By Cold, Hard Football Facts senior writer John Dudley
Offering up letter grades for team performance while referring to yourself as a “professor” has become a tired and trite method of evaluation. We have all attended this class dozens of times, and although the words may change, the lecture never provides any original insight. In fact, it has arguably encouraged drinking, as lying in bed with a severe hangover might be preferable to sitting through such mind-numbing torture.
If anyone puts the “hack” in “hackneyed,” it’s CBS Sportsline’s Pete Prisco. In his analysis of the NFL draft, he not surprisingly grants himself a Ph.D. and trots out the report-card cliché, like most of his contemporaries. Only in his case, a particularly insipid dissertation puts him at the back of the class.
Being that he is employed as a writer, Prisco is presumably an English professor in this highly improbable scenario. Yet he barely maintains a tenuous grasp of that very language. He favors the most basic words, reuses them incessantly and struggles to master simple sentence structure.
With the school year winding down, it’s time for Prisco’s work to be graded by the gridiron grammarian known as the Cold, Hard Football Facts. Class is now officially in session. Please reserve the front-row seats for coeds with tight tank tops and short skirts.
Prisco opens his article by likening his post-draft recap to a college class where the “teacher” gives a test on the first day and “says he will grade you as stringently as he would later in the semester when you’ve had time to prove yourself.” Well, most “professors,” as they are called by those who have actually enrolled at an institute of higher learning, strive for consistency in grading, regardless of when a test is given. They offer no leniency while waiting for proof that you belong. Poor Prisco can’t even make a decent analogy.
Whereas real professors are known for their esteemed educations, Prisco has the vocabulary of a fifth-grader...and not even a particularly precocious one. His preferred adjective is the first one that most kids learn: “good.” He uses it no less than 25 times in his story. There are numerous “good players” whose “good football” makes them “good picks” as part of a team’s “good draft.”
Prisco’s limited linguistic ability is reminiscent of the episode of “The Simpsons” when Homer meets a representative from Reading Digest. He tells her, “Ooh, I love your magazine. My favorite section is ‘How to Increase Your Word Power.’ That thing is really...really...really...good.”
Another of Prisco’s favorite terms is a close relative of “good” named “great.” It is slightly more emphatic but no less common. The Cardinals, Falcons, Panthers, Bears, Dolphins, Saints, Jets and Raiders are all credited with making either a “good move” or a “great move.”
Is he just too dim to think of better descriptive words? Were any of the moves “shrewd” or even “brilliant”? Could an “exceptional” player possibly be characterized as an “elusive” return man possessing “blazing” speed? Somebody get this man a thesaurus immediately.
One “good pick” is the Falcons’ second-rounder, Jonathan Babineaux. According to Prisco, the defensive tackle from Iowa “was a late climber up many team’s boards.” Here is Punctuation 101, Petey: When the word is both plural and possessive, the apostrophe goes after the “s.” Note how it was done with “Falcons” above.
Prisco’s attention to detail is staggeringly “not good.” He finds the concept of “singular vs. plural” and the use of articles (“a,” “an” and “the”) to be insignificant. The statement that Cleveland is a “team in need of playmaker” sounds perfectly fine to him.
In assessing Tampa Bay, Prisco comments that “it’s hard to justify using a second-round pick on linebacker Barrett Ruud, even tough he’s a good player.” We bet he’s especially good when he’s “tough.” Clearly, the word was supposed to be “though,” but an obvious lack of pride exists. Incomplete Pete feels that it’s the editor’s job to catch all the typos and to provide some semblance of clarity.
Other mistakes are even more egregious and embarrassing. In summarizing Houston’s draft, Prisco writes, “Johnson and Mathis help get this grade a bunch some.” Come again? We can’t even begin to speculate what his intended meaning was.
Unfortunately, Prisco’s errors are not just limited to redundancy, punctuation and syntax. He has trouble with the Cold, Hard Football Facts as well. He asks, “With so many needs on defense, how in the heck can the Chiefs use a second-round pick on a punter?” That might be a valid question…if the selection was actually made in the second round. In reality, Kansas City took Tennessee’s Dustin Colquitt at the end of the third round, 99th overall.
The Chiefs certainly do have defensive needs, but they have been addressing them. They signed two key free agents, linebacker Kendrell Bell and safety Sammy Knight, and traded for cornerback Patrick Surtain. In the draft’s first round, they had already picked Texas outside linebacker Derrick Johnson, the top defensive player on some boards.
Prisco could have conceivably phrased his rhetorical punter question as “how in the world?” or “why on earth?” But he is particularly fond of the word “heck.” It literally appears nine times throughout the piece. The Bengals, Cowboys and Vikings each had a “heck of a draft.” Other teams did a “heck of a job” or landed a “heck of a player.”
Apparently, words like “heck” must be popular in the parallel universe where Prisco could be a professor. When you use it, maybe the other tools on Planet Dork think you’re “neat” and “swell.” We understand that political correctness might not permit the blasphemous “h-e-double-toothpicks,” but do we really have to be subjected to that same euphemism nine times? I mean, Jeezum Crow!
The logic behind Prisco’s grading system is also suspect. He selectively incorporates trades in the evaluation process, with the Raiders being a primary example. “Randy Moss is part of this draft, which makes this an A grade.” In actuality, the Moss deal also involved giving up former first-rounder Napoleon Harris, the linebacker who was the centerpiece of their defense, but evidently there’s no need to take that into account.
On the other hand, the Chiefs traded only picks in acquiring the aforementioned Surtain, a two-time Pro Bowler, but no allowance is given for their missing second-round selection. Prisco eloquently sums up their draft as “pretty blah” and gives them a C-.
Considering his writing level, Pete Prisco’s work really doesn’t merit a letter grade. That seems a little too advanced. The Cold, Hard Football Facts give Prisco a “fair”...which is just one notch below “good.”
