Prediction Season!

It's a special time of year. The time when all kinds of prognosticators, with varying levels of direct access to the NFL, make bad predictions for the upcoming season - myself included. I'll have mine posted sometime before the start of the season. But for now I wanted to point out that Peter King picks the Giants (video embedded in Ross Tucker's column, for some reason) to win the NFC East. This terrifies me. And the fact that he puts together a solid argument why, terrifies me even more. But I'll set aside the obvious - that it's Peter King making the prediction, which means you should lean...no, run...in the other direction.

In 2007, the Giants thrived while little was expected of them. Coming into that season, they were seemingly a team in disarray, with coach Tom Coughlin on the hot seat. Of course, we all know what happened after that - only the greatest triumph in the history of organized team sports. On the other hand, in 2008 and 2009, they came in heavily favored, only to collapse.

Right now I have no clue what kind of Giants we'll see in 2010. But I'll try to keep my expectations low.

One network's bonehead mistake is another network's discovered gem

We saw two similarly colossal blunders made in broadcasting over the past year, and both have now been righted.

The first blunder happened in December 2009, when Steve Czaban's radio show, wildly successful for 7 years, was canned by Fox Sports Radio. I won't even mention his replacement beceause he doesn't deserve the publicity obtained by being mentioned on a sports blog with 7 readers, but trust me, he's been predictably awful since replacing Czabe.

The second came in January 2010, when NBC yanked Conan O'Brien from the Tonight Show after just 8 months, in favor of former host and current has-been Jay Leno. ("Ehhhhh, Kato Kaelin in the news again...")

Fast forward to August. Conan is less than 3 months from beginning his new late night show with TBS. And this glorious announcement came yesterday: Steve Czaban is returning to the morning sports radio landscape, joining the Sporting News Radio network in September.

NBC's and Fox's losses are examples of how arrogant, clueless network executives can screw up something that didn't need changing. But their losses are TBS's and SNR's gains, simply doing the common sense thing and scooping up tremendous talent that should have never become available in the first place.

The good news for TBS and SNR is, these common sense moves will pay huge dividends for years to come...provided they too don't screw up a good thing.