The media!  The all loving, all knowing, voices of the sports world.  The ones we call upon night and day to tell us all the sports stories and news and the people who analyze games, players, and situations.  They're good at one aspect of their job, entertainment, but when it comes to some other parts of the job, they just blow.  My biggest problem with the media is that they complain about stories they shouldn't be doing right before they're doing the story.  I hope that makes senses.  It's a reoccurring theme with them though.  If there's an unfortunate situation or something they deem wrong and they have to talk about it then they make it seem like some sort of tragedy that they have to spend five or ten minutes discussing the issue.  Too bad nobody wants to debate and discuss about stuff that isn't controversial.

The most recent thing that happened where I heard someone complaining was about Stanford going for a two point conversion after they were up three touchdowns in the fourth quarter.  Mike Greenberg of Mike & Mike in the Morning got a little perturbed because he thinks that they shouldn't have to waste their time discussing this classless display from Jim Harbaugh towards Pete Carroll instead of speaking about the game and how well the Stanford players played.  Guess what?  Shut up and discuss the game then.  We can debate about the issue and listen to what you have to say about it without hearing how it's a travesty that you have to talk about it.  There is no story without the two-point conversion.  The story would be about how bad USC is falling from the ranks than anything about Stanford being great.  My problem with the whole situation is that there would be no story if it wasn't for people complaining about that this shouldn't be a story.  Most people around the country didn't watch the USC-Stanford game.  If you did, fine, you can complain all you want, but for anyone else who saw the box score all you saw was that USC got killed.  There wasn't any mention of Stanford going for two and the classless act of Stanford's coach.

I just don't want to hear media outlets complaining about doing stories that are created by the media outlets themselves.  These stories is what gets people talking.  They sure had no problem debating all day about the Bill Belichick call.  My take on the call is that it was a completely idiotic call.  No other coach in the league would ever make that call.  People need to stop saying that if he would've made it he would've been a genius.  This is true for any situation.  If it's 4th and 18 from your 10 yard line and you throw a screen pass for a touchdown you are a genius too.  These situations happen all the time and you have to make the correct coaching call.  He didn't.  End of story.  Back to the original, sorry.  Basically controversial stories is what makes the sports world go around.  Controversy is always a part of sports so lets stop acting like it's cruel and unusual punishment when you have to talk about a controversy in sports you don't like for five minutes.

Earlier this year I wrote an article, Fantasy Football is a Game of Poker where I basically compared how the season was like a poker tournament and other stuff that you can read if you click the link above. Well now were into the point of the season or tournament where you could get knocked out with a bad beat. Like they say in poker, "You never remember the big hands you won, but always remember the bad beats."

Well yesterday I saw a bad beat that I'm sure happens weekly, but I haven't seen happen to my league before. In one of the divisions the first place team was playing the last place team. The last place team had Eddie Royal going into Monday night up 1.5 points and the first place team had Santonio Holmes. After Monday night's game the first place team got the victory by .5 points. Tough loss for the last place team as it pretty much knocked him out of any playoff consideration. I wanted the first place team to lose as well because it would've sent me up to first.

Yesterday night the last place team calls me and says, "Did you mess with the scoring? It shows I won." I went into my league and amazingly that's what it showed. I was in disbelief at what had happened. I knew there were stat corrections, but I thought they were usually done by Tuesday night. I finally found a <a href="http://www.quickstats.com/nfl/nfl-fixes.htm">web site</a> that listed all the stat corrections for the week and found out that they eliminated a sack fro mthe Dallas defense and made it a negative rushing attempt for McNabb. It was unbelievable! I got phone calls and texts from everyone. The first place team was rightfully ticked off, but what was I to do.

So as you can see there is more to fantasy football that makes it better and better every year. There's situations like these that you would never expect, but happen every year. I'd like to hear some of your best bad beat stories in your leagues. Hopefully they didn't happen to you.

Andre Agassi ruined himself; ruined his legacy, his reputation, and even some of his dignity just by releasing a tell all book.  Some would say that.  I don't.  I don't believe you can lose legacies, you can only grow upon them.  Good or bad he will be remembered for many things.  Whether it be his exceptional tenniss play, his "Image is Everything" commercials, or his tell all book, Agassi hasn't lost his legacy.  I'm not an Andre Agassi know it all or even much of a fan for that matter, but I haven't seen so many people so upset with an athlete since the Michael Vick saga.  We have athletes that kill innocent human beings in a hit and run or who are involved in drug busts and people don't come down on them like they do Agassi.  Maybe people really believe he wrote the book for the money.  I don't.  Maybe people just hate the fact that this American tennis legend is not the pure athlete that we once loved.  It doesn't really matter to me what he says in his book because there's so many worse things going on in the world or sports world to be upset over than the fact that Andre Agassi did crystal meth and he wore a wig because he was balding so much.  What I don't like are all the harsh criticizing towards Agassi over a stupid book.  Whatever the reason it is he wrote the book doesn't matter.  If it's for money, so be it, people have done much worse for money.  If it's really to help the less fortunate who could be in a similar situation, so be it also, I don't really care.  It just seems that when a person tells the truth than he's chastised, but when the truth comes out and he admits it than he's a saint.

