On Private And Public Behavior

Over the weekend I posted an item at Awful Announcing regarding photos of Iowa Hawkeye football color commentator Ed Podolak surfacing from an Iowa State message board and being publicized via the Wiz of Odds last week. The photos showed Podolak drinking, looking down a woman’s shirt, etc., while in Tampa for the Outback Bowl and are fairly tame as far as photos of folks taken at bars go. I didn’t post one of the photos, mostly based on personal choice*, but I still thought it was a story.

Now, apparently Podolak decided to retire (or, if you believe, got urged to leave) as a commentator after Iowa AD Gary Barta expressed a rather downbeat tone about the whole matter, and it has spawned some spite towards the Wiz of Odds: Black Heart Gold Pants called editor Jay Christensen an assbag, Brian Cook called it “complete bullcrap” in the tags, and I can’t blame them for doing so. I think it’s a bit of an overreaction by Barta, but I’m not going to hold Christensen at fault for this — and if you think I’m completely, utterly wrong on this, don’t hesitate to tell me. I’m more than willing to change my mind.

As a publicly recognizable figure, both as a media figure and former pro athlete, Podolak has to know better.  I work with people who are on television. I am fortunate to call many of them friends and drinking buddies. They are recognizable faces in the community.  By no means are they shut-ins, but they know that they have to comport themselves in a certain way when they go out on the town. It’s a double standard, it’s not fair, but that is kind of implicitly agreed to when you sign a contract to be a media representative of a university, by extension (even though Podolak was hired through another company, technically.)

In Podolak’s case, this incident came after he got arrested for public intoxication previously with a .23 BAC a few years back in Iowa City. I don’t think it would have come to “resigning” had this been a first-time incident.  I hesitate to say Gary Barta has any real right to determine what Podolak can and cannot do with his off hours, but ultimately, media figures give up certain things when they sign on the dotted line — even in cases where the goalposts have moved. Iowa officials in 1997 said “charges” were necessary to trigger suspension or firing. Drunken photos aren’t that, and Barta is apparently tougher on broadcasters than he is on the players in his revenue programs, which doesn’t look particularly good either — especially when another writer at the FanHouse is noting that Podolak’s bar times were not exactly a secret. It seems selective by Barta rather than any sort of principled stance.

(*The reason I didn’t post one of the pictures is because the woman wasn’t identified and it was a little more sensitive in nature. This may be my personal brand of journalism ethics training kicking in. I have no compunction about grabbing images via Google with randoms [mostly people with athletes at charity events or signing autographs, etc., just for photos for live blogs], but this was a bit different in my mind.)

Full Of Sound And Fury

So, it’s mildly amusing that AOL decided to take one of the most universally loathed sportswriters and give him a platform. I don’t know what drove the decision to hire Jay Mariotti for AOL Sports other than the desire for what I’ve personally called “The Rush Effect”*: people will click to be outraged at what he writes, but since page views are what matter, it will be a success either way, no matter how blatantly wrong he is.

In my original note about Mariotti’s debut at Awful Announcing on Sunday, I snarked about Jason Whitlock, which, in retrospect, isn’t exactly fair to Whitlock for a couple reasons:

1. Whitlock, from what I can tell, has a fanbase.
2. He also is right on occasion. Rare, but that’s better than Mariotti’s ratio.

Now, everyone is weighing in: Brian followed up at AA in the AM, MODI is calling for people to speak out forcefully at SOMM, and Deadspin’s Rick Chandler employed some good old fashioned snark and mockery.  After reading his introductory column, with some fashionable talk about how behind the newspaper world is (predictable) and spoiling a movie ending (yes, everyone could probably guess that the dog bites it in the end, but that’s still bad form), he goes into some victimhood:

I resigned after the Games with a calm, professional letter, a decision that came mere months after I’d signed a contract extension. I guess I hurt some feelings. The boys called me a “rat,” forgetting those 5,000 columns through the years. They accused me of using Beijing as vacation time (“Hey, kids, let’s ditch Hawaii and hang out in a Communist country.”). They let a few staff writers, who should focus on doing better work, react with rage reminiscent of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.” All because I handed back about a million bucks and wanted something more.

