Random Thoughts 9/4/10

• Sleeping with the windows open at night, snuggled under clean, fuzzy blankets, with the smell of chimney smoke wafting through the air… Ahh, the last two nights have been nice.
• With KU about to kickoff for the first game of new head coach Turner Gill's tenure, it sure would be nice to have a stud WR like Dezmon Briscoe on the team. But wait, Briscoe left college a year early for the NFL, only to be cut by the Bengals yesterday. Oops. Listen college players, if a first-team all conference, school record holder in almost every category, prototype WR can get cut, then so can you. Stay in school! Here's hoping that a WR with Briscoe's potential catches on somewhere else… like KC.
• The NFL owners are pushing hard to get an 18 game season. This is a terrible idea for the game. 18 games means that star players are going to be at a higher risk of injury. The only way to avoid that risk is to sit those players. Who wants to see NFL teams "resting" their stars for two or three games each season? It's already a problem in the one week before the playoffs start; why make it worse? 18 game will dilute an already long season, which would probably need a second bye week, meaning a 20 week regular season (up from 17). That means the season will run from a couple of weeks before Labor Day, with a Super Bowl coming after Valentine's Day. The NFL is reaching its saturation point. Don't ruin a good thing!
• If the NFL owners wanted a good compromise, here are my two suggestions: #1 – Add another week of televised games by adding a second bye week: 16 games, 2 byes for each team. The extra rest will help the players and the extra weekend of games (18 vs. 17 weeks) and the extra weekend of televised games means more commercials for networks to sell, i.e. more money. The fans see a few more games (because the same number of games are no spread out a little more) but the season isn't further diluted. #2 – Admit that preseason games aren't "real" games. Nobody cares, nobody is trying, success or failure means nothing in regard to the regular season. Reduce the preseason by a week and hold televised, game-like scrimmages. Each side gets 10 plays, then a special teams play. Rinse and repeat. Introduce some reality-TV style "will the underdog make the roster?" type of drama; do anything. Just don't pretend that these are real games that actually matter (and that season ticket holders have to pay full price for). Poorly produced, overly pretentious preseason games played by soon-to-be-working-for-FedEx players are terrible television. Period.
• More good commentary from Gregg Easterbrook on the NFL's 18-game proposal. And if you're curious where all those scary hurricanes (of the meteorological variety) went, read Easterbrook's article on that here.
• Commentator and conservative uber-thinker Charles Krauthammer has been on roll lately. Did you read this one about President Obama's lack of leadership on Afghanistan? Or this one where he points out that cornered liberals who lose their arguments call you a bigot. Or this one about the Ground Zero Mosque.
  
• Here's your politically incorrect thought for the day: For a Christian to murder an abortionist, they have to act contrary to the plain meaning of their scriptures. For a Muslim to justify killing an infidel, they only have to take their scripture at face value. That is, some 90% or more of the world's Muslims explain away jihad as an internal struggle and ignore some texts in favor of others. I appreciate that interpretation, but our nice, liberalized, peaceful Muslim friends need to address what this means: radical Muslim extremists are not extreme; they're fundamentalists. They haven't hijacked a religion, they've taken it literally.