Bottom of the Bird Cage 4/14
It’s the 104th day of the year.
On April 14, 1828 Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his dictionary. For those who may have forgotten, that’s the book with all the correct spellings of words. It was something people used before Spell Check. On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth.
Born on April 14 were a couple of famous baseball players. In 1941 it was Pete Rose and in 1966 Greg Maddux.
And on April 14, 1860 the First Pony Express rider reached Sacramento around 1 a.m. The mail pouch or mochila left St. Joseph at 7:15 p.m. on April 3rd, crossed the Missouri River on a ferry and headed west with great fanfare and festivities. The first rider out of St. Joe is thought to have been Johnson William Richardson.
From the Philadelphia Daily News:
THE ONE AND ONLY certainty about the 2009 NFL schedule to be unveiled tonight is that not everyone is going to be happy with it. Some teams won’t like the placement of their bye week. Others will gripe about a three-game October road trip or playing four of their first five games against playoff teams or having to make a cross-country road trek the week after a Monday night game.
The league’s television partners also won’t be completely happy. Fox and CBS will complain about some of the games they lost to NBC, ESPN and the NFL Network, and ESPN will complain about the quality of its Monday night package, and NBC will complain about having to pay for an extra driver to get the Madden cruiser from Miami to Seattle for back-to-back games in December.
“This is one of the most complicated and complex things I’ve ever been involved with,” said Howard Katz, the NFL senior vice president for media operations, who, for the last 4 years, has been the lucky guy charged with constructing the league schedule.
“You’re trying to serve 37 different masters - the 32 individual teams and the five networks.
This is an interesting look at how the NFL schedule comes together. There are a lot of factors, but the two biggest should always be fairness and balance. Fairness is often in the eye of the beholder, but balance becomes obvious. For instance, in 2007 when the Chiefs started the season with two games on the road and finished the season with two games on the road, that was not only unfair, but there was a lack of balance in the schedule. And no team should have to play three consecutive games on the road. There’s just no way that is fair or balanced.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer: The sadness wasn’t confined to the offices of Citizens Bank Park or the world of baseball yesterday. News of Harry Kalas’ death also hit home and hit hard across the river at the NFL Films home office in Mount Laurel.
Steve Sabol, the president of the company founded by his father, Ed, in 1962, left work in the early afternoon only to return when he learned that Kalas had collapsed and died a few hours before the start of the Phillies’ game against the Washington Nationals.
“I remember when we first hired him, everybody was concerned that he was a baseball guy,” Sabol said. “But he was only a baseball voice to everyone in Philadelphia. For us, he was going to be the voice to everyone in the world. I think in years to come he might be associated as much with football as he is with baseball.”
Kalas would often be recognized more by his voice than his face when he was on a road trip with the Phillies, and his dulcet tones became an integral part of football highlight films and television commercials during the last 32 years.
Most people who knew the voice of Harry Kalas knew him as a voice for football highlights. Only the folks in Philly, eastern Pennsylvania and down the shore in Jersey heard him do baseball. That he could be so honored in both sports is testimony to his distinctive voice and delivery.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader: To land its latest prized recruit, the University of Kentucky launched an intense six-month courtship that included a weekend stay at Gainesway Farm and the promise to invest more than $80 million. All this wasn’t for a McDonald’s All-American basketball player or for UK’s much-ballyhooed, newly hired coach, John Calipari.
University officials pulled out all the stops to reel in an even rarer commodity: a big-name surgeon/researcher to head its Markey Cancer Center. Tuesday, the university will introduce as the center’s new director Dr. B. Mark Evers, whom UK lured away from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Cancer Center.
The process of wooing a nationally known expert to a university’s faculty is a high-stakes, pressure-packed effort that rivals, and in some cases surpasses, college basketball coaching searches.”Recruiting the star-quality junior and senior faculty is not cheap,” UK Provost Kumble R. Subbaswamy said.
These are recruiting stories we seldom here anything about, but this one is fascinating. Sometimes you think college football and basketball have gone haywire with the way they go after head coaches and the money they pay. Then you see something like the chase after Dr. B. Mark Evers and realize it’s just part of a bigger picture.
Howard Katz ought to let Herm Edwards decide who plays when and on what network; according to Carlm and arrowhead1978, he’s got a gift for solid decision-making.
He sure does, he decided to dismantle the old team and start new. He also was the miracle in the meadowlands. Haley couldn’t clean Mickelson’s shoes…
Lukat Mapeenos
No one likes a debbie downer!!
It’s all about the right 53 year old!!
Bob, you should apply for the new voice of nfl films, you have a baritone voice.
naaaa
to nasally, with that Yankee twang, it wouldn’t appeal universally.
You suckers get your season tickets yet?
Better hurry!
wouldn’t want to miss out on Hunts new geriatric ward.
Run Suckers! Run!!!
Fund another soccer team for mr hunt, just what all hispanic Americans need.
oh, don’t count on him putting it in KC either. not a large enough hispanic population.
Here is another possibility.
Hunt is being paid by KU med center, to allow them to study the long term effects of head trauma.
thus the signing of Zack Thomas.
Another possibility is that I injested a homeless man’s diarrhea and now have sh-t for brains.
Haha. arrowhead1978, you are honestly my favorite person to read, whose opinions I usually do not agree with.
It’s totally all about the right 53 year old. haha
Lukat, I am not a big fan of last season 2-14 doesnt sit well with anyone. However, Herm got rid of 2 of the biggest problems the Chiefs had-Carl Peterson and Gunther Cunningham. I loved his youth movement. I loved the thought of not going thru another season of old retreads who wouldnt or couldnt help. Not his fault that Peterson wasnt helping him and not his fault that the great gunther cunningham (cough, cough, almost choked on my own sarcasm) could not put a defense together. Everyone wants to beat up on herm but the changes we see now is owed to him. I never thought herm was a good game coach and i never will. Herm should be a personell man somewhere. I think that is his forte or maybe a defensive backs coach.
and NOT a Head Coach, which I think is most everyone’s point.