It's Groundhog Day in Philly Sports and I Can't F*cking Take It Anymore
I need to screed for a moment.
Allow me to present an alternative fact regarding the positive narrative surrounding Philly sports for the past few months: this still fucking sucks.
I’ve been doing this for over seven – SEVEN! – years now, six of them full-time. The first few years saw, off the top of my head, a Stanley Cup Finals appearance, a perfect game and postseason no-hitter, two consecutive regular seasons with the best team in baseball, a Winter Classic, 24/7, a city-shaking signing (Cliff Lee), miraculous December Eagles comebacks, fan protests, Dry Island, and Riley Cooper. Since then we’ve been stuck in this morass of bullshit. The last playoff series a local team has won – not counting Villanova, of course – was when the Sixers beat the depleted Bulls in 2012. TWENTY FUCKING 12. Think about that for a moment. Think about how fucked up that is. They have gone through the most historic tanking process in the history of organized sports and are back on the way up and in all that time – ALMOST FIVE FUCKING YEARS! – another team hasn’t advanced through one round of the playoffs. In fact, over that time, there have been a total of only 14 playoff games– 13 first round games in series the Flyers lost to the Rangers and Capitals, and one Eagles playoff game that they lost to the Saints. 5-9 in those 14 games. Five playoff game wins, all by the listless, overmatched Flyers, in five years. Fuck.
This isn’t anything you don’t know, but quite honestly I think I’ve hit a breaking point. I can’t take it anymore. When I wake up, day after fucking day, Phil Connors, and wonder what the F I’m going to write about that is remotely interesting, I get sad. Not depressed sad, but that I just watched a little kid shoot an arrow at a squirrel sad. People give me shit for being negative, or comment that the site seems stale. No shit it seems stale! Have seen what’s going on in Philly sports? Take a look around you, Ellen, we’re at the threshold of hell! You try making lemonade out of a pile of discarded, rotten lemons every day and tell me if there’s anything to be upbeat about. I want to be positive. Believe me. Though I love snark, this site is at its best when we are crushing opponents. Those 2011 Morning Woods… they were the tits. That’s our wheelhouse, not bashing writers or even RADIO WARS. Tongue-in-cheek celebration of sports is what I’m best at. The fact that the site has not only survived, but grown and thrived over these last three years is seriously one of the only things that keeps me somewhat sane. If it worked through THIS, oh man are things going to hum once someone, anyone, does something exciting. But I feel like I’m waiting for a goddamned package that isn’t coming. For three years now.
Sure, the Chip Kelly era was, if nothing else, interesting. Ditto for Sam Hinkie’s tanking. There’ve been controversies, firings, absurd tales and the like to fill the gaps. But otherwise Philly sports has been a wasteland of shit. Just strewn, stringy feces all over the place. The Phillies and Flyers, the two teams this site was built around, have managed and played themselves into near irrelevance, or at least as close to it as you can get in Philly sports. There aren’t even words to describe how uninteresting the Phillies have been over the last three seasons. The Flyers provide the occasional intrigue, but five years after going for broke with Ilya Bryzgalov (whom they’re still paying, by the way), here we are with yet another mediocre playoff contender with inconsistent goaltending, and a savior, Ghost, who tonight will be a healthy scratch for the third time this season.
Just how bad has it gotten? This is the cover – COVER! – of the Daily News today:
Brian Dawkins. Brian. Fucking. Dawkins. Nothing against Weapon X, but WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HIM? Did he have some press availability at the Super Bowl the Eagles aren’t in? Cool. How about a local-guy Matt Ryan Tweet?
Matt Ryan w biggest crowd of media at today's #falcons news conferences of players. #SB51 @SportsRadioWIP pic.twitter.com/b1FE16ZFg9
— Howard Eskin (@howardeskin) February 2, 2017
Thanks, Howard. Where’s Sam Carchidi with a Bobby Ryan handjob when you need it?
The radio? Worse. When 97.5 isn’t re-running fucking Terrell Owens interviews, they’re literally talking about how there’s nothing to talk about:
https://twitter.com/Jt856/status/826915338235305987
RIGHT NOW @MikeMiss975 is doing a biopsy on the lack of Eagles conversation! Join in and voice your thoughts at 610.632.0975!
— 97.5 The Fanatic (@975TheFanatic) February 1, 2017
Wing Bowl is tomorrow. The fat slobs and coked up hookers of our area are thrilled. Here are some huge Wing Bowl fans lining up for free tickets in a local casino in a quest to temporarily relieve themselves of the sting of learning that they can’t get that Make America Great Again bumper sticker off their car as easily as they thought:
https://twitter.com/JOHNGENTILEINPA/status/826838885443330049
God. Dammit.
In 2011, after both the Eagles and Flyers went all-in with franchise-altering off-seasons, I wrote a piece pondering the bright and dark sides of the rainbow. I honestly scare myself with how accurate this was:
Dark side:
Over here, there’s no sun. Just rain. The rainbow only exists because of its reflection off the metallic dumpster, strategically positioned in the alley to hide a strung out leprechaun, who’s selling his last muddied coins for a thimble of coke which he will soon sniff out of the unfriendly end of a diseased hooker.
