New Rules: Fall 2011

Nearly eight months have passed since I've added some new additions to "The Law of Dave", so I feel it's time to once again take a page out of Bill Maher's playbook and offer up some up some New Rules

NEW RULE: The NBA has to take this season off. Perhaps it's unfair to compare pro basketball's labor strife to that of their NFL counterpart, but you can't help but notice the lack of dread on social networks, on TV, and through general word of mouth that is being felt by the possibility of no basketball this season compared to the frenzy over the NFL shutting down in '11. Obviously, that's a testament to the NFL being far more popular than the NBA but it's also a matter of the NBA having far more issues than the NFL had. While both labor issues essentially come down to money, the NFL is proven to be a fine product when it's actually on the field. The NBA hasn't.

For one, the league has been split into two categories: small-market teams hamstrung by bad contracts and poor attendance and their big market brethren who have benefited from the cash woes of their financially dysfunctional cohorts by poaching its stars via trade or by throwing big money at them come free agency. It's why a team like Miami can become a powerhouse utilizing star players from Cleveland and Toronto, while those latter teams flounder in front of hoards of empty seats. There's no parity in the NBA. The worst thing that came from last year's LeBron sweepstakes is that it set a precedent for big markets to form superteams with a duo or trio of supremely talented young stars. It's why Carmelo Anthony left a cushy situation on a superior yet smaller market team in Denver to tag team with Amare Stoudemire(and probably Chris Paul, eventually) in the big city lights of New York. It's why prognosticators are forecasting center Dwight Howard to leave a Magic team that made the Finals two years ago and line up with Pau Gasol and Kobe Bryant in Hollywood. 85% of NBA fan bases know their teams don't have a shot to compete because they can't land premier free agents every summer like the Lakers or Heat or Celtics. Part of that is the players' fault, and part of that is that there are so few teams with cap space to bring in a Dwight Howard or a Chris Bosh because they screw themselves by overpaying average players OR they spend so much time thinning their roster to get cap space that the overall talent makes them unattractive to big time players.

That's only a small part of my problem with the NBA. The bigger problem is the game itself. The game of basketball has become a game of fast breaks. It's like NBA Jam without the oversized heads and flaming nets. Shooting is at a premium and good defense is as shocking and surprising to see as Nancy Grace's nipple on "Dancing With The Stars". The influx of one-and-done players has been so hit-or-miss, that the strategy of building through the draft is almost defunct. For every John Wall and Blake Griffin, there's a Greg Oden and Mike Conley. The overall talent has dwindled because college kids are chasing NBA dollars without bothering to learn fundamentals while college coaches, knowing they have nothing to entice their freshman to stay past one year, are either recruiting college seniors for hire every year or using their own incentives to lure in big fish. The need for a draft rule similar to the NFL's "three years removed from high school before applying for the draft" has never been more necessary than it is now. You can't tell me that, even with as great as LeBron has been from jump street, that he couldn't have benefited from three years at Duke or Ohio State or UNC. The NBA money will always be there for these kids but there's as much resistance standing between them and the pros as there is defenders in the lane stopping a drive to the hoop, which is to say little.

The game is in desperate need of a year off and some tinkering. You know why fans aren't blowing up Twitter demanding basketball not be cancelled? Because we really don't miss it(Well, that and football's back). Take the year off. Shore up the league's cap issues. Find a way to keep these kids in college for a couple years and make rules to give the players you have now a reason to learn how to score besides hard-charge to the hoop and either draw the foul or posterize some seven-foot stiff from Lithuania who is staring into space under the basket. The game of basketball should be about more than just filling up highlight reels on SportsCenter. Baseball learned the hard way that dwelling on the home run, and thus forcing players to shoot up PEDs, was eventually going to hurt the game. Hockey had to go away for a year to make up for the fact that the league was just a handful of rich superteams and that a majority of their fan bases felt alienated. The NBA has to do the same. Make us miss you the way so many of your stars miss 15-foot jumpers.

