

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Old boy network can't fix baseball

Without acknowledging even the slightest bit of irony, Bud Selig has formed a committee comprised mostly of baseball’s eldest statesmen to help discuss ways to improve the game, claiming there are no sacred cows, that no concern will go unaddressed. In other words, Selig has brought in his most sacred cows to try to figure out why baseball has been replaced as the national pastime.

When you look at the names on the 14 person committee, it sounds more like some old boy network looking to have a reunion than a group of guys who can actually get anything done. Together the group, which features managers and executives like Tony LaRussa, Joe Torre, Terry Ryan and John Schuerholz and even political columnist George Will, has more than 450 years of baseball experience and almost double that in life experience. But what Selig failed to do was engage the younger generation of baseball people who will be essential to helping the sport evolve. Cleveland Indians General Manager Mark Shapiro, 42, is by far the youngest person on the committee and Frank Robinson is the only African-American.

By not enlisting even one of the game’s current stars or executives to represent that younger cohort, Selig’s project seems destined to perpetuate the theory that the people running baseball have fallen out of touch with the average fan. Even the timing of the formation of the committee comes off as more reactive than proactive. It sounds as though the calls to fix the sport have become louder and more frequent and Selig finally caved.

My concern is that this ageing group will sit around and quibble over issues that are either easily correctable or completely out of their hands while whiffing at the bigger picture. It shouldn’t take 14 people to agree that baseball needs earlier start times for games, should never ever be played in November and needs to expand the use of instant replay. These things are obvious. We also don’t need the committee spending the majority of its time discussing the pros and cons of the designated hitter, something the union would never consider abolishing, simply because LaRussa believes fans now fail to appreciate the art of the double switch.

Baseball’s problems run much deeper than that. How will some kid come to appreciate the art of the double switch when they don’t understand many of the basic parts of the game? Every guy on Selig’s committee grew up at a time when baseball was all you did as a child. Most were teenagers when the first Super Bowl was played. Basketball hadn’t taken off yet. And soccer was still for sissies.

Things have changed.

Unfortunately, baseball has not.

The committee can’t operate on the idea that every kid grows up wanting to be at the plate or on the mound in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. But it can encourage Selig and the rest of baseball to pay attention to the sport at the youth level in this country. Every franchise spends so much time and money trying to build feeder systems in other nations that they often forget about what’s happening here.

Let me tell you. The game is dying. The league I coached in here in Providence last summer had five teams with ten players on each roster. That’s it. 50 kids. Same with the older division. And it gets worse. There were only three tee ball teams. Yet every day the basketball courts located roughly 100 yards from the baseball fields were filled until the lights went out.

I can tell you first hand that this has nothing to do with a lack of resources or money, as many people like to argue. Kids choose basketball because they see LeBron James and Kobe Bryant doing commercials and they want to wear their sneakers. Basketball is cool. Baseball doesn’t need 14 elderly men telling it what to do. It needs a marketing plan. You know who the last truly marketable player in baseball was? Ken Griffey Jr. That was a decade ago.

Obviously that’s easier said than done. Baseball players won’t ever push sneakers or apparel the way NBA players do, but they can be more accessible. That’s what the committee must suggest. You want to make baseball more popular? Make it mandatory for players to attend every little league opening day within a given area. Every league schedules around their Mayor’s availability. Surely they would schedule around Derek Jeter’s. Imagine how many kids would sign up for baseball if they knew they would have a chance to meet David Ortiz or any pro ball player for that matter.

That’s the type of thinking it’s going to take to help baseball. Because in most parts on this country, the game doesn’t just need to be fixed.

It needs to be resuscitated.

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Manning needs a perfect season

We are now 13 games into the final year of the decade and the debate over who should join the Dallas Cowboys of the ‘90s, San Francisco 49ers of the ‘80s, Pittsburgh Steelers of the ‘70s and Green Bay Packers of the ‘60s as the team of the decade remains unsettled. Prior to the start of this season, most people seemed to agree that the New England Patriots were the front runner, but that the Steelers could pull ahead if they were to win another Super Bowl.

Right behind them, serving only as a cautionary tale, was the Indianapolis Colts. Oh right. Peyton’s team. The best regular season team led by the best regular season quarterback in history only made the conversation because of what it should have done rather than what it actually did. One Super Bowl appearance. One Super Bowl victory. A franchise that would be remembered in the history books the same way the Ravens, Buccaneers and Giants would in the 2000s – as having one good team.

