Collin Kottke: All-Around Swell Guy

Business of Sports Getting In The Way of Sports

Chances are likely that the Minnesota Vikings won’t make a franchise altering move before Thursday’s NFL Draft and it all depends who they select on Thursday on how franchise altering Thursday might be. If the Vikings were smart they would pull the trigger on an Adrian Peterson trade between now and then.

I can hear you already saying, ‘Collin! They can’t trade Adrian, he’s awesome and popular!’ That’s the problem.

The rule of thumb is that NFL running backs start to break down around the age of 29 or 30. Adrian Peterson is currently 29. He is still productive enough to be valued by a contending team, though. For a team like the Vikings that is in rebuilding mode and realistically a couple of years away from Super Bowl contention, Peterson doesn’t really fit into any plans or at least he doesn’t need to.

The Vikings find themselves in an interesting spot. When it comes to in terms of football, purely just the sport, it’s a no-brainer to trade Peterson. Football, NFL football, is not just football, though. The NFL is a business and that business keeps Purple Jesus in purple.

Adrian Peterson sells tickets and that’s why he’s still a Viking. Peterson is the only guy this team can currently plaster on billboards with everyone knowing who he is. Peterson has been that guy for his whole career with the Vikings other than two years when a certain Mississippi native was playing gunslinger, er, quarterback. The Vikings moving to the outdoors for a couple seasons and the fall out of sorts from the seat license fiasco all results in the email being sent from a New Jersey mansion to Rick Spiellman that simply says, ‘Don’t trade #28.’

Sports being a business brings a lot of ethical questions up and only about 120 people have to face these ethical questions. We’ve found out recently that despite the group being so small, some pretty unethical people get in.

The Vikings would be a better team without Adrian Peterson in the long run, but they are not trading him for the business aspects of the team. Is that right?

I’d think the Vikings would make more money in the long run by winning a Super Bowl than holding on to one guy, but there might be a reason that I type this on a laptop and I’m not saying it in a conference call at Winter Park.

At one time in the world of sports it was all about having a winning team and a team that might just win the championship in their sport. Now it is about making as much money as you can with the assets that you currently have. That’s the way business is and sports are now a business, we just have to deal with it.

I would trade Adrian Peterson. Everyone that could look at the situation rationally from a football sense would trade him too. It’s funny looking at football decisions by jersey sales, but that’s the world that we live in. It’s also the reason that Johnny Manziel would be an owner’s wet dream.

Craig Ferguson Is More Than A Comedian To Me

Late night television is in the midst of a huge shift. I’m sure there will be books written about this year and next that highlight all of the changes. Jay Leno left The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon became the host of The Tonight Show, Seth Meyers left Saturday Night Live to host Late Night, David Letterman announced his retirement on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert is leaving The Colbert Report to take over the The Late Show and another domino fell on Monday when Craig Ferguson announced that he is leaving CBS and The Late, Late Show.

All of these moves have made me feel some sort of emotion and, I assume I’m in the minority on this, the departure of Craig Ferguson is the one that hits me the most. Craig Ferguson has been my favorite comedian ever since I left the TV on after Letterman one night. I was hooked pretty quickly.

I can’t remember exactly what was going on during my first Late, Late Show experience, but I’m fairly sure Sid the Rabbit was there. Nothing gets the attention of a teenage boy like a high-pitched swearing puppet that was way too close to the television.

It takes a while to really ‘get’ Ferguson’s don’t-give-a-shit style, but once you get it, oh man, it’s the best ride on television.

Look at Ferguson at just a comedic skill level. Ferguson comes out every single night and virtually impovs a monologue. Sure, he has a couple talking points, but every other late night TV show has cue cards or a teleprompter telling the host exactly what to stay. Craig just doesn’t do that.

I could go on and on about Craig Ferguson. He completely changed the way that I look at comedy and life.

