So this morning I read (on Roger Simon's blog, via the inevitable Atrios) that Easterbrook has been fired from ESPN over his remarks. No one seems real thrilled about this, and it does seem pretty pathetic. Why did he get fired? For naming Eisner in his anti-Tarantino screed? because Rush Limbaugh's idiocy brought a lot of attention to ESPN? Because what he said was so unforgivable? It wasn't, was it? That unforgivable? Just lame, nasty, a careless, though loaded, piece of grandstandig, in the service of a banal argument... So maybe this is a case of the evils of media consolidation - why should something he writes on his New Republic blog about a Miramax film get him fired from his football writing job? even that seems too petty... I'll have to go with Limbaugh - they probably felt that having dumped Rush for being a thoroughgoing fool, they couldn't afford to set a double standard and not dump Easterbrook for being an occasional idiot. And of course, Easterbrook is only a writer, so it's easier to dump him...

I don't know. I was, if I had gone on a bit further with the Easterbrook bashing in the previous post, going to take a shot at his football column - he's been clamoring about the Maurice Claret case, the underclassman trying to force the NFL to let him into the draft. Easterbrook's against it - insisting that underclassmen and high school kids have ruined the NBA, and would ruin football. This is a very bad argument, if you ask me. First - because the rules government who gets to play professional sports should be dictated by what is fair to the players, not what is going to favor the league. That is - from a business and employment perspective, the "quality of the game" is not a primary consideration. Second - because football is not basketball. Underclassmen in the NFL would not have the impact on the game they have in the NBA. NBA rosters are smaller - there is less opportunity for development, fewer options - high school kids will be drafted and signed because many of them will, someday, be legitimate players - the teams have to take them, and then have to pay to teach them to play. And with 12 roster spots - you notice that. Baseball, on the other hand, drafts high scool kids, and it has no effect on the game, since baseball has a development system, the minor leagues. Football doesn't have minor leagues, but it has special teams, which seem to me to have soe of the same functions. And football teams generally don't run guys out there because they have to - for someone like Claret to get a chance in the NFL, he will have to beat someone else out. For Kwame Brown to get a chance in basketball, he just has to look like he has great potential, someday.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I will miss Easterbrook's football column - he's a good writer, he seems, to me, no expert on the sport, to have interesting isights into football... for some years, his column was the only football related thing I read or paid any attention to. I have to admit that I am running out of patience with him - the haiku and obscure college scores and so on are amusing the first 300 times, but somewhere in there the impact fades. And his cheerleader obsession is downright idiotic. And when he strays from football, even just tot he business side of football, or to other, better sports (like basketball, high school kids and all, or baseball), he starts to lose it completely. You get into his ideas about movies, religion and science (another area where he writes a lot of things that seem very reasonable and insightful, until you read them...), politics, etc., and you find yourself on increasingly shaky grounds.

All of which is frustrating, because he is, in a lot of ways, a remarkable write, and fascinating personality, the type of person who you want to make sense, because he is capable of being so interesting to read. when he does not make sense - as is all too commonly the case - it is very disappointing.