The Ex-'Burgher: Skewering the Sports Guy: 11/26/05

I find it so charming when people confidently assert their opinions and predictions after an event has taken place. Remember all of the talking heads on ESPN after the Malice at the Palace?

Bill Walton: “I knew something like this was going to happen. The NBA is full of thugs, with the exception of my son Luke.”

Steven A. Smith: “You have to recognize the possibility for violence on the NBA. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that this didn’t happen sooner.”

Stuart Scott: “Yo, dawg, we’ve been waiting for a fight up in this piece for a long time. Much love, man.”

This sort of talk is not limited to sports. Members of the media, noticeably those on television, like to come out with their “I told you so” comments whenever a big news event or catastrophe takes place (even though they never told us so). CNN coverage of Katrina, property tax battles, criticism of Neville Chamberlain -- the real news is full of people telling us how much they knew, but that they neglected to share with the public.

The reason for this is pretty simple – the news media wants you to trust them, they want to appear knowledgeable, and they often want to cover things up when they blatantly whiff on something. If Brian Williams leads into a story with “Whoops, we missed on this. Boy do we have egg on out faces,” people will be switching over to reruns of ‘The Simpsons’ almost immediately. If he leads in with “Here is a story about how we knew that the levees were going to fail” people will watch the story and believe that the news people had it right all along. The audience will forget that the news never noted the levees (or steroids or whatever) in the past, and will proceed directly to finding a scapegoat to criticize (usually conveniently provided in the news report).

Admittedly, this is a great tactic. It takes all of the scrutiny off of the failures of the media outlet and places it somewhere else. In the end, the media look like honorable folks who are doing the “tough work” of reporting, even though the news is basically useless after the fact. And our old friend Bill Simmons retrenches with the best of them. This week, Bill made some predictions for the remainder of the season (which look strangely like my predictions. I must be catching on!). He includes this note on the Chiefs: “Looks like I was one week late with my ‘Eventually, Trent Green is going to kill the Chiefs’ theory. Should have just stuck to my guns.”

This is the third time in the past month that BS has issued some sort of “I told you so”, presented in the form of “I should have told you so”, one week late. And I don’t like it. Anyone can look like a genius if they can predict the past. Remember in Back to the Future 2 when Biff manages to send himself a copy of sports scores back through time, and then gets rich betting on scores he knows about? Biff was a complete moron, and he could barely spell his name, let alone pick scores. But when he knew what was going to happen, he got rich. The same principle is at work here. If I tell you that George Bush will get re-elected in 2004, I can be pretty confident in my assertion, because it already happened! So, when BS tells his dear readers that Trent Green would eventually blow a game, it’s not a huge revelation.

What would be really impressive, and would take some balls, would be for someone to make a bold prediction in advance of a news event. We can’t expect this from the ‘real’ news people – they have too much riding on being accurate and impartial. But BS writes an opinionated, light-hearted column online. He can afford to make predictions, even if they are silly, because there is little to no reason to be overly concerned with his journalistic integrity. Also, people aren’t committing BS columns to memory in the same way that everyone noticed when Dan Rather participated in a fabricated story. If BS had laid out his Trent Green theory, Theo Epstein theory, or Gouda conspiracy, and been flat-out wrong, only a select few (seriously disturbed) people would notice.

That is why I am introducing, in the spirit of the ‘Peyton Face’, the ‘Bill Simmons

Smug Face’. I imagine it as the self-important, smug grin that BS wears when he types one of his “I told you so” lines. For a mental image, try envisioning the BS headshot, then place BS in a situation where he is a slimy guy who runs a dog-fighting ring, and his is the dog that kicks the snot out of every other dog (read some Jack London if you need a better visual). Now think of the face BS would make as his dog killed his neighbor’s poodle and he took all of the guy’s money. That is the ‘Smug Face’.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), BS is not on tv, so we can never see the face in action. But you can see its close cousin, the ‘Ron Jaworski Face’, pretty often. He usually whips it out at least once or twice every week on the Sunday and Monday Countdown shows, just as he is about to say “and that is why Peyton Manning is the best quarterback in the league.”

(I wonder if Ron and BS share ‘Face’ tips. They are both high up in the Steelers Hater Club, with Ron as VP and BS and secretary. Maybe during club meetings they envision killing puppies and practice their faces for each other. It makes me wonder . . .)

As the official watchdog of Bill Simmons, I will be keeping track of how often he uses the ‘Smug Face’ and will warn you, dear reader(s), accordingly. I am doing this as a public service – people deserve to know when they are being duped be a so-called ‘expert’ with the foresight of a mole. Be wary, because if the ‘Smug Face’ grows much further, we may be forced to turn away from ESPN for our entertainment, and that would be a sad day indeed.

Manalyzer results: -10. Predicting the past makes BS look downright foolish. At this rate, he might try to convince his readers that he was going to predict the Big Bang, but he forgot to include it in a previous article.