I don’t know if everyone has the realization that you don’t need to please everyone, but I did. I think I had the realization before I discovered Craig, but I know that he cemented the theory in my mind. Before the realization I thought that I needed everyone to love me and then I realized that that was a lot of work and I frankly didn’t care. I decided that I only cared what my family and a certain group of friends thought about me. It’s the best thing I ever realized.

Maybe this isn’t the exact outlook on life that Ferguson has, but I feel like it is. He doesn’t care, but there’s a glow about him when he talks about his boys or when he does a serious episode. Yes, Craig Ferguson is a comedian and has some weird conversations, but some of the most thought provoking television I have ever watched has been a Ferguson interviews.

I DVR’ed every episode of the Late, Late Show from my junior year of high school until I went to University of Minnesota for my freshman year and that was just because I wouldn’t have access to the DVR every night. I could watch him at 11:35 then, anyway.

To be honest, I’ve left Craig dangling a little bit. I’ve been conflicted ever since Seth Meyers took over Late Night. I’ve loved Meyers for longer than Ferguson and there are just not enough hours in the day, but I’ll make there is now.

Ferguson is leaving in December and I plan to watch every episode I can between now and then. This is the man that I can attribute a lot of my life upon. That sounds weird, but a comedian has taught me a lot. Maybe more than he should have.

His autobiography, American On Purpose, is my favorite book. He is the only comedian I have specifically gone to see. Ironically, I saw Craig Kilborn perform before a Timberwolves game before he left the Late, Late Shot.

I don’t know how to thank Craig for all that he has done for me because he’s done that much for me. He’s influenced my comedic voice and my voice as a human.

When I think back to Ferguson’s Late, Late Show I’ll think of a lot of things: Sid, Tweets and Emails, Geoff Peterson, Secretariat, Awkward Pauses, mouth organs, snake mugs, swearing on network TV, the flags/sound bites used to censor the swearing on network TV and how the commercials made the soundtrack to a summer of make out sessions. None of that will outshine the man whose name was in the title and who sang his own catchy theme song, another thing that I’ll never forget.

A lot of things are changing in the world of late night television, but my love for Craig Ferguson will never die. My own Sid the Rabbit puppet will be with me forever. Maybe someday Sid will freak out my future son’s girlfriend. This is the kind of thing that deserves to be a family tradition.

Eric Church Proves He’s A Badass, Fights Scalpers

Picture via: http://static.parade.condenast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eric-church-aviators-ftr.jpg

Not that long ago, it was illegal to scalp tickets in the state of Minnesota. Everyone played by the same rules and paid face value for all ticketing wielding events from Twins to Theatre to Tina Turner Tickets. If you live in Minnesota and have ever tried to get into anything, specifically concerts, you know that it is now legal to scalp tickets in Minnesota and you pay nowhere near face value.

Minnesotans have noticed the ridiculousness of scalping and so has country music superstar Eric Church. On Friday, he issued a big ‘F U’ to scalpers. Church cancelled 902 scalped tickets to his September 16 show in Minneapolis and put them back on the market.

I have to say that I have never heard of this happening before. Typically, when tickets are on the market they are out of the control of the artist and his team. Apparently they still have some pull afterwards.

The posts on Church’s Facebook page and posts on Twin Cities radio stations announcing the coming of 902 more tickets was almost all positive. In fact, I only saw one negative comment which was nicely snipped by a fellow Facebooker calling the writer of a negative comment a scalper. Ah, Facebook wit.

The rerelease of these tickets will allow me to go to the show now with reasonable priced tickets at $57 a crack for lower bowl seating.

Eric Church has been a badass for a long time. It shows in his music being actual country music and he proved it in the way that he treated his fans in Minnesota. Bravo, Chief.

Now, if only a certain ex-Beatle that’s coming to Target Field in August would control the scalpers who are selling tickets to his show for over a grand before the tickets even go on sale to the general public, that would be great.

A Riot Before A Riot: The Media, Police and University to Blame in Dinkytown ‘Riots’

If you head over to Dinkytown, the best-known college village literally steps from the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, at bar close or any time in the later evening, you’ll see a lot of interesting stuff. Primarily, you’ll see a lot of college kids who have probably had a couple too many and are attempting to make their way home. That should have been the case on Saturday night.

