Two days ago, I mentioned that there were 6 Miami Dolphins players highlighted on the NFLLondon.com website. I mentioned the first 5, including the fact that 3 of them would not be playing in London. Now it seems that number six won't be making the trip, either.

Player number 6 is Zach Thomas. Earlier this season, Zach missed 2 games due to lingering effects from a concussion. But it's not any on-the-field injury or team intrigue that will keep Thomas from playing this Sunday. No, he was hit by a car following the game last week. More accurately, his car was hit by another car. (That's right: after suffering an embarrassing beating, losing 49-28 to the rival New England Patriots, Zach Thomas' truck was rear-ended. That's a great conclusion to a great day, eh?) It is the whiplash from that accident that has kept Thomas out of practice this week and off the plane when the Dolphins fly to London today.

I suppose that when it rains, it pours.

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Just in time for a trip to London, defensive end Quentin Moses signed with the Miami Dolphins. Moses, a native of Athens, Georgia, played college ball for the University of Georgia (where he majored in -- I'm not kidding -- "Recreation and Leisure Studies") and was oft-bestowed lauded All-American honors. The highly-decorated collegian was the 65th pick overall and the highest draft pick of 2007 who did not make the cut for his drafting team, the Oakland Raiders, aka the 2006 Worst Team in the NFL. He has since been signed and released by the Arizona Cardinals, the All-Time Worst Team in the NFL. Now that he is on the roster for the team tied for the title of 2007 Worst Team in the NFL, I'm sure his fortunes will not improve.

Moses is a defensive end, one of the few positions that the Dolphins don't really need much help with. The team has now picked-up 5 defensive linemen in the past week. This is just another sign that the Dolphins are looking for young, inexpensive talent to replace their few remaining stars. In this case, Jason Taylor. Moses is made in the same mold as Taylor, and many around the League think he could mature into a great player with proper training and patience, two things he won't likely be getting in Miami, if recent history is any guide.

As for Taylor, despite being talented and popular enough to be the model for a giant robot stalking the streets of London, he's not good enough to remain a Dolphin. Rumors circulate that Taylor will be traded in the off-season to open up more room for young talent. It's good to know that's how the Dolphins these days reward their most talented and fan-favorite players: ship them off to the highest bidder. Taylor was publicly mulling over retirement after last season. I don't image that he'll have much incentive to stay in the League now. So no matter how it plays out, the Dolphins lose: either we trade Jason Taylor and lose a still-productive star, or Taylor, insulted by the Dolphins' trade-talks retires (a la Jake Plummer) and we lose the trade value. After the way the team mishandled the Daunte Culpepper situation last year, why should we expect any better treatment for Taylor?

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As I mentioned 2 days ago, the Miami Dolphins will be playing the New York Giants in London this weekend. I just took a look at NFLLondon2007.com, the official website of the game. The first three of six players highlighted to introduce the Dolphins to an unfamiliar British crowd are, in order, Trent Green, Ronnie Brown, and Chris Chambers, none of whom will be playing for the Dolphins come Sunday. (Green and Brown are out for the season with injuries and Chambers was traded last week.) Number four on the list is Ted Ginn, Jr, who has only 6 catches (and zero touchdowns) through the first seven weeks of the season. Wait'll they get a load of us!

On the upside, the 5th name on the list is Jason Taylor, the 2006 NFL Defensive Player of the Year and NFL's all-time leader in touchdowns scored by a defensive lineman. To promote the game in London, the NFL has constructed a 26-feet tall animatronic Jason Taylor -- "the worlds largest ever animatronic human" -- dubbed "Big JT." It looks TOTALLY BADASS. No doubt it will be shown on TV this weekend. You can see a brief video of Big JT in action on NFLUK.com. (Note that in the video, when asked to predict the game's winning team, Christian Slater, star of Kuffs, says, "Well, I grew up in New York so, uh, I've always been, uh, uh, a huge Giants and Jets fan, so, uh, I'm just excited to be here." Eloquent. And pointless, just like Slater's career.) The NFL's official pics are available in a slideshow at MiamiDolphins.com. If you'd prefer a longer, more boring video of the robot in action (but without Christian Slater), check out YouTube. Or, if you're into this sort of thing (as I am), check out the website of the SFX company that made the titan, Artem, LTD.