NEW RULE: America has to come to grips with the fact that Seth MacFarlane isn't funny. After watching Seth McFarlane bomb as host of the last three Comedy Central Roasts, it's become apparent to me who is doing the joke writing for MacFarlane's shows: The writers of "South Park" and "The Simpsons". I get it, "Family Guy" is popular. "American Dad" is popular and, in a pinch, they might evoke a laugh or two from a dumbed-down fan base. But are they original? Fuck no. Granted, in this day and age, nothing's original. The popularity of "Jersey Shore"(which was spawned from numerous seasons of "The Real World", another MTV hit) unleashed numerous Garden State related reality clones. The same way "Survivor" spawned rip-offs, and "Big Brother" and "Top Chef" and the like. But if a man who is billed as a comedic genius manages to go on national television in front of his peers and not be funny not once, not twice, but three times, at what point do we realize he doesn't have the goods?

Jeff Ross kills EVERY ROAST. Lisa Lampanelli kills EVERY ROAST. You know why? Because they're funny. I realize the "Seth MacFarlane steals from South Park and The Simpsons" crack isn't new or original but maybe it's also true. In a copy cat world where MTV hires a tard like Rob Dyrdek to helm a "Tosh.O" ripoff called "Ridiculousness", we are willing to give infamy to whatever seems new and original even if it isn't new and original. We're always looking for a fresh face to make us laugh.....even if that fresh face isn't funny. Which brings me to.......

NEW RULE: Networks have got to stop giving Jeff Dunham work. The man is a fucking ventriloquist. When have ventriloquists EVER been funny? You know who finds Jeff Dunham funny? Rednecks who think Larry The Cable Guy is talented, eventhough he's a fat bastard from Michigan making money off mocking the very fans that use their hard-earned Walmart money to go see him perform. I get it, Comedy Central, you need something to fill the void left by the still-legendary "Chappelle's Show", but there's a reason Dave Chappelle's three-season opus still resonates with fans: The man was actually funny. We've seen Jeff Dunham fail on television before. Remember the ill-fated "Jeff Dunham Show" back in 2009 that lasted all of seven episodes? Yeah, me neither. Critics have called Dunham's style "Don Rickles with multiple personality disorder". He's more like Don Johnson with down syndrome. According to Forbes, Dunham is the third-highest paid comedian behind legends like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld. THIRD!!!? And you wonder why we're in a fucking recession!? I wouldn't pay 2 bucks to have Dunham wash my car with his band of puppets. (OK, maybe I would, a good car wash is expensive).

Americans, we have to set the bar higher for ourselves in terms of what entertains us. We have to upgrade from a group of individuals who get our chuckles from watching whores eat eel shit, hillbilies telling fart jokes and some closet homosexual being a bit risque with his hand jammed up a puppet's ass. I know the Chappelle days are over and who knows if we'll ever get another classic comedy special from Chris Rock or Eddie Murphy but we have to branch out and put our money on someone with some actual talent. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.....and that anything has to stop being some doofus with a jalapeno on a stick.

NEW RULE: Madden needs to step their game up. The recent edition of the Madden football franchise(Madden 12, for non-gamers) was so universally panned by gaming critics that it might as well have had Nicolas Cage on its cover instead of Peyton Hillis(or maybe Hugh Jackman on the cover....Come on, you know you aren't going to see "Real Steel" when "Moneyball" is in theaters and, if you are, shame on you). The problem with "Madden" is quite simple: There's no competition out there and, thus, no reason to get better. Fans will buy Madden because it's a simulator of the most popular sport in the country. They'll pay 60 bucks despite the fact the game routinely has more bugs than a Newark Motel 6. They'll buy it eventhough it's pretty much the same game year-after-year with just different rosters. They'll own it regardless of the fact that it lacks the one thing a video game should have: fun. 9-year old kids could put up 42 points a game on All-Madden. Hell, I don't even play the game that serious anymore and I haven't allowed a touchdown in the regular season with my Packers in four games. From a visual standpoint, Madden looks as real as Christina Hendricks' breasts, but the mechanics of the game are screwy. Jay Cutler doesn't avoid six tacklers in the pocket and run untouched up the gut for 35 yards in real life. Reggie Bush doesn't bowl over Patrick Willis on a halfback sweep(at least not without tearing something). Victor Cruz doesn't win jump balls over Nnamdi Asomugha......wait, that actually happened last week. Sorry, Eagles fans. Couldn't resist.

