Reading too many stories . . .

In New England, Thanksgiving is arguably the most important football day of the year. It decides the playoffs and fires up old rivalries.

The next-best thing is the day after, especially with the “wonder of the internet.”

As I have said before, I have been a sports writer for a long time, although I am only stringing right now. I still read a lot of newspapers, live and on the web. Maybe I get too picky, but I had a bunch of thoughts I thought I would share.

While some of these are specific, I think there are enough generalities in the comments to make it worth posting here.

I spent much of this morning reading web pages from Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts – where Thanksgiving is key – and New York, where it’s just the day before football championship weekend.

1. If you are a statewide paper, and you are, there needs to be a playoff story and a bracket – easy to find – on the front of your sports web page. It ain’t that hard. Oh, and the same thing goes if you are a major regional paper in, say, the western third of your state. Where’s the playoff information?

2. Ya know what, coach, we don’t much care that you had kids suspended for the first game of the season? What-ifs, my butt. If your snapper gets the ball to your kicker, and your receiver doesn’t drop a TD pass . . . yeah, you probably win.

3. From the radio: Bad local announcers sound just as bad on an internet stream.

4. If a story says a team is going to the playoffs, we need to know who they are playing and when, and who they might play in the title game. Oh, and when it is.

5. If you’re in a state that does not have Thanksgiving football, maybe you could have a couple of local features – any sport – on your sports front on Thursday and Friday? Time for a nice swimming feature.

6. Putting the scores and a paragraph on your site is not that hard, especially when everyone else is doing it.

7. I don’t know about you, but I am an old, white guy, and I get a racist tone out of this: “I was proud of the way we played because you know what — they were a lot more athletic than we were.” Is he a racist or am I?

8. Now here’s a great story and a great kid:

After J.J. Nicastro's July 16 funeral Mass, Andrew Fulford visited John Nicastro, J.J.'s father, who also had become Fulford's friend. He shed tears. He offered condolences. Then he offered the most important thing he had: his jersey.
He offered to have his No. 23 hockey jersey buried with J.J. He gave John his No. 33 football jersey and asked John permission to wear J.J's favorite number, 21, for the upcoming season.
"I just wanted to have him play through me since he never got a chance to play [under the] Friday night lights," Fulford said.
Gloucester is a perfect 10-0 this season, champions of the Northeastern Conference Large School Division. A win today against Danvers would polish off an undefeated regular season dedicated to Nicastro.

. .

Fulford has run for 1,056 yards and 24 touchdowns this season, and now holds the school's all-time touchdown record with 46 going into today's game (the old record was 37). It's a mark he said J.J. would have broken if he got a chance.
"He probably would have been one of the best athletes ever at this school," Fulford said.

"You can just tell when a kid has special gifts."

Boston Globe

(Yeah, perfect 10-0 annoys me, too.)

9. Live blogging of state championship games (Syracuse Post-Star) is pretty cool. A lot of live blogging around here. (Upstate New York)

 

The Globe's Chris Forsberg does a good job with live blogging, shooting video and 10 other tasks.

 

Yep, he's a good one.