But now the Colts stand as not only the winningest team of this decade, but as the winningest team of any decade in NFL history. 114 wins in the 2000s. And their 22 consecutive regular season victories is also a record.

So is there any chance Manning could lead his Colts past the Pats and Steelers so they can be remembered as the most dominant team of the decade?

Yes. But he needs to be perfect.

That’s the only way. If Indy can withstand Mercury Morris’ attempts to hex them and a San Diego team who seems to always enter the playoffs looking great before choking and then a possibly unbeaten New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl, then you could make the argument that they are the most accomplished team of the 2000s.

It’s not just the team of the decade talk that matters here. In a lot of ways, Manning’s legacy is on the line. Another Super Bowl victory would be nice, but an undefeated season would push him to the very top of another elite list: the greatest quarterbacks of all time. 19-0 would be the unique accomplishment of his incredible career, something none of the other great ones could say they managed to pull off. Not Elway, not Montana, not Marino and most importantly, not his biggest rival, Tom Brady.

The media and fans tend to make a bigger deal of rivalries than they should. We’re long past the days of players refusing to talk to each other because they play for different teams. Free agency can be blamed for that. Now they all dine with each other, attend the other’s charity events and judging from those Monday Night Football introductions, most players pledge far more allegiance to their college program than any professional team they play for.

But on a strictly competitive level, Manning can’t like the fact that most people consider his friend Brady more accomplished than him. To make matters worse, most would say that Brady won three Super Bowls with less talent than Manning ever had and it would be difficult to argue otherwise. Until Randy Moss, Brady never won with an elite wide receiver, much less the two Manning has seemed to always have. It has to irk Manning to know that the Colts have wasted so much talent.

And unbeaten season could change that. He would finish the job Brady could not a few years ago, and if he were to do it against an unbeaten Saints team led by the league’s next great quarterback, Drew Brees, it would only add to the achievement. To add icing to the cake, there Colts and Pats could clash in the playoffs in a rematch of one of the great regular season games in history earlier this year.

Unfortunately, with that opportunity comes the chance to fail, which Manning and the Colts have done more often than not when it matters the most. The truth is they have been so good in the regular season that there should be no argument as to who the best team of the decade is. But up to this point, Brady has been more consistent and to be fair, Big Ben Roethlisberger has been more successful.

All the pressure is on Manning.

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Randy being Randy in a place that allows it

This one’s for all the New England sports apologists out there. For you, Mr. I’m still waiting for David Ortiz to get to the bottom of his positive steroid test. And you, Mr. Manny Ramirez actually works a lot harder than people think. And especially you, Mr. Spygate was all a conspiracy to end the Patriots’ dynasty.

If you’re one of those people who refuses to believe your favorite player or team can do any wrong, then you deserve everything you get with the most disgraceful player in the NFL, Randy Moss.

New England won Sunday afternoon, as it always seems to when playing at home, but the victory was overshadowed by reports of Moss quitting on his team following a 16 yard catch that concluded with a fumble in the first half. According to the Boston Globe, two Carolina Panthers said the game plan was to get in the star wide receiver’s head early because they knew he would give up if he became frustrated.

"We knew he was going to shut it down," cornerback Chris Gamble said. “That's what we wanted to do him. That's what we did. He'd just give up a lot. Slow down, he's not going deep, not trying to run a route. You can tell, his body language."

Moss finished the game with only one catch and then like a petulant child, gave the media the silent treatment following the game. He has refused to speak since being sent home last Wednesday morning for being late to practice.

Of course, this isn’t the first time, or the second or third, that Moss has been accused of not running his routes properly or just giving up entirely. In fact, quitting on the Oakland Raiders is precisely what landed him in New England in the first place. His otherwise brilliant career has been plagued by these reports dating back to his days in Minnesota, where he once claimed, “I play when I want to play.”

It’s sickening when you think of the beating his more reliable teammate, Wes Welker, seems to take each and every week. But don’t expect anyone to get on Moss about it. He plays in New England, after all. This is the same group of fans who wanted to place a statue of their lazy left fielder outside Fenway Park until his final month with the Red Sox. Randy being Randy is just par for the course.

The media is just as pathetic. Nowhere else in the country will you find a group of local writers, radio hosts and television reporters lining up alongside the fans to get autographs from their favorite players. Most of these guys are more in love with Tom Brady than Gisele is. Earlier this season, Mike Freeman of CBSsportsline wrote an article criticizing Moss for –you guessed it— quitting on certain plays against the Atlanta Falcons. He charted every single play and found that “on a significant number of them, Moss either didn't block or generated a lackluster blocking effort. On other plays, when the ball wasn't going to him, Moss jogged some of his routes.”