When Madden was on the older consoles, before the next-gen era and before it snatched up the NFL license, the games got better every year because it offered up something new each year from QB Vision to Hit Sticks to training camp drills. Why? Because it had the NFL2K series breathing down its neck every year. It needed to offer up an alternative to a very tough competitor. Now, the 2K series is dead in the water and, even with the presence of some of 2K's brain trust on the development staff, the game still underwhelms. Maybe we, as hardcore football fans and gamers, hold the bar so high for Madden because it's the quintessential sports franchise of our era. Maybe we expect too much. However, all other sporting games have managed to evolve over the years. NBA 2K11 emerged last year as one of the best sports games in history by upgrading a lot of things it did well and also offering up something new by offering up something old in bringing in Michael Jordan and the Jordan Challenge. This year, 2K12 offers up Jordan and then-some with a slew of new legends from Bird to Magic to The Big O. That's called progress. Madden offers up nothing new. The franchise mode is a mess. There's no restricted free agency like they had even back in the PS2 days and the offense is so simplistic that you could put up Matt Stafford numbers with your eyes closed. Some will use the uncertainty of this year's NFL season as a reason for Madden taking a step back but the game hasn't been entertaining for years. The game has never taken a critical ponding like this(It got a 7.5 out of 10 from Game Informer....worse than NHL 12, a game featuring a sport that's hardly watched outside of Canada and Pittsburgh). If Mark Zuckerberg, whose a billionaire sitting on loads of cash running a social networking business that has no close rival, can still find time to tinker Facebook on a routine basis, then it's time for EA Sports and Tiburon to go back to the drawing board and give us a Madden that even crochety skeptics like me can enjoy.

NEW RULE: ESPN has to stop making Tony Romo to be Willis Reed, Tom Brady to be Joe Montana and every Peyton Manning neck twinge to be front-page news. If the Madden franchise has let itself go from years of reading its own press clippings, then they got that way from watching "The Worldwide Leader". ESPN has to be the only network that makes stories out of its own stories. Prior to a boring Redskins-Cowboys showdown, the Monday Night Football cast as well as the members of ESPN's pre-show couldn't shut the hell up about Tony Romo's busted ribs. Then, in a neverending effort to fill time during a snoozefest, Mike Tirico and company couldn't stop going on about all the pre-game talk about Romo's ribs and how Tony Overrated responded to all the hubbub......a majority of which was supplied by ESPN. Romo's ribs is just the latest injury that ESPN has decided to beat into the ground and force down our throats. For weeks, analysts treated Peyton Manning's neck injury like a reason to raise the terror alert. In between that, it was round-the-clock coverage of every Michael Vick ailment that existed from concussions to bleeding tongues to his newfound hand injury that ESPN first reported as a fracture but now may or may not be a sprain depending on who you ask and what day of the week it is.



Enough already. I'm still exhausted from 2008's frenzy over Tom Brady's knee. Michael Vick gets hurt because he's undersized and he puts himself in harm's way with every scramble. That's why he's only played one full season in his entire career. Peyton Manning is 35 and coming off two surgeries on his neck. It doesn't take Chris Mortenson sitting on Peyton's lawn to tell you there was a good chance he was going to miss time this year. Hell, even I mentioned three months ago that Manning was a risky bet this season. Yet, all offseason, ESPN championed Manning as some modern-day Rocky Balboa and seemed dead-set that we'd see Number 18 suit up against Houston in the opener. Guess what? We didn't.....and the network reacted to Manning's consecutive games streak ending the way Jim McKay reacted to the Munich massacre.


I know ESPN christened 2011 as "The Year of the QB" but there are more than five QB's in the NFL. Give Josh Freeman some love. Talk a little more about Colt McCoy. Or, better yet, try talking to the NFL about putting some of these guys in the primetime slots instead of forcing us to sit through another wretched Redskins-Cowboys clash or a Manning-less Colts vs. Steelers tilt. Why put your eggs in a basket that is unraveling? And why continue to annoy viewers by regurgitating the same story over and over with that same trademark hyperbole? Tony Romo playing a Week 3 matchup against the Redskins with enough padding to negotiate a hostage situation doesn't make him Willis Reed coming out of the tunnel at Madison Square Garden against the Lakers in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals. It's bad enough you overpaid Jon Gruden to oversell every screen pass to be the Miracle on Ice. Show a little restraint and get over yourselves, ESPN.