Friday, October 13, 2006


I think it must really suck to be a non-Bears fan in Chicago right now, at least if you care about football at all. For proof, head on over the the FootballOutsiders comments track for Week 6's DVOA. There you will find, starting kind of early but especially once you get into comments 200 and on, a poor man who goes by internet name of Fnor, who seems to have annointed himself the corrective to "everyone's" over-rating of Grossman, and thus the Bears in general. I don't know what Fnor means, but when I first read the name I figured he was a Vikings fan. However, after five weeks of NFL play, the Bears have so clearly dominated their opponents and Grossman's put up decent enough numbers that the words "Grossman" and "Bears" apparently got to him, and starting in the late 200s of the comments, he kind of flips and starts accusing everyone who thinks Grossman might not be terrible of being obtuse. My favorite part is when he exasperatedly reveals that he is a Steelers fan living in Chicago. I actually was kind of surprised to find out that he's not a Vikings fan, but really this was just because his posting name is "Fnor," although he seems to assume that people thought he was a Vikings fan just because he hates Grossman. But, anyway, after reading his desperate post about being a Steelers' fan in Chicago, I kind of feel a bit of sympathy for the guy. For me, one of the most annoying things about being a football fan over the past five years leading up to last season was how high all of the Vikings fans around here got on Daunte Culpepper. Sure, the guy was putting up some absolutely spectacular numbers, but every time I watched him play all I could see was how he seemed to fumble the ball if anyone touched him and how obviously flustered and shitty he got when his team wasn't rolling. It was obvious to me but no one else seemed to notice it. Of course, both ends were probably exaggerations. Culpepper did get lucky that in a lot of cases his ridiculous fumbles and stupid mental errors didn't hurt him, but he also was capapble of throwing a pretty good game in between the blunders. Really, probably every "great" quarterback was like this. But now poor Fnor is stuck in Chicago where everything is turning up Bears all of a sudden, and when he watches a Bears game, he sees the throws that bounce off of a d-backs hands and gives Berrian the credit for all of Grossman's successes. What's kind of lame about it is that he is apparently a game charter for FO and he's said he's been charting some of the Bears' games this year, and so to whatever extent that charting is a subjective process, he's got a chance of skewing the analysis against Grossman. Not like it matters. Mainly I am just feeling some pretty rockin' schadenfreude while I imagine the words "Grossman" and "Bears" and "Super Bowl" resounding in poor Fnor's ears everywhere he goes in Chicago.

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