Well, I don’t know. I suppose that if you happen to take potshots in print and on TV at professional athletes and their coaches without daring to set foot in locker rooms any longer, the beat writers and columnists who do might be tired of taking shit aimed at you. When your paper uses your resignation to ramp up a subscriber drive, you might want to consider where your ego ran off the rails.

Jay, bless him, does no such thing.

I’m working for a company, AOL, that attracted 54 million unique visitors to its programming content sites in November and ranks fourth in traffic among Internet news sites. As established writers keep moving Web-ward, it will cause consternation among a few members of the sports blogosphere, some of whom think they own the Internet when, as everyone knows, Bill Kurtis owns the Internet. I’ve never bought into this “mainstream media vs. bloggers” blood war because, in my mind, we’re all writers. The best young writers provide compelling takes on sports. The losers wake up each day and attack (choose your ESPN target), an approach that can’t attract much audience beyond a few neurotic souls in sports media. Now hear this: I’m a bit too busy to hate bloggers or, really, anyone but terrorists and certain Illinois politicians. I just think they should be writing about Steve Smith, not Stephen A. Smith.

Well, we would, Jay, and happily, but the problem is that you, Stephen A. Smith, and many others have gone past the point of no return — you, through your writing, TV appearances, etc., in which you spout off, define the prism of sports for so many people and propagate coverage that makes the writers, reporters, and pundits as news-worthy as the athletes.

The angles taken by big-box columnists in an out-dated 80s narrative style and the focus of ESPN in paying more attention to athlete misdeeds (with a racial double standard to boot) is only part of what makes sports media an unwelcome part of the news when it comes to sports. A monopoly by one network is part of it, but when Ed Werder can take a completely anonymous sourced report and foment two weeks of Terrell Owens nuttiness, ESPN can ignore the civil suit against Brian Giles of abuse filed by an ex (along with the video), and when all sports websites run wire stories about athletes getting fucking parking tickets, of all things, sports media is as much a part of writing about sport as the competitions themselves.

Mariotti’s wishful thinking is just that — and a refusal to accept responsibility for the things he’s written before. The irony of all of it? His first full column is about Charles Barkley and his DUI, calling him “An American Idiot.”

You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t bother reading.

(*Named after Rush Limbaugh, naturally. I never understood why he had such a large audience as a kid. There are reliable conservatives, but I sense there are plenty of liberals listening just to hear the outrageous bullshit he’ll spout next.)

Leaving The Sinking Ship In Style

There are few things as satisfying as watching a fucktard like David Frum get his ass handed to him by Rachel Maddow when he accuses her show of fomenting hate similar to the crap being spewed by the audience members at recent rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin. After you’ve watched the clip, consider the hackery necessary to make such accusations:

Frum, you’ll recall, is the one who penned the phrase “axis of evil”  for President George W. Bush a few years backfor his State of the Union address. After departing the cozy confines of 1600 Pennsylvania, he then funded smear campaigns against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when she visited Syria and decided to play amateur psychiatrist with former VP Al Gore when he criticized Bush’s foreign policy.

So you’ll have to pardon me if I find it laughable that this member of the GOP intelligentsia is joining the very slim ranks of those who aren’t pleased with the choice of Palin and saying it doesn’t look good for McCain because of it. This group includes columnist Kathleen Parker, NYT op-ed writer David Brooks, and author Christopher Buckley, who appears to have been booted/resigned from the column at the magazine his father founded for his trouble in saying he would vote for Barack Obama.

I’ve noticed something after reading for the past week or so, these admissions of concern — a lot of it revolves around Palin’s lack of intelligence or intellectual curiosity, perfectly valid points and worth questioning.  However, I have a question for Frum, Parker, Brooks and their ilk*: where the fuck were you the past eight years with the current occupant of the White House, if this was such a problem?

Right, Like Too Many People Vote In This Country

I have a low opinion of ABC’s John Stossel to begin with — I don’t have a problem with holding libertarian political ideology (reliant on the myth of free-market perfection as it is), but there is a particular problem with misrepresenting people in news reports in advocacy journalism — particularly when it encourages really asinine things such as saying that people shouldn’t vote if they aren’t informed, like his report tonight on 20/20 is doing.

Now, we have a a habit of making fun of “low-information” voters all the time, but I’ll be damned if I ever suggest that people shouldn’t vote. The problem is that too few peopel vote in this country, and too few people vote with a complete grasp of the issues — but there’s no fucking way you solve that by telling people who can’t grasp every single nuance or some civics basics to stay home on Election Day. That’s advocating personal disenfranchisement in civic matters.

