You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (24 page)

Get into the psyche of a 20-year-old kid. Society is far more corrosive than it was thirty years ago. I’ll watch YouTube videos of a skateboard crash and wince. My 16-year-old stepson will watch them and laugh. There are entire television shows devoted to people having horrific crashes on skateboards. The 17- to 27-year-olds who are growing up in a more corrosive society with harsher images have a different stomach for the risks of X Games, and the injuries of X Games.

They’re not offended by it. I am, but I’m old-school media. I shouldn’t matter.

The mainstream media? Out of touch generationally on the X Games. But if you eliminate the branding, you solve the problem. They’ll simply ignore it. Problem solved.

If I ran ESPN and the X Games, I would say never label it as sports in any promo again. And take every one of my events out of the Olympics.

Wrestling got kicked out of the Olympics at the beginning of 2013 and everybody associated with the sport was crestfallen. The X Games should get the hell out of the Olympics—as fast as possible—and then throw a major X Game–style party to celebrate.

I’m not suggesting they change the X Games. It’s a huge success. Instead, change how it’s categorized. It’s like
tapas
. Are they an appetizer or an entree? They’re both, they’re neither—who
knows? They’re great, but the classification problem is why the local tapas restaurant will never be more popular than the Italian joint or the Mexican place.

Evel Knievel wasn’t an athlete in the traditional sense. He was on
Wide World of Sports
when I was a kid but we never thought of him the way we thought of Walter Payton or Mike Schmidt or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If he got seriously injured, the mainstream sports media didn’t jump up and down and call for a ban on motorcycle jumps or rocket rides across the Snake River Canyon. He was a guy performing a stunt.

Knievel bragged about breaking every bone in his body. That made him a hero. Broken bones are a badge of honor in very few human endeavors and precisely zero sports. Imagine an athlete in any sport bragging about broken bones or concussions or serious injuries. What general manager would say, “Hey, give me
that
guy”?

Of course not. Knievel would use it as a pitch to sponsors, and X Games performers take pride in their injuries because doing so is a testament to their willingness to take a risk. A fully intact body means you aren’t going far enough.

If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying.

There’s only one logical conclusion: any linkage between the X Games and mainstream sports is simply an invitation to criticisms and lawsuits. It is the only “sport” that should never, under any circumstances, issue credentials to the mainstream media.

In fact, the media strategy of the X Games when it comes to mainstream sports media should consist of three words:

Please ignore us
.

If X Games events continue to be part of the Olympics, they’re going to be judged by the standards imposed by 50-year-old white guys who don’t get it. And let’s be clear about one thing: the Olympics needs the X Games events far more—
far
more—than the
X Games needs the Olympics. The X Games already has the network platform—ESPN. Most winter sports are dying for network support.

Without the Olympics, luge doesn’t exist.

Downhill skiing needs the Olympics. Bobsledding needs the Olympics. The X Games has no need for the Olympics.

Conversely, X Games events are the best thing ever for the Olympics. What better way to attract a younger, hipper, cooler audience than to sandwich the snowboard halfpipe in between women’s figure skating and speed skating?

A spot in the Olympics comes with legitimacy, whether it’s earned or not and whether it’s wanted or not.

Q-tips says,
Don’t jam this in your ear
.

The X Games should say,
Don’t ever confuse me with a sport
.

Get out. Get out of sports and get out of the Olympics. The sooner, the better.

Eddie Murphy was once the funniest person on the planet—then he decided he would rather be cool. Suddenly he was as funny as re-siding your house. Entourages and bodyguards take the air out of a punch line.

Good-looking isn’t funny. Neither is 5 percent body fat.

Funny is disheveled, chunky, uncomfortable. It’s living in Yonkers crammed in a house with too many people and too few rooms. New York City is funny because it’s crowded and often miserably cold. You stay married in New York and fight through your problems. Los Angeles isn’t funny because it’s warm and spread out. People have space. They get divorced and start over and get happy again. Nothing ruins a knee-slapper like being content.

I was watching that show from years ago on NBC called
Last Comic Standing
when it dawned on me. The better weather the city had where that particular competition was being held, the lamer the comedians were. Boston or Minneapolis comics were gold. Phoenix Guy was a channelturner. You really think the fact that Canada has given us dozens of hysterical people—and Australia virtually none—is just a coincidence?

Discomfort creates humor.

It’s why I think most top comedians have roughly a ten- to twelve-year period to be labeled funniest guy on the planet. Then they become popular, rich, comfortable, and just another dude with a better sense of humor than most people.

Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, David Letterman, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, and Jerry Seinfeld have all taken turns being that guy.

Eventually they all lose that slight edge after their third six-thousand-square-foot vacation home.

Someone please beg Zach Galifianakis and Aziz Ansari not to buy a Lexus.

Everybody has an uneasy relationship with dynasties in American sports. We love to see them so we can either root for them or against them, and everybody feels equally strongly on one side or the other. We always associate dynasties with teams: Yankees, Lakers, Celtics, Steelers, Patriots. But right now, the biggest dynasty in American sports is a football conference.

And yes, there’s no doubt about it: the SEC is a full-blown dynasty.

