Quick Hits – Team Previews, Terrible Golf, and Crushing Your Inspirational Football Dreams

• First off we get another lack luster preview of our 2008 Denver Broncos.  The Sporting News brings us their camp countdown.  All in all a fair assessment.  I actually like a media source giving the Broncos some praise for promoting Slowik to take over the defense after the Bates debacle.  You’ve gotta give these guys one thing, they actually do their homework unlike our favorite crack network.

• Another good Broncos preview came from Warpaint Illustrated this week.  It’s hard to believe a dedicated Chiefs site on scout.com wrote this good of a summary for this year’s Bronco team.  Then to have it picked up on the Silver and Black page.  It makes me feel kind of “funny” if you know what I mean.  “Show us on the Miles doll, show us on the doll.”

• Sports Illustrated did a cool little segment called the Salary Cap Roster Challenge.  This is basically a fantasy pick all draft between two sports writers.  The catch is that you try to get the most bang for your buck by staying under the league’s $116 million dollar salary cap.  Jay Cutler makes second string QB on one guys roster after he broke the bank to take Tom Brady.  He followed it up by taking Brandon Marshall as his #2 wideout next to Greg Jennings, fair enough.  Not a bad showing Michael Lombardi.

Now either writer couldn’t take duplicate players, so they had to race to take the guys they wanted.  Next up was Bucky Brooks.  The only Bronco he selected was Selvin Young as a third string half back.  Surprised they could only find 3 high value, low cost Broncos.  Especially not one defensive player.  Funny how the Broncos offense always gets billed as a concern going forward in 2008 yet we see things like this.  I can’t believe they both overlooked D.J. Williams.  That guy has to be one of the best value backers in the game at this point.  Of course Dr. Z breaks everything down is his own “get off my lawn” manner.  He does give the Cutler pick a thumbs up, and actually scoffs at it, thinking Cutler is overqualified for the number 2.  Tell us who you think are high value per cost players in the comments, especially Bronco players.  This is supposed to be an interactive site, damn it.

• So Elway has been named the recipient for the Brodie award: “Recognizing an individual’s accomplishments in both a chosen profession and in the sport of golf.” Love how they’re handing out awards for amateur golf these days.  But John’s appearances and finishes have helped raise a lot for charity, so that gets a pass in my book.  I have a strong feeling Jay Cutler won’t be coming anywhere near this thing in the future.  Jay finished dead last in this week’s American Century Golf Championship out in Lake Tahoe.  Not only did he finish last, he finished last behind Charles Barkley.  You read that right, the Charles Barkley.  The man with the worst golf swing known to man.  So bad it’s been featured in commercials.  “That’s just terrible” To Jay’s credit, he only started golfing about a year ago.

Edit: It turns out this thing is a three day event like most golf tournaments.  You can tell how much I play golf.  Elway ended up finishing 10th overall, Mike Shanahan 57th, and Cutler 81st out of 82.  He beat Barkley!  Way to not finish in the cellar Jay!  Our old backup Steve Beuerline even finished at 50.  Herc seems to be following this much closer than I.

• Well it turns out that every Fighting Irish fan’s favorite movie, Rudy, is complete bulls**t.    That horrible coach that played the man trying to keep Rudy down, Dan Devine, turned out to be a really great guy.  So who was pushing for this movie to get made?  Rudy himself, persued it for 10 years in fact.  The one thing I always liked about Rudy, was it showed how crappy football practice really can be.  Great point on the movie 21 in this article by the way.  They basically white washed the cast to cover up the mostly Asian group the story is based on.