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Yesterday, backup QB Sage Rosenfels replaced the starting quarterback for the Houston Texans followng an injury. Should Rosenfels start for the team next week, he will be the 6th ex-Dolphin quarterback to start for a team other than the Dolphins this season. (Daunte Culpepper for the Raiders; Gus Frerotte, Rams; Brian Griese, Bears; Joey Harrington, Falcons; Damon Huard, Chiefs; and Rosenfels.) Since Dan Marino retired following the 1999 season, the Dolphins have had 11 different starting quarterbacks in 8 seasons. Of those eleven, 2 remain on the Dolphins' roster (Trent Green on Injured Reserve and Cleo Lemon, our starter) and 2 have retired (Jay Fiedler and Ray Lucas). That leaves only 1 ex-starting Dolphin in a position to start for another team this season: A.J. Feeley, benchwarmer for Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles. (Before Feeley was a starting quarterback for the Dolphins, he was the back-up to Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles.) With Feeley riding pine behind an injury-prone McNabb, could I dare to dream that every active ex-starting Dolphin quarterback could start a game during the 2007 season?

The Miami Dolphins: spreading bad quarterbacking throughout the National Football League since 2000.

On a side note, Jason Garrett, one of the backup quarterbacks that appeared on a Dolphins roster in 2004 but who never took a snap for the team in a game, is now the Offensive Coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys, which has one of the best offenses in the League right now. So our starting quarterbacks weren't good enough to start for us, but they are good enough to start for everyone else, and our backup quarterbacks weren't good enough to take a snap for us but are good enough to engineer winning teams for other organizations. So the question becomes: why does everyone suck when they are a Dolphin? I'm not really sure I'm ready for the answer to that question.

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The word "nikhedonia" is defined as the pleasure of the anticipation of victory. Now that the Miami Dolphins have extended their season losing streak to 7 games, the worst start in franchise history (>sigh<), my pleasure at watching the Fins play decreases as I anticipate very few victories. Next week we will be traveling very far from home to play the New York Giants in London. Where we, currently tied for the title of Worst Team in the NFL, will no doubt shock and awe the Brits into never watching American football again. Sorry, gov.

In case you're wondering, I discovered the word "nikhedonia" while reading the book There's a Word For It, in which I discovered that the particular disorder of my friend, who I will call Jason in the interest of maintaining his anonymity (he knows who he is), is called "haptodysphoria." Essentially, that means that Jason can't touch raw cotton because it feels icky to him. Other than that, Jason happens to be a pretty normal guy. For a haptodysphoriac, that is. You the man, Jason!

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It was just brought to my attention that the Miami Dolphins, the NFL team with the best overall record since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger, is on pace to lose that distinction by the end of this year. After being barely .500 since the loss of Marino (the Greatest Quarterback to Ever Live), the Dolphins will be supplanted in the record books by the Pittsburgh Steelers should they win 9 games more than us from this point forward. Though that seems unlikely, with the Steelers sitting at 3-0, and the Dolphins starting an abysmal 0-3, it could happen in week 12, when the two teams play one another.

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I'm back, and I have some catching up to do, don't I?

First game of the UGA season: victory! Dawgs win, 35-14, over the Oklahoma State University Cowboys. Word on the street was that the Cowboys sold out every seat that we offered them. Quite an impressive display of fan loyalty, there.

I know it was the first game and all, but I was surprised that the lady who owns the season tickets in the row in front of me didn't recognize me. She recognized my brother, and remembered my mother and father, but not me. I must have gained a lot of weight since last year.

Second game of the UGA season: defeat! Dawgs lose, 16-12, to the University of South Carolina Gamecocks. The Bulldogs performance was utterly uninspired, and the generally low expectations for this year's squad were proven uncannily appropriate awfully early in the season.

