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This week our contestants were asked to write about something they were passionate about. With three remaining, let’s see who fills the passion bucket and who goes home.

This week we have my good friend, Burnsy from Red, White and Dude and In Reality as our guest judge. If anyone knows about the intersections of sports and reality television, it’s this guy. My guess is that he’s probably going to hold back his opinion and coddle the contestants. Let’s see….

Philguard

In 1960 the NFL sat at a crossroads. With several ownership groups who had been shunned by the league banding together and creating the American Football League, owners were forced to look at the idea of expansion. The leading city for expansion was Dallas, TX. Redskins owner George Preston Marshall strongly opposed the idea, mainly due to the fact that he held a monopoly on professional football in the south because his team was the southern most franchise. To ensure no opposition, the Dallas ownership group led by Clint Murchison bought the rights to the Redskins fight song, “Hail to the Redskins.” Then they only offered to sell them to Marshall if he would vote for expansion. Once the vote was done, Murchison was awarded the franchise known as the Dallas Steers then the Dallas Rangers and finally the Dallas Cowboys.

48 years later there are few professional sports teams that garner as much attention, and often ire, as the Cowboys. A lot of folks love them. Possibly more hate them. Wherever you are, I understand.

I am a Cowboys fan. I make no bones about it. I am often a homer when it comes to my football team. Why?
My father was an 11 year old boy in Dallas in 1960. He witnessed the first 0-11-1 season under Tom Landry. He saw the Cowboys make the playoffs for 17 straight seasons between 1966 and 1983. He watched greats like Don Meredith, Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Drew Pearson, Cliff Harris, Charlie Waters and Bob Lilly roam the field on Sunday with a star on their helmet.

Twenty years after the birth of the Cowboys was the birth of his only child, a son. He dressed his son in Cowboys t-shirts. In fact my first professional portrait, taken at the Olan Mills in the Pleasant Grove section of Dallas, shows me in a Cowboys shirt holding a little plastic football.

My father never has been the rabid sports fan that yells and screams, although certain calls will still make him scoff at the TV. He disliked Jerry Jones for firing Tom Landry and then Jimmy Johnson. He took me to a memorabilia stand during the 1992 playoffs and bought my first authentic jersey, Emmitt Smith. As the Cowboys trounced the Bills is the Super Bowl he made sure to tell me to cherish that moment. After all it might never happen again. It did. Two more times. He shook his head when the Cowboys signed Deon Sanders because he didn’t like that kind of flashy player. He shook his head at Barry Switzer standing in the same spot as Landry. He shook his head as Michael Irvin walked into a Dallas courtroom in a mink coat. He told me how disappointed he would be if I had everything I could want and acted like that. He watches every game. He’s pretty laid back, but he’s a fan. You can tell. And I always knew it.

I don’t live near my parents anymore. Every now and then Dad calls and we talk about sports. He still brings them up first, but he calls them my Cowboys, like he doesn’t really care. He does. How could he not after 48 years, 29 playoff appearances, 19 division championships, 8 Super Bowl appearances with 5 NFL championships? And this family has been there for all of it, even through the Steve Pelleur years!

I’m a father now with two little girls who have Cowboys t-shirts. In fact my first daughter was born on game day when the Cowboys beat the Redskins, 27-0. I thought it was fitting! I even wore my jersey, Roy Williams.

I know there are a lot of folks out there that hate the Cowboys. I understand. I hate the Yankees and the Lakers. Not for any reason in particular, I just don’t like having to hear about them all the time. If I were from somewhere else I might feel the same way about the Cowboys. But I am a Cowboys fan! It’s in my blood. And I hope to pass it on. I’ll let my girls cheer for whichever team they like, except the Redskins. Then I’d have to disown them.

JP: I’m glad you decided to go the more sentimental route, as it fits your style better. A good introspective look at your fandom, without going into too much detail. Sometimes these type of posts can get bogged down in minutae or non-sports emotional scars, which you avoided. However, I didn’t see the hook for average readers. This would be popular among some Cowboys fans, but even then, it sounds like a story they’ve either lived or heard before. Overall, the piece is good, but if you were to re-write it I’d say find an angle with more intriguing for a vast audience.