You know what the collective response from NESN, Comcast SportsNet, WEEI, the Globe and the Boston Herald was? “Freeman is a hack.”

This is what happens when an entire culture goes from anguished to arrogant. Suddenly Bill Belichick’s decisions can’t be questioned, Theo Epstein is infallible and Doc Rivers is Red Auerbach with a more expensive suit. And the excuses extend to the field, which is why Moss can act like Manny in July 2008 but still be treated like Manny in October 2004.

Now with Belichick’s boys staring at a possible playoff matchup against the Denver Broncos and their much tougher wide receiver Brandon Marshall, I can’t help but think about the past. New England sports teams used to be defined by players who deserved to finally win a ring.

But these Patriots are defined by a guy who doesn’t.

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Time is now for Team USA Soccer

In my family, Father’s Day 1994 might be remembered as the day seven year old Danny McGowan realized it was okay to like sports more than anything else in life. Eating. People. My children. There we were, a Scottish family crammed inside an Italian restaurant, mispronouncing manicotti and asking if they sold mashed potatoes, laughing and drinking (I assume), in honor of my grandpa. And there was my grandpa, looking so bitter you’d have thought the bar ran out of booze.

Norway was playing Mexico in the World Cup and he was missing it for dinner in an Italian restaurant.

Now it’s quite possible my papa hated Norwegians and Mexicans (and Italians for that matter) all the same, but this was soccer on national television and he was missing it. I remember not really understanding his hostility toward us, but also being amazed by it. To that point, I had never known anyone that passionate about anything. Hell, I’d have burnt my baseball card collection for a trip to the Discovery Zone. He loved soccer. And he was my best friend. So I decided to love soccer.

It started with the Cup that summer. I felt that it was my patriotic duty to root for the Americans (he hated them too) and was crushed when Brazil eliminated us. That’s when I made it my goal in life to lead the United States to the top of the soccer world.

My career began that autumn.

My career ended that autumn.

I swear I gave it an honest effort. One Saturday morning, I even skipped a fall ball game in favor of a match. But I couldn’t help it. Soccer, put simply, was stupid. There were no rules, the coach’s son always got to play goalie and practice involved too much running. And even at my young age, I was bright enough to recognize that that much running should serve only as a punishment.

That was almost 16 years ago and while soccer clearly wasn’t for me, it seems obvious that hosting the 1994 World Cup led many children to take up or become more serious about the sport. Of the 23 Team USA players who dressed for a recent friendly against Denmark, 18 hadn’t reached high school by 1994 and 12 were younger ten, meaning they were probably still balancing soccer, little league and the Power Rangers at the time.

What does that mean? For the first time in American history, the national team can select from a talent pool larger than your average swimming pool. The guys competing for spots on the World Cup roster didn’t settle for soccer because they couldn’t hit a baseball or make a jump shot. They chose it as their sport and they received more and better instruction at a younger age than anyone before them.

With that comes real expectations and if my grandpa were still alive, he’d probably offer the following advice:

“Don’t fuck this up.”

It’s that simple. Public opinion has changed on soccer. It’s trendy to like the game. The sophisticated sports fan now spells color with a “u” and says things like, “I love to watch soccer played at its highest level,” which is both a way of fitting in and an excuse for having never watched an MLS game in their lives.

Of course, luck often plays the biggest role in determining the outcome of the World Cup, and team USA appears to have received plenty of it in last week’s draw. Aside from what everyone considers a favorable opening group with England, Slovenia and Algeria, the team would also be guaranteed not to play the defending champion (Italy) or any of the top three ranked teams in the world (Brazil, Spain and Holland) until the semifinals if it were to advance to the second stage.

Have all the stars aligned for the US National Team? It might be too early to tell. But the ingredients are all there. The fortunate draw, the fan base that has never been so excited and most importantly, the most talented group of players the team has ever had.

This has been 16 years in the making and if the Americans are looking for inspiration, they needn’t look far. Recently, a much more prominent national team faced about a ten year stretch of international struggles, much like Team USA in this decade.

But Italy went to Germany and won the whole thing in 2006.

Of course they did. They hosted the Cup in 1990.