At 6:30 Minneapolis time, the puck dropped on the NCAA National Championship hockey game in Philadelphia. Minnesota’s Golden Gophers played the role of Goliath, Union College played the role of David and, as usual, David won. Apparently, the Dinkytown dwellers were supposed to riot.

It was a likely scenario, right? They had just kind of, sort of had done just that when the Gophers beat arch rival North Dakota in the semi-finals. It was a riot full of, well, not a whole lot of rioting. Students were taking pictures with police officers, so obviously the enforcement wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with duties.

Flash-forward to Saturday night, throngs of cops and media showed up in Dinkytown; the former to keep the peace, the latter to report on the pending riot. The funny thing is that they caused the riot.

College students are the biggest group influenced by the theory of monkey see, monkey do. Students walk out of the bars and see police, mounted police, a State Patrol helicopter and a tank, seriously, and it hits them that they should be doing something bad. It’s what they are supposed to be doing, right?! That’s why everyone is there.

I assume there was probably a couple extra hundred people in Dinkytown because it was the National Championship game, but otherwise it would have probably been the typical Thursday-Sunday night on a college campus. Let’s not over-fascinate a common happening.

This brings me to the following example from KMSP, the FOX affiliate in Minneapolis – St. Paul, who had this beautiful piece of field reporting.

It shouldn’t come as a shock that drunken frat boys are the same to a lighted TV camera as a moth is to a flame. Did you seriously think you could go a legitimate live-shot in the middle of what you and your competitors blew out of the water and built up as a riot before the puck even dropped on Saturday night?

The University of Minnesota’s President Eric Kaler stating there would be a zero tolerance policy and announcing the extra police presence just added gas to the barely-lit fire. Let the kids be kids.

Do the police have to be there? Of course they do. Do they need to start attacking and pepper spraying? Absolutely not.

Does the media need to be there? Yes, it is a story. Is it right for the media to force feed a ‘riot’ days before it happens? No.

Drunken kids might have been a little rowdy, but all young people between the ages of 17-22 imitate what they see on their Twitter feeds, movies and TV shows. Say the kids were out of line, but don’t act like the adults in this scenario didn’t overreact.

Monkey see, monkey do.

UConn: Showing The Unexpected Can Happen

Things are supposed to go to plan, right? Trusted persons and experts should be able to look at something and say this and that will happen and it will. The UConn Huskies proved that sports aren’t for those who follow plans to a T.

If you are not affiliated with Connecticut in some way and said that the Huskies were going to win the NCAA Tournament Championship at the beginning of the year, it probably would have been suggested that you get your head examined. The same cross-eyed look would have come your way if you had said that in the middle of the Sweet 16, too. UConn simply wasn’t supposed to win.

Kentucky was supposed to. The Wildcats were number one in a whole lot of rankings and polls before any college hoops had tipped this season, then they faltered, but started playing well together when it mattered and got all the way to the championship game. It wasn’t a David-Goliath matchup, but it was pretty close.

UConn winning is the reason we watch sports. We watch for the unexpected. We might not admit that that’s why we’re watching or even consciously know that’s why we are watching, but that’s why we love sports.

Twins fans on Friday sat through four innings of baseball and we’re thinking ‘Oh, my God. Mike Pelfrey might pitch a perfect game.’ It fell apart, but that unexpected had us hooked.

We watch sports for that Brett Farve to Greg Lewis moment in the back of the endzone against the San Francisco 49ers. For the Christian Laettner shot. For Blake Hoffarber hitting the buzzer beater from his butt.

American society as a whole loves reality television because it’s ‘unscripted’ and anything can happen. We know that that isn’t always the case in reality TV, but it is in sports. Sports is the ultimate reality TV, anything can happen. The WWE even proved that it doesn’t always go to script in scripted sports.

Congratulations, UConn. You reached a pinnacle that not many reach and when you got to the pinnacle you made it your own. You made the unexpected happen. Any given Sunday.