Even candy bars are now sold with bad attitudes and rotten, no-upside messages.
Nestle, makers of Butterfinger candy bars, has teamed with Terrell Owens, long synonymous with selfish, TV-attendant, team-imperiling misconduct that, despite his talent, made him expendable (he played for five NFL teams). They’re offering to pay fines up to $50,000 for NFL players hit with “excessive celebration” sanctions in the AFC and NFC Championships and Super Bowl.
Oh, how “edgy.” As the incivility grows to where it determines playoff games — Steelers over Bengals — Nestle wants to reward the most excessively immodest.
Shucks, last year Nestle could have paid the fines for Marshawn Lynch’s NFC Championship “celebratory” crotch-grabbing, and for Seattle teammate Doug Baldwin’s Super Bowl end zone “defecation” of the football.
And if the unsportsmanlike penalty costs his team the game? Hey, a deal’s a deal!
Meanwhile, wonder how the bright light Nestle execs who came up with or approved this pathetic plan would respond if their own kids were flagged for over-the-top immodesty, for acting like selfish fools. Think they would stop on the way home to reward them by buying them a candy bar?
Then again Owens, Nestle’s choice to be the front man for such a repugnant promotion, was unable to pay child support for his four kids by four mothers. That $80 million-plus he made in the NFL? Not enough. He went broke.
Meanwhile, CBS, which carried that Steelers-Bengals gang war, continues to promote its NFL broadcasts with clips of showboating players — as if that’s an intrinsic element of football and why we watch.
Good grief, what does it take to show people that they’re destroying sports?
There is a reason Boeheim not among ‘greats’
When did Adam Schein become such an overt panderer? Last week on his CBS Sports Network show:
“I love Jim Boeheim. I think he’s a legend. He has just absolutely built that program. He gets amazing recruits. … He wins games. He has Syracuse in the Sweet 16 year in year out. Why isn’t he mentioned among legends? Is it his demeanor, how he treats some members of the press?”
Really? He hasn’t a clue? For starters, there’s the recent NCAA hammer for having discovered a decade’s worth of foul play on his watch, resulting in the “vacating” of 108 wins and loss of 12 scholarships. …
Never mind. Schein knows. How would it be possible that someone long in the sports broadcast business — a Syracuse graduate, no less — wouldn’t know?
For unintended comedy — specifically, satire — there always are “instant” replay review episodes.
Late in regulation of Wednesday’s Jazz-Knicks, as the refs gathered at courtside to peer at replays to determine possession — the jump-ball call eventually stood — MSG cut to the live scene from NBA Replay Control and Outlet Shopping in Secaucus, N.J., where we saw at least half-a-dozen men peering at roughly a dozen TV monitors. The look: Houston’s NASA Space Control.
And in the end, what placed the call in these men and their machines’ charge was that the determination as to who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds was a very close call, too close to change. Imagine that.
Last April, ESPN had ex-NBA ref Steve Javie posted in that Secaucus command center for a Wizards-Raptors playoff game when an instant replay review of a possession call gave Javie lots of time to be questioned as the review delay ran 2:45.
One replay clearly showed it was Washington’s ball, another showed, just as clearly, it was Toronto’s. Hey, conclusive but contrary evidence!
Javie said it doesn’t matter how long it takes, “The main thing is getting it right.”
But Javie also said, “This is going to be a very difficult call. I’m glad I don’t have to make it.”
In other words, no matter where the call was made or how it finally was determined, what Javie called, “The main thing, getting it right” became a sounds-good fantasy, a matter of mystic bliss. When replay reviews are not a matter of opinion, they become a protracted matter of passing the whistle from the court to a room in Secaucus to reach the same inconclusive conclusion: Too close to call, thus too close to change.
Nolan pulls a ‘Francesa’ on Mike
Two Peas In A Podcast: Interesting that Mike Francesa would reveal his WFAN farewell date to FOX’s Katie Nolan during her podcast. They have much in common.
Nolan, though flattering and even servile toward Francesa while they spoke, didn’t mention she previously has mocked his FAN show on her FOX Sports 1 program.
But that’s a Francesa standard: Belittle them when they’re not around, flatter them when they’re on with him.
Ah, so many from which to choose. … There was 2002, when he and Chris Russo ridiculed the Hall of Fame selection of Bills’ coach Marv Levy — they claimed he was undeserving. The next day Levy came on the show, and they congratulated him as one of the all-time greats!
Don’t know how many thousands of dollars it cost Rutgers, its stuck-for-the-bill students and their parents, and Jersey taxpayers to ship RU’s women’s basketball to and from East Lansing to play Michigan State last week, but the game, which appeared on the Big Ten Network — RU lost — was played to a nearly empty arena.
Attendance was announced as 4,900, but it had to be closer to 1,000.
Whatever, RU just keeps shoveling money into the Big Ten black hole and no one approves faster and louder than rah-rah absentee Gov. Christie, who dismissed RU football recruits’ violent, terrorizing felony crime wave last year as “kids being kids.”
Recall notorious cable TV time-buy scamdicapper, blowhard and professional get-rich-with-me (“I know the winners of horseraces before they’re run!”) baloney grinder Wayne Allyn Root?
The frequently failed sports tout has thrown his bombast and hubris into the political arena. Easy transition. Last month in Vegas he was the master of ceremonies — and the only other speaker besides Donald Trump — at a Trump for President rally in Las Vegas.
Two favorites: Root hurled repeated allegations to me about how the slimiest in what he admitted to be a slimy business — lucky me, I was talking to the one honest guy — is scamdicapper Jim Feist. Soon, as seen on TV, Root was partnered with Jim Feist.
Then there was Root’s published assertion that he was “a New York Daily News columnist.” Never. He briefly supplied the News a weekly football pick box — brief because he proved that no one needed his help to lose their money.
