TMQ

Last season, the Colts won the Lombardi in part by establishing a pass-wacky attack that defensive coordinators were obsessed with stopping, then gradually shifting toward the run in the postseason, then rolling out a rushing-based game plan in the Super Bowl that took everyone by surprise. … Belichick is among the best-ever students of the sport, so don’t be surprised if he remembers and attempts the same switcheroo. Of course at this point, don’t be surprised if Belichick suddenly rips off his prosthetic human face and reveals himself as a hideous reptilian space alien come to spearhead an invasion fleet.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback scores again with 2010: The Mock Draft.

Are you a sports fan? Have you ever wondered just how accurate those clocks are? And can a ref — or anyone — really determine a hundredth of a second?

The author of The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called Tuesday Morning Quarterback during football season. I didn’t get a chance to read it Tuesday because I was still in Vegas. I love Easterbrook because he’s not afraid to tackle social issues in the middle of discussing the merits of good run-blocking. Buried in the middle of this week’s football news he wrote the following:

Last week the British Medical Journal, a technical publication, released a survey in which physicians said sewers, not antibiotics or vaccines, were the greatest public health advance of the past two centuries. Those who live in the favored cities of the West should never take sanitation for granted. The construction of sewage systems in European and American cities, beginning in the late 19th century, dramatically lowered rates of disease, to say nothing of making cities more livable; lowered disease in turn helped Western nations grow more productive and affluent. Today much of the developing world is held back by the fact that its citizens are often sick, and thus not productive. Open conduits of sewage run down the streets of many large developing-world cities; raw sewage pours directly into the Ganges, where bathers are supposed to go for purification rites. In many developing nations the No. 1 need is clean water: clean drinking water, buried sewer systems and modern wastewater treatment plants. The United States appears to have wasted nearly $1 trillion in Iraq. That sum could have brought modern public sanitation to the 25 largest cities of the developing world, and made America the hero of the world’s poor for generations.

When I got to the office today there was a package sitting on my desk. I received my sixth copy of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” — I keep giving them away! — via Amazon’s used book marketplace. The book is in near-perfect condition, perhaps because it seems to have been stolen from the Naperville, Illinois Public Library. Either someone stole the book from the library and then sold it on Amazon, a Naperville Public Library employee is stealing books and selling them on Amazon, or the administrators of the Naperville Public Library are knowingly reselling their library books on Amazon. I don’t think that stealing library books is a crime that any police department seriously enforces, so people could presumably make quite a bit of money stealing library books and posting them for sale on Amazon. How odd.

I was in football nirvana this weekend. I watched no less than a dozen games — college and pro — since I left the office Friday night. The best by far was last night’s Boise State / Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl, one of the top ten football games I’ve ever seen. While watching Saturday night’s Giants / Redskins contest on the NFLN I kept wondering about all the commercials they kept airing for themselves. “Why in the world,” I asked, “do they keep showing me commercials for something they know I already have?”

The only people who could have possibly seen all the ads for the NFLN were the people that currently have the NFLN. And it wasn’t just the 30-second commercials spots, either. During the game they were constantly bombarding me with teasers and float-overs talking about how wonderful they are. Aside from the fact that it was mildly annoying, it was also pointless!

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from Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

Actual correction from last week’s San Francisco Chronicle: “A story about mathematical references mistakenly said that 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 1,922 to the 12th power. Actually, 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,258,614, 589,176,288,669,958,142,428,526,657 while 1,922 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,259,314,801,410,819,278,649,643,651,567,616.”

This week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback includes a delicious link to college football’s funniest fight song. It also includes the best football commentary on the web, and a little bit about that lovable V’Ger, from the first Star Trek movie.

If you’ve been trying to find Gregg Easterbrook’s column on Salon and you can’t, it’s because he switched to ESPN.com’s Page 2. From now on, you can get your weekly doses of TMQ right here.

Last spring Penthouse magazine, after announcing the publication of topless photos of Anna Kournikova, had to pay a judgment and issue an apology to model Judith Soltesz-Benetton, the woman really in the pictures. On Miami Beach, Soltesz-Benetton had been seeking a suntan without lines when she was glimpsed by Frank Ramaesiri, a vacationing salesman from St. Louis, who mistook her for Kournikova, snapped photos and sold them to Penthouse. …

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It took Drew Bledsoe exactly two games to have the best passing day in 43 years of Buffalo Bills history. Bledsoe threw for 463 yards, three touchdowns and no picks against Minnesota, a bigger single-game yardage total than any compiled by Bills Hall of Famer Jim Kelly or Pro Bowl QBs Jack Kemp, Joe Ferguson and Doug Flutie. From the start of the fourth period through his winning toss in overtime, Bledsoe was 19 of 24 for 266 yards and two touchdowns. At one point in the fourth quarter, Bledsoe’s lip was cut; he went the sideline and had the cut stapled together without anesthesia, immediately returning to the game. Remember, this is a gentleman whom most of the league’s general managers did not want when he was placed on the trading block last winter, questioning his arm strength and spirit.

Another terrific excerpt from the Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

In the NFL there are high-scoring 45-42 games and low-scoring 13-9 games; games that feature the pass and games that feature the run; there are games where teams try wild things and games when teams go conservative; there are games decided by a few sudden big breaks and games decided by long accumulations of field-position maneuvers; there are games played in heat, cold, rain, and snow. In the NBA, pretty much every game ends 98-93.

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Observations like this are why I love to read Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

This season, style demands that NFL players on the sidelines don baseball caps, often worn backward. Look closely next time you see a shot of a backward cap on an NFL star. TMQ has been doing this lately, and has noticed-the adjustable bands are always cinched halfway or even two-thirds over. Which is to say that NFL players, despite being enormous pumped-up gentlemen, have unusually small hat sizes. Think about it.

In other NFL news, NBC has announced that during halftime of the Super Bowl, it will air a 20-minute special of the drek “reality” show Fear Factor - reality shows” being the least real things on television - in which the contestants are six former Playboy Playmates of the Year. Swimsuits will surely be required for the so-far-undisclosed event. Maybe it will be a tanning-oil rubbing competition! The segment will start the moment the Super Bowl second quarter concludes, to lure viewers from Fox during the halftime festivities.