BOB COSTAS IS A DOUCHEBAG

by The Prophet, ProphetFighting

This diatribe is in response to a post by a fellow carny referencing the following:

Joining the ranks of Marcus Hayes and Bill Conlin is Robert Quinlan Costas, or as many in "the biz" know him, Bob Costas.

He has some not-so-nice things to say about bloggers in an article written by Barry Jackson of The Miami Herald.

If he ever comes to Portland I want to fight him.....his only mitigating performance was his classic "you're excited--feel these nipples" line in the great film "Baseketball". My thinking with this is that his "handlers" forced him into it to try to get him over with regular guys--kind of the same way that political candidates hit Letterman or SNL to show that they've got a sense of humor.

Let's look at the lofty standards of the so called "professional" sports media as demonstrated in the following article. I'm feeling charitable today so I'm not going to mention this writer by name, though he had no problem slapping his byline on this piece of journalistic debris. The article that this headline references isn't quite as bad as it sounds, but I'd strongly suggest that not even the lamest blogger would come up with something this inane. From ESPN.com's NBA section:

The NBA has better players, better games and better story lines than the NCAA tournament.

I added the emphasis...wow...going out on a limb there. Here's my hunch--the NBA has better players since they're "professionals" and all of that. Kind of like how doctors are better at surgery than med students, professional strippers are better at lap dances and pole acrobatics than the drunken skanks at "amateur night" or how professional wrestlers are better than amateur wrestlers.

The article it references isn't much better--I pretty much agree with the second half of his premise that the NCAA tourney is overhyped and overrated. Honestly, at this point I'd rather an alien spacecraft land on the verdant hills of Portland Oregon with the intention of subjecting me to an anal probe than be forced to listen to some empty suit at CBS trying to get me to feel all rah rah about watching an opening round game between Purdue and Sienna.

And I also agree with him that the NBA is *way* more entertaining this year--particularly out West which as a longtime Utah Jazz/recent vintage Portland Trailblazers honk is what I get the most of. I don't know what David Stern is putting in the water bottles, but who'da thunk that players would be playing hard every night in the regular season. I asked some of the local hippies if there was a shortage of "da chronic" to explain the newfound motivation of NBA players but that's not it. Even my local side, the Portland Trailblazers who are a longshot to even make the playoffs bring it every night--they're making a lot of the mistakes that you'd expect a young team to make but they play their ass off every night. Maybe its because they have better coaching and more "character guys" than a lot of the non-playoff teams (man, a few years ago I would have never thought that I'd be stringing together the words "Trailblazers" "good coaching" and "character guys" in the same sentence) but they sure haven't shown any signs of phoning it in....I might find the idea of throwing another lottery pick onto this already brutally talented young team enticing but Brandon Roy et. al. sure don't seem to be thinking that way..

But I digress....you don't exactly have to be a Mensa member to assert that Chris Paul and my SLC homeboy Deron Williams just *might* be better pointguards at this stage of their careers than even the best college players, let alone the pasty white dude running the offense at Davidson or somewhere. If the guy that wrote this is just realizing that the pros shoot at a higher percentage or that Kobe is a better scorer than anyone in college I really fear for the future of the human race.

And this is at ESPN.com which is nominally considered the apex of sports news. There's plenty of decent sports bloggers out there but its not like the "pros" are setting the bar particularly high--its low enough that anyone with a pulse and a room temperature IQ can stumble over it, even if they're drunk.

Anyway, what Costas is saying is no different than when the "hard news" types wring their hands over "bloggers" or "the blogosphere". I'll translate:

"It really sucks that anyone can now find an audience and that I'm no longer treated like Moses at Mount Sinai whenever I say something. I better discredit these people before *everyone* realizes what a talentless hack I am and I lose this cushy gig."

Here's the link of the article I was ranting about again. I almost pulled an Elvis and shot out my monitor when I read this guy's "the players in the NBA are better than college players" take....