Archive | May, 2012

Confused? Read the CBA!

31 May

I continue my series of posts on the Drew Brees contract negotiations on Canal Street Chronicles with a look directly at the CBA.  Stop listening to the Legitimates, and see what it says for yourself.  Stay tuned for my next not-on-CSC post, coming very soon – there will be discussion of traitors, and booing, and criminal activity, and links to 20-year-old articles.  Can’t-miss stuff right there.

As is par for the course this offseason, whether we’re discussing the bounty situation (enough with the –gate thing, people) or the Drew Brees contract negotiations, I believe the Saints fan community is taking too much at face value. A few snippets have come out of the Brees/Condon/NFLPA camp via the national media, and no matter if they’re presented as fact or conjecture, they’re not backed up by the actual documents. So, in the interest of self-education, let’s take a look at what the CBA actually says about the franchise tag. Stop trusting the national media, or even your friends in the Saints blogging community, even if they are sometimes right on the mark. You may learn nothing new from this post. However, instead of taking your information from Jason Cole or Pro Football Talk, why not take it straight from the source?

Here’s the CBA. Please, feel free to follow along after the jump.

 Jump to Canal Street Chronicles >>

Well I’ll Be Damned….

25 May

Just yesterday on Canal Street Chronicles I theorized that there’s a whopper of a bargaining chip out there somewhere, probably on the side of the Brees/Condon camp, that’s holding up negotiations. Call it, as some have, a “poison pill.” I said that I didn’t think your typical numbers game was the issue here, for several reasons.

I also admitted that perhaps I was being a little too tin-foily and reading too far into the situation. But, just maybe, I wasn’t too far off.

Read On >>

Bringing the Tin Foil to the Brees Contract Dispute

24 May

Note to Angry Readers: From time to time (maybe once a week) the Angry Who Dat will be coming to you on Canal Street Chronicles. I’ll let you know when you’re jumping off-site, as you see below. TheAngryWhoDat.com isn’t going anywhere, though, so stick around. If you see “Read on >>” for the jump, you’re staying here. Now, to the Drew Brees thing…

Here’s how I like to imagine the last contract negotiation going:

Condon: “$25 million a year. And a part-time sharecropper. Drew wants tomatoes, brah.”

Loomis: “Dude, what? $22 million a year, and we’ll frontload the contract.”

Condon: “Now we’re talking. Let’s discuss admission into the astronaut training program.”

Now I know what you’re saying. What the hell is this guy talking about? It’s foreshadowing. Stay with me.

See, I’m about to bring the tin foil to this contract situation – and I’m bringing it hard. Something weird’s going on here. Something unprecedented. Please, let me explain.

Jump to Canal Street Chronicles >> 

Anyone like free Saints tickets?

22 May

Yeah. Thought so.

Details >>

Did I Miss Anything?

21 May

 

I miss you already.

 

Good grief, did I.  If you didn’t notice, I’ve been out of touch for about a week.  The Caribbean says Hi, bitches!  I needed that.  Although the sun and the sand and the all-inclusive meals were great, I felt a little disconnected from the Nation™.  “¡¿Quién es ese, mi amigo?!”  Nothing.  “¿Que son los Santos, señor?”  Ah, hell.  C’est la vie.

If you’re counting, that first paragraph included three languages.  Hi five?  Anyway, don’t get me wrong.  I met quite a few great Saints fans on the cruise ship (lookin’ at you, Party People™) – quite a few were decked out in black and gold – and a few times I got drunk enough to shamelessly promote the site and the Who Dat Billboard Project.  I hope a few of them are reading this – and donating – this Monday morning.

I’m already back at work, and I’m not nearly caught up enough to write anything substantial (if anything on this blog can be considered substantial anyway), so I’m using my short lunch break to bang out something so everyone knows I haven’t vanished entirely.

Read on >>

Weird Science: Abusing the NFL Mortality Study

9 May
“Hitting people makes you live longer. You’re welcome.”

The league’s propaganda machine is working a full-court press these days.  It’s actually pretty impressive, in a dark, disgusting way.

The Angry Who Dat has never been against improvements in player safety, even rule changes to make the game safer and help these athletes to compete (and live) longer.  The Saints themselves have demonstrated an ability to be physical and lay impressive, roar-inducing hits, in spite of rules protecting defenseless receivers, et al.  The rules aren’t killing the game, and memes describing “flag football” and the “death of the game” and the “wussification of America” are completely ridiculous.

I only want to see the league address these issues legitimately and without hypocrisy.  Don’t scapegoat a team to produce a piece of favorable evidence against lawsuits (“See, we went after those bad, bad Saints”), the whole while pushing an 18-game season and talking out of the other side of your collective mouths about how the game is safer, children should be playing, and hell, football players are healthier than the general population anyway!

No, really, that’s what they’re saying.

Read on >>

An Open Letter to Local Sports Media

3 May

Not that any of them give a shit what I think, but it was a little too long to get out on twitter.  So, a blog post and a few emails, it is.  If any of them choose to respond, I’ll post the reply here.  Yeah, right. 

Please feel free to send this to anybody in the local media who you believe it applies to. My only condition: I want to see their self-righteous, asinine little replies.

If you don’t understand what this is about, you really need to get twitter.  Like, seriously.

To Mr. Varney, Mr. Spain, Mr. Duncan, and whomever it may concern:

I do not presume to speak for all Saints fans.  I know, however, that I speak for many who will agree wholeheartedly with what I have to say.

We do not expect local media, to include sports talk radio, print newspapers, beats on twitter, or professional online bloggers, to be fanboys, to commit to absolute homerism in all respects.  That, my friend, is what people like me are here for.  That’s why I’m an anonymous lowlife with a largely-ignored blog, and you are writing for the most popular paper in the New Orleans area.

What we do expect is a thorough examination of the situation.  It is not enough to repeat the official statements of the NFL or the NFLPA, or for that matter, the players themselves.  See, I can do that.  So can any number of people in the New Orleans area with even an inkling of literacy and reading comprehension.

The Rest >>

Journalism and Motivation

1 May
Another Saints blogger working diligently to bring you the truth.

I promise: this will be short.  No self-masturbatory indulgence, or whatever the hell that dude at the back table in the Social Club accused me of last week when I wrote more than he could read in one sitting.

First of all, I’m not a conspiracy theory guy.  Really, I’m not.  But people do things that benefit themselves, advance their own careers, make themselves money.  Look no further than Sean Pamphilon for evidence of that inevitable fact of life.

Over the last two weeks or so, your good buddy John Barr at ESPN rose to fame on the back of an imaginary monkey on Mickey Loomis’s back, was ridiculed by the entire nation, and vanished as quickly as he appeared. 

 It was a ridiculous story that he concocted (and that I will not link to in any form), of the Great and Scandalous Loomis hacking phone servers and rewiring communications devices to learn his opponents’ every secret (evil laugh here).  Never mind the silliness of the very idea that a GM would gain something from gameday communications between staff of another club and somehow use it to his – or his coaches’ – benefit.  Never mind the mediocre-at-best record the Saints posted in home games during the period in question.  To be fair, the Saints did drop to 3-13 when he stopped using the devices (allegedly, says the writer who is full of shit and doesn’t want to get sued), but there were some other factors in play, y’know?

I’ll get to the point soon, promise >>