The crowd was barely involved in the game. I don't know if we were too shocked or if we had resigned ourselves to the loss early. In last year's SEC home losses, the fans were behind the team until the final second. But this time we seemed to be as stunned as the players on the field that South Carolina, who most of us had written off as beneath us, was having their way with us. Damn you, Spurrier! >shakes fist in rage<

Of course, the NFL season kicked off this weekend, and my team, the Miami Dolphins, lost. The teams of my couch-mates, my brother and his girlfriend, respectively cheering for the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants, also lost.

So far, this does not have the makings of a very good Batman and Football Month.

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I had the good fortune to obtain Super Bowl tickets this year. This time yesterday, I was sitting in the rain and gusting wind of the coldest, wettest Super Bowl in history. I tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when the contest was over, and it wasn't because the Bears were trampled by the Colts, giving Peyton Manning his first NFL Championship. No, it rained and rained and rained. And then it rained some more. Trey and I briefly lamented not wearing raincoats to the game, but then we realized that those people who were wearing raincoats were just as soaked-to-the-bone as we were. Yet I still saw dozens of people in the fourth quarter who were still wearing torn, useless plastic bags as though they were life preservers and holding seat cushions over their heads like umbrellas. Fortunately for us, there was a stadium employee kindly warning us of a large puddle on the way to our cars. Most of the crowd walked through it anyway, as our shoes and socks had been completely saturated hours earlier.

Trey and I arrived early in anticipation of the day's events. While that meant that we were parked close to the stadium, it also meant that we would have to wait for nearly an hour to leave once the game was over. There is much truth in the cliche, "First In, Last Out." To my disappointment, the $20.00 I spent on a corndog, pretzel, bottle of water, and a Pepsi didn't go towards paying for a quality parking staff. At least they were a very large corndog and bottle of water. Though I hate Pepsi, as the "Official Soft Drink of the NFL," it was the only caffeine that I could get before the game. I'd forgotten how awful it tastes! Thankfully, the rain quenched my remaining, unsatisfied thirst.

As my first visit to Dolphin Stadium (formerly Dolphins Stadium, formerly Pro Player Stadium, formerly Pro Player Park, formerly Joe Robbie Stadium), home of the Miami Dolphins, it was practically a trip to Mecca. We spotted fans wearing gear from 26 of the 32 NFL teams (Bills, Jaguars, Lions, Panthers, Texans, and my hometown Falcons were not seen), but after the Bears and Colts, the team far-and-away best represented was the Dolphins themselves. I even had the opportunity to watch Dan Marino, whom the locals all apparently simply call "Danny," working on the CBS pre-game show with James Brown and Shannon Sharpe. (It was kind of comforting to see how the town still fully embraces him: the stadium is on Dan Marino Boulevard, and the city is peppered with billboards on which he pitches everything from weight-loss systems to used cars.)

I cheered for the Bears, and Trey rooted for the Colts. I'm not much of a Colts fan for the very sound reasons that they have long been over-hyped, they used to be in the AFC East with the Dolphins, and they are quarterbacked by an ex-Tennessee Volunteer. (Sure, Grossman is an ex-Florida Gator, but at least he's incompetent.) By the second quarter, it became apparent that the Bears were horribly outclassed (as expected) and wouldn't be much of a challenge for the Colts. Trey and I had predicted at the start of the playoffs that any AFC team could take any NFC team in the playoffs this year, and after seeing the Bears' miserable performance in the Super Bowl, I still think that's true.

Watching the game with Trey proved insightful, if irritating. He made several excellent points about both teams' strategies and execution. After Devon Hester returned the opening kickoff for a Bears' touchdown, Trey pointed out that an opening return always boded bad things for the scoring team. He reminded me that the same thing happened in last month's NCAA BCS Championship game for Ohio State, who, like the Bears, tanked the rest of the game. Most amusingly, early in the 4th quarter, after Grossman completed 2 passes and was moving the Bears down field, Trey proclaimed, "if [the Bears' coaches] call another pass play here, they are complete idiots." When on the next play, Colt's cornerback Kevin Hayden returned a Grossman interception for a touchdown, icing the game, Trey got the meanest looks from some nearby soggy Bears fans, as though Trey himself had stuck the dagger in the Bears' heart. I laughed and laughed.