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Iverson and Jeter: A case of supporting casts

There was a scene on Curb Your Enthusiasm this season in which Larry David gets into a phone argument with a stonemason over Derek Jeter. The stonemason, as many sportswriters have suggested in recent years, says that Jeter is the worst defensive shortstop in baseball and doesn’t deserve the money he is paid. Of course David, a diehard Yankee fan, counters with the stereotypical redundant Jeter defense – he’s clutch hitter and a great clutch player.

In a lot of ways, the scene represents an argument that has dominated conversations in the northeast for my entire life as a sports fan. For years, the question posed by Yankee haters and feared by Yankee fans has been: Who would Derek Jeter be if he were not playing in New York?

The answer, with all pun intended, is Allen Iverson.

You would have never guessed that would be the case 13 years ago. Three days before Jeter was to be named American League Rookie of the Year, Iverson stepped onto the Corestates Center (now known as the Wachovia Center) floor and dropped 30 points in his first game as a pro. By that time, Jeter was already a World Champion and looked to be on the fast track to becoming the most famous player on the most famous franchise in all of sports. Iverson was considered a future star as well, but he was mostly known as the kid who did jail time before somehow getting accepted at Georgetown to play for John Thompson.

It didn’t take much time to realize that their careers would head down very different paths. Jeter became a suburban hero. If you played shortstop in little league, you had to have a Rawling's glove with his signature on it. Iverson became an urban icon. You wore his sneakers and his jersey because The Answer defined cool.

Their dissimilarities in image would actually be reflective of the teams on which they played. Jeter was the face of the Yankees, but everyone chipped in. The Yankees were committed to winning and they did that more than anyone in the late nineties. Iverson’s 76ers were an example of what happens when mismanagement and bad luck are paired together. Example: The Sixers picked second in the NBA draft the year after they got Iverson. They took Keith Van Horn. The number one pick was Tim Duncan.

Think about how differently things could have played out if Iverson and Duncan were teammates. Instead, as Bill Simmons points out in The Book of Basketball, “Iverson’s prime was saddled with overpaid role players, overpaid underachievers, overpaid and washed up veterans and underachieving lottery picks.”

So of course that led to Iverson being a one man show. He was the future Hall of Famer who would never come close to winning a title. Even in 2001 when Iverson won the MVP and led the Sixers to the NBA Finals, the next best players on his team were Aaron McKie and a 35-going-on-50 year old named Dikembe Mutombo.

In other words, Iverson is what Jeter would have been if were drafted by the Kansas City Royals instead of the Yankees.

That seems hard to believe now. Iverson appears to be on his last legs. Jeter seems fresher than he’s ever been. Iverson recently retired from the NBA only to return to his old stomping grounds faster than you could say Brett Favre. Jeter was just named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. And of course, there’s the money. Iverson’s one year contract with the 76ers will earn him more than 20 times less than Jeter’s salary for next season.

But if you look at their whole careers, the two become the perfect case study for how a player’s value is dictated more by his supporting cast than any other factor, including his own talent. Jeter basically lucked out. Iverson wasn’t so fortunate.

And the rest is history.

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Tiger, it appears, is not who we thought he was

Let the Tiger Woods saga serve as a warning to the next wave of athletes who seek to become bigger than the sport they play, the LeBron James’ of the world, who calculate every move they make in hopes of maintaining the squeaky clean image it takes to become a global icon.

You can’t be Bono when you act like Gene Simmons.

A story involving an athlete or any celebrity and an alleged mistress (or three) doesn’t normally become the most talked about story in the world. They’re not exactly rare. Besides, if you ask the average person, chances are they’ll say it all comes with the territory when you’re famous. It might not be right, but that’s just what happens. And don’t we have more important things to worry about?

Of course we do. But on the same day that our President announced he would be sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, the most-searched topic on the New York Times website was “Tiger Woods.” On Google’s list of hot trends for Tuesday, December 1st, Woods or names associated with the rumors circulating about Woods appeared six times before any mention of the military. So while it would be completely fitting for Sports Illustrated to file our infatuation with this story under its “This Week’s Sign of Apocalypse” headline, the fact remains, it does matter.

And that’s entirely because of what Tiger is supposed to represent. He’s portrayed as not somebody we should wish to be, but someone we should strive to be. Everyone knows his story. He came from that American Dream of a family, with the father who pushed him to be great and the mother who would have loved him no matter what. He’s the guy who made the very most of his god-given abilities, the kid who was famous by age three and a global icon by the time he turned 21. And he did it all while playing a game most people with his skin color will never have the chance to try.