That's my real gripe with this whole situation; someone tells the truth and they're the worst person in the world.  Look at Michael Vick, look at A-Rod; both these athletes got caught, one caught cheating the game and the other got brutally abusing animals.  There was an uproar, there was criticism, but after they gave their apologies and told the truth people began to forget.  America is the land of second chances.  When someone does something wrong they can right it and we accept them for it.  I guess we don't give second chances for telling the truth.  That's the America we live in now though.  We don't like when people tell the truth, we like when people tell us what we want to hear.  We hate the tattle tale and love the comeback kid.  So let's put the whole story into perspective.  We have a star athlete from over a decade ago who writes a book about past drug use and not loving the game.  That's the entire perspective; simple and easy.  So before we get into a tizzy more than we already are let's realize that Andre Agassi wasn't harming anyone but himself.  He wasn't cheating the game, just cheating his career.  So maybe it doesn't seem like the smartest way to go, usually telling the truth when it's hard isn't, but at least he did it, for whatever reason, and Agassi's legacy shouldn't be punished just for telling the truth.

Typically I write a recap and analysis of the previous weekend's football events.  I think I'm done doing that.  Everyone does that.  Doyou really need me to tell you the scores of every game that you already watched and saw the highlights of on Sportscenter twenty times?  Instead I'll speak of some of the weekend's games and write about whatever comes to mind.  First and foremost let's speak on the New York Giants.  I've been proclaiming them the most overrated team in the NFL for a month now and I think my opinion finally came to fruition.  Now I'm not going to beat up on the Giants for being terrible.  They are.  And I'm not going to proclaim myself a sports genius.  But I am.  I'm going to be humble.  I think what we've learned is that we as a sports nation annoint team's great or terrible way too quickly.  I don't think the Titans, Panthers, or Buccaneers are magnificent teams, but we basically sunk their battleship after four weeks into the season.  On the other hand we have teams like the Packers, Giants, 49ers, and Ravens who were considered top contenders who have fallen pretty quickly as of late.  This is how we are though.  The Steelers beat the Vikings so they're back in the top 5 of power rankings.  If they lose tonight then everyone will consider them just good, not great.  I think we've finally come to a point in the season where we can finally judge a team a little bit better.  Remember, the Super Bowl championship goes to the team that played a successful season, but who is also playing the best at the end of the year.  It's all about how you are playing now, not how you played in week 1.  Some teams get better and some teams get worse.  We also got to see the last two undefeated teams get challenged and they both prevailed.  Championship teams will get challenged and won't have an easy victory every week.  Let's not buy into those close matchups as well.  So as the season crosses the halfway point we may finally be able to grasp a little bit of the playoff picture.  Just coming to the realization that half the NFL season is over is tough to grasp, but trying to decide on playoff teams is another story.  Even though  I can't believe the season is halfway over I can can believe that some of the teams we all thought were great aren't and vice versa.  Let's realize this happens every year.  We've gone a half a season and still have no clue so what makes us think we'll really know anything four weeks from now either?

Shout Out:  I'd like to wish a very Happy 25th Birthday to Chelsea Lizik.  You're getting old Chels!

I think this year of fantasy football has been unlike many of the others in the past. We always have our normal sets of injuries, normal sleepers, and normal busts, but this year is different. The difference this year is almost all the best fantasy players come from good teams. There's the occasional star like Maurice Jones-Drew from a bad team, but for the most part the point leaders are from contenders. The reason for this is because fantasy football is dictated by how the NFL season plays out. We are spoiled as fans. Usually we get a great parity amongst teams in the NFL and all games are exciting to watch and we usually don't know who is going to win. Not this year. Nope! This year we got a bunch of crappy teams and a handful of contenders and that's it. There's not many middle ground teams that are competing each week. Unfortunately for fantasy owners the same is happening with our fantasy players. The bad teams are bad and therefore the players on those teams aren't doing anything either. The NFL is different than most sports. One individual can't just take over the game as easy as a pitcher in baseball or a shooting guard in basketball. The team has to be solid for the players to shine. Now I know what everyone is thinking...why not just draft players from good teams and than things will be easier next year. The other problem is we don't always know who the best teams are going to be. Did we think the Bengals or the Broncos would have the records they have and their starting quarterbacks would be putting up big fantasy numbers? No. I really just think this is a fluke year. So don't jump ship from your normal draft strategies next year, but do look at the overall NFL picture, because if not much has changed than I would go with drafting players from solid teams.