Category: NFL (Page 3 of 8)

Steve Young and Jerry Rice Get Down With Their Bad Selves

30 May, 2011 / Kat

I may be super behind the times on this video, but forgive me. I finally saw Steve Young and Jerry Rice’s Van Heusen commercial for JCPenney this Memorial Day. This ad features Young as a professor teaching a class about men’s fashion, and using Rice as the example of what to wear.

The commercial is only epic if you’re a fan of the two (like I am.) For the rest of America, it’s about as relevant as having Full House’s Danny Tanner hawk cleaning products. Appropriate casting…for 1995. Heck, I bet half the people who see this commercial have no idea who they are, yet alone that they were one of the best QB-WR combinations in NFL history.

That aside, what is truly epic is the behind the scenes video. In this video shot by KGO-TV in San Francisco in December, Young and Rice get funky. Yes. Let us watch them get down with their bad selves. Jump to the :45 second mark in this video and see the two try to do some type of dance. Gosh darn it, is it terribly awkward.

This is the stuff popular animated GIFs are made of. Now, if only I knew how to make one.

I Get It. I’m With You. My Favorite Football Team Stinks.

10 March, 2011 / Kat

A sarcastically fun facet to being a Buffalo Bills fan living in Massachusetts? Every time the local TV stations have to find B-roll (the video footage that rolls while a reporter speaks over it) of a New England Patriots player, they use footage from a Bills-Patriots game.

Example: this morning, the local news I watch led off their broadcast with a story on Patriots safety Brandon Meriweather facing serious allegations regarding a fight at a party and a possible shooting. They used footage of Meriweather playing the Bills – which, granted was probably some of the only footage of him actually doing his job on defense. But still.

When Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was breaking out spastic moves that show he has no rhythm in South America this week, a station juxtaposed it with him throwing a touchdown…against the Bills. There are a ton of Brady touchdowns out there. He’s sort of the reigning NFL MVP. But no. They had to use the Bills footage.

I get it. The two AFC East foes play each other twice a year. There is a lot of footage to be had, especially footage in the Patriots favor. But come on. It’s becoming like the never-ending joke on Geico commercials, where the caveman is faced with the stereotype that cavemen are idiots at every turn. Bills fans in Boston have to face the idea that their team pales in comparison to the superior Patriots endlessly and at the most unexpected of moments. I wake up this morning not even thinking about football, sit up in my bed, turn on the morning news and…look! The Bills blew that coverage again. The Patriots intercepted the Bills. Ugh. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Really. All I wanted to see was the weather.

The Good, The Bad, and The QB: Why Did The Stereotype of the NFL Quarterback Decline?

4 February, 2011 / Kat

As I watched Ben Roethlisberger (he of a more unenviable last name spelling wise than my own maiden name) win the AFC championship game two Sundays ago, I wondered to myself, “what ever happened to the quarterback as hero?”

When I was growing up, the group of elite NFL quarterbacks included two men who promoted advocacy for two diseases that were woefully under funded at the time (cystic fibrosis and Krabbe’s disease), a law school student, and men who worked to be the face of a franchise and never would dream of leaving.

I am not saying they were saints (for example, Jim Kelly’s wife’s recent book shatters most of our good conceptions of Kelly thanks to his infidelities), but we were shielded from it while they played. Instead of talking about their most recent rape charge at a stoppage of play, they would talk about Boomer Esiason’s son’s progress as he battled cystic fibrosis, something Dan Marino did for the community, or Steve Young’s bar card. We only knew Joe Montana as Joe Cool, not the anti-social teammate who laughed at his tough-but-tiny teammate at Notre Dame, the one and only Rudy. We bought candles to support Kelly’s son Hunter as he battled a rare disorder. Drew Bledsoe was a good guy from Washington state, and John Elway made Colorado relevant beyond skiing. Quarterbacks weren’t bad – they were golden.

Happy Sweet Sixteen, Super Bowl XXIX

29 January, 2011 / Kat

Scanning through Twitter this morning, I saw Sports Illustrated writer Peter King reminiscing about Super Bowl XXIX – aka, my most favorite Super Bowl of all time. After four straight years of seeing my favorite AFC and hometown team, the Buffalo Bills, lose the Super Bowl, it was wonderful to see a Super Bowl where my favorite NFC team, the San Francisco 49ers, totally dominated. I had just turned thirteen, as awkward as a blue-collar teenage girl could be, and was struggling though a difficult time with my family. My baby brother was sickly, my dad was about to lose his job, my grandfather was sick, our car broke down and we couldn’t replace it, and I was going to have to drop out of dance classes. Pile that all on to turning thirteen, and of course I was looking for escapism anywhere I could find it.

As I wrote in 2009, that Super Bowl also meant a lot to me because reading the Sports Illustrated covering that game inspired me to want to be a sportswriter. If you doubt how much that one issue impacted me, I present to you a photo taken this morning of the ragged original copy that has moved with me to college, to Boston and grad school and now to my place in the ‘burbs. It may be torn, it may be worth absolutely nothing – but to me, it’s worth everything.

There are days where I wonder why I down multiple cups of coffee a day and sit up all hours of the evening to write for anyone and everyone who asks, despite working a demanding full-time job. All I have to do is break this out and flip through a few pages. If I can chronicle some event as well as King and Rich Telander did in this issue, and inspire some awkward thirteen year old by doing so, then all the late nights will all be worth it.

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Surprisingly, I’ve only written two blog posts over the years on Super Bowl XXIX. Here they are:

Fourteen Years Later, I Experience My Super Bowl XXIX

On Excitement and Nervousness

If you want to see some of the other newspaper clippings thirteen year old me saved from that Super Bowl, I took pictures and posted them on Flickr. It’s from back when there were two newspapers (Democrat and Chronicle and Times Union) in Rochester, NY. Snapping shots of these this morning made me appreciate newspapers the tactile quality. Saving printed articles from online isn’t the same as trotting out my folder of newspaper clippings.

Bill Belichick Made The 2011 Buffalo Bills Calendar

31 December, 2010 / Kat

This morning, my husband took his annual mission to the mall’s calendar kiosk to pick up his “Star Trek: Ships of the Line” calendar for 50% off. While there, he found a Buffalo Bills calendar located in the depths of the “random team” pile, left lonely with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Florida Panthers and Toronto Raptors calendars.

“Look what I found,” he said eagerly, handing me the calendar.

“The Buffalo Bills, a year in futility,” I smirked. “Sure, let’s get it.”

I didn’t look closely at the calendar until I got back to our apartment. I hold onto my mother’s old superstition that you are not to open a calendar until New Year’s Day, so I wasn’t about to tear off the plastic. Instead, I took a more careful look at the back, which previews every month’s cover athlete.

Hey, it’s Marshawn Lynch! And Bill Belichick’s favorite, Josh Reed! (In case you missed it, check out that link for Belichick’s Reed gaffe from last week.) There’s Shawn Nelson and Roscoe Parrish! Continue reading