(If you have a well-thought out reason to not vote on principle, that’s different.)

Even better, there are claims by the organization HeadCount that Stossel misrepresented it and the rock fans he interviewed on some basic civics questions at the concert he went to — of course, Stossel went to a rock show, full of young people eligible to vote.

Next, we suggest Stossel go to retirement homes or run through the AARP rolls to suggest people are too old and senile to vote properly, if he’s going to stay on this line of thought.  I would appeal by saying that maybe schools ought to get some funding for the basic civics classes we used to have (or at least I did, anyway), but Stossel isn’t a big fan of government intervention.*  Or, rather than put out reports like this on a Friday newsmagazine, how about the media educate the public for once on some of the basics again?  Just a refresher course, some basic breakdowns of the big issues?

Wait. This would require actual work, someone who knew economics, had a bit of insight on foreign policy, and wasn’t just taking interviews from people who have a dog in the fight as gospel. That isn’t a slam at Stossel so much as the media as a whole: political journalism right now resembles a series of press release journalism, with both sides getting their say in and the media not really caring to divine which one is the truth (or closer to it) in the interest of fairness.

Also, John, that sweater is horrific. I hope you plan to burn it or have already done so.

(*It seems like the people least likely to have unforeseen economic or natural disaster-type events affect their daily lives are always the ones saying that government isn’t necessary.)

Pushing The Narratives

The benefit of my current work schedule is the ability to watch Pardon the Interruption, which remains the only ESPN piece of programming worth investing too much time in.  SportsCenter is not as essential as it used to be; much of the analyst shows focused on individual sports are background fodder. Outside The Lines can be very hit or miss, and is subject to the typical ESPN/mainstream blinders on much of its subject matter. Anyway, back to it.

The Four-Letter’s $3 million a year poaching, Rick Reilly, subbed for Tony Kornheiser on PTI yesterday, via satellite from Denver with Michael Wilbon in-studio in D.C., and parroted what I’m fairly sure may be a common impulse among a certain segment of sportswriters regarding the current state of the baseball playoffs: he stated his preference for a Red Sox-Dodgers World Series, proclaiming the Tampa Bay Rays “bad for baseball.”

We probably need to separate that “bad for baseball” comment into two categories: bad for the sport and bad for the business of the sport. There is a vast difference: any die-hard baseball fan or one who merely follows the sport regularly would say a worst-to-first story is not only good for the sport, but also compelling and justifying smart moves by a front office.  Tampa’s entry into the playoffs already yielded more attention to manager Joe Maddon in SI, a likely Rookie of the Year award for third baseman Evan Longoria, and a front office that assembled a solid starting line-up and a roster of budding stars. That’s good for the sport; it gives some leverage behind the idea that baseball’s uncapped salary structure can still yield good things for teams who use their money wisely.

However, if you look at Reilly’s comment in the business sense, it fits. Tampa was 12th out of 14 AL teams in attendance this year, not helped by the reported shittiness of Tropicana Field, and locals are right to ignore a lousy team in a bad park for a while. That doesn’t change overnight, and it’s also part of the trend of questioning whether Florida is really interested in regular-season baseball. (We really won’t have an idea until both the Rays and Marlins’ new facilities open.)  The Dodgers and Red Sox are two of several “glamour teams”; ones that matter to people outside their home markets (the others, in my eyes, are the Cubs, Yankees, Cardinals, and Braves*.) Those are teams that have bandwagons, intense home fans, and ones who don’t drop loyalties when they move in the age of the Internet and MLB.tv.

Dodgers-Red Sox is an easier World Series to sell, and I’m sure it’s the one Fox is clamoring or as we speak.  The Rays aren’t, although everyone loves an underdog story — because there’s not enough to sell. The lore bheind L.A.-Boston is too much, two big cities, Manny Ramirez back in Betantown, the Sox seeking back-to-back titles, etc.  That’s a narrative that writes columns; that’s how Reilly kind of thinks., and it’s what Bud Selig would love to see. (Philadelphia doesn’t have the same pull as Dodgers-Sox, but it’s better to MLB than the other AL choice.)