This is the dark side.
In the corner, an extremity-less Michael Vick rolls himself into a bottle of Courvoisier to help ease the pain of his failed second existence. He played only two years of his contract, earning $35 million. Unfortunately, half of it went to taxes, agents, and lawyers. The other half went to his creditors. He played only four games in 2011. An angry Clay Matthews prematurely ended Vick’s season when he removed his right leg with a vicious low-blow. Linebackers had no recourse since Roger Goodell fined every hit above the numbers. A year later, a slowed-down Starship 7 ran himself into limb-breaking injury after limb-breaking injury. He played only three games.
In the powerless apartment above, Andy Reid and Howie Roseman watch re-runs of Good Times on a 15-inch television. They spent $35 million on an unfortunately unreformed criminal, who played only seven games in two postseason-less seasons. Juan Castillo has offed himself in the bedroom.
The Eagles all-in philosophy failed miserably. Their stellar wideouts couldn’t bridge the gap left in the middle by the horrid linebacking core and their offensive line never stood a chance to protect the expensive investment.
Just a few feet below, on an island in the middle of the street, Paul Holmgren is feeding a now incapacitated Ed Snider a glass of high-end malbec through straw- it’s one of the few luxuries he still enjoys. His 30+ year refusal to bet the farm on a goalie proved to be the right philosophy. He’s spent the last 29 months lamenting the trades of Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, both of whom not only won Stanley Cups, but also led Canada to a gold medal in the 2014 Olympics. They both matured and are widely considered among the best players in the world, with 5-7 years of production ahead of them. Believe it or not, their outlandish contracts actually proved to be valuable. Their old buddy, James van Riemsdyk, never lived up to his $25.5 million deal. He was traded to Toronto for cap space in 2012. His 2010 playoff performance was an aberration, made all the more misleading since he was the only player on that team skated hard. A fed up Peter Laviolette scratched him five times before Christmas of 2011 and got into a locker room fist fight with Claude Giroux, whose only crime, ironically, was that he enjoyed a glass of his owner’s favorite wine with dinner the night before a game. It turns out Lavs is impossible to get along with, a realization that should have been obvious when he used to bench Rod Brind’Amour. We later learn that the media considers Richards a “coaches captain.”
A violated hooker wobbles over to the aging Snider and steals the remaining change in his pocket. Sadly, Snider doesn’t even care. She will spend the money more wisely than Holmgren.
This is the dark side.
Sadly, it’s worse than that. First off, Ed Snider is dead. Also, the Phillies barely exist. The Eagles not only bottomed out with Howie Roseman, but also with Chip Kelly, and now they’re back to Howie Roseman again.
What about the Sixers, you say? You’re right. They’re a delight (and I’m a fucking poet). Other than some questionable ownership and management practices – which, if we’re being honest, have led us to a great, compelling, well-rounded product – the vibe surrounding them is nothing but positive. Part of that is because it’s the first thing we’ve have to cling on to in a while. Joel Embiid – Lord save his knee – looks like a genuine superstar. Ben Simmons probably will be, too. They have picks and cash galore. The sky is truly the limit. Multiple championships ceiling. No exaggeration. But isn’t it just a little bit sad that a truly awful team stepping into mediocrity with a guy who plays, like, 40% of their games has led to so much euphoria? Don’t get me wrong– I’m all in. The process is awesome. Raise the cats. I haven’t been this excited to see pussies online since I got that T1 ethernet connection in college. The Sixers are pure, unadulterated fun right now, and there is every reason to be optimistic. But that still doesn’t change the fact that the best thing we have going is a feel-good team that will finish with 50 losses. Really, other than celebrating growth and serving up crow to the moronic old-timers who bashed them every step of the way, what do we have?
This post, believe it or not, started out being about Carson Wentz having the fifth best-selling jersey in the league this year. Here’s something cool! No it’s not. I started to write it and then I hated myself a little. Every day. The same shit. Little nuggets of empty joy– like a starving third-world child finding a few crumbles of bread leftover from the last airdrop supply mission. The glucose spike isn’t even enough to get me through 50 words. And as I wrote this version of the post I got a press release about Ric Flair and Coolio appearing at Wing Bowl, the former because a bunch of mongrels started yelling “Woo!” from the nether reaches of the Wells Fargo Center during yet another farcical Flyers streak and it stuck for a few games. As if I didn’t already hate this Groundhog Day. Hey Ric, did you see your fucking shadow? SIX MORE YEARS OF LOSING!
I love Philly, don’t get me wrong. I love our sports teams. It’s different here. You can’t so easily just transition to national topics. We’re provincial. We consume our teams (probably to their detriment) like no other city. But we are still in midst of a years-long bastardization of our sports. The end could be in sight (maybe???). It has to be in sight. I can’t take this nonsense much longer. I had a conversation with my neighbor while taking out the trash the other night – how fitting – about how awesome it was that the Sixers were watchable. Watchable. We’ve reached the point in our sad, pathetic existence that one team being watchable is what defines our fandom. I’m sick and tired of it. OK campers rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties, because it’s cooooold out there today.
I actually feel better now.