When foreigners cover American football...

Yeah... But Rich Eisen's name would have surprised me less than Rod Woodson's, actually. It may have cracked me up too much. But it was right in the middle of a list of RSS links to stories like Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo! and the bombings in Baghdad. Cut me some slack, please. It just seemed so random and something you'd see from foreigners covering a boutique sport, but not something anyone BUT the NFL Network would give anything to in the U.S.

 

GB, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone. Really. I AM SORRY FOR THE FLIP REMARK. If I tattoo it on my forehead will it make it seem sincere enough?

You are taking this personally. I know NFL games get broadcast to a zillion countries around the world. I'm sure there is a guy in Libya with a GPS device hooked up to a coat hanger who stands on one foot on his roof to watch NFL games a few times a year. And I know that the NFL has a nice little cult following in Great Britain. Just like the Premier League does here.

You're reading way more into it than I intended because of the tone of my post. I had just clicked on a bunch of links such asEgypt arresting Palestinians armed with suicide vests who had breached their border. Then I see a headline about an NFL great picking the Giants mixed in with the story about the U.S. economy. It cracked me up that it was Rod Woodson. If they are going to mix in one Super Bowl story, it seemed so random. That was why I was so surprised. I wouldn't have been half as surprised if it was Jim Brown. Sorry.

 

Wow, BYH is on some serious roid rage right now.

 

BTW, I can see why this is funny to Ragu. When you think NFL Great, Rod Woodson's name isn't the first one you think of. He's right, you usually think glamor positions. Of course, the label does apply to Rod. But if I just shouted out "name one NFL Great" to a room full of 50 people, and they had to name a different one each time, Woodson's name doesn't come up much because he didn't play QB, RB, or even WR. And that's no slight on Woodson, and Ragu wasn't trying to imply one.

 

There wasn't any need to read any farther than the lede for me. That is exactly the point. I am looking at a list of RSS feeds from the BBC that include stories like:

Exxon Mobile records record profits
'Bizarre' new mammal discovered
Twin bombs kill scores in Baghdad
U.S. jobs cut as economy cools
Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo!

When I clicked through those stories, yeah, I read on. Imagine that. They seemed like, um, NEWS. They were substantive stories.

Then I saw this headline:

NFL great picks Giants for upset

That piqued my interest. Why was Mike Ditka or Joe Montana making this prediction?

And when I clicked through the lede was:

Yeah, I found it REALLY random, expected to see about 100 names OTHER than Rod Woodson's under that headline and I stopped reading... And I chuckled... It didn't quite fit in with the ledes around it, such as:

Disagree if you want. But you are attributing personal things to me I didn't mean to imply. I'm not making fun of the whole country by pointing out how random and incongruous it was, and how Rod Woodson doesn't register on that scale here. I actually don't think he'd register on that scale in Great Britain if there was more fan interest in the game. My guess is they could have done a whole story about Jay Fiedler's prediction for the game and it would have been as meaningful for the typical person who reads the BBC's website. I wouldn't have read farther than the lede in that story either, by the way (and before you go there, I am not comparing Jay Fiedler and Rod Woodson as players).

 

Oh, I can piss you off plenty of times more. Just you wait and see.