Gregg Easterbrook Is Still A Putz

Here are four sentences from last week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column (or as I like to call it, יום שלישי הקוורטרבק בוקר). They are remarkable in that they pile stupidly on top of one another like a litter of puppies.

Undrafted or unwanted players learn the playbook and watch film. High-drafted glory-boy types think they can just show up and wing it. Busted plays are a bigger factor in NFL outcomes than commonly understood. Working with humble players allows Belichick to nearly eliminate the blown assignment.

This isn't an argument so much as the prose equivalent of Colin Cowherd masturbating into a Matt Christopher book. There isn't a single empirically defensible sentiment in there, and even if there were, the whole glory-boy/humble-guy thesis Gregg Easterbrook is pushing would still be deeply stupid.

I don't know why Easterbrook keeps clinging to this particular fairy tale. I guess it's pretty to think that the football world would sort itself so neatly into good and evil , that only humble, virtuous players would ever work hard and succeed and only arrogant, glory-seeking players would ever dog it and fail. To believe — well into adulthood and against all evidence — that things really do work that way is to believe that life behaves like a panel of a Goofus & Gallant comic.

So, again, I have to ask: What's the point of writing a pedantic football column if you're going to be such a shitty pedant?

Patriots again have all angles covered [ESPN]

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