Lunchbox: This post was pretty okay.  I like the sentimentality.  But, I feel the same as JP here.  It was a story that sounds similar to just about every Cowboys fan out there…not that I really associate with any true Cowboys fans.  They don’t really exist in the parts of California I frequent.  Yeah…I can see DLamp turning that into a gay joke…

DLamp: I actually kind of like this. I thought it was a touching piece (editor’s note: touching! piece! ha!) about how a team brought/brings a family together. But you do understand that dressing your daughters in Cowboys gear is the same as naming them ‘Destiny’, right? Like, there’s only two professions to go into, and neither of them involved being fully dressed.

Burnsy:Fuck the Cowboys.

Frank Nevarez

How Can A Guy Get Any Work Done? Too Much Good Stuff

So I’m at work and I need a break. Where do I go? No smoking. No coffee. I go straight to ESPN,com or SI.com or Pro Football Talk.com or maybe the LA Times sports-page on-line. Your sports fix is taken care of instantly when you visit these sites.

I was checking all of them—and plenty of others– all the time when the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal broke. Need info on Patriots’ Spygate? It’s all at your fingertips. Don’t worry. You won’t miss a thing. You’ll get all the scoops.

Away from a TV on a Saturday or Sunday? Don’t worry ESPN.com 360 will broadcast select NBA play-off games for you. Golfers could enjoy continuous Masters tournament on-line coverage of Amen Corner. Many sport sites have realtime play-by-play descriptions of NFL, MLB and NBA games.

I grew up reading Sports Illustrated, I still subscribe, but I find myself leafing through it (let alone reading it) less and less. ESPN.com does a terrific job of updating not only regular sports news and headlines, but it also offers new stories, profiles, analysis and opinion pieces throughout the day.

Once upon a time SI magazine was the only place to find in-depth articles about all the things sacred and nutty about sports. ESPN.com has taken over that turf. Recent articles updating the career of Wally Backman (Arizona Diamondbacks manager for one day before getting yanked over newly discovered run-ins with the law) and former Oklahoma St. QB Bobby Reid (the subject of OSU coach Mike Gundy’s press blow-up) made fascinating lunchtime reading.

A colleague and I were laughing about those phone commercials with Charles Barkley and Dwayne Wade. It brought to mind some hilarious videogame spots involving Ben Wallace and comedian Tracy Morgan. We clicked over to YouTube and enjoyed them all over again. Monster dunks and homer-saving catches can all be brought up in the same fashion.

Sites, such as this, allow divergent points of view on sporting topics. The comments feature allows feedback, arguments and other points of view. Instantaneous letters to the editor are one of the most beneficial and empowering by-products of the internet.

Last night while watching the Celtics-Cavaliers contest, I saw the crazy tattoos on Delonte West and I was able to go on-line and, in seconds, find out the following: a) he was a teammate of Jameer Nelson at St. Joseph’s, b) grew up with not a lot of money—many dinners consisted of fruit loops and eggs, c) amongst his tattoos are appreciations of spiritual guidance and a lion symbolizing survival. And I thought he was just an out-of-the-blue guy having a decent play-offs series with some nasty tats!

In getting updated on Spygate, I ran into an intriguing on-line theory claiming that the reason Senator Arlen Specter may be getting involved and keeping the story in the news is because his home state of Pennsylvania includes the Philadelphia Eagles (losers to those cheatin’ Patriots) and Comcast, the cable TV giant, which is headquartered in Philly. So goes the theory, Specter can hassle the NFL and Commish Goodell with Spygate to punish the league for not giving Comcast a more reasonable deal over airing the NFL Network and for not making the NFL Sunday Ticket package available on cable TV.

Yes, yes – I know the conspiracy theorists can have a field day on the net. But look at all the great water cooler talk the internet has brought to sports fans! Of course national production is down. We’re all too busy surfing the net and having constant electronic daydreams of sports nirvana. I think it’s all a communist plot. This reminds me of the internet story I saw on the training of Chinese Olympians…

JP: Good stuff. I definitely think this is the most polished piece of the round and reeks of good writing and careful editing. I also liked the topic choice, as a lot of people can relate. I hate to keep harping on the same thing, but there wasn’t a clear point. I got that this is a great time to be a sports fan, but to be really good it should go to the next level of thought. You were really close talking about instantaneous letters to the editor, but never really explored that territory to any degree. For a blog post to be read by anyone other than your family and friends, it has to have something that engages the reader and I didn’t get that engagement from this.