I'm resentful of the fact that Peyton Manning secured his Championship ring (and cemented his legacy as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history) in Marino's hometown, but at least it rained on that punk's parade. Now I'm home, and I'm almost dry. It's certainly something that I'll have to do again. Next time, I'll be prepared: I'll take a snorkel.

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You know that I'm a fan of the Miami Dolphins. I have been since I first took an interest in the game of football back in the late 1980s. My favorite wide receiver of all time is a relative unknown named Orande Gadsden who played only 4 years exclusively for the Dolphins (and who, by the way, was the last man to catch a pass in the NFL by Dan Marino). I can tell you every quarterback who has started for the team since Marino retired. (Hmm, let's see; there's Huard, Fiedler, Griese, Lucas, Rosenfels, Feeley, Frerotte, Culpepper, Harrington, and now Lemon. Get ready, Packers fans, it will be worse than you think, trust me.) And we've been slightly above mediocre for most of that time. Hell, we've only had 4 losing seasons since joining the NFL! But if there's one aspect of the game that we've totally failed to grasp in the past two decades, it's coaching.

When current owner Wayne Huizenga bought the team in the early 90s, Don Shula was our coach. Shula was, in all regards, a great coach, one of the best in history. However, when Shula decided to retire 10 years ago, Huizenga chose to go with a proven wash-out at couch, replaced Shula with Jimmy Johnson, a Floridian who had great success with the Dallas Cowboys. Expectations were high. I thought we'd be great again, perhaps even Super Bowl bound. But the team went nowhere. This was likely because of a conflict between Marino, our aging superstar who naturally preferred the passing game, and Johnson, who would have preferred to restart the team from scratch with a focus on the run. In any event, after 3 years of exhausting turmoil, both Johnson and Marino were out.

In comes Dave Wannstedt, Johnson's protege who is fresh off several mediocre seasons with the Bears. Again I had high hopes. Wannstedt looked pretty good at times with the Bears, getting by with a team with less-than-stellar talent. Turns out that the talent problems were probably Wannstedt's fault. In Miami, he always looked lost, like a babysitter who doesn't know what to do when the tweens he's supervising get into the coffee ice cream and start bouncing off the walls. Wannstedt championed an ivy league quarterback with extremely limited passing skills, and he brought in Ricky Williams, who was the player voted "Most Likely To Destroy His Own Team" before the rise of Terrell Owens. We tanked. Wannstedt was fired in the middle of his fourth season, less than a year after receiving a contract extension from Huizenga as a reward for consistent under-performance.

Though I pulled for Wannstedt's temporary replacement, Jim Bates, to be the new coach, no one listened to me. Wannstedt's players had come together for Jim Bates, winning out at the end of the season. Instead of rewarding Bates, Huizenga traded competency for a "name" coach, LSU's head coach Nick Saban. Like a fool, I jumped on the bandwagon and agreed that he'd take us to the heights of the NFL again. But like Wannstedt, Saban soon proved that he couldn't control professional athletes or evaluate talent. Sure, he ditched Fiedler, but he replaced him with Culpepper. (True story: at Dan Marino's Hall of Fame induction ceremony, my brother and I noticed that Culpepper's numbers were comparable to some of the all-time greats. I remember my brother commenting that someone was going to look at those numbers and mistakenly think that he was actually good. Apparently, that someone was Nick Saban.) At least Saban fooled more than just me. He tricked professional sportswriters into thinking we'd reach the Super Bowl in 2007. Instead we had a 6-10 record, the third worst in the AFC. And then, like a kick in the crotch after a punch in the gut, Saban jumped ship earlier this week to head back to the relative safety (and economic goldmine) of college coaching.