We understand this on a certain basic level. It’s not that hard. We know SEC teams are 9-0 since the advent of the BCS Championship Games in 1998. We know they’ve won seven straight. We know that most of those games have featured dominating performances by the winning SEC team.

But it’s my contention that we don’t fully understand the depth of that dynasty. We don’t understand the extent of the gap between SEC football and the rest of the conferences.

Let’s break it down. By consensus, the second-best conference is the Big 12. We take this as an article of faith. The Pac 12 is finesse, the Big Ten is slow, but the Big 12 is the closest thing we have to legitimate competition for the SEC. The Big 12 sounds big and it sounds good. Texas vs. Oklahoma and all that.

So let’s take a look at the one game in the season when we know we’re going to get an SEC-Big 12 matchup: the Cotton Bowl. It’s not a BCS game, so the Cotton Bowl has to wait until the BCS teams are decided before choosing one team from the SEC West and one team from the Big 12. It’s often the third-place team in the SEC West against the second-place team in the Big 12.

Whatever the case, look at the last ten Cotton Bowls. Starting
with the 2004 Cotton Bowl, when Ole Miss beat Oklahoma State, and ending with Texas A&M’s rout of Oklahoma in 2013, the SEC has won nine of ten. The average score in those nine wins is 30-17, meaning the SEC team is nearly two touchdowns better.

And as they say on the infomercials,
But wait, there’s more
.

For people who say the SEC’s dominance is a little overstated, think about this: the Chip Kelly Era in Oregon produced not only the highest-scoring offense in college football but a running game that—in results if not style—harkens back to Nebraska in the ’60s and ’70s, or Oklahoma under Barry Switzer. In other words, it’s a tour de force offense that everyone assumes is virtually unstoppable.

In 2010, the year Oregon reached the BCS title game, it averaged 41 points per game and ran for almost 3,500 yards. The Ducks were good—so good that they were pulling their starters at the half in the majority of their games. If they hadn’t, it’s reasonable to assume Oregon could have tacked on another 2,000 yards rushing.

But against Auburn in the 2010 title game, Oregon had 75 yards rushing and averaged 2.3 yards per carry.

You could argue that Kelly’s offense got better and the team wasn’t the best offensive one that Oregon had during his time.

Fair enough.

So what happened when Oregon improved? When Kelly got that offense revving at its highest RPM, in 2011, his team finished the year averaging 47 points per game. The Ducks had almost
4,200
yards rushing. This was the pinnacle. This was the juggernaut to end all juggernauts.

They were putting up these cartoon numbers while, again, pulling starters at the half. The season was a playful romp in a meadow filled with wildflowers, with one exception: the Ducks
played LSU at the beginning of that season. In that game, Oregon had 95 yards rushing.

The next day, September 3, 2011, there was an article in the
Portland Oregonian
in which Ken Goe wrote, “LSU didn’t just beat Oregon; it beat Oregon up.” Both of Oregon’s starting running backs, LaMichael James and Kenjon Barner, were knocked out of the game with injuries. DeAnthony Thomas, a freshman at the time, was hit so often and so hard he hobbled off at one point and also fumbled.

Let’s put this in a broader perspective. This was a one-time deal for Oregon. But what if the Ducks had to play another one the next week? What if they had to go back to work Sunday and prepare for Florida or Georgia—and not Utah or Arkansas State—the next week with a battered group of running backs? What would Oregon’s record be if it had to run that gauntlet every year?

Oregon was doing whatever it wanted to do against any non-SEC team it played. It could have probably increased its offensive numbers by 30 percent if it had played its starters after halftime, and against Auburn and LSU they couldn’t break 100 yards rushing.

And by the way, in those games against Auburn and LSU, the elite, vaunted Oregon running game was forced to abandon the run. They literally could not run the ball, and they admitted it by not even trying. So instead of pulling their starting running backs and quarterback to take it easy on the opposition, against these two SEC teams Oregon stopped running
because they simply couldn’t run
. This from the best running game in the country.

In a way, our understanding of SEC dominance is similar to our knowledge of the health risks of soda. On a surface level, intuitively, you know it’s bad to drink soda. But if you dig a little deeper,
you find that it’s a tsunami of dental and physical decay. It’s an absolute disaster for your body. Drinking one or more soft drinks per day not only increases your risk of obesity by 30 percent, but a twelve-ounce Coke has nearly 40 grams of sugar. The recommended daily intake for women is 22. So, a woman would double her recommended sugar intake with just one soda for lunch.

Similarly, we all know the SEC dominance is thorough. We know the numbers—9-0 in title games, seven straight, routinely crushing the Big 12 in head-to-head matchups.

But wait, there’s more
.

In February 2013, Dirk Chatelain from the
Omaha World-Herald
wrote a really good article that indicates we haven’t seen anything close to the end of this SEC dynasty. In fact, what we’ve been seeing might be closer to the beginning than the end.

Here’s where it gets scary: the Sun Belt is exploding with young football talent. The numbers are mind-boggling. Georgia, with only nine million people in the state, produced over the past five years an average of 115 BCS-level, big-boy Division I recruits. Over that same time span, California—population: thirty-eight million—produced roughly the same amount.

It’s absurd. Georgia is in the same ballpark as California, and California has four times the number of people, and California is a talent-rich state for high school football. Chatelain’s story also notes that Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska are all down.