Lunchbox: Where’s the passion?  I like to kill time on blogs and sports websites just as much as you and any other desk jockey.  But that’s all it sounds like: a way to kill time.  Passion is being so devoted to your fantasy team that you create extensive spreadsheets analyzing inane stats and then wake up at 1am to check the waiver wire every week for a season.  Passion is driving 300 miles, without tickets, because your team is in the playoffs and you’re counting on seeing the game courtesy of a scalper outside the stadium.  Show me passion sir!

DLamp: I’m gonna disagree with JP here, and say that this sucked more than the ‘Destiny’ I mentioned in the previous post. You don’t seem passionate about this subject at all. I understand that it’s well edited and grammatically correct, but there is no real passion there. I know you’ve got more fire in that belly, so let’s see it! Lay it all out there. I want to see the person behind the computer screen. See the fan, as well as the facts.

Burnsy:Bonus points for mentioning Wally Backman. Minus points for reminding me how white Wally Zerbeeyak, my third favorite player of all-time, is. As much as I hate to admit it, ESPN really is the best Internet resource for sports, aside from YouPorn. However, I’ve been granted the power to admit something and then completely go against it. ESPN eats taint. As long as Jemele Hill is employed I will hate the WWL. And I would have liked this better if I didn’t keep trying to give my wallet to the picture of Ben Wallace.

Mako McCain

The Stench of Swine in the Golden State…and the sick demise of college athletics

These are dark days we are living in…dark and violent, terrible days.

We’ve had about a week or so to digest this little dilemma out in USC (http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=3389049 )…well, roundabout five or so days in the popular conscience of the sports world. And, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s no surprise. I don’t think it’s new news to any of us that college athletics might just be an evil and corrupt institution. I’ve had my suspicions since Blue Chips (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109305/). But, I have to confess, I was growing quite comfortable living with the illusion that college sports, in contrast to the back-stabbing, drug-ridden, decadent, and perverted business of the so-called professionals, was a haven of all that was pure, true, and great about sports.

It was not uncommon during casual sports banter around the country, in bars, diners, and golf courses, to hear mention of the superiority of college athletics over their professional counterparts. Not necessarily on the merit of athleticism (I think we can all agree that a certain LaDainian Tomlinson would run over the best defensive line college football could put together the same way Barry Sanders burns every defense on Madden ’93), but on the simple fact that we all want to believe, despite our better judgment, that in college sports “it’s not about the money”.

Whether it was true or not, we fans of college athletics believed it and while Christmas, the Super Bowl, Halloween, Led Zeppelin (via Page/Diddy and the Godzilla [1998] soundtrack - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_with_Me_%28Puff_Daddy_%26_Jimmy_Page_song%29), All-Star Games, Ultimate Fighting, and everything else that was holy and sacred on this planet got bought up, defecated on, then packaged up and sold back to us…we always knew we could trust college football on Saturday afternoons and the entire month of March to give us hope for humanity and a reason to believe that all was not lost in this sick and twisted world.

But now, thanks to the swine-meat sweltering in University Park under the dense smog of the City of Angels, there’s a dark cloud that hangs over those Saturdays we worked all week for and anxiously awaited like little kids staying up for jolly ol’ St. Nick and the hours we drove ourselves to Madness laboring to create, once and for all, the perfect bracket on those late nights in March.
It’s one thing to make a mistake or to get caught doing the wrong thing. This is America after all. We’ve come to expect people to do the wrong thing…especially when doing the wrong thing is gonna make you rich. We even elect them into office. But, it’s quite another thing to deny it when you get caught…not once, Mayo http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?section=ncb&id=3392623 , but twice http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=3396878 ?

I don’t know why this whole thing with O.J. Mayo and the alleged $30,000 and other luxuries he received during high school ($30K in high school?) and his one year at USC has got me so hell-bent with anger and is costing me at least three hours of sleep at night (three hours of indignation that are ultimately resulting in me sitting here at my computer unleashing this tirade to all of you, innocent bystanders)…but this just pisses me off. It’d be easy for me this point to chalk it up to my fervent hatred for all things having to do with the USC Trojans. I know I’m biased. I’m a Longhorns fan. And every Longhorn fan remembers how they felt while they watched Reggie Bush accept the Heisman over VY* and it doesn’t help either case that Mr. Bush’s own little situation (http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3191455) has yet to be resolved.