Now it's back to the drawing board to select a new coach. I've lost my faith. I'd hope that Huizenga could find someone qualified, but I know now that he's just going to grab a big name. In fact, I heard today that he's already planning to interview other washed-out ex-NFL coaches, including Dom Capers (a confused mess who couldn't manage a winning season in 5 years with the Houston Texans), Mike Mularkey (purportedly an "offensive genius," though he couldn't settle a quarterback controversy between the clueless J.P. Losman and mediocre Kelly Holcolmb for two years with the Buffalo Bills), Chan Gailey (an Dallas Cowboys head coach who fled criticism to Georgia Tech, where he can't get his students to play a complete 4 quarters or manage a game clock), and Jim Mora, Jr. (known to Atlanta Falcons' fans as "the man who ruined Michael Vick," he's every bit as bad as his father but without the entertaining press conferences).

So now the Dolphins have 2 or 3 more rebuilding years ahead, where the sputtering offense will have an ineffective overhaul as the aging defense falls apart under it's own weight. I'm starting to understand how Raiders fans feel.

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I was complaining the other day about the preponderance of Crime Investigation shows on television. It seems that every other primetime TV show is about how to solve a crime or how to get into the mind of a killer. CSI (pick a city), Law and Order (pick a subject), Criminal Minds, Navy NCIS, Bones, Numb3rs, Without a Trace... Clearly, America really craves this sort of show.

Despite my irritation, the "police drama" is nothing new to television. Dragnet is the grandfather of the genre on TV and deserves its accolades. However, Jack Webb was obsessed with realism and truth at the expense of entertainment value. Webb's Dragnet has more in common with today's "reality television" Cops than with any of the shows that I listed above.

Today's police dramas are more T. J. Hooker than Joe Friday. They play fast and loose with technology and procedure in order to craft a more dramatic storyline. Computers can run DNA tests in just under an hour, digital images can be focused to provide a crystal clear magnification, and putting yourself in the figurative shoes of a deranged killer, while stressful, always achieves a tidy solution. (So, turning our police into a group of coordinated, sadistic serial killers is a good thing, then?)

Granted, television is now and always has been about formula. People watch TV to relax and be entertained. Television shows with successful formulas are always predictable and therefore lucrative. (In time, even the innovative, creative shows like Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue, both very similar to begin with, probably because they had the same creators, develop predictable plot patterns.) And police cases are very formulaic by nature: a crime is committed, the police investigate, suspects are identified then culled, and the guilty party is finally determined based on evidence gathered. Anyone who can't turn that process into an hour long drama doesn't even need to be writing for USA Today.

My concern is not so much with the fact that modern TV has turned to so many make believe crime dramas. (TV has always been rife with fantasy police detectives on shows ranging from Burke's Law to Miami Vice.) What bothers me is that there are now so many of them on the air at once. Every night of the week there are hours of television devoted purely to police stories. In recent years, a police drama -- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation -- has ranked in Nielson as the #1 rated show of the year, something that a police drama has never done before in television history. Why does America suddenly want to see so much crime get solved? Is this another, prolonged reaction to 9/11? If we can't win the war in Iraq, at least we get to see some schlub go to jail on TV based on pubic hair evidence? >Ick.< Or is it something closer to home? As a generation grows up addicted to the internet and traditional socital mores are failing to take root in an impersonal environment, could our neighbors in fact be the very beasts that we see on the evening news raping our children and killing our grandparents? Quick, everyone, grab a pirchfork and bolt your doors! Save us, TV!

America, I propose a change. If it's escapism that you want, I say it is escapism that you should get. Let's abandon all of this pretend crime and turn back to the absurdist fiction of Fantasy Island of The Gong Show. Wait, I see that you're ahead of me. Thank you, television, for giving us Lost and American Idol (which actually suplanted CSI as the number one rated show last year). Now we can forget about all that crime and turn back to the things that are really important: celebrity couples.

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