The Tampa Bay Rays going from worst to first and capping it with a world championship is just another Marlins team beating Cleveland or the Yankees, or a Diamondbacks bloop single. It’s a blip, and won’t register outside of those of us who pay attention. Of course, you know what happens when the narrative gets openly expressed: the underdog shocks us all, and considering my loathing of both the Dodgers nad Phils, along with a need for Boston teams to cool off, I’m riding the Rays right now.

Fuck the cheap narratives, though. Let ’em do some work. Tampa is full of new stories, and that’s good for the sport.

(*I include the Braves because of their near stranglehold on the South until recently thanks to TBS and the lack of pro baseball anywhere else in that region.)

Pure Venom

The raging, unhinged bit of me has always been a fan of Matt Taibbi, despite his tendency to come off like someone trying too hard to be a neo-Hunter S. Thompson, ever since his writings in Russia for eXile and then the New York Press.

Godwin’s Law violations aside, one must admire the rhetorical audacity/complete insanity (depending on your political point of view) it takes to describe Sarah Palin’s RNC speech as “Gidget addressing the Reichstag” in his latest Rolling Stone piece.

Methinks HST would have liked that one.

Additional note: if you have lost Campbell Brown, the wife of a big-time Republican, regarding your campaign’s handling of Palin, you’ve got issues. Free Sarah Palin!

The Lane Kiffin Death Watch Gets Even More Absurd

I’m taking a bet on this since I don’t read him all that regularly, but San Jose Mercury News columnist Tim Kawakami is probably a bit of a dick. Most newspaper columnists have opinionated takes that tend to verge on the obnoxious a lot of the time. They get readers this way that either love them or hate them, and that’s usually how it goes.

Sadly, WordPress is not good with video not from Google or YouTube, thus, I can’t embed the little confrontation Kawakami had with Raiders senior exec John Herrera right here, but thankfully, the Merc’s online staff has seen fit to put it at the end of his latest column.

The basic background is that someone in the Raiders’ org circulated a column critical of coach Lane Kiffin on ESPN.com, and in a press conference yesterday where everyone thought Coach Lunch Money was going to get the ax, Kawakami asked a question about feeling isolated in the organization — which prodded Herrera to interrupt Kiffin’s response, and then the little side skirmish on the video.

Kiffin isn’t absolved of all responsibility in this soap opera — he has been insolent towards owner Al Davis and cavalier about his attitude, but if you’re working in what appears to be a completely dysfunctional structure, who can blame him?  He’s going to have to answer these questions every Monday until the Cryptkeeper fires him — which will be a mistake, because Kiffin is probably the best coach the organization has hired since Jon Gruden rightfully bailed.

Bill Callahan may have taken Gruden’s leftovers to a Super Bowl, but they tanked after the infamous Tuck Rule call. (Horrendously wrong, see “JusttheFacts” in comments.) Norv Turner was, well, NORV!  Art Shell 2.0 was disastrous. Kiffin is actually coaching the offensive side of the team up and trying to build with a quarterback in JaMarcus Russell who is clearly taking the reins before being even close to ready. To be that close against the Bills on Sunday was much, much closer than any of us would have given the Raiders credit for.

What Davis is doing, by letting this drag out, is ensuring a coach who will be happy to wreak vengeance every time he faces him again. Mike Shanahan does it, Gruden does it, and Kiffin, who will likely get another NFL job somewhere down the road, will do it.

But for now, we get to watch the dysfunction as it spills out, and for now, it’s entertaining, if in a very sad way.

Rid Of Him

Normally, I don’t write a whole lot of posts about media folk leaving their outlets, particularly when it’s people I loathe both reading and seeing on TV — like former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti — because everyone else and their mother will have written something about it online before I figure out something coherent, if not interesting, to say about it.

But when the departure of such a figure is being celebrated and used as a subscription sales tactic, that’s gone well beyond the usual parameters of a high-profile departure.

The paper is running a semi-article/column on the White Sox commenting about his leaving. There are reader letters being published. The web editor for the sports section is explaining that a tiff over who got to write an Obama/Cubs column that went in Rick Telander’s favor may be why Mariotti offered his resignation. Hell, one of the letters from a Deadspin commenter and his picture are featured on the rag’s front page. Even his former editor, Michael Cooke, is writing announcements like this one (boldface emphasis mine):

The Chicago Sun-Times had the best sports section in the city before Jay Mariotti came to town — that’s why he signed up with us — and his departure does not change that.

