The Sports Corner

Friday Football Fix: Thanksgiving

For a football fan, is there a better weekend than American Thanksgiving?

The Super Bowl is probably the best one day event, but there is no better time in a football fan’s life than Thursday to Sunday on American Thanksgiving.

College football rivalry week is sandwiched between three NFL games on Thursday and a bunch of Sunday games with playoff implications.

To me, it’s a slice of heaven.

What better weekend to have the first edition of the Friday Football Fix?Michael Vick’s got talent

There was a lot of buzz this week regarding Michael Vick and his possible return to the NFL after he had another day in court and his release date is now set for July 20, 2009. Every sports talk show was asking the same kind of questions that I wrote about back in May:

Who is going to take a chance and sign him? Will he ever get the chance to be a starting quarterback in the NFL again? Is there a chance he switches positions? Only time will tell.

There is one thing we can definitely count on though. His rating in Madden is going to go way down. I don’t know if we will ever see a rating drop off as big as his will be.

This brings us to a couple of other questions as well. Will people forget how truly dominant he was in Madden? Will he lose his first ballot induction into the sports video game hall of fame? These are the answers that I care about.

Someone will sign him because everyone with talent gets a second chance in America and there is always someone who thinks they are smarter than the next guy. Who would have guessed that five years ago Robert Downey Jr. would be Ironman?

As far as Madden goes, Vick is still on my first ballot for the video game hall of fame. I just can’t ignore the fact that my friends and I had a “No Vick” rule due to fairness. Only him and Bo Jackson have ever experienced that kind of respect in video games.

You just can’t ignore that.

Anthony Smith guarantees another win against New England

For the second year in a row Anthony Smith, a back-up safety with the Steelers, guaranteed a win against New England.

Is there anything more worthless than a guarantee from a guy who has only made six tackles this year and does not even start? I don’t even think it’s worth posting on the bulletin board for the Patriots.

It’s the equivalent of the guy who plays “Police Officer #2″ in a movie demanding that the movie gets an Oscar nomination. No athlete has gotten this much undeserved press since He Hate Me.

Please cut this guy so we never have to hear his name again.

Cheers to McNabb

Very few athletes have gone through the kind of gauntlet that Donovan McNabb has gone through during this career.

He has been hated (on draft day), loved (played on a broken ankle), hated again (didn’t play well in the Super Bowl), and hated some more. It’s tough to be a professional athlete in Philadelphia, that’s for sure.

Cheers to you, Donovan McNabb, for sticking it to Andy Reid and every Philly fan who thought you were done. You’re the only quarterback of the five first rounders in 1999 that lived up to the expectations and you deserve better than you have experienced your entire career in Philadelphia.

If Philly decides at the end of the year that they don’t want you anymore, then so be it. Hopefully you can go back to your hometown of Chicago and be the starting quarterback they have been missing for twenty years.