(*Note: It still feels real, real good watching this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8zZRBTOcnY&feature=related)

Yet, setting the fact that I’m a Longhorn fan aside, both the cases of USC “funding” O.J. Mayo and Reggie Bush as college players, “student athletes”, infuriates me on account of something much deeper than my allegiance to my alma mater…
The lack of integrity on the part of USC and the failure of the NCAA (among other entities) to effectively address this obvious problem pose a direct threat to college athletics, the last bastion of true, unadulterated, and honest competition (or so we want so badly to still believe).

This is my open letter to the powers-that-be in the NCAA to not take lightly the punishment they should and, with God as my witness, will inflict on USC to straighten this thing out. Pat Forde knows what I’m talking about (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=3390757&sportCat=ncb). This is a offense of the highest degree…and I’d up the ante here and say that the death penalty might be a little too soft…

We’re dealing with perhaps the most diabolical force in the history of college sports…if the news of its evils breaks the heart of Dick Vitale (http://espn.go.com/dickvitale/0805112MayoMess.html).

There must be retribution.

At the very least, NCAA, let us (fans of college sports) continue to live in the illusion that, when we watch Davidson make a valiant attempt to take down Kansas only to lose by 2 points, there’s nothing left out there on the hardwood but the pure devotion of those players to their school, the fans, their coach, and each other.

In these dark days we are living in, there is a desperate need for justice…

We won’t get it from our government…

We won’t get it from professional sports…

We’re trusting in you, the NCAA and all of its cronies, to make a stand, right now, and do what is right in a world that has gone irreparably wrong.

JP: As a USC Alum and ardent supporter I’ll try to overlook the partisan spirit that emerged while my beloved Trojans are described as “the most diabolical force in the history of college sports” and focus on something else. I really enjoyed how fired up you were on the topic and your passion was very clear. You took a strong position, which was solid but I’m not sure exactly what you’d like the NCAA to do beyond the death penalty. It felt like there wasn’t a clear point and this came off more as angry musings of a fan than a passionate rant of a blogger. There’s a big difference. And too many links. If you spent a little time polishing this up and constructing a clear thesis, it’d be much better.

Lunchbox: As a fella that bleeds Cardinal and Gold, I should probably be upset here.  But I’m not really.  I think Forde’s article was an uniformed tirade that he wrote because he wanted to be more relevant in the college football offseason.  The death penalty given to SMU is in a complete different realm, but whatever.  Anyway, as a USC fan, this whole muck with the Bush and Mayo transgressions kills me.  I am not going to change how I root for.  But it’s definitely not as fun to root for USC when I know that they haven’t been policing their players like they should.  It’s not fun when everyone reminds you that your team cheats (right, Patriots fans?).  It’s not fun to root for the bad guy.  I’d really like to see USC address the situation publicly, they haven’t said boo as of yet.  It’s complete BS.  They need to man up and admit things need to be fixed.  Whew…Mako, you just got me going about something I’m passionate about.  Nice job.  USC’s not the only program in the country that has these problems, but they’re the most visible and the most recent.  Anyway, some tips for the future: fewer links and fewer commas will make the post more readable.

DLamp: “That is a grown man’s dunk!” Stay down, ‘SC (and it’s two alumni that write for this site). Just…stay down. I like this a lot. Agreed that the links were a bit annoying, but not really. I mean, it’s just underlined words in the end. Good job getting your anger and passion about this issue across to us, the reader. I would have liked for you to have touched upon how USC clearly is just the tip of the ice berg and not the only transgressor, but eff it, it was well written.

Burnsy:This was written like it was torn from today’s headlines and I like that because I live in the present and the future, except when I masturbate I live in the past. Like Victorian England past. I like the way those broads jacked up their boobs. Anywho, what’s funny to me about the OJ Mayo thing is that he said he couldn’t have taken $30,000 because his mom was still living in the same small house and driving the same shitty car. Someone want to get this kid a math class? My bet is he’s broke by 2014. Also, Pete Carroll is a serious cockgobbler. My vote goes to Mako because he had the balls to get in JP’s grill and lay down the thunder. You just got F’d in the A, Pyle.

Vote for your favorite contestant below and come back next week to see who makes our Final 2. Next week, the remaining competitors get called up to the big leagues…