We still have the stars — respected veterans such as Rick Telander, fiery newcomers such as Greg Couch, quirky voices like Carol Slezak, not to mention seasoned beat reporters tracking the Cubs and White Sox toward their eventual collision in the World Series, plus the Bears, the Bulls, the Blackhawks, and all the other teams that make Chicago the sports center of the nation. We could have a World Series in Chicago in a couple of months … talk about excitement!

The Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com will continue to have the scores and the stories before anyone else, anywhere, and the deepest and most comprehensive stats and standings. We wish Jay well and will miss him — not personally, of course — but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days.

A paper, like a sports franchise, is something that moves into the future. Stars come and stars go, but the Sun-Times sports section was, is and will continue to be the best in the city.

I wonder if the Sun-Times and its staff would like to tell us how they all really feel about the man. That is colder than a witch’s teat, and rival Telander isn’t holding back either, talking to the Chicago Reader about it:

“Because the damage a ‘humorless loner,’ as you described him [I did], can do to an overstressed sports department is incalculable.” He said the sports department lost its cohesion and  became “sinister and secretive and fuck your buddy. It was the worst possible teamwork conditions.”

Yikes. Look, this is hellishly amusing to me, watching a media meltdown and human nature in an embattled industry lash out against what appears to be a singularly loathsome figure among the ranks of newspaper columnists — so much so that rumors of him heading to Boston are causing angst among that city’s sports fan — but let’s face it, it’s also brutally unprofessional.

You’re likely to respond, “well, so was Mariotti,” and you’d likely be right. However, there’s got to be some semblance of decorum regarding the departure of a hated figure — the enmity in the pages of the paper and the airing of dirty laundry tells me a lot more about the staffers still on the masthead of the Sun-Times’ sports section that it does about Mariotti. We already knew a sizable contingent (if not the majority) of Chicago sports fans disliked his Lupica-style attitude about not visiting the locker room and tendency to stir shit up for kicks (nothing is more annoying in a columnist than a reflexive contrarian.)

But the dirt-dishing about Mariotti’s tantrums seems, well, beneath a professional journalist.  I was a solid reader of the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune in college (my small little school had this newspaper program where students got free copies of those two papers plus USA Today, the New York Times, and the Des Moines Register), and while the latter is certainly the more tabloid of the two, this kind of pissing match just goes further than it ought to.

Maybe this is the natural outreach of sportswriters like Mariotti inserting themselves into the news cycle via TV appearances and outsized presences online and in print — he became just as much of a media story for his ranting and raving as those he covered, so now he is a public figure and, in this realm of Chicago sports infamy, everything goes when you are universally hated.

Does Mariotti deserve it? He probably deserves every trashing his former co-workers give him and more, but you’d think his editors and the others who are happy he’s gone would be a bit quieter about it, not because they ought to be automatons, but because this isn’t the way these things should be handled internally. Release a statement without the personal digs, leave the gossip about the departure to your competitor, and move on.

Sure, Blame The Typists Rather Than The Peacock

Usually I make a point of ignoring Bill Dwyre’s columns in my daily perusal of the L.A. Times — they have largely become a tour of fogeyism (outrage over Becky Hammon and Chris Kaman deciding to play for countries not their own in the Olympics, for example) — for some reason, I was bored this afternoon and read a column with its heart in the right place: there was a lot of instantaneous match update action rather than actual writing and reporting on the Olympics, but he takes shots at the wrong people for it, managing to empathize with NBC somehow in the end.

In Chippewa Falls, Wis., Herbie hits a button and yells out, “Hey, ma, Dwight Howard just got the opening tip over Pau Gasol.” Herbie is dazzled that he got the word so fast, and the typist is equally dazzled at the speed he got it there. Neither seems to wonder whether what had arrived was worth the effort on either end.

I sat alongside a bright young reporter for the Washington Post, while the Post’s local interest, tennis star James Blake, played a semifinal match. The reporter typed after each game and hit the send button. Blake served. He won. The other guy served. He won. Tennis is like that.

Noting that it was the middle of the night back in D.C., I asked the reporter why he was doing that, since his audience, at best, could only be 35 insomniacs and 11 tennis freaks. He shrugged and said he had no idea, he just did what he was told.

