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all praise to the flex schedule

Maybe the single best thing about Sunday night football is that NBC's contract allowed them to choose their 2nd half games based on play during the 1st half of the season. Which makes for far less stinkers (I'm looking at you, Seattle and Oakland). A few thoughts from tonight's NFC proto-championship game:

1. I thought the Bears were nuts to draft Hester as highly as they did in the spring. I'll be the first to admit I was wrong. How many other teams have 3 return TDs so far this season?

2. I like Heroes all right, but "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" has got to be the dumbest tagline in the world. It's a good thing that they didn't trot that out before the show began, because I wouldn't have watched.

3. When your team hits a snag, you hope that they get over it during the week. Clearly, the Bears didn't--the first half tonight was as ugly as any game they've played. But beginning from the final 2 minutes of the first half, they did as much as they could to regain their swagger, and it was a joy to watch (as a Bears fan).

4. The problem with "trademark" celebrations is that, unless you're planning on winning and all but shutting teams out, you're going to get to watch other teams mock your trademark, ad nauseam. No more with the jump shots, please.

5. Speaking of ad nauseam, my channel changer of the year has to be that series of commercials from Coors Light, where they show clips from Bill Walsh's and Dick Vermeil's press conferences, spliced with fake footage of frattish fans asking stupid questions. (Ex: Fan: "Did your placekicker make this onion dip?" Dick Vermeil: "He didn't appear to make it from where we were standing.") The worst part of these commercials is two-fold: first, it's an incredibly tired idea, and has been done 100s of times, and second, they don't even do it well. The clips are generic enough that lots of questions could be asked, but the questions themselves are written to the answers in an unnatural way. They're not stupid-funny, which I could live with. They're stupid-stupid. Someone made the decision to pay someone else thousands upon thousands of dollars to cut commercials that, given some footage, I could do in an afternoon in iMovie. And guess what? Mine would be written better.

And yes, I'll be closing the comments here soon, so that I don't have to wade through dozens of astroturf comments. The thought that some of that wasted money goes to drones who cut and paste dumbass comments on all the blogs that mention their commercials makes it even worse.

That's all.

Comments

I'm with you on the Heroes tagline. I've watched every episode and for the life of me I can't understand why exactly she needs saving. Regeneration seems to be working just fine for her.

At least they're not promoting "Save the Flighty Politician," "Save the Internet Escort Doppleganger" or "Save the Telepathic Police Officer." But maybe it would be a better draw if they switched it up occasionally.

Hey, all they'd need is the word "doppleganger" and I'd go to the wall for em. They could just flash it once, white text on a dark screen, and I'd be sold.

I love that word.

Sorry to hear about closing comments. I haven't had problems with astroturf yet, at least not the non-automated variety.

We'll see. I'll leave them open for a while, since my filters are set fairly high.

I've commented before on tv commercials, though, and got turfed pretty hard, so I'm cynical about it...

BTW, I am remiss for not saying the missed field goal return is one of the best plays in football. My favorite remains the safety.

I enjoy the missed field goal returns as well. They're right up there with last-play lateral kickoff returns into trombone players.

Too bad that real automated spam filters remain a fantasy.

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