All of those things are still true today. But now his image is taking a hit thanks to rumors about a mistress in New York and a cocktail waitress in Los Angeles and another woman in Vegas. But the public isn’t turning on Woods because of his alleged infidelity. We can handle that. It’s that we feel betrayed by someone we want to love.

By design, the man has lived in a bubble his entire public life. He declines most interviews, choosing to release statements on his website instead. He never takes a stance on any issue, be it large or small. And until now, he’s been far more likely to appear in the Wall Street Journal than in the National Enquirer. Put simple, he has acted more like a President than a famous athlete. And we’ve trusted him as such.

If these allegations prove true, Tiger has let us all down.

Never forget that Woods private nature was a page right out of Michael Jordan’s playbook. Jordan didn’t trust the media either. He had a very tight circle of friends. He always put endorsements ahead of world views. But everyone knew that you could always find MJ at the nearest casino with a couple women on each arm and a cigar in his mouth. We’ve never seen Tiger act like that, so we’ve always held him to an even higher standard.

That’s what the next generation of great athletes needs to keep in mind. We’re looking at you LeBron. You can’t deny us any access and party in excess and expect no one to notice. The truth is, we’d much rather see you turn up on Page Six than in the police blotter. What bothers us is when you pretend to be something you’re not.

That’s when the public turns on you.

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Only one choice to help ND return to major college football

How ironic that on the same weekend TCU and Boise State moved one step closer to undefeated seasons, Notre Dame would be getting ready to part ways with Charlie Weis following its sixth loss of the year. The Fighting Irish, after all, have been the bane of every non-BCS conference program’s existence for years, mainly due to the fact that even a two loss season pretty much guarantees them a spot in a BCS bowl no matter how many other teams are more deserving.

This is what happens when you’re the biggest name in college football, when NBC willingly becomes NDBC every Saturday afternoon. Yet there they were, trading touchdowns with Stanford the same way they traded touchdowns with everyone this season, looking like the stereotypical upstart program our current bowl system rarely rewards. Now it was Notre Dame, with all that tradition, displaying its prolific offense and a pathetic defense that couldn’t stop Navy or Connecticut this season.

That’s the program Weis built at Notre Dame. A remarkable offense with a glass jaw defense that allowed 30 points or more 24 times in his five years running the show. For the record, TCU and Boise State combined to do that just 21 times over the same stretch. He managed to help develop two first round picks at quarterback, but he couldn’t get a stop from his defense in year one against USC and still couldn’t in his final game against Stanford.

Now Weis is gone and the focus switches to who his replacement will be. The key will be bringing in someone who knows how to win in college football. For too long, Notre Dame has been a program that tries to get cute with its hires. 25 years before handing the keys to Weis, who had zero college coaching experience, the Fighting Irish hired Gerry Faust, a high school coach, to run the most recognized program in college sports. In between Faust and Weis, there was Lou Holtz, Bob Davie and Tyrone Willingham. Of that group, only Holtz had won more than one bowl game prior to coming to South Bend.

For Notre Dame to return to some form of respectability, the next coach needs to be the full package. He needs to know how to sell the program to players and parents, how to handle the boosters and most importantly, how to put together a team that can compete for a National Championship. That’s why both Jon Gruden and Brian Kelly, two coaches considered to be on the Fighting Irish’s shortlist, might not be the best choices.

Gruden has never been more than a wide receivers coach at the college level. What makes anyone believe he will know how to recruit? Spotting talent is only half the battle in college football. Kelly appears to be the favorite, but the question with the current Cincinnati head coach is, will he be able to handle the recruitment limitations at Notre Dame? Kelly has built winners at Division II Grand Valley State, Central Michigan and now Cincinnati, but he’s probably never had to deal with anyone in the admissions office refusing to accept any of his recruits before.

The obvious choice for Notre Dame has to be Bob Stoops at Oklahoma. It will take a lot of money to lure him away from one of the best jobs in college football, but Stoops is a brand name in the sports, he can recruit with anyone and he’s won a National Title. His resume blows anyone other than Urban Meyer‘s right out of the water.

And that’s exactly what Notre Dame needs. A big splash.

Stoops has more credibility than any other candidate and would need very little time to start bringing five star players to the program. Most importantly, he rebuilt a once-proud Oklahoma team into a national powerhouse seemingly overnight, which is precisely what’s in the job description at Notre Dame.

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