It is the way of the future, we are told, as if the word “future” always connotes “better.”

This practice has to be scary for Dick Ebersol and NBC. The Olympic god that we worship nightly for two weeks, every two years — that has set the pace and raised the bar and confirmed the tone of the Olympics as one of warmth and joy and celebration of athletic excellence and good sportsmanship — may soon be riding the same horse and buggy as this columnist.

Dwyre, the reason people are looking for these things online is the fault of Ebersol and his bosses at NBC — the refusal to alter the daily schedule and tape-delay the majority of events to the Western half of the U.S., never mind delaying the U.S.-Argentina hoops semi to preserve the Today show’s 7-10 AM slot across the country, is driving even more people and reporters towards on-the-spot updates of the action as it happens.

Look, I work in television. I know why it happens this way. Affiliate stations loathe delaying local news casts, because that’s where they pull a lot of their local advertising sales, and in a down economy, that’s what you have to try and bank on — sales of ads during the morning news, along with the 5, 6, and 11.  This is why even the Winter Games in Vancouver will be tape delayed despite the city’s location in Pacific time.  The ratings NBC garnered from the Olympics have justified the practice because 8 pm is a set time where people who are not sports die-hards, who have not had the results wrecked for them, will watch — and even if they have heard who won, there is the “you gotta see it” factor added in.  We are talking about corporate owned networks; this is not the CBC or the BBC, they need to bring in the cash to justify the expense.

This doesn’t make the practice right.  The reason Dwyre is lamenting an expansion of the “type it up and post it” ethic is because the core audience for the newspaper writers abroad — sports fans — are not being served by the main television outlet, which decides to hold onto events for half a day before airing them, an absolutely inexcusable matter for a sporting event. Yes, the Olympics are chock-full of soft-focus crap to appeal to people who don’t care about sports, but they are sporting events and ought to be treated as such.  For the responsible network with the rights, this should mean live coverage to all of the country, as much as possible.

Say what you will about ESPN — slaves to stereotypical narratives regarding athletes, in bed with the leagues it broadcasts to an uncomfortable extent, gimmicky, shoddy graphical look — but at least they treat the sports they broadcast as sporting events more often than not.

(Oh, Dwyre, nice cheap shot at the bloggers too — not like I haven’t read that one before. Y’know, the vast majority of us happen to pay rent to someone not a blood relation.)

Beijing: Olympics’ instant gratification has a cost [Los Angeles Times]
Beijing Olympics up 8% over Athens [Sports Media Watch]

(P.S. Yeah, that’s Katie Hoff, Michael Phelps, and Natalie Coughlin at some post-event function in China. I just thought the photo was funny.)

Why Aren’t You Pricks More Grateful?

Hey, Peter King, lighten up. It’s a fucking pre-season game, dude: From this week’s MMQB:

4. I think I don’t want to hear what great fans the Jets have. Not for a long time. That crowd Saturday night was a disgrace. At least half the stadium was empty for Favre’s debut in a Jets’ uniform. I expressed my amazement to a few fellow scribes Saturday night — emphasizing that N.Y. traded for an all-time-great quarterback, not a broken-down one — and they gave varying reasons for the poor turnout. Like it’s the middle of vacation month for New Yorkers, and it’s a preseason game. Horsefeathers. If you really love your team, and you have season tickets, you should have been at that game unless you were in Tibet. Ridiculous.

So let me get this straight: if you are a Jets season ticket holder, you should have dropped what you were doing, braved the god-awful traffic or trains in the Tri-State area just to get there in time to see Brett Favre play two series — not a full quarter, just TWO SERIES — because you’re not really serious fans otherwise?

Considering the Jets are going the Personal Seat Licenses route for its new shared stadium with the Giants (and it’s still in Jersey), plus the fact that there[‘s no guarantee a 39-year old quarterback (despite being a living legend) will get them to the playoffs (I don’t have ’em winning a Wild Card, do you?), I’d say a half full stadium for an ultimately meaningless game is what most NFL teams should be content with until the season kicks off.

King’s just surprised that the ticket-buying public isn’t going to go down on Favre as vigorously as he does in print just because he got traded to their team.

Photo: AP/Bill Kostroun